Misunderstood Myanmar - An Introspective Study os A Southeast Asian State In Transition

Publisher: Dr Koh Kim Seng, Singapore

February 2011, 284 pages

It may interest you to know that this book on Myanmar has just been published. The book is a private publication of a PhD thesis because the story of Myanmar revealed here is most unusual and runs counter to received wisdom and orthodoxy. The book is the product of the author s extensive field work in Myanmar, and reports on his close encounters with the military Junta, and with business and bureaucratic elites. The work is an introspective study because it reveals and respects the opinions, beliefs and strategies of these elites in an open minded approach that gives full scope to their alternative version of history.

Those who have even a passing familiarity with Myanmar will know that the Myanmar Government is exceedingly wary of letting any information out and that it guards its sovereignty and independence most jealously refusing to let any outside parties into its decision making processes. It is this very cloistered nature of the regime that has led to a dearth of inside information which has stumped many a student of Myanmar whether academic scholar or correspondent or political analyst. The result has been a failure to understand Myanmar s exceptional and intransigent response to the protests, exhortations and impositions of the US led international community more particularly the latter s democracy and human rights agenda. Thus for example, there has come about a wide spread perception that the Junta elites are corrupt and repressive , that the Myanma state is a pariah state, and that whatever development is taking place is merely cosmetic . The Myanma generals are often made out to be uneducated and stupid, as in the comment (recently repeated by Aung San Suu Kyi (ASSK) that putting four generals together will not add up to a standard three education , and that for decision making one has to go to the astrologers, etc, ignoring that many of the top brass have been schooled and trained in some of the leading institutions in the UK, the US and elsewhere.

This book argues that to understand the vicissitudes of Myanmar s recent history and the behaviour of its generals one has to grasp the dynamic interaction (struggle even) between, on one hand, its external environment (milieu exterieur), including the disgruntled diaspora alongside the US led international community, and on the other, the internal environment (milieu interieur) consisting of the generals ideological orientation in politics and economics which , the author argues, exceptionally , still draws from a well of adverse colonial experiences and betrayals, as well as from religion and culture. Exceptionally because unlike other developing states Myanmar has been isolated from the international world for so long that those same internal factors have crystallized and come to take on a significance which, arguably, exceeds the role played by history, culture and religion in other parts of the world.

Thanks to his very extended quanxi networks amongst the Myanmar junta, the author has succeeded in teasing out the causes of the Myanmar Government s reluctance to rapid developmental change and democratisation, its philosophical and buddhistic take on the country s postwar slide from pre-eminence to ignominy in the developmental world, and its post 1988 conflagration-resolve to gradually take steps to regain its Paradise Lost , taking advantage of present forces of regionalisation and geo-strategic hegemonic shifts. Whether this strategy succeeds thereby improving the lives of 53 million people depends much on how the clash between the international community s Prejudice and the Junta s Pride will be handled.