Burmas Military as the Countrys Blackhole Introduction Burmas military, both the despotic leadership and its institutional

instrument of power, Page | 1 namely the Tatmadaw or the Royal Army, remains enigmatic, in spite of it being in power for half-a-century (since 2 March 1962). It is the black hole of understanding in knowledge produced about Burma The world knows a lot about Aung San Suu Kyi her political beliefs and stance, her inspiring personal tale, and her pedigree. Even her aesthetic tastes are well-publicized, and so are the abuses and acts of persecution towards her. And yet the world knows surprisingly little about the countrys dictatorship, despite its half-century of military rule and the exceedingly negative impact that has had on Burmese society, culture, economy, politics, and foreign relations. This is not surprising since dictatorships typically thrive on secrecy about their modus operandi, and the resultant confusion amongst the oppressed. The Burmese dictatorship is no exception in this respect. In contrast, iconic dissidents such as Aung San Suu Kyi and opposition movements can only sustain their relevance and popular support by making their views, stances and strategies accessible to their friends and supporters, as well as opponents and detractors. Systems of political repression strive to paralyze the domestic public and its international supporters, while liberation struggles seek to mobilize both. Despite their often-reported ignorance, the military rulers in Burma are, in fact, far better informed about the world than they are given credit for, but the world continues to deliberate as to what will help nudge the Burmese dictatorship out of their darkness. The Burmese despots may feign strategic ignorance, but it would be a mistake to underestimate their knowledge of the world. As a Burmese saying goes, the ruler has 1,000 ears. According to Kyaw Thet, former professor of international relations and history at Rangoon University, General Ne Win sent one of his personal assistants to fetch a copy of Kyaw Thets doctoral thesis which examined the Sino-Burmese relations. In Professor Kyaw Thets words, (of all people) the General was the only one who showed a genuine interest in my thesis. The current aging despot Senior General Than Shwe, a former instructor at the now defunct Central School of Political Science at Chawtwingone, a suburb of Rangoon, is known among the staff of Foreign Ministry and Ministry of Defense to take interest in strategic ideas about international relations. Before the relocation of the old capital from Rangoon to the purpose-built new capital at Naypyitaw, Than Shwe was known to have surprised the staff at the National Defense College, the countrys highest-level staff college for upwardly mobile military officers, by coming to attend class discussions and listen in on seminars.

Over this half-century, successive military rulers have adopted a rather successful strategy of keeping their inner circles and the institution of military as little understood or readable as possible, by friends and foe alike. Even Beijing, the regimes most important international supporter and business partner, was left in the dark on 6 November 2005, when Page | 2 the regime decided to relocate the entire administrative capital from the colonial Rangoon to Naypyidaw, the purpose-built brand-new military fortress, complete with N. Korean-designed underground bunkers and escape tunnels. Regardless of the Chinese leaderships reported serious irritation at being kept in the dark, the military typically takes enormous pride on being able to keep its affairs and modus operandi secretive, unpredictable and thoroughly understudied. An illustrative motto Reveal little, listen, look and gather all you can posted on the door of former Military Intelligence Unit Number 7 on Halpin Road, Rangoon sums up the militarys strategic stance on informational and institutional secrecy. It is also considered treason for the rank and file members to communicate with foreigners, without prior authorization. And those who are officially assigned to liaise with foreign visitors of all national backgrounds are highly trained, least likely to spill any beans about their institution and least prepared to speak their mind to any foreign visitors. During the first military dictatorship of General Ne Win (1962-88), in the middle of 1970s, the regime relaxed a little in this respect by allowing some of its top commanders to mingle with western diplomats and military attaches. Declassified US Embassy cables from that period sent to Washington by its diplomatic intelligence unit in Rangoon indicate that exBrigadier Thaung Dan, former Deputy Chief of Staff Air Force, and a graduate of the Japanese Military Academy in the 1940s, would make personal requests to the Embassy staff to get certain books, such as Dr Ba Maws Breakthrough in Burma (Yale University Press), at the time banned by the Burmese regime. Also former Defense Minister ex-General Tin Oo (now the 82-year-old vice-chair of Aung San Suu Kyis National League for Democracy party) was allowed to play tennis with western diplomats by mid-1970s. These restrictions have been tightened since the end of General Ne Wins rule. Headquartered in the remote new capital Naypyidaw, the military is increasingly inaccessible to the West. In 50 years, only two foreign scholars have been granted limited access to the Army Archives, Ministry of Defense. (They are Robert H. Taylor and Mary Callahan, the political scientists who respectively authored The State in Myanmar (1987) and Making Enemies: War and State Building in Burma (2003). After a serious vetting process by the military intelligence and blessings from the highest level of authorities, both Ne Win and Than Shwes regimes officially allowed these Americans in as researchers, Taylor in the early 1970s and 1980s and

