The Siam Society Lecture: The Hidden History of Burma (9 January 2020)

it is my pleasure this evening to introduce our speaker dr. tan Mia new dr. tan was born into a very distinguished Burmese family his ancestors served the king of Burma in the court of Abha in the 18th century and in the court of Mandalay in the 19th century his grandfather was the secretary-general of the United Nations who tante and as a result dr. Tang was born in New York City in 1966 he went on to study at Harvard then got a master's degree at the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins and finally in 1996 earned his doctorate at the University of Cambridge in the UK dr. thanh has written four books on myanmar history over the years each with a different perspective and his latest a book which is on sale here came out recently and in it he combines the authority of somebody who has personally been involved in and witnessed the events of Myanmar's recent history with the training of a rigorous historian who brings an academic perspective to the events he describes but what he manages to do since he knows all of the players in contemporary recent myanmar history is bringing the story very much to life and he provides in a fascinating way in understanding of the nuances and complexities of what myanmar is all about today and how it became this way over the last hundred and fifty years of its history and this is I think a very useful perspective correction to the sometimes oversimplified narratives of recent Myanmar events that are so often provided by Western observers so it's a great pleasure this evening to invite dr. tan to speak with us please welcome thank you very much it's a very it's a great honor for me to be here I think it's the third time that I've spoken at the at the sime Society the last was when my last book came out seven or eight years ago and I'm very grateful to the chair for his for his kind introduction one thing that he he left out was to say that you know I lived in Bangkok very close to to where we are today when I was a teenager from when I was 12 years old to 17 or 13 to 17 in the very late 1970s early 1980s and I was a frequent visitor to the same society then so it's it's a particularly particular pleasure for me to to be here with you this evening I think when we when I talk about my book I think the best way to sort of describe it and I think I'd like to leave some time for questions if you have as well is to tell you a little bit about you know why I wrote the book and and how it evolved in different ways I first thought of writing this book back in 2015 and when I first thought of writing the book I thought it was going to be more or less a straightforward political history of the past ten years the transition from from democracy or sorry from dictatorship to democracy from the time of the military junta in the mid 2000s through the democratic elections of 2015 and the coming to power of the National League for Democracy and and and Oh answer soo-ji and I had been involved in and out in sort of Burmese politics in different ways for a long time in in 1988 I graduated from from Harvard as was mentioned and I was interning in Geneva for an NGO related to the UN and that's when the big pro-democracy demonstrations uprising broke out in in Yangon or in Rangoon at the time and I was really keen to try to be a part of that I was 22 at the time I felt I was missing out on on what seemed like was going to be an exciting revolution pro-democracy revolution and so I flew I quit my my internship I flew to Bangkok and I got ready to go into to Rangoon my parents were actually living in Bangkok at the time and the very morning that I was supposed to fly in from Don Muang Airport to Rangoon Zwingli Doan airport the airport on that side was shut down by the general strike and so I was I was stuck here and couldn't be part of what I thought was still going to be a successful revolution but within a couple of weeks a trickle of students for students first one of whom became the founder of the Democratic voice of Burma showed up at our door we were living at typing towers on on ekam I at the time and said the military is going to crack down this is what we think we need to we need arms we need to set up a student army at the border and those first few students became twenty students than fifty students in a thousand we were helped by Thai students at Ram Tamang University and elsewhere to hide many of these students in different safe houses in Bangkok eventually ten thousand arrived at the border by Christmas of that year and set up a number of different camps and they set up their army the all Burma students democratic front which actually still survives to this day so my first kind of immersion into Burmese politics was the year I spent with them here in Bangkok and then also at these camps along the border from all the way down opposite / - up all the way north to areas opposite mayor Hong Hong and I went from there to Washington I took up a masters I was supposed to be doing a master's full-time at Johns Hopkins sites in Washington DC but actually spent that entire time except for the the classes that I had to take to pass trying to sort of mobilize opinion against the military government at the time I set up the first Burma advocacy group there in in Washington they were there was a small band of people on the hill staffers of different congressmen senators like daniel patrick moynihan who were interested and we were campaigning basically for the hardest line approach possible against the burmese generals and i was for any kind of sanction any kind of measure that would revenge what we all saw as an incredibly unjust set of events that had taken place with the uprising being crushed in 1988 and it's aftermath and by 1990 we had had elections with these election results were not were not record where they were recognized but they were not respected dances uji won a nobel prize and shot shot to international fame and we all wanted to support the democracy movement as much as possible but really by 1993 I had had second thoughts and you know I had when we were living in Bangkok in the in the 80s we were traveling to to Rangoon all the time and we were there on holidays we were there for a couple of months every summer we were there over Christmas and Easter break when I wasn't it at is be down the street here and it was very clear to me even then as a child that a big part of Burma's problem was its isolation and in as much as I had wanted to see the end of military rule and and we were really angry about what the army had done in crushing democratic dissent in in 88 and 89 and 90 I also really wanted the country to come out of that isolation and so sanctions didn't really make much sense to me and I saw that the new military government at the time the hunter that took over however brutal it was was trying to do things to come out of that isolation it ended restrictions on tourism for example and said it wanted to rejoin the world economy so I wasn't really sure I didn't I didn't like the government at the time but I was I was pretty unsure about about sanctions so I left the whole political scene and didn't do anything in in Burmese politics for a very long time I went into academia I wrote my PhD I worked on 19th century Burmese history I was part of different UN peacekeeping operations that I worked at the UN in New York for for seven years not on on Myanmar but on other countries and then in 2007 after I had worked on UN reform under Kofi Annan for a couple of years and and thinking that wasn't really going to lead anywhere very quickly I quit the UN 2006 2007 and thought I might at least try to come back in see what was possible in Myanmar and I've been away I mean I visited on holiday been there for you know week over Christmas but I didn't really know the country very well but what I was increasingly certain of from what I had read and what I had seen even over my short visits was how poor the country had become in comparison with pretty much every other country in the region and really the depth and the scale of humanitarian deprivation in the country the absolute need for more international aid and the way in which the politics amount around democracy reform had made assistance to the most vulnerable people in the country more difficult so that I felt I was quite clear of in my mind and so when we came back you know I was based in Bangkok at the time but going into to Myanmar