Sebastian Strangio's Blog, page 6

Spinning the myth of a 16th-century king as elections loom in Cambodia

The former capital of the 16th century Cambodian King Sdech Kan is a sleepy place, filled with birdsong and that particular air of shabby mysticism that seems to surround pagodas in rural parts of Cambodia. Nothing much is left of the old city, known as Srolop Prey Nokor, except checkerboards of parched rice paddies and the remains of the broad moat and earthworks that once surrounded the capital. Inside, the only real attraction is a small pagoda where a statue of Sdech Kan rises in front of a newly built temple compound enclosing two crumbling pre-Angkorian ruins.

The statue shows the king as an archer mounted on a fierce-looking stallion — a typical warrior pose. The most significant thing is that the king’s face bears a deliberate resemblance to a successor whose “reign” recently entered its 32nd year: Prime Minister Hun Sen.

Sdech Kan, who only ruled Cambodia for a short period after the decline of the Angkorian empire, was until recently a mostly forgotten figure. According to legend, he came from a humble background and served in the court of King Srey Sukonthor Bat. In 1512, he overthrew the king, after the latter sought to have him killed based on a premonition that the young man would topple him from power. Kan went on to establish a reign of peace and prosperity, but was ousted in 1525 by the deposed monarch’s brother.

Despite the lack of documentary evidence of Kan’s reign, Hun Sen has come to closely identify with him. He has sponsored research into Kan’s capital, and funded a 2006 book on Kan for which he also wrote the preface. Statues of Sdech Kan, bearing Hun Sen’s face, have appeared around the country, commissioned by tycoons and senior officials. The Sdech Kan story is now being made into a film. With a $1 million budget, Preah Sdech Kan, currently in production, will be the most expensive film in Cambodian history.

Identifying with greatness

Why the obsession with such an obscure historical figure? In a 2013 article, Swedish academic Astrid Noren-Nilsson wrote that Hun Sen has used the story to bolster the legitimacy of his long and controversial rule. On one level Sdech Kan’s overthrow of a king provides a precedent for Hun Sen’s political marginalization of the Cambodian monarchy and its replacement with his own peaceful “reign.” For Hun Sen, who has described Kan as a “brilliant hero,” the story is also one of social mobility and the triumph of men of moral virtue — both of which offer insights into how the prime minister wishes to be seen.

Despite presiding over the longest stretch of peace in modern times, Hun Sen has always struggled for legitimacy. He was born into a peasant family in 1952, instead of coming from Cambodia’s traditional royal and political elites. To make matters worse, his government was installed in power in 1979 by the hated Vietnamese, an association that still clings to him and has hardly been dispelled by his intolerant, authoritarian style of rule. The longer he is in power, the deeper is Hun Sen’s apparent need to justify his rule — and he has done this in part by trying to connect his “peasant king” reign to that of a previous non-royal ruler.

The Sdech Kan myth has been hotly contested by Hun Sen’s rivals. Opposition leader Sam Rainsy has described Kan not as a hero, but as a usurper, and in a recent post on his Facebook page, extolled a military commander who helped overthrow Kan and restore the “legitimate heir” to the throne — a subtle thrust at Hun Sen’s pretensions.

This debate offers an interesting illustration of the obscure symbolic undercurrents that run beneath the surface of Cambodian politics. It also demonstrates the limits of such historical allegories. In 2013, the ruling Cambodian People’s Party nearly lost an election because the government failed to address problems like corruption, land grabs, and deforestation. There is also little evidence that Sdech Kan has captivated Cambodians. On a recent visit to his former capital in Tboung Khmum province, I found it empty except for some young monks and a couple of women grinding out sugar cane juice beneath the shade of the chhuteal trees. Few knew much about Sdech Kan, except that he was once king.

Cambodia’s next election in 2018 will no doubt be a characteristically solipsistic affair, dominated by personality over policy. But politicians will need to do more than spin myths for a discontented populace. They may remain fixated on the past, but increasing numbers of Cambodian voters will be looking to the future.

[Published by Nikkei Asian Review, February 18, 2016]

Communist Hard-Liners Ascendant in Vietnam, Despite TPP Membership

PHNOM PENH—Conservative forces have strengthened their grip in Vietnam after the ruling Communist Party, late last month, elected its incumbent general-secretary to a second five-year term in the country’s top political office. Analysts say the reappointment of Nguyen Phu Trong, 71, will put a brake on political and economic reforms, but it is unlikely to significantly alter the balance of the country’s crucial relationships with China and the United States.

The decision also spelled an end to the ambitions of the reformist Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung, who mounted a short-lived challenge for the Community Party’s top post before its 12th National Congress last week. Trong is said to have used his influence in the Politburo, Vietnam’s top decision-making body, to quash Dung’s bid for the leadership. The prime minister pulled out of the contest on Jan. 25, after failing to win sufficient support among the 1,510 party delegates.

Agreement on leadership changes is traditionally reached well in advance of the Communist Party’s showcase convention, which is held every five years. Trong will head the 19-member Politburo that will govern Vietnam until 2021, while Dung will remain in office until a new government takes over later this year.

In many ways, Trong and Dung represent the two poles of Vietnam’s system of so-called market-oriented socialism. Trong belongs to the party’s ideological old guard, drilled in Marxist-Leninist economic theory; Dung is pragmatic and reform-minded—a flamboyant figure by prevailing standards.

“He broke the mold,” says Carlyle Thayer, a professor at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra, of Dung. “He’s not part of the gray collective. He’s a vibrant personality—for good or bad.”

During his 10 years in office, Dung has spearheaded market reforms that have led to the rapid expansion of Vietnam’s economy and strengthened ties with the U.S., the country’s former wartime enemy. Both of these have created friction with party conservatives, who have criticized the speed of the reforms and the rising cronyism and corruption they say have marked Dung’s time in power.

With the 66-year-old’s departure, the pace of reforms is likely to slow. Though the Congress expanded the Politburo from 16 to 19 members to accommodate several young technocrats, including Nguyen Van Binh, the president of the State Bank of Vietnam, the new generation remains in the minority.

The Communist Party “is doing everything it can to shift the economy to less dependency on China.”

Tuong Vu, a political scientist at the University of Oregon, points out that the body now includes five former generals and the heads of several top-level Communist Party organizations, as well as Minister of Public Security Tran Dai Quang—widely tipped to become Vietnam’s next president. “The conservatives dominate the Politburo,” Vu says.

Vu predicts that the new leadership will tighten national security and political controls, while advocating a more prominent role for the large state-owned sector of the economy. Meanwhile, the incoming prime minister, now-Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, whose appointment will be rubber-stamped in a few months’ time, is unlikely to be as assertive as Dung. Thayer describes him as “an understudy trying to feel his way under the shadow of the current general-secretary” and the “cabal” which stymied Dung’s leadership ambitions.

The tension between conservativism and reform could become more pronounced when Vietnam enters the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the major U.S.-led regional trade signed this week in New Zealand by 12 Pacific Rim countries. As a condition of TPP membership, Vietnam must further liberalize its economy, opening key sectors to foreign competition, and make concessions in other areas, including labor rights and intellectual property protection.

Despite those commitments, Vu predicted that Trong and his faction “will resist any concessions” that touch on human rights or democratic reforms. Trong set the tone for his next term clearly at the closing of the Congress on Jan. 28, defending Vietnam’s system of tight one-party rule. “A country without discipline would be chaotic and unstable,” he said. “We need to balance democracy and law and order.”

While Trong and other hard-liners remain suspicious of the U.S. and its advocacy of what the party terms a “peaceful evolution” toward democratic rule in Vietnam, there is a growing consensus within the party that good relations with Washington provide a vital counterweight to China’s powerful influence in the region.

This was symbolized both by Trong’s landmark visit to the White House last July—the first by a Vietnamese Communist Party chief—and also by his embrace of the TPP, which is seen as a means of reducing the country’s massive trade deficit with its northern neighbor. The party “is doing everything it can to shift the economy to less dependency on China,” Thayer says.

Tensions have spiked recently over territorial claims in the South China Sea, where China’s massive construction of man-made islands has pushed countries like Vietnam and the Philippines closer to the United States. On the eve of the National Congress, Vietnam accused China of once again deploying an oil rig in waters close to the Vietnamese coastline, demanding its removal.

Thayer says that under the new leadership, Vietnam’s government would probably be less confrontational toward China than Dung, who gained popularity domestically with his strong anti-Chinese rhetoric. Yet the government would still remain ready to counter any aggressive Chinese moves in the region.

The sentiments of the Vietnamese people could also come into play, as they historically harbor a deep fear and suspicion of China. In May 2014, when China parked another oil rig off Vietnam’s central coast, anti-Chinese riots broke out across Vietnam, with protesters ransacking factories believed to be owned by Chinese businesses. In general, Thayer notes, the change in leadership will shift the “scope and pace of how foreign policy is handled, but not the broad framework.”

Looming behind all this is one question that the recent Congress left unanswered: the issue of Trong’s successor. By appointing him to a second term, even though he had passed the mandatory retirement age of 65, the Communist Party effectively sidestepped the issue, ensuring that backroom intrigue between would-be successors will drag on under the next government.

Vu predicts that the leadership uncertainty will ensure a degree of instability in Vietnamese politics until the issue of the succession is settled. “They’re going to face the same kind of rivalry and competition for that position [as before], because there’s no obvious heir,” he says.

One man whose name won’t be on the list is Dung, soon to be the former prime minister. Once his term ends later this year, his career will be effectively over. Like other former Politburo members, he will enjoy a comfortable state-funded retirement, but will also require special permission to travel abroad.

“There’s no real role for them,” Thayer says of former high-ranking party men. “They can’t be a Jimmy Carter or a Bill Clinton, and go around and give talks. [Dung] will go into political oblivion.”

Published by World Politics Review, February 5, 2016.

Great Expectations: Will Myanmar’s Election Bring Real Change?

On Nov. 8, an estimated 30 million people took part in Myanmar’s first free national election in a quarter-century. From the shores of the Andaman Sea to the Himalayan uplands, many lined up in the pre-dawn gloom before voting stations officially opened at 6 a.m. Vying for citizens’ votes across some 1,171 constituencies were 6,189 candidates from a total of 93 parties. For most voters, however, it came down to two. On one side was the ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), the drab political proxy of the powerful Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s military, which has ruled the country for more than half a century; on the other was the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD), led by the talismanic Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and international symbol of Myanmar’s long struggle for democracy. Two parties: one symbolizing decades of military rule, the other symbolizing change.

In the end, the people’s choice was unambiguous. “I think it’s very important for us to choose a new government—a good government,” said Maung Maung Gyi, a 56-year-old businessman, shortly after casting his vote for the NLD at a Buddhist pagoda in Mandalay, Myanmar’s former royal capital. “The whole world is watching this election.” By evening, euphoric crowds of NLD supporters, draped in the party’s red star-and-peacock insignia, had gathered in the streets to cheer the unofficial election results, which showed massive leads for NLD candidates in most of the country. This was later confirmed by the Union Election Commission, which released official results indicating the NLD had gained an astonishing 390 of the 498 elected seats in the bicameral parliament. Despite its incumbency and massive advantage in resources, the USDP won just 41 seats, with the remainder going to small parties.

