Episode 4: Empty Promises
Francis Wade on the Limits of U.S. Democracy Promotion in Myanmar
In 2015, following Myanmar's first free election in a quarter-century, Western governments, including that of the United States, staked their hopes for democracy on Myanmar’s de facto civilian leader, Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. Once regarded as a nascent democracy, Myanmar has sharply backslid in recent years. Suu Kyi’s denial of what the United Nations deems a genocide of the country’s Rohingya population coupled with her fall from power in February’s military coup, shows the limits, and perhaps naivety, of Western-backed democracy promotion.
This week, guest host and Eurasia Group Foundation research fellow Caroline Baxter speaks with journalist Francis Wade. They discuss America's attempts to curb the humanitarian and political crises in Myanmar, and the options (or lack thereof) confronting the Biden administration.
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Francis Wade is a freelance journalist with extensive experience reporting on South and South-East Asia. He is also the author of Myanmar’s Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of a Muslim ‘Other’. You can follow Francis on Twitter at @Francis_Wade.
This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.
Show notes:
“Western powers' empty rhetoric is making things worse for Myanmar's people” (Gabrielle Aron and Francis Wade, The Guardian, 2021)
“The U.S. has no good options in Myanmar” (Francis Wade, Washington Post, 2021)
Archival audio:
Why Myanmar's military overthrew the nation’s democratically elected government (PBS NewsHour, February 1, 2021)
Roads blocked in Yangon as thousands protest Myanmar coup (BBC News, February 17, 2021)
Crackdown on Myanmar protesters intensifies (CBC News, February 15, 2021)
Aung San Suu Kyi falls from grace as humanitarian icon (DW News, September 15, 2020)
Aung San Suu Kyi's turbulent relationship with military (Al Jazeera English, February 1, 2021)
Aung San Suu Kyi: How a peace icon ended up at a genocide trial (BBC News, December 10, 2019)
WATCH LIVE: Biden gives update on U.S. response to the coup in Myanmar (PBS NewsHour, February 10, 2021)
U.S. declares takeover in Myanmar ‘coup’, reviewing sanctions (Arirang News, February 2, 2021)
U.S. threatens sanctions after Myanmar coup (Reuters, February 1, 2021)
Transcript:
May 25, 2021
FRANCIS WADE: All I think one can hope for is that those in Myanmar on the streets, facing down the police, facing down the military, understand that transformative help from the West probably won't be forthcoming and that really the best hope lies with those inside the country whose continued resistance has been quite remarkable.
MARK HANNAH: Welcome to None of the Above, a podcast dedicated to seeking new answers and elevating new ideas for America's role in the world. We are, as you know, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. And with this episode, I'm delighted to introduce a new colleague to you, Caroline Baxter. Caroline is a research fellow who explores American policy in Asia, and so, this week's episode, which takes us to Myanmar, is right up her alley. We're excited to have her.
CAROLINE BAXTER: The crisis in Myanmar is now in its fourth month, and for many serving in the Biden Administration, it's personal. A number of people working on Myanmar today also served under President Obama, an administration which invested heavily in promoting democracy in the country. Pundits and analysts have argued that this crisis is Biden's first major foreign policy test. But a test for what? A test of action? Or a test of nerve? Is there really any productive role the U.S. can play here? As other humanitarian crises unfold, like the escalating violence in Gaza, one can't help but wonder what role the U.S. should be playing, if any, in these conflicts. We certainly have a lot to say, but what should we do? To help us answer this question as it relates to Myanmar, we're joined by journalist Francis Wade speaking to us from London.
WADE: I began working on Myanmar in early 2009 with an exiled media organization, The Democratic Voice of Burma. I began working with them in 2009 as part of their English language news team in Chiang Mai in northern Thailand. And so, I was based outside of Myanmar.
BAXTER: A few months ago, on February 1, there was a coup. Walk us through what happened.
WADE: In November last year, the military’s political party, the Union Solidarity and Development Party, suffered quite a humiliating defeat in elections and then accused the National League for Democracy—which is Aung San Suu Kyi’s party and has long been Myanmar's largest civilian party—of electoral fraud. And it demanded a recount of the votes of the November elections. The election commission refused this recount. So, February comes around just as the new parliament was due to sit—which the NLD, the National League for Democracy, would have dominated—the military staged a coup.
Interlude featuring archival audio
WADE: And that really set the stage for the nationwide protests we've seen today.
