Burma Redux: Global Justice and the Quest for Political Reform in Myanmar (3 page)

Before turning in its second half to debates about global justice and what it calls interactive intervention animated by constructive transnational partnerships for political reform, the book thus explores in its first half the situation in which Myanmar citizens currently find themselves. In such a layered and labyrinthine case, indeed in any case, this is a necessary basis for examination of means by which foreigners might reach across a recognized international frontier to facilitate political change. To get to that first main part and establish a context for analysis of a far away country about which outsiders typically know little, this introductory chapter looks at controversy surrounding its name, ways in which the current reality inside its borders might be framed, means by which its politics might be examined, and initial possibilities for rebuilding from the ruinous state that is Myanmar a place that might properly be called Burma.

Naming a nation

A standard starting point for debate, whether explicit or implicit, is a dispute about the name of the country that opened in the middle months of 1989 and continues to this day.
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It can be traced notably to Law No. 15/89, issued on June 18, 1989, which decreed that “The expression ‘Union of Burma’ and the expression ‘Burma’ or ‘Burman’ or ‘Burmese’ contained in the existing laws enacted in the English language shall be substituted by the expressions ‘Union of Myanmar’ and ‘Myanmar’ respectively.”
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In parallel, Notification No. 5/89 provided a brief list of new names for nationalities, states, divisions, cities and rivers across the land. Order No. 2/89 held that “since the term ‘Bamar’ used in the National Anthem of the Union of Myanmar refers only to the ‘Bamar nationality,’ it has been replaced with ‘Myanmar’ to refer to all the nationalities.”
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The quarrel unleashed by these edicts is an appropriate place to begin this analysis.

One feature worth noting at the outset is that the decrees affected peoples and places known to the outside world chiefly through colonialism. Indeed, it was largely because something had been lost in transliteration that changes in English terminology were deemed necessary in June 1989. The city the British called Rangoon, bureaucratic heart of their Burma and first capital of the postcolonial nation, was thus renamed Yangon to reflect local pronunciation as faithfully as possible. The Irrawaddy River, cast by Rudyard Kipling in 1890 as an imperial road to Mandalay, became the Ayeyawady.
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Maymyo, a hill station named in 1887 for Colonel James May and frequented by colonial officials, entrepreneurs and traders as refuge from monsoon heat and humidity in Burma’s central plain, became Pyin Oo Lwin. To the east, Karen State, lodged on the border with Thailand and fiercely loyal to Britain in the Second World War, became Kayin State. Its administrative capital switched its spelling from Pa-an to the aspirated Hpa-an. To the south in Mon State, port city and governance center Moulmein, setting in 1926 for George Orwell’s shooting of an elephant, became Mawlamyine.
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In these many ways, the Burma captured in stages by Britain through wars fought in 1824–26, 1852 and 1885, and ruled as part of the Empire on which the sun never set to 1948 save only for three years of Japanese control from 1942 to 1945, became a rather unfamiliar place to outsiders.

In principle there was little wrong with that, for it is hard to object to local people devising a set of changes designed to improve the mapping of English to indigenous usage. Indeed, in the context of postcolonial Asia such exercises have taken place repeatedly, and rarely have they generated sustained criticism. Among former British possessions alone, parts of India have experienced parallel revisions since independence in 1947, with colonial Bombay, Madras and Calcutta all taking new names as Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata between 1995 and 2000. Changes have also been made in Bangladesh (itself East Pakistan until independence in 1971), Malaysia (Malaya until a set of 1965 reforms), and Sri Lanka (Ceylon until 1972). Elsewhere, a classic instance is the switch from Peking to Beijing mandated by China’s adoption of the
pinyin
transliteration system in 1958. Although Beijing was rarely used by people speaking and writing in English during the early years of Communist rule, it became common linguistic currency from the 1980s onward as Chinese leaders promoted it more insistently. Other than in fixed historical contexts, such as Peking University in Beijing or Peking Road in Hong Kong, it is now the standard term across the English-speaking world, and Peking strikes a jarring note. Guangzhou (Canton), Nanjing (Nanking) and Tianjin (Tientsin) are also approved contemporary usages.

