The mess that the army has made of Myanmar
The Economist

Brutality and neglect by Myanmar's military regime have created a pariah state with a wretched and desperate people

FOR proof of how grim things have become in Myanmar, consider how locals talk about America's invasion of Iraq. There is no griping about violations of Iraqi sovereignty, no carping about the mysterious absence of weapons of mass destruction, no horror at the bloodthirsty insurgency that has ensued. Only one criticism is ever voiced: why hasn't America invaded Myanmar too? A monk, a taxi driver, a student, all shyly ask your correspondent whether America might not be prevailed upon to topple their dictatorial regime next. The country is stuck in such a rut that the prospect of a foreign invasion is a fond hope, not a fear.

It is against this backdrop of military misrule that the Association of South-East Asian Nations meets next week in Laos to decide what to do about Myanmar's impending chairmanship of the regional club. On the one hand, ASEAN is first and foremost an economic grouping, which does not normally concern itself with the political conduct of its members. Several other members, including Laos, the summit host, are hardly models of democracy. On the other hand, it would be enormously embarrassing for Myanmar's internationally reviled and economically illiterate generals to represent South-East Asia to the world. America, which has denounced Myanmar as an "outpost of tyranny", has said that it will stay away from any events hosted by the military regime.

So the other members of ASEAN have been hoping that Myanmar might find some face-saving excuse to pass up on its turn to hold the group's rotating chairmanship. Indeed, Major-General Nyan Win, the country's foreign minister, may still announce as much in the next few days. After all, whenever pesky United Nations envoys or human-rights investigators ask to visit Myanmar, the top brass simply declare that they cannot find any time in their busy schedules.

But Myanmar's generals also have a strong sense of their own dignity, and might be worried that caving in to ASEAN would be seen as weakness. What is more, excluding Myanmar from the chairmanship would run counter to ASEAN's own argument that it is better to engage the military regime than to ostracise it. Whatever is decided, the process will be closely watched and fiercely disputed by partisans in the never-ending debate over whether the generals respond better to carrots or to sticks.

In a sense, the argument is moot. Whichever decision ASEAN comes to, nobody imagines that the generals will behave much better as a result, let alone undergo a sudden conversion to democracy. Indeed, the junta looks more entrenched than at any point in the 17 years since it took power. Its internal and external critics do not seem to be making any headway. In the meantime, the life of ordinary Burmese is becoming ever more miserable.

The army has ruled Myanmar since 1962. In 1988, a popular uprising led by disgruntled monks and students prompted a group of generals to sideline the long-serving strongman, Ne Win, and call elections. But when these were held, in 1990, the junta refused to honour the result, a landslide win for the National League for Democracy (NLD) led by Aung San Suu Kyi. Instead, the generals simply locked up their political opponents and continued to run the country as a military dictatorship.

Since then, the NLD has been in a quandary. The State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), as the junta calls itself, still claims to be committed to an eventual transition to democracy. It has conducted desultory consultations over a new constitution, and even held periodic negotiations with Miss Suu Kyi, who has won international acclaim, and a Nobel Peace Prize, for her peaceful, patient and dignified resistance—but precious little else. Most of the time the junta has kept her under house arrest, while political repression and economic hardship have gone from bad to worse.

In 2003, the SPDC unveiled a seven-point "road map" to democracy. But the road, predictably, is long and winding. The first item on the junta's agenda is the completion of the new constitution. It duly assembled a "National Convention", heavily stacked with pro-regime delegates, to take up where the previous such body had left off. There would be no going back, the generals said, on clauses in the draft document reserving a quarter of seats in the national parliament, and a third of seats in regional parliaments, for the army.

Nor would the clause barring Miss Suu Kyi from the presidency be revoked. (The official reason for the ban is that she was married to a foreign national: her British husband, Michael Aris, died in 1999.) Miss Suu Kyi is being kept under house arrest during the convention, and this prompted the few NLD members who had been invited to the convention to boycott it.

The NLD says it is willing to be flexible if the generals would only agree to negotiate. There is talk of ending the party's support for international sanctions and calling for more foreign investment and tourism. A prominent role for the army in politics is not out of the question, says Bo Hla Tint of the opposition's government-in-exile. But previous attempts at negotiation have not ended happily.

In 2002 the junta released Miss Suu Kyi from one of her many stints under house arrest, and announced that it would pursue talks "facilitated" by the UN. Miss Suu Kyi began touring the country, in a bid to rebuild the NLD and hearten her supporters. Huge, enthusiastic crowds greeted her everywhere, despite much official intimidation. The generals, doubtless alarmed by her popularity, locked her up again in May 2003 and called off the talks.

