11 Counterpoints // STRATFOR: Myanmar Confronts Its Geography

အတီးေဒးဗစ္တာကေပၚေရ... ကရင့္အမ်ိဴ းသားေတာ္လွန္ေရးမွာ ေရွ ့မွီေနာက္မွီျပီး ျပည္တြင္းျပည္ပ ႏုိင္ငံတကာကုိပါထုိးေဖာက္ႏုိင္သလုိ ေရြ ့လ်ားေနတဲ့ ဗမာႏုိင္ငံေရး ေရစီးေႀကာင္းကုိ မ်က္ေျခမျပတ္ပဲ အေျခအေနမွန္ကုိ အျမဲတမ္း အကဲျဖတ္ႏုိ္င္ကာ ကရင့္ေတာ္လွန္ေရး ႏွင့္ တုိင္းရင္းသားတုိ ့ရဲ့ေတာ္လွန္ေရးကုိ ထိပါးတုိက္ခုိက္လာေသာ အဂၤလိပ္လုိေရးသားထားေသာ ေဆာင္းပါးမ်ားကုိလည္း ျပန္လည္ေျခပတ္ျပီး အျမဲတမ္းေထာက္ျပေဆြးေႏြးသြားတာကုိ ေတြ ့ေနရ၍ က်ေနာ္တုိ ့အရမ္းဂုဏ္ယူေလးစားမိပါသည္။ အတီးလုိ ကရင္အမ်ိဴ းသားေခါင္းေဆာင္တဦး ရွိတာ အင္မတာမွပဲ ဂုဏ္ယူစရာေကာင္းပါသည္။

သုိ ့ေသာ္... သုိ ့ေသာ္.. အတီးေပးတဲ့ အဆုိျပဳခ်က္ေတြ မွတ္ခ်က္ေတြက သူတုိ ့အတြက္ အရမ္းျမင့္ေနတယ္။ ၁၅ ႀကိမ္ေျမာက္ ကြန္ကရက္မွာ တက္တဲ့လာတဲ့ အမ်ားစုက နားမလည္ႏုိင္ဘူး။ သူတုိ ့လုိက္လုိ ့မမွီဘူး၊ အဂၤလိပ္လုိေရးတဲ့ ဒီေအာက္က ေဆြးေႏြးခ်က္ေတြဆုိပုိေတာင္ဆုိးသြားျပီး ႏြားကုိပလာတာေကြ်းသလုိျဖစ္သြားမယ္။
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Counterpoints Written by Saw David Tharckabaw

The following provides counterpoint perspectives to STRATFOR’s characterization of “Myanmar Confronts its Geography” (last under). STRATFOR’s analysis is in quotations, while counter-point is in italics.

Comment. Eleven quotations have been extracted from STRATFOR’s analysis to illustrate deficiencies in both facts and analysis, as well as lend missing perspective.

1. “After decades of civil war between Myanmar's central government and ethnic minority insurgent groups, the government is moving forward on a nationwide cease-fire, sweetened by political and business concessions to ethnic minorities. Naypyidaw hopes this unprecedented push at nation-building will bring it closer to its core geopolitical imperative of national integration.”

Counterpoint. This portrays an almost altruistic image of the Myanmar Government. This is as yet unmerited. The government dominated by urban Burman elites who came to power on the backs of ethnic minorities’ and their stolen ancestral lands, is intent on keeping ethnics marginalized under Burman rule. This is not about nation building that accommodates multi-ethnic society, but is instead about securing Burman superiority and dominance.

2. “…insurgencies that have plagued Myanmar for more than 60 years.”

Counterpoint. From the ethnic viewpoint, Burmans and Burman-dominated repressive governments have plagued ethnic minorities who were (1) the first inhabitants of Burma by well over 1000 years before Burman invaders and (2) most of whom have been in the pro-democracy camp for decades. Burmans' scorched earth campaign is more fitting for ethnic villagers being “plagued”. Here there is an issue of legitimacy.

3. “Naypyidaw can unify the country only by accommodating or conquering its borderlands. For now, it is moving toward accommodation through peace deals with ethnic insurgents, but the inherent instability of its border areas will limit this method's effectiveness.”

