Ending a dictatorship or authoritarian regime isn’t as easy as just changing a few leaders. Look at Burma. When I reported there, for “The Generals in their Labyrinth,” the country was ruled by a corrupt military government that craved isolation, and fostered paranoia to justify itself. I mocked them by playing golf on their private course in Naypidaw, the fantasy capital they built from scratch in the baking plains of the interior. But a devastating cyclone at the end of my stay showed just how incapable the generals were—it seemed that all the selfishness in Asia had been concentrated into the tiny minds of these astrology-driven men.
That was true enough in the moment. But the longed-for transition to democracy has brought surprises as well. Burmese people had been demonstrating for some kind of representative government before, including the so-called Saffron Revolution of 2007, which ended with violent military repression. But this time the transition seemed promising. Aung San Suu Kyi, whose principled resistance to military rule had left her under house arrest for decades, came out of house arrest to conduct a managed transition away from the generals towards some kind of accountable, elected government.
This was an improvement, but not the one many of us were hoping for. The Lady, as she is known, promoted an ethnic and religious definition of Burmese citizenship which discriminated against Muslims and rejected their presence in Burma, also known as Myanmar. Although many were born in the country, that wasn’t good enough. They were descended from Muslim outsiders, Bangladeshis. In 2012, under Suu Kyi, the Burmese army and police used small violent incidents as an excuse to stage a broad purge, according to Human Rights Watch killing tens of thousands of Muslim men, and chasing 750,000 Rohingya into Bangladesh.
The suffering was enormous, the hypocrisy even bigger. Democratic and civil values were trashed in an effort to create a pure and authentic Burmese nation, which is laughable, given the nation’s ethnic patchwork, with widely different regions from the Tibetan plateau to the Indian Ocean, dozens of religious cults, scores of languages, a multi-racial make up among the most complex in Asia, and a British imperial map that roped together various people based on what was convenient in London. Apparently the Rohingya Muslims were one group too much.
The problem of course is that it starts with one group, but it never stops with one group. Tiny secessionist movements in northern Burma were targeted next, and the repression of one is the repression, eventually, of all. The Lady maintains a gracious grip on Burma now, but Burma has lost her good example, and the credibility of their own transition. Dictatorship is the old way of humanity, and does not die easily.