The army’s stifling influence is preventing Myanmar's democracy from maturing
WITH GREAT power comes no responsibility whatsoever—at least, for Myanmar’s army. Although the country is in theory run by a civilian government, the army, or Tatmadaw, retains control of its own affairs. Its top general appoints his own boss, the minister of defence. For good measure, he also gets to pick the ministers of the interior and of border security, giving him control over the police, intelligence services and border guards.
That is no surprise, but it is a mistake. The Tatmadaw methodically erected this structure for 13 years before it handed power to Miss Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy in 2016. It is hard to know exactly what the army’s intention was, since it is such an opaque and prickly institution. But the generals seem to have wanted to make Myanmar more modern and respectable.
The hitch is, the army’s stifling influence is preventing Burmese democracy from maturing. Instead, the NLD and the Tatmadaw are locked in a destructive contest, in which each vies to prove itself more patriotic and closer to the Bamar Buddhist majority than the other. So when the army embarks on a pogrom against the Rohingyas, a hated Muslim minority, the government feels obliged to paper over its crimes against humanity.
It might still be possible, however, to turn this vicious cycle into a virtuous one. Miss Suu Kyi, after all, has proved that she is not an implacable enemy of the Tatmadaw—even going as far as travelling to The Hague to defend its indefensible conduct before the International Court of Justice. For its part, the Tatmadaw presumably did not spend more than a decade engineering a form of civilian rule it finds acceptable only to sabotage its own creation.
Amending the constitution to provide more of a semblance of civilian supremacy over the armed forces would be a good start. The army could cede control of the various security ministries, for example, or give up its voting majority on the special government committee empowered to declare a state of emergency. At one level, it would be merely a token gesture: Miss Suu Kyi surely knows that the army would not hesitate to stage another coup if it felt truly threatened.
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