Burma's Rigged Parliament Picks New PM

The Burmese parliament has selected a military loyalist to serve as the country's new prime minister. Thein Sein resigned from the army to lead the pro-military Union Solidarity and Development Party in last November's elections. Not surprisingly, the sham election resulted in his team taking 80% of the seats, and those members chose him over two other ex-military men (as a consolation prize, they each get to be vice president). On paper, though, Burma now has a civilian government. Despite the depressingly predictable outcome of all of this, one can see some green shoots of progress even without rose-colored glasses and self-medication.

The key to understanding Burma (this journal declines to call it by the name chosen by the junta, "Myanmar") is the realization that the military is the state. There is a shabby window dressing of constitutionalism and democracy . For example, there are parliamentary elections, but the military automatically gets 25% of the seats in parliament under the military-drafted constitution. The upshot is that Senior General Than Shwe is the one man with the one vote. As dictator, his word has been law since 1992. He is now 77 years old, and while he may live a great many more years, thoughts are turning to who and what comes next.

Professor Carl Thayer, an expert on Southeast Asia at the Australian Defense Force Academy, observed, "at 77 he will go the way of other dictators, that, eventually people will be looking beyond him because of mortality. And thus the loyal subalterns and lieutenants begin to make their own arrangements." It is most likely that this will merely result in factionalism within the military. That said, though, there is a precedent for events developing to the advantage of the Burmese people. Professor Thayer points to Indonesia.

"If we take the Indonesian example, once you create different interests among civilianized military from the professional military itself, and as Burma opens up, then what we saw in new order Indonesia was a rift between military and the Suharto regime and its cronies. That could also happen in Myanmar," he said.

In a different context, there is a parallel in the case of Poland in the 1980s. While the Polish Communist Party was still in charge, the Solidarity labor union and the Catholic church created and served different interests. Eventually, General Jaruzelski mounted a coup to prevent a Soviet invasion and to maintain communism. Even then, it was a matter of time before the Poles, and the rest of the Soviet bloc, liberated themselves.

Dictatorships are usually more stable than democracies, but at times of transition, they are very fragile things indeed. Dictators get old and die (although not quickly enough to suit this journal), and someone or something must fill the vacuum. The Kims of North Korean managed the trick of staying on once, and they could do it again. At the same time, certain Arab states are proving that dictators can clamp down on the various interests in any society for years, but during a period of succession, those interests have much more room to maneuver. Burmese society now has a slim chance, which is vastly more than it had a few years ago.

© Copyright 2011 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.

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