Counterpoint. This passage misleads in several respects. It subtly implies Burmans-in-power as legitimate. This is hotly contested. The simple assertion of either accommodation or conquer of ethnic insurgents is also misleading. The issue here is rather one of a central government, whose generals are still attempting to dominate ethnics, to act legitimately according to ethical norms and human rights standards. Focusing blame on “recalcitrant ethnics” misses the point as to what ails Burma ever since aggressive foreign Burmans invaded ethnic lands long ago.

4. “But the highlands around the Irrawaddy River Valley hedge in lowland powers, threatening them with invasion from above.”

Counterpoint. This is illogical if one knows historical and current facts. Ethnics seek autonomy and prefer to be left alone on ancestral lands. They have no interest in invasion of lowlands for pragmatic reasons. Their armed forces are territorial defense forces oriented on protection of ancestral lands in their possession for almost three millennia in some cases. The Burmese Army is an attack tool for internal control of the people of Burma. It is offensive in intent and action. The great failing of ethnics, in general, is that they have not banded together to take the fight to the Burmese. This is because their interests are parochially protective of homelands. Their tactics are mostly that of ambush and protective land mines. The concept of maneuver warfare is largely foreign to them, as most actions are protective in nature at battalion level and below.

5. “The dry zone is the heartland of the nation's ethnic majority Bamar, who make up 68 percent of the country's population of approximately 60 million and have controlled the government and military for most of Myanmar's post-independence history.”

Counterpoint. The 68% figure is a Burman figure that is unconfirmed. It stems from the British census in the 1930s when ethnics who were Buddhists were counted as Burmans. Burman elites in power continue to beg this issue in order to promote the notion of being the majority. Intentions to conduct a new census are highly politicized today, because of concern about continued Burman manipulation of the numbers.

6. “Today, the highlands afford cover for a number of ethnic insurgent groups supported by smuggling operations and foreign backing.”

Counterpoint. This short shift characterization uses innuendo to cast highland or hinterland ethnics in a generally negative light. It is not that simple. Defendable highlands have allowed pro-democracy freedom fighters, as well as Narco-traffickers to survive for decades against Burmese generals’ scorched earth campaign that has left over 3700 farming villages destroyed or abandoned in South Eastern Burma alone. Foreign support ranges from human rights support to pro-democracy support to buffer zone establishment to leveraging of surrogates. Ethnics can certainly be enticed by others if Burman elites continue to try to dominate and Burmanize them. This speaks more about Burmans than it does about ethnics, though. And not much at all about geography per se. Racism is the primary issue today in Burma under the Burman imperative of “One Nation, One Ethnicity, One Religion”. This is about Human-scape, not Landscape.

7. “Myanmar's modern history of rule by a military junta emerged from its innate highland-lowland dynamic and the circumstances of its independence.”

Counterpoint. This essentially excuses Burman totalitarianism following WWII. The Burman puppet government under the Japanese used its office to wage genocide against ethnic minorities who sided with US and UK. “The circumstances of its independence” were that ethnics were promised autonomy, but the Burman Independence architect, General Aung San, who wanted to work with ethnics, was assassinated by those who opposed this accommodation. Burmans-in-power then reneged on the 1947 Panlong Agreement guaranteeing autonomy and right to secession by certain ethnics.

Burmans then not surprisingly found themselves in February 1949 effectively surrounded in Rangoon under a 112-day siege by angered Karen forces. In some circles this became known as the “Seven Mile Government”, as the Karen finally halted or stalled within twelve kilometers of Rangoon. The dynamic today is not a “Highland vs Lowland” one, as much as it is a Liberty/Autonomy vs Oppression dynamic. STRATFOR erases history here by fixating on geography. The “insurgents in the hills” label misses the point. It incorrectly places emphasis on geography as causal. This is fundamentally wrong. Burmans elude due blame in STRATFOR’s analysis.

8. “Myanmar became a multi-ethnic parliamentary democracy, with broad representation given to its minorities. The country was a paragon of the newly independent states,”

Counterpoint. This is Burmese propaganda. “….the minority peoples were, by and large, willing to join Burma provided there was a federal system with guaranteed internal autonomy in their respective areas…” “U Nu and his ultra right-wing politicians sent their hit men and gunned down (General) Aung San and almost the entire pre-independence cabinet.” (Bertil Lintner, Burma In Revolt, pp 83- 84).

