POLITICS, ECONOMICS & SANCTIONS
POLITICS
316from the military or pro-military parties. In the new and all-powerful
National Defence and Security Council, only one of its eleven members is
genuinely civilian, and that member comes from the pro-military Union
Solidarity and Development Party.’ A post-election report from the In-
ternational Crisis Group (www.tinyurl.com/6e4omqk) is more cautiously
hopeful, noting that while ‘changes are unlikely to translate into dra-
matic reforms in the short term...they provide a new governance context,
improving the prospects for incremental reform.’
Many people continue to speculate about the role of Than Shwe, who
retired as the head of the military in March 2011. It’s commonly thought
he continues to pull strings from behind the scenes in much the same
way that Ne Win once did. Than Shwe, however, will be well aware of
Ne Win’s fate: the one-time strongman of Myanmar died in 2002, uncer-
emoniously buried, with some of his family jailed for their alleged roles
in planning a coup a few months earlier. The constitution contains pro-
visions to stop attempts to prosecute Than Shwe and other top military
brass for crimes committed under their watch – but the rule of law has
counted for little in Myanmar over the last half century.National League for Democracy
Founded on 27 September 1988, the National League for Democracy
(NLD; http://www.nldburma.org) is the best known of Myanmar’s pro-democ-
racy organisations, thanks to its iconic leader Aung San Suu Kyi. It won
the 1990 election in a landslide victory that the ruling junta ignored;
many of its members were subsequently thrown into prison; others went
into self-imposed exile (see p 303 ).
Unhappy with the revised constitution pushed through by the govern-
ment in 2008, the NLD called for a boycott of the October 2010 elections,
in turn causing the military junta to declare the party illegal. This deci-
sion caused a division within the NLD that resulted in senior members
of the organisation, Dr Than Nyein and Khin Maung Swe, leaving to
form the National Democratic Force (NDF), a party that did contest the
2010 poll.
Since the election the NDF has split into two factions, with some elect-
ed MPs committed to staying in the new party and others stating that at
any upcoming election they would rejoin the NLD.THE FICTION OF MYANMAR STATISTICS‘Facts are negotiated more than they are observed in Myanmar’, writes David Stein-
berg in Burma/Myanmar: What Everyone Needs to Know. ‘Statistics are often imprecise
or manipulated, caused by internal political considerations or insuffi cient data, and
biased externally by a lack of access to materials.’ Under such circumstances, economic
policy becomes pretty much guesswork.
Even a basic fi gure such as Myanmar’s population is elusive. The Chinese news agen-
cy Xinhua quotes the government’s 2009 offi cial fi gure of 59.12 million, while the Asian
Development Bank has it at 58.84 million and the CIA World Factbook at 54 million.
Sean Turnell, an expert on Myanmar’s economy at Sydney’s Macquarie University,
isn’t surprised by this 10% spread. ‘The last full census was back in 1913’, he says, point-
ing out that all subsequent attempts at a head count, including the oft-quoted census
of 1983, have been compromised by lack of data from parts of the country experiencing
rebellions and unrest.
Where we give population fi gures in this guide, they should only be taken as estimates
that try to gauge the relative size of diff erent towns and cities. Statistics provided by the
Myanmar government should be regarded at best as an indicator and at worst as pure
fi ction.Ethnic Politics
in Burma: The
Time for Solu-
tions, a report
by the Transna-
tional Institute
(http://tinyurl.
com /3o4pcqs)
makes for sober-
ing reading on a
land in political
transition and
ethnic crisis.Bribery is part
of all business
in Myanmar. The
owners of one
private guest-
house owner told
us they have to
bribe their tax
official. ‘We pay
the tax man 25%
of the taxes we
would have paid.
He’s a very rich
man.’