Aung San Suu Kyi has now spent a year as the de facto
leader of Myanmar. She has avoided clashes with the country’s former military
rulers, and there are clear, if ponderous, signs of progress on legal reform,
banking and financial regulation and rules for foreign investors. Downtown
Yangon is choked with construction cranes and traffic jams of newly purchased
automobiles. However, this progress – and the positive sentiment that should go
with it – is threatened by one thing: Myanmar’s long troubled relationship with
its ethnic and religious minorities. Much of the international press has been
devoted to the humanitarian crisis in Rakhine State and the plight of the
Rohingyas but this is only one unique piece of the ethnic puzzle.
If Myanmar’s good news development story is to prevail,
two fundamental conditions are necessary.
First, all of the country – not just the 60% ethnic Bamar majority –
must genuinely be brought into the development process. Second, Myanmar must be sustainably connected
to its more developed neighbors (especially China and Thailand, which represent
60% of Myanmar’s trade). At present,
neither of these two conditions exist and the situation is mutually reinforcing
since most of the country’s minorities live in Myanmar’s border areas. The land routes north and west remain subject
to instability in Kachin, Shan, Karen and Mon states where major ethnic armed
groups (EAGs) are in active conflict with the central government. In many cases
conflicts that have been raging off and on since the formation of an
independent Burma in 1948.
The solution of the ‘ethnic question’ has been a key
focus (some would say a preoccupying one) for Aung San Suu Kyi. It’s a legacy
thing. Her father, the independence hero Aung San, tried to create a united,
multi-ethnic state before his untimely death. ‘The Lady’ as she is often called
in Myanmar, wants to realise that dream.
The second Union Peace Conference (also called 21st Century Panglong
peace conference after the original conference held by Suu Kyi’s father in
1947) is expected to take place on 24 May, after having been postponed several
times. Although some smaller EAGs are expected to sign the Nationwide Ceasefire
Agreement, this conference is unlikely to deliver breakthrough results.
Aung San Suu Kyi comes to this renewed peace process with
few advantages: she discarded the
previous team of government negotiators who had built up a degree of trust with
ethnic separatist groups and a great deal of experience; she does not control
the military which – like the EAGs - has vested interests in the perpetuation
of a ‘conflict economy’; the EAGs do not trust her any more than they did past
military representatives (in their view, she, like the military, only
represents ethnic Bamar interests).
So how is the ‘ethnic question’ to be resolved? Three conditions must be met for the
incentives to outweigh continued conflict.
First, pressure must be applied by Myanmar’s neighbors to the EAGs which
they support and shelter. This is
especially true in the case of the conflicts along the northern frontier
involving the Kachin, Kokang Chinese and Wa (who run a large, well armed
narco-state). Second, a financial endowment must be raised to “purchase” the
agreement of combatant leaders on both sides to cease conflicts which generate
huge illicit cashflows from narcotics, gems, jade, timber, minerals, smuggling,
protection money, transit ‘taxes’).
Finally, the Bamar majority must reconcile itself to the
fact that the Union of Myanmar will only succeed if it lives up to the name – a
practical federal union with decentralized powers at the state level.
Fortunately there is an ASEAN model to emulate here – Indonesia. Like Myanmar, Indonesia is a large, diverse
resource rich nation that also transitioned from an autocratic military
dominated government (that served as something of a model for Myanmar’s junta)
to what is now arguably Southeast Asia’s freest democracy. This was only possible by decentralizing the
state and sharing revenues with localities, a process that was phased in over a
decade.
The factors needed for lasting peace are clear to all,
after 70 years of conflict all sides also recognize that movement towards this
objective isn’t going to be rapid, and Myanmar even has an ASEAN ‘blueprint’ to
follow from Indonesia. The question is who wants it? The real struggle in
Myanmar is between those who profit from the conflict franchise and those who
wish to realize broader gains from closing it down.
Jan Kamphuisen is a Director based in Myanmar and Dane
Chamorro is a Senior Partner based in Singapore at Control Risks, the
international risk consultancy.