BY FRANCIS WADE
NOVEMBER 15, 2015
The opposition won a big electoral victory — but in Burma, parliament is not where true power lies.
It didn’t take long after polling stations across Burma closed on November 8 for the country’s ruling party to concede defeat. “We lost,” the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) chairman Htay Oo said bluntly, unable to argue with early indications that suggested the party of Aung San Suu Kyi had won a convincing landslide. Her National League for Democracy (NLD) will dominate the new parliament in January. This is the second such victory for the party in 25 years, but the first that appears likely to be accepted.
The question now on the lips of many pundits watching this phase of the transition pertains to the military that has ruled Burma since 1962: will it accept the results, or will it intervene and retake power? In 1990, when nationwide elections gave the newly formed NLD nearly 80 percent of seats, the military quickly annulled the results. Scrambling to explain the decision, it argued the familiar line: that a country so beset by internal conflict and discord wasn’t ready for democracy. A statement by army chief Min Aung Hlaing in September suggested Burma now is. “I have no plans for a military coup [and] the military has no plans for it,” he said.
This may appear positive, but there are important reasons for the military’s newfound acquiescence. Over the past year, it has expanded efforts to plant newly retired military officers in civilian posts across various pillars of government — in the health and education ministries, the energy ministry, the Supreme Court, and more. In addition, 25 percent of parliamentary seats are automatically reserved for military legislators who occupy positions that, in any genuine democracy, should be held by figures independent of the institutions they create policy for. On top of this, the 2008 constitution states that the Home Affairs, Defense, and Border Affairs ministries must be headed by serving military men, thereby giving the military control of the three ministries most integral to governance in Burma. So while parliament may finally have a civilian majority, the military will remain firmly embedded within the administrative and policy-making arenas, serving as a potential barrier to whatever legislation parliament seeks to pass that might weaken the military’s political powers — a process that must take place if the transition to civilian rule is to be successful.
This has profound consequences for genuine democratization in Burma. While the creeping militarization of lower-level posts within other ministries serves to keep them within the military’s orbit, this isn’t necessary for the three ministries of governance and their functionaries: they answer directly to the commander-in-chief. While the Defense Ministry controls the armed forces and the Border Affairs Ministry oversees the affairs of ethnic states, the remit of the Home Affairs Ministry is more expansive: it controls both the police force and the General Administration Department, which manages all administrative functions from the state level down to village level, and which Human Rights Watch has said serves as a key instrument of local surveillance.
Through these ministries, the military has direct control over security and, via the General Administration Department, the entire structure of local governance in Burma. Those sectors are effectively beholden to unelected officials with a strong disposition towards preserving the military’s interests. “The chain of command for local administrators in every village and neighborhood in the country runs directly to the commander-in-chief, bypassing elected officials,” says Matthew Bugher, who last year co-authored a Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic report that traced war crimes committed in eastern Burma in 2005 and 2006 to the current Home Affairs minister, Lieutenant Ko Ko.
The command structure of these ministries should give pause to those celebrating the victory of the NLD, which has rallied against the military’s dominance over Burma’s political affairs. Despite its soon-to-be parliamentary majority, the NLD will still not be able to radically alter who has oversight of those ministries without first overhauling the constitution. To do this it must gain more than 75 percent of parliamentary votes; the fact that 25 percent of parliament is comprised of military men — as dictated by the constitution –ensures this is unlikely to happen.
The constitution was designed with the explicit intention of enshrining the military’s role in political life beyond the supposed transition. It is this document that, more than anything, explains Min Aung Hlaing’s nonchalance when asked whether a coup is likely. The military doesn’t need to retake power because it has never left, and it won’t anytime soon. The constitution locks in its interests and limits exactly what structural reforms a majority civilian parliament can make.
It also provides the military a much-needed safety net. When a number of former officers were appointed to the Supreme Court in September, it was only to administrative positions. But as the International Commission of Jurists notes, the constitution would allow them to take senior judicial positions if the president considers them to be “eminent jurists.” This allows for the insertion of people with vested interests in maintaining the impunity of the military into positions that enable them to influence court proceedings against the military. As a result, the Supreme Court loses its ability to oversee an institution that, more than any other in Burma, needs independent legal oversight.
