Crisis Thinkers or Thinkers in Crisis?
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 3 Oct 2011
Dr. Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service
A recently released report by the International Crisis Group (ICG), the world’s best known think tank on crises, brims with hope, optimism, and future possibilities in Myanmar, also known as Burma.
The news coming out of Burma/Myanmar is most of the time grim. More often than not, Burma/Myanmar news is about the pockets of near-famine, widespread sub-Sahara Africa-like conditions of life, the world’s longest smoldering civil war, the breakdowns of fragile ceasefires, the use of convicts as human mine sweepers, new influxes of war-fleeing refugees, environmental degradation, massive public asset transfers to the ruling military generals in the name of privatization, or other rampant corruption, death and destruction.
So any news and reports about something good and positive happening, or about to happen to the people and communities we Burmese exiles left behind for political activism, makes our hearts leap.
Last Friday [23 Sep 2011], the ICG’s Myanmar: Major Reform Underway made me sit up and read. But once I got past the title I realized the report suffers from multiple shortcomings so fundamental to comprehending Burma’s/Myanmar’s crises – note the plural here – that it lacked a credible basis either for exile excitement or any serious international policy discussions.
Here is a shortlist of ICG’s intellectual sins.
First, the report’s selection of sources has undermined greatly its own credibility, and by extension that of the commissioning ICG. It was more than evident that ICG allowed no raw information and consulted only with sources that would provide “intelligence” to uphold and validate the report’s sweeping claims. Nowhere in the 15-page text of the report did ICG indicate that it entertained, even as a matter of analytical possibility, alternative interpretations of recent events and pronouncements that it characterized singularly as “major reform”.
The report repeated and amplified President Thein Sein’s offer of peace to the armed ethnic minority resistance groups, active and ceasefire, having gleaned it from the state media and official transcripts. And yet the ICG’s “field research” didn’t deem it necessary to include any information as to how that presidential “peace offer” has been received by the armed groups.
Even if the ICG’s researcher(s) deemed it personally unsafe to travel to the country’s civil war zones, border towns such as Laiza in Kachin State or Mae Sot in Thailand could have easily provided directly relevant views of the armed resistance organizations, such as the Karen National Union and the Kachin Independence Organization. If that travel was too difficult, those views were also just a Google search away.
Second, the report paid only lip service to matters as grave and well-documented as pervasive human rights violations and “war crimes”, while emphatically disapproving of any United Nations-sponsored fact-finding through a Commission of Inquiry (CoI). Unsurprisingly, the ICG report only once mentioned the Human Rights Watch report about the government’s “use of convicts” in the military’s ongoing campaigns against ethnic insurgents, and then only as a footnote. Nor did ICG consider Amnesty International’s intervention in March at the last UN Human Rights Council meeting in support of the CoI important enough to merit even a single mention throughout its report.
Third, on the country’s reported approximate 2,000 “prisoners of conscience”, a long-standing issue of domestic and international policy importance and considered a key litmus test of the generals’ genuine will to reform, ICG even refuted the figures compiled by the Burmese-run Assistance Association of Political Prisoners, the main clearinghouse for such information which assists groups like the International Committee for Red Cross (ICRC).
Crimes of omission
Fourth, ICG obviously prides itself for putting out “field research”-based reports on existing crisis situations, or those pregnant with crises, around the world. But after reading Myanmar: Major Reform Underway any professional researcher with a modicum of standards would be left wondering what actually constitutes “field research” for ICG considering it clearly never spoke to real people on the streets or communities across the country’s active and smoldering civil war zones in eastern and northern Burma.
Instead, the report gives an unambiguous impression that its “field research” in Burma/Myanmar consisted of little more than quoting state mouthpiece media, presidential speeches and conversations with international diplomats, most likely in luxury hotel lobbies, bars and restaurants as well as government offices in the region and Western capitals. ICG sprinkled its report with such puffed up characterizations of its chosen sources in Rangoon as “well-placed individuals in Myanmar”, “well-informed Myanmar individuals”, “recent visitors to Aung San Suu Kyi”, and “people who have had multiple encounters with and spent a lot of time with President (Thein Sein)”.
To be sure, talking to local commercial elites, presidential technocrats and bar-chatting with “recent visitors” to Suu Kyi is a useful method of information gathering. But with ICG’s lofty stature in the international community and its message of reform hope, it raises questions about why its researchers didn’t speak directly with either Suu Kyi or the generals.
Fifth, ICG was apparently only interested in gathering corroborating evidence for its long-standing anti-sanctions stance. I am with the ICG on its anti-sanctions stance, providing that the generals engage in the give-and-take of international politics, rather than crying out for an international policy black check (such as development assistance, loans, normalization, legitimacy, etc). As early as 2003, I was among the first Burmese dissidents to openly break with Suu Kyi and her continued endorsement of Western sanctions, notably at a time when it was politically and personally unfashionable for many of the latter-day anti-sanctions advocates, Burmese and foreigners alike.
