UN special rapporteur on human rights in Burma Yanghee Lee, centre, arrived in Arakan State on Friday. (Photo: DVB)

By Kimberley Phillips

By Ko Aung

Democratic Voice of Burma

October 31, 2016

The Arakan State government says it will form a militia to bolster defenses along Burma’s border with Bangladesh in the wake of a series of deadly attacks earlier this month, according to Maungdaw Township’s new border police commander.

Police Brig-Gen Thura San Lwin, who was appointed to the position two week ago after his predecessor was sacked for failing to prevent the 9 October attacks that left nine border police dead, said the new “volunteer police force” would operate under the supervision of the border police.

Police are “working to train local young people to safeguard their own areas and villages and State Chief Minister [Nyi Pyu] also gave advice,” he said, adding that new recruits would be aged between 18 and 35 and have at least a primary-school education.

Training will take place in the state capital Sittwe and at the police headquarters in Maungdaw’s Kyikanpyin village tract, where attacks took place, said Thura San Lwin. Police from Maungdaw who are currently stationed elsewhere can also be transferred to the region if they wish to, he added.

The move follows demands from ethnic Arakanese Buddhists who say they need to be armed to protect themselves against future attacks by Rohingya Muslim militants.

Some local young people expressed an interest in joining the new force, but they said the most important thing was that the police should listen to their concerns.

“The police chief said that he wanted to cooperate with local people, which means listening to them,” said Maungdaw resident Win Than. “By listening to local people, and using the information they provide, police can better uphold the rule of law and maintain national sovereignty.”

Meanwhile, claims by Rohingya villagers living in the region that they have been subjected to widespread human rights abuses by security personnel looking for the attackers have been dismissed as “propaganda for Muslim groups”by Colonel Sein Lwin, the police chief for Arakan State.

Police said that as of 25 October, they had arrested 50 people and recaptured 18 guns and more than 3,000 rounds of ammunition that had been seized during the 9 October attacks.

By Libby Hogan

Democratic Voice of Burma

August 31, 2016

The 21st Century Panglong Conference kicked off today— a forum that aims to help bring peace and reconciliation to Burma, and end decades of armed conflict between ethnic armed groups and the Burmese military.

Before the opening ceremony this morning, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon met with representatives of civil society organisations over breakfast to hear their views.

“This morning was very exciting to meet with Mr Ban Ki-moon and to have a chance to raise our concerns and recommendations,” said Thinzar Shunlei Yi, secretary of the National Youth Congress. “The first issue I raised was the need for young people’s voice at the conference in designing our future.”

She said she hoped that young people would gain a formal seat at the table inside the conference.

“At the moment we are not identified as an important peace-making partner, so I encouraged the Secretary-General to make sure that we are placed as an important peace-making partner,” said Thinzar Shunlei Yi, speaking to DVB after the breakfast. “Youths [are involved in] every issue. We suffer from environmental projects and are accused as the ones who [threaten] the country’s solidarity because we go out to protest on the street – such as against the controversial education bill.

“We are also mobilised in armed groups. They are the ones who die first — so in history, we are always on the front line striving for democracy.”

There is a long wish list of issues to be discussed at the conference. Although it’s not likely that any formal agreements will be signed, UN chief Ban says it’s a “promising first step”.

Some 20 ethnic armed groups will attend the peace conference. But three militias — the Arakan Army (AA), Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) and the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) – have refused to put down their arms, and will not take part in the discussions.

Soe Lunn, the director of People for People, an organisation that advocates on behalf of issues in Arakan State, said that the conference falls short of its stated aim of being fully inclusive of all groups: “Rakhine [Arakan] State was not included when the first Panglong Agreement was signed, and now this Panglong Conference is not inclusive as it does not include the AA, the MNDAA, and the TNLA, nor the ALP [Arakan Liberation Party] and Arakan National Council.”

Soe Lunn also met with Ban at the breakfast, and said he hopes that recognition of the problems in Arakan State will receive some of the spotlight. “There are land issues, poor education and health, women’s and children’s rights, and the conflict issue — everything is in crisis,” he told DVB.

Wai Wai Nu, the director of Women Peace Network-Arakan, echoed those calls. “Ban Ki-moon said how much he cares about the role of civil society groups, and I talked about the need for women’s peace and security,” she said.