quite frequently in 2007 8 for those of you who are here you might remember that was the time of the of the monks protests that were crushed violently it was also the time of cyclone nargis which killed 140,000 people in a single night and many of those people even still now haven't haven't had the assistance to to recover their lives and so for a few years I worked with different people internationally and and Myanmar people to try to improve international aid access to negotiate more aid programs into the country the generals were very paranoid the generals were very isolated it took me a couple of years to just meet my first general and and to have a normal conversation with him and to try to convince him that it was in everyone's interest to allow in more international assistance but it meant also trying to convince people on the outside that international assistance might be possible and might reach the people who were most in need and in doing that in those years I got to know other sort of like-minded Burmese people people who didn't like the regime who wanted to see change but who also wanted to put the situation of ordinary people and poor people first and who were instinctively by that time against increasing economic sang tighter economic sanctions and aid cut-offs against the country and so that was that's the kind of background in terms of what happened to me in 2011 because all of a sudden all these doors that had been slammed shot or or seemed to be shots only swung swung wide open and outside as you probably remember very few people thought that anything was ever going to change in Myanmar and people had written off the new constitution the one that we have now and the elections in 2011 as really leading to nothing more than a fig leaf for continued military dictatorship no one expected anything except for the people that I had gotten to know in Myanmar at the time who I think because they had developed some links with people within the military because they were negotiating aid access had a sense much clearer sense that the generals weren't about to kind of give it all up but they were planning the biggest power shake-up in a generation and that would be an opportunity and so what I do in part of my book is to try to describe what happens next and it wasn't as seen or sometimes portrayed from the outside is a sort of miraculous shift from from dark dictatorship to to complete democracy it wasn't the result of Western sanctions and pressure it wasn't even the result of President Obama's engagement policy at the time it wasn't because the generals had wanted to pivot away from China and we're looking at things geo-strategically on it on a map it was actually for a whole variety of reasons linked to intra military and intra elite politics and for those of you who read the book you'll see really came down to a few specific personalities and very personal motivations within parts of the military elite for wanting to move in the direction that they did and so when I first thought of writing the book in 2015 I thought that was the story I wanted to tell I got to know some of those ex generals the ones who had led the reforms in in 2011 that included former president Dane sane who was then an ex general it included a couple of his his ministers like who so Thane and hua min who headed the peace process which I worked on and I interviewed them for about 5 10 15 hours and you know it was very clear to me that the the reasons they did what they did and what they did for those of you may not remember was they went off-script in 2011 there was a new constitution it was not a democratic constitution the army was still autonomous but there was a little stage created for elected political parties and in the first instance the elected political party was basically the party of ex-generals and so again many people didn't expect things to change but then a few of these guys went way off what was intended in releasing very quickly thousands of political prisoners and freeing up the internet a hundred percent in ending media censorship and allowing free trade unions to be to be organized and a whole slew of different economic measures and even more importantly bringing civilians and outside civilians into government for the first time since the military first took over in 1962 these things were completely unexpected and again unprecedented in half a century of military dictatorship if you read the book you'll have a sense of why they did that but they did that at exactly the same moment that Washington under President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were looking for their own reasons to engage with Myanmar's generals with an eye to China and so there was an alignment of the stars in the sense that at exactly the moment that Washington was looking for a reason to engage the generals the generals gave Washington just enough scope and reason and justification to justify basically a rolling back in a quick rolling back in 2012 of of us and eventually other sanctions as well so again part of my book is is that that political process and and really zooming it down to the level of the key three or four people who I think made a big difference for good and bad reasons and very different reasons that that at that time and of course if you take the story forward it goes to 2015 and the elections and then the coming to office of dancers uji and then the specific instance or the specific context within which she came into office really led to a certain type of government which was very different than what many people expected not the kind of revolutionary democratic government that some expected inside the country not the liberal leaning government that many on the international side expected government led by her to be but something very different with with roots in in Burmese nationalism but much more importantly I think very much situated into the strange political context that had developed by 2015 in in Napier between the army and different political personalities as well as factions in the country but I you know when I started writing the book in 2016 a couple of things had already begun to happen which clouded that that picture the first was the peace process which I had worked on as a special adviser to the government and the peace process was was was going nowhere fast by that point the initial hopes because there have been a number of ceasefires agreed in 2012 and 2013 that there would be a permanent peace that basically everything all good things democracy and peace were just around the corner that that wasn't going to happen instead there was an outbreak of fighting in the far north of the country in the kitchen hills displacing a hundred thousand people leading to thousands dead and then there were sporadic but sometimes intense fighting along the Chinese border as well and the nationwide ceasefire agreement that I had been part of the team that led the government negotiation and in drafting with the leaders of ethnic armed organizations that was only signed by a minority of those groups in 2015 for those of you who don't know and you look at the map you can see the Bashan plateau in the in the east of the country that's where the bulk of of the armed conflict has been over the past few decades there were cease fires since the late 1980s early 1990s but those are the cease fires that began to break down in part after 2011 Myanmar is a country of about 20 different ethnic armed organizations the biggest is the United Wall State Army which controls areas both on the Chinese and the Thai border they have over 20,000 perhaps as many as 30,000 well-armed troops with armor and artillery and surface-to-air missiles in a consider and a fairly sizable city of their own Peng sang it's really a mini state about the size of Belgium in the northeast of of Myanmar but alongside these different ethnic armed organizations or hundreds of militia perhaps as many as a thousand different militia groups stretching that entire border from almost Tibet all the way down towards renown in the in the south of Thailand but that peace process even though there were initial hopes that this would lead to a permanent peace again began to go pear-shaped and and didn't lead anywhere by 2016 and of course by 2016 we also had not only the the communal violence between Muslims Muslims and Buddhists in in the Western reclines day and then the exodus of thousands of people by boat again mostly Muslims