That aside, Suu Kyi has acquired worldwide fame as a staunch advocate of dialogue. She and her National League for Democracy (NLD) party leaders would, no doubt, have welcomed an honest conversation with ICG while its researchers were in Rangoon. Maybe the ICG already knew she and her colleagues weren’t going to give any corroborating oral evidence for the ICG’s long-standing anti-sanctions “field research”. Instead, when she was quoted in media reports it was to buttress ICG’s title claim that major change is underway.
It’s one thing that ICG was unable to secure opportunities to conduct its field research in Naypyidaw, the country’s reclusive capital, or speak with crucial ranking military officers who, rather than President Thein Sein, still hold the real levers of power in Burma/Myanmar. “Senior Myanmar diplomats involved in negotiations” on the generals’ bid to chair the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 2014 simply doesn’t cut any ice in Burmese politics. Not even the foreign minister dares to issue important humanitarian aid worker visas without a nod from behind the military’s curtain.
Sixth, on matters of utmost importance to the country’s people and their collective future, that is, the military, its thinking, its modus operandi, and its intra-military inner workings, ICG finds itself not only without access to the decision-making generals but utterly out of its intellectual and analytical depth. ICG’s analytical and interpretative capabilities were hampered significantly as a result of the extremely selective way it went about conducting in-country “field research”, with the obvious objective of sifting and finessing evidence to fit its predetermined policy template.
Shallow understanding
Instead, ICG’s report tucked away the single most important issue in Burma/Myanmar politics, economy and society, as well as her foreign relations, on page six of its 15-page report that skims over “the constitutional and de facto independence of the military”. Even then this unquestioned constitutional primacy was mentioned only in passing, while the report spilled inordinate quantity of ink on the symbolisms – for instance, the bigger physical size of the Central Bank of Myanmar vis-เ-vis that of the Ministry of Finance, and the reappearance of the martyred independence hero Aung San on the presidential office wall.
The result is that ICG was unable to offer any shred of evidence or explanation as to what really is the power base of President Thein Sein, whom the report lionized in terms of his stature, vision and political will. Never mind that this ex-general, considered “thick” by dissident military officers who worked with him in the General Staff of the Ministry of Defense, spent half of his career at the desk. The soft-spoken and mild-mannered ex-general, may be presentable to international diplomats and local commercial elites, but he has no power base inside the military, the government’s backbone since 1962 and to present.
Perhaps ICG erroneously thinks Thein Sein’s base is a mixture of the country’s wealthy cronies and puffed-up presidential advisors. The truth is Thein Sein’s advisers are so intellectually neutered in support of regime-led change that they are unable to address the most obvious point: that “major reforms” are inconceivable without confronting head-on the military’s class rule and the generals’ greed, delusions and paranoia.
At the root of any real reform is a fundamental shift in power. However, in a country such as Burma/Myanmar – where the military is a well-oiled a killing machine with sophisticated surveillance apparatus – without the backing of regional commanders and those who hold strategic military posts, ex-generals pushing for reforms, however genuine, have absolutely no chance.
It is a melancholy fact that ICG really has nothing concrete, insightful or policy-relevant to say about the military’s vested class interests, how those are going to manifest themselves in “Myanmar’s major reform” said to be underway, and how junior generals can be persuaded to voluntarily permit external curbs and control over a half-century of extra-judicial – and since 2008, Constitutional – right to rule the country.
Finally, ICG engages in excessive self-referencing to back up its new report’s assertions and claims. The act of referring to one’s previous written work is a valid professional behavior for researchers whose work is original, humanly objective, and has lasting validity. But the problem is ICG’s analyses in the past have proven to have a valid shelf life of less than six months. Only six months ago, on March 7, ICG spoke with an intimidating air of authority in its Myanmar’s Post-Election Landscape report, analysis it is has now turned on its head:
Predictably, in such a tightly controlled poll, the regime’s own Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) won a landslide victory leaving the military elite still in control … The new government that has been formed, and which will assume power in the coming weeks, also reflects the continued dominance of the old order with the president and one of the two vice presidents drawn from its ranks and a number of cabinet ministers recycled. These changes are unlikely to translate into dramatic reforms in the short term, but they provide a new governance context, improving the prospects for incremental reform.
Granted that policy analyses and field reports are not based on rocket science, but are primarily interpretative exercises. But ICG’s Burma/Myanmar reports’ less than six-months empirical and interpretative validity calls into question the value of contributions to international Burma/Myanmar policy discussions. Obviously, producing analyses of lasting quality doesn’t appear to be ICG’s concern on Burma/Myanmar.
For whatever the content of its analyses, it keeps playing the same tune over and over from its Burma/Myanmar policy hymn book: embrace the generals, in skirts or in uniform; unconditionally drop any punitive measures; and reward them with loans, grants, technical assistance and recognition.
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Dr Zarni (m.zarni@lse.ac.uk) is a member of the TRANSCEND Network and a Research Fellow on Burma at LSE Global Governance.
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 3 Oct 2011.
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