Any chance of a “multi-ethnic parliamentary democracy” died before independence was granted with this loss of General Aung San. He was the only one willing to be fully inclusive of ethnics in government and the future of an independent Burma. Burma was hardly a “paragon” of anything promising and unraveled after this point as Burman exclusionists began to marginalize and oppress ethnics in a systematic manner.

9. “The central government became so hedged in by insurgencies that it became known as the "Rangoon government," after the then-capital city of Rangoon (now known as Yangon) to which federal authority was confined. Over the following decade of political infighting, the military consolidated into the most effective institution in the nation.”

Counterpoint. As mentioned above, the “Seven Mile Government” of 1949 was Burmans’ “Almost Alamo” after their betrayal of promises of ethnic autonomy and democracy. Burmese generals used this close call as a rallying cry to become the protectors of the nation. This justified waging a decades-long campaign of oppression against ethnics. This mission as “national saviors” was further enabled by the generals getting their start as businessmen through the Defense Services Institute in 1951. DSI was a non-profit entity that could conduct business.

“The military leaders, happy and proud of their achievements, learned something wonderful about their business experience. They discovered that a business enterprise without government taxes could yield a great fortune. And then the DSI expanded rapidly.” (U Thuang, Army’s Accumulation of Economic Power in Burma, 1985) What resulted was “a financially strong army over which the civilian government had virtually no control.” In March 1957….(General) Ne Win was in undisputed control of the military and the transformation of the army from being a defender of the government to an autonomous force with its own agenda had been completed.” (Burma In Revolt, p. 176)

10. “The military was left with one option: to trade in its assertive role against the insurgencies and return to the tactics of the 1940s and 1950s. In 2010, the military junta handed over power to a civilian government, albeit one with a strong role for the military.”

Counter-point. This passage is confusing. “The tactics of the 1940s and 1950s” were ones of genocide and rising counter-insurgency, respectively. The assertion that the junta “handed over power to a civilian government” is false. The dictator, General Than Shwe, reflagged and re-clothed obedient generals as civilian leaders and then stepped down from government, but not out of control of these generals - one as President and one as Commanding General of Burmese Armed Forces. This maneuver hardly merits the label of “military handing over power to civilian government”.

Refer to http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/07/09/the_militarys_still_in_charge

“Thein Sein has a long and controversial resume. The ICG's abridged biography presents a few choice bits of his recent political career but glosses over many imperfections. Thein Sein is a retired lieutenant general and served as the last prime minister (2007-2011) of the military regime that ruled the country consecutively beginning in 1962. He served previously as regional commander of the Golden Triangle Region in the Shan State (1997-2001), an area where the military has been widely accused of human rights abuses in its fight against ethnic Shan rebels.”

Refer to http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/SEA-01-220413.html

11. “Although Naypyidaw now is in the hands of a civilian government, the constraints of geopolitics and the ever-present need to assert centralized authority remain.”

Counter-point. Naypyidaw is in the hands of Burmese generals and their counterpart business cronies. President Thein Sein is not funded by these, but rather largely by international sources. This effectively means he is not linked to real Burmese power, but is dependent on foreigners. “The need to assert centralized authority” is an intention consistent with Burman self-preservation. Strong central authority that keeps generals immune from prosecution, assures them of dominance in government and avoids their prosecution for crimes against humanity for decades, is not central authority of much merit. Its instincts to preserve itself without balance of power inclusive of ethnics, assure future conflict.
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မူရင္းေဆာင္းပါး ေအာက္ပါအတုိင္းျဖစ္သည္။

Myanmar Confronts Its Geography

February 24, 2014 | 1130 GMT

Summary
Editor's Note:The following is the first installment of a four-part series on Myamar's struggle to establish national unity.

After decades of civil war between Myanmar's central government and ethnic minority insurgent groups, the government is moving forward on a nationwide cease-fire, sweetened by political and business concessions to ethnic minorities. Naypyidaw hopes this unprecedented push at nation-building will bring it closer to its core geopolitical imperative of national integration. However, the process is a delicate one. Modern Myanmar is defined by geography fractured along ethnic and religious lines, with an artificial and porous border threading through remote highlands separated from a lowland consolidated under Naypyidaw's rule. Myanmar has never been a nation-state in the true sense.

