Mushtak Parker
London - The outrage is predictable, laced with the usual plethora of pious diplomatic platitudes.
Neighbouring China, in the mother of all euphemisms, called it a cabinet reshuffle. Cambodia, Thailand and Philippines dismissed it is an "internal matter". US President Joe Biden threatened to re-impose sanctions.
Myanmar’s slide back to a “pariah state”, following its latest military coup, conjures yet another sense of déjà vu.
Strongman General Min Aung Hlaing, the armed forces commander-in-chief, seized power a few days ago and detained de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi and her ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) colleagues, declaring a one-year state of emergency.
The general’s beef is that November’s general elections, which the NLD won by a landslide, was “stolen”, presumably from the army. Not that the previous government was headed by “State Councillor” Aung San – she is disqualified from becoming president because her children have foreign nationality – was the epitome of democratic polity.
Myanmar’s constitution reserves a quarter of seats to the military in both houses. The unholy alliance undermined the reputation of Aung San, hitherto the darling of the chattering classes in the West, the self-styled “lioness of democracy” taking on one of the world’s last remnants of a brutal military regime.
Over the years she was a symbol of human rights and spent years under house arrest for promoting democracy, leading to the Nobel Peace Prize.
It was too good to be true. In 2019, she faced international condemnation including from Pope Francis, ex-Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu of Cape Town and UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres over her failure to denounce the military (the Tadmadaw) for its mistreatment of its 1.4 million Rohingya Muslim minority. The spectacle of her defending her country and the army against charges of genocide and ethnic cleansing committed against the Rohingya at the International Court of Justice, was either a monumental error of judgement or betrayed an unsavoury side of her politics.
The dichotomy of her political persona, exuding an air of superiority and a cult of personality, as if she had a divine right to be "above" public scrutiny, has made her a victim of her own mythology. No doubt, among her millions of supporters in Myanmar today she remains an icon, perhaps more a reflection of its political culture.
At the Hague, she defended the very people who had imprisoned her, and last week ousted her – the Tatmadaw. Both the UN Human Rights Council and Foreign Affairs Committee of the UK’s House of Commons published damning reports confirming that the violence perpetrated by the Tatmadaw against the Rohingya in Northern Rakhine state does constitute “ethnic cleansing” and might also amount to “crimes against humanity and even genocide”.
Some 750 000 children, women and men have been displaced and forced to flee their homeland, languishing in squalid refugee camps on the Bangla-Myanmar border.
Aung San and the Tatmadaw refused to co-operate on the UN Report and to give journalists access to the conflict areas. This prompted calls for the Nobel Committee to revoke her laureate.
She also seems to have a phobia about Islam. When Mishal Hussain of the BBC Today Programme went to interview her, and she found out that she is Muslim, she refused to continue with the interview. Aung San’s democratic “aberration” might be a case “like father like daughter”. Her father, Aung San, was a staunch Burmese nationalist who led the Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League against Japanese occupation and fought with the British to liberate Burma in 1945. He led the interim government a year before independence in 1948 but was murdered by nationalist rivals.
Democracy is largely bereft in the political DNA of Myanmar, which was under British rule from 1824 to 1945, save a brief era of Japanese and Thai occupation between 1942 and 1945, before independence in 1948.
Myanmar, says Transparency International, is the 137th most corrupt country in the world, with allegations of generals implicated especially in the drug trade.
Any notion that democracy will easily take root in today’s Myanmar is naïve. When you have foreign policy based on narrow political and business self-interest, bereft of ethics, and organisations such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations showing a callous disregard for the abuses in one of its member countries, democratic niceties are a mere irritant.
Until the international community especially the new Biden administration, Britain and the EU are prepared to put ethics above profit and contracts not much will change. Myanmar’s latter day colonial pretenders are China, Russia and India. It is a “key pillar” of Indian PM Modi’s Act East Policy, which includes bilateral security, counterterrorism and defence collaboration in addition to infrastructure projects like the Kaladan Multimodal Transport Project, which seeks to connect Kolkata with Myanmar’s Sittwe port. China is promoting its flagship The One Belt One Road Initiative that focuses on a China-centred trade and development connectivity between China and Eurasian countries, including a warm water port in the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea.
When nationalism and religion, Buddhism in the case of Myanmar, merge in their extremes it can be explosive. The past decade has seen the rise of the Saffron Revolution – an arc of militant violent Buddhist nationalism spreading from India to Myanmar to Thailand and Sri Lanka – Islamophobic and Christophobic, of which the two most vitriolic are the 969 Movement led by the “monk” Ashin Wirathu, "the Burmese Bin Laden" and the Bodu Balan Sena, the driver of Sinhalese Buddhist chauvinism.
How ironic that the NDL should issue a statement from Aung San urging “people not to accept this, and wholeheartedly to protest against the coup by the military."
* Parker is a writer and economist based in London.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of IOL.