Callahan a decade later. Even then, no archival materials dated after 2 March 1962, the date of the military coup, were made accessible to either researcher. The now widely-acknowledged fogginess of the worlds knowledge of Burmas military dictatorship and the military as their institutional base of power is the intended outcome of a Page | 3 deliberate strategy of information and data control. Thus the resultant general ignorance about the generals and their world, and the generals studied display of ignora nce about the outside world has served the countrys dictatorship rather well. The generals have apparently taken Sun Tsus advice to heart, Confuse your enemies, and turned it into the official policy regarding information about the military. The Nationalist Military or a Nationwide Mafia? On the eve of the countrys greatest popular uprisings in 1988, a decorated soldier with the rank of major remarked candidly to me that, the Tatmadaw or the countrys Armed Forces in which he served had morphed from the once venerable national and nationalist institution into the countrys largest mafia, soaked in corruption and rotten to its core, with all the manifest characteristics of a criminal network. Sitting in his office in a military compound and looking deeply dismayed, this officer mocked such a long-cherished popular notion as soldiers as ultimate patriots. He continued, We call ourselves patriots and nationalists. A ll we do is steal from the people and rob them of their future. This whole army stinks. My wife has to suck up the wife of my boss. The guy below me licks my boots and I have to do the same with my superiors. If I want to climb the career ladder I have to pay my commanding officer. This chain of bribery and corruption is pervasive. His final solemn words of advice to me were: So, dont come back here (to Burma). Find greenerpastures and settle there . The overwhelming majority of foreign writers, experts on Burma and diplomats usually find the Burmese military dictatorship morally repugnant and show varying degrees of disdain towards the ruling generals. And yet many of them would not hesitate to use the term nationalist to describe the motivations of military personnel. What moved a decorated soldier to speak unequivocally ill of his surrogate parents, the army, while many Burma scholars and journalists who have never met a flesh-and-blood Burmese soldier and/or set their foot on a military compound refer to the very same institution as nationalistic? Soldiers surrogate parents is a special term the Ministry of Defense Directorate of Psychological Warfare has coined and actively promulgated among the militarys rank and file members in order to specifically remind the armed service personnel that their primary allegiance is to the Armed Forces, which is coterminous with the sovereign Burmese nation-state. Upon hearing the speculations about the possible reforms that it was said would come about from the formation of a new cabinet and a new parliament in April 2010, a former junior

general who was forced to retire, now resident in Rangoon, remarked to a foreign visitor that the new generation of rising military officers would be more interested in getting to the buffet table than launching genuine reforms to address the concerns of public welfare. That was in spring 2010, two decades after my own officer friend, the major, described the military, his Page | 4 employer, as a national mafia. And yet one often hears policy makers and the popular press making references to the Burmese military rulers and the military as fiercely nationalistic as if this presumed nationalism explains and justifies the generals behavior, policies and practices. What is in the regimes nationalism? Why does it qualify to be referred as such? Do national level mafias have ideologies that can be glorified as nationalisms in the most elemental sense of advancing the interests and agenda of ones own (presumably) mono-ethnic nation within and without the recognized territorial confines? Since its inception as a revolutionary armed force in 1942 by Aung San, father of Aung San Suu Kyi, and his revolutionary comrades, including Ne Win, the countrys military has gone through a regressive evolution. At the outset, this military was generally a popular nationalist institution which helped restore a sense of national pride among the dominant Burmese or Bama majority, who had been barred by the British rulers from carrying knives bigger than pencil sharpeners while the Raj was recruiting large numbers of exclusively non-Burmese ethnic groups into its local imperial army and organizing them for ethnic based battalions such as the Chin Rifles, Kachin Rifles, and so on. Despite how nationalism was used to mobilize support for the armed forces in the period immediately after independence, by 1962 the countrys armed forces were blowing up nationalist symbols such as Rangoon University Student Union building and indiscriminately killing unarmed students on campus. At the second party Congress in 1968, General Ne Wins deputy San Yu, who was 2nd in command of the Revolutionary Council government, officially declared that that the newly established Burma Socialist Programme Party and its nucleus of military officers considered both politically active students and Buddhist monks to be the greatest challenge to his government as enemies of the State. The regimes bloody crackdown, raiding hundreds of monasteries, and indiscriminate shooting and killing of students and monks during the Saffron Revolt (of the saffron-color-robed monks) in 2007 is only the best known and most recent event in a long-running tension between these two groups and the state. The same military internally discriminates against military officers of Christian faith, denies Muslim Rohingyas the right to nationality resulting in systematic abuse and exploitation, loots local Karen villages, scavenges from rural populations, condones the rape of ethnic minority women and girls by military personnel in the war zones of Eastern Burma, tortures

