While President Obama was watching his party lose control of the House of Representatives in Tuesday’s midterm elections, let’s hope he was planning a response to another vote–this coming weekend’s elections in Burma.
The Nov. 7 elections will be held with pro-democracy opposition leader and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi still under house arrest, and they have been rigged by the ruling military junta to ensure Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), cannot effectively participate. The elections are the first since 1990, when Suu Kyi’s party won, resulting in her arrest and the junta’s increased–and illegitimate–control over the country.
Suu Kyi is one of 2,100 opposition members who will spend election day under lock and key, and as Britain’s ambassador to Burma Andrew Heyn has noted, the supposedly independent Union Electoral Commission, which oversees the elections, is essentially taking its orders from the junta.
The junta has ensured that state media coverage tilts overwhelmingly in favor of its proxy political party, the Union Solidarity and Development party (USDP). The largest opposition party has been barred from fielding candidates for all but about 14 percent of the seats up for election. Twenty-five percent of the new parliament must be made up of military nominees.
Any vote against the USDP, therefore, is nothing more than a protest vote–as is boycotting the election completely. Those are the two choices facing Burma’s suffocated citizenry. Heyn wrote:
“The regime’s dreadful record on the economy matches its record on democracy and human rights. It is based on an apparent disregard for the general population’s welfare, demonstrated by its chronic underfunding of public services such as health and education while money is poured into the defence budget and private bank accounts.”
In August of last year, Democratic Sen. Jim Webb visited Burma and met with Suu Kyi and junta leader Than Shwe, precipitating the highest-level engagement between the two countries in a decade and a half. Webb suggested that the U.S. consider easing some sanctions put in place to pressure the military leaders.
The fallout from Webb’s visit and the administration’s engagement began immediately. Webb claimed Suu Kyi supported lifting some sanctions; Suu Kyi responded that she hadn’t even discussed sanctions with Webb. Two leaders of Burma’s democratic activists called Webb’s methods “ignorant” and “damaging to our democracy movement.”
The junta’s armed forces stepped up their attacks on the ethnic minority Karen community, conscripting children as young as ten into servitude, and refugees flooded into Thailand.
Reuters reported last week on the divisions within the Obama administration on its approach to Burma. Webb thinks the outreach didn’t go far enough, and he apparently has some support within the administration. He claimed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wanted to try it his way, but was pressured against it.
Not only does the junta have a stranglehold on the Burmese people, it has powerful allies. China has exerted much effort in keeping close relations with a country it sees as a source of natural resources. China’s moves brought India to the table to compete for Burma’s attention, especially after China built a station in Burma from which to monitor India’s naval activity. Both countries are now investing in infrastructure and oil projects in Burma.
There are two important lessons in the junta’s success in Burma. The first is, as James C. Scott notes in The Art of Not Being Governed, Scott’s history of Southeast Asia’s upland peoples, ethnic groups occupying the margins of a state–like the Burmese Karen–are often “linguistically and culturally distinct from the populations that dominate the state cores,” and they “spill promiscuously across national frontiers, generating multiple identities and possible foci of irredentism or secession.”
This can prove disquieting and destabilizing, but to a country ruled by a dictatorship such peoples can embody the otherwise broken spirit of a restive population. Therefore, the junta’s ability to dominate the Karen could inspire similar misbehavior in the region by Laos, China, and possibly even Cambodia.
Second, one of the side effects of the Western left’s cultural relativism is its condescension on democracy, often expressed via doubt that other cultures are “ready” for representative self-government. Rest assured this isn’t the case in Burma.
“Under totalitarian socialism, official policies with little relevance to actual needs had placed Burma in an economic and administrative limbo where government bribery and evasion of regulations were the indispensable lubricant to keep the wheels of everyday life turning,” Suu Kyi wrote in her essay “In Quest of Democracy” two decades ago.
Democracy, she continued, would be the cure:
“At its most basic and immediate level, liberal democracy would mean in institutional terms a representative government appointed for a constitutionally limited term through free and fair elections. By exercising responsibly their right to choose their own leaders the Burmese hope to make an effective start at reversing the process of decline. They have countered the propagandist doctrine that democracy is unsuited to their cultural norms by examining traditional theories of government.”
Suu Kyi went on to explain why democracy is perfectly consistent with Burma’s Buddhist culture. Her country’s response to this weekend’s sham elections will prove that she is right, Jim Webb is wrong, and we need a new strategy–if, that is, we still care.
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