But the militarization of Burma’s nominally civilian government also has more mundane day-to-day implications. A case in point is the health ministry, which is overseen by retired major general Dr. Than Aung. Here, military officers have been posted to administrative positions that give them final say on appointments, promotions and dismissals. They will strengthen Burma’s own glass ceiling, one that prevents any non-military figure from taking a position above that of their military colleagues, thereby leaving technically capable staff subordinated to untrained officers. This can only further stunt the development of a sector that ranks among the most poorly resourced in the world.
Looking to the shifting composition of parliament as a barometer of change in Burma is problematic because it ignores the fact that parliament is not the center of power that a democratic state requires it to be. The NLD can, of course, make changes in many areas regardless of the constitution, ranging from infrastructural development to poverty reduction policies to bolstering social and environmental protections in investment laws. But if we’re looking for more fundamental transformation, the task becomes much harder, because that kind of change is beholden to a constitution designed to be impervious to change. Even positions not protected by the constitution — administrative roles in the education ministry recently granted to former officers, for example — will be hard to overhaul. Any attempt to supplant these officers with people trained in their field will likely be viewed as a purge of the old guard, and could compel the military to assert its primacy in ways that could endanger the democratization process.
Burma’s transition phase should be an opportunity to transform the hierarchy of power so that it is more accountable to the electorate. But any move to do so is being resisted by forces deep within that hierarchy that designed this transition with the knowledge that, on November 8, 2015, the opposition would finally sweep to power. But that script made space only for a limited power. The Catch 22 that protects the Burmese elite — that changing the constitution requires changes to the constitution — means that a key component of a viable democracy, the civilianization of decision-making, may have to wait.
In the photo, a Burmese soldier secures the entrance of an army compound in Rangoon on November 12, 2015.
Remember Abenomics? Neither Does Abe.
Japan's Prime Minister has been obsessing over defense policy and international affairs, at the expense of his country's lackluster economy.
BY WILLIAM SPOSATONOVEMBER 13, 2015facebooktwittergoogle-plusredditemail
Remember Abenomics? Neither Does Abe.
TOKYO — Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has had a busy few months. After a summer of pushing through controversial new defense policies, he held a successful and strategically important trilateral summit with South Korea and China and crossed visiting all of Central Asia off his bucket list — becoming the first sitting Japanese prime minister to do so. What is missing from his list of recent accomplishments, however, is any tangible progress on what he has called his No. 1 priority ever since taking office in December 2012: the Japanese economy. While growth has picked up slightly in the past two years, Japan again finds itself in an economic downturn. Third-quarter gross domestic product (GDP) figures to be released on Nov. 16 are expected to be negative. After a downturn in the second quarter, that means Japan will be back in recession — just six months since the last one ended.
For Abe, political success abroad has proved easier than economic success at home. His penchant for bolstering Japan’s defense posture may have come at the expense of his much-vaunted “Abenomics” program, designed to pull the economy out of its long slump. “Since resistance to reforms can be strong in Japan, the government often focuses on only one policy issue at a time,” said Martin Schulz of the Fujitsu Research Institute, an economic research and consulting group. In this case, that means the “structural reform” legislation that would make the economy more efficient has taken a back seat to the bitterly contested defense agenda.
Indeed, Abe faced heavy resistance to win even a relatively modest change in the way Japan’s military can operate. The country’s post-World War II constitution renounces military force to solve disputes. (Though that has not stopped the development over the last few decades of the Japan Self-Defense Forces, one of the world’s largest and best-equipped military forces.) The recent debate focused on “collective self-defense” — a seemingly basic concept. Previously, if U.S. and Japanese forces were on a joint patrol in, say, Iraq, the Japanese could not get involved even if U.S. forces were to come under attack. That has now changed — a seemingly logical move for a force that is supposed to be the United States’ closest security ally in Asia and to the delight of Japanese conservatives.
