The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century

by Thant Myint-U

None of this caused much of a fuss until 1989, when the ruling army junta officially changed the name of the country in English to Myanmar (the final “r” was meant to lengthen the vowel, as it would when spoken in the southeast of England, and not be pronounced). The justification offered was that the name “Myanmar” incorporated all the country’s indigenous peoples. This was untrue. Few minorities, if any, would claim that the word historically applied to them. The real reason for the change was that the government of the time was moving in a nativist direction

Most Burmese have only given names. These are traditionally chosen by parents on the advice of monks or astrologers, and often depend on which day of the week the child is born and the corresponding letters in the Burmese alphabet.

Top businessmen followed, with George Soros at the head of the flock, their private jets crowding Rangoon’s little airport, keen to invest in Asia’s next frontier market. By 2016, Angelina Jolie, Jackie Chan and other celebrities were added to the mix,

Burma is a country of about 55 million people, squeezed between China and India but larger than France and Britain combined.

Burma is one of the poorest countries in Asia, with one of the biggest illicit narcotics industries in the world. It is prone to devastating natural disasters (over 120,000 people died in a single day due to a cyclone in 2008) and is predicted to be one of the five nations most negatively impacted by climate change.

And as Burma, which ranks consistently as one of the most generous countries on earth, integrates itself into the world of the mid-21st century, what is it exactly about this long quarantined nation, with its unique cultures, that needs to be changed, and what should instead be embraced? In an age of reform, few have thought about what it is important to protect.

The Burmese were healthier and better fed, enjoyed far higher rates of literacy, and commanded bigger incomes than the average person in India.

honest, it is true that the British are robbing and pilfering Burma quite shamelessly.” Writing a few years later in London, he thought that Burma had indeed developed “to a certain extent” but that the Burmese themselves were now poorer, as wages were not keeping up with the cost of living and the weight of colonial taxation was ever harder to bear. “The reason is that the British government has allowed free entry into Burma for veritable hordes of Indians, who come from a land where they were literally dying of hunger, work for next to nothing and are, as a result, fearsome rivals for the Burmese.”

In 1937, the British separated Burma from India, in response to a decades-old Burmese demand. This was India’s first and largely forgotten partition. And whereas the second partition, in 1947, created the nation of Pakistan on the basis of religious identity, this first partition created Burma within its modern borders on a basis of racial identity.

In 1945, the British retook control, but they stayed only a little while. Burmese nationalists were demanding immediate British withdrawal, and with Indian independence in 1947 Burma lost its strategic importance. The cost of rebuilding would be high and the Labour government in London had other preoccupations, not least at home. On January 4, 1948, Burma became formally independent

On March 2, 1962, this battle-hardened machine seized power. Military administrations were then the norm across Asia: South Korea, Thailand, Pakistan, and Indonesia were all under army rule in the 1960s. But Burma’s was different: it sealed the country off from the world. The army set up a Revolutionary Council and embarked on what it called a “Burmese Way to Socialism”: 400,000 Indians were expelled, all external trade was stopped, and all major businesses were nationalized.

Ne Win also ruined Burmese education. Whatever the evils of colonialism, the British had left behind in Rangoon one of the best universities in Asia, as well as dozens of excellent English-language schools. With the end of academic freedom and the flight of many distinguished scholars, Rangoon University became a shell of its former self. The schools were nationalized, foreign teachers sent packing, and the teaching of English prohibited except in the higher grades. For decades, investment in education hovered close to zero. There are many reasons for Burma’s ills today, but the hollowing out of the education system alone explains much.

After a short stint at the UN, Aung San Suu Kyi married a British scholar of Tibet, moved with him to Bhutan (where he tutored the future king),

from Burma to a variant of its ancient Burmese-language ethnonym, Myanmar. It was something that would lead to endless confusion and debate in the years to come. The junta claimed to be ending a colonial legacy. But as “Myanma” refers only to the majority Burmese people, not to the Shan, the Karen, or others, the move also signaled the revival of a nationalism centered squarely on a Burmese–Buddhist racial and cultural core.

Logging became another big business. Burma in the early 1990s still had vast areas of virgin forest, with more than 90 percent of the world’s teak and many other hardwood trees as well.

system in colonial days: an extractive economy that benefited office-holders most, then a handful of businessmen, with infrastructure built to serve exports, and with little or no concept of the state as something meant to serve popular welfare.

