I spent my childhood in Burma, and indeed it is difficult for me to talk about Burma without a deep sense of nostalgia. My earliest memories are all of Burma, where I grew up between the ages of three and six, where the world presented itself to me, as I started sensing that there existed an external world beyond me.
My father was a visiting professor at the Agricultural College in Mandalay, on leave from Dhaka University. My first memory of striking natural beauty is that of sunrise over the hills, seen from our wooden house on the eastern edge of Mandalay. It was a thrilling sight, even for a young boy. My first recollection of warm human relations, stretching beyond my own family, are also of kindly Burmese society. Mandalay was a lively city in the 1930s, and Burma an immaculately beautiful country. The richness of the land and the enormous capacity of the Burmese people to be happy and friendly shone brightly through the restraining lid of British colonialism. After a short period of independence from British rule and a brief experience of democracy, Burma has been in the grip of a supremely despotic military rule for almost half a century now. There initially were some ups and downs, but over the last couple of decades there has been nothing but downs and downs.
The country has steadily fallen in the economic ranking of poor countries in the world and is now one of the absolutely poorest on the globe. Its educational and health services are in tatters; medicine is difficult to get and educational institutions can hardly function. There is viciously strict censorship, combined with heavy punishment for rebellious voices. The minority communities – Shan, Karens, Chins, Rohingyas and others – get particularly cruel and oppressive treatment. The shocking litany of different cases of arbitrary imprisonment, terrifying torture, state-directed displacement of people and organized rapes and killings. When the population faces a catastrophe like Hurricane Nargis in May 2008, the government not only does not want to help at all, its first inclination is to ban others in the world from helping the distressed and destitute people in the country.
The military rulers have renamed Burma as Myanmar and the renaming seems perhaps understandable. For the country is no longer the Burma that magnificently flourished over the centuries. New Myanmar is in fact the hell-hole version of old Burma. What is striking is that tyranny has grown steadily in Burma precisely over the decades in which democracy have made major progress across the globe. When the great late leader Aung San, who led Burma to independence, was gunned down on the 19 July 1947, there was no democratic country in Asia or Africa. India became independent next month, and established a flourishing, multi-party democracy soon thereafter. And one by one a great many countries moved from authoritarian rule to democratic forms of government.
China, even though it does not have a multi-party democracy, gives plentiful evidence of being deeply concerned, in the systematic and dedicated way, with the wellbeing of its population, in terms of removing poverty, advancing education and health care, and promoting exceptional material and intellectual progress. I know that there are limits to that and issues of human rights come up in that context, as they recently did in the context of the Nobel Peace Prize award. But, it would be a great mistake not to see the commitment of the government to what it sees as the well-being of the people, in terms of their own perspective. And that is where the contrast is.
Burma, on the other hand, has moved exactly in the opposite direction. Ne Win, the military leader, began with the caretaker government in 1958 and then seized power in 1962; Burma has had a continuous sequence of military rule since then, with the grip of uncaring oppression, steadily growing in its reach of enforcement, with total indifference to the well being of the people. One of the foundational questions to be addressed at a meeting like this one, is how has the long process of Burmese descent into hell been possible in a world that has been moving exactly, steadily, and firmly in the opposite direction? What does it tell us about global relations and what can we do about it?
I shall take up these difficult issues to date presently. But before that, I ask a basic question: individuals and groups act on the basis of reasoning in undertaking actions. The reasoning can be primitive or sophisticated, and the wisdom of actions and the resulting consequences cannot but depend on the quality and reach of such reasonings. These reasonings often go by the name of incentives, to which reflective agents tend to respond. When we are concerned with changing behaviours and policies, as we have to be in this case, we have to examine carefully what incentives do different agents involved – the Burmese government, the citizens, and neighbouring countries and the world at large – have in contributing to changing things in Burma.
