Overview: A Land in Transition

Ethnic conflict and political stasis have been at the heart of Myanmar's legacy of underachievement in social and economic development since independence from Great Britain in 1948. The two crises are interlinked and stand in contradiction to the many expectations at independence that Myanmar, a land of abundant human and natural resources, would have the most prosperous future of any of its neighbours. However, with an estimated per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of just US$300 in 1999, a recent United Nations (UN) study concluded that Myanmar was the poorest country in Asia in terms of purchasing power parity at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Furthermore, in a fast-developing region, it is increasingly recognized that the twin ethnic and political crises in Myanmar have significant international dimensions. Located on a strategic crossroads in Asia, Myanmar reflects its heritage as a land of vibrant ethnic and cultural diversity. But such geopolitical complexities also place nationality issues in Myanmar in the front-line of regional developments. For not only do ethnic minorities constitute an estimated third of Myanmar's 53 million population, they also inhabit all the borderlands with the neighbouring countries of China, India, Thailand, Bangladesh, and Laos. With an international frontier-line of 3,650 miles, Myanmar's border territories make up around half its total landmass. All have been the scenes of modern-day conflict in some of the longest running insurgencies in the world.

As a result, it can be concluded from both internal and external experiences since independence that, rather than being marginal or secondary issues, ethnic peace and political inclusiveness in Myanmar are integral preconditions for sustainable development and economic progress in the new century.

At present, under the military State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) government, Myanmar is engaged in its third different era of political transition following the British departure.

Professor David Steinberg, one of the contributors to this volume, had organized an international conference at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, in Washington, D. C. in November 2002. The theme of the conference was “Burma: Reconciliation in Myanmar and the Crises of Change”. Among the participants were three of the contributors to this volume in addition to Professor Steinberg. This was one of innumerable such conferences which have been held in Asia, Europe, and North America since the late 1980s to discuss the current political, economic, and societal issues of Myanmar. Unlike most of these conferences which go over the same ground again and again, this one challenged participants to think of new initiatives and departures which might be constructive in attempting to open up and understand the seemingly intractable nature of Myanmar's problems and issues. Coming fourteen years after the political upheaval, which led to the coming to power of the current military government, and twelve years after the annulled election, which many once saw as a first giant step towards that end, that challenge was most appropriate.

One of the ideas which emerged from the discussions was that an academic conference should be held in Myanmar in order to try to understand how people within the country felt about the issues upon which so many thousands of words have been expended abroad. While since 1995 the Universities Historical Research Centre had been holding international conferences on social science and humanities issues at Yangon University, and a number of international scientific, commercial, and technical seminars had been held within Myanmar since the government had reopened the society to greater international exposure and joined many international organizations, many people assumed that the authorities would never permit independent discussions between foreign scholars and Myanmar citizens on the country's sensitive issues.

Thanks to the encouragement of Mr K. Kesavapany, Director of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS), an opportunity to test that proposition was created in February 2003, when a proposal to hold an eight-day workshop divided between Singapore and Yangon was submitted to the government of Myanmar.

To understand modern Myanmar, one needs to appreciate the various pathways to the present that have come together to create the country's current condition. The inherent complexity of the issues involved is made easier to comprehend if one attempts to analyse separately the various historical forces and understandings that came together to shape the present. But in doing so, one must not lose sight of the actual interconnectedness of the strands of history that are described below. The issues which today concern the citizens of Myanmar are rooted in the country's complex and often contested institutions and history. Those who perceive their solutions as simple, and to be solved quickly by the mere introduction of democratically elected civilian rule, are in danger of deluding themselves.

Without attempting to understand how Myanmar came to its current condition, simplistically proffered recipes for change, democratic or authoritarian, are as likely to result in failure as success. Indeed, it can be argued that the country's condition now is the result of often well-meaning but ultimately foolhardy attempts to apply currently popular political solutions, encapsulated in the most popular ideology of the day, to Myanmar's myriad societal imperatives. “Nationalism”, “socialism”, and “autarky”, just as “federalism”, “autonomy”, and “centralization”, have all had their day as policy prescriptions in post-colonial Myanmar. People have fought and died during the past half century and more to promote and defend diverse sets of inchoate ideas which have marched behind each of these banners. Those that have come to be implemented have often persisted long after they demonstrated their inappropriateness. All have led to the present condition of Myanmar's more than 50 million ethnically and linguistically diverse people.