Burmese political opposition, auctions off the countrys irreplaceable natural assets such as rivers, forests, minerals, natural gas and so on, confiscates thousands of acres of virgin lands from minorities for the development of mono-crop agri-business with no compensation to the latter, , forcibly relocates hundreds of villages in armed conflict zones and uses innocent Page | 5 villagers and prison convicts alike as human mine-sweepers and porters during military operations. As recently as March 2010 the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Burma, Tomas Quintana, repeated his official calls to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva to establish the UN-led Commission of Inquiry to investigate alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the military-ruled Burma, a call that has been backed by several previous Special Rapporteurs and Harvard Law Schools International Human Rights Clinic. During his address at the Annual Conference of the Commanding Officers of the Defense Services on 9 September 1957, Burmas first Prime Minister (and the last democratically elected one before the coup of 1962) with an illustrious nationalist career, spoke these prophetic words: there are generally two different types of armies: a truly national peoples army, and a pocket army for the powers that be. The primary task of a truly national peoples army is to protect the lives and property of the people . Thus in countries which have truly national peoples armies, the people do not go about in fear of the army. A pocket armys primary task is to protect the lives, property, status and vested interests of the party or the individuals who are exploiting the pocket army. (As such), the people have no regard or respect for the army, but only a great loathing and fear. Whatever the nomenclature, a national mafia or pocket army of the ruling military class or a despotic general, todays Tatmadaw or Army of Burma is, without a doubt, as widely feared as it is loathed. Here one needs to examine the militarys regressive evolution in terms of its institutional ethos, culture and practices, historical conditions which have caused the militarys regressive evolution towards its mafia-like nature, and the beliefs and attitudes of those who lead, manage and man this omnipresent organization. Whose military is it? The Evolution of the Institutional Mission and the Sources of Influence One of the best known historical facts about the military in Burma is that it was first and foremost the direct product of fascist Japans military strategy which sought to recruit, train and arm local nationalist elements in Asia against the British and Allied forces. Subbas Chandra Bose of the Congress Party and Aung San of the Burma Freedom Bloc, founders of the Indian Independence Army (IIA) and, more consequentially, the Burma Independence Army (BIA), are just two of the best-known names. While Tokyos efforts at using the IIA as its local proxy to repel the British out of the Indian sub-continent didnt come to fruition, their sway over the Burmese nationalists whom

they trained and armed to become the nucleus of the Burmese Army was rather short-lived. It was only 3 years (from 1942-45) before the Burmese turned against the Japanese who, upon entering and replacing the British rule with its military occupation, reneged on their promise of Burmese independence in exchange for local assistance to Tokyo under the banner of Asia for Page | 6 Asians. The original Burmese admiration for Japan as the most powerful non-European power was primarily based on her status as a victorious military and industrial power after it emerged victor in the Russo-Japanese war of 1905. Forty years since its victory over Tsarist Russia, Japan had not only lost its political and military independence of the United States but also its standing in the eyes of the Burmese. Despite the lasting psychological special tie, which the Japanese veterans reportedly retained decades after the WWII ended, towards its former Burmese military proxies, the influence of Japan in the Burmese military since Japans military defeat has been minimal. For one, Japan itself had to accept the humiliation of total surrender to the United States and all Allied Forces in August 1945. Second, even if the Japanese veterans wanted to revive the old military ties, it would have been inconceivable under Japans US-imposed Constitution, which bars Japan from building even its own national armed forces. Naturally, the Burmese nationalists, both civilians and their military comrades, looked to the new victors, namely the United States, as a source of support and new military inspiration. Japans status as the single largest provider to Burma of Overseas Development Assistance during the post-independence period in Burma did not have any impact on the institutional developments of the Burmese military. It was the Cold War which, without a doubt, indelibly shaped developments within the military as an armed organization, as well as developments outside the militarys institutional boundaries (such as the nature of the militarys relations with other constitutive elements of a new modern state including political parties, business and commercial elites, autonomy- and/or independence-minded ethnic minorities, Burmese communist movements and so on). While the civilian democratic government of U Nu was a prominent player in the then newly hatched Non-Aligned Movement, the Burmese military leaders such as Brigadier Maung Maung, a personal staff officer assigned to Major General Aung San during the Japanese occupation period, were developing ties with and seeking support from the United States and, to a lesser extent, the UK for the militarys expansion and qualitative upgrade of its weapons and the build-up of militarys human resource base, the cadets and officers. As powerful head of the Directorate of Military Training (DMT), Maung Maung was hugely influential in shaping a new generation of military officers as he presided over the founding of both the militarys most prestigious Defense Services Academy (DSA) and the most advanced staff college, the National Defense College (NDC) in the mid-1950s. Many members of the faculty in these institutions