Myanmar’s Red Dawn

The magnitude of the USDP’s loss was underlined by the defeat of key party candidates, many of them former high-ranking officers in the military junta that handed power to the semi-civilian government of President Thein Sein in 2011. One was the once-powerful parliamentary speaker Thura Shwe Mann, who was ousted from the USDP leadership in an internal party coup in August. Another was the USDP’s acting chairman U Htay Oo, who quickly conceded his constituency in Hinthada, west of Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city.

Few predicted such a sweeping victory for the NLD. While the party was expected to do well in the seven regions dominated by the ethnic Burman majority, it also dominated in Myanmar’s seven ethnic states, where parties representing ethnic minorities were expected to garner strong support. In a matter of hours the NLD had painted the country red, transforming the make-up of Myanmar’s national and regional parliaments, and giving the party the majority it needs to form a government and select the country’s next president. It was an overwhelming vote for change.

Since the election, the military and its USDP partners have accepted the result and pledged to peacefully transfer power to a new NLD-led government. “We will make sure it will be smooth and stable without having to worry about anything,” Thein Sein said at a gathering of Myanmar’s political parties on Nov. 15. In mid-December, the two parties established an eight-member committee to expedite the transition and address any issues that may arise over the coming months.

From afar, it is tempting to see the NLD’s victory as a fairytale ending to the long struggle between Aung San Suu Kyi, the beautiful daughter of the independence hero Gen. Aung San, and the rotating cast of generals that has ruled the country since 1962. But Myanmar’s red dawn will give way to a long day of uncertainty. After years on the sidelines of politics, the NLD is now tasked with trying to reverse the political pathologies of a half-century of military rule: ethnic conflict, sectarian violence, pervasive corruption and the military’s lingering grip on Myanmar’s politics, economy and society. The latter, in particular, won’t be an easy task: Despite the remarkable opening that Myanmar has undergone over the past five years, unelected generals will continue to wield great power.

The Nov. 8 election was the culmination of a carefully managed reform process that began in 2003, when Myanmar’s generals announced a “seven-step roadmap” to transition the country from dictatorship to “discipline-flourishing democracy.” The roadmap envisioned the drafting of a new constitution, the loosening of state controls and the holding of elections. The ultimate aim was for Myanmar to escape its status as an international pariah and reduce the country’s perceived overreliance on its vast northern neighbor, China, one of the junta’s few international allies.

The roadmap took its most visible steps forward after the much-criticized 2010 election, which the NLD boycotted. Shortly afterward, the government released NLD Chairperson Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest; later, it loosened media controls to facilitate an open discussion of politics that had not taken place in decades. In April 2012, when the NLD participated in by-elections, it won 43 of the 45 seats up for election and Suu Kyi was elected to parliament for the first time, affixing her implicit seal of approval to the reform process. With “The Lady”—as Suu Kyi is referred to in Myanmar—on board, Western governments rolled back economic sanctions. Investment and development aid flooded in. As the roadmap intended, Myanmar quickly shed its status as an international pariah. A country once described in the same breath as Iran and North Korea was now being spoken of in some quarters as a bastion of democracy in Southeast Asia.

The roadmap, however, has placed tight limits on how much power the new NLD government will be able to wield. The primary constraint is the country’s constitution, which was approved in a flawed referendum in 2008 and grants the military a perpetual right “to participate in the national political leadership role of the state.” The charter is filled with safeguards against any outbreak of “undisciplined” democracy. To start with, a provision bars anyone whose spouse or children hold a foreign passport from becoming president, a measure tailor-made to prevent Suu Kyi—whose late husband was a British citizen, as are her two children—from holding the office.

The constitution also reserves a quarter of parliamentary seats for military candidates, and grants the military control over three powerful ministries: Defense, Home Affairs and Border Affairs. The military’s power extends to the commercial sector, including jade and ruby mines, a brewery, banks and transport lines, which are controlled through military holding companies or via influential tycoons with close ties to the army. As a result, security budgets and much of Myanmar’s economy will effectively remain above civilian scrutiny, regardless of which party controls the government. Finally, the junta’s constitutional hold on power is safeguarded by a keystone provision, Article 436, which requires a 75 percent vote in parliament to pass any constitutional amendments, giving the army a de facto veto power over any proposed changes. Myanmar’s existing legal framework makes the country democratic by name, but “disciplined” by nature.

To longtime Myanmar watchers and activists, this dynamic helps explain why the generals and the USDP have so far been relatively gracious in defeat, in contrast to the aftermath of the election in 1990, when the military annulled the NLD’s landslide victory. Mark Farmaner, the director of Burma Campaign UK, said that while the defeat’s massive scale may have shocked some onlookers, it’s nothing that the roadmap didn’t envision. “People keep talking about the elections as a step in a process of transition, but as far as the military is concerned, the transition is now complete,” Farmaner said. “No further steps are required.”

The new government will therefore be a strange and potentially unstable entity: a composite administration comprising a strong NLD and a constitutionally entrenched Tatmadaw—the two poles of the country’s generation-long political struggle between democracy and military dictatorship. The NLD’s victory may have given it an overwhelmingly popular mandate, but under the current system it will have to govern with one hand tied behind its back.

Analysts say the balance of power between the military and the new NLD-nominated president will do much to shape the country’s trajectory over the next five years. The coming weeks and months will be especially crucial. Yan Myo Thein, a Yangon-based political commentator, predicts that the military will work “positively and constructively” with the resurgent NLD, but will continue to guard its prerogatives fiercely. “The possibility that the Tatmadaw will ever allow the constitutional amendments that undermine its special position is still minimal,” he said.

The current legislative term runs until Jan. 30, after which the newly elected legislators will convene to elect the next president. The NLD-controlled lower and upper houses will nominate two candidates, and parliament’s military bloc will nominate a third. Both houses will then vote on the president, with the runners-up becoming vice presidents. Only at this point will the new president assemble his or her Cabinet, which will replace the current administration at the end of March.

The first question is who the NLD will select for the top job. So far Suu Kyi has refused to comment on the subject. Initial speculation centered on Shwe Mann, the USDP’s parliamentary speaker, but he appears to have fallen out of the race after being removed as party leader in August—in part because of his perceived sympathies to Suu Kyi. Other names being touted include U Htin Kyaw, a senior NLD member, and U Win Htein, a longtime member of the party’s central executive committee. Some are even predicting the octogenarian U Tin Oo, a former general who serves as the NLD’s emeritus chairman and remains one of Suu Kyi’s most loyal colleagues. In some ways, the selection for Myanmar’s next president is a moot point: Suu Kyi has repeatedly made it clear that she intends to rule from “above the president” in defiance of the constitution’s proscription on her nomination. In a pre-election interview, she said that the party’s eventual choice “will be told exactly what he can do.” The NLD’s U Win Htein, a close aide to Suu Kyi, has said that the party aims for her to become president “within five years.”

Challenges of Conflict Governance

Whoever is at its head, the new government will inherit some intractable problems. Since gaining independence from Britain in 1948, Myanmar has been in a state of near-constant civil war between the ethnic Burman-dominated military and a raft of ethnic minorities who amount to around a third of the population and live on the country’s mountainous periphery. These ongoing tensions overshadowed the NLD’s euphoric victory on Nov. 8. In Shan state, Kachin state and other outlying regions, hundreds of thousands of members of ethnic minorities were unable to cast ballots after voting was canceled due to conflict or instability. Since then, violence has continued to rage: An estimated 10,000 people have been displaced in fighting between the military and ethnic rebels in central Shan state.

After more than six decades, ethnic conflicts remain the glitch in Myanmar’s national hardware, a structural flaw that, in 2003, the scholar Mary P. Callahan predicted would pose serious problems “not only for the military junta but also for any future regime, democratic or otherwise.” The outgoing government’s success in handling these problems has been limited. On Oct. 15, Thein Sein signed a much-lauded Nationwide Cease-Fire Agreement with eight rebel groups, but conflict persists between the military and a number of nonsignatories, including the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and the Taang National Liberation Army in the northern states of Kachin and Shan, respectively.

Seven other groups didn’t even take part in the cease-fire negotiations. These included Myanmar’s largest ethnic-minority army, the United Wa State Army (UWSA), which controls large swaths of territory along the Chinese and Thai borders, maintains a well-equipped army of at least 20,000 and has long been considered one of the largest drug-producing syndicates in the country. Despite efforts to end violence, much of Myanmar’s periphery remains a patchwork of autonomous areas, rebel enclaves and low-level conflict zones where military abuses are commonplace.

On top of this, an acute humanitarian situation has ravaged Rakhine state, where violence broke out in mid-2012 between Buddhist Rakhines and Muslim Rohingyas, eventually driving 140,000 of the latter into squalid internal displacement camps. Sectarian tensions subsequently spread to the country’s ethnic Burman heartland, where deadly anti-Muslim pogroms erupted in a number of cities in 2013 and 2014. On election day in November, hundreds of thousands of Rohingya were barred from voting on the grounds that they are largely illegal immigrants who must be “returned” to Bangladesh, even though many have lived in Myanmar for generations. At the same time, the Union Election Commission disqualified Rohingya candidates, including some sitting members of parliament, in a process the U.S. State Department called “opaque and discriminatory.”

Myanmar’s sectarian turn has been encouraged by an ultra-nationalist Buddhist group known as the Association for the Protection of Race and Religion, better known by its Burmese acronym Ma Ba Tha. As the Rohingya have been pushed into a stateless limbo in Rakhine state, Ma Ba Tha has been instrumental in the parliament’s recent passage of four pieces of “race and religion” legislation, which ban interfaith marriage and tightly regulate religious conversions, targeting the country’s Muslims. As a result of pressure from Ma Ba Tha, few parties—including the NLD—fielded any Muslim candidates in the election. The new parliament will be the first in Myanmar’s history to have no Muslim members.

Myanmar’s Crony Economy

The new government also faces stiff challenges on the economic front. Myanmar has experienced five years of considerable reforms and strong growth—the Asian Development Bank projects that its economy will grow by 8.3 percent this fiscal year. Still, the country still lacks many of the fundamental characteristics of a modern economy: Infrastructure remains in a moribund state; Internet access is unreliable; and electricity is among the most expensive in the region. In the last issue of the World Bank’s Doing Business Report, Myanmar ranked 167nd out of the 189 countries surveyed.

Most of the recent growth, meanwhile, has been concentrated in urban areas like Yangon, the country’s largest commercial center, which has quickly metamorphosed into an outpost of Asian shopping-mall capitalism. “The transformation of those places, Yangon in particular, is exceptional,” says Sean Turnell, an expert on Myanmar’s economy at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. “But 10 minutes out of the city, just across the river, and you’re back into deepest poverty.”

