Why Ne Win’s Burmanization Policies Are Still Important Sixty Years Later: The Burmese Burden

Abstract

This chapter describes the thesis of the book regarding the long-term impact of Ne Win’s Burmanization policies, which began after the 1962 coup. The policies emerged when the Burmese army sought to create a country unified around what they saw as a unified race, which they defined as the Burmese people. The multi-ethnic “indigenous” population was to be assimilated into this goal, while foreigners were to be excluded. The policies for this were developed in the 1950s in the Directorate of Psychological Warfare, which developed historical narratives fixing the role of the Burmese army as the sole institution capable of protecting national sovereignty against many foreign enemies. As for ethnic highlanders, they were to be assimilated into the more civilized Burmese identity using military discipline. These programs established a habitus of “Burmanization” which became an authoritarian dictatorship that has never achieved legitimacy via elections, but rules with fear.

Taking Up the Burmese Burden by Saw Eh Htoo

Take up the Burmese burden- Send forth the best ye breed- Go send your sons to ethnic land To serve your ethnics need To wait in heavy harness On fluttered folk and wild- Your new-caught sullen peoples, Half devil and half child Take up the Burmese burden In patience to abide To veil the threat of terror And check the show of pride;

By open speech and simple And hundred times made plain To seek another’s profit And work anther’s gain Take up the Burmese’s burden- And reap his old reward: The blame of these ye better The hate of those ye guard- The cry of hosts ye humor (As slowly) to the light: “Why brought ye us form bondage, Our beloved Burma night?”

Take up the Burmese burden- Have done with childish days- The lightly proffered laurel, The easy, ungrudged praise Come now, to search your manhood Through all the thankless years, Cold-edged with dearbought wisdom, The judgment of your peers!

1 The Origins of Ne Win’s Burmanization Programs

Burma is known today for having the world’s longest civil war. The conflict began weeks after independence on January 4, 1948, and continues today. But those conflicts actually began first during the days of British colonialism, and from 1942 to 1945 when Burma was a battlefield between The British and Japanese Empires in World War II. Indeed, there was really only one brief period of relative peace between the 1920s, and the coup that installed Ne Win as the military dictator in 1962, and that was between the end of the Burmese Civil War, and Ne Win’s 1962 coup. Before and after, highland areas were in revolt, while the cities periodically exploded in mass demonstrations and revolt in response to with mass crackdowns, massacres, arrests, and terror.

General Ne Win who was dictator of Burma from 1962 to 1988 insisted that the problem was interference by outsiders whether from Britain, China, the United States, India, Pakistan, or elsewhere, and in their own ways, each of these countries gave him reason to be suspicious. His response after he seized control in 1962 was a regime that ruled through disciplined terror and fear. At that time, the military nationalized assets, expelled foreigners, closed off the country to foreign trade and even refused loans from the World Bank and IMF. Inside Burma, fears of Ne Win and his generals were felt most harshly via the rule of military officers. After 1962, what became known as Burmanization policies were implemented, in which assimilation to Burmese Buddhist identity was insisted upon, minority rights were eliminated, long-time foreign residents were expelled, and the economy was brought under centralized control by the army. Dissent was treated as treasonous. Fear of arrest, torture, and death at the hands of the police state became pervasive. Travelers risked arrest and disappearance.

With the loosening up of political conditions after 2011, there was a headlong push to sweep Myanmar into the global society of nations. Myanmar was described at that time as the world’s best hope for rapid liberal democratic reform, and indeed, the economy did briefly grow rapidly, as a building boom began in Yangon, Mandalay, and other cities demonstrated. But unattended were festering ethnic issues focused by a reflexive insistence on rule from the Burmese-speaking center. Harsh military policies continued in the highlands where “ethnic armed organizations” provided alternative governance and areas of the north slipped into an alliance with China. The centrality of the Burmanization narrative though was missed by the many foreign aid organizations focused on applying liberal models of good governance, peacebuilding, elections, free markets, federalism, and human rights as the basis for a democratic transition.

By 2012 federalism under the charismatic leadership of Aung San Suu Kyi was viewed by international donors as the way to a lasting peace. But the hope was not to last long, and in fact completely collapsed following the February 1, 2021, coup when the army again seized complete power, and large areas of the country slipped into an even more widespread civil war. Burmese-centric “People’s Defense Forces” seizing control of areas of cities, rural areas in Sagaing, and other areas. Highland “Ethnic Armed Organizations (EAO) expanded their control areas, too. And all attracted attacks by the still-powerful and well-armed military which used the tools of a violent government to reinstitute the oppressive Burmanized police state of 1962–2010 so many remembered. Today, the army is reinstating Ne Win’s authoritarian rule with its apparatus of arbitrary arrest, censorship, travel restrictions, midnight raids, and grinding war.

What were Burmanization policies of the 1960s, and why are they so important today? The answer is that the population since 1962 has continued with a habitus of discrimination, which puts Burmese language, culture, military, and identity at the center of the nation. Burmanization policies took for granted the supremacy of the Burmese Buddhist culture, a centralized economic system, and the disciplined quasi-military¹ government that held it together. These policies intensified the ethnic tensions and rekindled the violent conflicts which exploded into the Burmese Civil War in 1949–1952, and is the division that continues today.

There were of course many wishes that separatism and distrust would simply disappear as a result of good governance policies. One of the most important reasons for such thinking is wishful, is that the nature of Ne Win’s Burmanization policy of the 1960s means that not even the democratically elected NLD government could resolve decades of tensions. Even with the words on the 2015 Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA), the emergence of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD), and the optimism of the massive People’s Power demonstrations of 1988, 2006, and 2021, the Burmanized society prevailed. Burmanization had effected the NLD supporters as well, and they were afraid of foreign intervention, and internal betrayal, particularly by ethnics. Just how big such wishful thinking of the foreign peacebuilders was, is illustrated by the harsh coup of February 1, 2021, when the Bamar-dominated military again seized control of the country, sending Myanmar into a deeper civil war between the Bamar-dominated military and the rest of the country.

This is why this book looks at the consequences of Prime Minster General Ne Win’s nation-building or “Burmanization” which began after 1962. Described is why and how these years are important for understanding the failed peace politics in Myanmar between the relatively open times between 2011 and the February 1, 2021, coup.

The harshest rule began when General Ne Win seized complete power in 1962. He restarted military operations in the geographically peripheral areas of Myanmar where ethnic minorities lived and simultaneously started deporting hundreds of thousands of Indian and Chinese from the cities. More fled to Thailand. Since that time, there have been glimmerings of hope for domestic change following the demonstrations of 1988, elections of 1990, further demonstrations in 2007, and relatively free elections in 2015 and 2020 which Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD won, and was the basis for a power-sharing agreement with the military.

All of the hype and progress seen in 1988, 1990, 2007, 2015, and 2020 were crushed by military governments in the name of returning the nation to the people that Ne Win deemed the rightful heirs of the land, the Burmese Buddhists. They intuitively believed that the point of government, whether one ruled by the military or the NLD, was to return the country to a time when rulers created a powerful, prosperous, and disciplined kingdom.²

In crushing the opposition, three basic principles were returned to by the military time and time again by the military government. These are

• (1) “The armed royal state” (Le Net Nainggan Taw) is normal for Burma. The only way the ancient city-state sustained itself was through hard power politics,

• (2) “We will have a strong nation if we have a powerful Tatmadaw” (Tatmadaw Inarr Shi Ma, Taing Pyi Inarr Shi Me).

• (3) The Tatmadaw stated emphatically that they themselves, unlike others, have never betrayed the national interest (Tatmadaw the Amyothar Yey Koh Bae Tawt Ma Thitsar Ma Poak).

The latter two principles in particular were embedded in the school curriculum, popular culture, and slogan-making that dominated Myanmar society since the 1962 coup.

2 The Beginning of Ne Win’s Burmanization Policies: The Burmese Burden

This chapter opens with Saw Eh Htoo’s adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “White Man’s Burden.” The poem was written in 1899 and was addressed by Kipling to the United States, which recently had acquired The Philippines as its first colony. Kipling’s poem was a cynical welcome to the Americans who were joining the greatest colonizer of all, Great Britain, in delivering the benefits of civilization to populations that Kipling acknowledged were uninterested in what Britain offered. But, as Kipling notes, this is beside the point—the resistance, and the presumed wildness of the Filipinos, is the justification for the American colonization itself. They will of course ask incredulously “Why brought ye us from bondage?” as if the only route from the bondage of savagery to the wonders of civilization is the British Raj, and the American civilizing mission. The plausible response for Kipling is that criticism of the noble intent of the colonizer is to be expected from someone who is “Half devil half child.” The colonized cannot win against this type of reasoning.

Saw Eh Htoo’s innovation is to point out that the Burmese military government since 1962 has a similar attitude toward the highland ethnic people and those who oppose them. The unquestionable goal of Ne Win’s government was to bring the superior nature of the Burmese civilization to the mountains where those they believed “Half devil half child dwell.” There the military officers and soldiers drafted into the ranks of the Burmese army will take up the “Burmese Burden,” irrespective of the opposition of people who are assumed to benefit but never offer a word of thanks. Only someone who is half devil half child after all would refuse the gift of Burmese culture, and retreat to the mountains to engage in violent lawless behavior. The reasoning may be tautological to a trained academic mind, but it is perhaps convincing the British, American, and Burmese colonizer’s more vain mind.

Saw Eh Htoo as a Karen was not drafted into the Burmese military. Rather as written in his auto-biography, he instead pursued studies in Philosophy, Theology, Anthropology, and Peacebuilding. It was in the context of his M.A. in Anthropology that he had the most direct contact with the philosophy of the Burmese military. The Department of Anthropology at Yangon University was established by General Khin Nyunt, who was Director of Intelligence for many years, and briefly Prime Minister of Myanmar in 2004. Military Intelligence presumably wanted to use Anthropology to civilize the half wild children that they fought in their mountains since Independence, and indeed before and during World War II.³

In effect, Yangon University used anthropology to support military rule, in the same way that the US military PSYOPS used Ivy League anthropology to conduct counterinsurgency operations in World War II in the Philippine “Huk” insurgency of 1946–1951, and later in Vietnam. This move was put into the language of the “hearts and minds,” of a peasantry presumed incapable of modern reason. The problem of course is that such anthropology was ineffective for insurgency operations undertaken by such well-educated PSYOPS operatives in the 1940s where it was first tried, until American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan where it took on the name Human Terrain System.

Anthropology when conventionally practiced highlights the ineffectiveness of using military operations as “pacification” tools. Anthropology describes highlanders opposing military incursions as something very different than “half devil, half child.” This is something that Saw Eh Htoo was well aware. Nevertheless, he appreciated the chance to get to know the Burmese military officers who were his classmates at the University of Yangon. It was through such interactions that he came to understand the inherent flaws in the Tatmadaw’s “anthropological” reasoning, and their assumption that Burmese civilization was a special burden. The very hostility of natives/ethnics was tautologically taken as evidence that the assumptions of British/American/Burmese superiority were correct.

3 Ne Win’s Collaborators from the Directorate of Psychological Warfare

Different scholars argue that Burmanization started earlier than the period of Ne Win’s dictatorship (1962–1988) period because indeed the term was occasionally used, even by the British colonial authorities seeking to “Burmanize” the Indian civil service typically by promoting Karen, Kachin, and others who the British trusted more than the ethnic Bamar. It is clear that by the end of the British era in 1948, the government institutions the British dominated were more likely to be staffed by Karen, Chin, and Kachin, than by ethnic Bamar. This habitus manifested itself in World War II when the Bamar-dominated Burmese Independence Army (BIA) allied itself with the invading Japanese in 1942-early 1945, while the Karen, Kachin, and Chin units allied with the British (see e.g. Selth 2002: 8). In this context they fought each on the battlefield, at least until the BIA switched sides in March 1945. The consequences of this split continue today, as the Burmese-speaking Tatmadaw continue to fight Karen, Kachin, and Chin ethnic armed groups.

Ne Win though had a new version of Burmanization which began after the coup in 1962. After General Ne Win seized power, he consolidated his authority over both the army as its commander, and the putatively civilian government as Prime Minister. This is the “Burmanization” described in this book. These are the policies that we believe are at the heart of why peace is so difficult to achieve seventy-five years after the authoritarian British left, and formal independence was achieved by the Bamar-dominated Anti-Fascist Peoples Freedom League (AFPFL).⁴ These are the policies that put into action what Saw Eh Htoo described as the “Burmese Burden.”

3.1 Ne Win, the Thirty Comrades, and the Celebration of Burma’s Army

Ne Win was born in 1910 or 1911 north of Rangoon. He came of age in a country dominated politically by first the British Indian Civil Service, and second by social movements challenging British colonial rule.⁵ His father was a minor official in serving the British colonial power.

Ne Win himself participated in the nationalist movement and revolution beginning during the British colonial period while he was at the University of Rangoon where he was a student from 1929–1931 (Dr. Maung Maung 1969: 83). That anti-British nationalist movement became the foundation for the Burmese nationalist identity, which he would “Burmanize” decades later. In Rangoon he joined the Burmese nationalist group known as Dobama Asiayone, which became a nucleus of the opposition to British rule in the 1930s. Future leaders Aung San and U Nu were also members of this group.

This led to Ne Win’s recruitment into a group known as the “Thirty Comrades,” young leaders recruited by the Japanese and General Aung San to lead the overthrow of the British colonial rulers. The Thirty Comrades are today legendary in Burma history, and part of every school curriculum. Leaders would achieve senior positions in both the future BIA of General Aung San, and the Burmese Communist Party (BCP).

The “Thirty Comrades” were provided military training in Japanese-occupied Hainan for about six months in 1941. There, the Burmese Independence Army (BIA) was organized under the leadership of General Aung San, and Japanese military trainers. The training reflected the harsh standards of Japanese officer training which emphasized military discipline in which slapping, and the physical assault of trainees were common.⁶ The Thirty Comrades then accompanied the Japanese to Thailand, where in Bangkok they, and their Japanese commander, each poured blood into a cup, from which each drank, and pledged their lives to the liberation of Burma. From there the thirty original comrades were organized into brigades which had Japanese and Burmese officers and were tasked with the raising of Burmese soldiers for the planned invasion of Burma from Thailand. Initial recruitment was in Bangkok of Burmese migrants. Ne Win himself was tasked with infiltrating Rangoon in order to raise support for the invasion.

The invasion of Burma began in February–March 1942. The reception of the BIA by a Burmese civilian population weary of British domination was enthusiastic, and tens of thousands rushed to join the invading BIA army. It would take about five months of fighting for the Japanese and BIA to expel the Indo-British, including British-funded Karen, Chin, and Kachin units to India. In the process; Karen villagers at Hpapun in today’s Karen State, and at Myaungmya deep within the Irrawaddy River Delta were massacred. It was such massacres that Eh Htoo’s grandfather told him about when he was a boy (see also Thako and Waters 2023).

The invading force was primarily made up of units of the Japanese Imperial Army in the name of anti-British colonialism, and creating Japan’s Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. In this context, the State of Burma was proclaimed in August 1943, with lawyer Ba Maw as President, Aung San as Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense, and U Nu as Minister of Foreign Affairs. General Ne Win was commander of the renamed Burma National Army (BNA). Baw Ma and U Nu were not members of the Thirty Comrades, but both were former prisoners of the British, arrested for undermining the British colonial government in 1940, and released only in the wake of the Japanese-BIA invasion. By 1944, though, the Burmese BIA felt betrayed by the Japanese who never granted real independence; and Aung San’s began negotiating secretly with the British in India in late 1944.

The Thirty Comrades led by General Aung San, Ne Win’s commander, became the independent leader negotiating the decolonization of British Burma. General Aung San and his Anti-Fascist People’s Force League (AFPFL) negotiated with the British a new Constitution that would grant independence on January 4, 1948. A first compromise was buried in the Constitution to assist reluctant Shan and Karenni leaders. The Constitution promised that they could hold an independence referendum after remaining in the Union of Burma for ten years. A second compromise called for a unified army, which would include units from the BIA, and the British King’s Rifles of the Karen, Chin, and Kachin fighters. The first commander would be the Karen General Smith Dun, and his Deputy the BIA General Ne Win. Both compromises would prove unreconcilable with future national goals; they were in effect “poison pills” from the perspective of the military.

Aung San was assassinated on July 19, 1947, six months before independence in July 1948, along with four of his cabinet members. The assassination, which was undertaken by General Aung San’s Burmese political rivals, disoriented the country fast moving toward independence from Britain. The consequences of Aung San’s assassination of course in Myanmar are felt even today. General Aung San’s daughter is the Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, who led the National League for Democracy (NLD) beginning in 1988 and became State Counselor in Myanmar following a landslide election victory in 2015. Her popularity was based in the large Bamar-speaking areas of the country.

Ne Win himself was named Commander of the Army in The Japanese dominated State of Burma in 1943, and was part of the army’s plan to switch to the British side. After the Allied victory, he was allied with the returning British, and organized attacks against the Burmese Communist Party on behalf of the British.

Karen General Smith Dun though was named the first commander of the new Tatmadaw, an amalgamation of the British allied forces which Dun had commanded, and the BIA of General Aung San. General Smith Dun was dismissed though from the army weeks after independence, as Karen units left the army because they believed the British reneged on a promise of an independent Karenistan. Smith Dun’s deputy, General Deputy General Ne Win was promoted to be head of the army, Deputy Prime Minister, Home Minister, and Defense Minister. His immediate duty was rallying the parts of the army which had not mutinied,⁷ and push back revolts by the Karen on the outskirts of Rangoon, and Communist armies which occupied northern Burma. At its height, this rebellion almost resulted in the capture of Rangoon by the Karen Armies at the Battle of Insein four miles from Rangoon, in May 1949. They occupied other major cities until 1950.⁸

Thus, Prime Minister U Nu’s government for a few months really only controlled Rangoon. The north, including the second city Mandalay, was for a time controlled by the Burmese Communist and the Karen forces. Ne Win as commander-in-chief of the army during U Nu’s civilian premiership (1949–1962) was viewed as a hero for rescuing U Nu’s government from near defeat. Ne Win would go on to be acting Prime Minister for 18 months from 1958 to 1960 at the invitation of U Nu who considered the army to be more efficient and cleaner than civilian power centers which were known for corruption. Ne Win would use this brief time to harshly clamp down on corruption and also send officers on shopping trips abroad to purchase new weapons. Thus, the basis for the 1962 coup d’etat was the military style discipline which Ne Win valued.

Most significantly for the future, Ne Win’s first stint as Prime Minister convinced his officers that they alone had the discipline to operate the government. This approach was to be the basis for his Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP) which after 1962 would be created to legitimate the power of the army.

3.2 Burmese Dominance

The emphasis on Burmese-dominance (Bamar Baho Phyu) was taught in the centralized school system Saw Eh Htoo experienced as a boy in the Irrawaddy Delta and Yangon. All was focused on the glories of the Burmese people, especially General Aung San and his “Thirty Comrades,” including Ne Win himself.

Some English-writing scholars describe Ne Win’s administration as successful, because it created a strong sense of identity where there had been none, and seemingly eliminated the foreign influences from Britain, India, China, and the United States which threatened Burma militarily during the Burmese Civil War (1949–1952), and later through economic domination. Ne Win’s academic sympathizers (in English see e.g. Taylor 2009; Aung Thwin 2012; in Burmese see Maung Maung 1969; Ko Ko Maung Gyi 2013) all emphasize that Ne Win was independent, and created an independent nation with a revitalized national identity no longer threatened by outsiders. Often they point out that Ne Win’s government avoided the catastrophic Great Power proxy wars that consumed neighbors like Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

Most English writers believed Ne Win failed abysmally (see Maung Maung Gyi 1983; Shwe Lu Maung 1989; Mya Maung 1991; Steinberg 2012), typically focusing on the economic collapse of sectors in the country while Ne Win ruled from 1962 to 1988, the implementation of harsh totalitarian police state, and the re-emergence of revolt in large areas of the (see Smith 1991; Callahan 2003; South 2008; Myint-U 2008, 2021). Focus is typically on the collapse of economic productivity as measured by international trade, and GDP capita, all measures by which Myanmar went into decline relative to its neighbors. What is typically missing from these approaches, though, is any interest in the actual content of Ne Win’s Burmanization policies, even though this is the ideology underlying the state and society, even today. Failure or not, Ne Win’s Burmanization ideology permeates all corners of Myanmar society that government institutions touched. And it also shapes the reaction in the many corners of Myanmar where the army finds its enemies.

4 The Content for Ne Win’s Burmanization Policies

Ne Win based his rule on memories of Burmese civilizational greatness, and oppression by the British colonialists and their Indian subalterns. Ne Win first sought approaches inherited from the powerful Bamar kings of the central plains who dominated their neighbors and maintained a large royal army (the Tatmadaw). The final king was deposed by the British only in 1885, in the Third British Burma War, a date in the living memory until at least the 1950s. The Tatmadaw’s restoration of 1962 viewed martial strength as the basis for independence and military weakness as the cause of foreign aggression.

In response, Ne Win developed policies about Burmese hegemony, now known collectively as “Burmanization” which he believed would revive times of greatness. In doing so, he drew on the traditional understanding of Burmese kingship rooted in Buddhism, the dominant religion of the majority of Bamar, as well as Shan, Mon, and many Karen. Traditional Burmese monarchs believed that being a Buddhist king was a sign of being a Bodhisatta, that is, a Buddha-to-be whom the heavenly cosmos granted the responsibility to rule (Maung Maung Gyi 1983: 20).

Such rulers brought the charismatic authority of the heavens known as Barami which resulted in wisdom and justice. It is admittedly a circular argument. You were called to rule out of wisdom and justice, so the rule must be wise and just. Circular reasoning or not, such views are largely taken for granted in charismatic politics from Myanmar, and many other countries.⁹

In practice, this meant that Ne Win justified ruling central Burma with an iron fist, with the liberal use of secret police, informants, disappearances, prison, and police. For the distant corners of the mountainous country, there were military attacks. This was done with the military discipline that General Ne Win brought from his own military experience in World War II and the Burmese Civil War, in which unquestioned obedience was assumed. The Burmese language and culture, and Burmese Theravada Buddhism inherited from the powerful kings were also considered superior. To consolidate the power that the army sought to establish, Ne Win reformed the economy, political structures, and ethnic relations. He pointed to the success of his political coup as evidence that his mighty plans for the future of Burma were wise and just, and would succeed.

For the world, Ne Win justified his coup in 1962 by pointing to a need to stop the civil war then being reported on in British newspapers, even though the wars were burning out. During the previous ten years ceasefires (formal and informal) were agreed to by the Burmese government, Burmese Communist Party rebels in the north, and the Karen rebels to the west, and further rebellions by Shan, Kachin, Chin, Rakhine, and others. This is what is particularly tragic; implementation of the Burmanization policies after 1962 would rekindle the revolts among the Kachin, Shan, Karen, and others which had died down in the 1950s.

Yet, in Ne Win’s own reading, there was yet more to it: His coup paved the way for a specific policy that is his “Burmese Way to Socialism.” This Burmese Way to Socialism, replaced the 1947 constitution granted by the British at the time of independence. The driving force behind the Burmese Way to Socialism was Ne Win’s insistence on a nationalistic process that incorporated military rule and what he called “socialist” economic policies. In the name of Burmanization, Ne Win’s regime nationalized the business sectors, and expelled Chinese, Indian, and European foreigners from Burma beginning (see Holmes 1967).

Just as he had in his brief time in power in 1958–1960, Ne Win strengthened the Burmese-speaking army with the goal of defeating the ethnic militia, dozens of which were (and still are) present in the mountainous peripheries of Burma.¹⁰ The dominance of the ethnic Burmans in Burmese politics was legitimized based on the assumed glories of the ancient Burma kingdoms. And indeed, before the first conquests of the British in 1824, the hegemonic sway of Burma in Southeast Asia was impressive. Burmese kings successfully conquered areas in the west (Rakhine), east (Siam), and fended off the Chinese from the north.

Internationally, Ne Win’s Burmanization continued U Nu’s neutralism, rejecting both Western capitalism and Eastern communism. He did this with a vengeance, though, expelling any element viewed as foreign, and withdrawing from international organizations. Holmes (1967: 188) was perhaps the first Western writer to apply the term “Burmanization” to Ne Win’s rule. His perspective was that two factors were instrumental in the formulation, of this policy:

• (1) Xenophobia among the highly nationalistic members of the Burmese Revolutionary Council government, who desired to eliminate the vestiges of the previous dominant foreign cultural and economic influence and to initiate a process of Burmanization; and

• (2) Lingering hostility toward the United States, stemming from the suspicion that the US sought to dominate the country.

In this context, Ne Win approved a thirty-year action plan with the long-term goal of expanding the influence of Theravada Buddhists in Burma (Dr. Hla Myint 2018: 36). This plan in turn was based on the intellectual works that three of Ne Win’s collaborators had begun at the Directorate Psychological Warfare in the 1950, before Ne Win’s coup. The head of the army at the time was General Ne Win.

5 Ne Win’s Intellectual Collaborators, on the Burmese Way to Socialism from the Directorate of Psychological Warfare

General Ne Win was a soldier with a soldier’s mindset, dedication, and focus on discipline and obedience. But he also sought well-educated people to support his regime. He did not really consult with those so-called educated people (or anyone else), but rather dictated to them his plans, and expected them to assume responsibility for implementation (Taylor 2015: 260). The key philosophers helping General Ne Win with his Burmanization policies were U Chit Hlaing (also known as Ko Ko Maung Gyi); Major General Aung Gyi; and Dr. Maung Maung. These were the groups that came together in 1962 to create the Burmese socialist narrative that would legitimate Ne Win’s regime, create the discipline he sought, and habituate the population to his authoritarian practices. Their work was to be the basis for the curriculum Eh Htoo would be indoctrinated within the Burmese school system decades later.

A closer look at the development of his political thought in the context of Burma’s military politics in the late 1950s and early 1960s helps clarify Ne Win’s decision to develop two texts based on intellectuals who worked at the Directorate of Psychological Warfare. The two texts were the Policy Declaration of the Burmese Way to Socialism, and The System of Correlation between Man and His Environment (Nakanishi 2013: 63).¹¹

Ne Win emphasized in his orders, “We are planning to form a party and open the training center. We need a guiding philosophy for the party. We are sure to emphasize the economic sector, but we also need philosophy” (see Ko Ko Maung Gyi, 2011: 190–192). The modified guideline they inherited from the Directorate of Social Warfare, and developed a “Guardian Government” philosophy which drew on elements of Marxism and Buddhism. The draft philosophy had six sub-titles, reflecting an eclectic mix of a Marxist focus on dialectics, and a Buddhist emphasis on control of the mind.

• 1. Dialectic of Matter and Mind

• 2. Reciprocal Relations of Matter and Mind

• 3. Dialectics of Man and His Environment

• 4. Reciprocal Relations of Man and His Environment

• 5. Dialectical Correlation of Matter and Mind

• 6. Dialectical Correlation of Man and His Environment (p. 192)

The titles focusing on matter, mind, and environment may seem opaque to the Western eye from outside Burma. But these principles reshaped Burma’s society. For the ethnic minorities, these were to be the ideological means for policies of assimilation of cultural traditions. In the 1970s, this would become the violent “Four Cuts Policies” which sought to violently enforce conformity to these values.

5.1 U Chit Hlaing (Ko Ko Maung Gyi)

U Chit Hlaing (also known as U Khin Maung Gyi, and Ko Ko Maung Gyi 1926-2018) was from Katha township, which is in upper Burma. He studied at the Katha High School, which was a Roman Catholic missionary school where they used English as a teaching language. According to his 2011 auto-biography, in 1939, a student riot changed his life, and he became a political activist (Ko Ko Maung Gyi 2011: 3). He met with student leaders from the University of Rangoon, and started to study the books from Nagani (Red Dragon) Books. Most of the books were Communist books, and U Chit Hlaing took an intense interest in Communism. He joined the Burma Independence Army (BIA) and became a soldier during World War II (Ko Ko Maung Gyi: 2014: 80–93), and then in the early 1950s, studied in France and Russia. During his days in France, he attended Jean-Paul Sartre’s lectures (Ko Ko Maung Gyi 2011: 618). After his studies, he returned to Burma and served in U Nu’s government as a civilian, where he was assigned to the Directorate of Psychological Warfare in the Ministry of Defense.

U Chit Hlaing drafted what became Ne Win’s “Burmese Way to Socialism,” based on his work at the Directorate of Psychological Warfare. He finalized a draft of the “Burmese Way to Socialism” within seven months following the 1962 coup, and submitted it to Ne Win in December. Emphasized was “The correlation of matter and mind.” This concept assumes that leftist and rightist ideas should be avoided. According to General Ne Win, leftists over-emphasized materialism, and rightists over-emphasized idealism. He said he wanted to avoid both extremes and be only based on humanism (2011: 193). U ChitHlaing asserted that this idea was different from that of the Burmese Communist Party with its emphasis on dialectical materialism, which of course was an enemy of the government (Myat Khine 2009: 48). With this in mind, “The Burmese Way to Socialism” was announced on January 17, 1963. Colonel Ba Than then translated the manifesto into English, and Dr. Maung Maung edited it (Ko Ko Maung Gyi 2011: 194). Ne Win used it as a philosophy for his political goals.

5.2 General Aung Gyi (1919–2012)

The second important figure who collaborated with Ne Win in developing the philosophical grounding of the new government was Major General Aung Gyi, who was an officer in the BIA in the 1940s, and instrumental in engineering the coup of 1958 (Callahan 2003: 74, 198–199). In preparing the Burmese Road to Socialism, he was known for emphasizing socialist economics.

At the time of the 1962 coup, General Aung Gyi was close to General Ne Win and was Ne Win’s Vice Chair for the Union Revolutionary Council, and “heir apparent.” This high appointment reflected his roles in drafting the Burmese Way to Socialism at the Directorate of Psychological Warfare, his role in the 1958 coup, and his long service with Ne Win in the military command dating back to the BIA starting in World War II. While in office he probably orchestrated the violent crackdown on the University of Rangoon students who protested the 1962 coup. General Aung Gyi was though removed in 1963 from the Ne Win administration, over disagreements regarding the expulsion of Chinese and Indian minorities, which was a key part of the new Burmanization policies.¹²

5.3 Dr. Maung Maung

Dr. Maung Maung was known as a gentleman and scholar who earned doctoral degrees in law from both the University of Utrecht in Holland, and Yale University in the United States. Dr. Maung Maung was active in Ne Win’s government until 1988, and indeed for a brief time after Ne Win stepped down, served as President. He was not a military man, but served Ne Win well as a journalist, legal scholar, and in high positions as Attorney General and Chief Justice An admiring Robert H. Taylor (2008: 3) wrote that,

Dr. Maung Maung was a man of many parts – a scholar and a soldier, a nationalist and an internationalist, a parliamentarian and a public servant – and his life and times spanned seven decades of political, economic and social turbulence in the country he loved and served, Myanmar.

Robert Taylor portrayed Dr. Maung Maung as the most important agent serving the regime from behind the scenes. In his early life, he started by enlisting in the successor to Aung San’s Burma Independence Army (BIA) the Burma National Army (BNA) after the British retreated to India. The BNA turned on the occupying Japanese in 1945 and created an alliance with the British before the end of World War II. After independence, Maung Maung joined the government service (Taylor 2008: 4) and in the 1950s, he pursued his academic interests in Western countries. With government scholarship programs he earned higher degrees in law in England and the USA. It was on this basis he created for himself a role as the honored historian-professor for Ne Win.

In the late 1950s, Dr. Maung Maung wrote influential newspaper columns and books. His English described Myanmar to the world, even as he was assigned to the Psychological War Department.¹³ Following the 1962 coup, he became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Dr. Maung Maung worked as a Chief Justice, Attorney General, and State Central Executive Member. He was part of the constitution-making of 1974. He even served for a month as President following the student demonstrations of 1988. When U Chit Hlaing was playing his role as a socialist philosopher, Dr. Maung Maung was on the other side focused on nationalism and the creation of a Burmese identity.

These three collaborators U Chit Hlaing, General Aung Gyi, and Dr. Maung Maung provided Ne Win with the foundation of the Burmese Way to Socialism beginning in the Psychological War Directorate in the 1950s and were ready to implement it immediately after the coup on March 2, 1962.

6 Shaping a Burmanized Narrative

Ne Win’s Burmanization policy rested on three pillars, which were Burmese Theravada Buddhism; Burmese language and culture; and the importance of military control and discipline for society. The three pillars were Ne Win’s gold standard for evaluating Burmeseness.

Three principles underpinned these elements. They were

• 1. National identity is formed by the Burmese Buddhist culture.

• 2. The national economy needs to be a centralized system, around the military.

• 3. The national government has to be a quasi-military government, in which the Burmese army plays the central role.

As will be described, these foundational principles emerged from the 1960s leading to explicit policies of assimilation, accommodation, and alienation for the one-third of Burma’s population who were not Bamar. These policies continued into the 1970s when Ne Win presented his regime as a uniquely patriotic institution that successively prevented the disintegration of the country after independence. From this, the Ne Win government created a nationalism with a specifically Burmese identity necessary to perpetuate the centrality of the Burmese-speaking military. The military, economy, schools, Buddhism, and cultural institutions were all infused with an assertion that the military, market, and culture must serve these goals.

These foundational principles are taken for granted by the peoples of Burma, but are often passed over in the English-language literature which views such policies as inchoate ideology that digress from the core goals of the international foreign policy establishment which focused on good governance, free markets, democracy, and international alliances. But Ne Win’s ideology was taken for granted in Burma and is deeply embedded in the habitus of Burmese belief. Thant Myint-U (2021: 32) is of course critical of Ne Win’s ideology which he finds confusing and inchoate, albeit for good reason. He wrote “The official ideology was a half-baked mélange of socialist, nationalist, and Buddhist ideas,” which was perhaps all true. Erin Murphy (2022: 116) reported, that Kurt Campbell, US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs, complained of the meetings with UN Representative Than Shwe.¹⁴ Campbell told her that his meetings with the UN Representative were “fairly unproductive [in a] four hour meeting in which Than Swe digressed on the history of Myanmar.”¹⁵

6.1 Buddhism and Nat Worship

Religion is elemental to Burmese politics and identity. 85% of the population though is Buddhist, including almost all of the Bamar speakers who are perhaps two-thirds of the nation’s population. Behind Buddhism though are major sources of ethical and political understanding regarding governance. These views are pervasive, and Burma’s generals have long sought to capture the monkhood with the legitimacy of Buddhist teaching, which is so important to everyday understanding, and nat worship as a way to sustain power (see Cockett 2015: 70–72).

The Theravada Buddhism of Burma emerged from the ancient Pali literature. Theravada Buddhism, the historians point out, came from the southern Burma of Burma where Mon civilization flourished widely for over 1000 years before the arrival of the Burmese in the tenth century CE. Southern Buddhism started separately with King Asoka in India, who sent Buddhist missionaries to different regions. Two venerable monks, Shin Thana and Shin Uttma, arrive in Thaton where the Mon Kingdom flourished (Ashin Kayla Tha 2011: 18; South 2003: 54–56). There they started preaching among the people of the ancient Mon Kingdom where the preexisting belief system rested on nat spirits.

Nevertheless, it was difficult for even Ne Win’s historians to make the connection with Burmese Buddhism as practiced in the 1960s and military rule. A way to tie this together was by focusing on the traditional Burmese spirit worship, known as nat, which had origins in Hinduism and animism. This connected Ne Win to King Anawrahta’s epoch. Maung Htin Aung (1959: 1–2) explained that “Nat worship before the arrival of Buddhism, during the emergence of Burmese Buddhism, and even today, was not only in upper Burma, but also in hill areas.” It was said that before there was even Pagan, two cities existed: Old Vishnu and Hanlin, demonstrating that Buddhism and Hinduism had co-existed during the time of King Anawrahta and perhaps before. Most importantly, this was used to legitimate rule by the Burmese Buddhists in the 1960s.

Reforming Burmese Buddhism in the manner sought by the military government of Ne Win meant first reigning in the monkhood, and making sure that it did not present an alternative power center. Most important for the military are the concepts of centralized rule. Second, it meant recovering and regarding long-term peace and human development, teachings that could be propagated by a massive state-supported/dependent monkhood. The reasoning continued, the state is by definition a part of the people, and it does not simply refer to the government. Buddhist monks accept food offerings from the general public, but they must remain separate from the secular world in order to teach Buddha's method of redressing the world's inequity. The rule followed by the Sangha group is democratic in nature, according to Sulak Sivaraksa, a well-known Thai academic. Buddha left the Dhamma (Buddha’s teaching) and Vinaya (monks’ rules) to the people, which the military government assumed meant them.¹⁸

As for politics, the leader of a nation, a king, formally inherited moral rules that emphasized the Buddhist middle way, i.e. not right nor left, capitalist, or communist. The ten moral rules for the kings are as follows:

• (1) Donation

• (2) Maintaining good morals

• (3) Sacrificing the king’s life if necessary

• (4) Follow the righteous path

• (5) Gentleness

• (6) On the Sabbath, preserve the eight moral virtues

• (7) No rage

• (8) Do not torture others

• (9) Maintain tolerance

• (10) Avoid doing things that are inconvenient to the people they rule (Ashin Kayla Tha 2011: 104).

As for the King himself, he possessed a Barami, which was the mandate from the heavens which reflected virtuous behavior in previous lives. Barami is a charismatically derived authority that leaders by their very nature have and is that concept central to the exercise of power in Thailand¹⁶ and Burma in particular. The King in response has a responsibility to use this power wisely, and will always seek to do so. Since such power comes from the heavens downward, there the polity tends to be centralized in the palace, rather than in dispersed provinces (see Waters 2022a; Waters and Panyakhom 2021).

If the country's leaders use their Barami wisely, justice and equality will flourish. The Sangha is the communal check that exists to challenge the actions of the rulers. The Sangha is effective for this because it has a social goal different from the King and balances his earthly power. In order to achieve nirvana, monks give up the world. They are unattached to the ordinary world in which their country's leaders live and seek power. Sangha and the people, according to Myanmar's political scientists, rely on each other to jointly address political, social, and economic challenges. Only the Sangha and those who understand and practice the Dhamma, can build a peaceful and tranquil country.¹⁷

6.2 Burmese Buddhist Identity

Along with Burmese Buddhism, Burmese identity was highlighted as a central value holding the nation of Burma together. Ne Win’s Socialist government wrote Burma’s political history, and prepared ethnographies that would provide the highland groups with a rationale for what could be preserved, and more importantly what would be assimilated into the larger Burmese identity. Ethnographies of the Kachin, Kayah (Karenni) Kayin (Karen), Chin, Mon, Rakhine, and Shan were written with this in mind. The ethnographies focused on issues such as dress, dance, food, and non-political characteristics which could be easily documented in museum displays. Left out were the more distinctive features of even these seven groups, which would have focused on differences with the Burmese, especially the distinctive languages, memories of Burmese oppression, and in the case of the Kachin, Kayah, Kayin, and Chin, large Christian communities. These groups were recognized as indigenous and therefore “Burmese,” but the policy for them was to assimilate into the Burmese institutions of Rangoon, and later Naypyitaw. In this they were to be nurtured, as described in Saw Eh Htoo’s Burmese Burden, on the assumption that relative to the Burmese, they were half devil and half child. As for substantial Muslim minorities found in Rakhine, (i.e. Rohingya), they could not be assimilated, and therefore not Burmese.

Assumptions like this that full adulthood meant assimilating dominant Burmese Buddhist norms, and restricting ethnicity to dress, food, and non-political features of society, would lead to catastrophe and active revolt. And only, preferably, only on holidays!

6.3 The Military

A grand military narrative became central to Burma’s political history as schooling spread out from the Psychological Warfare Directorate to Ne Win’s Ministry of Education after 1962. Throughout the narrative, the Ne Win government promoted the military’s role as the necessary agent in Burma. Previous royal dynasties were all led by great warriors, including King Anawratha, King Bayinnaung, and King Aung Zay Ya, who all had a royal army called Tatmadaw. The assumption was that Ne Win’s Tatmadaw continued with this ancient role—they were the logical heirs to great kings. This indeed was explicitly articulated in BSPP documents (see e.g. BSPP—1st Volume, 1970: 33), with the assumption being that Ne Win himself in 1962 inherited the kingly responsibility to rule.

Thus, Ne Win and his scholars created a Burmanized narrative where non-Burmese were subjects of Burma’s King and Burma’s socialist government he prescribed. Military traditions, Burmese identity, and Burmese Buddhism created space for the ultra-nationalists in the first place, who also needed enemies who could only be controlled through the use of military force. These new Burmese Road to Socialism narratives would socialize deeply into every level of Burmese society via mass schooling, popular culture, and isolation from the rest of the world.

The narrative was made all the more plausible in the context of Chinese and American expansionism across the 1960s and 1970s in Southeast Asia, particularly the American wars in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The military catastrophes in these countries made plausible Ne Win’s claims that the only thing keeping Burma out of the wars was the strength of the Tatmadaw, and a disciplined population. Even then, it was contended, Chinese and American involvement in the highlands, where they often sponsored clients and the drug economy flourished, was still a problem even as Ne Win’s grip on the country tightened. This argument would continue to be made into the 1990s and 2000s, a time when China continued to seek investment in Myanmar, and the United States sought to influence policy through the application of sanctions. The fact that the Chinese infrastructure was never built, and the American sanctions ineffective, was viewed as a success by the generals.

7 The Collapse of Peace Initiative in Burma (2015–2021)

The broader world came to believe that Myanmar was passing out of Ne Win’s world of Kings, Socialism, and Buddhism with the liberalization by the Thein Sein government beginning in 2010. From the outside perspective, it seemed to be the beginning of normal politics and economy, particularly following the NLD victory in the 2015 elections, and the coalition government formed between the victorious NLD and the outgoing military government. With the signing of the National Ceasefire Agreements of 2015 by the Burmese military the transition seemed complete. The transition in Burma was viewed optimistically by diplomats who patted themselves on the back for engineering the transition. All that was left was for Myanmar’s people to finish the job.¹⁸

But there was an unnoticed problem. During the time of military rule (1962–2015), a deep Burmanization habitus was engineered into the population by the ruling military government. This habitus was rooted in fear, and took for granted not only the fear, but also patterns of thought about history, religious rationale, “The Other” and the righteousness of Burmese Buddhist military rule. The depth of the authoritarian habitus was not readily seen, whether in the successful implementation of the Rohingya expulsion/genocide, the resumption of the fighting in the highlands, or the reluctance of the Bamar-embedded NLD to intervene in a fashion the Western donors deemed righteous.¹⁹ The February 1, 2021, coup was the nail in the coffin for liberal democratic hopes and a forceful reassertion of ethno-military dominance.

7.1 The Disappearance of the Liberal Democrats

Faith in neo-liberal peacebuilding was particularly strong in the context of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who won her prize for the promotion of nonviolent means of resistance, and her insistence that courage is needed to overcome the fears propagated during the violent military rule. She was the charismatic leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD) which won a resounding electoral victory in the by-elections of 2012, and then in November 2015. In 2016, she became the de facto leader of Myanmar. Her efforts were enthusiastically cheered by Western donors who viewed her as a leading figure in the struggle for democracy and openness in Myanmar.

However, the Western donors little understood the depth of divisions within the Burmanized society were to be disappointed. Aung San Suu Kyi had for the West, made her name by resisting the military government, writing a book about the power of nonviolence, and patiently enduring periods of confinement which lasted decades, but that is all they seemed to see. She was also the charismatic leader of the Burmese-speaking masses who were raised in an isolated Burma, and deeply believed in the ethnocentric assertions of Ne Win’s decades of conditioning to Burmanization (see Myat 2019; Lubina 2021).

The problem is perhaps that peace and prosperity the West seemed to argue, simply a matter of negotiation, compromise, the holding of fair elections, and opening to foreign investment. There is little discussion of cultural habitus. Whatever was in the past could be taken care of through the formulaic medium of peacebuilding workshops using best practice formulas discovered in Colombia, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere. The Norwegian government and the European Union in particular stepped in to fund what was needed. In 2015–2016, optimism was in the air that Burma would move past the excesses of authoritarian rule.

But the glow of the 2015 ceasefire and the successful emergence of the NLD-elected government in 2016 disappeared quickly, for both the west and the highlanders. Under the 2008 Constitution, the military still controlled the armed forces, and the NLD emerged from a thoroughly Burmanized population. In this context, in August 2017, the army coordinated expulsions of the Rohingya Muslims, and the ruling NLD with its roots in the Burmanized masses acquiesced. The army contended that under the citizenship laws on the books, the Rohingya were illegal immigrants, and as Muslims, a threat to the existence of Burma as a Buddhist state. The expulsions would be labelled as genocide by the international community. As for the highlanders, the ceasefires began to break down too in bits and pieces, as the military pushed into territory traditionally held by Ethnic Armed Organizations (EAOs) with road-building crews, school takeovers, police, and military.

7.2 The Continuing Narrative of Burmese Exceptionalism and the Rohingya

Decades of Indo-British propaganda during colonialism, and then the Burmese nationalism originating from the Directorate of Psychological Warfare asserted that the Muslim farmers living in Rakhine State were from India. The propaganda asserted that the Rohingya were an ongoing threat to the Burmese Buddhist identities, a finding reinforced via decades of schooling, movies, and television. The assumption was that such people, many of whom traced their ancestry back to what is today Bangladesh, were usurpers on land they were granted by the British colonial government between 1825 and 1938. This narrative in Burma became sharper and more threatening to the Burmese masses, as global hostility between Western and Islamic states sharpened after the 2001 attacks on the United States, and the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This confrontation was justification to the Burmese masses for expulsions which turned into ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya population in Rakhine. it was in this context that Aung San Suu Kyi, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, acquiesced to the army’s expulsion of 800,000 Muslim Rohingya in 2017–2018, to the consternation of her Western supporters, who sponsored the 2015 ceasefire (see Myat 2019; Lubina 2021).

