Truths and totalitarianism are irreconcilable. They have
never co-existed, they do not coexist, and they never will.
 |
| S.Gen Ming Aung Hlaing & Daw Aun San Suu Kyi |
By Dr.Maung Zarni @drzarni (
Whatever the exterior - fascist, corporatocracy
(government of, for and by corporations), military, communist, or theocratic -
the regimes of un-truths share a common hallmark, namely, their marked disdain
for empirical facts that undermine their legitimacy. Through manufactured
falsehoods, they all try relentlessly to establish and maintain a monopoly grip
on power and control the population, both bodies and minds.
 |
| Suu Kyi & Army Chief Min Aung Hlaing |
The arrest of two Burmese Reuters journalists who were
sniffing the military’s dark “top secrets” in Rakhine is just one evidential
incident in a long series of frontal assaults on truths which Myanmar’s
NLD-military hybrid regime seeks to conceal. Myanmar government uses
anachronistic colonial-era ‘security and anti-sedition’ laws to put in interrogation
cells journalists or activists who attempt to uncover and expose them at great
personal risk, while it labels some of us outside Myanmar as ‘national
traitors’ and ‘enemies of the state’. As a recipient of such high national
honour, I speak from my own experience.
This is not news, however. Astute students of politics
know very well the hand-in-glove nature of falsehoods (official propaganda) and
political repression, in all senses of the word.
But what is new, and deeply troubling, is the “Free
World” of the West (that is, USA, Canada, EU, Japan and Australia, as well as
certain UN agencies) are resorting to exactly the same type of totalitarian
methodology insofar as their justifications offered in defence of their
business-as-usual Myanmar policies are concerned. That is, London, Washington,
Brussels and other western regimes are crafting, promoting and defending a
single lie, just as they put out ‘statements of grave concerns’ directed at
their increasingly repressive Myanmar business partner.
This foundational lie of today’s western policies towards
Myanmar goes something like this:
The country is in a fragile democratic transition under
the leadership of Aung San Suu Kyi, who represents ‘the best hope’ for the
people. Accordingly, the West’s Myanmar policy delusion demands that we suspend
our common sense and swallow its self-serving discourse of ‘balancing’ the need
to address the country’s genocide of Rohingyas and stand with the Great
Democratizer, that is, Aung San Suu Kyi.
These prevailing Myanmar policy discourses are
self-serving at best and sinister at worst. As a Burmese activist who has
worked on Myanmar political and policy affairs for nearly 30 years, having
lived in Washington and London, I smell a rat.
These discourses under their liberal veneer are
self-serving because they enable Western commercial and strategic interests,
however defined and whatever they are, to stay put in Myanmar despite the
genocide. And they are sinister because western policy-makers know that the road
to democracy and human rights has never run through any totalitarian ideology
or system. Nazi Germany, fascist Japan, communist dictatorships of former USSR
and the now deceased Eastern Bloc spring to mind.
And my country of birth today, both the ruling hybrid
regime and the society at large, is progressively moving not towards any form
of pro-human rights democracy, but towards what I call Buddhist Fascism.
In this sordid political climate in Myanmar, the formerly
pro-human rights public, peaceful Buddhist Order and pro-human rights
dissidents, from Aung San Suu Kyi and former student leaders of the Great
Uprising of 8.8.88, have closed ranks with their former military jailors and
torturers. Their new-found mission is nothing short of building a Myanmar majoritarian
ethnocracy where Buddhism is systematically misused as the state’s political
ideology. The Commander-in-Chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing has repeatedly
declared ‘defence of Buddhism’ as an additional duty of the armed forces, in
addition to serving as the self-style institutional shepherd of what the
generals call ‘Discipline Flourishing Democracy’. His former titular boss,
ex-general and President Thein Sein, enacted the Four Race and Faith Defence
Laws, persecutorial and discriminatory towards millions of non-Buddhist
citizens.
In addition, Myanmar military has accomplished its
long-standing, if unwritten, objective of cleansing the armed forces of any
officer who is not Buddhist. While the country’s most powerful institution is
well-known for its Islamophobia, what is less known is that Christianity is
widely mocked, being called “Virus C”, sufficient ground for discharging
military officers from strategic positions.