mostly Rohingya Muslims from Rakhine State to Thailand and Malaysia and in 2015 but then in 2016 we saw much more serious violence that led to the exodus of sixty seventy thousand people into Bangladesh and that was then followed in 2017 by even more bloodshed leading to 700,000 people fleeing to Bangladesh and in one of the fastest and biggest refugee exodus is since the second world war anywhere in the world so because of that I felt it couldn't be my book wouldn't just be this this imp all political history about why things shifted in 2011 and began to lead towards more democratic outcome but really had to think about you know why is this been a country with this kind of conflict what are the roots of this conflict how does one even begin to think about issues of identity and ethnicity citizenship and belonging differences in race and religion and what this is meant and for that I couldn't just talk about the last 10 years and I felt I had to to both write a little bit about the the deeper history of the country over the past many centuries and I do that in the very beginning of the book but also talk about the huge and negative legacies of colonialism because if you go back to British times in the late 19th and 20th century and this is when colonial administrators administered censuses which could put which put people into or tried to put people into very neat boxes which categorized people including the people in Aragon which is now reclined state asking people are you sure if you're Muslim or if you're Buddhist are you really this are you really that and those debates around the censuses putting people into specific ethnic categories into very rarefied essentialist categories is what has shaped the thinking and the discussion in the discourse around race and identity in Burma in Myanmar all of these years including the 70 years since the end of of colonial rule so I talked about the colonial legacy of race and we have to remember that no Burma was not this Burma that you see on the map this never existed until the 1886 or 1887 you had different kingdoms in the Irrawaddy Valley going back a thousand years or more but this particular set of boundaries is new it's a modern colonial creation and Burma was in the late 18th sorry late 19th century born as a British and quite brutal British military occupation it grew up in the late 19th and early 20th century as a racial hierarchy for the first time where people's position were were based on on blood and race and British left behind three very clear legacies the first because of world war ii and the japanese invasion and we sometimes forget how destructive that invasion was we're pretty much except for a rangoon every single town and city in the country was bombed flat every economic infrastructure in the country every road every rail every factory every oil refinery was was utterly destroyed and then the British came back and basically spent a couple of years in in Burma and then left in 1948 and left extremely weak institutions so whereas in India the civil service had developed to a point where you had hundreds if not thousands of well-trained experienced Indian civil servants both in India and in Pakistan in Burma the number of people who had experience in in senior or even middle level administrative and government functions was extremely extremely few and so there were very weak institutions and the British of course had had ruled on parts of Myanmar maybe half of Myanmar only very lightly or indirectly so in the hills it had been almost no government even in the days before World War two so within a year of the end of British rule basically everything collapsed into civil war and this is the civil war that we've had ever since ever since 1948 so weak institutions a race-based sort of set of identities were two of the legacies but you know the more I thought about writing this book and I'm just looking to see if I have a I didn't bring my watch so if someone can tell me when when my time is almost stopped be please let me let me know and because I'd like to leave time for questions as well I think you know what when I started actually writing this book and trying to figure out how is going to shape this and make sense of everything and the more I interviewed people and I interviewed dozens and dozens of people and you'll see in the book from frumpy who are extremely poor migrant workers and others too to the top generals and and and businessman the more I realized that you know even more important than the political history of the country even more important than the history of ethnicity and race and identity in the country the thing that has really been shaping people's lives and and has animated really Burmese society for these past couple of decades is the history of the political economy in the country and that is often never really discussed and and talked about and it wasn't really a framework from which I had thought about things to be honest ten or fifteen years ago and I'll tell you what I I mean because I'm gonna just see what time it is right now is it 7:30 okay good how sweet for thirty minutes I think you know when people think about the the modern or the recent modern history of of Myanmar nineteen eighty eight is usually thought of as an inflection point where we had the uprising that I'd mentioned before elections that were not respected a couple of years later NLD was formed or masucci want her Nobel Prize and then the 2025 years since then is portrayed as is struggle between dictators and Democrats between the generals and the NLD and Dawson suji's been held up as this democracy icon especially in the West and and in a similar of a different way within the country as well but I think that in a way the even more important inflection point in understanding Myanmar today is what happened a year later in 1989 and that's often not really thought about in 1989 four different things happened at almost exactly the same time the first is that the new military junta came to power and abolished the old Burmese way to socialism it ended the socialist system and any pretense at a socialist ideology now up until that point the left had completely dominated Burmese politics the third legacy of British colonialism because British colonialism it had been very exploited it left behind a very unequal society was a left reaction and so from 1948 onwards Burmese politics was all about which side of the left you were on what socialist party you belong to or did you belong to the Communists were you socialist a communist which faction of the Communist Party it was all dominated by the left in 1989 that ended the military junta abolished the Burmese way to socialism and said that Burma would from now on be a free-market economy and they took a number of different steps opening up the country to trade while welcoming investment for the first time foreign investment for the first time opening up the tourism sector at the time privatizing hundreds of state state-owned enterprises and people who had been operating on the margins as black marketeers suddenly were celebrated as national entrepreneurs and and welcomed as as a new breed of businessmen exactly the same time over those few months the Communist Party of Burma collapsed and the Communist Party of Burma insurgency had controlled the northern hills along the Chinese border they collapsed the old Marxist ran away to China and their armies fractured into different ethnic based insurgent armies one of which became the United wall state army the Burmese army and the successor armies to the Communists signed or agreed to cease fires that summer of 1989 so that was the second thing that happened the communist collapsed and their successor armies which became ethnic based militia agreed to cease fire so there was no more fighting in the north thirdly the border with China was thrown open China had been pushing because China was also coming out of its isolation in those years in the 80s for an open border between Yunnan and Myanmar and this was agreed and fourthly these ceasefire groups in the north like the wah and the government basically went into business together that is the origin of the political economy that we had we've had in Myanmar over these past 25 years illicit industries especially narcotic drug production especially heroin production and trafficking boomed in the 80s there was massive deforestation in the east of the country for the export of timber to Thailand as well as to