The complexity of Myanmar is significant by any measure. Geographically it stretches some 1,275 miles from north to south and 582 miles from east to west at its widest point.

Myanmar's foreign relations have been subjected to significant changes from the late 1980s. These changes derive both from domestic political changes within the country as well as international responses to these changes. Depending on the country involved, specific issues have also tended to have an overwhelming impact on bilateral relations. This chapter examines the domestic contours and considerations in Myanmar's foreign policy output as well as the nature of its relations with the United States and the West, China, India, Japan, and the member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). It would not be an exaggeration to note from the very outset that the policy output of the major powers towards Myanmar has tended to be reactive rather than proactive. The policy output of China and ASEAN has tended to be more proactive but these relationships are in turn determined by China's and ASEAN's greater strategic consideration of the bilateral relationship.

Organizationally, this chapter is divided into seven major sections. The first section examines normative values that have informed Myanmar's foreign policy as well as significant historical conjunctions that have led to major shifts in policy positions. The next five sections examine Myanmar's bilateral relations with the United States and the West, China, India, Japan, and ASEAN. Finally, the last section summarizes the nature of Myanmar's bilateral relations with the countries examined.

Significant Historical Conjunctions and Policy Priorities

Myanmar's foreign relations with the external world since the country gained its independence in 1948 were a function of domestic political developments, as noted at the outset, as well as a number of important general perceptions. In terms of important political developments, major historical turning points occurred in 1962 when the military wrested power from the civilian government, and in 1988 when the Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP) government was replaced by the military junta.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, policy-makers and students of comparative government alike have celebrated the large number of countries which supposedly have made the “transition to democracy”. Yet, behind the numbers lies an extraordinarily complex reality and immense problems for most of these countries in making democracy “real”. The mere fact of “free and fair” multi-party elections, the most commonly used indicator of democracy, says little about the actual distribution of power and almost nothing about the quality of governance and broader development of the countries in question.

“Democratization” is a highly complex, multi-faceted and openended process, involving shifts in many different spheres of governance and social relations, often including a stop to armed conflict, the introduction of regular elections for government office, greater freedom of speech and association, an expansion of civil society, and improvements in economic and educational opportunities for the general population. It is the totality of these processes that matters, both for the sustainability of democracy as a system of government and for progress in human security and welfare.

When considering the challenges of transition in Myanmar, it is critically important to keep these complexities in mind. The Myanmar people may both want and need “democracy”, although perceptions of what that entails differ greatly within the country. But there is no single path forward, no one event — whether the inauguration of a new constitution, the holding of multi-party elections or the convening of an elected parliament — that would define success, and no endgame to win or loose. Instead, the focus should be on the multitude of issues that needs to be resolved to facilitate the country's progress towards peace, prosperity, and participatory government. Only then may we begin to capture the true meaning of democratization, and realize the many potential benefits that such a process undoubtedly holds.

Introduction

Compartmentalization has been all too prevalent in analysing the economic problems facing that complex society called, today, Myanmar. An unfortunate academic predisposition exists towards maintenance of the purity of disciplines which often leads observers to separate social sectors into clear and distinct categories. This Cartesian approach may be academically appropriate, but it neglects reality and tends to obfuscate the possibilities of policy formation that could lead to practical results. The development of watertight disciplinary departments that feed within exceedingly limited and abstracted perspectives seems especially rife in the field of economics, where specialists create models that, although internally consistent, may ignore other critical elements that relate to social reality beyond the periphery of the discipline. Complexities in the social sciences that transcend disciplinary categories and are not quantifiable are often attributed to the amorphous arena of “culture”, an ill-defined but exceedingly useful, intellectual quagmire usually denigrated by economists and others as beyond the disciplinary pale. Are they the academic equivalent of Joseph Goebbels who, if memory serves, said that when he heard the word “culture”, he reached for his gun?