Aid restrictions imposed by Western governments had reduced international assistance to approximately $3 per person per year, compared with $9 per capita in Bangladesh, $38 in Cambodia, $49 in Laos, and $22 in Vietnam.10 The junta did little to help. The government’s coffers were improving from their bankrupt state in the early 1990s, but next to nothing was spent on education and health care. In 2000, the World Health Organization had ranked Burma’s health care at the very bottom, below Angola, the Central African Republic, and even the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of Congo.

At UN conferences, nations agreed that the goals of peace, development, and respect for human rights were intertwined and must be addressed together in “holistic” ways. These lofty ideas were born of decades of experience in war-torn societies. They were, however, thrown out the window in the case of Burma, where the goal was democracy and little else. Every year, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution drafted by the European Union that essentially called on the junta to give up power to the National League for Democracy. There was rarely any mention of the armed conflicts, or even of the country’s dire poverty.

policy. A big hurdle was the bizarre psychology that had evolved during Burma’s isolation. We should be looking for ways to break down that isolation, I said, including the right kind of economic engagement. No one really disagreed. But no one wanted to rock the boat. Burma was just not important enough. Showing solidarity with the democracy movement was politically expedient. Results didn’t matter.

Housing, for instance, was a no-go area for Western governments, as it seemed to go beyond emergency aid and drift toward development assistance, which was forbidden. Aceh in Indonesia had received billions of dollars to rebuild after the 2004 tsunami. Burma’s total foreign aid went up slightly in the months after Nargis, but slid back down again by late 2009 to around $5 per capita, a tiny fraction of what was being given to people in Vietnam and Laos next door (both countries under Communist regimes).

I’ve heard many Burmese warn that giving Muslims in northern Arakan taing-yintha status, as “Rohingya,” would lead automatically to their being entitled to a zone of their own. “A part of Burma would fall under sharia law,” a university lecturer whispered. To consider the Muslims of northern Arakan as one of the “National Races” fused anxieties around both race and religion. The ethnonym “Rohingya” was particularly toxic for this reason, as it means literally “of Arakan” and therefore implied that those to whom it referred were indigenous. On the other hand, if they were called “Bengalis,” they could be seen—like the other kala and tayok, who were believed biologically as well as culturally distinct—as immigrants and not natives deserving special protection and special rights.

Whereas India was a few weeks’ sail away, across warm and pacific waters, reaching China meant months of arduous travel by foot and mule. It was this geography that was now being altered. Yunnan, the Chinese province closest to Burma, had only a minority Han Chinese population until the 20th century. Now it was fully integrated into the People’s Republic. It was also industrializing rapidly, tying its markets closely to Burma’s. By the 2000s, the Chinese were hoping that Burma would provide a route to the Indian Ocean. This was a very old ambition, going back to the first Chinese explorers two thousand years ago who searched for a way from today’s Yunnan, via Burma, to the sea.

Perhaps most importantly, we spent a lot of time on language and translation. I had been to many meetings where a good part of what was said was mistranslated and 100 percent of the nuance was lost. Burmese is a wonderful language for telling stories and expressing human feelings and experiences, but it is not very good for expressing policy ideas. Many words related to government are neologisms. “Human rights” is translated as lu-akwint-ye, where the word for “right” is the same as the word for “license” or “opportunity”;

It was partly a problem of translation. Thein Sein had said, “During the colonial period, many Bengalis came to Arakan to work. A portion chose to stay. Under Burmese law, anyone who is a third-generation descendant of these immigrants is entitled to Burmese citizenship. But there are also illegal immigrants who have come since colonial times and who are using the name ‘Rohingya.’ Their presence threatens stability. We cannot take responsibility for them. The UN should place them in refugee camps until they can be taken to a third country.”

In many places, Buddhist monks protected Muslims. In Lashio, for example, a Buddhist abbot named U Ponnanda sheltered 1,200 Muslims in his monastery. “I welcomed them on humanitarian grounds, and gave them food and shelter,” he said, believing it was his duty as a Buddhist to protect the most vulnerable. “We were able to look after everyone, regardless of race and religion.”

