Burma and the vagaries of national reconciliation

Monday, 18 October 2010 09:58 Mizzima News

Title: An Inside View of Reconciliation

Publisher: Brookings Institution Press (2010)

Author: Dr. Maung Zarni

Reviewer: Joseph Ball

“Burma’s political stand-off and prospects of conflict transformation and/or resolution have long been dominated by actors representative of Track I and III undertakings. The former refers to activities and initiatives of officially recognised governmental and organisational personnel, while the latter incorporates individuals and private groups dedicated to promoting specific causes.

What happened to Track II? In short, Track II has been routinely neglected by dominant voices – bolstered by a vibrant Track III community – calling for, and supportive of, an overarching and near-immediate Track I solution.”


I penned the above paragraphs two years ago in an essay published on Mizzima’s website titled “Searching for Track II”. The subject matter and obvious frustration percolating just below the surface are echoed in the words of Dr. Maung Zarni, a Burmese activist and research fellow at the London School of Economics’ Global Governance centre, in his contribution to Myanmar/Burma: Inside Challenges, Outside Interests. The book edited by Lex Rieffel, a senior fellow in global economy and development at the Brookings Institution, explores issues at the centre of Burma’s continuing political crisis.

Maung Zarni’s chapter, “An Inside View of Reconciliation”, is a thought-provoking, occasionally personal and at times somewhat inchoate account of why attempts at reconciliation in Burma have to date failed so miserably, as well as an assessment of present and future obstacles if any process of reconciliation is to meet with fruition.

One of the more in-depth components of the essay concerns the author’s own experiences in previous aborted attempts at facilitating Track II diplomacy, defined as “a subset of unofficial activity which involves professional contacts among elites from adversarial groups with the purpose of addressing policy problems in efforts to analyse, prevent, manage and ultimately resolve inter-group or interstate conflicts”.

In the autumn of 2003, Maung Zarni and like-minded exiled dissidents, with the knowledge of the United States government, entered into direct communication with the office of then Burmese prime minister and intelligence chief General Khin Nyunt. According to the author, as early as March the following year a deal was struck between the general and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi that would have allowed for “The Lady” and her National League for Democracy (NLD) party to be brought on board a project of national reconciliation.

Here, it must be noted that throughout the account the confrontational persona of Khin Nyunt is painted in quite a positive light, not from a moral, value-laden perspective, but from that of pragmatism. Tellingly, Maung Zarni laments that the pragmatist as political actor in today’s Burma is virtually extinct.

In the attempts at Track II manoeuvering, Maung Zarni and his cohorts – defined as those who had become disillusioned with the empty rhetoric of democracy promotion on the part of Western benefactors – understood the imperative of involving “a certain segment of the military” in the process of transforming the state away from a centrally controlled military apparatus.

The hollow fate of the initiative, however, was sealed with the removal and house arrest of Khin Nyunt later in 2004. Yet, this act alone, prospers Maung Zarni, was not the sole assassin of the attempt at political reconciliation.

The junta, in addition to the arrest of the intelligence chief, also chose to use the dialogue for the purpose of short-term public relations gain as opposed to long-term state-building, while the NLD assisted in playing the role of spoiler as a result of feeling threatened by Track II initiatives. Specifically, Maung Zarni assesses the NLD as reacting from a sense of fear over possibly being circumvented by Washington and in response to the audacity of Burmese dissidents to engage with authorities despite the NLD having concluded that negotiations were off-limits.

Portraying himself as something of a martyr-like figure in the face of unjust, if nonetheless expected, reprimands from various components of the Burmese political spectrum, the lessons to be drawn from the experience are clear to Maung Zarni: one, personalities are at the heart of Burmese politics, and two, initiatives are dead in the water without the blessing of Suu Kyi.

Extrapolating on the theme of the importance of the protagonists to Burma’s political malaise, Maung Zarni finds: “The all-encompassing conflict seen today is constructed by the elite.” This constituency, it is claimed, has thus far failed to alter established and competing historical interpretations and ideological prospects for a future Burmese state.

On the contentious subject of reconciliation, the competing and mutually skewed interpretations of what must happen are characterised by Maung Zarni as, firstly, the generals relentless drive towards recreating a dominant centralised state that was disrupted by colonial rule and post-independence civil war and, secondly, a competing camp that tends to equate reconciliation as between the military rulers and the NLD.

As such, and only compounded by “the elite’s near-total control of both the decision-making process and the public sphere”, Maung Zarni contends long-term success towards national reconciliation must entail “harmonious co-existence among all elite groups, both ethnic and military, and their institutions”.

The author, however, is not consigning Burma’s general populace to an endless history of capitulation to elite interests. Rather, Maung Zarni maintains that there must and need be a simultaneous programme of greater education available to the country’s diverse population.

Nonetheless, in a world of pragmatism, it is concluded that any initial deals aimed at fostering peace and reconciliation will, given Burma’s socio-political environment, be of the character of elite power-sharing deals. The people will again be left to follow. However, if people follow of their own volition, then definitions of democracy can be expanded beyond the narrow and debilitative delineations that currently dominate the political sphere.

There should be no misunderstanding, as the contribution makes abundantly clear, national reconciliation and the manufacturing of a viable 21st century Burmese state is a lengthy undertaking lacking any magical elixir to absolve the country and its citizens of the preceding decades of misrule and abusive political climate.

Whether elections next month will go any distance towards national reconciliation and political transformation has less to do with the question of polling meeting applied standards of what constitutes a free and fair voting environment, than it does with whether or not competing elites can identify common ground, rediscover the utility of pragmatism and expand upon the available tools of conflict transformation.

Finally, mention must be given to the closing paragraphs of the chapter, in which, despite the well-paid attention to internal interests and obstacles to national reconciliation, blame is suddenly and apparently entirely shifted onto the shoulders of forces beyond Burmese borders and the control of Burmese authorities.

“Until the external equation changes fundamentally,” writes Maung Zarni, “reconciliation in Myanmar [Burma], not just human rights and human dignity, will remain a victim of globalisation. The military regime is simply the local proxy in a process that is seeing the country’s economic sovereignty slip away.”

While certainly an intriguing and worthy line of argument to follow, the gravity of the conclusion is inadequately supported, with the reader offered little more than a perfunctory list of multinational corporations involved in the exploitation of Burma’s resources while the interests of external actors such as the United States and China are also dealt with only cursorily. Surely Burmese and Burmese leaders have not lost the entirety of their autonomy as social actors?

As a final word on the barriers to reconciliation, the final assertion of blame laid bare at the feet of a rampant and rapacious climate of globalisation may be better substituted by an earlier assertion of the author’s that, while by no means optimistic in its appraisal for the foreseeable future of the Burmese political state, at least offers the scantest of visages for a path forward:

“It is hard to see any efforts at reconciliation having any impact on the conflict landscape of Myanmar [Burma], however creative or imaginative or powerfully supported they may be, as long as the regime views national reconsolidation as simply the restoration of a national unity that never existed, with the military as the ultimate unifier.”

The realisation that a mythical unity cannot be forced upon the country’s citizenry at least would be a start; and entirely within in the purview of Burma’s embattled leadership.