Outside In | Myanmar’s problems go far deeper than the Rohingya crisis

In Harvard last week, hundreds gathered for the 2017 Ig Nobel Awards, celebrating research on why old men have big ears, whether cats are solid or liquid, and whether gamblers take bigger risks in the casino after they have hugged a crocodile.

If developments in Myanmar were not so horribly unfunny, Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi would have been a prime candidate for “Ignobility”.

From the high hopes generated when the military ceded parliamentary power in 2011, and when she received her Peace Prize in 2012 (she in fact received the award in 1991, but was under house arrest at the time), she has fallen far. A Financial Times editorial reached its own harsh and perhaps premature view after her tepid address last week: “Her chance has come and gone and she has failed the test.”

Whether this is her own fault, falling short of the “Mandela” expectations of her, or the product of falsely inflated expectations in a nightmarishly complex country, only time will tell. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands in Myanmar continue to suffer, and the potential of one of Asia’s largest and best resource-endowed economies continues to be untapped.

In the present fevered mood, the temptation is to see the Myanmar problem as a Rohingyan problem. And of course no one can credibly make light of the appalling plight of the 400,000 or so Muslims who have been forced to flee their homes in the impoverished state of Rakhine into equally-impoverished Bangladesh.

But the “Myanmar problem” is much more than this. First, despite the Buddhist majority, the country is thought to be home to around 100 different ethnic communities, 17 of them with their own ethnically-based armies. Kachin and Shan populations along the border with China’s Yunnan have been in a state of civil war with the country’s 400,000-strong army, called the Tatmadaw, virtually since General Ne Win brought the military to power in a coup in 1962.

Second, there is the unique challenge of emerging from five decades of military rule. Zaltan Barany at the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies identifies five factors that “render the Burmese version of military authoritarianism unique”: sheer longevity which led to exceptionally deep penetration of society, culture and religious life; military control of the economy, which was incompetent, corrupt and long-standing; third, the wide range of security threats from both the ethnic minorities inside, and from untrusted powers outside; fourth, the cumulative isolation, especially trapped between two behemoths – China and India; and finally, the chronic weakness of opposition and democratic forces, who were systematically traumatised by harsh military control.