In the Myanmar case, however, objections to the name changes soon surfaced, though at the time the foreign press displayed little interest. In the United Kingdom, for instance,
The Times
took three days to report the news and on June 21 ran only a 20-word item supplied by the Reuters office in Bangkok. In the United States,
The New York Times
carried a 100-word piece from the Associated Press one day earlier, on June 20. In Hong Kong, Britain’s last Asian colony, the
South China Morning Post
also mentioned the change from Burma to Myanmar on June 20. Tellingly, it buried the item at the end of a story on political talks between regime officials and student leaders: “Meanwhile, the country officially changed its name in English yesterday.”
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With the passage of time, however, this early indifference became atypical as varying degrees of opposition took root.

One challenge was technical. Containing only two linguists among more than 20 members and convening for no more than a few weeks, the Commission of Inquiry into the True Naming of Myanmar was widely held to have done a poor job. On the headline issue of country name, for example, several criticisms surfaced. One was that Myanmah would be a better English rendition than Myanmar, as it would more successfully generate the soft tonal ending found in the indigenous language.
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Another was that Myanma was preferable, and that the “r” added to produce a final long “a” sound was ineffectual outside southern British English. In the wake of the changes, and indeed for some years thereafter, academic articles from a wide range of disciplines and on an eclectic mix of topics devoted lengthy footnotes to technical flaws in the new transliterations.

Ultimately, however, the greater challenge was political. At base, this focused on naming rights for a composite country that in 1948 gained independence as a functioning democracy with explicit protections for at least some minority groups, but in 1989 was subject to martial law. Many noted that when formed by military leaders on September 18, 1988, precisely nine months prior to release of the name changes, the State Law and Order Restoration Council had pledged to be no more than temporary. The
tatmadaw
, or defense service, Chairman General Saw Maung declared, had “no desire to hold on to state power for a prolonged period.”
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Rather, the junta intended to stabilize the polity and then sponsor a transition to fully elected government. Its first decree, issued as Declaration No. 1/88 on its initial day in control, thus set out four objectives: first, maintain law and order; second, provide secure and smooth transportation; third, ease the material needs of the people; and fourth, once all the other measures were complete, oversee multiparty democratic general elections. On September 21, it followed up by promulgating Law No. 1/88 to set the stage for nationwide polls. On September 27, it issued Law No. 4/88 to permit political parties to register. In this transitional setting leading to a planned election, many felt SLORC had no mandate to change English names across the country.

This critique was reinforced by evidence of widespread repression undertaken by SLORC both before and after its renaming exercise. Declaration No. 2/88, also issued on its first day, placed major constraints on civil liberties, declaring that “Congregating, walking, marching in procession, chanting slogans, delivering speeches, agitating and creating disturbances on the streets by a group of more than five people is banned regardless of whether the act is with the intention of creating disturbances or committing a crime or not.”
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Notification No. 8/88, issued on October 10, 1988, imposed strict limits on political parties, notably restricting their ability to address issues relating to the
tatmadaw.
Martial Law Order Nos. 1/89 and 2/89, promulgated on July 17–18, 1989, authorized the Yangon and the Central and Northwest Military Commands to conduct summary trials and executions. Within three months, 100 people had been sentenced to death.
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On July 20, Aung San Suu Kyi and other top opposition figures were detained under house arrest.