were drawn from the pool of Burmese graduates of Britains Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and US Staff and Command Colleges. The fact that the Burmese military, now under the leadership of commanders and directors who received their training from the Japanese military, made a conscious decision to Page | 7 model the militarys command structures, its human resource development and intelligence training on the United States military should give those who feel tempted to find explanation for their current conduct in the fascist Japanese origins of todays Burmese military pause for thought. For its part, the United States more or less embraced the mildly socialist, nationalist civilian politicians (such as U Nu, Ba Swe and Kyaw Nyein) all of whom, staunchly antiCommunist, were leading the efforts to defeat Burmese communists underground and above ground movements. Even if the senior military leadership such as General Ne Win felt a need to strike the militarys balance in terms of its external relations by maintaining cordial ties with both eastern and western bloc countries and their militaries, the rank and file officers of the Burmese military have long been pro-USA. According to the Voice of America Burmese Services interview with 82-year-old former General Tin Oo, Defense Minister under General Ne Win in the mid-1970s (who is co-founder of the Aung San Suu Kyis National League for Democracy) broadcast in April 2011, many officers in the Defense Ministry, were unhappy with Ne Wins decision to reject, out of political concerns, the US offer of sophisticated fighterbombers kept in hangers at US Air Force bases in Thailand at a mere $1 million per piece, after the US ended its military involvement in Vietnam. In addition to this near complete break from its Japanese fascist roots, the military has long abandoned the fragile legacy of its founder General Aung San, namely Aung Sans commitment to keep the military under the control of civilian politicians and political revolutionary leadership ala USSR and other communist models. As evidenced in the renaming of one important public holiday, Resistance Day (Resistance against fascist military occupation from 1942-45), as Armed Forces Day, the Burmese military has, over the past 50 years, made concerted efforts to rewrite its own institutional history, as well as that of the countrys nationalist movement. It portrays itself rather incorrectly as the sole vanguard of Burmas liberation struggle against first ly British imperialism and later Japanese fascist military rule. The revolutionary leadership which led the well-timed armed resistance against the Japanese military occupation in Spring 1945 (summer in Burma) came from Burmese Communists such as Thakhin Soe and Thakhin Than Tun, as well as from the then head of the Burma Defense Army, Major General Aung San. Aung San himself cut his teeth as a Marxist-influenced student agitator on Rangoon University and was one of the five founding members of colonial Burmas first communist cell. Under these mens leadership, local resistance commands were formed along the communist resistance model according to which military commanders are answerable to the political commissars attached to their commands.

Shortly after the WWII ended, Lord Louis Mountbatten invited Aung San and a group of nationalist leaders including the prominent communist leaders such as Than Tun and Thein Pe to Kandy, then Ceylon, where Mountbatten was headquartered as the supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Southeast Asia, to discuss inter alia the future of the Japanese-trained Page | 8 Burma Army under Aung Sans military leadership. Now that the British had restored its postWWII colonial rule in Rangoon, Aung San was presented with a choice between staying on as the head of the soon-to-be-down-sized Burmese nationalist army, keeping his majors general uniform on, or relinquishing his military post and becoming a national politician. Under the British proposal the national resistance army would be downsized, and only a certain number of qualified Burmese officers would be given direct commission, with their old ranks transferred automatically into the newly restructured military along the British model of a professional military. Aung Sans communist rivals pressured him to stay on as head of the new Burma Army so that political leadership of the post-WWII popular nationalist movement, and conceivably the power to shape the future course of post-colonial Burma, would be left in their hands. Against their advice, Aung San chose the civilian politician role, giving up official military titles and ties with the newly restructured Burma Army and handed over the command of the military to Colonel Letyar, his close comrade and long-time friend from his Rangoon University student agitator days. Following this arrangement Aung San was no longer the General, but the Burmese public continued to address or refer to him as Bogyoke or Commander in Chief or Chief General until his assassination on 19 July 1947. Despite the official uses of hagiographic tales of General Aung San by his close personal aides and comrades in arms (for instance, Director of Military Training the late Brigadier Maung Maung, and most specifically General Ne Win) , there have been no known attempts to restore Aung Sans legacy of keeping the military as a professional organization which is accountable to the civilian democratic leadership during the past half-century of military rule. Aung Sans early death was tragic not only for the countrys ethnic relat ions but also because early attempts by this remarkable nationalist revolutionary to professionalize the military in the soon-to-be independent British colony were buried with his remains in 1945. At the time, Aung San Suu Kyi was barely 2 years old. Relying on her secondary knowledge of her fathers political legacy which should include his short -lived and little known efforts to keep the military a professional force under civilian political leadership, she has been calling for the reform of the military along a more professional and honorable line, a call that has fallen on deaf-ears over the past 22 years since she first asked the question Whose military is the Tamadaw?, stating specifically that the Army of her father was to be the peoples national army.