An incentive may not be based only on crude self interest, for human beings are capable of understanding other kinds of reasons that can also move and inspire us. Indeed, we will never be able to understand why functioning democracies prevent famines from occurring if we believe that everyone only acts according to their narrowly defined self interests. A famine never threatens more than a small proportion of the population, usually no more than five or 10 percent. I have certainly in my two decades of study never encountered a famine affecting more than 10 percent of the population, a small minority which couldn’t sway the election.
And it is through the ability of people in general to understand each other’s predicament, through exposure to news and public reasoning, that makes a minority cause a commitment for the majority of people. Self-interest and prudence, important as they are, are embedded within a larger totality of action-related reasoning. The question that does arise is: how should we think of the Burmese hell hole with this broad understanding of incentives and human reasoning at the national, regional and global levels today?
First, the Burmese government: if one thing is clear from the experiences of the past, it is that the military rulers in Burma see the division between “we rulers” and “they the people” to be an unbridgeable gap, unless the maltreatment of the people can somehow rebound against the interests of the rulers themselves. The control of news and censorship make open and public discussion impossible. If democracy is governed by discussion, as John Stuart-Mill made us understand, there is an uncrossable barrier there, as things stand in Burma. Do the Burmese government have any reason to remove or relax this barrier now? It is hard to think that there is any indigenous force in that direction. What about exogenous influence?
The pressure for this is likely to come from Burma’s powerful neighbours, China in particular, but also India and Thailand. More of that presently, because that is not an immutable situation. But with the fears and anxieties that the Burmese government often display, the global community can do something here if they include the subject of censorship and news control among the conditions to be negotiated between the Burmese government, and say, the United Nations. It is not enough when the weak voice of the UN emissaries assure that the Burmese government has promised to lift the harshness of the regime. And it is not adequate for the Asian leaders to announce cheerfully that they gave the Burmese leaders an “earful”. The military butchers are happy to have their earful so long that they hands remain free.
There is a real need for insisting that concrete steps be taken by the government right now. With effective arrangement for verification and assessment. There is much of it that the Burmese military rulers are concerned about – world opinion – with the impression of being almost paranoid about it. And it is easy as to why they see this as an important requirement of their long run viability. Because that is indeed the case.
There are a lot of complex issues but also some things made more complex than they need be. If the reasoning presented so far is correct, then it’s right to expect that the regime would worry least about those embargoes that harm the general population and most about those that hit things about which they particularly care – because that is the nature of the incentives; it is not like a case of hitting a government country where the government is actually bent on the well-being of the people. What we need is identification of targeted sanctions, and a replacement of restrictions that can hurt the general population with sanctions that target the rulers in particular.
There is a timing issue here and some observers are understandably worried about the signalling that will go with any reduction of sanctions at all at this time. If the announcement about the lifting, of any kind of lifting, were to come shortly after the fraudulent election, since any lifting might be misconstrued as a belief that has now emerged that there is some hope that there are better things to come from military rule. This is, indeed, a serious concern. But I don’t really think that this is likely to happen if the strategy behind targeted sanctions, and taking into account the incentives involved, is fully explained loudly and clearly. The lifting of non-targeted sanctions has to be combined simultaneously with specific embargoes that hit the military regime in general and the rulers in particular.
The combined changes have to be announced not as a lifting of sanctions, but with clarity about how to make the sanctions more effective, aiming not at the general population, but at the rulers at whom the sanctions are addressed. The constraining of oppressive powers of the regime and the facilities that dictatorial rulers seek for themselves is the issue at hand and it’s really the articulation of that that is clue to the timing issue.
So what are these targeted restrictions? At the top of the list must be an embargo on arms and armament of all kinds, and the removal of any military assistance that the Burmese government gets in a direct or an indirect way. Similarly, financial restrictions can impact on those trades in which regime leaders are particularly involved. This is a large list varying from particular minerals and gems, jade and others, to oil and gas, and there will be a strong need for examining the pros and cons of each of these putative candidates for restriction, taking into account the impact of the contemplated actions, both on the general population, which has to be avoided as much as possible, and on the tyrannical leaders – the beneficiaries of the system – who are being targeted.