Of course, it was never going to be easy to address the massive fiscal distortions created by the Tatmadaw, an institutional behemoth that for decades has diverted valuable budget resources from education, health and other social services. Myanmar’s military legacy has overshadowed the reforms to date, with many of the country’s most lucrative assets remaining in a shadow economy controlled by an elevated caste of “cronies” with close ties to the military. In the run-up to the 2010 election, these tycoons were the prime beneficiaries of the largest sell-off of state assets in Myanmar’s history. The military’s privatization drive, which saw the sell-off of factories, port facilities, colonial-era government buildings and a stake in the national airline, formed an economic parallel to the junta’s roadmap: It ensured that the commanding heights, like the political system, would remain in safe hands.

Today, this military-crony nexus continues to control the majority of Myanmar’s most productive and valuable assets. Military elites have also profited greatly from the unstable conditions in Myanmar’s borderlands, where many of the country’s most valuable natural resources are located. Starting in the late 1980s, the central government signed cease-fire agreements with a number of major armed ethnic-minority groups, a strategy aimed at ending civil wars and converting restive rebels into people the junta could—and eventually did—do business with. In the years since, ethnic tensions, rich natural resources and diffuse sovereignty have come together in a damaging but mutually lucrative symbiosis that the researcher Kevin Woods has dubbed “cease-fire capitalism.”

A case in point is Myanmar’s jade industry, which the London-based advocacy group Global Witness described in a recent report as “the biggest natural resources heist in modern history.” The report estimated that jade-mining companies connected to the Tatmadaw had extracted a staggering $31 billion worth of jade in 2014, most of it from mines in Kachin state. In late November, a month after the report was released, at least 120 people were killed in a landslide in Hpakant, a jade-mining hub in Kachin—a tragic demonstration of the industry’s hazardous working conditions and lack of transparency.

According to Khin Zaw Win, the director of the Yangon-based Tampadipa Institute, the dangerous effects of the military’s grasp on politics and the economy are part of an “interlinked ‘cluster’” of challenges that include conflict resolution, development, poverty reduction and the creation of a federal system of government that can safeguard the interests of ethnic minorities. “There has been growth, but it has not been shared equally,” he says in an email. “That is perhaps the greatest economic challenge, and it can quickly become political if not realized.”

Reform in a ‘Disciplined’ Democracy

How will the NLD tackle these issues once in government? So far it has offered surprisingly little indication. Understandably, the party has been so focused on winning power that it hasn’t said much about what it will do once it gets there. In September, it released a 20-page election manifesto that pledged to pursue “transparency,” “development” and “national reconciliation,” among other goals, but gave few details about how it would achieve them. A similar vagueness permeated its election campaign, which focused on adoration of “Mother Suu” rather than substantive policy statements. On the road, Suu Kyi’s campaign boiled down to a reassurance that a vote for the NLD would be a vote for peace, democracy and development.

The NLD now finds itself at an inflection point. Just as Myanmar has undergone its own transition from military rule to “disciplined democracy,” so too has the NLD been forced to rapidly transform from a small band of besieged activists into a nationwide political organization capable of running an unwieldy country. Just over three years since it re-entered the legal fold and ran in the 2012 by-election, only a handful of its leaders have had any practical experience in government. Some analysts and political activists also worry that power in the party is overly centralized in Suu Kyi’s hands, and that she is poised to adopt a supra-presidential role. “There is no debate. Suu Kyi dictates everything,” U Myat Thu, a former political prisoner and founder of the Yangon School of Political Science, said in an interview before the election. A personality can carry an election, but can it carry a government?

NLD officials have downplayed claims of Suu Kyi’s allegedly authoritarian tendencies; longtime spokesman U Nyan Win said that important party decisions are the product of deliberation. But the NLD is more candid about another upcoming challenge: generational change. By the next national election in 2020, Suu Kyi will be 75 years old, and her eventual successor is unknown. It’s true that the Nov. 8 election heralded an influx of young talent into the national and regional parliaments: According to the NLD, 12 percent of its candidates were under 35 and another 40 percent were aged between 35 and 50. Among the victors was the 35-year-old blogger and activist Nay Phone Latt, who won a seat in the Yangon regional parliament. Looking beyond the next five years, however, it is hard to identify potential replacements to the NLD’s senior core, including those on its central executive committee, many of whom are in their 70s.

Perhaps the biggest internal challenge for Suu Kyi and the NLD, however, will be the crushing burden of high expectations. The almost unanimous popular faith invested in Suu Kyi to solve the country’s problems could easily turn into disillusionment absent quick improvements, said Khin Zaw Win of the Tampadipa Institute. “There has to be progress within the coming 12 months if the new NLD government is to be considered credible,” he said.

Certain reforms could conceivably come quickly. Phil Robertson, the deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch, called on the NLD to make “a clean break from the rights-abusing policies of past governments” by immediately releasing remaining political prisoners and moving to repeal repressive legislation. “Lifting these laws would be one of the most appropriate actions for the first 100 days of an NLD administration because it would help lift the fear that has plagued Myanmar for far too long,” he says.

Beyond reforms, things get more complicated. In the current “road-mapped” system, the NLD government could introduce reforms in areas such as health, education and agriculture, but would have relatively little power over security matters or the pace of political reforms. For many overseas Myanmar watchers, the main question is what the NLD will do to end the ongoing discrimination against ethnic and religious minorities. For years, Suu Kyi’s foreign admirers have tended to assume that, after years of standing up to dictatorship, she would defend human rights and democratic values once she had the power to do so. Recently, however, she has come under fire for failing to condemn the situation facing the besieged Rohingya, and her party has been criticized for refusing to present any Muslim candidates in the election.

The NLD’s implicit promise in both cases has been that it would win first and solve the problem later. During a campaign visit to Kayah state in eastern Myanmar in October, Suu Kyi said that advancing the peace process would be a high priority. “If we can form a government, we will serve the rights of ethnic people and protect them,” she told her audience. Since the election, she has also pledged to protect Muslims and prosecute perpetrators of hate speech, and promised to include ethnic representatives from other parties in the new government as a gesture of national reconciliation.

Despite Suu Kyi’s grandiose promises, none of these challenges will be easily overcome. The stakes are particularly high on the ethnic front, given the strong support for Suu Kyi among ethnic minorities. Indeed, the poor showing of ethnic-minority parties came as a surprise, given the historical salience of ethnic identity politics in modern Myanmar.

Tom Kramer, a researcher for the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute, attributes ethnic-minority parties’ poor performance to insufficient resources, vote splitting among them, public distrust of local leaders and Myanmar’s first-past-the-post electoral system, which disadvantages minor parties. But the upshot of the NLD’s sweeping victory has been a parliament both dominated by ethnic Burman representatives—a traditional gripe of ethnicminority-group leaders—that is expected to deliver benefits quickly. “People have enormously high hopes on this government, and on her, to do everything to solve all the country’s problems,” Kramer says.

Phil Robertson of Human Rights Watch argues that although parties representing ethnic-minority groups didn’t poll well, the question of ethnic political representation is unlikely to go away. “The ethnic attention will increasingly shift to the negotiations on political arrangements and federalism coming out of the nationwide cease-fire agreement, and if that doesn’t go well, you should expect to see a resurgence of support for the ethnic parties,” he says.

The dilemma for the NLD government is that resolving the conflict will require authority over security and border affairs, which the Tatmadaw still controls. The primacy of the army was demonstrated in 2012, when it launched large-scale offensives against the KIA in Kachin state. Kramer says that President Thein Sein’s orders for the military to engage only in defensive maneuvers were effectively ignored. “The NLD has never shown any policy on how they will run the peace process, how they will deal with the fighting in the north, how they will deal with the army,” he says. “What will happen if [Suu Kyi’s] government orders the army to stop fighting, and it doesn’t do it?”

The Rohingya crisis is even more problematic. To start with, there’s growing evidence that key NLD figures don’t see it as much of a crisis at all. “We have other priorities,” U Win Htein, a senior party leader, told the New York Times shortly after the election. “We’ll deal with the matter based on law and order and human rights, but we have to deal with the Bangladesh government because almost all of them came from there.” His provocative comments closely mirrored the language used by the army’s commander in chief, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, who said in a separate interview, “We do not allow the word Rohingya. They are Bengalis. These people are not our ethnics. They are not our nationalities. They are from Bangladesh.”

The situation will only worsen if Suu Kyi doesn’t take “timely initiatives” to stem violence and discrimination, U Kyaw Min, president of the Democracy and Human Rights Party, a Rohingya group, says in an interview at the party’s Yangon headquarters. “She should foresee the coming problems in Rakhine state. If she becomes complacent or passive or unconcerned, things will become worse than before,” he adds.

Muddying the issue is the fact that Rakhine state is home to the Arakan National Party (ANP), one of the few ethnic-minority political parties to poll well in the Nov. 8 election. The ANP also happens to be a hard-line Buddhist nationalist party that has lobbied to strip the Rohingya of their citizenship and voting rights. Aided by the disenfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya, it won 22 of the 29 seats in the Assembly of the Union, and hopes to form the next state government in Rakhine. Kramer explains that the ANP’s local power, coupled with continued pressure from nationalist groups like Ma Ba Tha and the general public, could make the Rohingya issue highly sensitive for the NLD. “It’s going to be a very different battle,” he says.

Seeking Common Ground

All this brings the focus back to the next few months, which will be a crucial transition period that analysts predict will set the tone for the NLD’s first term in office. With the military still in a position to exert powerful influence, Andrew Selth, a leading analyst of Myanmar politics based at the Australian National University in Canberra, has argued that Suu Kyi and her party will need to think realistically about how to accommodate their prerogatives. “In considering the way ahead, Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD will need to make due allowance for this reality, and come to some kind of modus vivendi with the military leadership,” he wrote. “To reject such a course of action would see everyone suffer.”

In principle, there is no reason why the NLD and the military can’t reach a workable arrangement. On several occasions, Suu Kyi has spoken of her “affection” for the army, which her father founded before independence. And so far, Min Aung Hlaing has shown himself to be open to negotiations on how the two sides might share power. On Dec. 2, Suu Kyi and the commander-in-chief met to discuss the transition for the first time. In many ways it was a remarkable sight—the 70-year-old democracy icon standing alongside the stiff general in his medal-covered, bottle-green uniform. A statement released by the general’s office after the meeting reported that the pair had “agreed to cooperate on peace, the rule of law, reconciliation and the development of the country.”

Whether they agree on the pace of change is a separate question. Since the election, Suu Kyi has seemed impatient and defiant, pledging to act as a de facto president—like “a rose by any other name,” as she put it to the BBC—while vowing to press for immediate amendments for the constitution. On the other hand, Min Aung Hlaing has spoken of the importance of achieving “stability” before any rapid changes are undertaken. “We have only experienced democracy for a short time,” he said in a recent interview. “To get good results for our country, you need to be patient. It is very difficult for us to have quick change in our country.”

