The military coup in Burma, resulting in the detention of the country’s elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi and her colleagues in the democracy movement, dials the clock back three decades and wipes out the past ten years of reform. For anyone who has observed the country’s courageous struggle for democracy and faltering, fragile progress in recent years, it is absolutely heartbreaking.
We have worked together for Burma’s freedom for 17 years. In 2004, we travelled to the Thailand-Burma border together to meet refugees and exiled activists, and we crossed the border to visit internally displaced peoples in the conflict zones of eastern Burma. Three years later we visited refugees on the India-Burma border. We collaborated on advocacy in Parliament throughout these years and eventually had the privilege of hosting Suu Kyi in Westminster when she visited in 2012, just 18 months after her release from house arrest. Since then we have both travelled in Burma and witnessed the flowering of what we hoped were the first seeds of democracy. Now we are back to square one.
Since she began her first term as de facto head of Burma’s first democratically elected, civilian-led government in 2016, Suu Kyi has not always lived up to expectations. At times she took positions which left us aghast, particularly when she travelled to The Hague to defend the military from charges of genocide against the Rohingyas. It wasn’t simply her silence in the face of atrocity crimes, but her active dismissal of the evidence. As the one Burmese politician whom the country’s ethnic minorities previously looked to with some trust, or at least hope, her failure to advance a peace process or to defend human rights was a grave disappointment. On her watch religious nationalism and intolerance grew, and the space that had begun to emerge for civil society and media shrunk.
Nevertheless, despite all that we had hope that her re-election last November with an even bigger mandate might strengthen the prospects of progress. In her first term, she had to navigate the tight-rope between pursuing the goals for which her democracy movement had fought and keeping the military onside. Moreover, under the constitution – which the military wrote – her power was limited. The military retained control of three key ministries – home affairs, border affairs and defence – and held a quarter of the seats in Parliament. She had little room for manoeuvre. With her re-election last year, though the constitution remained unchanged, we hoped her political position would be strengthened.
From the military’s perspective, the coup makes little sense. They had real power, they used her as a shield against international criticism and they could continue profiting from their enterprises. Now, they risk returning to pariah status, with talk of sanctions and diplomatic isolation. If one of the motivations behind the reform process that began a decade ago was to be accepted by the world and released from dependency on China, the coup is self-defeating.
That is until you look at it from the perspective of the coup leader, Commander-in-Chief Min Aung Hlaing. He wants to be President. He was disappointed – perhaps shocked – by how badly the military’s Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) did electorally. He knows he has to step down from his current position this year, and so he clearly decided that if he couldn’t win at the ballot box, he’d do what he does best and use the barrel of a gun to win instead. It is all about his personal ambition.
For that reason, if there is to be any hope of making this reversal of fortunes temporary, there must be a robust response from the international community. Condemnatory statements alone don’t cut it. We need tough, targeted sanctions – not against the people of Burma, but against the military and its enterprises. We need a global arms embargo, coordinated through the United Nations, and even if Russia and China won’t join, they can at least be made to feel embarrassed by their support for this brutal, illegitimate regime. And we need more countries, including the UK, to follow the example of Canada and the Netherlands in joining The Gambia’s case against Burma at the International Court of Justice, to hold the perpetrators of genocide and crimes against humanity to account. We must raise the cost for the military for what it has done to such a level that some within it may decide that supporting Min Aung Hlaing’s vain ambitions is not worth it.
In 2004 we sat in bamboo huts in the jungle listening to parents describe seeing their children shot dead in front of them by the Burmese Army, and met children whose parents had been shot dead in front of them. We heard accounts of torture, rape and forced labour. Such atrocities continue to this day in Burma’s ethnic states, but today the misery is compounded by the knowledge that the brutal military dictatorship – which never really went away – is now back in full power. That can only be bad news for human rights and prospects for peace.
The one hope for the future, as always, lies in Burma’s people. The courageous scenes of tens of thousands protesting peacefully throughout the country in recent days, despite Internet shut-downs and risk of arrest or injury, are an inspiration. If the peoples of Burma this time can truly unite, setting ethnic and religious differences aside in pursuit of the freedom they all desire, and if the international community will stand with them, then perhaps this coup will be a short-term setback, and the flame of democracy in Burma can be rekindled. If not, then this beautiful country which has already suffered from over 70 years of conflict and over half a century of dictatorship faces yet more darkness ahead.
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