The Burmese generals were not the only ones to conveniently overlook the need to keep the countrys armed organization at a healthy distance from the countrys necessarily messy democratic politics during the decade that immediately followed independence. Domestically, a multiplicity of armed rebellions by both Burmese communist parties and nonPage | 9 Burmese ethno-nationalist organizations such as the Karen National Defense Organization, to name just a few, inadvertently ensured that the militarys influence in political and policy processes, as well as the civilian leadership selection, remained vital throughout the parliamentary period (January 1948-March 1962). Internationally, as the Cold War raged on, the intellectual and ideological climate in the United States and the Western Bloc was such that western academics, policy and opinionmakers portrayed anti-communist soldiers in the newly independent countries in the Third World, such as Burma, as bureaucratic modernizers and efficient nation-builders vis--vis incompetent quarrelsome and argumentative civilian politicians within their naturally messy parliamentary and other political contexts. In Burmas case, it was said that the West was concerned about the ability of Prime Minister U Nu to keep Burma safe from the Burmese communists, at a time when Washingtons main preoccupation was to prevent communist dominos from falling across Southeast Asia. So, when the Burmese military sought active US support for its institution building efforts, including the training of military personnel in various branches of the military as well as intelligence operations, the United States was more than a reluctant partner. When General Ne Win ended Burmas 12-year-old experiment in parliamentary democracy in a coup on 2 March 1962, the event was not even deemed headline news by the Western media. Two years later in 1964, President Lyndon B Johnson hosted an official welcome dinner to the visiting General Ne Win and Madam Ne Win at the White House. Also at Buckingham Palace the Burmese general was a welcome guest of Queen Elizabeth who sipped tea with him and even thought the general to be a nice chap, according to Derek Tonkin, former Burma desk officer at Britains Foreign and Commonwealth Office and retired British Ambassador to Thailand. The Military and its Selective Professionalization and Training of the Future Ruling Elite With the favorable ideological climate, intellectual and academic justification, political and diplomatic recognition, and the resultant western material support, the stage was set for the Burmese military to continue to tread its chosen path where it would be accountable or answerable to nobody, other than its Ministry of Defense and the senior military leadership. With ties to and assistance from the United States military and West Germanys state-owned arms manufacturer, Fritz Werner, the Burmese military has for decades engaged in what might be termed selective professionalization. That is, the Tatmdaw has upgraded its organizational and technical capacities professionally, but when it comes to professionalizing and

democratizing its relations with civilian institutions which are vital in forging a modern political state/country out of a myriad of multiethnic communities, it has shunned the kind of professionalization which would certainly subject it to civilian democratic leadership, as in the case of the Indian military since independence in 1947.
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Some sixty years ago only generals, brigadiers and colonels, or commanding officers, felt disdainful towards the inefficient, talkative politicians of parliamentary democracy. During the countrys parliamentary democracy period immediately following independence (1948 -58) a young captain would typically assume attention position upon entering the office of a township administrative officer, a civilian. If a military officer violated the general civil law of the land, he would be liable for prosecution at a court of law in the politically independent judiciary. Today the military class feels that they are a cut above the rest of the Burmese society. It now plays judge, jury and prosecutor within the legal system which it doesnt even itself observe. Constitutionally, the military is governed by its own set of laws, norms and regulations. These take precedent over any other legal frameworks and no military personnel, past and present, may be prosecuted for deeds which they have engaged in while discharging their duties. In short, civil laws do not apply to military personnel. For its part, the Burmese public has come to despise the once honorable military, both the leadership and its institutional power base. The public knows that the military as an institution has become a class in and of itself. From their formative years as cadets in the countrys defense academies , the two successive generations of officer corps, numbering in the thousands have been subject to an intense and sustained indoctrination process designed to make them think, feel and act as a distinct nationalist class. It acts as if it were the natural ruler of the people. The most important of all officers training schools is the Defense Services Academy (DSA) at Pyin Oo Lwin (formerly May Myo, British-colonial era summer station) whose alumni now occupy virtually all important positions in the military including the most powerful Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces as well as other civilian organs of the State, such as the cabinet and the various line ministries which it runs. Since its inception at the then newly built Bahtoo military town in Shan State in 1955, it has undergone significant changes both quantitatively and qualitatively. It has been massively expanded in terms of the number of graduates it produces in a single batch or in-take, as it is called. Its original motto for the officer-cadets was circumspect, professional and modest: Future Victorious Warriors for the Country. Today the Academy instills in the thousands of young cadets between the ages of 16 21 a new ethos. The cadets are training to be The Future Ruling Elites of the Nation. In the early years, the academic curriculum was developed and managed by civilian academics in various arts and science fields, and Rangoon University Academic Senate was