In a country buffeted by change, both sides will have to tread warily. Khin Zaw Win of the Tampadipa Institute fears that after their big win, Suu Kyi and the NLD could succumb to a “juggernaut mentality.” But “the NLD can’t go it alone,” he says. “It does not need to form a coalition, but it should deliberately do so, and invite in other parties as well as ethnic leaders.”

Whatever happens, international perceptions of Myanmar are likely to change. From overseas it has sometimes been comforting to view the country’s struggles as a simple morality tale: a battle between Suu Kyi and the generals, between the victims and the violators, destined, like all morality tales, for a satisfying conclusion. The red sun that dawned on Nov. 8 may herald a positive step for Myanmar—a significant repudiation of military rule. But the NLD will realize that the hurdles it overcame to win the election will prove far smaller than the task of governing within the confines of Myanmar’s “discipline-flourishing democracy.”

Faced with many potential battles, the new government will have to choose carefully where and when to engage, said Kramer of the Transnational Institute. “The NLD clearly have to compromise on some issues with the army, so the question is which issues are they going to push for, and how will they do so. I think that’s going to be a very big challenge.”

Published in the World Politics Review, December 17, 2015.

With connectivity boom, Cambodia’s political battles shift online

PHNOM PENH — In September 2015, a Facebook page bearing the name of Prime Minister Hun Sen notched up its millionth “like.” Until then, the long-serving Cambodian leader had denied ever using social media, making fun of political rivals, like opposition leader Sam Rainsy, who were active online. But with its following now in seven figures, Hun Sen finally not only admitted the page was his but began to promote it.

“We started it first as a test,” Sok Eysan, a spokesman for the ruling Cambodian People’s Party, told local media. “Then we saw that it has attracted popularity and is very popular among citizens, so we made it official to widen communication between top leaders and the people.”

Since then Cambodia’s prime minister has enthusiastically embraced Facebook. His page, which features everything from live-streamed speeches and ribbon-cuttings to photos from Hun Sen’s 31 years in power, is now one of the fastest growing in Cambodia in popularity terms. In the past three months it has leapt to 1.55 million fans, making it the country’s seventh most popular page, according to Socialbakers, a social media tracking site. Rainsy, the premier’s long-time rival, sits in third place, with nearly 2 million followers, but at the current rate, Hun Sen should out-“like” him sometime in the next year.

Hun Sen’s dive into the digital world reflects the ruling CPP’s broader campaign to extend its presence online following a sharp fall in its popularity at the last national election in 2013. Confident of victory, the party saw its majority plunge from 90 seats in the 123-seat National Assembly to just 68. The main beneficiary was Rainsy’s Cambodia National Rescue Party, which cleverly used social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube to circumvent the CPP’s tight control of the press and disseminate information about problems like land-grabs, police violence, and corruption.

“It was a blessing for the opposition to have Facebook at the time,” said Ou Ritthy, a blogger who runs Politikoffee, a weekly political discussion group. “The opposition had no access to other media.” Ritthy said that the CNRP’s social media successes served to jolt Hun Sen and his government into the digital age. “They want to attract new voters,” he said, “and a lot of young people have started to use Facebook.”

Internet boom

The election took place in the midst of Cambodia’s recent Internet boom. Since 2010 the number of Cambodians online has leapt from 320,000 to more than 5 million — around a third of the population — according to official government figures. As in neighboring countries like Myanmar, this has been fueled by strong economic growth and the increasing availability of cheap, web-enabled smartphones.

A report issued in November by the Asia Foundation and the Phnom Penh-based Open Institute found that some 40% of Cambodians now own a smartphone, twice the number as in 2013. More than 98% of those accessing the Internet do so from mobile devices.

“There’s a lot changing. Just the pace of the adoption of the smartphone is mind-boggling,” said Silas Everett, the Asia Foundation’s country representative for Cambodia.

The report also found that the Internet has become the country’s second-most important source of information, after television. “People generally come online to socialize and meet friends and things like that, but as they start getting on Facebook, they want to get information about news and events. It’s a dynamic process of engagement,” Everett said.

With an estimated 3 million Cambodians now on Facebook, and many more expected to log on in coming years, social media looms as a crucial political arena ahead of local elections in 2017 and crunch national polls the following year. After its shock losses in 2013, the Cambodian government made a concerted push to counter the CNRP’s strong online presence. Politicians, ministries, and other government bodies were instructed to open Facebook pages. (Even the CPP’s Heng Samrin, the octogenarian president of the National Assembly, has a profile, boasting a more modest 13,436 “likes”). In June, according to a Reuters report, the government held mandatory classes for 400 heads of schools in Phnom Penh, in which they were shown how to open Facebook accounts and defend the government from negative messages online.

The CPP’s cyber-strategy is best encapsulated by Hun Sen’s Facebook page, which has been used both to promote government achievements and to craft a softer public image for the pugnacious leader. Between information about bridge-openings and public speeches, the page has featured old family photos of Hun Sen with his wife Bun Rany and their children; other posts have shown a youthful Hun Sen playing sports with fellow politicians during the 1980s. “He is trying to show the public that he’s a good leader, a good father, a good husband,” said Ou Ritthy.

Phay Siphan, a spokesman for the Council of Ministers, Cambodia’s cabinet, said Facebook offered Hun Sen and other leaders the benefit of “two-way communication”. “The prime minister learns from his own people what the people want and what the people don’t like,” he said. “It’s not targeted to the election, it’s targeted to better serve the people.”

New way to engage

It is true that social media has given people a new way of putting pressure on public officials. In July, Sok Bun, a Phnom Penh property tycoon, was caught on a restaurant’s CCTV camera savagely beating an entertainer and former TV presenter. The footage was leaked online and quickly went viral. In the face of rising public outrage, Hun Sen condemned the attack and the tycoon was arrested.

Thy Sovantha, a prominent Facebook user who helped disseminate news of the beating, said that in years past, a man like Sok Bun would have escaped punishment. “Before, everyone was afraid of rich people, or oknha [tycoons], or the government,” she said.

At the age of 20, Sovantha is already the doyenne of Cambodia’s social media scene. Her Facebook page, a stream of fashion selfies and commentary on issues such as anti-government protests, rural poverty, and border disputes with Vietnam, now counts just under a million fans — more than most leading politicians.

Many of Sovantha’s fans signed up in the run-up to the 2013 election, when the high-school student started posting opposition news alongside glamorous selfies and photos. Unlike TV, which is tightly controlled by the government, Sovantha noted in an interview that the Internet has given Cambodians a way to make direct demands of their leaders. “Facebook is very important. It’s like a mirror for our government and for our people,” she said.

Ritthy agrees that the Internet and digital media has great potential. So far, however, it has had limited effect on the quality of the country’s political debate. He pointed out that Cambodian Internet users are much more likely to “like” individual politicians than their parties, reflecting the continuing precedence of personality over platform in Cambodian politics. Supporters of both parties, meanwhile, have used the Internet to spread old rumors, insults, prejudice, and misinformation.

Old habits die hard

To a large extent, Cambodia’s old political battles have simply moved online. As the “culture of dialogue” established by Hun Sen and Rainsy collapsed earlier this year, the two men have used Facebook to continue their two-decade-long political jousting. In mid-November, after the government activated an old arrest warrant against Rainsy, effectively forcing him into self-exile, he made a Facebook post branding Hun Sen a “dictator” and comparing himself to Aung San Suu Kyi, whose opposition party had just won a landslide election victory in Myanmar. Hun Sen responded by live-streaming a speech on his Facebook page in which he called Rainsy “the son of a traitor to the nation,” referring to his father’s opposition to Prince Norodom Sihanouk.

“They face off,” Ou Ritthy said of the dueling Facebook pages. “They compete not just in terms of fans and followers — their content is attacking each other.” In other words: business as usual for Cambodian politics.

Ritthy said that while the quality of online debate was slowly improving, Facebook and other digital platforms offered no short-cut to lasting political change — something which would need to begin offline. “It’s just a platform,” he said, “but it needs content.”

Published by the Nikkei Asian Review, December 25, 2015

New charges against opposition leader maintain political stalemate

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PHNOM PENH — Cambodia’s beleaguered opposition leader Sam Rainsy faces fresh legal troubles after a court summoned him for questioning on possible charges of being an accomplice to “forgery and incitement.” But Rainsy, who is currently in Manila, welcomed the charges, saying that “clownesque” efforts by the Hun Sen regime to persecute him only added momentum to his fight for justice.

According to a Phnom Penh Municipal Court summons issued on Friday, the charges relate to a post made to his public Facebook page by a third party.

Ruling party officials say the third party was Hong Sok Hour, an opposition senator arrested in August on the orders of the country’s long-serving leader, Prime Minister Hun Sen. Sok Hour has been charged with forgery and incitement after posting on Rainsy’s Facebook page a video containing inaccurate version of a 1979 border treaty with Vietnam.

“Senator Hong Sok Hour, he posted false documents on this account,” said Phay Siphan, a spokesman for the Council of Ministers, as Cambodia’s cabinet is known. As the owner of the page, he said Rainsy could be liable for Sok Hour’s posts, but added that formal charges have yet to be filed. Rainsy has been summoned to appear on Dec. 4.

In later remarks, at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations meeting in Kuala Lumpur on Saturday night, Phay Siphan told the NAR that the charges against Rainsy are “a matter for the courts not the government.” He refused to comment on whether the Cambodian government would raise Rainsy’s presence in Manila with the Philippine government, either at the ASEAN meeting or later.

Spiralling tensions

The summons is just the latest shot fired in a brewing political stand-off pitting Rainsy directly against Hun Sen, who has ruled Cambodia for more than three decades through what is widely seen as a combination of belligerent realpolitik and subtle manipulation.

It comes at the end of a week in which Rainsy, president of the main opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party, was effectively stranded overseas after the courts ordered his arrest on an old defamation conviction carrying a two-year jail term. While Rainsy vowed to return to Cambodia on Nov. 16 to face arrest, he postponed his return at the last minute, citing fears of violence.

The defamation case referred to comments from 2008, in which Rainsy accused Foreign Minister Hor Namhong, a senior member of Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party, of collaborating with his captors at a Khmer Rouge prison camp in the late 1970s.

In remarks to Cambodian media, Rainsy welcomed the new possible charges, which carry a maximum combined penalty of 17 years in prison. “It may seem paradoxical but it’s good news for me; the more clownesque the CPP-controlled court becomes the stronger the support I get to find justice for all the victims of the recent political repression in Cambodia,” said Rainsy, who is currently in Manila with other members of his party.

Even so, the legal charges raise the prospect of another prolonged absence from the country for Rainsy, who has spent nearly half the past decade in self-imposed exile during Hun Sen’s various crackdowns.