At the heart of the problems was a state that still did not control its territory and a society divided on who belonged and who did not. Both were colonial legacies. In 1948, the British had left behind a weak state that collapsed within months into civil war. The peace process had started off well, but there was no real strategy for how a state could be knitted together. The old-fashioned way was for the central power simply to defeat its enemies on the battlefield. But that road to state-building—a military solution—was neither desired nor probably even possible.

Children’s health was getting better. In just the two years between 2013 and 2015 the percentage of kids who were stunted decreased from 33 to 25 percent, and those moderately or severely underweight dropped from 25 to 14 percent.

really the only future possible? Burma is one of the richest countries in the world in terms of its biodiversity. In the past few years alone, more than forty new animal species were discovered in the country. Despite the ravages of the past two decades, the country still commands breathtaking natural landscapes and is home to the last free-flowing rivers as well as the largest population by far of wild elephants in Asia.

By 2015, Rangoon was already becoming a less livable place. Liberalization and rising incomes led to a deluge of new cars, from 50,000 to 400,000, on the same colonial-era roads. For poor people, a thirty-minute commute by bus became a three-hour commute each way.

The next morning, Chris Tun woke up to several emails from Facebook, concerned that their site seemed to be down in Burma. Facebook at the time had only a single Burmese-language speaker, who was tasked with monitoring all 18 million new users.

The idea that most of the Muslims of northern Arakan were either recent illegal arrivals, or at best Britsh-era immigrants, was accepted without question. Few if any in the rest of Burma had ever heard the term “Rohingya” before. The British had not used the term, and neither had the military regime. Many Burmese saw the name as part of a drive to force acceptance of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh not only as Burmese citizens but as taing-yintha, an indigenous race.

In 2015, she was adamant that Muslims holding temporary ID cards shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Demonstrations spread from Sittwe to towns around Arakan, and then to Rangoon. Within days, the government buckled under pressure and canceled the cards altogether. A million Rohingya would have no say in the upcoming elections.

Aung San Suu Kyi and her newly elected NLD members of parliament had taken their seats in April 2012. No one knew exactly what to expect. Thein Sein was advised to offer her a cabinet position, perhaps as minister of health or education. But this never happened. Shwe Mann, however, immediately gave her the chairmanship of a new parliamentary committee (on the “rule of law and stability”).

For her to become president was impossible under the current constitution, as the clause listing qualifications for the presidency explicitly states that no one with immediate family who were foreign citizens could be chosen. Aung San Suu Kyi’s two sons, Alexander and Kim, living overseas, were both foreign citizens. Neither she nor her party liked the current constitution. If it were up to them they would have scrapped it and written a new one with clear civilian control of the armed forces.

By June 2016, all attempts to revise the constitution had fallen through. In welcoming Thein Sein’s reforms in 2011, Aung San Suu Kyi had thought that the army would eventually allow the constitution to be amended. She felt betrayed. “People are now crystal clear about who they have to support,” she said.

The result would be a decisive win for the National League for Democracy. Everyone I asked who voted for the NLD said the same thing: they wanted to show their hatred of past military rule as well as their love and respect for the sacrifices made by Aung San Suu Kyi and other members of her party. They also said they wanted a brighter economic future for themselves and their children. Issues of race and religion played little part in their choice. This was the view in most urban areas. In the countryside, it was different. Many had no idea what they were voting for. An NLD candidate told me that at least one-third of his rural constituency had no understanding of what an election was.

Under Burma’s constitution, the president is chosen by parliament. He or she then appoints the rest of the government, including the chief ministers of the fourteen states and regions. The National League for Democracy had won a big enough landslide that even despite the army’s hold on a quarter of the seats in parliament, they still had a majority.

In the week that followed, the NLD-dominated parliament passed a law to create the entirely new position of State Counsellor for Aung San Suu Kyi. The post would allow her both to direct the government and to steer the NLD in parliament. When the army raised objections, on the grounds that the bill was unconstitutional, her party simply overrode them.

BURMA’S DEMOCRATIC TRANSITION seemed to be settling into its final chapter. Washington planned not only for close ties with the new government but for ties with the army as well. After all, at a time when the Arab Spring had turned into multiple nightmares and even Thailand next door was under a new military junta, the Burmese generals had been true to their word and had allowed their erstwhile foes to take office after free and fair elections.