Interlude featuring archival audio
WADE: I think the violence that has ensued—close to 700 people have been killed by the military—gives a greater degree of clarity over the military's willingness to use brute force to maintain power.
BAXTER: Brute force is the right turn of phrase. The military has used machine guns and rocket propelled grenades or RPGs on groups of pro-democracy activists. One particularly bloody night in April saw eighty-two people killed in a single city in Myanmar. But protesters are undeterred and continue to take to the streets, demanding the military hand power back to the civilian-elected government. And while some protesters had demonstrated peacefully, many have fled to the jungles to learn guerrilla tactics and train with firearms, while the ousted civilian government has called for the creation of a federal army.
Let's take a step back. Where is Myanmar? It's sandwiched between China to the northeast, Thailand to the southeast, and Bangladesh and India to the west. In 1962, only fourteen years after gaining independence from Britain, Myanmar's young democracy was toppled by a military coup, and the military never truly handed power back. In 2011, a series of elections slowly ceded power back to civilians, but a constitutional amendment that reserved twenty-five percent of the seats in parliament for the military cemented their role in government.
Fast forward to today. Myanmar is once again under complete military control. The democratically elected leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, is in jail, and the country is under a state of emergency.
WADE: Very few outsiders understand the military. It's a very opaque institution. Its inner workings are a mystery. We do know it's very capricious and very cruel. It’s willing to go to any lengths to secure power, to mold Myanmar society into the shape it desires, to cleanse it of those who it sees as undeserving of a place in society. It's a very brutal institution. I don't think anyone really knows how to persuade or coerce it into relinquishing power. It knows who will protect it, and we think most obviously here of Russia and China. It knows the limits of the Western willingness to intervene, that there will be no military intervention. It can mitigate the worst effects of sanctions by maintaining close economic alliances with regional allies. Essentially, it knows the terrain in which it's fighting, and it knows that its opacity and its mysterious inner workings are a hindrance to the ability of Western governments to leverage any influence over it. And it sees no real reason to change it. The military isn't a clique of people bunkering down in the capital. It's present at every level of society, in every town in the country. It's everywhere. The actions it’s taken against protesters—just like the actions it took against the Rohingya and against other ethnic minorities who have resisted total control by the military—show that it is willing to go to any lengths to maintain its power. And I don't think that would change were there to be a military intervention. I think it would double down, and I think it would be absolutely catastrophic for the country.
BAXTER: What about Aung San Suu Kyi? In the U.S., at least, we all seem to know and love that name. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in the 1990s. She and President Obama had a close relationship. He lifted economic sanctions on Myanmar once he saw progress was being made because of her leadership. She was kind of an icon showing people around the world that democracy could prevail against military dictatorships.
Interlude featuring archival audio
WADE: San Suu Kyi is, of course, the daughter of General Aung San who was Myanmar's independence leader, and she returned to the country having been schooled abroad, having gone to University Oxford. She returned to the country as the 1988 uprising was gathering momentum. And because of her relationship to her father, she quickly became a leading figure in the uprising. She became the point person for Western engagement with the opposition in Myanmar. So, she had a huge amount of influence over how policy towards Myanmar was configured. Essentially, as I understand it—and others might disagree—she steered, if not had, the final say over the U.S. approach to Myanmar during the transition period from 2010, I guess, until the coup.
BAXTER: But fast forward to 2017 to the Rohingya crisis. Aung San Suu Kyi, the Democratic icon, excused at best what the United Nations deems a genocide, including the displacement of over 700,000 Rohingya, one of the many ethnic minorities in the country.
Interlude featuring archival audio
WADE: What became clear—and, again, I go back to the Rohingya episode because it is so illustrative of the many maladies and ills that afflicted the country. When that campaign by the military is gathering momentum, or in the years before when Rohingya were being confined to internment camps, we saw very little effort by Suu Kyi and by the NLD to correct that, to address that. It became clear again that perhaps we in the West—governments in the West—had held her aloft as this democratic ideal but hadn't really tested her own interpretation of democracy. She had been this figure that Western governments had invested hugely in, I think, both materially and emotionally, for want of a better word. And when her, I suppose, true stripes were shown—the fact that she carries a deep prejudice against the Rohingya herself, the fact that as she rose higher in government from 2012 onwards, that she had an authoritarian streak herself and sought to centralize what power was available to a civilian leader in her hands—it became clear that once again, Western governments had approached the country rather naively. And they had courted figures rather naively without really testing their stances on issues that were supposedly important to Western visions of a democratic or democratizing state.