After the transition in 2010, there was conflict between Muslims and Buddhists and about 130,000 people were displaced. Since then, conditions have been deteriorating day by day. We haven’t seen any changes since the democratic transition — we are seeing just more deterioration in Rakhine, and no feasible steps to address the root causes.”

A commission to focus on Arakan issues was established last week, and will be headed by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Soe Lunn said he hopes there will be some momentum from this conference to focus on building peace in Arakan State as well. “I don’t know if it [Kofi Annan leading the committee] is good or not good – but people hope that it will be good. International aid brings attention to development in Arakan State but every person living in Arakan State needs to work together.”

Wai Wai Nu says the key to success for the 21st Century Panglong Conference will be respect for the different groups in society.

“In my understanding, it is not just about peace between armed groups and the Tatmadaw [armed forces], but national reconciliation and state-building again — so I think it should be more inclusive, including the Rohingya and the armed groups who are not able to attend, and also more women in the peace conference.”

Ko Shine, the founder of Interfaith Youth Coalition on AIDS in Myanmar, a coalition of young people from different religious backgrounds, is attending the conference and says he is focused on drawing attention to the need for reconciliation among religions: “This conference is not just about co-operation among ethnic armed groups, but there also needs to be co-operation among faith groups.”

Ko Shine welcomed Ban’s opening address but said he hopes there will be more support from Aung San Suu Kyi “Mr Ban Ki-moon used the terms ‘multi-faith’ and ‘multicultural’, but nobody else did. I think it would be more powerful if Aung San Suu Kyi and the Senior General [Min Aung Hlaing] also used these terms.”

By Feliz Solomon

Democratic Voice of Burma
May 19, 2016

A top State Department official said on Wednesday that the United States wants to see rights granted equally to all people in Burma, including the stateless Rohingya Muslims of restive Arakan State, also known as Rakhine.

“Our policy is pretty simple,” said Shaarik Zafar, the US special representative to Muslim communities. “We want to make sure that we see peace, stability, development and harmony for all the people of Rakhine State, all the people of Myanmar, and of course that includes the Rohingya community.”

Speaking to reporters via telephone from Singapore, the envoy said dire conditions for the Rohingya were something that the United States has “thought about a lot,” and that equal development would be integral to broader stability.

Viewed as one of the world’s most persecuted minorities, the Rohingya are denied citizenship and basic rights. Violence between Arakan State’s Buddhist majority and minority Muslims beginning in 2012 left more than 100 people dead and some 140,000 others displaced. Most still live in squalid camps where they are denied freedom of movement and access to health and education services.

“We want freedom of movement, access to education, healthcare and economic opportunity for everyone in Rakhine State and the people of Burma, which includes the Rohingya community,” Zafar said.

Zafar, an advisor to Secretary of State John Kerry, made the comments while touring Singapore and Malaysia to assess the engagement needs of Muslim communities in Asia. Kerry will visit Burma on Sunday, days after the United States eased some economic sanctions on the former pariah state.

The United States’ re-engagement with Burma is part of the Obama administration’s broader Asia rebalance strategy, which hinges on a trade pact geared toward integrating economies and standardizing business practices.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, was signed by 12 Pacific Rim nations earlier this year, but has yet to go into effect. Burma is not a party to the agreement, nor is neighboring giant China.

“It’s incredibly important that the TPP gets finalized,” Zafar said, citing human rights, climate, security and economic concerns in the greater Asia-Pacific region, which accounts for some 40 percent of the world’s GDP.

In his capacity as special envoy, Zafar stressed that “religion matters in foreign policy, in health and in development”, particularly in the multi-cultural Asia-Pacific.

“Diversity leads to greater innovation, diversity leads, frankly, to a more successful country. And that’s true not just in the United States, that’s also true in Southeast Asia,” Zafar said.

By Bill O'Toole

Democratic Voice of Burma

By Democratic Voice of Burma

March 15, 2016

A special sitting of Burma’s Union Parliament elected Htin Kyaw as the country’s next president on Tuesday. The 70-year-old is now set to be sworn in as Burma’s ninth president and first democratically-elected leader since 1962.

Htin Kyaw, the long-time friend and confidant of National League for Democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, swept the parliament’s votes with more than half of the ballots. Lawmakers from both legislative chambers burst into applause at the conclusion of the tally.

Suu Kyi’s former driver— who has never held public office— comfortably secured the presidency with 360 votes from the total of 652 ballots counted. The other two candidates in the running, Myint Swe and Henry Van Thio, came away with 213 and 79 votes respectively.

