‘To become a truly democratic union’, she said, ‘I urge all members of parliament to discuss the enactment of the laws needed to protect the equal rights of ethnicities’.
Aung San Suu Kyi led her National League for Democracy (NLD) party to power in a landslide victory in the 2015 general election, as the Burmese people savoured their first taste of democracy.
Since being swept into power, the NLD and Aung San Suu Kyi have faced their fair share of criticism both inside and outside the country. Critical murmurs have rippled across the country since the NLD celebrated one year in power at the end of March. Disappointment centres on the much-anticipated but paper-thin 12-point economic plan, Myanmar’s faltering economic growth, sluggish foreign direct investment figures and ongoing conflict in the frontier zones.
Three factors constrain Myanmar’s democratic development even today.
First, power is still concentrated constitutionally with the military in key areas. The military has a constitutional veto; it has control over key ministries; and it has the ability to declare martial law whenever it sees fit.
In recent months the tone of military power appears to be changing. On 20 June, a day after Martyrs day, the military publicly admitted responsibility for the deaths of five civilians in Shan State. Seven soldiers faced trial in September and four were sentenced to five years in prison. This was an unprecedented concession to democratic accountability. Maybe it hints at the rise and reinvention of a more democratic and legitimate military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP). But it does not yet change the reality of the military’s power in Myanmar today.
Second, a culture of loyalty still shapes Myanmar’s democratic experience. As David Steinberg explains in this week’s lead essay, the culture of loyalty that permeates the political regime confines democratic decision-making to only the highest echelons of power. This top-down governance model ‘constipates change’, Steinberg argues.
The NLD itself epitomises this problem. Aung San Suu Kyi campaigned on a platform of democracy, capturing a ‘nationwide desire for change’. Democracy was always more than a political system for the people of Myanmar. A vote for Aung San Suu Kyi in 2015 was a vote for democracy; and a vote for democracy was a vote for Aung San Suu Kyi.
The NLD is Aung San Suu Kyi and there is no delegation of authority to the party through which its membership might carry sway. In late March, members of the 88 Generation Group, (activists in the uprising against the Ne Win’s military regime in 1988) — many of whom were deliberately excluded from the NLD because of fear of conflict with its top leadership — met to discuss the formation of a new party. While they might not contest the 2020 election, they aspire to provide a kind of check-and-balance against top-down democracy, military-dominated or otherwise.
Third, Myanmar is still at war with itself. The NLD is now all about the peace process. But until the Ethnic Armed Organisations (EAOs), the government and the military can come to some kind of understanding and agreement, the country will continue to languish in violence. These troubles have the dual effect of legitimising the military’s continued presence in all spheres of national life and perpetuating Myanmar’s risky investment environment.
All eyes are on the NLD as it attempts to broker peace between the EAOs and the military during the second Panglong Peace Conference which began on 24 May. Last year’s inaugural dialogues were heavily criticised for not reaching out to those who had not already signed the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA). As Su Mon Thazin Aung rightly argues, the clamour is for compromise and concrete change. But the Northern Alliance — a group of non-signatory EAOs who established a new negotiating committee in April — refuse to engage with the ‘NCA first’ pathway to peace. Without progress this time around, the mechanism of Panglong itself, widely accepted as the way towards a long term ceasefire and lasting peace, may be in jeopardy.
Some, like Matthew Walton and Elizabeth Rhoads, argue that Aung San Suu Kyi is losing touch with the ethnic states. The NLD performed poorly in the 1 April by-election, in part due to controversy over renaming a bridge in Mon State. Aung San Suu Kyi’s decision to rename the bridge after her Burmese father — instead of a name more meaningful to the Mon community — opened up debate about the NLD’s Burmese-centric approach to nation building. This presents a huge problem for the NLD whose primary aim is ostensibly an ethnic inclusive Union.
Aung San Suu Kyi also has her hands full with the Rohingya ‘issue‘ in Rakhine State. Usually unduly seen as a crisis fuelled only by anti-Muslim nationalism, the Nobel Peace laureate is often placed at the centre of international criticism for her failure to speak out on the issue. But as Nick Cheesman argues compellingly, not enough attention is given to taingyintha — Myanmar’s constitutional recognition of ‘national races’. Taingyintha has the effect of framing Myanmar politics entirely in terms of ethnicity. ‘National races trump citizenship’, and for the Rohingya, taingyintha means they are submitted to a juridicial schema that denies them political power or recognition. In Myanmar, ‘the place of people belonging to non-national race groups is precarious’. Taingyintha is yet another phenomenon that Aung San Suu Kyi must navigate with care.
The transition to democracy in Myanmar was never going to be easy. Aung San Suu Kyi’s call for the international community to encourage her country ‘to maintain peace and stability, and to make progress in building better relations between its communities, instead of always drumming up cause for bigger fires of resentment’ is a painful plea for understanding her challenges along this path. Progress on peace, for example, would garner her more support for negotiation of the constitution.
Myanmar has made remarkable progress on its path to democratisation, and it’s not going to turn its back away from democracy now. But the way forward would likely be easier if the governing party now chose to devolve power from the top and build capacity at its base to ensure that it is a political force beyond Aung San Suu Kyi’s remit. Doing this would ease some of the constraints that limit its ability to connect better with the people, threaten its success as a unifying government, and hold back the country’s progress towards democracy.
The EAF Editorial Group is comprised of Peter Drysdale, Shiro Armstrong, Ben Ascione, Amy King, Liam Gammon, Oliver Friedmann and Jillian Mowbray-Tsutsumi and is located in the Crawford School of Public Policy in the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific.