(Commentary) – The major objective of the 2010 elections was to end the legitimacy crisis of the Burmese army junta that grabbed political power in 1990 after losing an election to Aung San Suu Kyi.
Has the result of the 2010 elections ended political struggles between military generals and their opposition, including Aung San Suu Kyi and ethnic rebels?Regardless of the army’s coercive power, the political opponents are not giving up the struggle against the government because of the army’s failure to understand that for a constitution or the contract between the people and a government to be legitimate, it must be free and voluntary.
As Aung San Suu Kyi and the constitutional scholar Dennis Mueller explain, a parliament will help end the political crisis only if all citizens are represented, with voting rules that encourages consensus, plus constitutionally defined citizen rights, and a judiciary to further safeguard against the few who wish to tyrannize the many political institutions.
Furthermore, Mueller states that if the uncertainties and other factors at work at the constitutional stage do not bring about a consensus on rights issues, then the federalist rights option is the only one that neither imposes one group’s value on all others nor prevents the polity from forming. To provide the optimal amount of public good, citizens’ preferences must be known; wherein, a federal structure is a potentially powerful aid to advance the interests of all individuals.
Contrary to the army’s expectation, the brutality and the coerced 2010 elections in Burma have started yet another major episode of armed conflict and Naypyitaw is now surrounded by enemies on all sides. Unfortunately for the junta, James C. Scott, a historian, has concluded from past evidence that, ‘the mountains favoured defensive warfare in general and provided innumerable places where a small group could hold off a much larger force. Wide tracts of uncultivated forest, miles of waterlogged country, reeking with malaria, or confused tangles of scrub jungle and ravines afforded the dacoits safe retreat. The military’s obstacles to the conquest of remote mountainous areas were formidable. The combination of a mobile and generally hostile population and a rugged topography meant that even punitive expeditions, let alone military occupation, were risky enterprises’.
During the 2007 Saffron Revolution, with the fearless support of the people, organizers of the movement were able to evade the government’s arrest and planned the uprising. Ashin U Gambira, a leading spokesperson for the All Burma Monks Alliance during the Saffron Revolution, was arrested only because he refused to flee as the government’s thugs were closing in on him.
Even though Burma has been immersed in civil war for more than a half century, Burmese people are still standing up to the central authority, and this time it is for democracy. The stakeholders in this struggle against dictatorship in Burma now make their plans with calculated risks incorporating experiences from the past sixty years. And sacrifices made by armed ethnic groups and student rebels may have helped the central Burmese opposition and the ethnic rebels in remote areas understand each other more.
Unsurprisingly, the 2010 elections seem to have deepened the resolve of major armed ethnic insurgents, and nudged the urban political oppositions toward a unity. A second Panlong Conference may open the way for all political opposition groups to begin a serious conversation together.
At the moment, time is running out for Naypyitaw and Burma to find peaceful coexistence. Hopes and prayers alone will not help Aung San Suu Kyi cross Burma’s last Rubicon and leave behind the generals’ zero-sum game. As she continues to ask, those of us who are free to act must do our utmost now to bring international pressure on the Burmese government to offer a path of peace and a humane political environment before it permanently descends into Asia’s slow burning Middle East.