to China you had a number of different new industries also developed by the late 1990s 2000s like Jade which was estimated to be worth by 2010 2012 in the billions of dollars every year billions of dollars from black money on registered money untaxed money came in to create the new Yangon real estate market and construction sector and this gave birth to a certain type of of capitalism and a certain type of business class in the country which has had a grip on Burmese society for the past 25 years people in in Burma sometimes talk about the Army's economic interests sometimes talk about cronies and different business cronies some of whom are more famous than others people talk sometimes about these illicit industries but no one's really tried to put it all together into a single frame and I think the problem is or not the problem but I think the way we need to think about this is that over the past 25 years the institutions of the state which were never very strong anyway have weakened further other than perhaps the army but the army itself in some ways is is not the strong institution that some people might think but what has become extremely strong over these 25 years is this system of money making and the networks the rackets that really extend across every racial and religious line in the country from the very far north to the very far south and are responsible for multi-billion dollar industries intimately tied to China intimately tied to illegal and illicit trade and production if you look in the last few years for example we've seen an entirely new industry develop and that's the methamphetamine industry which was which was not much for 10 10 15 years ago but is now estimated by the UN as being worth somewhere between somewhere over 60 billion dollars a year now even if that is exaggerated even that is not true even half of that is is half of the the entire official GDP of the country there was a there was a piece and I think it was by Reuters about six months ago three to six months ago looking at different sources looking at the methamphetamine trade and basically discovering that the methamphetamine trade coming out of Myanmar is really controlled by a single drug kingpin and ethnic Chinese Canadian Chinese whose income is believed to be worth or yearly income it's believed to be worth over fifteen billion dollars a year so again even if those figures are off even by an order of magnitude it's an enormous amount of money in Myanmar and the fact that these networks these rackets both legal and illegal are largely hidden I think tells us a little bit about the way in which we're missing parts of the bigger picture in the country but I think on the political economy you know I end with some more questions and then answers and I think it's trying to understand this intersection between economics and politics which is urgently needed in Myanmar if we go back to you know what I said in the beginning about sanctions and and and poverty and and humanitarian assistance you know Burma is a country which has progressed a lot in many ways except for people in Rohingya and other people in in Rakhine affected by conflict and some people in North but for ordinary people things are better now than they were ten ten ten years ago but people are still extremely poor ten twenty thirty million people in in Burma oryx are some of the poorest people in the world and it's a much more unequal society than at any time since since British rule but yet no one talks about equality in the country no one talks about giving content to new democratic institutions through some kind of discussion about what a future economic agenda should be and I think that you know this is a core challenge in Myanmar today is there a way in which at a time when democracy is so fragile is there a way in which new ideas about the political economy and ways in which it can be shaped and changed is it possible at this stage in Myanmar and I'll just end by saying that you know in in Myanmar today I think you can look at it in one of a couple of different ways one is that you know you put all of these different issues on on on the table twenty-eighth Nick armed organizations hundreds of militia multi-billion dollar or tens of billions of dollars worth of of illicit industries like methamphetamines weak state institutions the legacy of military dictatorship which means that people are extremely uneducated education systems are are have atrophied over generations and then you have on top of that the real effects of climate change which may be around the corner and Myanmar is predicted to be one of the three or four countries most negatively affected by climate change anywhere in the world and you wonder why the country is even holding together as bad as as well as it is right now right and so I think you can you can think of Myanmar as a country which is just on the edge right now which has made a lot of progress but unless it makes a lot more progress and gets its act together very soon it may be in for much harder time still or it's possible that we're just missing something still that we're missing you know you go to yong-go and many of you may have been to Yangon it's relatively peaceful place there are a lot of young people who are extremely motivated to change their country in a good way you see a lot of good developments in civil society and political parties even in businesses as well in terms of reform and and businessmen and women wanting to do the right thing and maybe we're missing something maybe there's some other glue maybe there's some other ingredient that's both holding things together and that's going to see things through but I think we'll know more in the next few years how things go but for me I think the hardest thing in writing this book was was trying to decide you know whether to end on a relatively optimistic or or pessimistic note and you can you can judge yourself if you read it in terms of in terms of what you think but let me stop there and see if if you have questions thank you thank you very much [Applause] I think they're coming with the microphone in your opinion does Ansan Suchi understand the situation of the country just like you and that's you really have power and dad is she capable yeah I think I don't I don't know she she thinks the same way I I do or if she has the same I mean I think she's put I mean I think I think the difference though I would say is that she and a lot of other people in the country quite understandably have put you know have a singular focus on political democratic change this is where they came from this was the issue around which they had organized and through no fault of their own over 20 years many hundreds of people who were exiled hundreds of people were thrown into prison dozens of people died in in prison so they never really had a chance where many of them never had a chance to to think and debate and and and and travel around the country and come up with different different ideas and and even now I think in 2016 when they finally came into office they came into office with this very clear focus that the Constitution as it was was not democratic and needed to change and I think the agenda on a wider spectrum of issues really wasn't there but in many ways that's the tragedy of the country because they themselves also didn't have that opportunity to do that until these 2011-2012 I think in terms of the power I think she has a lot of power I think I think we have to be clear what the Constitution is and in the current constitution the army has 25 percent of seats in parliament which means that it has an effective veto on further constitutional change so the Constitution cannot change without the army agreeing but because the NLD has a supermajority has more than 50 percent despite the 25 percent army it means that it can pass any other law that it wants so the government's budget which is about 15 16 billion dollars a year the government budget government spending in general health education trade issues economic issues investment foreign policy and the general administration department now which is the local administration department going down to the township village level that all reports to the up to the president which is her appointee so in in in the economic and social and foreign policy sectors she has pretty much complete control just one more question the drug problem is not only me and my problem is all the world problem I have a big question mark for so