BAXTER: As you say, the Rohingya crisis seems to really highlight the pitfalls of U.S. democracy promotion efforts. We supported a leader who was then implicated in the ethnic cleansing and the mass displacement of hundreds of thousands of people. You also argue the same could be said about the coup.
WADE: I think what this coup in February has really demonstrated is the fact that whatever democracy promotion efforts had been pursued by the West over the past decade—and let's remember that heaps of resources were plowed into trying to nudge Myanmar on a supposedly democratic liberal path—those efforts had little lasting effect in terms of reconfiguring the shape and character of the state in Myanmar. And so, I think the coup has provided a chance for quite sobering reflection on the shortcomings of U.S. democracy promotion efforts and general U.S. policies in countries the U.S. doesn't really understand and institutions like the military that it doesn't really understand.
BAXTER: This is clearly not a democracy promotion success story. What went wrong?
WADE: Well, I think we need to go back to look at the level of influence the U.S. has enjoyed in Myanmar over the past decade before we can really answer that question. It's the period leading up to the genocidal assault on the Rohingya in 2016-17 that really, I think, showed the limitations of Western influence in the country and also how disjointed and ultimately ineffective the approaches of the U.N., the U.S., E.U. governments, and so on were. The U.S. in particular seem to believe the military really had reformist intentions, that its so-called roadmap to democracy would end in civilian governance of Myanmar, and essentially that the military would return to the barracks. And so, the U.S. and the U.K. offered these programs of training for young soldiers and policemen in how to act responsibly in their duty and so on. They poured money into cease fire efforts. Over the past decade there was significant investment in the idea that within the military lay in intent to do good and to cede its power to an elected government.
But when these attacks happened on the Rohingya, it became clear that the military would do absolutely as it pleased and that when it felt threatened by the prospect of a civilian government gaining ground, it would resort to lethal measures to try to rally popular support. And so, by the time of 2016-2017, after years or decades of dehumanizing propaganda against the Rohingya, which cast this community as foreign and threatening and so on, they were widely reviled by the population.
The military began its assault in 2016. It drew popular support, and it became clear that not only did the military care little for the supposedly liberalizing efforts of Western governments like the U.S., but so, too, that when it came to certain communities in the country, there was a vicious anti-democratic prejudicial streak within society that could be activated or played on by the military. There were divides, fault lines, that weren’t given due attention, I think, by governments like the U.S. who figure they had the measure of the military.
BAXTER: What you're saying is we really need to reassess our democracy promotion strategy here in the U.S.
WADE: Like I said, I think it provides an opportunity to reflect on where the U.S. has come up short in its attempts to leverage influence over states that have long resisted Western influence, and Myanmar has been one of those.
Interlude featuring archival audio
WADE: Ten years of liberalization. We had answered Aung San Suu Kyi, who's feted by the West in a position of some power within the country. Even despite this, there was resistance within the political elite in the country and within broader society in Myanmar towards Western meddling, intervention, or influence. Again, I keep going back to the Rohingya crisis, but I think it is indicative of how Western countries have a certain idea of how democracy should proceed and the shape and character it should take. Inside Myanmar, the interpretations of what democracy is differ wildly. The genocide of the Rohingya received quite an alarming degree of public support inside the country because it was seen almost as a democratic effort to empower those within the country who are truly deserving of democratic rights—i.e. the indigenous Buddhist community. So, in that sense, I think the U.S. and the U.K. and a lot of other Western countries who promote liberalization abroad have long lacked an understanding of the nuances and the different interpretations of that concept of that institution—democracy, liberalism, and so on. It makes the U.S. appear to be slightly bullish and also slightly naive.
BAXTER: Francis, you had worked on Myanmar for quite some time prior to the coup earlier this year. Tell us about whether you think America's response differs significantly from its responses to previous periods of instability in Myanmar.