Travel bans on individuals running the regime are also an important area of action that can be contemplated. Some of the top leaders of the military regime seem to be eccentric enough in their behaviour pattern to have no interest in travel outside Burma. But many of the active operators are interested in being able to move freely across the world, which can lift their own localized lifestyles, help them to get medical attention when needed, and also allow them to conduct business profitably to themselves and to the regime.
This is of course not the occasion to try to draw up anything like a specific list of what should be placed under more control and what sanctions should be relaxed and reduced, but the general principle should be clear: the object of sanctions is not to make the population undergo hardship for the sins of the rulers, but to restrict the tyrants and the oppressors in the regime. The philosophy of sanctions has to be understood with clarity and explained with very strong responsibilities of particular countries rather than the world at large. There are certainly significant asymmetries in what the different governments can do, and the roles of the neighbours are particularly important for the operation of the Burmese military regime.
The Chinese government is the most important player in this area, both because it has done business with the regime for a long time and has provided indirect patronage to the regime. And given its veto power in the Security Council, its support is especially important for the Burmese rulers. Chinese trade and business are extensive in the country. These interests apply not only to oil and gas exploration, but also, very extensively, to general business. From what I understand from visitors to Mandalay – I have not been there since I was six – it is now largely a Chinese-run city.
To emphasize the special role of China is not any reason for not scrutinizing the roles of other countries in the region, particularly India and Thailand. Both of these countries have extensive business relations with Burma, free trade agreement from the regime, and in the case of India, also getting Burmese help with dealing with some rebellions in the Northeastern region of India that borders on Burma. At one level, it’s not hard to see why India and Thailand, in addition to China, have been tolerant of the Burmese regime and indeed supportive of it through political relations.
And yet the violation of the political morality in these relations is extraordinarily acute. I have to say that as a loyal Indian citizen, and as the only country I’m a citizen of, it breaks my heart to see the Prime Minister of my democratic country, and as it happened, since I know him well, one of the most humane and sympathetic political leaders in the world, engaged in welcoming the butchers from Burma and to be photographed in the state of cordial proximity.
I’m also concerned that public discussion of the Burmese situation and India’s Burma policy has been so conspicuous by its near absence in India. This is not because there is any kind of governmental restriction of discussion on this subject or any fear of public penalty for expressing disapproval of the government of India’s stand on Burma. The newspapers are quite ready to carry any such critique. I know from my own personal experience that when I expressed my total disagreement with the Indian government’s policy on Burma at a public meeting in New Delhi, chaired as it happened by the Prime Minister himself, the papers were perfectly willing to report fully my concerns and my thesis.
The problem arises rather from a change in the political climate in India, in which now, what is taken to be national interest, gets much loyalty, and India’s past propensity to lecture the world on global political morality is seen as a sad memory of Nehruvian naiveté. It’s worth remembering that after the military takeover of Burma, the government of India did for a great many of years provide support for the democracy movement in Burma and particularly with Aung San Suu Kyi, who happens to be a graduate of Delhi University before she went to Oxford. As India has redefined itself, partly in imitation of China, the country has increasingly been dominated by much narrower national concerns than those that moved Gandhi and Nehru.
If there is going to be a change here, the best hope for it in India lies certainly in arousing public interest in this issue. The findings of the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on the happenings in Burma, indeed the establishment of a Commission of Inquiry on Burma, would make headlines in Indian news coverage and will certainly influence political dialogue within India.
In some respect, the situation is similar in Thailand as well. And I have to say that some of the papers there have indeed carried editorials criticizing Thai policy regarding Burma and Burmese refugees in Thailand. In my last trip to Thailand, to Bangkok, I saw a main editorial in The Nation that was very critical on that. As an avenue of change for Burma, this is not an easy route to public discussion. But it would be silly not to pursue this, and silly also to underestimate its ultimate power in countries like India and Thailand, even as other policies are pursued across the globe about tackling the ruthless dictators of modern Myanmar.