Since then, the government has closed all the NLD's offices save its tiny and dilapidated headquarters in the capital, Yangon. Although some long-jailed dissidents have recently been released, younger activists are still frequently arrested. More than 1,000 political prisoners, including many NLD supporters, remain behind bars. Miss Suu Kyi herself is held in "virtual solitary confinement" according to the UN. No one but her doctor and two maids are allowed into her house, and she has no access to a telephone, correspondence, newspapers or the internet. The other, elderly leaders of the NLD, deprived of contact with Miss Suu Kyi and harassed by the authorities, look somewhat at sea.

Observers believe that the junta is busily undermining the party in preparation for elections to be held some time after the constitution is completed next year. In this scenario, the generals' despised civilian fan club, the Union Solidarity and Development Association, would transform itself into a political party. The electoral rules would then be written, and the vote rigged, to guarantee its victory. With a constitution that granted it sweeping powers, and a compliant parliament, the army could then preside over a sort of Potemkin democracy.

The junta seems to have equally unreasonable plans in store for the ethnic minorities who make up 40% of Myanmar's population, and who dominate the country's border regions. Numerous ethnically based rebel outfits have fought against the central government on and off since independence in 1948. Over the past decade or so, the regime has managed to arrange uneasy ceasefires with 17 of them, leaving only a few more still fighting. Now it says that the 17 ceasefire groups should disarm, and pursue their goals through the political process outlined in the road map.

Most of the groups view this as a trap. The architect of the truces, Khin Nyunt, a former number three in the SPDC, fell from grace last year and is currently on trial for corruption. Representatives of the ethnic militias are still participating in the National Convention, but the junta has ignored most of their suggestions. Any hint of federalism seems out of the question, as does a rejigging of provincial boundaries or administrative hierarchies to give disgruntled minorities more autonomy.

Indeed, the junta recently signalled its intransigence by arresting the leader of one ceasefire group, the Shan State National Army (SSNA), along with various other politicians from Myanmar's biggest ethnic minority, the Shan. It seems to be gambling that most of the groups that agreed to a ceasefire will not dare to go back to war. After all, the ranks of the army have more than doubled since 1988, to roughly 380,000. The revenue from gas exports has allowed the regime to upgrade its weapons, while improved relations with India and Thailand have removed the rebels' past sources of arms and sanctuary.

But the junta's bet could yet sour. Only one small group has surrendered its weapons. Others, especially the United Wa State Army (UWSA), remain well armed thanks to revenues from drug trafficking. The SSNA, for one, broke with the regime after the arrest of its leader, and merged with another rebel outfit. The ensuing upsurge in fighting in Shan State has displaced as many as 200,000 civilians, according to human-rights groups. Were the regime to pick a fight with the UWSA, the fallout would be even worse.

Nonetheless, all the signs indicate that the top brass is determined to press on with its plans, even in the face of fierce resistance. It was Mr Khin Nyunt, the general who was purged last year along with all of his allies in government, who made the greatest effort to cultivate friends and placate detractors. Since his departure, the junta has abruptly ended overtures to critics such as Amnesty International and the International Labour Organisation. It has not allowed either the UN's special envoy or its point man on human rights in Myanmar to visit in over a year.

Instead, it appears to be digging in, literally: the army is shifting its headquarters to a series of underground bunkers in a town called Pyinmana, in a remote, hilly region of central Myanmar. The rest of the government may follow, in what looks like a crude attempt to protect the authorities against future invasions or uprisings. Many members of the opposition take the move to Pyinmana as proof that only foreign pressure will help to rein in the SPDC.

But, if anything, foreign pressure is decreasing. America did ban imports from, and financial transactions with, Myanmar in 2003. But the European Union is toying with greater engagement. Last year, for example, it permitted Burmese officials to attend its annual summit with ASEAN for the first time. Both America and the European Union have resisted activists' demands that they ban all investment in Myanmar, allowing both Unocal and Total, two big oil firms, to continue to operate there. Japan, which suspended its aid programme after Miss Suu Kyi's arrest in 2003, has resumed it again.

Myanmar's neighbours, meanwhile, have become much friendlier in recent years. Under the leadership of Thaksin Shinawatra, Thailand has buttered up the generals in the hope of stemming the flood of methamphetamines across the two countries' long border. (Mr Thaksin's family also has business interests in Myanmar.) China, never the fiercest proponent of democracy, has taken advantage of good relations with the junta to establish its only toehold on the Indian Ocean, in the form of a military surveillance station in the Coco Islands. Myanmar's friendship with China has also prompted an anxious Indian government to cosy up to the generals. In January, it signed a deal to build a pipeline across Bangladesh to import Burmese gas. With so many close friends in the region, western sanctions and boycotts carry relatively little sting.