The military’s pick for president, the outgoing Rangoon Chief Minister and former general Myint Swe will act as Burma’s senior vice-president. NLD lawmaker and ethnic Chin Henry Van Thio will serve as the secondary vice president.

The three candidates were cleared by a parliamentary scrutiny body only yesterday, as questions arose over the constitutional eligibility of both Henry Van Thio and Myint Swe for Burma’s presidency.

Although Suu Kyi is constitutionally barred from the top job by virtue of her foreign family members, the Nobel laureate has indicated she will ‘rule from above’ effectively marking Htin Kyaw her proxy.

Htin Kyaw and the NLD will take the helm of government on 1 April, fulfilling a mandate to rule issued by the Burmese people in November 2015, when the NLD secured an election victory and a numerical majority across both houses of Burma’s bicameral Union Parliament.

By Bill O'Toole

Democratic Voice of Burma

March 4, 2016

By Maung Zarni

Democratic Voice of Burma

January 11, 2016

On Tuesday, Burma’s lame duck government led by President Thein Sein and backed by the country’s military is holding a national conference ostensibly to foster peace. The dialogue will bring together the Burmese military and the representatives of the eight ethnic armed groups that agreed to the partial ceasefire agreement in October.

The National League for Democracy (NLD) led by Aung San Suu Kyi – which will come to power at the end of March – has officially declared that “establishing peace with minorities will be the single most important goal” for her government.

However, neither the most powerful stakeholder, namely the military, nor Suu Kyi’s NLD will address the need to end the systematic persecution of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority living in their own ancestral borderlands between Burma and Bangladesh, whose persecution has repeatedly hit international news headlines.

Already, her top deputy on the Central Executive Committee, the ex-army officer Win Htein, has made it clear that ending the suffering of the Rohingya – estimated at 1.33 million in western Arakan State and an equal number in diaspora – is not on the party’s agenda.

By all indications so far Suu Kyi’s government shares with the Burmese military a racist view towards the Rohingya Muslims. They will most likely continue the current policies of systematic persecution and discrimination.

Their shared indifference is deeply disturbing in light of the growing consensus worldwide about the genocidal nature of Burma’s abuse and persecution of the Rohingya.

Over the last several years, academic and non-academic researchers have raised a very real possibility that Burma is, as a matter of national policy, engaged in initiatives designed to destroy the Rohingya as an ethnic people. Among the organisations that have sounded this alarm are Fortify Rights, Human Rights Watch, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, ASEAN Parliamentary Human Rights Caucus, Al Jazeera Investigative Unit, Yale University’s Human Rights Law Clinic and the International State Crime Initiative at Queen Mary University of London.

Suu Kyi’s studied silience 

Noteworthy is the fact that Suu Kyi’s culpability in the state-directed persecution of the Rohingya goes beyond her silence, which has been roundly criticised. Suu Kyi routinely offers Islamophobia as an explanation, and denies any systematic wrong-doing while dismissing the genocide and ethnic cleansing accusation as simply “exaggerations”.

Never mind that seven of her fellow Nobel Peace laureates including Mairead Maguire and Desmond Tutu, as well as her long-time supporters such as George Soros and Amartya Sen, have come to view Burma’s treatment of the Rohingya as nothing less than a slow genocide.

George Soros, who escaped the Nazi-occupied Budapest as a Jewish teenager in 1944, took the trouble of visiting a Rohingya neighbourhood in Arakan State a year ago. After having witnessed the conditions in which the Rohingya were forced to live, Soros was moved to draw what he called an “alarming” parallel between the Nazi genocide and Burma’s Rohingya persecution. Last year Ms Suu Kyi also travelled to Arakan State to gather Arakan votes for her party. She did not bother to pay a brief if unpopular visit, out of compassion, to the Rohingya refugee camps and “Rohingya ghettos”, as Soros put it, in the vicinity. Her calculated avoidance goes back to the beginning of the anti-Rohingya mass violence in June 2012.

As a Burmese researcher and activist I joined Suu Kyi on the Rule of Law Roundtable at the London School of Economics (LSE) on her first visit to UK in a quarter century. Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office, her visit’s official sponsor, informed the panel chair Professor Kaldor that our guest of honour was “in listening mood”, that is, she wasn’t willing to speak on the hottest topic of the day. Only a week or so before the LSE panel, the Rohingya had suffered violence perpetrated by the sword-wielding local Arakan mobs, organised and backed by the state. I was pre-assigned to handle any question about the persecution of the Rohingya as she maintained the studied silence on the grave and domestically unpopular subject.

