BRAVE LADY
I was absolutely delighted that Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest on the thirteenth of November. It is a wonderful but fragile happening that amplifies hope for Myanmar in the long run - but her long incarceration and proven vulnerability to re-arrest underscore the ability of the Myanmar Government to behave badly.
As for the lady’s personal courage in seeking wider liberty for her fellow citizens, I imagine that de Tocqueville would be awed by her constancy and shamed by his sexism, even though it is hard to disagree with his general sentiments:
“Men who take up liberty for its material rewards, then, have never kept it for long.... What in all times has attracted some men so strongly to liberty has been itself alone, its own peculiar charm, independent of the benefits it brings; the pleasure of being able to speak, act, and breathe without constraint, under no other rule but that of God and Law.”
Much more mundanely, the episode has set me thinking about my own very brief involvement in the political economy of Myanmar, and how I can even start to consider her level of self-sacrifice.
Let’s take the last first.
We were born within 13 months of each other, and some parallels and overlaps are evident in our academic interests and involvement in international development issues - and in the way that our careers and family lives evolved up to our early forties. But things diverged sharply in 1988, the year that we both returned home to cope with the severe illnesses of our mothers.
She returned to Rangoon in April 1988 and on the 8th of August there was a mass uprising in Burma. Her first public speech on the 26th April called for democratic reform in front of a crowd of half a million people. However, the protests were brutally suppressed by the military and thousands of protesters were killed. In July 1989, she was placed under house arrest for the first time.
In May 1990, Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy wins a landslide election victory but the junta refuses to recognize the results. Despite being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, she was not released from house arrest until 1995 and was unable to travel to see her dying husband in 1999 in fear of risking exile.
In September 2000, she was placed under house arrest again after she defied travel restrictions in an attempt to visit the city of Mandalay. Released conditionally again in May 2002, she was imprisoned following violent clashes between her supporters and the government. In September 2003, she was allowed home under house arrest but this became essentially indefinite.
So 22 years passed in which for the most part, she was a prisoner living largely without companionship and communication in a crumbling colonial villa – with, so the story goes, snakes nesting under the staircase. I can only marvel yet again at her fortitude - and at my own relative good fortune in being able to continue to explore the world and build loving relationships during those two decades.
THE MYANMAR STRATEGY STUDY
In July 1997 Burma was admitted to the South East Asian regional grouping ASEAN, and pressure developed within the Asian Development Bank to attempt another rapprochement with the Burmese Junta – particularly as India - one of the Bank’s major shareholders and power-brokers was in the process of developing closer economic relations with Myanmar.
At some point in the later part of 1987, I caught the shuttle bus (almost certainly during, immediately preceding or immediately following a typhoon) from the ADB’s satellite office in Makati (which housed the Economics and Development Resource Center where I normally worked) to travel across downtown Manila for an appointment at the ADB’s HQ in Roxas Boulevard.
The meeting was with Rick Tan, an affable Filipino who was a senior manager in the Country Department. Rick explained that he had cast around for someone to head up work for Bank’s new ‘Myanmar Strategy Study’ and that my name had come up in lights. I was flattered.
But Rick was also a wily operator in the Bank’s bureaucracy and he had chosen craftily. I had the ideal mix of brashness, vanity, skills and dedication to hard work. Nor, as I later found out, could he persuade anyone else in the Country Department to enrol for what was widely regarded as an arduous and potentially pointless exercise.
So it wasn’t long before I pitched up at Rangoon (Yangon) Airport with my lugubrious colleague and friend Steve Whitmer. A local official and a driver had been sent to pick us up and I soon asked whether my counterpart was going to work with us on the Myanmar Strategy Study.
‘We’ve heard nothing about that’, said our host, ‘We were told that you were coming to inspect progress on the Concrete Pipe Factory’. Rick had of course wisely neglected to inform the Burmese Government of the real purpose of our mission.
Not surprisingly, we had to work hard to get meetings and although I was proud for a while of the research and its recommendations, the work came to nothing. Even before the August 1988 Uprising, the Government was becoming ever more difficult to deal with. The homilies about the need for partnership, evolution and participation in the liberalization of the economy and society met stony-faced rejection or wry smiles.
Still I see faint references on the Internet that there had been an attempt to develop a strategy for ADB lending around 1987, with the note that this marked the end of policy dialogue. However, there is an eight page Economic Update that was issued in 2001 that may have drawn on some of the material. Some of it sounds very much like me:
‘This report draws on official data that are of variable quality and are sometimes incomplete. To help better inform those who make policy and other decisions, there is an urgent need to upgrade Myanmar’s statistical system’.
As for the main messages, they are pretty basic:
‘There is a pressing need to increase the flow of public resources to basic health and education services and other areas where developmental needs are not being met.
Investment has remained stagnant for more than a decade at only 13% of annual national production - this is less than a third of the investment levels the rest of South East Asia has managed over the past three decades.
