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

by Thant Myint-U

It’s less clear that the Burmese—as they pose for selfies in front of the escalators and water fountains—are as yet very good at buying things they might not really need.

The late 20th-century military regime would make 1824 the cut-off date in determining who belonged in Burma and who did not, whose ancestors were “natives” and whose came as a result of foreign occupation and therefore were, at best, “guests.”

Some well-to-do Indians, Chinese, and Burmese were schooled in England and were even wealthier than their European counterparts. Still, however rich or well bred, all were excluded on racial grounds from the upper echelons of Rangoon society; membership in the Pegu Club, the city’s apex social club, was strictly for whites only.

Pariahs (now usually spelled Paraiyar) from south India, a low caste who came to do menial work, especially in Rangoon. Perhaps

Men and women who were living together were considered married. If they split up, property was divided equally as a matter of custom.

Sometimes I get sick of this hot sunshine and these garish colors. I want grey skies and a soft rain falling and the smell of the country.

Then the Karen National Union rose in rebellion, demanding a breakaway republic for the Karen ethnic minority. The

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.

By the mid-1990s, these campaigns became Internet campaigns and Burma became one of the very first causes to gain traction over the World Wide Web.

A kind of capitalism was being restored. Some like to put an adjective in front: “crony capitalism,” “ceasefire capitalism,” “army capitalism.”

The disbanding of the Iraqi Army and the cavalier attitude taken toward other Iraqi institutions were based on an assumption by American planners that the country was a tabula rasa, needing only new constitutions and fresh elections. The assumption was wrong, and over the next few years the perils of state-building became clear. Afghanistan proved no easier. Neither did Somalia or Libya. Understanding grew that these places that needed fixing had their own histories, their own unseen and complex dynamics, and that any intervention might well do more harm than good. Except in Burma.

Senator McConnell, later Senate Majority Leader, was a diehard fan of Aung San Suu Kyi; on his office wall hung a framed letter she had sent the year before, thanking him for his support.

Perhaps Than Shwe was unable to come up with a good name.

THE UN LIKES TO SAY that its mission everywhere is conflict prevention and peace-building. 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.

The actor Jim Carrey taped an appeal to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on YouTube.

The protests were rooted in the economic desperation of the poor, but the West chose to see these events as a pro-democracy uprising that was crushed.

felt anything that pulled the country out of its shell was a good thing, including the right kind of trade, investment, and even tourism.

But by 2007, I was extremely skeptical that any outside intervention could work, anywhere, unless it was part of a peace accord already agreed upon by all parties.

He had never before been to a big city and during his first months there, he rode the buses for fun.

It’s not clear what the Burmese government knew about the impending catastrophe, or when.

At a lunch afterward with Debbie Aung Din and several exiled Burmese dissidents, the president reflected, “The further you get away from Burma, the more you really don’t get all the facts.”

Collusion and racketeering knew no linguistic, racial, or religious divides.

Would money continue to shape the next iteration in Burmese politics? Or would race thinking trump all?

The anxieties of the free market were coupled with a sense of impotence. Many people turned to Buddhism or other faiths.

THE STORY HAD CHANGED, but the world saw only a fairytale. Few did their homework to really understand what was driving the positive momentum and how best to keep it going.

The words for “economic” and “business” are the same: si-bwa-ye. So an economist is literally a business expert.

She witnessed a Buddhist mob catch a young Muslim man holding a Molotov cocktail and beat him to death there on the street. She had never seen such violence in her life.

We talked about mutual friends,

Burma was being rebranded.

The National Democratic Alliance Army, another (similarly named) rebel group based at Mongla,

In 2015, Burma was ranked the most generous nation in the world, measured in part by how often people helped strangers or volunteered for charities. That same year, torrential rains led to severe floods that displaced a million people. UN officials organizing the relief effort say they had never seen anything like the community-based efforts across Burma to raise money and deliver assistance. Yet none of these things are valued when the future of the economy is under discussion.

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.

At the same time, the Chinese government was planning a comeback.

Having dismantled these institutions, and with no grand strategy for reforming the public sector, the incoming administration was becoming dependent on the same bureaucrats, most ex-military men, who had been around since the days of the old dictatorship. In several ministries, there was one new man, the minister, usually a septuagenarian NLD loyalist with no government experience, trying to preside over thousands of long-serving civil servants, adept at managing red tape, many with their hands deep in the till.

One of the key participants was Ko Ni, an NLD Muslim lawyer who had been pushing hard for constitutional change. We lived in the same apartment building in Rangoon, and I had last seen him on election day.

It was the biggest single flight of refugees in modern times. Aung San Suu Kyi’s staunchest supporters in the West were dismayed that she had not demanded an end to the violence. In a public letter sent on September 7, Archibishop Desmond Tutu, calling her “my dearly beloved sister,” wrote, “It is incongruous for a symbol of righteousness to lead such a country. If the political price of your ascension to the highest office in Myanmar is your silence, the price is surely too steep.”27 On September 19, Aung San Suu Kyi broke her silence and, in a televised address to diplomats in Naypyitaw, questioned the narrative taking shape overseas.

Whereas the ex-generals of the previous government had needed to prove their democratic credentials, Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD, having won an election landslide, believed legitimacy was already on their side.

The government itself seemed torn between the neoliberal prescriptions of experts, both local and international, bureaucratic desires to micromanage the economy, and the old left-wing instincts of many in the NLD rank and file. There were good people on the government’s economic team, but decision-making was slow and there was little coordination across ministries.

The underlying problem, as always, was that there was little idea of what life for ordinary people could or should be like in ten or twenty years’ time. And this wasn’t an economy that had been doing reasonably well and needed only a gentle steer: a deeply exploitative colonial economy had been followed by war and a disastrous socialist experiment. Capitalism was then resuscitated in the 1990s by a hodgepodge of illicit industries. It was an incredibly unequal economy that was in danger of being overwhelmed by two unmanageable forces: the disastrous effects of climate change and the rise of China next door.

At the heart of the crisis are issues of blood and belonging that first consigned Rohingya-speaking Muslims to a second-class status and then ostracized them from the emerging democracy.

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 notion of uniting fixed ethnic categories. The British were correct in analyzing Burma as a zone of “racial instability.” Accepting this, seeing it as a strength rather than a weakness, finding new sources of national identity, separate from notions of ethnicity, and embarking on an aggressive agenda to end discrimination in all its forms, are elements of a conversation that’s been almost entirely absent.

Since colonial times, whatever has happened in Burma, the ordinary people have consistently wound up the losers.