Why democracy in Myanmar was so easily crushed

Protesters sit outside the Russian embassy on Friday in Yangon, Myanmar. (Hkun Lat/Getty Images)
Protesters sit outside the Russian embassy on Friday in Yangon, Myanmar. (Hkun Lat/Getty Images)

Once again, Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s most famous citizen, finds herself under arrest.

History rhymes, but it never repeats itself exactly. This time around, in the wake of a Feb. 1 military coup that toppled the Nobel Peace Prize laureate from power, things are rather different from how they were the last time she was under arrest.

The world outside her country no longer sees Aung San Suu Kyi as the hero of democracy and human rights we once believed her to be, and few will campaign for her release with the energy and zeal with which they did in the past. And while she remains popular in Myanmar itself, that popularity remains unlikely to translate into the reversal of the coup.

She has spent the past six years in power as the head of the civilian government, and her record, particularly on the issues of democracy and human rights, has been dismal. During that time, she appears to have abandoned virtually all the values we believed she stood for. By far her greatest lapse has been her defense of the Myanmar military for its genocide against the Rohingya. Her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), then actively participated in disenfranchising virtually all of the Rohingya that remained in the country in the lead-up to last November’s general election.

Her government kept in place virtually the whole package of laws for the repression of dissent and democratic pluralism that the previous military governments had instituted. These included limits on media freedom and political association as well as measures defining “threats to the state” so broadly as to effectively disbar most potential rival political forces.

The NLD did challenge the military over control of some state institutions. But it has done virtually nothing to open up the state and the wider society for genuine democratic development, nor has it opened the door for any other voice apart from the NLD and the military to be heard. Rather than working to build a broad and resilient democratic culture in the country, members of the NLD focused almost entirely on concentrating all power they were able to take from the military in the hands of one person: Aung San Suu Kyi. This is, in part, a consequence of her own inability to tolerate criticism and dissent, and her own lack of foresight for how to build a democracy that might outlast her.

So now she finds herself a victim of her own mistakes. That the NLD would have wanted to progressively wrest more power from the generals was perfectly sensible and the only way to move the country along the path of democracy. But by concentrating power almost exclusively in Aung San Suu Kyi, her party has left Myanmar democracy with a “bus factor” of one: To effectively kill “democracy” in Myanmar, the generals needed to arrest only one person.

Following the coup, it took the people of Myanmar nearly a week to start pouring out on the streets in defense of their democracy. In recent days, protests have started picking up, but so far they are disorganized, relatively limited in scale and easily contained by the military government. Even if protests continue to grow, it is difficult to see how they can achieve their goals when they are not nearly as organized and coordinated as they need to be to effect change, when they do not have the NLD leadership to direct them.

All this is largely because “democracy” in Myanmar was not allowed to become “the power of the people”. “Democracy” in Myanmar only ever came to mean the power of Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD bureaucracy that answers to her. With Aung San Suu Kyi and her key lieutenants in prison, there is no democracy left to come to their rescue. There is no democratic “civil society” that can mobilize and organize to resist the military takeover.

And that is why Aung San Suu Kyi may well be looking at the end of her political career. And she might not leave much in the way of a legacy, either. She is 75. All the hopes and dreams for democracy in Myanmar for 40 years have been invested in her alone. There is no broader democratic movement except her movement. And perhaps most irresponsibly, there is not even a line of succession to her within that movement.

For now, she retains her popularity with the people of Myanmar, but she will likely languish in prison for the foreseeable future. On paper, she is not yet a spent force politically, but if she ends up spending a few more years under arrest, as the generals seem to be planning, her capacity to direct, or even inspire, the people of Myanmar toward any political end will slowly fizzle out. And as that happens, the movement for democracy in Myanmar will be further set back.

Azeem Ibrahim is a director at the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy and author of “Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide”.

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