The most recent spell of exile began in late 2009, after Rainsy in a provocative move uprooted temporary demarcation posts along the Vietnamese border, and lasted until Hun Sen – in a move to improve his image — engineered a royal pardon allowing Rainsy to return to Cambodia shortly before national elections in July 2013.

Same old tune

Kem Ley, head of Khmer for Khmer, a political advocacy group, said the latest ruling party crackdown on dissent was simply “the same song” repeating in a different key. “The CPP has no new strategy to get popular support,” he said. “They know only one way — to crack down on the CNRP.”

The crisis also marks a final breakdown in the so-called “culture of dialogue” — a political truce which was brokered by the two leaders in mid-2014 in a bid to end the bitter recriminations that followed the disputed 2013 national election. The pact reached its zenith in July, when Hun Sen and Rainsy dined together with their families at a Phnom Penh hotel, posting pictures of the event on Facebook.

Since then it has all been downhill. After the arrest of Senator Hong Sok Hour in mid-August, Hun Sen gave a string of barnstorming speeches in which he compared Rainsy to Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot and warned several times of civil war if the CNRP ever came to power.

On Oct. 26, CNRP parliamentarians Kong Sophea and Nhay Chamroeun were dragged from their cars and beaten in the street by thugs after a National Assembly session. CPP lawmakers then voted to remove CNRP vice president Kem Sokha from his post as deputy president of the National Assembly.

The last straw seemingly came when Rainsy began comparing himself with Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, following her National League for Democracy party’s landslide win in the country’s historic election on Nov. 8.

He posted on Facebook old photos of himself with Suu Kyi, and juxtaposed images of the 1988 student protests in Myanmar, put down with bloody force by the country’s military, with pictures of recent CNRP rallies. “The wind of freedom that is blowing throughout the world will also reach Cambodia in the very near future,” he wrote.

Eye on the elections

Local analysts say Hun Sen is maneuvering with an eye on crucial local elections in 2017 and national polls the following year. The CNRP is expected to poll well in both after a strong showing at the last election in 2013, when the CPP saw its parliamentary majority slashed from 90 seats in the 123-seat National Assembly to just 68.

The CNRP, created from a merger of the Sam Rainsy Party and Kem Sokha’s Human Rights Party in 2012, cleverly tapped into a reservoir of discontent relating to land grabs, corruption, mismanagement, and a general lack of opportunity for many Cambodians, despite two decades of strong economic growth.

In a bid to rebuild popular support, Hun Sen has attempted to introduce reforms and rein in big business. In October,  he canceled a deal giving ticketing rights for the famous Angkor temples in western Cambodia to Sokimex, a local conglomerate, a move that has been strongly criticized by the opposition.  At the same time, the CPP has fallen back on the sorts of violent political tactics that have served it well over the past two decades.

“He is much too concerned about political competition,” Koul Panha, executive director of the election monitoring group Comfrel, said of Hun Sen. “The opposition has the right and the duty to criticize the ruling party.”

U.S. concerns

On Nov. 19, a U.S. State Department official told a Senate subcommittee that Washington was “very concerned” that the current political situation would affect the legitimacy of the upcoming elections. “Recent events…including beatings, arrests, imprisonment of opposition supporters, and the removal of opposition MPs, have severely limited political space and are a cause for grave concern,” said Scott Busby, deputy assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor.

While political deals and amnesties have ended Rainsy’s previous bouts of exile, ruling party officials have suggested that this time might be permanent. CPP spokesman Suos Yara said Friday that Rainsy has only one choice: to face the law. “He has to come and serve his sentence,” he said. “Sam Rainsy is a leader of an opposition party, but as an individual person he needs to be responsible.”

During a state visit to Paris last month, Hun Sen foreshadowed possible legal trouble for Rainsy over his Facebook page, warning that a pardon could be out of the question. “The page’s owner is Rainsy, so it can be involved with that guy,” the prime minister said in a speech to Cambodians living in Paris. “This time, I will not pardon him because I have granted him a pardon two times already.”

Koul Panha, executive director of the election monitoring group Comfrel, said he expected political negotiations would eventually allow Rainsy’s return. But the crackdown had taken a political toll on Rainsy, he said, citing the CNRP leader’s decision not to return and face arrest, which after comparing himself to Suu Kyi and promising to “sacrifice his life” for his country, had disappointed many CNRP supporters.

For the past two decades, Sam Rainsy has built a career out of trying to convince others, and perhaps himself, that his victory over Hun Sen was merely a matter of time — that the “wind of freedom” was blowing in his own direction.

Hun Sen, on the other hand, has shown little hesitation in forcing reality, often violently, to conform to his own wishes. The Cambodian people clearly want a change from the current government, which has ruled Cambodia for more than a generation — but Rainsy’s long-sought victory, if it comes, will have to be fought for.

Published by the Nikkei Asian Review, November 21, 2015.

Uncertainty looms for Myanmar’s Muslims

Despite a historic election promising change, Muslims in Myanmar feel threatened and excluded.

Yangon, Myanmar – Two nights before Myanmar’s November 8 election, hundreds of leaflets were scattered on the sun-baked streets of Mandalay, the former royal capital.

“It’s time for change,” they said, echoing the slogan of the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD).

But the plain white fliers were not printed by the NLD. Instead, they warned that a vote for the party would lead to a takeover by the ‘kalar’- a derogatory word for Myanmar’s Muslim minority.

“The kalar have the Muslim peacock in their hands,” they concluded, referring to the NLD’s logo. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party sweeps Myanmar polls

Some fliers were more vulgar: one featured a badly manipulated image of the NLD’s leader, Aung San Suu Kyi embracing a Muslim leader; another showed her in cartoon form, breast-feeding a Muslim man, while neglecting her child, the nation of Myanmar.

Muslim community leaders in Mandalay said the pamphlets were a crude attempt to whip up sectarian fears to the benefit of the ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), the political arm of Myanmar’s powerful military.

“They were just scattered everywhere,” said Thein Swe, 60, the deputy chairman of the Shwe Pone Shein mosque, Mandalay’s oldest. “We feel a bit uncomfortable about it.”

In the end, Myanmar’s voters paid little attention. Going to the polls on November 8, for the first free national election since 1990, they voted overwhelmingly for Aung San Suu Kyi and her party, which as of Sunday had won 387 of the declared 478 parliamentary seats, to the USDP’s 41. It was a stunning repudiation of military rule and a decisive vote for change.

Ma Ba Tha

But despite the NLD’s euphoric victory, for the first time, Myanmar’s Muslims will not be represented in parliament. This is a victory for the ultra-nationalists who have risen to prominence in this Buddhist-majority country since President Thein Sein took office as the head of a semi-civilian government in 2011.

“From the British period up to the 2010 election, Muslims were equal – they were participants in all parliaments, and ministers even,” said Kyaw Min, the president of the Human Rights and Development Party (HRDP). “But the coming parliament will be bereft of Muslims.”

Sectarian tensions first flared seriously in mid-2012, when violence broke out between Buddhist Rakhine and Muslim Rohingya in coastal Rakhine State, in Myanmar’s west. The conflict eventually drove around 140,000 Rohingya into internal displacement camps. Sectarian tensions also spread to the country’s heartland, with violence in a number of cities, including Mandalay.

The clashes have been egged on by an ultra-nationalist Buddhist group called the Association for the Protection of Race and Religion. Known by its Burmese acronym Ma Ba Tha, the monk-led organisation was instrumental in the parliament’s recent passage of four repressive “race and religion” laws, which ban inter-faith marriage and tightly regulate religious conversions.

Its most prominent member, the monk Wirathu, has described Muslims as “mad dogs”, and has called for boycotts of Muslim-run businesses.

Rejection and exclusion

Under Ma Ba Tha pressure, few parties risked running Muslim candidates in last week’s election. Of the 6,074 candidates who competed in the November 8 poll, just 28, or 0.5 percent, were Muslims – a tiny slice of the community’s population as a whole.

Even the NLD refused to endorse Muslim candidates.

Ko Ni, a Muslim lawyer who works as a legal adviser to the party, said that the NLD’s Central Executive Committee believed it was unwise given the political climate. “In this situation, if we chose Muslim candidates there might have been some problems,” Ko Ni said.

In troubled Rakhine state, meanwhile, the government barred most Rohingya from either voting or registering as candidates.

“In law all are equal, but in practise Muslims are treated as a degraded and unwanted community,” Kyaw Min told Al Jazeera. His Rohingya party saw 15 of its 18 candidates rejected by the Union Election Commission.

Now, without representation in the newly elected parliament, some Muslim citizens say they have never felt less welcome in their own country.

“Muslims need to be involved in Burma’s politics,” said Ko Maung Maung, a 40-year-old water seller, using the former name for the country. “Now that we’ve been removed I feel like someone’s thrown a handful of sand on our plates.”

Historically, Muslims have played an active role in Myanmar society. Aye Lwin, the chief convener of the Islamic Center of Myanmar, said that when King Mindon founded the city of Mandalay in 1857, his palace compound included a mosque. Mindon also built a rest-house in Mecca, constructed out of Myanmar teak, for Muslim subjects undertaking the Hajj.

Later, Muslim politicians participated in the struggle to cast away British colonial rule, which was eventually achieved in 1948. Among the most prominent was U Razak, a former minister of education, who was assassinated in 1947 alongside General Aung San, a revered national figure and the father of Aung San Suu Kyi.

“This is our country,” said Aye Lwin, whose own father was decorated for his role in the independence struggle. “We are not strangers. We have not sneaked in from Bangladesh.”

Aye Lwin told Al Jazeera that while the lack of Muslims in parliament was painful on a personal level, the priority was backing Aung San Suu Kyi to end half-a-century of military domination in Myanmar.

“This is a time for revolution,” he said, “so we can’t be sentimental in this regard. We have to stand behind one bloc to make that change”.

With Myanmar’s Muslims voting overwhelmingly for the NLD, the party now has a responsibility to protect their rights, said Phil Robertson, the Asia deputy director for the US-based Human Rights Watch.

“A lack of Muslim representation in the national parliament means that an even higher duty of care falls to the NLD-led government to speak up and take action against any and all instances of rights abuses based on religious discrimination,” Robertson said.

Fear and uncertainty

Even so, it will take time to overcome the fear and uncertainty of many Muslim citizens. One Muslim man standing near the Bamala Mosque in downtown Yangon lamented how bad things have become. “Even little children see us and they say: ‘These are the kalar,’ and see us as enemies,” he said.

The 45-year-old, who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the issue, said he and others feared a nationalist backlash if the NLD tries to promote inter-faith harmony. “Whatever happens, we Muslims are being very cautious.”

The NLD will find things particularly challenging in Rakhine state. With around 650,000 Rohingya barred from voting, the election there was dominated by the Arakan National Party (ANP), a hardline Buddhist Rakhine party which has lobbied hard to strip Rohingya of citizenship and voting rights.

