Htin Kyaw will become Myanmar’s first civilian president in over 50 years. (Reuters)
As Barack Obama once famously said, ‘Elections have consequences.’
Indeed, few elections were more consequential in 2015 than the landmark vote in Myanmar, the country’s first freely open democratic election after a decades-long fight by activist Aung San Suu Kyi, a daughter of one of the country’s founding fathers, who began fighting to open Burmese political space in the early 1990s. The most outward consequence of that victory was Tuesday’s election of a new president, and the majority commanded by Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) meant that it could essential name the president.
With one exception. The most obvious choice, Suu Kyi, by far the country’s most popular figure, is barred from running because of a constitutional technicality. Instead, electors chose the next best thing: a close ally and friend fighting alongside Suu Kyi for decades.
Accordingly, Myanmar’s new president — and its first truly civilian president after a half-decade of military rule — is Htin Kyaw.
A 69-year-old British-educated computer sciences expert and author, Htin Kyaw was a civil servant in the 1980s before joining Suu Kyi’s democratic crusade. A longtime intimate of the Nobel peace laureate, he made it immediately clear upon his election that it would be Suu Kyi calling the shots in the new government. Suu Kyi herself has said that she will be ‘above the presidency,’ though she may yet take a role, such as foreign minister, in the new government. Continue reading Htin Kyaw elected Myanmar’s first civilian president→
Hillary Clinton, during her tenure as US secretary of state, traveled to Myanmar to visit Aung San Suu Kyi. (US State Dept.)
With the ruling party already conceding defeat in the landmark elections that took place in Myanmar on Sunday, it seems certain that, a quarter-century after the Burmese military nullified her last election victory and placed her under house arrest, pro-democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi will now lead her country, with her National League for Democracy (NLD) set to win a resounding victory.
Official preliminary election results will be announced on Tuesday, but the outcome now seems all but assured as more details emerge of the ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP)’s electoral collapse.
It is, above all, a moment for the people of Myanmar to celebrate what seems likely to be the most important step yet in the transition from military rule to something that looks increasingly like a democratic state. It’s also a moment for Suu Kyi and her party to celebrate, even though her late husband’s British nationality will prevent an NLD majority to select her as Myanmar’s next president.
No matter.
Suu Kyi, barring a major hiccup in the vote counting or a sudden volte face from the military, will soon become Myanmar’s next leader.
But it’s also a huge triumph for former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who championed Suu Kyi’s struggle in her tenure at Foggy Bottom and spent significant time and effort on building greater US-Burmese ties after years of hostility. When Clinton flew to Myanmar in 2011 to meet Suu Kyi, it was the first time that a senior US government official had set foot in the country for a half-century.
Clinton didn’t have to expend so much political capital on Myanmar. It’s not an incredibly strategic country to the US national interest, even in light of the increasing importance of the Asia-Pacific region. Goodness knows there are no votes among an American electorate that would be challenged to pinpoint Myanmar on a map. But there are (and continue to be) political downsides for Clinton if Myanmar’s transition disintegrates. That she moved so aggressively anyway to facilitate Burmese democracy is worth celebrating as part of the best tradition of American leadership in the world. Continue reading Burmese opposition victory a policy triumph for Clinton, too→
Democracy advocate and decades-long opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi hopes to lead her party to power on Sunday. (Facebook)
Five years ago, the National League for Democracy (NLD), Myanmar’s chief opposition party, boycotted the 2010 parliamentary elections because the party’s leader, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, was barred from the presidency under a 2008 constitution amendment preventing anyone with a foreign spouse or children to run for president, and it was clear enough to anyone paying attention that the new rules were designed to keep Suu Kyi out of the presidency.
But shortly after that election, however, the ruling military junta released Suu Kyi from the house arrest under which she had been subject for more than 15 of the prior 20 years.
It was a sign of good things to come for Burmese advocates of democracy and liberalization.
On the cusp of the country’s elections on Sunday, touted as the most free and fair set of elections in a quarter-century, Suu Kyi appears to be on the cusp of leading the pro-democracy NLD to its greatest triumph yet — potentially remaking, rebranding and reforming her country in the 21st century.
From dictatorship to open elections
Shortly after the last elections, Thein Sein was sworn in as president in 2011. His government launched a tentative push for reform, freeing of many of the country’s political prisoners and introducing legally recognized labor unions. In the April 2012 by-elections, the NPD was not only permitted to campaign openly, but it won 43 of the 46 seats up for election. Later in 2012, Thein Stein appointed Aung Kyi, a leading negotiator between the government and the opposition camps, as his new information minister.
