Twenty years ago, humiliated by the landslide election of Aung San Suu Kyi, the military junta in Burma ignored the poll, placed the newly elected leader under house arrest and decided to play a waiting game with the international community. Suu Kyi, the charismatic daughter of a charismatic general, was undaunted. She refused to answer the junta’s violence and intimidation in kind, and her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), stoically resisted its many provocations. Two decades later Burma – now renamed Myanmar – has become a prison state, run by a repressive, politically remote and paranoid group of generals. But power has only deepened their insecurity. Despite their complete control of the state apparatus, Suu Kyi has retained the moral high ground. After more than 15 years of house arrest, and a series of impossible political choices that have ostensibly dissolved the NLD, the generals know that she is still the country’s chosen leader and they rightly fear that no amount of constitutional chicanery or the recent sham elections will change this stubborn fact.
Reports that Suu Kyi’s most recent house arrest was to be ended by the junta yesterday immediately sent crowds of supporters to her house in Yangon. Officially, Suu Kyi will have little to celebrate on her release. In a boycotted election, the pro-junta Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) was said to have won clear majorities in both houses of parliament. But there are countervailing political realities in the world beyond Burma, and these will likely influence the immediate political future more directly than the recent poll. In spite of their best efforts to create the illusion of democracy, the junta and USDP are keenly aware of the general scepticism which has greeted the election. (UK Foreign Secretary William Hague called it “a sham process designed to keep the military in power” and President Obama deemed it “anything but free and fair.”) The release of Suu Kyi is a canny move in that it will certainly distract the media from heaping further ridicule on the poll, but it is also a clear sign of the junta’s uneasiness.
Several founder members of the USDP are former soldiers who played key roles in the 2003 massacre of at least 100 pro-democracy campaigners at Depayin. These men have held ministerial posts under the junta and now stand poised to take over control of a nominally democratic state. But they do so with the uneasy knowledge that their crimes have made them notorious in the wider world. Within Burma the absence of an independent press has allowed them to suppress their connections to the murderous force that has been repeatedly used to quell pro-democracy campaigns, but the state’s official lies have not fared as well abroad. Human rights groups have persuaded the international community to adopt carefully targeted sanctions against the junta and its supporters. These have meant that the USDP leaders and their families risk arrest when they travel outside the country and live under the constant threat of having their overseas financial assets seized by the EU and UN.
Two years ago, the world could only look on helplessly as the Burmese military obstructed international relief efforts in the wake of cyclone Nargis. While it dithered over the task of distributing aid, the military’s control of the media was obsessive. After Burma’s best known comedian, a poet named Zargana, gave foreign media interviews which criticized the regime’s inept response to the crisis, he was swiftly arrested, tried on a series of trumped-up charges and given a 59-year prison sentence (later reduced to 35 years). In 2010, however, technology has given thousands of democracy and human rights activists new ways to circumvent state censorship. An “election tracker” website, for example, has gathered hundreds of interviews and reports from people on the ground and these have allowed the foreign press to give the lie to official claims about the election. The junta has also been embarrassed to learn that dozens of hours of a media archive of Suu Kyi touring the country, speaking to large crowds of supporters, was recently smuggled out of the country and is now available online. In Burma, as elsewhere, the government is learning to its cost that censorship has become a fool’s errand in an age of cheap miniature electronic devices that can quickly distribute text, sound and video worldwide. It is only a question of time before Aung San Suu Kyi exposes the moral bankruptcy of Burma’s military leaders once again. Knowing this, they have tried to postpone the inevitable democratization of the country with another piece of bungled political theatre. The recent “election” is merely the latest instalment in two decades of a convoluted and deadly political farce and it is not likely to be any more successful than the junta’s previous offerings. Democracy will come to Burma, and it will almost certainly be ushered in by the apparently powerless lady who has been the country’s democratically elected leader for 20 years. Fraudulent elections can shield repressive governments from unwelcome political realities for decades but they can’t maintain the illusion of democracy forever.
