Comments on: Exceptionalism and the Burmese generals

By: Grasshopper

Grasshopper — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:25:57 +0000

Thanks Hla Oo. This is a good post and provides much food for thought.

By: Moe Aung

Moe Aung — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:03:50 +0000

Poor generals, all misunderstood and unloved. Perhaps we should all be praying for them. But then again, karma maintains that as you sow so shall you reap, that’s if they believe in it as true Buddhists.

By: Nicholas Farrelly

Nicholas Farrelly — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 11:08:34 +0000

Thanks, Hla Oo, for your personal reflections on this and other Burma topics. They are very welcome and so please keep them coming.

The transition you outline here – from relatively ordinary student/soldier to battle-hardened power-monger – is one that I think many New Mandala readers would be keen to learn more about.

These lines between “thuggery” and “decency”, between “youth” and “experience”, between boyish “dreams” and adult “reality” are, I feel, a particularly interesting area for further exploration. Understanding more about the ways that particular generals have been educated and indoctrinated is one thing. It is quite another to peel back some of the layers and look at the way that since the 1970s (when most of these men joined the army) the institutional framework and evolution of the tatmadaw has shaped a whole generation of “survivors”.

If you could say something more about the (future SPDC) men you knew, I’m sure many of our readers would find it most illuminating.

Best wishes to all,

Nich

By: Hla Oo

Hla Oo — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 07:29:07 +0000

I went to an army high school together with two of younger Burmese Generals in SPDC during late sixties and early seventies. Thuggish and unsophisticated were not the qualities I would assign to both of them. They were as decent as you and I were and as normal and as intelligent as you and I were as normal boys growing up, only to become powerful and hated men later.

One thing Burmese Army and the brutal civil war did to them was turning them into disciplined, brutalized, and traumatized hard men. Do you know that 80% of their colleagues were killed during the height of civil war in late seventies and whole eighties? Any Burmese officer has only two options- either get killed or become wealthy and powerful later as the survivors advanced- as in ancient imperial times. (In Burmese, Thay Yin Myay Gyi, Shi Yin Shwe Htee) Getting killed was a 80% sure way for most of them as they fought the hard battles especially against Chinese supported BCP.

As efficient killing machines as they are, their only logical response to the dissent is use of force and so they did in abandon. The line between thuggery and decency is getting blurred as the glasses they wear to look at the civilian population is getting grayer and grayer as they grow old in absolute power.

Also compared with other armed forces in SE Asia, especially Thailand and Indonesia, Burmese generals have had basically no experience dealing with free market economy and freely evolving business(the main pillars of civil society) as, first, most of their early years were under a socialist system, and later when they reformed the economy into market economy the western democracies have imposed various sanctions and killed off their economic inspirations.

Now they are like threatened fighting-dogs in a very tight corner, just struggling to survive in a very hostile world. Than Shwe basically showed it by his strange reaction to Ban-Ki-Mon’s visit just after Nargis. Like a bewildered child, he just didn’t know how to respond!