The United States took notice, engaging the new reform-minded Burmese regime and even lifting many of US government sanctions, so as to permit greater bilateral trade. By the end of 2013, US president Barack Obama had visited Myanmar, and Thein Sein had visited Washington in return, winning additional relief from US sanctions, despite ongoing concerns about treatment of the Rohingya minority — practicing Muslims who represent around 4% of the country’s 51.5 million population, mostly located in the far west of Myanmar.
Still, it’s no exaggeration to say that US outreach to Burmese officials in favor of modernization and liberalization might be the most important and well-deserved (though certainly unexpected) legacy of Hillary Clinton’s four years as US secretary of state.
Nevertheless, impatience with the glacial pace of reforms and lingering dissatisfaction with Burma’s economy explain why the NLD is such a strong favorite to win the November 8 elections.
It’s not the first time Burmese citizens have demonstrated their yearning for change. In the 1990 election, the NLD also won an overwhelming victory, only to watch as the country’s military installed an even more autocratic dictatorship, promptly placing NLD leaders, including Suu Kyi, in prison or under house arrest. Seventeen years later, between August and October 2007, Buddhist monks led a series of protests in what Western media christened the ‘Saffron revolution,’ attacking the rising cost of living and the sudden removal of Myanmar’s longtime petrol subsidy, which drastically increased fuel costs.
As world elections go, however, Sunday’s will be one of the oddest.
So Time Magazine’s decision to anoint a Person of the Year since 1927, for reasons unknown, holds a rapt audience among folks in the United States, myself included.
In those 85 years, of course, Time has chosen every U.S. president (except Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover and poor Gerald R. Ford), and in recent years, it’s made some pretty silly decisions (‘You’), but even as recently as 2007, chose Vladimir Putin as its Person of the Year.
Indeed, over its long history, it’s identified many world leaders as Person of the Year — Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi in 1930, Ethiopian emperor Haile Sellasie in 1935, (controversially) Nazi German leader Adolf Hitler in 1939 and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in 1940, (less controversially) U.K. prime minister Winston Churchill in 1941 (and again in 1949), Iranian president Mohammad Mossadegh in 1951, West German chancellors Konrad Adenauer in 1953 and Willy Brandt in 1970, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1957, French president Charles de Gaulle in 1958, Saudi King Faisal in 1974, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1977, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in 1978 (and in 1985), Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979, anti-Communist Polish Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa in 1981 and even the anti-Marcos Filipino president that toppled the Marcos family, Corazon Aquino, in 1985.
Many of those decisions were thoughtful and, perhaps, even courageous. As a platform for highlighting key issues and illuminating the mechanics of how cultures, politics and economics shape our world, the ‘Person of the Year’ concept isn’t a bad one.
But before Putin in 2007, you have to go back to 1987 and 1989, when reform-minded Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev was chosen twice.
Is it really true that Time can’t find anyone in the world (outside the United States, of course) in the past 25 years worthy to be ‘Person of the Year’ other than Russian autocrats?
German chancellor Angela Merkel, who has nudged and cajoled the eurozone to bailouts of Greece, Portugal and Ireland that have kept those countries in the eurozone, while centralizing more fiscal policy and banking policy decision-making powers in the hands of the European Union. In doing all of this, she’s maintained or even gained in popularity in Germany.
European Central Bank president Mario Draghi, whose commitment to stabilizing the eurozone in no uncertain language last summer may well have turned the page on the eurozone’s ongoing crisis.
International Monetary Fund managing director Christine Lagarde, for assistance in cleaning up most of Europe’s economic mess and the rest of the world’s besides, all the while trying to initiate a discussion about balancing austerity with the need for higher growth.
Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi, whose Muslim Brotherhood now controls the government of the world’s most populous Arab country in the wake of the revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak last year, and whose rule, above all over this week’s constitutional referendum, remains subject to increasing uncertainty and doubt among secular liberals?
Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas achieved recognition of Palestine as a state in the United Nations last month.
The incoming leader of the world’s most populous country, Xi Jinping, as the new general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. Hell, Time could have chosen the entire new seven-member Politburo Standing Committee.
Time could have been timely — and creative — and chosen the four new leaders of four East Asian countries — Xi, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, Japan’s incoming prime minister Shinzo Abe and South Korea’s incoming president Park Guen-hye, the latter two being elected just this week.
México, poised to overtake Brazil as the largest economy in Latin America in the 2020s, has returned the longstanding PRI to power under the leadership of new president Enrique Peña Nieto, who promises tax reforms, privatization and development of México’s oil industry and a new approach to drug violence and security.
Maybe even Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos, who’s staked his presidency on peace talks with the longtime rebel guerilla group FARC?