WADE: The U.S. response has been, I suppose, the usual combination of targeted sanctions and quite forceful rhetoric. They've gone after both individuals in the military and military-owned companies and conglomerates. These conglomerates are very powerful in the Myanmar economy. They have interests in banking, construction, mining, agriculture, food, and so on. And their economic resources help, in part, to sustain the military. So, I think the U.S., the U.K., and others were right in really going at these powerful economic entities within the country. The language the U.S. has used, I think, has been unusually strong, at least stronger than I've seen it use on Myanmar over the past decade. They are using words like “abhorrent,” “immoral,” and “indefensible” to describe the actions of the military, both its staging of the coup and its attacks on civilian protesters in the aftermath. I think the U.S. government is certainly trying to take a leading role in opposing what has been happening there and trying to, I suppose, prove to the military that it is under scrutiny, that it won't be allowed to continue as it is.
BAXTER: Has anything about the U.S. response surprised you?
WADE: I'm surprised at some of the rhetoric that has come out of Washington and London, given the recent history of forceful rhetoric towards the military and its inefficacy. I worked closely on the Rohingya crisis. I worked closely on ethnic conflicts in the borderlands. I don't doubt that at certain points over the past decade, the Rohingya or other ethnic minorities really believed the West would come to help them, or in the case of the Rohingya—even long before the genocide came to its full expression in the attacks of 2016-2017, when tens of thousands of Rohingya were confined to these camps—that something could be done to end the crimes being committed by the military. Obviously, that never happened, and three quarters of a million people were driven out of the country. Thousands more were killed.
So, it does rankle when the likes of Boris Johnson now promise the military will be, quote unquote, “held to account for the coup,” because where's the evidence this will happen? These are fairly empty promises, I feel. They're intended for posturing. All I think one can hope for is that those in Myanmar on the streets, facing down the police, facing down the military, understand that transformative help from the west probably won't be forthcoming, just as the Rohingya came to learn, and that sanctions and so on will only have a limited effect, and that really the best hope lies with those inside the country whose continued resistance has been quite remarkable. Lots of protesters have held signs saying, “When will intervention come? What about RTP—Responsibility to Protect?”
RTP has three pillars, one of which is military intervention, and that obviously happens after the fact. The other two pillars are preventative. So, it's already too late for those. If people are pushing for the RTP path or route, we’re left with intervention. But the U.S., as I'm sure most of us agree, won't just intervene militarily. There would be little support within the U.S. for that, and I suspect little support within Myanmar. And of course, it would be fiercely opposed by China, who shares a border with Myanmar, who has substantial economic interests there. And my sense is that the forces a military intervention would unleash and the destabilizing effect it would already have on an already woeful situation would last well into the future.
BAXTER: You've written in a few places, The Guardian and The Washington Post among others, that there are only a few good options available to the U.S. that would be less harmful than, say, out and out intervention. Walk us through those options, because, frankly, it's difficult to look at what's going on in Myanmar and not feel the urge to do something, especially when America has invested so heavily in the country's Democratic future. If the Biden Administration says they want to do something, what should they do?
WADE: The U.S. can still pressure work with regional countries. You do have a greater degree of leverage over the military, and I think they are doing that. That should continue. I don't think that's a hopeless endeavor. I think the effect the U.S.-targeted sanctions will only be seen in due course, but I think there's now an opportunity to work closely with opposition groups within the country—civil society groups, exiled media, the General Strike Committee, ethnic minority political groupings, and so on. Those who know how to distribute resources inside the country, who have networks of undercover journalists that continue to report from inside and who can help sustain the population amid the crisis. Those who represent the diverse views inside the country.
I'm somewhat pessimistic about what the U.S. and others can do at a higher, I suppose, more structural level in terms of what influence they have over the military. And I feel ultimately, as I've argued elsewhere, that the U.S., the U.K., and others would do well to do away with these misrepresentations of their influence, because it's, as far as I'm concerned, both arrogant and deceptive. In particular, it’s not rooted in an actual track record of engineering positive, progressive, lasting change in the country.
BAXTER: Thank you so much, Francis, for joining us.
I'm Caroline Baxter, and this has been an episode of None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. I want to give a special thanks to our None of the Above team who make this all possible. Thanks to our producer Caroline Gray, associate producer and editor Luke Taylor, music and mixing by Zubin Hensler, and EGF’s graduate research assistants Adam Pontius and Sean Steinberg. If you enjoyed what you heard, we'd appreciate you subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or anywhere else you find podcasts. Please rate and review us, and if there's a topic you want us to cover, send us an email at info@noneoftheabovepodcast.org. Thanks for joining us. Stay safe out there, and see you next time.
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