Myanmar: Ma Thanegi's case against Sanctions

Continuing from here and here. Olorin looked up a copy of the Lonely Planet guide to Myanmar and discovered that the article he read was in fact published in the Far Eastern Economic Review (Feb 19, 1998), "The Burmese Fairy Tale", around the time when economic sanctions were first being imposed on the country.

The author, Ma Thanegi, worked as an aide to Aung San Suu Kyi at one point, and was imprisoned for nearly three years for her work as a democracy activist. (As of 2002, she was a BBC reporter; see below. See correction here.) In the FEER article, She criticised Aung San Suu Kyi's approach of openly calling for economic sanctions against the country. This is basically the heart of the article:

I have no regrets about going to jail and blame no one for it...But my fellow former political prisoners and I are beginning to wonder if our sacrifices have been worthwhile. Almost a decade after it all began, we are concerned that the work we started has been squandered and the momentum wasted.

In my time with Ma Suu, I came to love her deeply. I still do. We had hoped that when she was released from house arrest in 1995 that the country would move forward again. So much was needed-proper housing and food and adequate health care, to begin with. That was what the democracy movement was really about-helping people.

Ma Suu could have changed our lives dramatically. With her influence and prestige, she could have asked major aid donors such as the United States and Japan for help. She could have encouraged responsible companies to invest here, creating jobs and helping build a stable economy. She could have struck up a constructive dialogue with the government and laid the groundwork for a sustainable democracy.

Instead, she chose the opposite, putting pressure on the government by telling foreign investors to stay away and asking foreign governments to withhold aid. Many of us cautioned her that this was counterproductive. Why couldn't economic development and political improvement grow side by side? People need jobs to put food on the table, which may not sound grand and noble, but it is a basic truth we face every day.

Ma Suu's approach has been highly moral and uncompromising, catching the imagination of the outside world. Unfortunately, it has come at a real price for the rest of us. Sanctions have increased tensions with the government and cost jobs. But they haven't accomplished anything positive.

And there some criticisms are reserved for the western democracy activists:

I know that human-rights groups think they are helping us, but they are thinking with their hearts and not their heads. They say foreign investment merely props up the government and doesn't help ordinary people. That's not true. The country survived for almost 30 years without any investment. Moreover, the U.S., Japan and others cut off aid in 1988 and the U.S. imposed sanctions in May last year. Yet, all that has done nothing except send a hollow "moral message."

Two Westerners-one a prominent academic and the other a diplomat-once suggested to me that if sanctions and boycotts undermined the economy, people would have less to lose and would be willing to start a revolution. They seemed very pleased with this idea, a revolution to watch from the safety of their own country.

This naive romanticism angers many of us here in Burma. You would deliberately make us poor to force us to fight a revolution? American college students play at being freedom fighters and politicians stand up and proclaim that they are striking a blow for democracy with sanctions. But it is we Burmese who pay the price for these empty heroics. Many of us now wonder: Is it for this that we went to jail?

(By the way, if anyone thinks that all this entails some sort of endorsement for the 'continued engagement' practiced by some Asian countries, he or she's better be sure that engagement has indeed improved the lives of ordinary Myanmese before boasting. See my previous post: "The "sorry record" of Myanmar in ASEAN")

As only to be expected, there were critical responses to Ma Thanegi's article, some of which can be found on the archives to reg.burma. The article itself was posted here, and the first response here (thereafter, follow the "next by thread" link). There was also an article in The Irrawaddy (Apr 1998), "Can Sanctions bring Democracy to Burma", by Sai Lu, and more recently, Ma Thanegi has a piece in BBC (Mar 4, 2002), "Burma sanctions: The case against":

The ideas behind the use of sanctions in their simplest perspectives are:

- The government concerned has been bad; therefore it must be punished.

- The government concerned has been bad; therefore pressure must be put on it so that it will do what it should do, or stop doing what it should not be doing.

The usual argument for sanctions is that they only hurt the government concerned and that it is their fault in the first place for being "bad" so that sanctions inevitably had to be imposed.

My argument against sanctions is that they hurt the people more than the government, and that there are other ways to bring about change other than the idealistic and futile strategies of sanctions, boycotts and isolation.

The verdict--

Imposing sanctions, especially on a country without a lucrative market, oil reserves or nuclear weapons is an easy step to take, no matter that history has shown that it does not work.

Alternative strategies may not be politically correct nor popular media-wise, but what is more important, realistic changes for the sake of the people, or a popular image of being correct? How long must the people be held economic hostage?

If there is a sincere will to bring about good and realistic changes, then emotions or self-glorification should be set aside, however unfair it may seem.

Strategies that do not work and at the same time hurt the people should be reconsidered in the name of "fairness", which, after all, is the battle cry of democracy.

[UPDATED] On the same day that BBC published Ma Thanegi's piece, they also put out this piece, "Burma Sanctions: The Case For" by By Zaw Oo, policy advisor to the Burmese exile government.

The debate is still on. Here's another two pieces against the sanctions, Japan Times (May 3 2004), "Myanmar sanctions hurt more than help", by Philip J. Cunningham
Special to The Japan Times, and even more recently, in the Financial Times (July 27, 2004), "Myanmar: Sanctions Won't Work" (via YaleGlobal Online), by Jeffrey Sachs. The April 2004 report by the International Crisis Group sums up the situation well:

At least in and of themselves, sanctions freeze a situation that does not appear to contain the seeds of its own resolution. The military, despite its many policy failures, has stayed in power since 1962, and there are no indications that external pressure has changed its will or capacity to do so for the foreseeable future. On the contrary, sanctions -- so long as they are not universally applied (and there is no ground for believing they ever will be, given attitudes in the region and the politics of the UN Security Council) -- confirm the suspicion of strongly nationalist leaders that the West aims to dominate and exploit Myanmar, and strengthen their resolve to resist.

The pro-democracy movement, symbolised bravely by Aung San Suu Kyi, remains alive in the hearts and minds of millions, but under the existing depressed political, social and economic conditions, it does not have the strength to produce political change. Sanctions may provide moral support for the embattled opposition, but they also contribute to the overall stagnation that keeps most people trapped in a daily battle for survival.

The widely expressed belief in the West that just a little more pressure might break the regime has little objective basis. It is certainly not shared by Myanmar's neighbours and most important trading partners, who strongly oppose coercive methods. If sanctions are to be anything more than a symbolic slap on the wrist, there is a need for more flexible diplomacy that involves the country's neighbours and allies and embraces other more forward-looking initiatives to help overcome the structural obstacles to political and economic development. But that diplomacy clearly needs to be much more purposeful than the limp 'engagement' strategies with which, most of the time, Myanmar's Asian neighbours have been content, and which have conspicuously failed to produce positive change inside the country.

(Read the whole thing).