long you need raw material even the minority army they need weapon they need ammunition they need uniform somebody supplying that like it can't be cut the flow of that yeah I guess that's a good question I mean I think that you know there as you know there are many different black markets and grain markets and weapons I think the uniforms are probably not that that difficult I think in terms of arms you have both coming out of China but also out of other countries you have different black engrave markets and in weapons including quite sophisticated weapons the Myanmar army recently overrun a village and in the northeast of the country in Shan State belonging to the that had been controlled by the Thien la which is one of the insurgent groups and they discovered Chinese made surface air missiles shoulder-length surface-to-air missiles that can take out a a plane and those without those were made in China exactly how it comes across the border from China I guess is is anyone's guess a lot of precursor chemicals for methamphetamines come from China maybe some come from other countries as well but it's primarily from China so it's a question in terms of you know what is that border who controls it how much control can the Chinese central government have how much of it is being allowed by more local authorities or does it work in a different way that's more for a China specialist to judge but in that border is basically completely open if we think about arms though I think the only other point that I would make is that the United Wall State Army which is again the biggest armed group in the in the country and one of the biggest non-state armies anywhere in the world has its own weapons producing capability as well they have factories which make light arms and as well and it's quite obvious even to normal citizens that the military basically used their position to benefit from this crony capitalism which you described and given that they also don't have another ideological platform how sustainable is their position I mean how can they justify so to have this privileged political position if the citizens don't see any benefit I think I think I you know I'm not I'm not sure I think that I think that we have to think of a few things one is that the generals which created the political economy in the 90s many of whom were super corrupt and made a lot of money as regional commanders in the 1990s are basically now gone I mean they're dead or they're retired and very old the second generation of generals who rule the country in the 2000s basically some of whom became the ex generals who were in the in the last government they are also some of them are still active in politics but many of them are also retired the current army generals are a new generation of generals many of whom are you know my age and they're in their late 40s or 50s and who were not responsible for the system as I grew up and I think are not really sure what they should want in the future as well so I don't think we should think of the army as a monolith but also I think we have to understand that the Army has shifted its position and it's thinking and it's made up with different people now than it was 10 10 years ago so I think that's that's that's one point the second is that the army did give up a huge amount of its economic power in 2011 as an institution the army until 2011 controlled through the trade council all import/export they controlled they had a monopoly for instance on car imports car permits were sold for a hundred thousand two hundred thousand dollars and were given out to two army officers they had a monopoly on beer and cigarettes which they gave up they began to pay tax their companies for example so the Army's footprint on the economy is actually shrunk quite dramatically since 2011 without the second point I think in terms of the relationship between the army generals even in the past and the crony businessmen basically 40 50 top businessmen in the country it's a little more complicated I mean and and I think it differs from person to person general to general and businessman to different businessman I think what's clear is across the board almost all not all but almost all of these businessmen oh they're their wealth and their success to relationship with usually one or maybe a couple of generals the question is what did the generals get out of it and it wasn't necessarily I don't think a simple transaction where you know they set up this business as a shell business led by some crony and then they make a lot of money I think it's it's more different and I think if you look closely for instance in the conflict areas there was a security agenda as well so in many of these places nurturing a certain type of business in this new system was also a way of either buying off militia or extending the influence and the authority of the center at a time when the center's institutions were very weak so you go off and you give a businessman and thousand acres of land to set up a plantation at a time when the state cannot roll out health and education and judicial services or anything else so it was a part of a stable the other thing is that I think you know the relationship between wealth and power also works in slightly different ways and I think for some people it's not just about I mean for the for the for the generals and for office holders because it's bureaucrats as well I think it's not so much about necessary hoarding as much wealth and having as much cash as possible in the bank account it's been about nurturing a whole network of businesses that basically owe you as a patron right and so it's I guess what I'm saying is it's a complicated and complex set of of relationships and and in terms of what happens next I think within the army I think amongst ex-generals I think within that crony top business class I think you'll see a whole range of different views in terms of where they think things should be and that's why yanmar is at this really delicate moment where I think in the democracy movement in the Army in the business class people are not really sure what should happen and and in a way I think it's a time when you know new ideas and big ideas can also have a have a have a big impact as well thank you very much for your sorry hello can I ask a question well wherever you look in the world very often is the students are in the vanguard of opposition to to oppression so I wonder could you briefly elaborate on your connection with the all Burma students Democratic Front that was very interesting for Laura they're all now like me in their fifties and so they're not really students any anymore but what happened to them was that you know at the height in late 88 89 there were 10,000 of them they organized in these camps they had very little money they were they were dependent on the ethnic insurgent groups like the Korean National Union and the monuments de Partie army at three pagodas pass for their basic survival and you know they wanted to fight the Burmese army and so they wanted training they try to get guns they tried to buy guns in Thailand they try to you know he went along and patrols with these ethnic insurgent groups but pretty soon many of them went home some of them were arrested then some of them came to Thailand some of them became refugees or sought asylum and so it shrunk over after about five six years and now there's a very small number left which then officially signed a ceasefire with the government a few years ago I think in terms of student politics at the center the army basically decimated the stuff I mean crushed the student movement and decimated the education system in the 90s by having schools and universities closed for many years at a time and basically ending the elite university system in the country Rangoon University Mandalay University used to be quite good universities they were they were gutted and the army set up hundreds of other not hundreds but dozens of other small universities to spread out the student population is as much as possible many academics lost their jobs many of them were jailed many of them left the country and so you really just have a shell of what was a fairly good education system through the relative to other Asian countries through the 60s and even 70s Ian can I ask you you hinted on some big ideas big leap that Myanmar would need otherwise it would rot along like this for another 50 years would you entertain the idea that the Thai and me and my