Before the election, the party handed out leaflets saying: “Love your nationality, keep pure blood, be Rakhine and vote ANP”, according to Reuters.

If an ANP figure emerges as chief minister in the next government, it would be “really bad news for the Rohingya”, said Mark Farmaner, the director of Burma Campaign UK.

Suu Kyi’s power will be restricted further by the military-drafted 2008 constitution, which reserves 25 percent of parliamentary seats for the army, and gives it control of the three most powerful ministries: home affairs, border affairs, and defence.

Since any change to the constitution requires a three-quarter supermajority, the military has an effective veto over any changes.

Without full control over the security forces, “there is a big question over how far [the NLD government] will go to restore their rights and ensure they have citizenship”, Farmaner said of the Rohingya. “The prospects for the peace process are very unclear.”

But with new leaders taking control, and a system in flux, some Muslim leaders are optimistic that things are moving in the right direction.

La Shwe, the 67-year-old imam of the Shwe Pone Shein mosque in Mandalay, said the day before the election that a vote for the NLD was a vote against inter-faith conflict and fear.

“We seem to be heading towards democracy,” he said. “There might be some problems, but I’m looking on the bright side.”

Published by Al Jazeera English, November 15, 2015.

Myanmar’s Elections: What Now?

With the NLD on the brink of a landslide victory in Myanmar’s elections, attention is turning to what comes next.

YANGON—Four days after Myanmar’s historic November 8 election, it is clear that Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) is poised for an overwhelming victory. The party claims it is on track to win more than 80 percent of the seats in union and regional legislatures, inflicting a massive defeat on the incumbent Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), the political arm of Myanmar’s powerful military.

More than 30 million citizens cast ballots in the poll, Myanmar’s first relatively free national poll in a quarter of a century. Though the Union Election Commission (UEC) has been drip-feeding official results in piecemeal fashion since Sunday, the numbers have been astonishing: As of Wednesday evening, the UEC had the NLD winning 256 of the 294 seats declared so far in the 664-seat Union Parliament.

“It will be more than the result of the 1990 election,” said Nay Phone Latt, an NLD candidate for the Yangon regional parliament, referring to the NLD’s general election victory that year, which was promptly annulled by the military.

The NLD is poised to far exceed the parliamentary majority it needs to form government and select the country’s next president. The party’s success has relied heavily on the almost supernatural aura of its leader Aung San Suu Kyi, channeled effectively by a campaign that elevated “Mother Suu” over any substantial discussion of platform or policy.

This euphoria was palpable in many parts of the country on election day. In Mandalay, Myanmar’s second city, long lines stretched outside polling stations before they opened at 6 a.m. Daw Than Tha Htwe, 38, waited two hours to cast her vote, and emerged at 8:30 a.m., an ink-stained finger held aloft. When asked who she voted for, she gave a big thumbs up: “Daw Aung San Suu Kyi! All of my friends and all of my neighbors are for Aung San Suu Kyi.”

By the evening, euphoric crowds of NLD supporters – draped in the party’s red star-and-peacock insignia – had gathered in Yangon, Mandalay, and other cities to cheer on the first unofficial election returns.

The magnitude of the USDP’s defeat was underlined by the defeat of key party officials. Among them was the once-powerful parliamentary speaker Shwe Mann, who was ousted from the USDP leadership in an internal party coup in August; he admitted defeat in a Facebook post on Monday morning. Also among the vanquished was the USDP’s acting chairman Htay Oo, who conceded his constituency in Hinthada, west of Yangon, telling a reporter simply, “We lost.”

Many struggling USDP candidates were formerly top-ranking officers in the military junta that handed power to the semi-civilian government of President Thein Sein in 2011, after nearly five decades of army rule. The NLD’s victory was so overwhelming that Khin Maung Thein, a candidate in the Sagaing Region parliament, defeated his USDP opponent in a landslide – despite having died two days earlier.

At the same time, observers have sounded a word of caution, pointing out that however bad the USDP’s electoral showing, Myanmar’s military, known as the Tatmadaw, will continue to wield great power. The nation’s constitution, drafted by the old junta and passed by a bogus plebiscite in 2008, ropes off a quarter of parliamentary seats for military candidates. It also ensures that the most powerful ministries – Defence, Home Affairs, and Border Affairs – will all remain under military control, as will the Tatmadaw’s diverse and lucrative business interests. Another provision – Article 59(f) – bars Suu Kyi from holding the presidency, due to her foreign spouse and children.

On the one hand, a newly emboldened NLD; on the other, a chastened, but still powerful, Tatmadaw – these are the two key actors in the complicated political negotiations that will unspool in the weeks and months ahead.

Since three-quarters of lawmakers are required to amend the constitution, the military holds a de facto veto over any changes. Mark Farmaner, director of Burma Campaign UK, said that a new NLD-dominated government would have wide scope to introduce reforms in areas such as health, education, and agriculture – but little power over security matters or the pace of democratic reforms. “The military have used the constitution to try to tie the hands of the government,” Farmaner said. He described the constitution as “effectively a brick wall on the road to reform.”

Myanmar’s next government therefore looms as a strange creature: a composite administration comprising the dominant NLD and the constitutionally entrenched Tatmadaw – the two poles of the country’s generation-long political struggle between democratic reform and military dictatorship

Whatever its particular hue, Myanmar’s new government will inherit some daunting challenges. Despite the signing of a “nationwide” ceasefire agreement last month, the country’s ethnic regions remain unstable and deeply troubled. As the country celebrated its historic election on November 8, local media were reporting that two villagers had been shot by Tatmadaw soldiers in a remote part of Shan State – a reminder of the conflicts that still fester across the country’s mountainous periphery.

The darkest stain on the November 8 election was the disenfranchisement of more than a million Rohingya Muslims living in coastal Rakhine State in the country’s west. They were struck from voter lists because they are considered illegal migrants from Bangladesh, even though many have lived in Myanmar for decades and voted in the last, flawed election in 2010. Many more voters in ethnic areas, including in Shan and Kachin States, were unable to participate after polls were cancelled due to conflict and instability.

With her party stampeding towards a famous victory, Suu Kyi has been increasingly forceful in claiming a political mandate to tackle these problems on her own terms. When the NLD takes power, she has vowed to press for immediate amendments for the constitution She has also provocatively vowed to position herself “above the president,” in open defiance of the constitutional provision barring on her presidency. She told an interviewer Tuesday that whoever the NLD nominates as president – so far the party is  remaining close-lipped about potential candidates – “will be told exactly what he can do.” She added, “He will act in accordance with the decisions of the party.”

So far her opponents have been conciliatory. On Wednesday the NLD said that it had received a message from Information Minister Ye Htut congratulating the party, on behalf of President Thein Sein, for its massive lead in the election. The message pledged that the government would respect the popular will and allow a peaceful transfer of power “in accordance with the legislated timeline.” Later, the Myanmar military itself congratulated the party on its success, pledging to join the NLD, President Thein Sein, and speaker Shwe Mann for “national reconciliation” talks next week.

Yan Myo Thein, a Yangon-based political analyst, predicted the military would likely work “positively and constructively” with the resurgent NLD, but would continue to guard its prerogatives fiercely. “The possibility that the Tatmadaw will ever allow the constitutional amendments that undermine its special position is still minimal,” he said.

On the one hand, a newly emboldened NLD; on the other, a chastened, but still powerful, Tatmadaw – these are the two key actors in the complicated political negotiations that will unspool in the weeks and months ahead.

Richard Horsey, a leading analyst of Myanmar politics, wrote before the election that the creation of a functioning government – one that could tackle the country’s most intractable problems – would ultimately hang on the relationship between the NLD-nominated president and the commander-in-chief. “If they get off to a bad start,” he concluded, “it will be very hard to recover.” In a country being buffeted by change, both sides will have to tread warily.

Published by The Diplomat, November 12, 2015.

Hope and fear in Kachin State as vote draws near

MYITKYINA, Myanmar — Four years after being driven away by the military, Dagaw Hpung is finally letting himself dream of going home. On Nov. 8, when the country heads to the polls for a long-awaited election, he will be casting his vote for a new government — one he hopes will help end the conflict which has raged between the military and the Kachin Independence Army since 2011.

“I expect that something will change at this election — real change,” said Dagaw, a wiry 61-year-old in a bright blue longyi, traditional Burmese garb not unlike a sarong.

Dagaw and his three children fled their home in August 2011, when the army descended on their village in northern Kachin State and burnt villagers’ homes. After a week on the road, they eventually arrived at the Tatpone camp, a dusty settlement of 340 displaced people outside the state capital Myitkyina.

Like many others across Myanmar, Dagaw hopes that Aung San Suu Kyi, the world-famous leader of the country’s largest opposition party, the National League for Democracy, can help end the war in Kachin. “If the NLD wins, I believe that the coming election will help support peace,” Dagaw said, as barefooted children played nearby in the dust. “If the election brings peace, then we will be able to go home.”

The mostly Christian Kachin number around 1.5 million out of a national population of 51.5 million. The November election, Myanmar’s first free national ballot since 1990, has stirred both hopes and skepticism in this conflict-torn northern state. When fighting between the KIA and the military broke out, it shattered a 17-year ceasefire. Since then, the conflict has displaced around 120,000 people, who remain scattered across the region in makeshift camps for “internally displaced persons,” or IDPs.

In many areas, the election looms as a two-horse race between the military-backed ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party and Suu Kyi’s NLD. But the political terrain in Kachin and other ethnic minority states is fractured and complex, highlighting the depth of the ethnic conflicts which have wracked Myanmar since its independence from Britain in 1948.

“Inequitable distribution of political and economic rights has long driven mistrust and conflict in Myanmar,” the Transnational Institute, an Amsterdam-based research and advocacy group, wrote in a September briefing on ethnic politics.

In Myitkyina, a green low-slung city of 350,000 spread along the banks of the Irrawaddy River, the final week of election campaigning was peaceful. Campaign posters were plastered along the shady thoroughfares. Trucks festooned with colorful banners occasionally passed through the center of town, blaring campaign songs.

Outside town, however, the tension is palpable. While the KIA has pledged not to disrupt voting on Nov. 8, it has also refused to sign the heralded “nationwide” ceasefire agreement signed on Oct. 15 between the government and eight other ethnic armed groups. After outbreaks of fighting in parts of Kachin in September and October, the Union Election Commission announced that voting would be cancelled in more than 200 village tracts, compared with just 68 at the 2010 election.

Not everyone shares Dagaw Hpung’s optimism that Sunday’s election will change this situation. “The current government lies all the time. I don’t trust them,” said Ze Naw, 39, who was chased from her home by the Tatmadaw in mid-2011.

Sitting outside her thatched hut in the Zi Un IDP camp, a well-ordered limbo for some 760 souls on the edge of Myitkyina, one of 66 camps run by the Kachin Baptist Convention, she said she had given up hopes of any quick change. “The reality is that military forces are still in the fields. I don’t believe the election can stop the war,” she said.

