Myanmar Leaders and Their 34 Concrete Ways of Control, Deception, and Manipulation
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 27 Jan 2014
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service
Myanmar’s military leaders
My advice to anyone who attempts to analyze, write about, or simply understand Burma or Myanmar:
Assume the worst when it comes to the regime. They are far worse than you think humans are capable of in terms of sinking to depravity and ruthlessness.
Here is MY list of concrete, empirically verifiable acts the Burmese generals and ex-generals have been engaged in over the past 50 years since General Ne Win introduced the military rule on 2 March 1962. These acts are a given, irrespective of which general is in charge. They are getting worse.
Ask yourself this: do these acts suggest they are ‘nation-builders’ ‘reformers’ ‘democratizers’, ‘sincere leaders’, ‘patriots’, ‘nationalists’, etc.?
1) a long trail of broken promises, lies, deceptions, and distortions;
2) cheats;
3) loots;
4) personal manipulations;
5) mass murders;
6) rape and gang rapes with impunity (that is, as a matter of policy NOT to prosecute soldier-/officer-rapists);
7) wanton destruction;
8) pillage;
9) theft;
10) robbery;
11) forced labor;
12) forced evictions and relocation;
13) Made-in-UK Four Cut terror campaigns (first used by the British troops in the then colonial Malaya against the anti-British Communist resistance);
14) cooptation;
15) threats and intimidations;
16) blackmail;
17) summery execution;
18) outsourced mass violence;
19) incubate, stoke and mobilized ethno-religious racism;
20) promoting neo-Nazi ideas (that an entire group should be shipped out, interned or otherwise eradicate);
21) discrimination as a matter of policy;
22) fostering ethnic divide and rule;
23) commercial/resource/business enticement and charm offensives;
24) tortures;
25) life and long years of imprisonment;
26) breeding civil wars;
27) planting bombs to create a climate of fear;
28) extortions;
29) land and resource grab;
30) intellectual impoverishment of the public as a matter of policy;
31) deliberate destruction of health care system for the public at large;
32) the use of ‘nationalism’ as a smokescreen/ideological shield;
33) creation of cronies as the military and generals’ wealth/portfolio managers (for in neo-Feudal Myanmar it is power that generates WEALTH, not the other way around); and
34) consolidation of the military’s grip on power, wealth and population while barking ‘reforms’, ‘transition’, ‘human rights’, ‘zero tolerance’, ‘multiculturalism’, ‘harmony’, ‘interfaith’, and every other well-worn buzz word which pleases the Western ears, resonates with the shallow and stupid international mass media, and gives self-interested external players – governments, UN, EU, ASEAN, corporate, think-tanks, etc. – a cover for their dodgy agendas in Myanmar.
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Maung Zarni, Associate Fellow, the University of Malaya. Dr. Maung Zarni is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment, founder and director of the Free Burma Coalition (1995-2004), and a visiting fellow (2011-13) at the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit, Department of International Development, London School of Economics. His forthcoming book on Burma will be published by Yale University Press. He was educated in the US where he lived and worked for 17 years. Visit his website www.maungzarni.com.
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