responsible for ensuring that the Defense Academy observed certain academic standards. All incoming classes of cadets were required to study the democratic thoughts, modest personal behavior and lifestyle of the militarys founder and slain national hero, Aung San, in order to instill due respect for the civilian public, modesty, love of truth, fairness and honor of public Page | 11 service, and national duty. The military curriculum was developed by Burmese graduates of Britains Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and US Staff and Command Colleges. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, there were not more than 50 officer cadets graduating from the DSA. They would be assigned to three different branches of the Armed Forces (Infantry, Navy and Air Force), Towards the end of the first military dictatorship of General Ne Win in 1988 about 120 officer cadets graduated in a single in-take (the military was 125,000-strong in 1988, while the countrys population was estimated to be about 26 million). In 2011, its graduating class fluctuates between 2,000 3,000. In 2010, the countrys military was estimated to be nearly half-a-million strong making it Southeast Asias largest military after Vietnam. The total population of the country doubled in the two decades since the collapse of General Ne Wins rule in 1988 (and that of the Beijing-backed Burmese Communist Party a year later), while the countrys armed forces grew 400%. In 2011, 24% of the countrys national budget has reportedly been earmarked for the military (compared with 4% for education and 1.3% for health services). In addition, bypassing even its own military-controlled Parliament, the military leadership declared the establishment of the extra-legal, supra-Constitutional National Defense Fund where the unspecified amount of state funds will be stored, authorizing the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces as the only state official with access to the fund, unanswerable to any organization or individual in his future use of this Fund.

Laying the foundations for re-fuedalization The Burmese problem is not simply the countrys successive ruling cliques of generals (since Ne Win) aggrandizing themselves at the expense of the public at large. Those of us Burmese who grew up hearing the hope-filled speculations that things would get better once Ne Wins reign was over are no longer fooled by this once -the-old-guards-are-gone buzz. As the Burmese saying goes, once you have been dead you know the cost of the coffin. The old generation of nationalist soldiers, General (later U) Ne Win and his military deputies, for example, left intact a process of distinct class formation with recognizably feudal features (minus the old cultural and customary constraints, for instance, Indic moral guidelines over the rulers conduct). Nearly seventy years since its founding by Aung San, the Tatmadaw officer corps, and the soldiering class as a whole, have come to view themselves as a cut above the predominantly agrarian masses. This ruling class has set the countrys politica l clock to the

absolutist feudal era while the basic structure of the economy under their rule is stuck in the colonial, pre-World War II days, as the Burmese economist U Myint has pointedly remarked. Since the collapse of Gen Ne Wins Burma Socialist Program Party, the regime in Naypyidaw has jumped on the bandwagon of marketization or privatization, Burmese-style. Page | 12 Under the banner of privatization, public assets (land, forests, immovable infrastructure such as office buildings, power industry, and so on) are being divided among the families of senior and junior generals, as well as their cronies who, inter alia, serve as the generals portfolio managers. With all these signs of bountiful state-sponsored cronyism, the countrys soldiering class has taken an increasingly kleptocratic turn, which is a throw-back to the old feudal days during which the monarch and his men ate the kingdom in terms of land, labor, and natural resources. The Burmese have a wonderfully descriptive term of capturing this type of phenomenon: hungry hounds stumbling on a pagoda feast. Be that as it may, it is worth pointing out that Gen Ne Win and his men deliberately set in motion the revolutionary process of class formation, revolutionary in the sense that the military that was created by, of and for the sons of the people (Pyi Thuu Tatmadaw, for instance) no longer sees itself as part of the people. It is now a class of the heaven-born, entitled to rule, not simply govern, the country in accord with the needs, concerns and interests of the senior and junior generals and so on. All these men began their military careers as cadets or other ranks pledging before every meal the mantra, We pledge our allegiance to the country that feeds us. As a class, they have failed to uphold this cardinal pledge, rather acting trigger-happy, shooting to kill indiscriminately any segment of society -- monks or Muslims, Bama or Karen, farmers or labourers, young or old. And evidently somewhere along their career path, the military has drifted away from their sense of gratitude to the country and honour to serve the people, towards an institutional/class allegiance and personal loyalty towards the chief. It is rather telling when some ex-military officers who publish their biographies (ex-Brig Gen Tin Swe and ex-Lt Gen Tun Kyi, for instance) and the in-service soldiers describe not the people but the armed forces as surrogate parents. This represents a fundamental regression with dire national consequences, for the military as an institution and the soldiering class no longer serves or defends the people from any enemy, including unscrupulous military leaders. Furthermore, the Tatmadaw set up its own economic base and interests, fostered a distinct class consciousness (informed by their own sense of superiority vis-a-vis the rest of the society), wrote its own radical revisionist Burmese history where the military was the sole national liberator and the sole guardian of the nation. Indeed the militarys propagandists and in-house historians have attempted to erase from public consciousness the historical fact that virtually every segment of Burmese society, both the ethnic majority and minorities, all gave

