Myanmar Peace Talks, But No Peace: Both Aung San Suu Kyi And the Army Are to Blame
The
Economist
Aug 18th
2020
Aung San Suu Kyi
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JUST FOUR
years ago, war-weary Burmese could imagine that one day the guns might go
silent. It was August 2016 and Aung San Suu Kyi was hosting the “21st Century
Panglong Conference”, the first of several talks designed to end the numerous
ethnic insurgencies that have ravaged the country since its founding in 1948.
The peace process had been launched by Myanmar’s previous leader, a former
general, but Ms Suu Kyi, winner of the Nobel peace prize, inspired genuine hope
that a lasting truce could be made. Since then, however, that delicate hope has
withered. Talks have stalled.
Sporadic
clashes continue to occur in Kachin, Kayin and Shan states, while new conflicts
have since 2018 erupted in Rakhine and Chin states, where there have been
nearly 1,000 civilian casualties and at least 80,000 people displaced. As Ms
Suu Kyi’s government, the Burmese army and several ethnic-minority groups
gather together from August 19th to 21st in the capital, Naypyidaw, for the
last peace pow-wow before a general election in November, the question on
everyone’s minds will be: what went wrong?
It was
never going to be easy. Ms Suu Kyi inherited what is often described as the
world’s longest-running civil war. Her peace process was named after the first
“Panglong conference”, convened by her father, Burma’s independence leader, in
1947. Ever since then, conflict between the army and a plethora of ethnic-based
forces has spluttered on in many of the country’s border regions, and Ms Suu
Kyi took over “one of the most labyrinthine peace processes” in history,
according to the Transnational Institute (TI), an international research
outfit. Thein Sein, her predecessor, had drawn up a Nationwide Ceasefire
Agreement (NCA), which promised to establish a federal system.
Those who
signed it would graduate to the next phase, political dialogue. But the army
angered the biggest, most powerful rebel outfits when it declared in 2015 that
six of their number would not be permitted to sign the NCA. Initially just
eight armed groups, representing 20% of Myanmar’s rebel soldiers, signed up,
making a mockery of the notion that the NCA is “nationwide”. This created a
complicated, two-track peace process: dialogue with NCA signatories; and
bilateral ceasefire talks with non-signatories. Since Ms Suu Kyi’s ascent to
power, she has been able to convince just two piffling non-signatories to
commit themselves to the NCA and has not made any real progress in peace talks.
The army is
not helping. Ms Suu Kyi cannot force it to extend an olive branch to its foes.
The constitution gives the army, or Tatmadaw, control of the ministries of
defence, border and home affairs, and a quarter of the seats in parliament,
giving it in effect a veto on constitutional reform. It “has not made any
commitments or any real concessions to ethnic groups during the peace process,”
says Tom Kramer of TI. In fact it has deliberately sabotaged the peace effort,
for instance, by clashing with two NCA signatories, the Karen National Union
(KNU), an ethnic-Karen (or Kayin) group, and the Restoration Council of Shan
State (RCSS), an ethnic-Shan group, while talks were taking place. In October
2018, both groups withdrew from the peace process.
Since
January 2019 the army has also escalated fighting with the Arakan Army, an
ethnic-Rakhine group, and one of the six prevented from signing the NCA in
2015, leading to the bloodiest fighting in Myanmar in decades. “They’ve not
been pursuing peace, they’ve been pursuing conflict,” according to Priscilla
Clapp, a senior adviser to the Asia Society, an American think-tank. The
commander-in-chief views Ms Suu Kyi as a rival, and does not want to give her
any political victories if he can help it. Moreover, the Tatmadaw has always
been viscerally opposed to the idea of federalism. It is committed to a vision
of Myanmar as a unitary state, dominated by the majority ethnic group, the
Bamar, a vision that it is all too happy to impose on restive minorities by
force. “I don’t think they want a genuine peace,” says Naw K’nyaw Paw, general
secretary of the Karen Women’s Organisation.
The
Tatmadaw leaves Ms Suu Kyi little room to manoeuvre. Yet she has made many
missteps. At first she set about jump-starting the peace process with gusto.
According to a report by the International Crisis Group, a think-tank, her hope
was that a deal would be the swiftest route to constitutional reform, the only
way to curb the power of the army, something Ms Suu Kyi longs to do. The army
has said that resolving hostilities is a precondition for reform. But as the
scale of the challenge of brokering peace impressed itself on her, Ms Suu Kyi’s
enthusiasm waned, and she focused on other issues. It has become clear that
“the priority of the NLD government has been to build reconciliation with the
army, not with [ethnic groups],” says Mr Kramer. The hope was that, if the army
does not feel threatened by the civilian government, it might consent to
constitutional reform. One consequence is that the army has tried to dominate
the peace process.
Even as her
government neglected peace negotiations, it inflamed relations with ethnic
minorities. In March the government refused to give state legislatures, some of
which are dominated by ethnic parties, the right to choose their chief
ministers. Ms Suu Kyi has failed to acknowledge the long-standing grievances of
ethnic minorities, or to tackle concerns among signatories to the NCA about the
army's breaches of the agreement and its failure to treat ethnic groups as
joint partners in, or articulate a vision of what a federal union might look
like. “A lot of ethnic voters feel betrayed,” says Mr Kramer. “We are
disappointed in her,” says Ms Naw K’nyaw Paw.
The
prospect of facing voters at the general election in November with nothing to
show for years of peace talks has galvanised Ms Suu Kyi into action. There are
promising signs. In January the KNU and RCSS returned to the negotiating table,
apparently reassured by the government’s willingness to deal with some of their
concerns. But none of the principles likely to be agreed on at Panglong go
beyond what is already in the constitution or existing law: “It doesn’t give
these groups anything new,” Mr Kramer says. And as Ms Naw K’nyaw Paw says, if
not every armed group is included in the process, “we are wasting a lot of our
time.” She suspects that the government has convened this week’s conference
merely to “save face” ahead of the election. It will do nothing to stop the fighting
that she says is “always” present in her country.
Original
Headline: Aung San Suu Kyi has brought Myanmar peace talks, but no peace
Source: The Economist