Taxation is amongst the lowest in the world, preventing the government from investing in essential services and infrastructure development. Only three people out of every 20 have access to electricity and the country's road network is totally inadequate. Only one person in 200 has a telephone and most rural areas lack even a single phone link to the outside world.
Government expenditure on education and health is low - amongst the lowest in the world says the bank, while the country's state economic enterprises are inefficient and a drain on the economy’.
Above and between the lines, the ADB unmasked a country that was suffering from massive economic mismanagement, international indebtedness, political instability and social stagnation after decades of military rule - necessitating extensive economic reform and international financial and technical assistance.
Based on a household income and expenditure survey, and using a national poverty
line, the Central Statistical Organization had calculated that 22.9 percent of the population was below the poverty line in 1997. This suggested that by 2001 there were approximately 11.7 million people in Myanmar who lacked basic subsistence.
A variety of social and health indicators also gave cause for concern. In 1999, expected life expectancy for urban males was 61 years. In 1997, the incidence of malnutrition in children under five years of age was reported to be 31 percent and the under five mortality rate was 77.77 per 1000 live births.
Estimates made by international organizations painted an even worse picture. Tuberculosis was still seen as a serious threat to health in Myanmar and malaria control remained a key concern. While there were no official estimates of the prevalence of HIV/AIDs, informal sources suggest that it has reached epidemic proportions’.
Revealingly, when the Economic Update was tabled at a Mekong Secretariat meeting in 2002, the Burmese military intelligence chief Lt General Khin Nyunt was pleased tell a fairy story to fellow Ministers from neighbouring countries. He claimed that the economy had been growing at over 8% a year over the last five years - and had done so without international assistance. He also predicted the economy would continue to grow at 6% per annum over the next five years.
Things have probably not changed that much since 2002 – especially for ordinary people – and have probably worsened in the aftermath of Typhoon Nargis.
Economics Professor Sean Turnell at Sydney’s Macquarie University in Australia, who has been following Burma’s economic situation, earlier was reported early in 2010 as confirming that the Burmese economy has been dragged to abysmal depths by the ruling junta’s mismanagement.
‘Burma, once known as the ‘Rice Bowl’ of Southeast Asia, since 1962, when dictator General Newin assumed power in a military coup, has been facing economic deterioration forcing the United Nations to categorize it among the Least Developed Countries (LDC)’.
OLIGARCHY AND THE ‘RESOURCE CURSE’
Why on earth then doesn’t the Burmese Government do more for its people?
Well, it is a convenient assumption of most western economists that governments are concerned about the welfare of their citizens – but one that is very open to debate in the case of countries like Myanmar.
I caught a whiff of the way the Government thinks in one of my interviews with officials. When I raised the possibility of funding social development by collaborating with foreign investors (under the right conditions) in the export of natural resources, the spokesman quickly put me right about where the preferences and trade-offs lay.
‘We know that everyone wants our resources and that natural resources will be in ever increasing need internationally. We will keep the resources in situ under our control until until demand increases and then we will be able to sell in a rising market'.
Well quite apart from issues of resource substitution and discovery, the statement makes little sense if you accept a pressing responsibility to provide physical infrastructure and social services to today’s citizens and their children – and to generate surpluses for investment in other forms of productive activity that will grow the economy.
The real issue is that the Government is fraudulently farming the economy and the population for the benefit of the members of the military clique and the associated business oligarchy.
Yuki Akimoto puts this into a wider perspective in her 2006 report for the Open Society Institute. ‘Preparing for Burma’s Economic Transition’:
‘Natural-resource-rich countries like Burma are more likely than resource-poor countries to experience flat economic growth, endure greater poverty, incur unwieldy debt, develop authoritarian and repressive governments, and suffer armed conflict.
Receiving significant revenues in payment for natural resources can free a country’s government from the need to collect taxes from its citizens; this severs a vital bond between the citizen taxpayer and the government and dampens the government’s incentives to implement sound economic, social, and fiscal policies in a transparent and accountable manner.
In many countries, revenues from extraction of natural resources actually trigger a decline in living standards and exacerbate social problems. Revenues generated by exploitation of Burma’s natural resources are helping to sustain the country’s military dictatorship, contributing to human rights abuses and conflict, and failing to alleviate the poverty and poor governance most Burmese suffer.
Natural resource extraction in Burma has produced long-term damage to the environment; contributed to a decline in agricultural productivity; aggravated corruption of the government and civil society; exacerbated the illegal drug trade, the exploitation of sex workers, and the spread of HIV/AIDS; and funded warring factions’.
So given impending world-wide shortages of natural resources, it is worth reflecting that, rather than Myanmar evolving into an open economy and a liberal democracy, many more countries may fall prey to military juntas and business oligarchies. Not such an unreal prospect as income differentials rise and it becomes impossible to deliver even in the illusion of rising living standards to the mass of people.
But there again, why stand on a podium in a military uniform half the day with the other members of an obnoxious clique when you can simply juice the rising commodities markets by buying and selling futures?
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