Contributor Bertil
Lintner knew intimately the ruling National League for Democracy's top legal
advisor and his plan to enact a more democratic constitution
By BERTIL LINTNER
YANGON,
JUNE 17, 2017
Four months since Ko
Ni, one of Myanmar’s most prominent and talented lawyers was assassinated in
broad daylight outside Yangon’s airport and local authorities are not any
closer to solving the case. The gunman, Kyi Lin, was apprehended only because
furious taxi drivers parked outside the airport chased and apprehended him.
An antique smuggler
from Mandalay, Kyi Lin had obviously been hired to kill on the fateful day of
January 29. But the person who has been named as the possible mastermind of the
plot, a former army officer known as Aung Win Khaing, vanished without a trace
in the capital Naypyitaw after the killing — quite a feat given the
military-built city’s vast, almost empty streets and scattered building
complexes.
The ineptitude of
the investigation has been matched only by misleading reports in the Western
media. Nearly all major Western publications, including the Economist, the
Financial Times, the New York Times and the Washington Post, dwelled on Ko Ni’s
religion, Islam, as a probable motive.
The Economist called
Ko Ni a “prominent defender of religious minorities”, while the Financial Times
described him as “one of Myanmar’s most prominent Muslim voices.” The BBC even
linked their account of the killing to its previous reports on the persecution
of minority Muslim Rohingyas in western Rakhine State.
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| Funeral of U Ko Ni |
As an old friend and
colleague, I was distraught to read those reports. I recalled John F. Kennedy,
a Catholic of Irish descent, who famously said before he was elected president
of the United States in 1960 that “I am not the Catholic candidate for
president. I am the Democratic Party candidate for president who also happens
to be a Catholic.”
Likewise, Ko Ni was
first and foremost a constitutional and human rights lawyer who also happened
to be a Muslim. In our many wide-ranging discussions, he never mixed his
personal faith with his wider role as a legal defender of the human rights of
all Myanmar’s citizens, regardless of their race or religion.
Portrayals of Ko Ni
as a “Muslim activist” have only played into the hands of those who would want
people to believe his assassination was part of the Buddhist-Muslim communal
violence that has wracked the country in recent years. Those misreadings of the
situation have given the apparent military culprits an alibi for their widely
suspected role in his killing.
Ko Ni was a partner
in the investigative journalism program I have led in Myanmar for the past two
and a half years. He spoke at the workshops about legal matters affecting the
media, providing sage advice to young, aspiring journalists on how to protect
themselves against threats in the country’s new, less-censored semi-democratic
context.
“The 2008
constitution guarantees press freedom and freedom of speech,” he would often
say during his presentations, “But…”. Then he would enumerate the long list of
those exceptions — defamation, libel, trespassing, unlawful association,
exposing official secrets — and proceed to explain how reporters could best
protect themselves against such legal threats.
As a long-time
friend, we also shared numerous discussions in private on a wide range of topics,
including the country’s delicate political situation with the military still
lying in the wings. In those many talks, I don’t ever recall him touching on
any subject relating to religion, other than the broad notion that there should
be religious freedom in a democratic nation.
So then why was Ko
Ni assassinated? People familiar with his work knew that he was drafting a new,
more democratic constitution to replace the current charter, which was adopted
after a fraudulent referendum in 2008 and bestows ultimate political power on
the military, not elected bodies.
The current charter
gives the military a 25% appointed block in parliament and control over the
government’s three most powerful ministries, namely defense, home and border
affairs. Ko Ni’s main concern was the General Administration Department, a body
under the Ministry of Home Affairs that staffs all local governments, from the
state and region levels down to districts and townships.
While the ministers
who were appointed after the 2015 election won by Aung San Suu Kyi’s National
League for Democracy (NLD) serve as nominal heads of their respective
government departments, the bureaucracy underneath is still populated by
military-appointed officials who dutifully served the previous rights-abusing,
authoritarian regime.
Before the landmark
2015 election, the previous quasi-civilian, military-controlled government even
appointed the permanent secretaries who run the ministries, likely as an
administrative buffer against if and when a truly democratically elected
government rose to power.
Ko Ni wanted to
change all that to firmly consolidate democratic rule, but he also knew that
amending the 2008 constitution would be nearly impossible under the current political
configuration. Because any amendment of the charter requires agreement of more
than 75% of all MPs, the military maintains de facto veto power through its 25%
appointed bloc.
But Ko Ni was a
master at finding loopholes in the military’s constitution, a skill that may
have cost him his life. When Suu Kyi and the NLD won a landslide at the 2015
election, she was prevented from assuming the presidency because her two sons
are not Myanmar citizens – a clause the military imposed specifically to keep her
from becoming national leader.
But Ko Ni devised a
legal solution to the problem: an entirely new, overarching government position
was created — State Counsellor —that allowed Suu Kyi to become de facto head of
state. She is now widely viewed as the country’s undisputed leader, even though
scholar and Suu Kyi loyalist Htin Kyaw officially holds the presidency.
In the same vein, Ko
Ni told me in one of our discussions that there was no point in trying to amend
the 2008 constitution, but that none of its military-promoting clauses said
that parliament couldn’t abolish the charter outright with a majority vote that
opened the way for the adoption of a new, more democratic charter.
Many people knew
that Ko Ni was drafting just such a new constitution at the time of his murder,
a point that was raised at a press conference organized by the police in Yangon
on February 26, a month after his killing. At the event, a local reporter
bravely asked whether Ko Ni’s assassination had anything to do with his work on
a new charter.
The police chief,
Major General Zaw Win, gave a typically evasive answer, saying only that his
officials were investigating various possible motives for his murder. While
police allegedly continue their search and the military mastermind suspect is
supposedly missing, one thing is clear: Ko Ni was killed in cold blood not
because he was a Muslim, but because he was a democrat.
Source: http://ati.ms/HFUQoH