A year later, on her second visit to UK in 2013, Suu Kyi was put on the spot on Radio Four by the host Mishal Hussain who front loaded the violence against Muslim Rohingya. Suu Kyi actively denied that Burma was committing “ethnic cleansing” against the Rohingya. In her own words: “No, no, it’s not ethnic cleansing. It’s a new problem…these problems arose last year. This is due to fear of both sides (Buddhists and Muslims). I think you will accept that there is a perception that Muslim power, global Muslim power, is very great. Certainly, that’s a perception in many parts of the world, and in our country too…”

On the eve of Burma’s elections, which her party won a crushing landslide against the incumbent military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party, her position shifted decidedly from a calculated silence to an active dismissal of any systematic wrong-doing. Human Rights Watch refers to what is happening to the Rohingya as ethnic cleansing. The Queen Mary University and Yale Law school researchers call it genocide.

In a rare press conference held at her residence in Rangoon on 5 November, Anthony Kuhn of US National Public Radio asked her about the accusations of mass atrocities. She responded by saying, “Don’t exaggerate the problems [of the Rohingya]” while proceeding to echo the government’s portrayal of the Rohingya as simply “from Bangladesh”.

In her rhetoric and lack of action, Suu Kyi has has evidently chosen to ignore a mountain of irrefutable official and historical documentation which backs the Rohingya’s claim to identity, history and citizenship in Burma.

Deep historical ties

In sharp contrast to the official and popular portrayal of the Rohingya as merely the descendants of farm ‘coolies’ imported by the British Raj to develop the fertile wet rice land of Western Burma adjacent to the then East Bengal (or present day Bangladesh), ethno-linguistic fieldwork going back to AD1799 – a quarter century before the British annexation of Western Burma – establishes the Rohingya as an ethnic group of Islamic faith.

The claim of the historical presence of the Rohingya is further reinforced by stone inscriptions from AD 1440 unearthed and interpreted by none other than two of the leading founders of the historical studies of pre-colonial Burma, namely the late Gordon H. Luce and his most distinguished pupil the late Professor Than Tun of Burma Historical Commission.

During the period of British colonial rule (1826-1947), Burma’s pre-colonial ethnic groups with their self-chosen identities were lumped under broad categories informed in part by anthropologists and in part necessitated by the administrative needs of the colonial bureaucracy.

Following the country’s independence from Britain in 1948, the Rohingya reasserted their ethnic identity and historical presence in the borderlands between the new nation-states of Muslim Bangladesh and Buddhist Burma successfully. By 1954, Burma’s national leaders fully embraced them as an ethnic group of the Union of Burma. The Ministry of Defence was directly involved in negotiations with the Rohingya leaders in terms of the state granting the official recognition of Rohingya ethnicity as integral to the Union of Burma.

In 1992, the late Brig. Aung Gyi, the second in command of the Burmese Armed Forces under General Ne Win, recorded in writing his first-hand knowledge of the emergence of the state-recognised official Rohingya ethnic identity.

In those days, the War Office had to pay a very close attention to Buthidaung and Maungdaw townships, just like today’s War Office is paying a close attention to the border regions with Thailand. Eventually, the Rohingya warriors (Mujahideens) gave up their armed rebellion. In the discussion that ensued during the Surrender Ceremony, they made a specific request to the army representatives: that we don’t address or refer to their people in ways they consider racist and derogatory. Specifically, the Rohingya leaders asked us not to call the Rohingya [pejorative terms such as] ‘Khaw Taw’, nor ‘Bengali’, nor ‘Chittagonian Kalar’ nor ‘Arakan Muslims’. Instead they said their preferred and self-referential ethnic name was the Arabic word Rohingya (meaning the Easterners – east of the old Bengal). In terms of the administrative name of their region, they proposed a completely secular term devoid of any religious connotations, namely Mayu after the river Mayu. 

The War Office agreed to organise the two majority Rohingya towns – Buthidaung and Maungdaw – into a single administrative district which was to be directly commanded by the War office (Ministry of Defence) as part of the Tatmadaw’s wider strategic border affairs paradigm (where ‘development’ was pursued as a tool to combat ethnic rebellions). This arrangement by the War Office was subsequently officially approved by the Cabinet, thus having given birth to the Administrative Region of Mayu and resulting in the official recognition of the Rohingya as an ethnic group and name.