economy is just the economy part should merge because there are four or five millions but me it's already in in Thailand a little bit like West and East Germany's but in a way that is only affect the economies in order to to leap the labels the salary the development because if you look at the border area the border areas are the part that most people the grassroot people are most well-off because they can leave the benefits of this side of the economies thank you yeah I think it's you know one of the biggest untold stories in which I touch on the book but actually don't talk about enough perhaps is is this gigantic west to east migration of people over the past 20 years which has meant that millions of people from East of Myanmar Shan state especially southern Shan State Koreans date tonight Ramones day have crossed into Thailand and have become workers in Thailand over the past 20 years and then their place has been taken by millions of people from the dry zone very poor ethnic Burmese people from the center of the dry zone which is one of the poorest places in the country around Mandalay Pugin and and further south we had droughts which led to near famine in in 2010 many of them are people who left at that time and then after cyclone nargis left hundreds of thousands of people without livelihoods you had a move of people from there also to the east and then from Rakhine State you have not just Muslims Rohingya and others traveling by boat to Thailand and elsewhere but you have reclined Buddhists also cross going up to Cochin state to work in the Jade mines to work in in the cities so it's it's a west to east migration and because you know labor sorry migrant labor has been formalized and more or less regularized over the past few years since 2012 you have a fairly integrated labor market in in one way and for a poor burmese person if you want to go to Thailand and and work you can it's not like in the old days where it was technically legal and very dangerous and difficult so I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing I mean in one way it's a good thing because I think without that you would have a far greater poverty in in Myanmar the the remittance economy from Thailand is a huge driver of positive not positive it's a huge driver of economic activity in the country you go to villages in Myanmar and the families that have one kid in Thailand are much better off than than those who don't but I think going forward I don't know what the big ideas are but I think we should look at all kinds of big ideas for three I would say three things one is that I think in Myanmar what's urgently needed is an agenda against discrimination there's a lot of discussion in Myanmar about federalism as a outcome of a peace process but to be honest I'm a little wary of I'm all in favor of local democracy and good local government but if by federalism we mean ethnically demarcated States I'm not sure how well that's going to work in the future because Myanmar is a much more country demographically than it was even 20 years ago and this is you know you go back and you look at the British census records that I mentioned the British called Burma as oh and they meant this in a in a derogatory way a zone of racial instability meaning that people weren't sure what they were and they were changing all the time and intermarrying and and moving around and Burma today or Myanmar today is like that it's much more mixed than it was before and so I think ethnically demarcating States to belong to one group or another I may not be the way for it but I think a strong anti-discrimination agenda because you have hundreds of thousands of Cochin and Sean and others living in in Rangoon for example I think is extremely important I think secondly though I think in Myanmar we need a much more radical vision of what a welfare state in Yanmar could look like I think it's a poor country but it's a country that can that can afford much better services for vulnerable people in the country I think we need a revolutionary change in our health and education systems and a massive investment especially in education I think we need an almost sort of war footing in terms of you know an all government approach to how to overhaul the existing bureaucracies and move education in a new direction and I think we have to think about how to manage China I think Thailand is really important as a big economy next door but China is probably even more important and and how we can just stop playing a defensive game and think about how to take advantage of being next to China is a new idea that's necessary and then we need urgently as well to think about climate adaptation and what climate change over the next 10 20 years is going to mean and should me even now in terms of infrastructure planning and planning for urban city growth and urban development in the country so I think you know I don't disagree with you in terms of thinking about how greater integration between Thailand and Myanmar could work and I think that I think what's needed though and what I would like to do over this coming you know year or two is really think much more with other Burmese as well as other people internationally about understanding the political economy as it is more because I think we have a lot of kind of abstract ideas out there and I think not enough done in terms of understanding the relationship between power and money in Myanmar and I think unless one understands relationship between power and money any good idea is gonna run up against a lot of problems very quickly I don't know who to call on if said thank you very much for your illuminating lecture my name is Mauro cause of moviemaker so I agree you feel very much that there is a over simplified negative in a Western media about the Puma very much so but you bring in your pop clot of history and as we know the term history comes from Greek historian which means inquiry so we can learn from history and if we look how Western media is describing the situation in Burma the mainly the terms like the lack of democracy not so much openness needed not knowing the place on international arena so on and so on and what these terms are they are the descriptions to be open or not open is a description to be democratic or not democratic is a description and the tricky thing which has happened in media is that these descriptions become the value statements so we assume that openness is always good that democracy is always good and why I mentioned the history that we can learn from history if you go to the archeological museum of a jung-geun the great place you can see just a she of a paper this transcript from the letter of a king of Burma the man called King how long I think is how long to the English King George the second and in this letter the puma's King is basically asking to come and take the country over and you mentioned the dark area of colonial regime and so on so maybe we can we have to learn from from the history we have to learn from the history and we also need to ask how much openness we need my question is that how you yes sorry I am yes my question is that how you feel about the letter of king of a permit to a church second which one can see in the Archaeological Museum of jung-geun thank you yeah well it's a it's I don't know he never received a reply to that it's it's interesting because it's a it's it happened during the French and the war of 1757 French and Indian War in the United States where there was a civil war in Burma at the same time the burmese were in the north of the country the Mons had a kingdom at peju in the south of the country the English basically supported the the Burmese along here and others the French from Pondicherry supported the Mons in the south and the Mons lost and but the French didn't find out until it was too late and the interesting story in relation to what happened at the end was that a French ship 300 men from Brittany and Normandy sailed into Rangoon Harbor after the Mons had surrendered and they didn't know that they were on the losing side and all the men of the ship were promptly arrested by the Burmese and were marched or maybe shipped shipped or marched north to a village not far from where mandalay is today and their descendants are there today and so it's a little little kind of ending to a French attempted to be involved in more politics at that time but the letter that you mentioned was the Burmese king reaching out to the English for support in a