Nevertheless, the idea brought out protestors at levels not seen since the Vietnam War and scuffles in Japan’s parliament, known as the Diet, producing memorable photos and a field day for headline writers: “Japanese Politicians Fight Over Pacifism,” quipped the Wall Street Journal. Abe managed to push his legislation through the Diet after a late-night session that dragged into the early hours of Sept. 18. Given his coalition’s 150-seat majority in the more important 475-member lower house, even that seemed like a small victory.
Yes, Washington was pleased (some cynics would say that’s all that really matters in Japan’s official circles). And some analysts have risen to Abe’s defense, saying that it was indeed time well-spent — a necessary first step to go beyond the question of collective defensive and toward the establishment of a new security framework. “The new legislation opens the way for Japan to make a broader international commitment,” said Narushige Michishita, a Japan scholar at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. “When it comes to the defense industry, this will be a major reform measure,” he said.
With that battle over, Abe appeared ready to try to get his economic program back on track. When he first took office, Abe framed Abenomics around “three arrows”: Arrow 1 was a flood of easy money from the Bank of Japan in a quantitative easing program that made the U.S. Federal Reserve’s famed QE look tame. Arrow 2 was a straightforward spending program, while Arrow 3 was the elusive structural reforms. In late September, Abe announced that he was relaunching his economic agenda, dubbing it “Abenomics 2.0.” Like many upgrades, however, it proved to be less than a roaring success.
Largely dropping any reference to his first set of arrows, Abe launched three new ones: an ambitious plan to raise GDP 20 percent to roughly $5 trillion in five years, requiring a nominal annual growth rate of around 3 percent, roughly double what Japan has been able to do since its economic collapse in 1991; greater child care support to help boost the birth rate in a country whose population is expected to shrink 15 percent from current levels by 2050; and enhanced social security benefits to help families care for elderly relatives. Business leaders and economists are skeptical, especially about the new GDP target. “It is not controversial; it is just an unrealistic number,” said Hiromichi Shirakawa, Credit Suisse’s chief economist for Japan, at a Sept. 28 press briefing on the state of the Japanese economy.
And his first three arrows, especially the third one, seem like they’ve missed their mark. “For the third arrow, the things you need to have are not getting done,” said analyst Naomi Fink, who heads the economic research firm Europacifica Consulting. There has been far too little basic work done on wringing out more efficiencies in the key areas that have been lagging in overall productivity, Fink added.
It has not been all bad economic news for Abe, however. On Oct. 5, the 12 nations negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade pact managed to reach agreement, after five years of negotiations and several brushes with death. The clear winners in this will be Japanese consumers, who pay exorbitant prices for food due to high tariffs protecting Japan’s farm sector. The GDP impact will be minor — agriculture accounts for just 1.2 percent of the total. But the symbolism is strong, since it shows that Abe is taking on entrenched power bases. “They were anchoring their economic reforms on TPP,” said Fujitsu’s Schulz, though he notes that some of the benefits are years down the road, with some tariff phaseouts taking 25 years. And the job market remains strong: Overall unemployment was just 3.4 percent in September — just slightly higher than in April, when Japan hit an 18-year low of 3.3 percent. The closely watched ratio of available jobs to job seekers is at 1.24 to 1, the highest since February 1992.
But that has not translated into wage inflation and larger pay packets: Real wages have risen only modestly, up 0.1 percent in August and 0.5 percent in September from year-ago levels, figures that are unlikely to help spur more spending. And expectations of a new recession, even if mild, could lead to a general “sell Japan” feeling among foreign investors, even if other indicators are holding up a bit better. In a bid to get more money into the hands of the average household, Abe called in business leaders on Nov. 5 for a scolding over high profits and still-stingy wage hikes. But the prime minister tried the same tactic last winter — and it didn’t work then, either.
Abe will need to spend a lot more time and legislative muscle on economic reforms if he wants to be remembered as the prime minister who broke the 20-year stretch of a slow but steady decline — instead of the first prime minister to visit all of Central Asia.
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