Lum Zawng, a lawyer standing as a candidate for the Kachin Democratic Party, said this is a common attitude in remote areas, where people lack information on the voting process and have been worn down by years of conflict. “They aren’t interested in the election,” said the 26-year-old, the youngest of 13 candidates competing for a state parliament seat in Myitkyina. “They are paying attention, but there’s a little bit of doubt.”

Many, like Dagaw Hpung, seem to be hoping that Aung San Suu Kyi can deliver them from their suffering. When “the Lady” made a rare swing through Kachin in early October, thousands turned out to hear her speak, despite her long silence on the conflict in Kachin.

“Let me tell all of you that the NLD is for all the ethnic people in the Union. It is not a Bama party, by Bama people,” she said to a crowd in Myitkyina on Oct. 2, referring to the country’s ethnic Burman majority.

But Suu Kyi faces stiff competition from a raft of ethnic Kachin parties competing in the election for the first time. In pole position is the rebel-turned-politician Tu Ja, a former vice-president of the Kachin Independence Organization — the KIA’s political wing — who decamped in 2009 and founded the Kachin State Democracy Party.

Tu Ja’s party is running 55 candidates in the election, on a platform to “develop our region and to build national reconciliation.” He expects most Kachin to vote for Kachin parties, and that many people were disillusioned by the NLD’s stubborn silence about the KIA conflict, especially when serious fighting erupted in 2012 and 2013.

“They don’t understand much about the nationalities, the feeling of the nationalities. This is the main problem for them,” he told the Nikkei Asian Review in an interview at his home in Myitkyina.

The KDP, meanwhile, is running 32 candidates for the union and state parliaments, calling for a federal union, an end to the controversial Myitsone dam project on the Irrawaddy, and greater Kachin control over the region’s lucrative jade and timber resources. “Ethnic people want peace, genuine peace, and they want self-determination… We have very rich natural resources, but we are very poor,” Lum Zawng said. He expects about half the party’s candidates to win seats.

But the Kachin parties, like those in other ethnic states, face a serious problem: there are too many of them. After aborted attempts to form a united Kachin party, four separate parties will be trying to woo voters on Nov. 8, potentially cannibalizing votes.

Kachin parties say they are further disadvantaged by alleged voter list errors — Tu Ja said that up to 30% of those displaced by the fighting are absent from lists. Of 283 eligible voters at the Zi Un IDP camp, only 207 were on the most recent voter lists, according to staff. The vote cancellations are also likely to fall hardest on the ethnic parties, who draw most of their support from rural areas. According to Tu Ja, the election “can be free, but it cannot be 100% fair.”

The KIO, meanwhile, maintains that true ethnic self-determination is not possible without serious changes to the current, military-drafted constitution, which reserves a quarter of the seats in parliament for handpicked military delegates. “This election cannot solve our political conflict,” said Dau Hka, a spokesman for the KIO’s technical advisory team in Myitkyina. “All the ethnic people, including the armed struggle groups, they are seeking a genuine federal union system — that is the baseline. Not just democracy.”

Others take a more optimistic approach. Gun Mai, a project manager at the Shalom Foundation, which provides aid to thousands of people displaced by the conflict, said the current election will be a great improvement on the last, much-criticized national poll, when Kachin parties were barred from taking part. “This election will not be a solution for the conflict,” he said, “but we believe it can be part of the solution.”

At the Zi Un IDP camp, 46-year-old Bawm Myaw finds herself torn between cautious hope and well-worn skepticism. She remembers the night in June 2011 when she was forced to flee her home in Waingmaw township. “The fighting started at 2am, while we were sleeping,” she said. “I’d never heard that kind of gunfire. We left the house and took nothing with us, just ourselves. For a week we fled through the jungle.”

Now, as she prepares to vote in an election for the first time, Bawm Myaw is a little confused. All the parties promise change; all promise peace. But who can deliver it? “The reality is that the fighting continues,” she said. “I don’t know what will happen. Everything is in God’s hands.”

Published by Nikkei Asian Review, November 4, 2015.

Satire, Myanmar-style: Political cartoonists test limits of newfound freedom

YANGON—With a few deft strokes of Beruma’s pen, a jowly likeness appears on the blank page: a caricature of Senior Gen. Than Shwe, Myanmar’s former dictator. A few more lines and his successor, President Thein Sein, materializes. A slight, bespectacled man, he looks somewhat nervous, eyes bulging comically.

Beruma, one of Myanmar’s emerging political cartoonists, picked up his pen in 2007, when mass protests led by Buddhist monks were quelled with ruthless force by the military. “I thought, how could I go against the junta?” he recalled. “I was looking for a weapon. And I found this weapon.”

Following the abolition of pre-publication censorship in 2012, the softly spoken 33-year-old — real name Wunna Soe — enjoys a freedom that his predecessors never did. His cartoons, published in the Democratic Voice of Burma, The Irrawaddy news magazine and directly on Facebook, depict child soldiers, illegal logging, military politics — topics that were previously off-limits.

One recent effort shows a tight-lipped Thein Sein rowing through rising floodwaters, handing out T-shirts on behalf of his Union Solidarity and Development Party to flailing flood victims.

Like the old Soviet-bloc jokes that chipped away at the pretensions of “actually existing” socialism — “You pretend to pay us, we pretend to work” — Myanmar’s cartoonists have, for decades, used satire to skewer homegrown dictators and tyrants. But under censorship, Beruma said, “Our thinking wasn’t free. Our mindset wasn’t free until now.”

Simple, humorous and instantly absorbable, political cartoons today represent the sharp satirical edge of a press that has been reinvigorated by political reform. With the end of direct censorship, cartoons are enjoying a renaissance in Myanmar, fueled by social media platforms that have given artists such as Beruma access to a larger audience than ever before.

As the country approaches landmark elections on Nov. 8, a growing fraternity of cartoonists stands ready to pour humor and ridicule upon those in power. “They are as bold as ever,” said Thiha Saw, a veteran journalist and president of the Myanmar Journalists Association.

Political cartooning has a long history in Myanmar. A seminal character in that history was Ba Gyan (1902-1953). Like his contemporary Herge, the Belgian creator of Tintin and his dog Snowy, Ba Gyan infused his work with reflections on his country’s political evolution. He pioneered newspaper cartoons and produced Myanmar’s first animated short film in 1935. In his final years, Ba Gyan held an annual cartoon exhibition outside his home in downtown Yangon, a festival revived by his successors in 2010 on a street that now bears his name.

Despite the passage of time, Ba Gyan’s illustrations addressed similar social and political issues facing the current generation. “His political cartoons are still relevant, even today,” Thiha Saw said.

After the 1962 military coup, the authorities instituted censorship and clamped down on political expression. Maung Maung Fountain, 47, who contributes cartoons to The Irrawaddy and other local journals, took up his craft around the time of the 1988 student protests, which prompted a campaign of fierce repression by the military. “Cartoonists drew cartoons to stimulate the movement, but we couldn’t use our real names,” he said. “The government was squeezing everything.”

Self-censorship de rigueur

Myanmar’s most famous living cartoonist, Aw Pi Kyeh, has witnessed the evolution of the media landscape over more than three decades. “Before 2012, when we were thinking of ideas — before we drew — we needed to censor ourselves,” the 57-year-old said. “It was a very bad habit.”

Aw Pi Kyeh — his real name is Win Naing, and his friends and peers call him A.P.K. — lives on the third floor of a musty apartment block in the Yangon suburbs. He draws on a small draughtsman’s desk, crammed between a bed and a shelf filled with art books he bought while completing a master’s degree at Harvard University in 2002-2003. Shoeboxes hold his large collection of fountain pens and precious tools, also procured abroad.

Like most of his peers, the Mandalay-born Aw Pi Kyeh, whose pen name means “loudspeaker,” is self-taught. He took up cartooning seriously after arriving in Yangon to pursue an engineering degree in 1975. Those were turbulent days in student politics. The year before, protests erupted when then-dictator Gen. Ne Win refused to accord a state funeral to U Thant, the recently deceased secretary-general of the United Nations. After a tumultuous week, the military responded with lethal force, killing more than 100 students.

Aw Pi Kyeh’s early cartoons dealt with issues of student life, but he soon gravitated to politics. “I needed to carry some of the load for my country,” he explained. But with censors vetting every publication for anything deemed remotely subversive, the system tested cartoonists’ reserves of metaphor and suggestion. Aw Pi Kyeh estimates that more than 300 of his cartoons were nixed by the censors over the years.

The vetting process involved submitting newspapers and journals to a censorship office before publication; the office then spiked anything it felt would be offensive. But Aw Pi Kyeh was, nonetheless, able to get many subtle messages through, laying down some symbolic markers and then letting a knowing audience fill in the blanks.

One of his simplest and most famous images appeared ahead of the widely criticized 2010 election. It depicts a soccer player coming off the field to be substituted, but instead of being replaced by another player, he merely switches shirts — just like the generals reinventing themselves as civilian politicians. Nobody in Myanmar needed the joke explained to them.

Aw Pi Kyeh said the best cartoons tap the unspoken assumptions lurking beneath the crust of daily life. Hence, the reason for his nom de plume: “A loudspeaker has no voice, it only amplifies the voice. The artist or cartoonist has no voice, he only reflects the public voice.”

Pressure persists

In Aw Pi Kyeh’s view, Myanmar’s young cartoonists, for all their technical skill, have yet to develop the searing touch of the old masters, although he is optimistic. “They begin to walk on free ground, but their feet are not strong enough,” he said. “But after two or three or four years, they will run.”

Of course, there are still limits on how far Myanmar’s cartoonists can go. After a police crackdown on student protests in March, Beruma produced a cartoon depicting the goons who attacked protesters with slingshots. He said he received a threatening message from an official on Facebook. “This year there’s been more pressure on cartoonists,” he said.

In March, The Myanmar Times, the country’s only daily newspaper with foreign ownership, was forced to apologize after publishing a cartoon by Htoo Chit, which suggested a link between Myanmar’s armed forces and evictions of farmers. “This cartoon was inappropriate and not in good taste,” Chief Executive Tony Child wrote on the newspaper’s website.

Another challenge that cartoonists face is purely practical: It is nearly impossible to live off their trade, with publications paying as little as 5,000 kyat ($3.87) per cartoon. “Very few people can make a living as a cartoonist,” said Maung Maung Fountain, a bachelor who runs a grocery store to supplement his income. “It’s like my hobby, but I can live with that.” Even A.P.K., the doyen of the industry, earns his living doing graphic design work and commissions for nongovernmental organizations.

Despite such obstacles, Myanmar’s most subversive art form has never had such fertile soil. Indeed, it seems almost tailor-made for the country’s new age of social media: humorous, instantly digestible, “shareable” at the click of a button.

“Cartoons take up just a little space,” Maung Maung Fountain said, “and they tell so much.”

