What are the prospects for Myanmar?
Although Suu Kyi said that the conference was intended to
kick-start dialogues that would eventually produce peace deals, in the past year conflict has actually increased in many outlying regions
Joshua Kurlantzick
Roughly a year after Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy party took control of Myanmars parliament, the countrys euphoria has melted away. When the NLD won a sweeping electoral victory in November 2015, the countrys first truly free and accepted national elections in decades, it gained a massive majority in parliament. Myanmar citizens swept onto the streets to celebrate. The military, which had ruled the country as a junta or a quasi-civilian regime between 1962 and 2015, publicly affirmed that it would accept the results of the election.
Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who was kept under house arrest for years, had offered a broad slate of promises to the Myanmar public. She had vowed to aggressively push for a lasting peace deal with the countrys many ethnic insurgencies, some of which have been fighting the government for decades. She had promised to protect threatened minorities, such as Muslim Rohingya in Rakhine State in western Myanmar. She had expressed her desire to build a developed country, telling people on the campaign trail in 2015, we dont want to be a country which needs to ask other countries for help.
Yet in the past year, most of these promises have seemed hollow, and Myanmars stability appears to be disintegrating at an alarming rate. Human rights groups contend that the security forces are engaged in a scorched-earth campaign in Rakhine against the Rohingya. Some Myanmar and international activists have turned on Suu Kyi, claiming that she has ignored looming rights abuses in the country and failed to rein in the still powerful military.
In many respects, the situation has not markedly improved in the past year. Suu Kyi led an initial national peace conference last summer, bringing together delegates from ethnic insurgencies and other powerful leaders, but representatives of the most powerful ethnic militia, the United Wa State Army, walked out of the talks early on.
Although Suu Kyi said that the conference was intended to kick-start dialogues that would eventually produce peace deals, in the past year conflict has actually increased in many outlying regions. Bertil Lintner, a veteran analyst of Myanmar politics, recently concluded that: Myanmars frontier areas are now suffering from some of the most intense fighting seen since the 1980s.
Meanwhile, the prospects for clearer civilian control of the armed forces, which would require changes to the Myanmar constitution, seem very murky. Suu Kyi has vowed to give birth to a genuine democratic union, which probably means removing ministries from control of the military and cutting the overall powers of the armed forces. But she has not made much headway in actually changing the charter. And many Myanmar observers believe that the armed forces are trying to undermine any constitutional reform. One of the most prominent advocates of constitutional changes, NLD law adviser Ko Ni, was murdered by a gunman in cold blood just outside Yangon airport in January. Several former military officers reportedly laid the plot for his killing.
Perhaps most important for many Myanmar people, Suu Kyis government has not offered a clear strategy for how to maintain high economic growth, satisfying investors, and also improve the fortunes of a broader range of citizens. Then there is Rakhine State. After an attack on police posts last October, reportedly by a group of Rohingya militants, the armed forces have allegedly waged an even more brutal campaign in the state, already one of the biggest hotspots in Asia. The United Nations special adviser for human rights declared earlier this year that abuses against the Rohingya may amount to crimes against humanity, since violence seemed widespread as well as systematic. Just since last October, it is estimated that more than 60,000 Rohingya have fled Rakhine State, mostly into Bangladesh.
How much is Suu Kyi to blame for proble in a deeply divided country that was ruled for decades by a brutal junta? To be sure, when the NLD took over parliament last year, they inherited the titles of government but only modest control of many institutions. It remains unclear whether civilian leaders can give effective orders to senior military commanders about Rakhine State or anywhere else in the country.
The writer is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations
