When Myanmar received its independence from Great Britain at 4:20 in the morning of 4 January 1948, Ne Win, as commander of the Northern region, was responsible for defending the country's borders with India, China, French Indochina, and Thailand. India was convulsed with the consequences of the partition from Pakistan and China was in the final throes of the civil war between Mao Tse-tung's Red Army and Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang (KMT). Laos, as a French colony was relatively peaceful and Thailand was just two months back under the military rule of Marshall Pibul Songram. None of these at that time appeared to pose a threat to the territorial integrity or the sovereignty of Myanmar but with Chinese Communist victory apparently imminent, and Thailand having only recently given up administrative control of the cis-Salween (Thanlwin) Shan State of Kengtung which had been given by Japan, the future appeared ominous.

Moreover, both putative Chinese governments maintained claims to territory bequeathed by Britain to Burma to a line deep into Ne Win's command, roughly from Myitkyina west to the Indian border. In January 1948, it was fortunate that no neighbouring government either wished, or was in a position, to challenge Burma's borders. The northern command had neither the troops nor the equipment to move up to the borders and defend them. During the sixty-two years that Britain had controlled this vast territory, little had been done to develop the roads and railways of the region. Being a rough mountainous country with few obvious economic assets, most of the border areas remained largely undisturbed except for the many Western and Karen missionaries who were converting the peoples of the area who were non-Buddhists, particularly the Kachin, to one or another variety of Christianity. Like the Bamar, however, the Shan remained overwhelming followers of Theravada Buddhism.

Despite what is known of his life, in many ways, Ne Win remains an enigma. There is too much unknown to form a rounded and satisfactory understanding of the man. He was a man of his time, and that time is now gone. The issues which inflamed nationalist politicians in Myanmar and other colonies in the 1920s and 1930s are all but forgotten, except by historians. The changing alliances and the violence of war and revolution in the 1940s throughout Europe and Asia are now the romance of movies and historical documentaries. The global Cold War and the anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist rhetoric of Third World leaders of the 1950s and 1960s are now marketed as Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh T-shirts. The collapse of socialism and Communism is now taught as inevitable by the sons and daughters of the neoclassical economists who developed monetarism and privatization in the 1970s and 1980s. Men and women born in this century will find it hard to understand how once white skin was a necessary badge for admission to the centres of global power and wealth, or that men brought the world to the cusp of nuclear war over ideological shibboleths of Communism and Democratic Capitalism. Even if we knew more about Ne Win, it is doubtful we would know how to understand the world as he and his generation of Myanmar nationalists did.

However, some aspects of his character, purposes and intent do show through his words and actions. Of course, over a lifetime of more than nine decades, his opinions changed as he learned new things, experienced new sensations, and observed the world around him alter, seemingly imperceptively, but cumulatively, significantly. However, like most people, Ne Win was probably not as adaptable to change as he thought he was or perhaps he should have been, particularly towards the end of his political career. He was born in a township in the middle of a province of British India and died in a nation whose government was considered a pariah by the Western governments which had seen him for twenty-six years as a champion of anti-Communism and the nation he governed, the quiet hub around which the international politics of South, Southeast and East Asia's conflicts were waged.

As Ne Win entered his 41st year, he might well have felt that he had done his share of creating and defending Myanmar as an independent state. During the previous decade, he had been part of six organizations and re-organizations of Myanmar's first army since 1885. He had climbed up and been lowered down the chain of command of armies led by Japanese, Burmese, British, and again Burmese officers. Always playing a leading role, whatever his rank, he rose to the pinnacle of military power and had political power within his grasp, but had refused to keep it. Seen by many as the “virtual dictator” of those parts of the country where the government's writ ran,1 rather than grab for power, he eased back and for the next eight years reverted to a man many people remember from his life in Yangon during and after his stint at Yangon University, a rather shiftless, easygoing playboy, intent on rather selfish and hedonistic pursuits, with little ambition and less energy for the details of government.

During the next eight years, he married, for the third time, the woman with whom he is most remembered in Myanmar and who bore him three children who were closest to him. To the extent that Ne Win had a normal domestic life, it was during this period. He travelled the world for business and pleasure, playing golf in Scotland, lunching with prime ministers and heads of state, taking what were in effect extensive holidays abroad, as well as visiting foreign military bases and holding high-level strategic and political discussions with governments of every political stripe, capitalist republics, Communist one-party regimes, and the mixed bag that came to be known as the Third World, of which Myanmar was a part. He clearly mellowed during these years and the intensity which had driven him in the 1940s, and especially during the height of the civil war, was gone, for a man taking a more measured view of matters, even a degree of detachment.

Events once more moved Ne Win's life in a different direction a decade after Myanmar gained its independence. In 1958, he assumed the Prime Ministership, the pinnacle of political power which he had refused to grasp when it was first within his reach. How much he had a hand in engineering the events that led to his elevation remains in dispute, but the evidence, to the best it can be understood, is that he was at least a willing participant in the politics which led to what U Nu subsequently realized as his own irrational and petulant behaviour which allowed the army to oust him from power. As Ne Win was the head of the army, he might have taken measures to ensure a different result. In any event, he did not stop the process which led to his first assumption of the reins of government.

Burmese politics were changed irreparably when the ruling Anti- Fascist People's Freedom League (AFPFL) split into two factions at the end of April to the beginning of May 1958. The split had consequences not only for the country's political parties and its army, but also for the Buddhist monkhood, which was also fractured by the rupture (Mendelson 1975, p. 244). By 9 June, the split was absolute, but, in retrospect, it seemed to be inevitable after, if not before, the 1956 elections. The Socialists, led by Kyaw Nyein and Ba Swe, left the government at Prime Minister Nu's insistence, and he and his faction, now a minority in the Pyithu Hluttaw, could only continue in office with the support of minor parties, particular the largely pro-Communist National United Front (NUF) (the ur-manuscript on this is Sein Win 1959).

It is both too soon and too late to write a political biography of General Ne Win. Too soon for several reasons: one is that his name still stirs political passions, though not as strongly as two or three decades ago. Another reason is that a number of diplomatic records necessary for a full account are not yet available. Under the thirty-year rule that applies in many archives, most of Ne Win's final decade in power is still under a blanket and this book is weaker for that. Moreover, the Myanmar archives and the archives of other countries crucial for a complete account are partially or totally unavailable. If I had more time, more money, and an even more tolerant publisher, the book would be substantially longer than it is now.

A political biography of General Ne Win is also too late in that many people who might have been interviewed and provided first-hand accounts of events and circumstances are no longer here. The Grim Reaper reached them before I did. Especially, the subject of the volume, General Ne Win, whom I never met, has been gone for more than a decade as I write. He does not have the chance to rebut and refute what I have written about him. However, given his lack of interest in what others said about him, and his unwillingness to encourage a cult of personality around himself, other than in the reflected glory of General Aung San, it is unlikely that he would do so even if he were alive.

A question that readers might ask is why have I bothered to write this book? I do not need to do so as I am under no obligation to a university to drive it up the league tables or a funding council to demonstrate that I deserve my noodles and potatoes.1 There are, however, reasons which grew out of my academic career.I lived in Myanmar in 1978 and in 1982 for periods of six months each, and visited the country almost every year between 1975 and 1987, the year before Ne Win stepped down from formal office. Though I was unable to travel widely before 1989, and never reached the furthest regions of the country until this century, I did experience a little of what life in socialist Myanmar was like.

General Ne Win's assumption of power on 2 March 1962, while not unexpected, was nonetheless a surprise to many. It was executed in secrecy, and apparently even the deputy commander of the armed forces, Brigadier General Aung Gyi, was not informed until the next morning, though he must have been expecting it as early as November 1961, when he raised the prospect with colleagues. Others in the army, including Brigadier General Tin Pe, had been urging Ne Win to halt what they saw as a drift towards the dissolution of the Union of Burma. U Nu's cooperation with the Shan and Kayah traditional leaders in the Federal Seminar, and growing discontent in other minority areas caused by Nu's constitutional amendment making Buddhism the state religion, were creating political forces which many in the army felt the increasingly fractious Union Party government could not resist. Kachin Christians, led by former students fired by zeal for “Kachin national culture”, resented the installation of Buddhism as the state religion and the Shan Sawbwa, in the name of Shan “national determination”, were beginning to organize armed opposition to the government. The possibility of the Union Party splitting, as the AFPFL had done in 1958, became ever more likely, especially after Nu, the only person holding the party together, announced he would not run for office again after the next elections due two years hence (Silverstein 1977, p. 66). Planning for the corp commenced on 24 February, and twenty-eight officers were instructed as to what to do when the order for the coup was given. However, the date remained unknown until Ne Win gave the order (Mya Han and Thein Hlaing 2001, pp. 164–65).

Nu who was held incommunicado at Mingaladon from the middle of the night, initially believed that his detention was engineered by junior officers and soon Ne Win would come to his rescue (Nu 1975, pp. 141– 44). He, like many others, had false expectations, believing the past would be a guide to the future.

Ne Win commenced his sixteenth year in power, and his fourth as President, in a calmer mood than was apparent during the previous years. He spent ten days around the Burmese New Year, thingyan, in Maymyo in 1978 with some of his children, playing golf, rather than going abroad as often in the past. However, he had a mishap of some nature and had to be flown by helicopter to Mandalay on 24 April. Nonetheless, three days later he was receiving departing ambassadors as usual. One of the achievements of the socialist revolution, the People's Health Plan, had commenced on 1 April. For all the problems of the economy, some of the social reforms that were dreamt of at the time of the 1962 coup were at least being realized, if only on paper. However, the cost was significant in other terms and it was believed by the British ambassador that Myanmar was then holding 1,500 political prisoners, many having been arrested in the workers and students demonstrations in 1974. Others would have been insurgents and other rebels caught in military campaigns against the Communist and ethnically designated separatists. However, as the economy improved, the international situation evolved in ways posing no immediate threat to the country, Ne Win's confidence grew and, within two years, there would be a significant liberalization within the boundaries of the oneparty state.

Background to the Conflict

Even casual observers of the Myanmar political scene will be aware that one of the most difficult and enduring problems that continues to challenge the country's political transition is the need to find a resolution to the manifold conflicts that have taken place in the so-called “ethnic” states. One of the longest of these conflicts has been in the Kachin State, in the north of the country. The Kachin Independence Army was founded in 1961 and entered into armed conflict with the central military regime following General Ne Win's takeover of power in 1962. Although there were some attempts to broker ceasefires during the following decades, the fighting continued more or less without cessation until 1994, when an agreement to retain arms but refrain from violence was eventually signed. In June 2011, this ceasefire in turn collapsed after being in place for seventeen years and the conflict has since then remained stubbornly impervious to resolution. It is proving as difficult as ever it was in the past to find a way forward through negotiation, and the national peace process, centred upon the conclusion of a nationwide ceasefire with all principal ethnic armed groups as promoted by the national government, is floundering once more.

It is a convention in almost any policy document or analysis of the Kachin conflict to begin with a longer history of the Kachin regi on, often invoking, too, a pseudo-anthropological interpretation of kinship and lineage as perennial markers of “Kachin” identity and a means of explaining the nature of this enduring resistance. Typically, too, such analysis will describe the Kachin experience under colonial rule as a decisive factor in explaining the continuation of problems down to the present. This includes the political separation of the Frontier Areas from the rest, the military privileging of ethnic recruits into the colonial army and then the failure and ongoing symbolism of the Panglong Agreement of 1947. The agreement was signed by General Aung San and a number of elite representatives of “ethnic minority” communities with the intention of facilitating the speedy withdrawal of British imperial power on the basis of a future commitment by the Burmese nationalist government to introducing a federal system. This over-arching historical narrative, which is used to explain the emergence and rationale of the Kachin conflict down to the present, is so well-rehearsed that it has become almost impossible to resist.

After a decade in power, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono retired from the Indonesian presidency in October 2014. Arguably, his rule was the most stable period of governance in Indonesian democratic politics — counting both the sixteen years following Soeharto's fall and the seven-year parliamentary democracy in the 1950s. Accommodating a wide array of ideological, religious and social interests, Yudhoyono has been a master political integrationist. The slogan of his party (“nationalist-religious”) symbolized Yudhoyono's determination, and ability, to bridge the key divide in Indonesian society, that is, that between nationalists, who believe that religion needs to take a backseat to larger societal issues, and devout Muslims, who favour a stronger role for Islam in political life. While balancing these two groups, Yudhoyono also neutralized a host of other conflict spots. Handing out patronage posts to all major parties that sought them, and refraining from conflict with forces critical of him or democracy overall, Yudhoyono ensured that almost everyone accepted, or at least tolerated, his rule. The result of this decade-long political equilibrium looked impressive: Indonesia recorded economic growth rates last seen under Soeharto, communal violence was kept at very low levels, and one major separatist conflict — Aceh — was resolved.

Yet Yudhoyono's quiet rule was followed by the most divisive elections since the end of Soeharto's New Order regime in 1998. The struggle for Yudhoyono's succession saw renewed tensions between the nationalist and Islamic camps, and supporters of a return to some form of autocratic governance faced off with defenders of the democratic status quo. Both candidates in the 2014 presidential elections, Joko Widodo (Jokowi) and Prabowo Subianto, styled themselves as populists who promised — in very different ways — to address public dissatisfaction with Yudhoyono's steady but uninspiring government. Clearly, then, Yudhoyono's presidency had not ended the country's long-standing tensions and conflicts — it had simply bottled them up. The 2014 elections returned Indonesia to a more “normal” state of politics — one in which the heterogeneity of views and interests played out in the open instead of being absorbed into Yudhoyono's quest for societal harmony. This article describes the repolarization of Indonesian politics by evaluating the “battle of the populists” in the 2014 elections, the state of the economy as a main driver of the populist surge, and the new, more aggressive foreign policy rhetoric under the Jokowi administration.

Introduction

The 2013 national elections could be seen as a transformative event for Cambodian politics. Given its massive grassroots organizations, strong symbiotic relations with domestic tycoons and its control of state resources and institutions — particularly the security apparatus, the judiciary, and the National Election Committee (NEC) — the ruling Cambodian People's Party (CPP) was expected to win a landslide victory over the opposition Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP). This expectation was up-ended as large numbers of Cambodian people voted against the CPP, forcing the party to do some soul searching. This article addresses four points.

The first examines factors that led many people to expect CPP victory. The second focuses on reasons underlying the protest votes against the CPP and the CNRP's popularity. The third documents the popular protests organized by the CNRP and the CPP's responses that culminated in a political compromise; and the fourth addresses CPP's reform efforts since the election. It then concludes by outlining expected trends for the coming years.

The Expectations

The CPP went into the 2013 election cycle with strong prospects. First, the economy was strong, growing at a rate of over 7 per cent propelled by the agriculture, textile and tourism sectors. The CPP controlled all government institutions from the national to local levels including the National Election Committee. It also had a monopoly over the media; major television and radio stations are either affiliated with or owned by the CPP. As the Cambodian state has been synonymous with the CPP, the party was able to manipulate public goods transforming them into partisan resources. The CPP has strong organizational capacity with networks that link the state and business tycoons to local communities, creating a massive patronage-based vote-driving machine. The core of this structure is the party working groups comprising central party officials, senior government officials, and sub-national government officials with funding from these government officials and businesses. These working groups contributed resources for the construction of schools, roads, bridges, and offered a variety of small gifts including cash, monosodium glutamate (MSG), clothing and reading glasses. Nationwide opinion polls conducted by the National Republican Institute found 79 per cent of Cambodians believed that their country was headed in the right direction. Top reasons for people's confidence included the country's infrastructural improvement. Cambodia watchers generally believed that the CPP would win a comfortable majority even in the absence of electoral manipulation.

The July 2013 General Elections was a critical turning point in the modern history of Cambodian political development and democratization. The predominant role of the Cambodian People's Party (CPP) with the long-serving Prime Minister Hun Sen was challenged for the first time in twenty years. The results of the 2013 election illustrated the narrowing political power base of the ruling CPP and the increasing popularity of the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP).

It is the first time the opposition party gained such a strong power base. The popular votes for both parties were roughly equal (CPP received 3,235,969 votes — 48.83 per cent and CNRP received 2,946,176 votes — 44.46 per cent). In terms of seats at the National Assembly, the CPP got sixty-eight seats while the CNRP got fifty-five seats, signifying the narrowing of political gap and the emergence of political power transformation in Cambodia.

2014 was a year full of controversies and complexities but was also a year of hope. There are strong political pressures and impetus to reform state institutions to be accountable to the people. Fruitful reform results are expected if both parties can effectively work together to serve their people and national interests.

Economic growth rate remains high and the current 20 per cent poverty rate is expected to be reduced by 1 per cent per annum. However, bureaucratic capacity, political leadership, good governance and human capital are the main constraints in maintaining high economic growth and promoting socio-economic equity and inclusiveness.

Social dynamics (socio-economic inequality, social injustice, and social trust issues) are posing a serious threat to national stability and well-being. Without efficiently and effectively addressing such social issues, Cambodia may fall into political, social and economic crisis in the coming years. Clean and accountable government needs to be strengthened at both the national and local levels in order to improve the trust between society and state.

In terms of diplomacy, Cambodia has strengthened bilateral ties with Thailand, Vietnam and China. Bilateral relations with Thailand face new challenges after the coup in Thailand in May although both sides are trying to carefully manage ties. Relations with Vietnam have strengthened remarkably especially in economic cooperation although they face certain challenges coming from the opposition party in Cambodia. Relations with China continue to develop fast.

POVERTY

The villagers of Long Tuyen Village constantly mention “poverty” as the main problem in their life. When I first met them and explained that I wanted to learn about their life, the first comments I received were, “Vietnam is poor, because it is a developing country”, “in Vietnam, farmers are poor”, and “our life is difficult because we are poor”. Later on, after I had spent a few months in the village, the villagers would ask me, “Have you found out why Vietnam is poor?” or “do you know how the farmers could be helped so that we are not poor any longer?” Leshkowich states that the female market traders in Ho Chi Minh “consciously perpetuate negative stereotypes” about petty traders for their own benefit (Leshkowich 2000, p. 8). It is possible that the farmers stressed their “poor” life in to me because I was a foreigner from a rich country and they expected me to help them. However, my research suggests that the farmers’ use of the word is not only for taking advantage of “being poor”. Poverty constitutes a part of their perception of the reality that they see in their actual life, and it also forms their identity.

Are the farmers actually poor? It can be said that the villagers of Binh Thuong B Hamlet are poor in a general sense. About one third of all houses do not have electricity. Only a few have water pumps, and the rest use muddy river water for drinking and cooking, as well as for other daily purposes. Many houses are made of water coconut leaves, and many have dirt floors. The villagers do not regularly eat meat which they have to buy in the market, and they often eat only fish from the river, vegetables from their garden, and rice from their field. However, to say whether the villagers are poor in any objective sense is a difficult task beyond the scope of my work. Rather, what is important is the strong “feeling” of poverty among the farmers. Why is it so widespread and where does it come from?

Poverty is often relative or subjective, and I argue that the villagers feel poor for several reasons. First, they do not have enough money to buy things they consider necessities.

For Thais, 2014 could be divided into two distinct periods: pre-coup, and postcoup. Before 22 May, Thailand was chaotic; after 22 May, outwardly much more orderly. However, orderly at what price? During 2014, Thailand's often contentious politics reached levels of conflict arguably not seen since the 1970s. Summarizing what happened is quite straightforward, but characterizing the conflict is more tricky. Superficially, there was a showdown between two rival power networks: the network aligned with former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra (including his sister Yingluck, the Pheu Thai Party, the Red Shirt movement, elements of the business community, and the police) and the old power elite network aligned with the military (and including the palace, the Democrat Party, much of the bureaucracy, and the various “post-Yellow” movements). In this showdown, the military and their allies defeated the pro- Thaksin network by force, and then sought to consolidate their victory through lasting new political arrangements.

This interpretation assumes that the military and the Democrat Party were fast and firm friends with a common agenda. Another, and more troubling, possibility is that while Thaksin was especially disliked, the military harboured a deep distrust of all elected politicians, and has been profoundly unimpressed by the performance of the Democrats in recent years. In other words, the goal of the military is the “depoliticization” of Thai life, the creation of a public sphere in which contentious debates are permanently suppressed. Since this goal was unlikely be accomplished, the junta may have been setting itself up to fail.

Restart Thailand?

Following a troubling attempt by her administration to push an unpopular amnesty bill through Parliament, Yingluck Shinawatra was confronted by a wave of street protests that forced her to dissolve Parliament in early December 2013.2 The rallies peaked on 13 January 2014, when the anti-Thaksin movement attempted “Bangkok Shutdown” at eleven key locations across the city. At their height in mid-January, the protests led by the People's Democratic Reform Committee (PDRC) mobilized hundreds of thousands of people; at their nadir, by late April, they probably comprised no more than a few thousand. The grouping popularly referred to as the PDRC was a repositioning or regrouping of a range of organizations that had long been discontented with Thaksin and his political machine.

Growth prospects for Southeast Asia in 2014 turned out to be less than what many expected earlier in the year. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) lowered the growth forecast for regional economies in their fourth quarter 2014 flagship publications by 0.2 and 0.4 percentage points respectively relative to what they had perceived earlier in the year (see Table 1). These changes imply more pessimistic perceptions about how the region's economies will fare in terms of their growth as more data became available. As a consequence, according to ADB estimates, aggregate GDP growth for all Southeast Asian economies in 2014 moderated to 4.6 per cent relative to 5.0 per cent in 2013, marking the second consecutive slowdown in economic activities of the region. Inflation, however, is projected to be relatively stable at slightly above 4 per cent.

Despite the trend of general slowdown, there are differences in the performance of each individual country (Table 1). Downward corrections for the projection of 2014 growth rate were obvious in the case of Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. Malaysia, on the contrary, is marked with an upward correction, an improvement in economic growth performance relative to the previous year. This paper provides a discussion on what is behind the general slowdown in growth of the region and a glimpse at the prospects going forward.

Large Economies Dominated the Slowdown

Aggregate GDP growth rate in the ten Southeast Asian economies decelerated for a second year in a row, to 4.6 per cent in 2014 from 5.0 per cent in 2013 and 5.7 per cent in 2012. The softer growth rate was primarily driven by slower growth in the region's four biggest economies, which occupy about 76 per cent of the Southeast Asia's total output (see Figure 1). Indonesia and Thailand, the two largest economies in Southeast Asia, have dragged down the region's growth over the past two years. In particular, the regional growth performance in 2014 was affected by political instability in Thailand that saw a contraction of the economy in the first half of the year and an unexpectedly sharp slowdown in Indonesia that brought growth to its weakest in five years. By contrast, Malaysia, the third largest economy in the region, was performing much better than expected and was forecast to expand at its strongest pace in four years.