How about Aung San Suu Kyi, who after years of house arrest is now serving in the parliament of Burma/Myanmar, with the once nearly-autarkic regime engaged in reforms to not only its economy, but human rights and democracy as well, garnering the re-establishment of relations with the United States?
U.S. power isn’t infinite, especially in the increasingly multipolar 21st century — and at some point, it’s a little ridiculous for Time to focus on Americans to the exclusion of those outside the United States. Maybe it’s time to call it what it’s become — the Person of the Year Most Relevant to the United States.
It’s a bit whimsical, but that’s probably the right call, considering that no one person has more power, probably, to determine whether the eurozone sticks together or falls apart.
Also on the list are several women of important to world politics:
U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton (#2),
Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff (#3),
Indian National Congress Party leader Sonia Gandhi (#6),
International Monetary Fund managing director Christine Lagarde (#8),
Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (#16),
Burmese National League for Democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi (#19),
Australian prime minister Julia Gillard (#27),
Malawi president Joyce Banda (#71),
Nigerian finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (#80),
Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (#81), and
UAE minister of foreign trade Shiekha Lubna Al Qasimi (#92)
Predictions, questions and thoughts:
Where is Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt? Robbed!
And where is Icelandic prime minister Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, the world’s first openly lesbian head of government? Also robbed!
Might Parti québécois leader Pauline Marois make it on next year’s list if she wins the Sept. 4 election in Québec and schedules a referendum on Québec’s independence?
It wasn’t exactly the opening of the floodgates, but Burma’s Sunday elections marked a significant step toward greater political liberty from a regime that is moving rapidly from authoritarian to something much more liberal.
Longtime pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi emerged as the clear winner, with her National League for Democracy (NLD) winning 40 of the 45 seats being contested. Kyi herself will join her NLD colleagues to become a member of the Burmese parliament.
Nonetheless, the military still essentially controls the majority of the 664 seats in the parliament, which itself has very weak powers in respect of governing the country.
Still, Burma is shaping up to be one of the more surprisingly positive stories of the year, as its once-tight junta loosens political controls over a country long known for its repression. General Ne Win took power in post-independence Burma in 1962, and the military has held power essentially ever since. The so-called “8888 Uprising” in August 1988, saw Ne Win resign from power and Aung San Suu Kyi emerge for the first time as a player in Burmese politics. Even though the military used lethal force to put down the 8888 Uprising, just as it had during protests in 1975 on the occasion of the death of Burmese politician and United Nations Secretary-General U Thant, new hope — in the form of the 1990 elections — indicated perhaps a new opening in Burma for political freedom.
Kyi won those elections handily — the NLD took 58.7% of the vote and 392 of the 492 available seats in the constitutional committee to be formed. The military junta, however, annulled those results, established what would become the State Peace and Development Council under General Than Shwe, who ruled until 2011. Kyi, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for her efforts, remained under house arrest for most of those 20 years. Even recently, in the so-called “Saffron Revolution,” a revolt led by Burma’s highly respected Buddhist monks in 2007, was put down with brutal force, and the 2010 elections were not in any way fair or free.
Shwe stepped down in March 2011 and his successor, Thein Sein, has been making moves toward moderate reform ever since — Sunday’s election result was perhaps less striking than the amnesty provided to many political prisoners, the program of economic reform that Thein Sein has initiated and the diplomatic front that his government has opened to warm relations with the west — UK Foreign Minister William Hague and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have both visited in the past year. Indeed, the announcement yesterday of a “managed” floating exchange rate is perhaps even more significant for Burma’s reemergence on the world stage.
As Simon Tidsall writes in The Guardian, it is too early to tell whether the gains are irreversible — Burma’s leaders are not all nearly as reforming as Burma’s new president. Indeed, Kyi herself made the same point — with just a handful of seats in a parliament that remains submissive to the military, the NLD will be hard-pressed to achieve its three goals: rule of law, a revised constitution and national reconciliation.
But after two chilly decades of repression, all signs indicate cause for cautious optimism that such a thaw is well under way, even if it remains to be seen if Burmese military leaders will oversee a transition to full democratic freedoms and economic liberalization.
In its four decades of military, near-autarchic rule, Burma has watched Japan and South Korea leapfrog into the league of fully developed nations. It has watched China and India assume their role as the 21st century’s massive economic giants in manufacturing and data services. It has watched income growth in countries like Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam — once well far behind Burma’s development — double and even triple that of Burma/Myanmar.
After four decades that have seen Burma degenerate from one of Southeast Asia’s economic powerhouses into one of its poorest nations, Thein Sein’s gestures are a clear sign that Burma’s leadership wants to pivot to a freer society and a freer economy — and attract the international aid that can facilitate that transition.