There are so many issues to discuss that I can’t cover within my limited time, but I’m looking forward to the Q and A, but I end this presentation on the use of reasoning and incentives with three final observations:
First it is hard to persuade governments like India, Thailand, or for that matter, China, that their policies regarding Burma, are exceptionally crude and valuationally gross, if the Western countries with their sharper rhetoric in denouncing Myanmar, do not do what is entirely within their power to do with their own Burmese involvement. Several European countries, as well as countries elsewhere, have strong business relations with Burma, for example, in oil exploration. At a different level, neither the European Union nor the United States, nor Switzerland, Australia, or Canada, has used their power of financial strength against the regime, demanding substantial change in their policies.
This makes it harder to press the offending neighbours when global action is so limited. It is for this reason, among others, that a greater global awareness and more concerned global action would be very important in bringing about a real change in the situation in Burma – both in terms of the direct impact in Burma as well as on its impact on the neighbouring countries to Burma.
Second, provincial reasoning for any country’s so-called national interest calls not only for thoughts regarding here and now, but also about the future, indeed even the long-run future. This applies as much to China as it does to India and Thailand. Given the history of oppressive regimes in the world, the tyrants of Burma will sooner or later fall. The memory of the turmoil of Burmese people will last well beyond that. There are some lessons of history here and some analogies to draw on. The United States might have thought that it was doing what the US administration imagined to be in the US national interest in supporting brutal right-wing dictators in Latin America in the world of yesterday. But the intensity of anti-Americanism that is one of the most potent forces in contemporary Latin American politics today brings the culpability of the past into the attitudes and reflections of the present. The ghost of today will haunt the present-day collaborators of military butchers, tomorrow.
Third, there is a kind of defeatism about Burma which seems to have caught hold of the thinking of many people in the world who worry about Burma, but feel no hope of real change, and thus look for little mercy, that I think is a very serious issue to be concerned. I think we have to be more forward-looking, more confident that with more reasoned public effort across the globe a great deal more could be achieved and things could change. It is important, to begin to talk about what forgiveness. But of course the sight of forgiveness, the possibility of forgiveness, brings about the possibility of non-forgiveness, of that situation. It’s a very good time to think, not just about tomorrow, next month, next year, but what at the end, of where the Burmese leaders would go, where would they find refuge, would they get some kind of immunity, which would be generous. I think we have to change the dialogue in that direction. The dialogue is much, much too defeatist today, and this is I think one of the problems that bothers me most as I think about what’s going on in Burma today.
Towards the end of March 1999, when I was at Trinity College in Cambridge, I received a phone call one morning from one of my old friends from Oxford, Michael Aris, the husband of Aung San Suu Kyi. I knew that he was extremely ill from prostate cancer then. I knew also that it had metastasized and we knew that his time was coming to an end. Michael told me in this rather unexpected but very powerfully articulated call, as he had done many times earlier, that the one focus of his life was to help Suu Kyi. Despite his illness, he sounded adamant, and explained to me, even as his voice was fading over the phone, the need for focus in confronting Burmese tyrants. “Make no mistake, Amartya,” Michael told me, “this disease will not, it cannot, kill me. I have to recover and be active again to help my Suu and my Burma.” This was on the 24 March 1999. I received a call on the 27 March that Michael had died. It was, as it happens, also his birthday.
Michael Aris is no longer here to tell us that we must have focus in our action, but his parting message is important. We can control and confront the tyrants – do our duty to Burma – only if we do not lose focus. The need for that concentration has never been greater than it is today, when the monstrosities of the regime continue undiminished; when the preordained electoral arraignments confuse and confound well-meaning people; when the world seems at a loss about what can be done to help the Burmese people. There is everything to fight for, with clarity and with reason.
This article is adapted from a speech given on 20 September for Human Rights Watch by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, and titled ‘A Return to Civilian Rule?’
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Masha langai ngai a tingkyeng shinggyim ahkaw ahkang hpe hkra machyi shangun ai zawn re ai Gasi ,Ga hkum ni,Kyinsha Lasha re ai Gasi,Ga hkum ni hpe koi gam ga