Tanks, missile launchers and armoured cars were rolled out yesterday in Myanmar, formerly Burma, to mark 75 years of breaking free from Britain. In truth, there is little freedom about this benighted regime. Only days before the parade, it added more years to the cumulative jail term of the last democratic ruler of the country, the Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. The 77-year-old is expected to serve 33 years of imprisonment.
No amount of pomp or 21-gun salutes can hide the fact that its corrupt generals are dependent on Chinese aid and trade as well as Russian weaponry. One of the great scandals is how this southeast Asian country has been allowed to shrug off responsibility for its crimes. That comprises not just killing 2,400 activists — including teachers and cultural leaders — but also locking up 16,000 political critics. The most shocking outrage came in the expulsion at bayonet point of more than a million Rohingya Muslims. Women and children were raped and houses torched as they were driven across the border. Many of them live in tent cities set up by humanitarian organisations in neighbouring Bangladesh.
No amount of sanctions and western public condemnation has been able to extract an apology or a shift in the junta’s behaviour. The reason is clear: it enjoys the protection of veto-wielding Beijing and Moscow and need not fear serious intervention by the UN security council.
Myanmar, once admired by travellers for its golden pagodas, rubies and floating gardens, has become a tarnished destination, its rural poverty all too obvious. Since the military coup in February 2021 the economy has shrunk nearly 20 per cent. Yet none of this seems to bother the country’s generals whose brand of khaki capitalism has enriched them and their families.
Elections are due to be held this year and the United States has predicted they will be a sham. The last attempt at a democratic election, in November 2020, was won by Ms Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy. The army’s proxy party suffered major losses. It has, accordingly, sought to shift the balance in its favour. For a while she seemed ready to accept some of the propaganda narrative of the army in order to pave the way for a form of peaceful transition away from authoritarian rule. Looking strained, she defended the army’s operation against the Rohingya Muslims — prompting many westerners to speculate that she was bargaining for her future. Critics said she had betrayed the logic of being a Nobel laureate.
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Any idea that she could negotiate her way into a position of leader of a legal opposition movement and thus apply pressure to the regime has been squashed. Only the regime’s respect for her late father, General Aung San — who led the independence struggle against the British — has, it seems, kept her alive.
The only way to extract concessions from the junta is for China to apply pressure. Beijing is reluctant to do so. It sees the generals as being on the right path. The ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya matches China’s harsh treatment of the Uighur minority, a policy of forced “re-education” of Muslims. Both countries fail to grasp that they are creating a time bomb: brutal repression will lead to a strong sense of Muslim grievance and ultimately the kind of radicalisation that the governments say they are trying to stamp out. China and Myanmar are playing with fire.