Published by Nikkei Asian Review, October 2, 2015

The Future Starts Here

Next month the people of Myanmar head to the polls for a famous general election. With ethnic allegiances, miniature coups and a skewed constitution already in play, the outcome looks anything but predictable

By any account next month’s election in Myanmar will be historic. It will be the country’s first free national ballot since 1990 and the first in which opposition figures, led by the living symbol Aung San Suu Kyi, will be vying in a general election against the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP).

It will also be the largest election in Myanmar’s history: a complex, kaleidoscopic race that will see 93 parties and 6,189 candidates contest 1,171 constituencies in national and regional parliaments. When Myanmar’s voters go to the polls on November 8, the world will truly be watching.

For many, the election will be a critical pivot-point for this star-crossed country of 51 million, whose six decades of modern history have been a catalogue of ethnic conflict, frustrated state-building and the worst extremes of political repression.

Kicking off the National League for Democracy’s (NLD’s) campaign on September 8, Suu Kyi said the election and its aftermath could be a crucial “turning point” in the reforms that have taken place since the government of President Thein Sein took office in 2011. “For the first time in decades our people will have a real chance of bringing about real change. This is a chance that we cannot afford to let slip,” she said.

While the 2015 election will indeed be an important marker on the twisting road out of military rule, the ultimate destination remains far from a foregone conclusion. Indeed, rather than determining one way or the other the success of Myanmar’s so-called democratic “transition” – a word suggesting a natural, even inevitable, process – the poll is likely to give way to a new phase of fragility, contingency and political gymnastics.

Next month’s election hasn’t emerged from nowhere. It has been designed as the culminating step of the “roadmap to disciplined flourishing democracy” launched by the military in 2003 – a plan to secure military control while modernising the economy and rehabilitating the country’s image abroad. The reality, often overlooked amid the very real changes wrought by Myanmar’s historic opening, is that the USDP and its military backers have scripted this election not to yield power, but to strengthen their hold on it.

To navigate their way through a general election, the USDP and its military backers have tilted the political gameboard heavily in their own favour. Myanmar’s constitution, passed by a bogus plebiscite in 2008, bars the popular Suu Kyi from running for the presidency and reserves a quarter of seats in parliament for military representatives. This alone ensures that even if the NLD wins a majority of the vote, which many observers expect it will, the electoral system may prevent it from securing a ruling majority in parliament and thus keep it from exercising power.

The magic number for the NLD is 333 – the number of seats it needs to win to control the 664-seat Union Parliament and elect the country’s next president. In comparison, the USDP-military bloc, with 166 military seats already in the bag, needs to win just 167 more to retain effective control. Put another way, the USDP has written the rules to ensure that its opponents will need to win twice as many seats to secure the same outcome. “Our party and all the people of Burma want democracy very speedily, but the army will only give democracy very slowly,” said Nyan Win, the NLD’s long-time spokesperson.

To navigate their way through a general election, the USDP and its military backers have tilted the political gameboard heavily in their own favour.

With few credible opinion polls in the impoverished country, it remains unclear whether the NLD can reach the magic threshold of 333 seats. A rare poll conducted in early 2015 by the Taiwan-based Asian Barometer Survey was inconclusive: 24% nationwide said they would vote NLD, compared with 16% for the USDP, but more than half expressed no preference.

Despite Suu Kyi’s evident popularity, observers say the party may struggle to secure a majority. Yan Myo Thein, a Yangon-based political analyst, said that the USDP, linked to powerful “crony” tycoons, enjoys a large advantage in resources, which will weigh particularly heavily in rural areas. “The ruling party will focus on rural votes, not on township votes or city votes,” he said. “They can buy votes in the villages.”

The NLD also faces a steep challenge in the country’s seven ethnic states, where Suu Kyi’s aura – strong in the central heartland – shines less brightly. While the Nobel laureate enjoys goddess status among the ethnic Burman majority, the view is less rosy from the country’s ethnic periphery. “The majority of ethnic people think that she doesn’t care about our problems,” said Aik Paung, the chairman of the Shan Nationalities Development Party (SNDP), one of the country’s largest ethnic parties.

This is no small issue: 84 seats in the upper house – fully half of those up for election – are in ethnic states. A smaller, but still significant, proportion is up for grabs in the lower house. “In some areas, such as Shan State, the NLD will not win in many constituencies. There are very strong ethnic parties,” said Myat Thu, the founder of the Yangon School of Political Science.

Ethnic allegiances could well play a crucial part in the selection of Myanmar’s next president after the election. Once the new parliament is in session, three candidates will be nominated, one each from the lower house, upper house and military bloc. A joint session of the 664-member parliament will then vote on which of the three candidates will be president, with the two runners-up becoming vice-presidents.

Thiha Saw, a veteran journalist and president of the Myanmar Journalists Association, said that in a post-election scenario where no party has an outright majority, the USDP’s ability to dispense political favours – including state chief minister posts – to small parties could be crucial. “They still have these kinds of advantages, even though they won’t win a majority. They still have some cards to play,” he said. Several observers said that the larger ethnic parties – including the SNDP, which currently holds 22 parliamentary seats, and the Rakhine National Party (16 seats) – were most likely to support the ruling party.

So far the NLD remains undaunted in the face of these challenges, staking everything on the hope that Suu Kyi’s personality cult will deliver it the majority it needs. “We think we are the only [party] who can compete, to transform the situation and reform the situation,” said Nyan Win.

It’s too soon to say whether or not the NLD’s strategy will pay off, but Yan Myo Thein said a range of tools and strategies – favourable arithmetic, vote-splitting, political horse-trading – could all act as an effective buffer against Suu Kyi’s resonant political brand. “The military leaders and the ex-military leaders have pushed the NLD into a narrow corner,” he said.

That, at least, is the plan. But the law of unintended consequences cuts both ways. Until last month, the presumptive frontrunner for president was the USDP’s Shwe Mann, the powerful speaker of the lower house and a rival of President Thein Sein. Given his constructive relationship with Suu Kyi, many believed Shwe Mann would enjoy the NLD’s backing for president in lieu of ‘The Lady’ herself.

This scenario is now looking less likely. On the night of August 12-13, security forces surrounded the headquarters of the USDP in the capital Naypyidaw and, in a purge that recalled an earlier phase of junta rule, Shwe Mann was removed as USDP leader. Information Minister Ye Htut later justified the move on the grounds of Shwe Mann’s closeness to rival party leaders and his “very questionable” decisions in parliament.

Myanmar’s election will test the narrative of reform and ‘transition’ against the complex realities of a country still deeply scarred by ethnic conflict and a troubled sense of national selfhood.

Sean Turnell, an economist and long-time Myanmar watcher at Macquarie University in Sydney, said that the Shwe Mann affair showed that for all the USDP’s careful planning, it was hard to keep everybody on script. “The people in charge of the transition are partly in control, and partly have the tiger by the tail,” Turnell said. “They’re not fully in control of events.”

At the same time, the opposition – burdened with the task of transforming itself in short order from a besieged core of activists into a cohesive, nationwide political organisation – faces its own centrifugal challenges. Many grassroots NLD members were angered when the party released its candidate lists in August, and failed to include a raft of popular figures, including charismatic ‘88 Generation’ student activists such as Ko Ko Gyi. Overlooked in favour of appointees from Yangon, some township leaders have announced they will run as independents.

While Suu Kyi has urged voters to support the party rather than specific candidates, Yan Myo Thein said the affair highlighted the perhaps inevitable divisions between the central leadership and grassroots. “My worry is that the vote can be split and spread,” he said.

In a broader sense, the political contest will play out against a backdrop of daunting logistical challenges. Armed conflicts continue around the country’s periphery, and it is by no means certain that a substantial Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement will be signed in time for the election.

According to ethnic party officials in Shan State, six constituencies under the control of ethnic armed groups will not hold elections at all, suggesting that Myanmar’s deep ethnic fissures will remain a cardinal challenge far beyond the next electoral cycle.

A second potential problem lies with the electoral process itself. In an August report, the US-based Carter Centre reported that despite considerable achievements in preparing for the election, “key aspects of the process remain unregulated or non-transparent, such as advance voting, election dispute mechanisms, election security and the criteria for cancelling elections in particular constituencies”.

In late August the Union Election Commission (UEC) announced that parties would not be permitted to criticise the armed forces or the 2008 constitution – the two main impediments to a free and fair election. The UEC and the Ministry of Information will vet all party statements to ensure no language is included “that can split the Tatmadaw [Myanmar military] or that can disgrace and damage the dignity of the Tatmadaw”.

Suu Kyi and others have also raised concerns about flaws in voter lists, which allegedly include many dead voters’ names and omit a large number that are still living. Myat Thu said the errors seemed to be concentrated in NLD strongholds, where the error-rate ran as high as 50%.

But the biggest challenge, from the standpoint of international credibility, may be the disenfranchisement – in a general context of persecution and immiseration – of the ethnic Rohingya Muslims, an embattled minority mostly living in Rakhine State in the west of the country. The Rohingya have been ostracised since deadly unrest in 2012 between Buddhists and Muslims in Rakhine State, which left some 140,000 people, most of them Rohingya, confined to internal displacement camps.

Now, in the run-up to the elections, most Rohingya voters have been scrubbed from voter lists on the grounds that they’re not citizens. In the Rakhine State constituency of Buthidaung, as many as 150,000 Muslims cast votes in 2010 but, after a government move to revoke temporary identity cards, few will do so this year. The UEC has also disqualified Rohingya candidates on the grounds of citizenship, among them Shwe Maung, a self-identifying Rohingya lawmaker elected for the USDP in 2010. After his appeal was rejected by the UEC, he described the decision as “illogical” and “illegal”.

Myanmar’s nationalist turn – the dark side of Thein Sein’s reforms – could well benefit the incumbent USDP. Influential nationalist groups such as the Association for the Protection of Race and Religion, known by its Burmese acronym Ma Ba Tha, and the 969 movement, led by the rabidly anti-Muslim monk Ashin Wirathu, have denounced Suu Kyi and the NLD as insufficiently dedicated to safeguarding Buddhism against a supposed Muslim “threat”. “She has emphasised democracy, but not nationalism,” Wirathu told Southeast Asia Globe in an interview in May. “I fully trust in Thein Sein.” Under pressure from these fanatics, the NLD, too, has baulked at running many Muslim candidates.

All this adds a potentially inflammatory ingredient to an election that is already set to test the narrative of reform and ‘transition’ against the complex realities of a country still deeply scarred by ethnic conflict and a troubled sense of national selfhood.

After years of observing his country’s fractious politics, Thiha Saw said that simply tracking the current dynamics offers little hint of what might be to come. After the unexpected purge of Shwe Mann, he said that “anything could happen”.

“What’s going to happen on the day, or what will the outcome be? We have to say we don’t know,” he said. “One thing we’re really sure about is that things will get more complicated along the way.”

Published in the Southeast Asia Globe, October 2015.