The “success” of US Senator Jim Webb, who chairs the influential Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs, in securing the release of the deluded fellow Vietnam vet John Yettaw from the Insein prison in Rangoon has made headline news. The Senator’s whirlwind visit to Burma was in fact choreographed with a pre-arranged outcome. And it needs to be seen for what it really is -- a part of the 'Engagement, Right or Wrong’ campaign waged by humanitarian and development NGOs with their own organizational agendas, commercial interests, executed through unaccountable policy wonks with little or no lived experience of oppression and/or poverty.

This cautionary note from me may come as a surprise, considering that I was the first Burmese dissident who, much to the consternation of the mainstream opposition and Aung San Suu Kyi herself, pursued engagement strategies after openly questioning the conventional wisdom of the mainstream opposition’s policy on the country’s foreign relations, tourism, trade and development, when it turned into a sanctions orthodoxy.

Now I am seeing the emergence of a new lobby pushing strategically and aggressively for the policy of ‘Engagement Right or Wrong’. While I count myself amongst ‘engagers’, my fellow ‘engagers’ are, in my view, becoming too devout in their preachy analyses. In their zealous push for a new Western approach, they are basing their strategies on rather flimsy evidence and shaky analytical foundations. 

There are five fundamental realities that absolutely need to be factored in imagining a more effective approach for helping trigger a genuine change process there.

First, contrary to the current media and policy discourses which portray the Burmese regime as ‘isolated’, neither the Burmese military nor its society is isolated from the post-Cold War world.  How could a regime that receives solid military, economic and political support from the world’s giants including Russia, China, and India, as well as a number of Asian governments with varying clout, which also enjoy full economic engagement with the entire global natural resource extractive industry, from gas and oil and mining companies from Australia, Canada, France, Italy, and USA be seen as isolated?  

The regime has very cleverly tapped into the process which my colleague at the London School of Economics, Professor Mary Kaldor, calls ‘regressive globalization’, which hurts the oppressed and downtrodden, while strengthening the repressive rule of authoritarian regimes globally.  The crucial issue is to make this globalization process work for the people, not just a handful of neanderthal generals and their economic and military bases. Mere increases in western foreign direct investment and policies designed to stimulate economic growth will do nothing to turn this equation around.

Second, and internally, the State in Burma is predatory, militarist and colonial in terms of its policy priorities and its institutional practices. Its corporate worldview and the leadership culture are deeply feudal.  

The State in the hands of the generals since 1962 vacuums the country of all marketable natural resources much of which happen to be found in the ancestral lands of ethnic minorities. Not only do the generals confiscate a massive quantity of land, they extract labor from various pockets of population and view politics as an extension of war and military operations, not the other way around. The regime’s Constitution merely legitimizes, if internally, the already existing colonial distinctions between the military and civilians, as well as indigenous ethnic minorities.  

Third, the self-perception of the military leaders is deeply feudal and paternalistic to a fault: the officers, big and small, require their subordinates to call them as ‘Big Father’ or ‘Small Father’, not ‘Senior or Junior General’.  The generals view themselves in the mould of the “Buddhist” warrior kings of bygone centuries who rose to power - usually in blood baths and military conquests – is glorified out of proportions in Burmese nationalist historiography. As far as Burma's military leaders are concerned, observing the Buddhist Sabbath on special occasions or ‘meditating’ for next life, and ordering troops to slaughter unarmed civilians or implement ruthless ‘Four Cuts’ operational plans, host no moral contradictions.

Fourth, the corporate worldview among the officer corps is uncompromisingly statist. Having captured all organs of state in Burma, they embrace the absolutist notion of state sovereignty which in effect holds the head of State, not the people, as the sovereign.  The result is a military which serves the sovereign leader and feels no need to reconcile with any other organisation in the country – not even with the most sacred segment of the Burmese society at large, namely its Buddhist monks.  

While the opposition and the entire world, including regime supporters such as China, India and ASEAN push for ‘reconciliation’ in Burmese society, the military as a whole, not just the top generals, operate within the paradigm of ‘national reconsolidation’, a euphemism for consolidating their military power within the post-colonial national boundaries.  There is no meeting of half-way with any opposition – not just Oxford-educated Aung San Suu Kyi or urban dissidents, or with the tradition-bound Buddhist order.

Fifth, there has been an on-going humanitarian, political and socio-economic crisis in Burma, which is the direct result of policies, practices and above all, the leadership of the military. The well-being of the public at large is certainly not even in the top five policy priorities of the ruling junta. The generals’ actions, not words, speak volumes about where their concerns and priorities lie.  

As of now, the regime is pouring an estimated US$ 10 billion plus, according to one in-country observer, into massive weaponisation projects, both conventional and non-conventional, in 22 different sites scattered across the country, with technical assistance from Russia, North and South Korea, China, Russia and Singapore. The project of building 600-800 tunnels with help from N. Korea and the attempt to acquire various military technologies from the same rogue nuclear power are only two among many projects which divert the country’s financial, natural and human resources away from economically productive investment or social welfare services.

In pushing for genuine political change and economic betterment, 2,100 dissidents have risked – and received – lengthy jail sentences (up to 100 plus years!).  Literally hundreds of thousands have either lost their lives or families and millions more are subject to either grinding poverty, outright and systematic violence, and rape if they happen to be born in a wrong village in the country’s war zones, all as a direct result of the military’s systemic policy and leadership failures.   I have trekked through the war zones in Eastern Burma and stayed with armed resistance fighters in their front line trenches deep inside ‘enemy lines’.  I have witnessed personally how horrible and uncertain the lives of the Karen and other adjacent minorities are, sandwiched between the ruthless and superior Burmese military and the Thai and Chinese commercial interests which seek to secure natural resources in commercially and strategically important geographic locations.

Burma’s problems are well-known and the atrocities well-documented.   A hastily formulated sanctions campaign twenty years ago- of which I was a part - based on faulty assumptions and models of social change  have created a situation where people remain locked in poverty and oppression.  Another hasty push, out of revolutionary pragmatism, to put the military in the driver’s seat towards genuine reforms, despite its half-century of spectacular failure in nation building, will only further entrench the military in power and politics. The current top-down approach towards engagement needs to take account of the above-mentioned fundamentals and consider how to engage with all levels of society, economy and military. 

To say there is no magic wand or the silver bullet for Burma's woes is cliché.  As analysts, researchers, and lobbyists, in our search for nuanced policies it is imperative that we take care not to trivialize the Burmese dissidents’ principled sacrifices, their 11th hour fight for a better and brighter Burma and, above all, render the oppression of ordinary Burmese people meaningless.