Much has been written about whether Aung San Suu Kyi could have “done something” to protect the Rohingya in 2017–2018. But that is beside the point, at least from the perspective of this book about Burmanization. Aung San Suu Kyi was not making decisions in a vacuum but in the context of supporters who were indoctrinated for over 50 years of Ne Win’s Burmanization ideology. To understand how this happened, it is necessary to go back and understand where Ne Win and Ne Winism came from, and why and how his government “Burmanized” vast sectors of what is what is Myanmar. In doing so, he created enduring institutions that today present the context in which any peace will be negotiated.

8 The Directorate of Psychological Warfare: Habitus, Thymos, Isothymia, and Megalothymia

The original bureaucratic source of the Burmanization politics that afflict Myanmar today are The Directorate of Psychological Warfare, founded under the U Nu government in the mid-1950s but coordinated by Ne Win’s supporters with counterinsurgency lessons learned from the Israelis, Yugoslavs, and American CIA. The Directorate sought to prepare the population for a habitus that emphasized the primacy of the military, hierarch, and the legitimacy of violence.

The underpinnings for this were to be found in how Burmese history was framed. Burmese school history, is the story of the military and justifies how ancient rulers expanded their empires (See Gervais and Metro 2012; and South and Lall 2016). The promotion of Burmese colonialism is based on this understanding. Thus, “Thaung Gyan Thu,” is the label for “insurgent.” This name was given to ethnic armed organizations and continues to be so. The Burmese expression “Thaung Gyan Thu” refers to a group with no moral foundation that uses guns to control others arbitrarily. In the mind of the military, this can only be the ethnic insurgents who challenge the Tatmadaw. It cannot by definition be the Tatmadaw who, after all, are the heirs of great kings. Colonel San Pwint (2016), a member of the military peace team in the 1990s, wrote about his memories of the peace process. Many of the retired military officers’ memoirs expressed feelings about ethnic armed groups, only using the dysphemistic term “guerrilla” in their writing reflecting their own assumptions of righteous dominance or what Fukuyama (2019) in his recent book Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment called megalothymia (see as an example Pwint 2016: 12–13), which is about a Greek concept which is about the need to be recognized by a superior as exceptional. The problem with megalothymia is that for every individual recognized as exceptional, many more are perceived as inferior and receive no public recognition of their human worth. During the second half of the twentieth century, this would become the Rohingya in particular, and ethnics in general.

For Fukuyama, megalothymia is rooted in the Greek concept of Thymos which is about the spiritedness of identity, and isothymia which is about the demand by formerly oppressed people to be recognized for what they are. Or as Fukuyama put it, when isothymia seeks equality and megalothymia seeks recognition as superior, thymos seeks recognition (Pwint 2016: 18–23). Such concepts of superiority emerged from Ne Win’s ideology which stressed the central authority of the military.

The army generals who continued the Ne Win legacy in Burma consistently positioned themselves as cosmically superior and insisted that their enemies recognize them as the only legitimate rulers of Myanmar. The superiority of the Tatmadaw was even assumed in the NCA which called for the disarmament of the Ethnic Armed Organizations, but not the Tatmadaw. The generals believed that being superior meant being the power holder or decision-maker, and as described below, was rooted in the sacred Buddhist Barami inherited from virtuous previous lives. The desire for political equality motivating ethnic armed organizations’ attempts to engage in political dialogue was inconsistent with the habitus of this world view.

9 Talks of Peace

Saw Eh Htoo still was an optimistic man, and shared this optimism with others. Eh Htoo wrote that obviously, the military dominance highlighted in the military-centric textbooks is not the only narrative available in Myanmar today. There are also stories about peace among the people, but conflict narratives were unaffected by these peace narratives. Dagon Taryar (1919–2013) was a student leader in the British times and spent 39 months in Ne Win’s prisons after the 1962 coup. He wrote the following in 2006:

There are no enemies or friends in my life. If I say I have no enemies or friends, some people may be offended. Peace should be achieved, in my opinion, through peaceful means. Ordinary Burmese people understand that we can't do anything without peace. (2006: 109–110)

Taryar was a Burmese who dedicated his life to making Burma a more peaceful place. In addition, his story reflected the majority's point of view. Civil war, dictatorship, and poverty have all been part of the Burmese experience. All of these factors play a role in the lack of peace.

In his memoir, the Mon ethnic leader Nai Ngwe Thein expressed his political views as follows:

The path to a federal state is linked to peace. We must put an end to the civil war and bring peace to the country. When it comes to political issues, our problem-solving should be based on democracy and equality. In Burma, the use of arms to solve problems has stifled the development of the state and our people. The achievement of peace is critical.

In Nai Ngwe Thein’s comment, there is an unquenchable thirst for democracy and peace. He was a powerful Mon politician and rebel, but he worked for peace in his later years. Even though he was the leader of the Mon army, he knew how to best resolve the conflict. His words were intended to bring Burma peace.

According to Thomas Thangnou a Chin revolutionary who was recently engaged in talks with the government,

The political strategy is the most effective way to address ethnic tensions and the decline of democracy. Burmese politicians have relied on armed conflict to resolve political issues since independence. As a result, our society has become entangled in a vicious cycle of hostility, distrust, and misunderstanding. Another consequence is that the best option for dealing with the Burmese situation is a political solution.

During the Civil War, as a Chin revolutionary he was involved in numerous acts of violence, only later admitted that the most peaceful path was the best. His words and deeds reflected the realities of how the post-2011 peace process played out. The Chin leader believed nonviolent means were the only way to achieve peace.

According to U Aye Thar Aung, a Rakhine ethnic leader, trust-building, partnerships, and political discussion are the only ways to end the civil war. He had spent more than a decade in prison as a political prisoner. When he was elected vice-chair of the House of Representatives, he stated that the failure of the peace process was due to the use of military force in Burma. A Shan political party leader, Sai Nyunt Lwin, stated that they could if someone wanted to establish a peaceful route. We require a leader who is concerned about the country and recognizes the value of peace. He brought Burma's reality to light.²⁰

Ne Win ironically tried to do this through his Directorate of Psychological Warfare. When this didn’t work, the habitus of violent means, which in the Myanmar military means Four Cuts anti-insurgency taken from the military playbook.

Still peace is deep within Myanmar’s varied cultures. But conquering hostility, mistrust, and misunderstanding is difficult, and really a matter of the heart, reflected in the arrogance that has trapped the Tatmadaw into “Taking up the Burmese Burden,” just as the British took up the White Man’s Burden, and then encouraged their American cousins to do likewise, are also matters of the heart. The peace narrative needs to recognize how deeply this is embedded in the habitus of Myanmar’s military-centric culture.