their share of contributions to the emergence and subsequent maintenance of sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Page | 13 'Refeudalization' post-1988

Since 1988, four significant features and/or developments distinguish the present phase of this class formation from the previous socialist revolutionary phase of military rule: refeudalization of the countrys military class and political culture; (paradoxically) removal of any cultural/traditional constraints on governmental conduct (for instance, the conditioned belief in onesown honour as a warrior or the Indic code and notions of the righteous ruler who is said to posses, among other things, compassion, wisdom, integrity, sacrifice, fairness and so on; creation of a crony capitalist economy via a pool of its own economic agents (better known as cronies); class consolidation and reproduction through a combined policy of setting aside a very high percentage of admission slots in military academies exclusively for the army-bred, and of careful screening of family backgrounds of officers and their spouses, especially for influential posts within the military; and, last but not least, the widespread practice of active participation of the wives of military officers in the intra-military and political affairs (for instance, hiring and firing of deputies for their husbands) or managing the flow of bribes and business deals. Perhaps most important, the military-led class formation has turned decidedly feudal. Some of the more superficial acts of re-feudalization of the military and the State include Senior General Than Shwe's and his familys well-known royal pretensions, with family members addressing one another using the arcane language of the long-gone feudal courts which today is spoken only in the Burmese theatre, building a brand new capital and naming it and all its residential quarters and streets auspicious-sounding old royal names selected from Buddhist Jartaka tales, or requiring comically obsequious gestures and demeanours from all subordinate members of Burmas bureaucracy, military and society for instance, subordinates, their spouses and families being pressured to get down on their knees even in informal gatherings, activating the royal protocol of subordinates speaking only when spoken to, in the presence of their military superiors, or the Cyclone Nargis victims being instructed to greet Than Shwe and other generals during their propaganda journeys to the Irrawaddy Delta as if they were Boddhiisattva or would-be-Buddhas. In Burmas post-feudal society the military-led re-feudalization has indeed gone to comic extremes as the scenes of Burmese citizens kowtowing to these military men of vainglory become common. Beyond psychological and behavioural dimensions, the deeper and more institutional acts include, in effect, reinstituting the old feudal practice of sanctioning and encouraging

regional commanders and other military officials to extract revenues and labour from local communities under their direct military and administrative control, giving rise to competition among military commanders in collecting the greatest quantity of funds and other resources from respective local populations.
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Paving the Way for Cronyism To paraphrase the late Ernest Gellner, Cambridge anthropologist and noted author of Nationalism, 1997, in feudal society it is power that generates wealth, not the other way round. Economically, Than Shwe whetted, and subsequently unleashed, the economic appetite of other senior and junior warriors. As a point of departure from Ne Wins regime, which pushed out a large number of alien commercial and technical elements from the economy (for instance, 300,000 Indians), out of the country altogether with its catastrophic economic nationalization scheme, Than Shwe and his deputies have strategically chosen to build and expand the militarys economic and commercial base. In so doing, they have resorted to nepotistic practices, which involve patronizing only the army-bred, ex-military officers and business-minded civilians who have unquestioningly embraced the primacy of the military class in Burmese society. Here the best known case is Tay Za, Burma's wealthiest and most influential tycoon with a close personal tie to Senior General Than Shwes family, who also serves as the militarys principal arms-dealer. A son of a former deputy of Brigadier Maung Maung who was the chief architect of the militarys institutional development s including the establishment of military and defense academies in Burmas immediate post-independence years, Tay Za was himself a cadet at the Defence Service Academy in the early 1980s. He was expelled from it for violating the then strict code of conduct for cadets. Aung Thet Mann and Toe Nay Mann, the two sons of Thura Shwe Mann, until recently the regimes third-ranking general and now Speaker of the militarys newly established parliament, have also joined the countrys top 10 influential and richest businessmen. The famous tycoon Zaygaba Khin Shwe, a close friend of Prime Minister General Khin Nyunt, who headed the powerful military intelligence until his demise in 2004, also served with the Army Engineering Corps during General Ne Wins rule. Khin Shwe is now a member of the military-controlled parliament from the regimes Union Solidarity and Development Party while his daughter is married to one of Shwe Manns sons. There are lesser known cronies, who are army-bred and thus army-backed, (for instance, Hla Maung Shwe of Myanmar Egress, a local NGO which the regime uses as its civil society proxy ). It is, without a doubt, to the military rule and the generals that these men, and many others like them, owe their personal fortunes.

