Looking beyond the Myanmar election

Now that we have agreed that Myanmar’s Nov. 7 election is going to be a sham, there is really no point in criticizing the junta and then hoping for a radical change in the way the polls are managed in the two weeks left before voting day.

For what it’s worth, Myanmar’s first elections since 1990 still serve to create a space for free expression that has never existed there before. Those who are truly concerned about the future of Myanmar and its people must look beyond the elections and take advantage of this new space, no matter how small it is.

Anyone hoping for meaningful change from Myanmar’s election should read what Winston Churchill had to say about regimes such as the one currently in control in Myanmar: “Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.”

There is no way (in hell) the military generals in Myanmar will ever let go of their power. While bowing to international pressure to hold elections, they are already making sure that no matter what happens on Nov. 7, they will still control the country.

The military has already barred Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi from running, even to the point of keeping her under detention. Her National League for Democracy, which won the last election in Myanmar in 1990 before it was robbed of its victory by the military, has already been dissolved so as to not upset the generals’ plan.

The election mechanism has been designed to ensure a victory for the junta-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party. In addition, the military is assured 20 percent of the parliamentary seats even before the election day. For good measure, foreign observers and journalists have now been barred from monitoring and reporting on the Myanmar election.

If all this seems familiar to Indonesian onlookers, it is because the Myanmar generals actually came to Jakarta in the 1990s and learned a trick or two from Soeharto how he and his generals had controlled the population through their proxies in the Golkar Party for three decades. They learned from the best and then went further to make sure that nothing went wrong.

The Myanmar dictatorship’s resemblance to Indonesia, however, goes beyond what the junta learned Soeharto. No one expected the Soeharto regime to collapse when it did in 1998. In the same vein, one can almost be sure that the Myanmar junta will crumble sooner or later.

The next chapter from the lesson of Indonesian history is for Myanmar’s civil society. They have to prepare for the eventual collapse of the junta, and fill in the power vacuum that is bound to arise if and when that happens.

A direct comparison between post-Soeharto Indonesia and post-Saddam Hussein Iraq may be far-fetched, but one major difference between these two episodes was that in Indonesia civil society already had a strong presence that could fill the power vacuum left behind by the weakened state following Soeharto’s departure.

Indonesia momentarily had a weak and failing state, but its civil society was there to prop up the nation. Indonesia even elected Abdurrahman “Gus Dur” Wahid from within civil society to become the president of Indonesia in 1999.

Prior to the collapse of the Soeharto regime, Indonesian friends had been busy helping to build the capacity of its civil society organizations, ranging from religious mass organizations to various advocacy groups and the press. By 1998, they were strong enough to help keep the nation intact in the face of the divisive forces contesting for power that emerged after the fall of the dictatorship.

The absence of a strong civil society in Iraq led to the nation degenerating into sectarian conflicts pitting the majority Shiite Muslims, and the minority but powerful Sunni Muslims and Kurds seeking their own independent state in the north. Iraq quickly became a failed state and has been struggling ever since.

Myanmar, a nation made up of several ethnic groups, will likely face similar divisive forces if and when the junta collapses, a factor that the military generals have used as pretext to retain power. This was also a fear tactic used very effectively by Soeharto and his generals in running Indonesia for more than three decades.

Iraq, Myanmar and Indonesia are all nations comprising different ethnic and religious groups. Of the three, Indonesia is in fact the most diverse and therefore the most vulnerable to a breakup into smaller states along ethnic lines. The one factor that kept Indonesia together was the presence of a strong civil society that transcended the racial, ethnic and religious divides. If Indonesia survived — albeit through tumultuous and violent phases in the first years – so should Myanmar.

Friends of the people in Myanmar, whether in Indonesia or elsewhere, will do Myanmar a much better service by focusing on what lies beyond its Nov. 7 elections and using the opportunities these polls create to help strengthen Myanmar civil society. The biggest challenge for Myanmar is not bringing down the military regime, but keeping the nation intact.

As Bob Dylan sings in his famous anti-war song, “How many years can some people exist before they are allowed to be free? … The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind.”

We already know the answer. We just have to make sure the people are prepared when it happens.