In fact, the worst damage to Myanmar's economy is wrought by the generals themselves. Sean Turnell, of Australia's Macquarie University, points out that they grew up under a socialist regime, and have little understanding of market forces. They meddle in everything, change regulations, and issue or revoke licences and permits at whim. They fund big budget deficits by printing money (or "borrowing" it from the central bank, as official statistics have it), a policy that has provoked double-digit inflation (see chart on previous page).

In 2003, they refused to take any action to prevent a run on the nation's banks. They operate an absurd system of at least three exchange rates, with all the concomitant inefficiencies and opportunities for corruption. The Heritage Foundation, an American think-tank, considers Myanmar's economy the most distorted in the world save for North Korea's.

The result is a country where everything is in short supply. Power is erratic, cars are rare and telephones are unreliable. Farmers are never sure whether they will be forced to sell their crops to the government at below-market rates, and so don't plant as much as they might. Border crossings with Thailand, through which most imports pass, are often closed without warning for long periods. Goods are endlessly repaired and recycled, for want of replacements: all over Yangon, tradesmen can be seen gluing books back together, soldering ancient transistors, or respooling the tape on old audio-cassettes. The generals, however, are in total denial. They claim the economy is growing at a steady clip of 10% or more a year.

No wonder, then, that living conditions are deteriorating rapidly throughout Myanmar. The UN ranks it among the least developed countries in Asia, on a par with Cambodia and Bangladesh. But even that assessment may be over-generous, since it relies on the government's rosy statistics. In 2002, before the latest economic downturn took hold, the UN found that the average household was spending 70% of its income on food. Since then, hunger and malnutrition can only have increased. Some three-quarters of the population live below the poverty line, according to one aid worker's estimate.

The government allocates only 3% of its budget to health and 8% to education, while 29% goes to the military. Foreign donors are loth to lend to such a pariah. America and others block loans from the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, a measure supported by the NLD. Meanwhile, less than half of children complete primary school. Doctors complain that even basic supplies—bandages and painkillers—are hard to obtain. AIDS has become a "generalised epidemic", with 1.2% of the population infected with HIV. Almost 100,000 new cases of tuberculosis are detected every year.

The situation is particularly bad in Myanmar's border areas, where government brutality and neglect, coupled with long-running ethnic rebellions, have lowered living standards yet further. The army often resorts to murder, rape, theft, arbitrary arrest, relocation and forced labour. In a recent report, Guy Horton, a human-rights activist, argues that these abuses are systematic, deliberate and aimed specifically at ethnic minorities, and so constitute genocide. He cites written orders from senior officers to raze villages and to kill "anyone related with the enemy". Estimates of the total number of people killed in the border region range as high as 10,000 a year. Many more die of disease or starvation brought on by the conflict.

The border zone also has the highest prevalence of AIDS in the country. In Hpa-an, not far from the Thai border, 7.5% of pregnant women test positive for HIV. A recent report from the Council on Foreign Relations, an American think-tank, argues that Myanmar is exporting AIDS around the region. Genetic analysis shows that certain strains of AIDS prevalent in India and China originated in Myanmar.

Some Burmese hope that these grim conditions will eventually provoke their fellow citizens into an uprising. They did, after all, take to the streets in 1988 to protest against the economic mismanagement and political oppression of Ne Win's regime. Those demonstrations, although violently repressed, paved the way for the 1990 election.

But the junta has been working assiduously since then to prevent any repetition. The authorities have clamped down particularly ferociously on students and monks, who led the protests in 1988. Universities, which were simply closed for several years, have now reopened—but in distant suburbs, far from any likely venues for demonstrations. At the first hint of trouble, classes are suspended and campuses roped off. Monasteries are also under surveillance. Troublesome ones have their funding cut. Some 300 monks are currently in jail.

Nonetheless, there are some signs of unrest. In May, three big bombs exploded in Yangon, killing at least 11 people and injuring over 100. Smaller devices explode from time to time in both Yangon and Mandalay. The SPDC dismissed the senior ranks of the army's intelligence service last year, along with Mr Khin Nyunt, who used to head it. The purge must, at the very least, have damaged the regime's spy network, and might also have started an internal rift.

But Aung Zaw, an exiled Burmese journalist, worries that protests or even coups, should they materialise, would not necessarily lead to any improvement. Instead, he argues that worsening living conditions, increasing government paranoia and growing popular resentment will simply breed greater violence. "There's a sense of hopelessness," he laments.