Why Soldiers Don’t Rebel in Than Shwe’s Burma

   BY Dr Zarni
      
            Besides seeing the generals’ Burma as a world-class disaster of rights abuses and poverty, one fruitful way to understand it would be to view it as a country that is subject to a military-led process of “re-feudalization” of the soldiering class, which is reshaping the country along precolonial feudal lines with adverse domestic and regional consequences. 
Despite an outward appearance of modernity—the MiG-29s, sub-machine guns, alleged nuclear and missile programs, smart western military uniforms and the democracy double-speak—the military has, since 1962, morphed into a ruling class whose interests, concerns and values have long diverged from those of the country’s multi-ethnic peoples under its lordship.

Dr Zarni (m.zarni@lse.ac.uk) is research fellow on Burma at the LSE Global Governance, the London School of Economics and visiting senior fellow at the Institute of Security and International Studies, Chulalongkorn University.

No doubt personal loyalty towards particular senior or junior generals has played a role in the officer corps, especially those in strategic positions, “hanging together” during crises such as the monk-led uprising, instead of shifting their allegiance back to their real masters, the country’s citizenry, as in the cases of the military in Marcos’ Philippines and Suharto’s Indonesia.  But ultimately, the non-occurrence of this most crucial shift may come primarily out of their vested class interests and privileges, soaked in an evident class consciousness as the “patriotic warriors.” 

The problem, of course, is that while the ruling military is regressing, the public in Burma has moved onto a recognizably modern mental space where notions of democracy and human rights have taken root, even among the country’s “great unwashed,” and the traditions-bound Buddhist clergy.  The Burmese as multi-ethnic people may not have internalized democratic values; but they have certainly embraced the most minimalist reading of a democratic process: the right to pick their own leaders and representatives.  This societal development is of no small import as it has indicated a break with its feudal past.     
                    Also times have changed outside Burma’s national borders. Even the Association of South East Asia Nations (Asean) has manufactured the Asean Human Rights Charter, with its dominant discourse of “Made-in-Singapore” Asian values giving way to the alien lingo of a “civil society.”

                  Burma’s pervasive human rights and humanitarian problems however, are only symptomatic of a problem far more fundamental than various policy regimes (constructive engagement, sanctions, or a combination of both “carrot and stick” under the new label of “pragmatic engagement”) are prepared to even acknowledge, namely the re-feudalization of the warrior ruling class and its societal and regional consequences. 

                  If the international community is serious about helping to empower Burmese “civil society” it needs to come to grips with the fact that the liberal language of human rights and humanitarianism don’t do justice to the people’s predicament.  Burma’s agrarian societies are no longer prepared to accept their own military’s class control, domination and exploitation concealed in the language of self-interested nationalistic paternalism.    

Laying the foundations for re-fuedalization

         The Burmese problem is not simply the country’s successive ruling cliques of generals (since Ne Win’s era), and their cronies (since the-collapse of Ne Win’s socialist program in 1988), aggrandizing themselves at the expense of the public at large.