civil war which in the end he didn't he received some arms from the East India Company but it may not have been decisive a couple of more questions you know you you had mentioned that outside and inside Myanmar there's been a lot of hope I guess or projection with on son Suki and I read your book and I came away from my sense of what you were saying in there was that she's actually perhaps a little bit of a cipher or maybe just a very typical politician in other words people don't really know I mean what she projects or what people think is not really who she is I'm just wondering if I interpreted that right that she's not really the person that might be able to bring about the change that a lot of people think or want yeah I think she's not the person that many people in the West thought that she might be which was really I mean in a way the Western image was almost an image of a cipher in the sense of someone who is just there as a vessel for Western Liberal Democratic thinking and ideas about human rights as they were at the time in 1995 or 2000 and I think in the end she's you know she's a very complex person and and I've known her for a long time and you read the things that she said or wrote about 20 years ago ten years ago what she talks about today and you know they they go in many different directions and I and and I think you know only time will tell in terms of what her exact place in in Myanmar history is is going to be but I think whatever it is it's very clear to me that you know she is and I think she she feels herself to be a Burmese nationalist first and and foremost and I think the legacy of her father is a nationalist leader it's very important to her I think this idea of the army is an institution that her father created which has gone off on the wrong track and and she has a historic kind of responsibility or a destiny to kind of bring the army back on track I think it's very important to her so I think what's important to her is the Myanmar story that she that I believe she feels she's a part of and it's fueled by a particular strain of Burmese nationalism and I think these last few years and her living up in the capital and experiencing multiple crises together with other Burmese people there I think it's only reinforced that that perspective so I think whatever other perspectives there may have been that may have been you know fresher in the days when she was just a few years from from moving from Oxford to to Burma I think those have have waned I think she believes that she is you know her mission is to affect this more democratic constitution and bringing the army under an elected leader and you know if she managed to do that over these few years and perhaps history will see her in a certain way if she doesn't manage to do that then people might think that there were other roads not taken that that might have been worth trying I think I think a lot of you know the criticism of her or the disappointment comes in such different directions I mean in the West it's really 99% about the Ranger crisis and her handling of that within the country from ethnic minorities it's much more about a feeling that she has not empathized with them or their struggle and the way in which the peace process has been handled from businessmen it's completely different is the sense that her government is not priority on the economy and has not managed the economy well from Burmese civil society groups it's about a feeling that she hasn't stood up for protecting the increasing freedom and media freedom that was established in the early part of this decade and and not showing herself to be this strong supporter of basic political free so these are completely different kinds of criticism but I think you know we're going into elections in later this year and perhaps on the exact same day as a US election so it'll be an interesting 24 24 hours but you know I think they're very much her party's to lose I think you know it despite the disappointment of all those different groups that I just mentioned I think for the ordinary Burmese person in an average town and village in the country again not counting the conflict areas in the West and in the north the last 10 years have probably been the best 10 years of the last half-century and you know in these towns despite all of the problems you do see some positive changes you see local activist groups and others some affiliated with the NLD some not able to take on you know poor sanitation or a corrupt judge or improve neighborhood policing or whatever it is and in the end they believe that it's it's her and her sacrifice that have allowed this new situation to emerge and I think and and many of these same people will say you know they're they've only been in office for two three years and you have to give them more time so I think there's still this wellspring of good feeling towards her and I think that's going to carry the election in 2020 oh sorry thank you for your presentation you are quite an apologist for Burma and probably the kind of person that is really needed however I have to say as a westerner the thorough hanga crisis and then there's also hundreds of thousands of people in camps along the Thai Miam our border this is outrageous you talked about maybe Burma is racist but this is outrageous these are real people and their lives 600,000 and more people forced out and the people in the camps I find this is outrageous I just I have to say that I don't know what you can say back but you can put it in a category but I think that a lot of the world's outraged what was the question that well how can you answer it I mean how can you accept it what can be done to bring the people back to their legitimate homes so they don't go or on the Thai border do you mean bro hang gar on the Thai border both yeah on the Thai border I think it's it's relatively it should be relatively easy because we've had a peace process which has been going on it's not difficult the negotiations have been difficult for the last few years but there's at least a chance that the ceasefire is in place will lead to some sort of settlement which means that people the refugees on this side can go back you've had some reintegration of 400,000 IDPs who are on the Myanmar side of the border over the past five six years but their situation is terrible but it's not just them the situation of poor people IDPs around the country everywhere is awful which was the main point that I was trying to make I think with Roja who are in the bangladesh refugee camps i know i don't think we should be under any illusion that people will be able to come back in dignity honour security voluntarily anytime soon i think that if you look at the constellation of political forces at work on the ground i think the chances that they will actually want themselves to come back in this situation is extremely remote I think if you look at the the people who are in the camps I mean half of them are kids 400,000 or so out of 700,000 or kids or very young people they have almost no education in the camps at all it's a time bomb in terms of their situation so I think the protection of people in the camps where they are is a number-one priority I think the second is the situation and protection of vulnerable people in Rakhine state itself where you have half a million or so with some different communities not just growing a common in others but you also have hundreds of thousands of people displaced from recent fighting who are from different ethnic communities you have this new erican Army insurgency which has gone from strength to strength over the past couple of years you have a terrible situation in Rakhine and I just don't see I don't have any good ideas in terms of how that can be addressed outside of change in Myanmar as a whole I don't see any way in which we can carve out and make a tiny part of Myanmar that much better I think it means systemic change across the entire country it's you have tens of millions of vulnerable people everywhere in the country who are getting a raw deal right now and unless we put in place the dynamics which are going to fix that for all of those people I just don't see at the margins things improving either in Western Rakhine or in conflict areas in the east as well just a quick comment and then a question the comment is that you know I hear east/west and I think that's a bit of a false divide yes the so-called Western media bosses are not that interested in the good stories that