By May 1961, Burma government established a Rohingya language service on the country’s sole national radio station and by 1964, the Rohingya were given an official entry in the government’s Burma Encyclopedia, recognising the two Northern Arakan townships as the predominantly Rohingya ancestral pocket.

Betrayed by the Junta

After the military coup in 1962, General Ne Win, the deceased founder of the country’s former junta, turned on the commercially successful segment of Burmese society made up of people of Indian sub-continental origin. Over 300,000 Burmese of Indian origin were effectively expelled from the country. Han Chinese too suffered. The new military state confiscated their businesses, properties and bank accounts. Nothing was spared. A decade later, Uganda’s Idi Amin replicated the Burmese military’s model of dealing with successful ‘foreigners’ as he expelled the entire community of people with Indian sub-continent ancestry.

This is what has been happening to the Rohingya of Burma albeit at an excruciating slow pace since the late 1970s, when the military leaders decided to frame the Rohingya – and Muslims – as a threat to national security, and proceeded to devise strategies of disenfranchising them and destroying their economic and legal foundations. Campaigns of physical violence, mass arrest and de-ethnicisation have been coupled with the enactment of laws and regulations which have encoded Rohingya and Muslim persecution.

The Rohingya have borne the brunt of this racist campaign centrally developed and directed simply because all of the different types of Muslim communities, the Rohingya are the only one with a brief history of armed revolt against the newly independent state of Burma, having their own ancestral geographic pocket adjacent to one of the most populous Muslim countries – Bangladesh.

In October 2012, the second bout of organised mass violence, arson and looting drove over 140,000 Rohingya from some of the most commercially lucrative neighbourhoods in Arakan State. While these Rohingya languish in internments surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by security troops, their old neighbourhoods – burned to ashes in a matter of days – have been marked for the development of Special Economic Zone. That joint venture between the Burmese military and a Chinese corporation is worth US$17 billion.

The popular misperception manufactured and encouraged by the government views the Rohingya as greedy, desperate ‘Bengali’ economic migrants, or ‘leeches’ ‘parasites’ ‘ogres’, from across the western borders. The reality for the Rohingya is that the Burmese government has effectively completed the process of not only stripping them of official and historical ethnicity and legal citizenship but of successfully destroying the economic and social foundations to sustain life as a cohesive ethnic community. Burma’s decades-long policy of targeted destruction of the essential conditions of life for the Rohingya as a group is the driving force behind the mass exodus of the group from the country’s west. Those desperate waves of people then make easy prey for human traffickers and people smugglers.

Suu Kyi must be pressed

For Aung San Suu Kyi to be echoing her former captors’ official portrayal of the Rohingya as ‘Bengali’ migrants assuming a false and non-existent identity is devastating to the Rohingya who had high hopes of the NLD government ending their sufferings.

On the contrary, Suu Kyi should be paying close attention to Amartya Sen, her supporter and former teacher at Delhi University, who sounded the alarm on the plight of the Rohingya when he said in 2014:

The term ‘slow genocide’ is an appropriate fit here because you deny people health care and nutritional opportunities. You deny people opportunities to work and earn an income and make a living to feed themselves and their family members. You deny people having medical care and expel the only organisation(s) providing health care like Médecins Sans Frontières, and don’t allow them to return. That is killing people. And in that sense it is a genocide. It is a slow genocide.

As Aung San Suu Kyi prepares to take over the reins of the new government, the international community – of diplomats, world leaders, journalists, human rights researchers and world citizens – needs to press the Burmese leader to reflect critically on her stances on the Rohingya. There has been a talk of inter-faith and inter-communal reconciliation efforts at the grassroots level between the Rohingya and the Arakan Buddhists. However laudable, these communal efforts can go only so far in ending what effectively is a state crime. As the incoming head of state, the moral and political responsibility to end the slow genocide in Burma will fall squarely on Suu Kyi’s shoulders.

Maung Zarni is research scholar with the renowned genocide Documentation Center of Cambodia (Sleuth Rith Institute) and publisher of the forthcoming Rohingya Calendar 2016-17. (http://www.rohingyacalendar.com/)

By CARLOS SARDIÑA GALACHE

Democratic Voice of Burma

November 13, 2015

By Democratic Voice of Burma

October 27, 2015

The incumbent Upper House representative for Gangaw Township in Magwe has touted his party’s credentials as being racist and discriminatory against Rohingya Muslims.