Certain regional powers -- namely China, India and Thailand -- have tried to exploit this division, contributing to the insurgencies that have plagued Myanmar for more than 60 years. A weak and threatened state apparatus and fear of foreign exploitation have shaped modern Myanmar's two principal geopolitical characteristics -- a strong military in the seat of government and a policy of international isolation. Naypyidaw can unify the country only by accommodating or conquering its borderlands. For now, it is moving toward accommodation through peace deals with ethnic insurgents, but the inherent instability of its border areas will limit this method's effectiveness.

Analysis
The key to controlling Myanmar is controlling the plains around the Irrawaddy River, which provide ample farmland to support a population as well as access to lucrative trade routes in the Indian Ocean. But the highlands around the Irrawaddy River Valley hedge in lowland powers, threatening them with invasion from above. The mountains are a natural buffer between the Irrawaddy lowland civilization and neighboring valley civilizations in India, China and Thailand. These neighbors, China in particular, also seek to use the highlands as a buffer and compete with the Irrawaddy Valley for influence over the area. For this reason, lowland powers must either absorb or dominate their highland frontier.

The country's lowlands comprise Myanmar's core, centered on the Irrawaddy River Valley. The river and its valley encompass more than half of the country's territory, with the Irrawaddy flowing south from the mountains of Myanmar's Kachin state through the central dry zone and then across the fertile Irrawaddy Delta to empty into the Andaman Sea. The lowlands are essential to the nation and are home to most of Myanmar's commercial activity, the majority of its population and its three main cities: Yangon, Mandalay and Naypyidaw. Most exports travel out of Yangon by sea, and the Irrawaddy Delta and dry zone produce most of Myanmar's agricultural output. The dry zone is the heartland of the nation's ethnic majority Bamar, who make up 68 percent of the country's population of approximately 60 million and have controlled the government and military for most of Myanmar's post-independence history.

The highlands surround the Irrawaddy Valley on three sides. To the west, the Arakan Mountains run from India's Manipur state into Myanmar and include the lesser Naga hills, Chin hills and Patkai range. To the north, along the Sino-Myanmar border, the mountains split into two regions. The 3,000-meter (9,800-foot) Hengduan Mountains -- the source of the Salween, Irrawaddy and Mekong rivers -- comprise the northern portion of the border. Farther south these mountains slope down into a plateau called the Shan hills. From there, the mountains descend south along the Thai-Myanmar border, becoming the Karen hills and then the Tenasserim hills before ending as the Central range of the Malay Peninsula.

This horseshoe of mountains around the Irrawaddy core is essential to securing any lowland power center. The highland region is also difficult, and at times impossible, to centrally govern. Often, two villages separated by a valley will speak mutually unintelligible dialects. Rugged terrain makes it hard for lowland states to project force into the region or for a single dominant power to arise among the ethnic groups that inhabit the region. Instead, highlanders rely on small power bases, formed along ethnic lines. Worse still for lowland powers, the highland areas are only one part of a much larger complex of mountains that extends north into China, west into India and east into Thailand, Laos and Vietnam. This not only allows highland insurgents to flee easily into neighboring territory, it also leaves Myanmar open to foreign incursions by groups hardy enough to brave the terrain. The Bamar themselves originally invaded the Irrawaddy Valley from the highlands, sweeping down on horseback in the 9th century from the Tibetan Plateau.

The rugged terrain of the upland border areas has produced a number of ethnic minority groups that have not been absorbed into the state. They make up more than 30 percent of Myanmar's population and are divided between five main highland ethnicities (Karen, Shan, Karenni, Chin and Kachin) and a number of smaller groups, including the Wa and Pa-Oh. The highland's rough terrain historically has shielded highland power centers from lowland domination and prevented the lowland from absorbing them into the population. Today, the highlands afford cover for a number of ethnic insurgent groups supported by smuggling operations and foreign backing.

Loose Borders, Frayed Edges

The territory of Myanmar has only been unified under a single power during three periods of its history: the Pagan Empire (849-1297), the Taungoo Dynasty (1486-1752) and the Konbaung Dynasty (1752-1885). None of these unifications resembled the modern conception of a state. Instead, the highland areas were governed lightly and operated more as buffer zones -- owing allegiance to the lowland Irrawaddy and to other powers as well. These Irrawaddy states were also inherently unstable, tending toward chaos and eventual fragmentation under pressure from the uplands. Pagan dissolved through Mongol and Shan invasions, Taungoo because of pressure from India's upland areas in Manipur and Thailand's Chiang Mai, and Konbaung because of the British invasion from the western uplands simultaneous with a sea assault. Myanmar's geopolitics have always made it difficult to govern the highlands, which are key to the governance of the lowlands.

