Myanmar’s military leaders shut down dissenting voices

Myanmar’s military leaders must now realize that the coup of February 2021 has not gone according to plan. The civilian government was supposed to be swiftly overthrown and after a few street protests and some weak pronouncements from the international community about respecting the people’s decision and human rights, things were supposed to settle down — just like last time. Having failed to subdue the people’s thirst for democracy, the military returned to form and started brutally shooting protesters in the head. But even that was not enough to deter the masses. Myanmar’s military soon realized it must shut down all dissenting voices in this new digital information age — and that controlling TV and radio was simply not enough — and things have evolved since they were last in power. So, last week Myanmar received the ignominious title of having jailed more journalists, writers and public intellectuals than any regime in the world.

This was not how it was supposed to go according to the dictator’s playbook. The coup was supposed to be a seamless exercise. The 2010s experiment in democracy in Myanmar followed a change in the constitution of the country that the Tatmadaw conceded in 2008, in the wake of their disastrous handling of the aftermath of cyclone Nargis. Incompetence and corruption in that crisis led large swathes of the people to once again withdraw their tacit acquiescence of the military government, and so the leadership decided that the only way to mollify dissent was to reform the constitution to allow for a form of managed democracy, where ordinary citizens could vote for representatives and those representatives would then have a good deal of influence on domestic policy, but the Tatmadaw would still retain an effective veto of issues they deemed fundamental to their interests.

That arrangement worked well for the Tatmadaw for more than a decade: Long-standing sanctions on Myanmar overall, and the economic interests of the Tatmadaw leadership in particular, were lifted by the international community; many of their leadership saw a degree of rehabilitation in the eyes of the international community, and their seemingly close relationship with the elected leader of the civilian government, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, bolstered even their domestic standing.

It is still not clear exactly what prompted the leadership of the Tatmadaw to execute the coup last February. The only apparent immediate cause seems to have been that Aung San Suu Kyi’s party won a sweeping majority for the second time in a row, and that may have prompted fears that the civilian government was becoming entrenched in a way that might be impossible to veto down the line. Perhaps the motivation was as simple as the leadership of the Tatmadaw feeling that their ultimate control over their attempted “managed” democracy was slipping away, and that they needed to reimpose their authority while they still had time.

In any case, it appears that their calculations have been entirely wrong. It appears that the craving for democracy has grown really deep roots in Myanmar over the past decade, and the people of the country would simply not accept the military imposing themselves on the government again. The tragic consequences of this is that we are currently witnessing a civil war over the issue. And the pro-democracy movement among civilians is now suffering the same kind of genocidal treatment that the Tatmadaw has wreaked on the country’s ethnic minorities in decades past. The people of Myanmar have experienced some brutal suffering over the past 12 months, and it appears that there will be yet more suffering for them ahead.

On the positive side, it appears that nothing will stop them from pursuing democracy and freedom for themselves. If they have not yielded in the wake of the brutal military operations of the past year, nothing the Tatmadaw can do will suppress them. The Tatmadaw is running out of road on several fronts in their ability to fight this civil war. Time is on the side of democracy. We may yet hope that this conflict ends as soon as possible, and with the smallest possible human cost in 2022. But the people have already demonstrated that nothing will make them back down, so the result is not in doubt: As things stand now, it seems that democracy for the people of Myanmar is only a question of when, not if.

• Dr. Azeem Ibrahim is a director at the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy in Washington DC and research professor at the Strategic Studies Institute US Army War College. Twitter: @AzeemIbrahim