In exchange for their entrepreneurial services to this growing military class, of which they have long been an integral part, the ruling junta has allowed Burmas nouveau r iche to exploit the country and its resources. Recently, Yuzana Htay Myint, another in-house businessman, has been permitted to take over 100,000 acres in the ancestral land of the Kachin Page | 15 minorities in the northern most part of Burma, originally designated by the regime as a national wildlife sanctuary. In his otherwise insightful analysis titled The Future of Tatmadaws Political Role in Myanmar: Prospects and Problems, Maung Aung Myo, an army-bred former lecturer at Burmas National Defence College, observed that the Tatmadaw has been hijacked by a small group of generals for their own personal aggrandizement. But it is, upon closer examination, a case of intra-class symbiosis where juniors and seniors divide their ill-gotten gains at the expense of the citizenry. If anything is being hijacked, it is the country and its future that has been hijacked by its own soldiers. In feudal systems of Burmas bygone eras, all the kings men served at the monarch's pleasure, and they rose and fell, lived and died, precariously. This scenario has been re-enacted in Than Shwes Myanmar and in Ne Wins Burma (as it was then). Whimsically, these despots carried out large scale purges, for instance, the purge of Military Intelligence under the directorship of Brig Tin Oo in 1983 and the ousting of Gen Khin Nyunt and dissolution of the entire Directorate of the Defense Services Intelligence in 2004. Consequently, military officers, as well as other ranks, have opted to optimize their administrative and political authorities by translating them into riches through bribery, big and small, while in office. To get rich quick was indeed glorious for Dengs China post -Chairman Mao. But in Than Shwes Myanmar, eating as much of the country as fast as you can may not be glorious, not at least in the eyes of the traditional pious Buddhist population; but it has become the wisest and most strategic course of action for virtually all Burmese military officers who are clever enough to recognize that theirs is a class kleptocracy. Only the naive types remain moral in this new thoroughly feudalized military class. No wonder that Burma consistently ranks at the bottom of Transparency Internationals Corruption Index, after Somalia. Patronizing and 'Incentivizing' the Commercial Classes Institutionally, since the early 1990s, the Ministry of Defense has taken over State enterprises and re-established them as businesses owned solely by the Tatmadaw. Now the military has its hand in virtually every economic pie, from poultry farms, small factories, real estate, tourism, transportation, construction, rental business of regimental facilities to shipping, power, banking, export and import, agriculture, energy and mining. Virtually no business entity

of commercial significance can operate without being linked to the military, institutionally or to individual commanders, thereby bringing the commercial elements in society under the Tatmadaws effective control.
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Unlike Ne Wins socialist military government, the regime in 2010 doesnt alienate the commercial elites. Instead, the generals have made local entrepreneurs work for military rule through an evolving economic and political symbiosis. The military, in this new arrangement which harks back to the old monarchical days of commercial and trade monopolies, has learned to patronize the economic class for its own benefit. In fact, Senior General Than Shwe has effectively used the twin elements of greed and pervasive anxieties and uncertainties about the soldiering class future, encompassing both the officer corps and the emerging crony capitalists. Internationally, Than Shwe knows only too well how to dangle this possibility of Burmas economic liberalization post -election before the eyes of foreign investors and venture capitalists who view Burma primarily as the worlds last economic frontier. Only time will tell whether the forces of the free market will overpower Burmas soldiering class. Unlike the military in Indonesia, Philippines or Turkey, Burmas military is marching backward along feudal lines and attempting to consolidate its class hold on Burmese society, economy and polity, while at the same time trumpeting democracy and free market which they know resonates well in western ears. During the post-independence formative years, the pro-capitalist West had looked at the regressive evolution only through the selfserving lens of the Cold War and hailed the soldiers as modernizers. Then western concerns were the Containment of anti-market Maoist and Soviet influences. Sixty three years on, the post-Cold War western governments and other interests appear to be bent on overlooking the militarys attempt to build a military apartheid wherein the military and its commercial, technocratic and ethnic proxies rule over the bulk of the population and territories. This time around the grand rationale behind the Wests attempts to recognize the Burmese military is the advancement of the Free Market.