At a campaign event last week in the village of Bawpyin in his constituency, senior MP and renowned firebrand Hla Swe of the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) rallied a crowd of supporters with the following discourse: “People of the village of Bawpyin, let me ask you a question – would you agree to give citizenship to the Rohingya kalar [derogatory term for dark-skinned people of South Asian descent]?”

The crowd responded in unison: “No, we don’t!” Hla Swe repeated the question twice, before reassuring his constituents: “Well, I am delighted to know that the people of Bawpyin are on the same page as our president, USDP Chairman U Thein Sein.”

He added: “U Thein Sein has stated on the record in newspapers that there are no Rohingya in Burma. There are only Bengali kalar and they shall not be granted citizenship. He has declared this publicly and even stood up to the UN on the subject.”

But despite the applause and cheers, not all local residents in the Magwe town appreciated Hla Swe’s sentiments.

“USDP candidate U Hla Swe during his campaign yesterday dug up matters of nationalism and religion to use as leverage,” said Bawpyin villager Chan Min on 22 October. “He also said that his father had fought against Thakin Soe’s Red Flag communists, and that now he, Hla Swe, is continuing the fight against another ‘red flag’ party.”

The latter statement was presumably a jibe at Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD), whose brand colour for campaigning is red.

Also running in the 8 November general election in Gangaw Township are candidates from the NLD, National Unity Party, and National Unity Congress Party, as well as four independent candidates.

In the 2010 election, Hla Swe took the Upper House seat with nearly 64,000 votes, although candidates from three other parties also received more than 20,000 ballots each. The NLD did not contest that election.

Hla Swe’s inflammatory comments come at a time when many political figures and observers have warned of increased religious tensions around election day.

The opposition NLD has also come in for criticism – although mostly from foreign media – for its attempts to distance itself from the Rohingya crisis. The NLD rejected all Muslim candidates from its party list for the upcoming election.

By Democratic Voice of Burma

September 2, 2015

A total of 88 candidates from across Burma, including almost an entire Muslim political party, have been disqualified from the 8 November general election.

The 88 were mostly rejected by the Union or regional election commissions for not meeting personal criteria. The highest number of revoked candidacy applications was in Arakan State – some 28 – all of whom were from the minority Rohingya Muslim community. Invariably, those rebuffed did not meet the election commission’s citizenship criteria.

“They [Rohingya candidates] failed to meet the qualifications under Electoral Law Article 10(e) – that a candidate must be a Burmese citizen, who is also born to parents who are both Burmese citizens. The rejected candidates did not meet this criteria,” said Aung Kyaw Nyunt, the chairman of Maungdaw District’s election commission.

In fact, 17 of 18 candidates were disqualified from one party alone: the Democracy and Human Rights Party (DHRP), based in Rangoon and Maungdaw, which has a high Muslim membership and Rohingya rights agenda.

“We [DHRP] received a letter from Maungdaw District Election Commission saying our candidates were rejected after their applications were scrutinised and found not to be in conformity with the laws and bylaws,” said party chairman Kyaw Min.

“I wonder if the government is prioritising a policy over the law,” he added.

Also among the Rohingya aspirants rejected was incumbent Lower House MP Shwe Maung, a former Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) member, who was seeking to run in the polls this time as an independent candidate for Buthidaung Township.

He told DVB that his appeal against the district election commission’s rejection was dismissed by the state-level election commission on 1 September.

“[Fellow Rohingya candidate] Daw Khin Khin Lwin and I presented our appeals on 27 August and were appointed a hearing on 1 September,” he said. “At 10am, I went to the hearing and presented all my evidence, but the decision must have already been decided, because in less than 10 seconds, [the official] said: ‘U Shwe Maung’s appeal has been dismissed, as has Daw Khin Lwin Lwin’s’.

“From what I could see, the Arakan Election Commission did not give me a proper hearing and had already made a decision [to reject me],” he continued. “This makes me suspect that the Maungdaw district and Arakan state election commissions are being put under pressure by some group or a person.”

The northern Arakan town of Maungdaw, like nearby Buthidaung, is majority Rohingya Muslim, or “Bengali’ as many Burmese prefer to refer to the community, a largely pejorative term suggesting they are illegal immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh.

