Myanmar’s startling changes: Pragmatic virtues || The Economist
Another day, another milestone: there appears to be no let-up in the frenetic pace of Myanmar’s political transformation. In early February, for the first time in memory, the finance minister revealed details of the government budget. In a speech to parliament (of all places: the place had been considered a joke), he also divulged how much Myanmar owed in foreign debt ($11 billion). Then, a couple of days later, the hitherto secretive and repressive dictatorship told a UN human-rights envoy that it will now consider allowing monitors into the country for by-elections on April 1st.
It would be an extraordinary step. These will be the first parliamentary seats to be contested by Aung San Suu Kyi’s opposition party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), since it was unbanned by the government just a few months ago….
Yet the question remains why an entrenched military regime, in power since 1962, is doing all this now, and so fast. In comparison with the bloody political upheavals in the Middle East, Myanmar’s political revolution has been top-down and largely peaceful. The changes may yet prove to be more profound than in Libya or Egypt.
Long-term anxieties contributed to the generals’ change of heart. After decades of failed socialist planning followed by a few more of military crony capitalism, the regime became increasingly aware that once-rich Myanmar had in its hands fallen embarrassingly far behind the neighbours. At some point, this humiliation trumped the ability of a few to make very corrupt fortunes.
In the spirit of openness now sweeping the country, officials acknowledge that the economy was in no shape, for instance, to prosper after Myanmar’s planned entry into a single market among the ten-country Association of South-East Asian Nations in 2015. What is more, many in government badly want their country to be reconnected to sources of international finance, especially the IMF and the World Bank. Myanmar has been denied this under Western sanctions. If prisoners must be freed to get sanctions lifted, so be it.
Many presumed that these sanctions did not worry the generals because they could rely on Chinese aid instead. Not so. Particularly in northern Myanmar, the often arrogant and sometimes brutal behaviour of Chinese companies in the end alienated even the government. What is more, the sort of technical and educational assistance—“capacity-building” in the jargon—that Myanmar now craves is just what China does not do. Thus the generals have been obliged to turn back to the West, and political reform.
Government types now acknowledge that other factors were at work, too. One high-up official concedes that the reform process was greatly accelerated last year by the Arab spring. This scared the generals: “it was a very critical time for us”. The regime was afraid that opposition groups would take to the streets again, as they had done in 1988 and 2007, maybe in conjunction with the many armed groups, including among the Karen and Kachin minorities, fighting ethnic insurgencies in the border regions. It was time, this official says, to pursue national reconciliation.