Objections deepened still further when SLORC eventually allowed a reasonably free and fair general election to take place on May 27, 1990, but then tightened its stranglehold on power when the opposition won in a landslide. In a stunning result, the National League for Democracy took some 60 percent of the national vote, 80 percent of the parliamentary seats, and 90 percent of the seats for which it stood candidates. Even military towns voted NLD in large numbers. By contrast, the National Unity Party and its allies, widely seen as close to the generals, won little more than 20 percent of the vote and 2 percent of the seats.
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Faced with this unexpected outcome from a poll in which more than 200 political parties initially surfaced to compete for votes, the junta again exhibited its repressive instincts. Rather than transfer power to the NLD and deliver on the undertaking given in 1988, or even set up the constitutional convention to which military leaders pointed toward the end of a campaign evidently not going to plan, SLORC proceeded as if little had changed.
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In Declaration No. 1/90, issued on July 27 by Secretary-1 and Military Intelligence chief General Khin Nyunt, it insisted that it was “not an organization that observes any constitution.” Rather, it was common knowledge that SLORC was “governing the nation as a military government and that it is a government that has been accepted as such by the United Nations and the respective nations of the world.”
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The junta amplified this response by reasserting harsh control, notably through harassment, imprisonment and sometimes torture of opposition leaders, many of whom had won seats in the general election.

In this context, a set of name changes always viewed with skepticism around the globe came to symbolize the brutal rule of a military machine that brazenly ignored the will of the people and persisted for years thereafter in centralizing power within a tight elite. Inside the country, the NLD long argued that any changes must be endorsed by an elected legislature, specifically the parliament chosen by the people in May 1990, and many other opposition figures supported this position. Leaders of minority ethnic nationalities also questioned the imposition of fresh English transliterations derived from the language of the dominant ethnic group, and mainly resolved to stick with colonial usage for both their territories and the country as a whole.
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Outside, the UN acting in accordance with practice and precedent at once accepted the switch from Burma to Myanmar. Most states in international society also fell into line. However, a small number continued to hold firm to the old practice. Chief among them remains the US, which expresses solidarity with opposition to military rule by refusing to use the revised terminology.
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Two and a half decades on from the late 1980s, when a broad-based democracy movement was crushed, a military-backed single-party state was replaced by a formal junta, a landslide electoral victory was blithely ignored, a broad swath of civil rights was trampled and, at the same time, a set of changes was made to place-names throughout the country, the term Burma thus continues to represent, for many, more than just customary usage for the largest country in peninsular Southeast Asia. It also signals thoroughgoing opposition to the military machine that introduced the name Myanmar, and fierce commitment not only to the democratic cause of the opposition movement, but also to the identity claims of minority ethnic nationalities likewise preferring, on the whole, to speak of Burma. Clearly there is some irony in this, for the Burma erased from the map by dictatorial fiat in June 1989 was in no sense democratic and to no satisfactory degree multicultural, and had not been so for decades. Rather, throughout the period since the 1962 coup it had been a highly centralized authoritarian state exhibiting scant regard for minority nationalities, many of which it had long fought in alternately hot and cold civil wars.

In these circumstances, what gives the term Burma a democratic spin and at the same time hints at real ethnic diversity is its association with a series of democratic thrusts and inter-communal accords scattered across many decades of history. On the democratic side, the link is above all with the late 1980s conflict between a genuinely mass movement bent on thoroughgoing political reform and prepared to take to the streets to argue, fight and not infrequently die for it, and an entrenched dictatorship determined to cling to power by whatever means necessary. Additional ties bind in those who struggled in the long 1950s to turn the democracy created on British withdrawal in 1948 into a workable system of government, and movements launched from the 1920s to the 1940s to campaign openly for a sovereign and democratic Burma. On the side of ethnic diversity, the association is chiefly with a legendary inter-ethnic agreement struck at the Shan town of Panglong in 1947, and a series of largely unknown individuals who subsequently struggled to resist a remorseless military machine bent on imposing its will throughout the land.
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Before that, it is with an assortment of princely leaders and peasant militias who fought loyally with the Allies in the Second World War, and believed they would one day be rewarded with meaningful degrees of territorial and cultural autonomy. To some extent it is also with romantic notions of tribal communities untouched by the rigors of modern life and skilled in evading the ever more insistent demands of the nation state.
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When, in the late 1980s, the authoritarian strand in Burmese politics opted for Myanmar and other name changes as correct English terms, contending strands in the democracy movement and minority nationalities chose to hold fast and defiantly to the traditional nomenclature. For many, then, Myanmar and Burma most fully capture the broad national forces that for years have set the main parameters of political discourse and action across the country.
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