many journalists actually want to write and quite a few of them who are able and sometimes are allowed to write these kinds of stories but it's that distortions but it would never have been possible for the UN General Assembly and Human Rights Council to seize the initiative from the inactive sleeping UN Security Council if there had not been worldwide support for solutions for what I call not the Rohingya crisis but the Rakhine State Christ that's one point that might be my question is more about well it's I feel for you because it's difficult to find the right time to write a book about Verma and you must have thought a number of times this year when things were happening what if and you just mentioned Rock Island that is that is that is one of them but another one is is is China and another one is accountability on China you know two weeks time President Xi Jinping will be there what should we expect of that visit bakra see he doesn't come if he doesn't have a good reason to come and the the the other one I forgot what the other one Bosco but that's quite enough I think yeah I sort of I worry a little bit you know with the UN that it's it's a place sometimes as you know very well where governments do things in not in the real life but in in in one way and then at the UN they vote in a different I mean the UN sometimes is a convenient and cheap place in which to show a certain type of position and sometimes it's not reflected in how those same governments may act in bilateral relations or another other fora as well so I think but I accept your point that it's a very mixed picture in terms and it's not a solid sort of I mean certainly not east-west because you have the whole oh I see that is extremely oppositional to to Myanmar at the moment I think in terms of China it's you know it's just a not it's it's another huge issue which I don't think there is a overall strategy I think to be I guess to be fair to the government in a way you know China has been pushing PRI projects in the China Myanmar economic order now for for a while I think with China you know the it's its number one concern is to prevent the kind of fighting at the border that we saw a few years ago which led to tens of thousands of refugees crossing the border fighting spilling over into the Chinese I think that's their number one red line I think secondly though I think the Chinese were extremely anxious about what they saw as a Western funded and Japanese funded peace process from that I was involved in 2011 to 2015 and which they thought might lead to some kind of ceasefire and peace settlement that would bring Western governments NGOs UN people right up to their border and I think they have pushed back against that situation and and created a situation where they are the only outside actor really involved and indispensable to the to the peace process going going forward I think the infrastructure projects are important to China but I don't think all of the different infrastructure projects are are necessarily that I mean Yanmar as an economic entity is is a drop in the ocean for China and even the kind of access to the sea and things people make a lot of things make a lot of a lot of it but I'm not sure it's that important for China to have right now I think what's important for China is that they feel they have a window of opportunity that because of the Rakhine crisis relations with the west or on a back foot and that they want to create a certain situation where China locks in its position as as Myanmar's top friend and I think they feel that they have the opportunity to do that so it might be in terms of the number of deals that are signed over the couple of coming week or two it could be something else but I think they feel that the timing is right and and I think they're Beijing has also been very actively preparing for major celebration of the 70th anniversary of PRC Myanmar relations this this autumn as well okay please ask yeah quick quick question in 2015-16 I was repeatedly visiting Myanmar and when I went to like the Rotary Club this on a notice a very positive aspect it was a kind of a brain flow back a lot of people in the professionals in their 30s and 40s who had once upon time to give almost ironed their country were coming back with new optimistic expectations particularly prior to the last election but since then I got the sense there's a great amount of possible disappointment as you mentioned that too much was put in on the shoulders dancing to Keith and my question would be is since all these expectations from various sectors of Myanmar been placed on one let's put it frankly elderly woman who could momentarily suddenly drop out of the scene physically or mentally how vulnerable is the state with so much riding on one frail woman's shoulders yeah that's a good question because it goes it goes to a little bit of what I was saying before you know is this this situation where there's actually a lot of other things that are holding things together in situation is terrible in reclined situations terrible the Northeast but for a lot of the rest of the countries it's relatively peaceful are we missing things that we're not seeing in terms of weak institutions or is it the case that things could tip over and perhaps someone like you know just aa Suchi whatever you say about her and however critical she's one of the pieces that's kind of holding things together if she's not there won't I don't know it's very hard for me to to imagine the National League for Democracy surviving without her in its present form because she is so much the dominant person and and and and and figure that it really has centralized a lot of power there and then you have the army and then it's a question of what the Army's capacity would be to kind of play a stabilizing role if that's what it would have to do in that situation my guess is that if I had to guess I would say that you know it's going to be like now in the future in the sense that there'll be parts of the country that are extremely badly off and then you'll have pockets of progress you'll have some people who do very well you'll have you know within earshot of of millions of people who are not I think you'll have a extremely mixed picture and whether that leads to the whole thing again falling apart into something much worse or not I guess it's difficult difficult to say but yeah I think you know the the story so far has been one where she has moved into this paramount position very clearly whatever the Constitution says and everything else and so you know I think if she you know her party wins the election in 2020 I think a huge issue will be in 2021 do we start to see anything significant or different in terms of succession planning and will new people emerge from from within the NLT so the the deputy leader of the NLD at sort of the party boss below her is the Chief Minister of Mandalay but he was a little bit younger than her but not that much but he was recently diagnosed with leukemia and it's been out of action for for a few months so it's not really clear who who would be the person that she might put up there as her as her deputy if she begins to take a step back as she has said that she might maybe one last or no that's fine I'm sorry yeah I don't I don't plan to join any political party right doctor town thank you very much for a wonderful lecture I'd just like I'd like to share with the audience one other aspect of dr. Tom's life he mentioned that as a teenager growing up he came here to the Siam Society that the same Society is now going to be working with him in another role in jung-geun which he didn't mention this evening one of his achievements there is a few years ago to set up the jung-geun Heritage Trust which has been extraordinarily successful in raising consciousness among the government and the people in Yangon about the importance of preserving the old colonial architectural heritage of the city and the jung-geun Heritage Trust has now joined with the Siam Society and five other civil society organizations in AH sayin to start an essay on heritage Alliance so we look forward to working with you and maybe having you come back and speak on that subject next time thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: The Siam Society Under Royal Patronage

Views: 16,290

Keywords: Burma, Myanmar, History, Thant Myint-U, Siam Society, The Hidden History of Burma

Id: WrbkQdwi7-8

Length: 76min 33sec (4593 seconds)

Published: Thu May 07 2020