The question of disciplinary segregation has also been prevalent in other states and in economic assistance organizations; their experience may offer some lessons for Myanmar and for its future and necessary economic rehabilitation. For example, when the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank criticized South Korea (among other states) during the Asian financial crisis of 1997 for the deleterious link between the state, the supposedly autonomous financial institutions, and big private businesses (chaebol or zaibatsu) that resulted in non-viable lending, favouritism, and corruption among all three groups, they decried it; they were quite accurate that such collusion was rampant and deleterious. The multilateral institutions thus called for reforms which the Korean government agreed to implement. Although the diagnosis may have been correct and the medicine prescribed may have been appropriate, all groups naively believed (or said they believed) that the disease could be isolated by an administrative tourniquet — that there were watertight compartments separating economic reform from other societal aspects.

The intimate and complex relationship between health and socioeconomic development is most readily seen in the close and presumably causal relationship between improvements in a country's socioeconomic status and gains in health status and life expectancy. In particular, improvements in the quality and stability of the food supply, progress in housing and sanitation, and advances in the quality and availability of health services have consistently translated into gains in such macrosocial health indicators as healthy life expectancy (Folch et al. 2003). Less evident but no less important is the close association between major population-level health events — phenomena such as epidemics of severe infectious disease or famine — and declines in a country's social and economic well-being (Bhagava et al. 2001; Watts 1997). This relationship is readily seen in the case of the plague epidemics in medieval Europe (Orent 2004) or the social, economic, and political disruptions effected by AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa (Barnett and Whiteside 2002; de Waal 2003). Other less dramatic but no less important examples include the chronic depression of economic productivity attributable to endemic malaria (Bonilla and Rodriguez 1993; Chima, Goodman, and Mills 2003; Sharma 1996; Utzinger et al. 2002) and seasonal peaks in worker absenteeism (with associated costs) which occur in conjunction with an outbreak of influenza (Szucs 1999).

For a country such as Myanmar where per capita income is low, health care services limited in coverage and sophistication, and general infrastructural development including housing and sanitation, wanting, the drag of adverse health conditions on socioeconomic progress is likely to be considerable, and the issue thus cannot be excluded from any discussion of the country's present status or future prospects. What this chapter sets out to do, therefore, is first to sketch in very broad terms the state of health and health services in Myanmar, and then to look in greater detail at the way in which one significant health event, the recent spread of HIV/AIDS, might be impacting upon national and regional (sub-national) development.

Introduction

New Zealand's relations with Cambodia have not been substantial — there has never been an embassy in Phnom Penh — but diplomatic recognition from 1978 to 1990 was one of the more controversial episodes in New Zealand's diplomatic history. New Zealand acquiesced to the requests of both its ASEAN friends and China, and recognized, first of all, Khmer Rouge representation, and then a coalition that included the Khmer Rouge (including their occupancy of the UN seat). Subsequently, after the Paris Accords, New Zealand made a major contribution (by New Zealand standards) to the peacekeeping mission in Cambodia.

Although New Zealand's controversial recognition policy towards Cambodia in those years ran parallel to that adopted by the United States, the documentary evidence shows that it was Thai, and to a lesser extent Chinese, officials, who persuaded New Zealand to maintain its position — perhaps contrary to what many have assumed. In fact, there is no real evidence that Washington played any kind of leading role in convincing New Zealand to hold the line. But the decision to recognize the Khmer Rouge at the United Nations, and subsequently the resistance coalition, did not sit easily with a succession of New Zealand leaders. Robert Muldoon, while Prime Minister, expressed his displeasure directly to Thai officials over the ongoing role of the Khmer Rouge. The subsequent Lange Administration made more public its dislike of the Khmer Rouge factions within the coalition that it recognized at the UN table, and Foreign Minister Russell Marshall openly referred to the policy as a “dilemma”. Moreover, New Zealand decision-makers were of the opinion that the ongoing hostilities between Vietnam and the three Cambodian resistance groupings merely played into the hands of the Soviet Union — but they were unable to convince their counterparts in the United States, Thailand, and China. Furthermore, the New Zealand public could never understand a policy that appeared to recognize the Pol Pot regime in exile — a regime that, while in government, had been one of the most monstrous in history. Despite this unhappiness with ASEAN's policy on Cambodia, there was never any serious contemplation of going against it. New Zealand would try to persuade ASEAN, but would always abide by ASEAN's final decision — until the break finally came in 1990 during the Cambodian peace process.

