The military’s seizure of absolute power in Myanmar this week reflected the country’s legacy of repression and military dominance that dates back to the overthrow of an elected government in 1962. Launched to prevent representatives elected in November from taking their seats, the latest coup by the already powerful military shattered the fragile façade of democracy maintained since 2010. The arrests of State Councilor Aung San Suu Kyi, President Win Myint and many other civilian leaders follows an old army playbook for suppressing popular leaders.
The coup was triggered by the abject flop of the military’s own political party in the elections and led to the arrest of most of the candidates who won the elections. It followed the script for army actions set in 1990 demonstrating how little the military has learned or evolved since then.
Elections overturned in 1990
The Myanmar armed forces, known as the Tatmadaw, in 1990 allowed the first democratic elections in 30 years, apparently believing its own propaganda that it was loved and respected by the people. A new civilian political party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), however, decisively defeated the military party. Led by Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of one of the country’s independence heroes, the NLD won 392 of the 492 seats.
Instead of honoring the elections as promised, the Tatmadaw immediately re-arrested Aung San Suu Kyi and all of the NLD politicians it could find and simply continued to administer the country as a military dictatorship. That dictatorship continued for another two decades as Myanmar, despite its rich natural resources and talented population, fell further behind its neighbors in health, education and economic development.
This week the Tatmadaw once again refused to accept an NLD victory. In November the NLD won 258 of the 330 seats in the House of Representatives while the military party won only 26 – a humiliating defeat. The NLD also dominated elections for state and local bodies.
NLD loyalists hold a picture of party leader Aung San Suu Kyi during the 2020 election campaign
Why now?
This NLD victory threatened an increase in civilian power despite a constitution carefully designed by the military to preserve its power and economic privileges. It also appeared to be a setback to the ambitions of Army Commander-in-Chief Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, due to retire in July this year. Some believe the general wanted to maintain his current influence or even become president after retiring. That ambition was put in jeopardy by his strained relations with NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi, whose hand was strengthened by the election outcome. Continuing as commander-in-chief without interference from the pesky NLD, Ming Aung Hlaing controls the army along with as the national police, intelligence agencies and pro-government militias. The coup puts the 65-year-old general in a position to order a new election next year and stage-manage its results, possibly paving the way to the presidency.
Even if the speculation about Ming Aung Hlaing is true, it is unclear why other senior military officers went along with him when their power was already enshrined in the constitution. That constitution allocated 25% of the seats in the House of Representatives to unelected military officers and gave them automatic control of three of the most important government ministries. By ousting the NLD and the elected legislature they will now have to take responsibility for running a country deeply divided by political and ethnic conflicts and suffering from the economic and human cost of the Covid pandemic.
The “Burmese Path to Socialism”
There is, however, a long history of the Tatmadaw’s belief in its own superiority and its disdain for the Myanmar people. The military first seized power in 1962 under General Ne Win. That began nearly 30 years of military repression and mismanagement of the economy under Ne Win’s “Burmese Path to Socialism.”
Ne Win’s “socialism” was a sleepy system of nepotism with most of the economy controlled by bureaucrats careful to do as little as possible. Government shops had long lists of products, but most were unavailable unless one had connections or the money to offer a little bribe. It was a system described by the saying "ma lok, ma shot, ma pyot," meaning "No work, no responsibility, no sacking."
Under Gen. Ne Win, life in socialist Burma was both primitive and tightly controlled by the military party.
In ethnic Burman areas political order was maintained by local committees who had authority over the details of ordinary life including travel, business and housing. U Chit Tun, the well-informed UPI correspondent in Rangoon in the 1970s and 80s once told me it was “George Orwell’s Big Brother in a longyi (the traditional Burmese sarong).” In the ethnic minority areas, political order was maintained by brutal army operations against ethnic group armies sometimes funded by drugs and smuggling.
Brutal suppression in 1988
This repression, mismanagement and often bizarre policies espoused by the deeply superstitious Ne Win led to massive protests in 1988. The army brutally suppressed those protests, killing some 3,000 people and imprisoning 3,000 others. At least 10,000 people, many of them students, fled to Thailand. Deeply suspicious of education, the army shut down all of the country’s universities for years. As the UPI bureau chief in Bangkok at that time, I covered the violence and repression. The unrest forced Ne Win to give up power to a new generation of officers. Those officers, however, sought only to improve economic management while continuing political repression with widespread arrests and torture.
Burmese soldiers attack a student demonstration in 1988.
I vividly recall a reporting trip to Myanmar in 1989 in which the Tatmadaw sought to convince visiting journalists that the authorities were not torturing and killing their political prisoners. The army intelligence colonel who accompanied us showed no embarrassment in explaining why the Tatmadaw had to stay in control. The people, he said, are too stupid to understand what is good for them. With such an ignorant population and so many ethnic divisions, only the Tatmadaw, he said, could maintain the country’s unity and independence.
Burmese officers welcome Western journalists they hoped to convince that the army was not mistreating prisoners
When Tatmadaw fantasies of election victory by a military-backed political party were shattered by outcome of the 1990 elections, the military simply ran the country by diktat. Rumbling dissent, including protests in 1996 and harshly suppressed demonstrations by Buddhist monks in 2007, along with further economic decline finally led to the 2010 decision to allow elections under the Tatmadaw-designed constitution. The thinking seemed to be “let the civilians try to solve the problems while we maintain power and privilege without responsibility under a thin veneer of democracy.
What now?
With the 2021 coup, the Tatmadaw’s decade-old plan is now up for a rethink. Their problem is that even that thin veneer gave hope to many. The civilian administration, as limited and flawed as it was, expanded freedoms, opened up the country and improved the economy. Despite security limitations people were freer to travel both inside and outside the country. Despite army repression, independent journalism expanded. Despite army cronies’ dominance of the economy, people were better off. The Internet and social media gave the people of Myanmar access to a world of information and opinion for the first time. Reports from Rangoon say that citizens are banging pots and pans every night to show their anger at the Tatmadaw. Noisy nights are unlikely to bother the generals very much. They have the soldiers and the guns to suppress any more overt dissension, but past uprisings have shown that the army may struggle to keep the lid on permanently.
Despite everything working against them, the people of Myanmar have had at least a taste of democracy and relative freedom. They will not submit willingly to more years of military domination. Large demonstrations against the military takeover in the last few days demonstrate how little support the generals have. However much the Tatmadaw may want to return to the days of the military’s absolute dominance, it may not be so easy to drag the people of Myanmar back to the past with them.