Tensions between Arakanese Buddhists and the Rohingya community have boiled over several times in the past, most notably in 2012, when communal violence left over a hundred dead and some 140,000 homeless after mobs sowed destruction among each other’s neighbourhoods.

The opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) has reportedly said that seven of its 1,138 proposed candidates have been disqualified for a variety of reasons including ethnicity, age, and association with illegal organisations. An NLD spokesman suggested the party would appeal those cases.

The ruling USDP has so far made no announcement about any rejections among its submitted list of 1,139 candidates.

UEC Chairman Tin Aye said the rejected candidates have one week starting from 3 September to appeal the decision with their local election commission. If rejected, they may still reach out but not appeal to the regional [state or division] election commission whose decision will be final.

By Maung Zarni

Democratic Voice of Burma

July 26, 2015

Last week on BBC, Myanmar’s Commander-in-Chief Snr-Gen Min Aung Hlaing said confidently that he “expects a free and fair election” sponsored by his military scheduled for November this year, and will honour the electoral results. The BBC hailed not only the general’s pro-democracy pledge, labelling this year’s polls “historic”, but also the very fact that the country’s most powerful soldier – generals in Myanmar are traditionally media-shy – sat down with the BBC for an interview.

Sitting across from a row of microphones in the BBC’s London studio, the World Service Newsday’s presenter Clare McDonnell asked me what I thought of the general’s promise and his unprecedented interview to the BBC. My answer: the generals are getting PR-wise.

Alas, the once media-shy Burmese soldiers have come of age: they have grown media-savvy and supremely confident in dealing with the outside world.

Over the last four years, since US-led Western powers embraced Myanmar’s quasi-civilian government of ex-general and current president Thein Sein, Burmese generals have acted incredibly relaxed about talking to the international media, whether to the regime-friendly outlets such as Singapore’s Channel News Asia or the Voice of American Burmese Service, or more professional programs like BBC’s Hard Talk.

After all, the Burmese generals have forcibly pushed through their amendment-proof constitution of 2008, which effectively elevates the military, both as an institution, and the generals, as a class, above the law. It shields the most powerful institution from any popular pressure, accords the military a veto on any policy and institutional measures, and, most importantly, legalises any future military coup deemed necessary by the commander-in-chief.

In addition, today’s Burmese generals and ex-generals have been ably assisted on public relations matters by a small but highly educated group of Burmese advisers, as well as international friends including the regime-friendly diplomats, politicians, academics and policy lobbyists. As a consequence, the generals have learned to parrot pro-democracy liberal spins while pursuing the same old illiberal agenda dictated by the typical anti-democratic mindset instilled through military academies and decades of working in the country’s militaristic, authoritarian political culture.

Upon closer look, in spite of being touted as “historic” in Western media, world’s capitals and investors’ circles, Myanmar’s upcoming elections lack any democratic substance.

One only needs a cursory glance at how political power is divided – or not divided – among the country’s stakeholders: non-Myanmar or non-Burman ethnic communities such as the Kachin, the Karen, the Shan, the Mon, the Rakhine [Arakanese], the Karenni, the Chin, etc. who make up roughly 30-40 percent of the total population of 51 million; and the pro-democracy Myanmar civilian communities.

As a matter of fact, Myanmar’s power set-up in 2015 resembles far more closely that of India under British colonial rule in 1918 than any political system that can be characterised as even remotely “democratic”. In his book The Future of Burma (1937), F. Burton Leach, the then chief secretary to the (colonial) Government of Burma and the political secretary to the Burma Chamber of Commerce in Rangoon, wrote: “When Mr Montague and Lord Chelmsford set about to prepare their scheme of reform in 1918, the two outstanding features of the system of Government in India which had survived all previous changes, were …. first, the marked centralisation of power in the hands of the [British colonial] Government of India, and the small amount of power, either legislative, administrative or financial, possessed by the Provincial Governments, and secondly the complete independence of the [colonial] Executive from any control by the Legislature, either in the Central or in the Provincial Governments”.

Anchored in their constitution adopted in 2008, Myanmar’s military leaders introduced a new political system – “Discipline-flourishing Democracy” – after the military’s political proxy – the Union Solidarity and Democratic Party (USDP) – won over 80 percent of the popular votes in a country where the military and the generals are most widely reviled. This new system devised by and for the military contains the two anti-democratic features which were the pillars of British colonial rule in India almost 100 years ago.

