2 - Myanmar’s Post-coup Crisis: Reflections on a History of Failed Nation Building

Summary

What Myanmar1 is currently experiencing is often referred to as a ‘post-coup crisis’. Within the country, people call it the ‘Spring Revolution’, because it began in February, Myanmar's ‘Spring’. As significant parts of the country descended under armed conflict, political analysts and pundits began to start speaking of ‘civil war’ and the concept of a ‘failed state’. All these terms are accurate to some extent and reflect a certain kind of reality. And yet, they are inadequate and incomplete. In a world where unspeakable happenings occur almost daily, those who write pieces on Myanmar for the media will find the words ‘crisis’ and ‘tragedy’ a common feature of their news articles. In Myanmar we see and encounter such things with numbing regularity. And yet even we, ourselves, have not come up with a common term or phrase to label what we are faced with on a daily basis.

By calling it a ‘cataclysm’ one comes closer to the mark. Sifting through different descriptive terms of trauma goes together with plumbing the nature of the upheaval. An outsider may not comprehend the magnitude of the trauma and the depth of suffering that is being experienced — or indeed, that has been experienced collectively over the course of our history. That is one reason the remedies prescribed by external actors (like ‘dialogue’ for instance) fall flat on Myanmar ears. The United Nations and its various representatives have become the butt of jokes for their repeated expressions of ‘concern’. Because what is happening is unprecedented in living memory. While one can go back a number of decades to look at comparable circumstances, those cases simply don't do justice to the present. To the fear, uncertainty, exhaustion, sadness, anxiety, confusion and overall deep sense of utter devastation at what has and continues to take place on a daily basis.

One event that comes to mind is the fall of the Kingdom of Burma, etched into the history books by the deposition and exile of the last King, Thibaw, and annexation to the British Empire in 1886. Not many people are aware that the subsequent ‘pacification’ of the country took ten more years, and the deployment of 60,000 troops from the British Empire to quell various forms of resistance.