To the dismay of many of its Muslim supporters, Aung San
Suu Kyi’s NLD party, with the parliamentary majority has followed suit: it has
not a single Muslim representative, thanks to the autocratic Suu Kyi’s
single-minded strategy of pandering to the racist Buddhist majority.
Consequently, for the first time in the country’s
1,000-years of recorded history, Myanmar now has Muslim-free armed forces, a Muslim-free parliament
and a Muslim-free
executive branch. (The judiciary doesn’t count as its decisions are
dictated by those in the executive branch and ultimately by the military).
 |
| Thidagu preaching to the Army Generals |
Religion isn’t the only issue that drives both the NLD
and the military’s policies and political moves. The Burmese majoritarian
ethnic identity is inseparable from this institutionalisation of Buddhism as
the country’s ruling political ethos, displacing, in effect, any secularist
values such as respect for non-Buddhist and non-Burmese ethnic and religious
minorities, multiculturalist pluralism, fundamental human rights, civil
liberties and intellectual and press freedoms.
In response to a strong criticism by the UN Special
Rapporteur on human rights situation in Myanmar Professor Yangee Lee directed
at the country’s state actors, the NLD-controlled national parliament passed
unanimously the NLD’s motion, specifically designed to condemn Ms Lee and her
mission to investigate and highlight human rights violations. Only in a
totalitarian system of governance is such unanimity of views and votes
conceivable and possible.
Indeed, Myanmar today is, in essence, more akin to
Germany in the 1930’s where a single ethnic community, namely German Jews, were
singled out and made scapegoats for all the fears and ills that the
majoritarian public was reeling from.
It defies intelligence to paint, as western governments
and regional blocs such as EU are doing now with a collective straight face,
Myanmar’s emerging populist politics with its fascist characteristics as a
‘fragile democratic transition’. This is against the backdrop of Rohingyas
being singled out as ‘illegal Bengali migrants’, for extermination the way
European Jewry were in the Nazi-occupied Europe.
What of Myanmar’s “best hope”, namely Aung San Suu Kyi,
who had until recently been viewed worldwide as ‘Asia’s Mandela’ or an iconic
leader in the mould of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.?
Suu Kyi’s abysmal record on human rights promotion since
her release from house arrest in November 2010 speaks volumes. Dismissing any
association of human rights with her leadership - “I am not a human rights
defender, but have always been leader of the political opposition” - the NLD
leader has chosen not to stand up for the displaced Burmese farmers, the
non-Bama ethnic minorities, for instance, Christian Kachins in the war zones of
Eastern Myanmar, student dissidents who demanded democratic educational
reforms, and even her own rank and file members who attempted to challenge the
military-backed racial and religious discrimination.
And worse still, Suu Kyi has on more than one public
occasion, expressed her ever-lasting ‘affection’ - which she qualifies as
‘genuine’ - for what she calls ‘my father’s army’, even when her former captors
in general’s uniform have long been accused of commissioning all crimes in the
international law book including war crimes, crimes against humanity and
genocide.
On Ms Suu Kyi’s role in these governmental crimes since
she entered into a partnership with the military, the UN High Commissioner for
Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein recently told the BBC that "…there's
the crime of omission. That if it came to your knowledge that this was being
committed, and you did nothing to stop it, then you could be culpable as well
for that."
One year ago, in the Foreign Policy article entitled ‘A
Genocide in the Making’, Sir Geoffrey Nice, the lead prosecutor in the trial of
Slobodan Milosevic, wrote these prophetic words: “Today we know enough about
the conditions that give rise to genocide that no one in power can justifiably
claim ignorance.... Suu Kyi should know that inactivity in the face of genocidal
actions can carry moral, legal, and even criminal responsibility.”
Five years ago the world welcomed and held up the
‘Burmese Spring’ as a model democratic transition. Now the only transition that
my old society is undergoing is a transition to Buddhist fascism.
In today’s Myanmar former dissidents speak of ‘national
security’ against Muslims - and particularly against vulnerable Rohingyas - and
most local journalists use their hard-earned press freedom to promote the
military’s brand of hatred.
It is well past time that the Western governments and
international institutions stop peddling their twin delusions about my
country’s ‘fragile democratic transition’ and its Nobel ‘woman of destiny’.
(Maung Zarni is a Burmese human rights
activist, an adviser to the European Centre for the Study of Extremism based in
Cambridge, UK and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Sleuk Rith Institute in
Cambodia).