While ignoring the blatant disenfranchisement of nearly one million Rohingya in western Burma and possible disenfranchisement of Kachins, Karen, Shan and Rakhine in active war zones in the upcoming elections, Western governments have made an issue out of Aung San Suu Kyi, the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize winner and the most popular Burmese politician, being constitutionally barred from holding the highest office in the land on grounds of her two children – and late husband – being foreigners.

However, structurally speaking, the two most important issues that expose the most anti-democratic pillars of Myanmar’s “democratic system” hark back to the British colonial era political system that was deemed necessary to reform even as early as 1918: the concentration of political and administrative power in the central government vis-à-vis the non-ethnic Myanmar “peripheries”, for lack of a better term, and the constitutionally guaranteed absence of democratic accountability for those in the Executive branch, made up almost exclusively of Myanmar generals and ex-generals.

Just last week, the military bloc-voted against a motion designed to devolve the central/national government’s existing power to appoint chief ministers of states and divisions to local legislatures, dealing a blow to any hope for an evolution of the military-controlled Parliament over time.

Furthermore, only Myanmar’s commander-in-chief is endowed with the power to appoint crucial cabinet posts such as defense; home affairs; foreign affairs; border affairs; as well as endorse or reject any presidential and vice-presidential nominees from the elected political parties; assign military officers to man the 25 percent of parliamentary seats in all national and state/provincial legislatures; and organise a military take-over against any sitting parliamentary government.

The fact that any constitutional amendment requires more than 75 percent of the approving votes gives the commander-in-chief veto power over virtually all aspects of Myanmar’s political system. The 25 percent of military representatives are organised as a brigade within the parliament. Unfailingly, the military representatives vote as a bloc, whatever the issue, as ordered from the Office of the Commander-in-Chief.

Aside from the categorically anti-democratic constitutional arrangements of political and administrative power, there is also a profoundly disturbing issue, namely the military’s capture of what academics call the State, that is, the governmental/administrative ethos, culture and practices, institutions, and personnel. During the past 53 years – of which 49 were direct military rule and four are quasi-civilian – the Burmese generals have staffed virtually all strategic administrative positions at both state and national/central government levels with military personnel: literally thousands upon thousands of bureaucrats are either in-service military officers or military veterans.

Some token civilian administrative heads and advisors notwithstanding, all important decisions are taken by the officer-cum-civilianised-bureaucrats. The buck stops at the military’s desk. The futility of ceasefire negotiations in the face of the Burmese military’s push for the surrender of the ethnic armed resistance organisations is a case in point.

To ensure there is no split in culture, ethos and loyalty in the country’s vast security sector, the military has infused its loyal officers into police and intelligence services. Further, the military has organised a vast nationwide circle of veterans whose loyalty and support can be counted upon in terms of popular mobilisation for the military’s strategic ends. This is in addition to the military’s ultimate control of the ruling USDP.

With these kind of British colonial-style safeguards for the ruling military’s vested interests, both political and economic, there is little wonder that the commander-in-chief had no problem making the promise of respecting the outcome of the November elections.

Economically, since the early 1950s when the country’s civil war with multiple fronts increased the central role of the military in Burma’s national politics, the generals have built up an economic base for the military as an institution. To date, virtually all important sectors of Burma’s national economy – including an informal economy – is tied to the military’s interests, and is under either the direct or indirect influence of the Ministry of Defence.

The military’s conglomerates, and their associates – known as cronies – run vast economic enterprises and mega-development projects. Not only are the Burmese generals and their base – the military – above the law and beyond accountability, but their conglomerates not only oppose any external audit but also laugh at any foreign ideas such as “corporate social responsibility”.

To be sure, transition from 50 years of military rule to a representative system of government is going to take years and monumental efforts – even in cases where the military leaders are aware of their own failures at nation-building and as policy makers.

In the case of the Burmese military leadership and the military, this transition from dictatorship to democracy is made incomparably harder. For the military has internalised the self-serving justification that without its strong hand – that is, concentration of power and control in the military and its loyalists – the multi-ethnic country is going to disintegrate.

No number of election cycles nor amount of election monitoring will make a dent in the military’s structures of power. Seen in this light, Burma’s upcoming elections will change nothing in terms of power and control.

Maung Zarni is a dissident scholar and activist with 27 years’ involvement in international activism, pushing for democratic change in his native Burma.