http:\/\/www.voanews.com\/burmese\/news\/soldier-talk\/08_28_10_soldiers_talk023-101709843.html<\/a> ), Myint Aung was one of the senior military officers directly involved in the Christie Island massacres.<\/p>\nAung Lynn Htut, then a military intelligence officer,was present at the emergency meeting at the Zardatgyi Naval Headquarters where Myint Aung told everyone (officer) present in the room to \u201cnot ask any questions and just follow the execution order from Abagyi or the Senior General.\u201d<\/p>\n
Those in desperate search of a silver lining in the new military line-up would do well to rethink their age-biased projection that \u201cyoung is liberal.\u201d The news from Burma that men in their mid-50s with blood on their hands have been anointed top soldiers in the Tatmadaw, even if the real power remains in the hands of the same old general, does not bode well for future prospects for democratization.<\/p>\n
The fact that the younger generation of junior generals are being promoted to such key, formal positions as \u201ccommander-in-chief\u201d \u201cdeputy-commander-in-chief\u201d and so on does not necessarily mean this generational shift signals a new progressive era even by the country\u2019s regressive standards.<\/p>\n
For those of us who lived through Ne Win\u2019s 26-year rule of one-man one-party dictatorship, this business of \u201ccivilianizing military rule\u201d is all d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu. One major problem is that, young or old, the officer corps since Ne Win installed the military rule in 1962 has been conditioned to view themselves not simply as \u201cguardians of the nation and defenders of the faith, culture and race,\u201d but more importantly, the natural-born rulers of the country who by virtue of their soldiering \u2013 and nothing else \u2013 must lead Burma\u2019s \u201cgreat unwashed.\u201d<\/p>\n
The founding motto of the Defense Services Academy in the early 1950s was \u201cVictorious Warriors of the New Era.\u201d Today it is a more self-serving one: \u201cRuling National Elites of the Future\u201d.<\/p>\n
During the 48 years since Ne Win destroyed the fledging and flawed parliamentary system, the two generations of military officers have gleefully bought into this flattering perception of the soldiering class, equating national defense with nation-building, with rather catastrophic consequences.<\/p>\n
For one, this smacks of internal \u201csocial class colonialism\u201d reminiscent of the superiority complex typical of the \u201cthe-heaven-born,\u201d a faded reference to the Oxbridge educated colonials who manned the British Empire\u2019s outposts, teaching \u201cstinky and smelly natives\u201d\u00a0 Civilization\u00a0 101 while sowing apartheid\u2019s seeds in places like South Africa and legalizing forced labor in British Burma.<\/p>\n
Like the heaven-born of bygone days, Burma\u2019s military officer corps as a distinct professional class has been a categorical failure when it comes to promoting public welfare and nation-building. A cursory glance at the mountains of verifiable evidence suffices.<\/p>\n
In all national dimensions such as life-expectancy, corruption, governance, accountability, public health, rule of law, political freedoms, public health, education, infrastructure, economy, foreign relations, the state of the natural environment, resource management, human resources development, peace, human and food security, Burma fares worse than most other Asian nations.<\/p>\n
Sixty-two years after the country\u2019s independence, 50 of them under military rule, the Burmese enjoy neither peace and security nor freedom and prosperity, while successive generations of junior and senior generals continue their \u201cmarch of folly\u201d toward one man-made disaster after another.<\/p>\n
These otherwise able men with patriotic intentions could turn the country around. In fact, the Tatmadaw is the institution with possibly the largest concentration of human resources in Burma. But they must first abandon their self-serving class ethos of \u201csoldiers as the heaven-born\u201d and the generals\u2019 nation-destroying policies and practices, which have brought the country to its current state.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately for the Burmese public, the officer corps, the newly promoted or the nearly-dead, have refused to reflect honestly and critically on their own mythology of \u201cnational unifiers\u201d against their profession\u2019s spectacularly failed record in either nation-building or national unification.<\/p>\n
It matters not which general sits on the throne, what structures the military creates, or what slogans of patriotism the officers wear on their sleeves, as long as the officer corps clings to its double-Orwellian creed\u2014\u201cofficers-good, dissidents-bad,\u201d \u201cmilitary-superior, civilian-inferior\u201d\u2014there exists no bright future for Burma country and its people.<\/p>\n
Fifty years, or the equivalent of two generations, is more than enough for any social class in power to do good.\u00a0 The military, as the ruling class with a monopoly over state power and institutions, have failed the people over the past half-century.\u00a0 And they are bound to produce a similar record of spectacular failures in the coming 50 years.<\/p>\n
The generals\u2019 record in nation-building speaks louder than half-baked expert theories of how the military-elite-led liberalization is going to deliver the Burma peace, prosperity and democracy. This, even superstitious Burmese with their voodoo art of fortune-telling, can tell you with precision.<\/p>\n
There just isn\u2019t any other way to make this message more palatable to the (presumably) hostile ears of junior and senior generals.<\/p>\n
The crucial question is \u201ccan the 50-million Burmese, and their environment, afford another half-century of bound-to-fail military rule with a civilian mask?\u201d<\/p>\n
_______________________<\/p>\n
Dr Zarni (m.zarni@lse.ac.uk) is research fellow on Burma at the LSE Global Governance, the London School of Economics and visiting senior fellow at the Institute of Security and International Studies, Chulalongkorn University.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A lot seems to be happening lately in the world of senior and junior generals in Burma. The reports of the recent military reshuffle involving dozens of senior regime officials cannot be understood fully without taking into account a number of developments both at home and abroad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-transcend-members"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7183"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7183\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}