British rule left Myanmar with a legacy of essentially artificial borders. The British formalized the borders of what had been until then a loosely organized territory. The British colonial government also exacerbated the already deep ethnic divisions in the country by centralizing governance into a single source of power, ending the loose, at-will relations of the pre-British period. British administrations also relied on a "divide and rule" system that favored ethnic minority groups, which it called the "martial races" and used as the backbone of the British military in Myanmar to balance against the majority Bamar.

Toward Military Rule

Myanmar's modern history of rule by a military junta emerged from its innate highland-lowland dynamic and the circumstances of its independence. Myanmar (known as Burma at the time) became an independent state in 1947. (The military government changed the country's name to Myanmar in 1989 to reflect a more inclusive national identity -- while Burma and Myanmar have the same etymology, Burma sounds more like "Bamar," the dominant ethnicity.) During World War II, the country was divided along geopolitical lines. The Bamar under Gen. Aung San (father of democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi) invited the Japanese into the country as liberators while the minority groups fought a vicious guerrilla war against the Japanese in the hinterlands with British support.

Following the defeat of the Japanese and long negotiations for independence, Myanmar became a multi-ethnic parliamentary democracy, with broad representation given to its minorities. The country was a paragon of the newly independent states, with Myanmar diplomat U Thant serving as secretary-general of the United Nations and Sao Shwe Thaik, an ethnic minority Shan, as Myanmar's first president. But the divided parliamentary government and weak military could not keep the nation from fragmenting. The ethnic Bamar in control of the Irrawaddy were inherently divided. Three factions defected from the government and became insurgents in the Irrawaddy lowlands: the White Flag communists, Red Flag communists and military defectors known as the Revolutionary Burma Army. Splits and infighting continued through the 1950s. Simultaneously, the ethnic Karen, under the leadership of the militant Karen National Union, overran the city of Mandalay and laid siege to Insein township outside of Yangon.

The central government became so hedged in by insurgencies that it became known as the "Rangoon government," after the then-capital city of Rangoon (now known as Yangon) to which federal authority was confined. Over the following decade of political infighting, the military consolidated into the most effective institution in the nation. In 1958, Prime Minister U Nu invited armed forces chief of staff Gen. Ne Win to become acting prime minister and, after a brief return to civilian rule, Ne Win dissolved the parliament in 1962.

Under military rule, Myanmar was able to begin managing its internal conflicts. Ne Win put in place a highly centralized government with strong state planning and a major role for the military. Myanmar essentially became a siege state, diverting resources to support its military apparatus and shutting itself off from the international community in an attempt to avoid foreign meddling. Moreover, it tried to avoid taking sides in the Cold War by joining the Non-Aligned Movement. These tactics led to the gradual push of insurgencies to border areas and out of the Irrawaddy River Valley. These groups enjoyed the Cold War backing of regional powers -- the Chin and Rakhine were supported by India, the Wa, Kachin and Shan by China, and the Karen and Karenni by Thailand. But junta rule also justified military abuse of power, corruption and its seizure of private and state resources.

By the mid-1980s, Myanmar's economy had stagnated because of isolation and mismanagement. Extreme currency reforms in 1987, meant to revive the economy, instead caused huge losses for the population and led to massive pro-democracy protests in August 1988, known as the 8888 uprising, in which Aung San Suu Kyi became prominent. The military attempted to open up economically in the 1990s while retaining its strong hold on the Irrawaddy, but the pressure of Western sanctions made this impossible, leading to continued economic problems. The military was left with one option: to trade in its assertive role against the insurgencies and return to the tactics of the 1940s and 1950s. In 2010, the military junta handed over power to a civilian government, albeit one with a strong role for the military.

Myanmar's core geopolitical divide remains the primary concern of any power seeking to govern the modern nation. Although Naypyidaw now is in the hands of a civilian government, the constraints of geopolitics and the ever-present need to assert centralized authority remain.