According to the constitution, the president, in extreme circumstances and “in consultation” with the council, could temporarily hand over power to the commander-in-chief. This was the scenario the NLD dreaded most, a constitutional coup d’état. So Aung San Suu Kyi resolutely refused to convene such a meeting, perhaps worried that doing so might confer enhanced legitimacy on the council. Meanwhile, the army was increasingly adamant that they be given the proper authority to act.

Militants allied with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) had seized the port city of Marawi in late May, leading to months of intense fighting with the Philippines army. Public opinion in Burma saw ARSA not as a ragtag outfit trying to defend the rights of an oppressed minority but as militants who were the local leading edge of a global Islamic threat.

police. Al-Qaeda warned that Myanmar would face “punishment for its crimes.”

The views inside Burma were not only different but diametrically opposed. The vast majority believed that ARSA was not only a real and present danger to the country but had inflicted terrible suffering on non-Muslim communities in Arakan. Burmese Facebook pages teemed with photographs of Arakanese Buddhists and Hindus who had been killed. Radio stations broadcast interviews with weeping survivors of ARSA attacks. Most cheered the army’s offensive to wipe out ARSA.

Over September and October, the army commander-in-chief, General Min Aung Hlaing, delivered a series of uncompromising speeches, promising to do his duty and finish the “unfinished business of 1942”—meaning the twin threats of “Bengali” immigration and Muslim insurrection. On Facebook, his following soared. There were loud calls for a wall to be built to prevent renewed “Islamic” aggression from across the Bangladesh border. Both Aung San Suu Kyi’s government and the army promised to make this happen and asked leading businessmen to help foot the bill. Because so few believed the allegations of army massacres, there was also mounting anger at what was seen as extreme Western bias. Regional governments were largely supportive. Just days after the fighting began, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, on a visit to Burma, refused to denounce the crackdown, instead saying, “We share your concerns about extremist violence in Rakhine State and especially the violence against security forces.” In late October, thousands rallied in downtown Rangoon in support of the army and against “international pressure.”

But under the constitution, the president appoints the chief minister of every state. The Arakan National Party had hoped that, in the spirit of democracy, Aung San Suu Kyi would appoint one of their own. When she didn’t even reach out to them, they felt humiliated. Many, especially young Arakanese, gravitated toward the Arakan Army. The conflict in Arakan in 2018 was not simply between Muslims and Buddhists, or between the Burmese state and the Rohingya. Forgotten in many outside perspectives is the central place of the Arakanese Buddhists, many of whom consider themselves heirs to a once independent Arakan, and who see both the Burmese to the east and the “Bengalis” to the west as existential threats to their future.

Hopes for a lasting peace had also dimmed. Fighting flared across the north and northeast of the country, not only between government and rebel forces but now among the Ethnic Armed Organizations as well. On secluded hillsides, troops of the Restoration Council of the Shan State battled both the Taang National Liberation Front and their ostensible brethren in the Shan State Army North. In Lashio, near China, fighting between rival militias could be heard on the outskirts of town.

The peace process that began in 2011 attempted to stop all fighting. So far, it hasn’t worked. If anything, this period of attempted talks has led to more violent conflict and the emergence of more armed factions than ever before. Part of the problem is that the situation is seen as a “war” requiring “peace,” as if a previously orderly society had fragmented into civil conflict and needed only to be repaired. But Burma was never whole. And it’s not a coincidence that nearly all the fighting since the 1950s has been in what the British termed the “Frontier Areas”: rugged hills and distant valleys that had always been a patchwork of authority and had never before come under the sway of a single state. The core strategy of the state since independence—of seeing Burma as a collection of peoples with the Burmese language and culture at the core—has failed, and will continue to fail. The government and army may well agree on a formula for constitutional devolution, one that might even be acceptable to many Ethnic Armed Organizations. But to think that was ever the main issue would be a tragic mistake. Race and identity have been at the heart of Burmese politics since the start of modern Burmese politics a hundred years ago. Colonialism and the immigration of millions of people from India brought on an identity crisis that has not yet been resolved. Any brighter future will depend on Burma crafting a new and more inclusive identity, one not tied to race and one not based on a not...

At a time when democracy and markets are increasingly seen in the West as unable to cope with issues of inequality, identity, and climate change, they have become Burma’s only prescription for the future. Twentieth-century solutions are being offered as the default answers to the country’s 21st-century challenges.