Much has been written about the effects of regional autonomy on natural resource management in Indonesia. While a survey of the literature generally will tout the benefits of decentralised management in the form of greater responsiveness, greater efficiency, greater transparency, greater accountability and so on, the literature on decentralisation in Indonesia – particularly as it relates to natural resource management – has been much less sanguine, portraying a system of governance that has moved rapidly towards greater exploitation at the regional level, with almost daily reports in local papers of corruption among regional parliaments, and little transparency among regional administrative offices (see, for example, Bünte 2004). At the same time, some districts and provinces (collectively referred to as regional governments) have undertaken some excellent initiatives and enacted some excellent regulations in order to better promote sustainable management, and clarify and enhance the administrative structure for more transparent natural resource management decisions. The question is now one of implementation of those regulations (Asia Foundation 2003).

Regardless of the direction, regional governments in Indonesia for the most part have fulfilled one universal truth of decentralisation: they have been much quicker and more responsive in exercising their newfound authorities than the central government has been in providing guidance or standards for those authorities. Only in 2004 – almost five years after the original decentralisation laws were enacted – did the central government enact revisions to those laws, and it is still developing a series of laws to better address natural resource management specifically.

The economy has performed reasonably well over the last year, as is evident in the most prominent macroeconomic indicators. Much recent commentary has emphasised that this has been achieved at the same time that Indonesia has been undergoing radical political change. In particular, with President Megawati's position under threat, fiscal responsibility could easily have been forgotten, and any number of populist but counterproductive economic policies could have been introduced. Seen from this perspective, macroeconomic performance has indeed been commendable. On the other hand, there has also been a good deal of commentary that is considerably more pessimistic, suggesting that the glass is half empty rather than half full. Observers in this category tend to focus on the things that are not going well, or not as well as they should be, viewed from a more absolutist perspective of economic performance and policy evaluation that abstracts from the political and social context.

GROWTH OF OUTPUT AND PER CAPITA INCOME

Termination of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) program at the end of 2003 has had no noticeable impact on Indonesia's economic performance. For the last two years, output of the economy has been growing at about 4.8 per cent per annum; this compares with an average of 7.5 per cent for the four years just before the crisis (June 1993 to June 1997). Indonesia's recession was so severe that it took about five years for GDP to return to the level it had attained prior to the downturn. By 2004 it was about 10 per cent higher, but in 2003 national income per capita was still more than 4 per cent less than in 1997, as a result of population growth; in this important sense, the economy has yet to return to pre-crisis levels of prosperity.

Introduction

New Zealand did not “discover” Southeast Asia (to the extent that one can speak of “Southeast Asia”) until well after the end of World War II and thus, did not have much to do with the region in any way before then. Indeed, there was early senior level scepticism about the region. In 1953 future Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Frank Corner (then External Affairs Officer in New Zealand's High Commission in London), could write to the then Secretary, Alister McIntosh, that “we only stand to lose in South East Asia … our present limited interest in South East Asia, shown in our contribution to the Colombo Plan, has already cost us a good deal of money with doubtful benefit to us or the recipients”. Perhaps fortunately, Corner's view did not prevail although it took some years before New Zealand was ready to embrace the region wholeheartedly. By 1970, New Zealand officials noted the policy “of active involvement in Asia [effectively Southeast Asia] … participating in a new move to develop regional groupings[which was in its] early stages [and] widened the scope for us to influence Asian political thinking”.

International organizations generally were themselves also the subject of some early scepticism. As early as 1947 New Zealand Ambassador to the United States, Carl Berendesen, noted the proliferation of “United Nations and other commissions, missions, committees, conferences and so forth. I think there is a serious risk of the whole thing getting quite out of hand”. That attitude has not been unusual over the years as New Zealand has attempted to balance the costs of participating in international and regional organizations with the benefits of that participation. In practice, New Zealand has always committed itself to international organizations reluctantly, continually worrying whether value for money would be gained by membership or whether attendance would merely perpetuate talk at the expense of substantive and beneficial action. This reluctance is curious when balanced with the knowledge that New Zealand has only limited ability to achieve its international ends unless it does work through international organizations.

New Zealand's relationships with Southeast Asia's regional organizations may be considered in terms of two perhaps three distinct but overlapping phases.