History of Burma since 1945

From British Rule to Independence

Modern Burma has suffered from the legacy of colonial rule in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The British conquest over the course of three wars (1824-26, 1852-53, and 1885) followed by the pacification campaign that dominated Upper Burma in the late 1880s and early 1890s ultimately involved the removal of the court, and traditional elite, the end of rural subsistence safeguards, and an end to state patronage of the monastic order. The relatively late introduction of representative institutions in the colonial period provided weak roots for Democracy once independence was eventually achieved. 
Nevertheless, Burma’s political and economic trajectory was also significantly impacted by events and developments in the 1940s, particularly by the delay in resolving significant national problems until after the end of colonial rule. Burma emerged from World War II with a political leadership that had both collaborated with and fought against the Japanese. Aung San and other young nationalists had joined the Japanese invasion armies in late 1941 as the Burma Independence Army, forcing the British out, but, by 1944, came to realize that “independence” granted under the Japanese in 1943 fell short of their hopes. In 1945, Aung San led a Burmese military revolt, under the banner of the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League (AFPFL), which would serve as the leading political umbrella for Burma’s national leadership until its practical split in 1958 and its final dissolution in 1963. 
	The remaining years of British rule in the immediate postwar period were too short to rectify the economic or social damage of the war and much of this work was left to a fledgling regime without the means to do so. Political independence was granted by Britain in 1948 as a result of negotiations over the course of 1947 rather than through a tough, but potentially unifying experience as was experienced by the Vietnamese. The AFPFL thus never became the kind of vehicle for one particular political group that the Vietminh quickly became in Indochina. When independence was realized the leading political group faced numerous political competitors within and without the AFPFL. Ethnic and religious minorities feared Burman Buddhist domination, while Burman Buddhists resented years of minority privilege under the British. Worse, the national leader with the credentials to hold together such a fragile environment, Aung San, was assassinated along with much of his cabinet in July 1947. Political leadership thus fell to the sincere, but less politically astute U Nu.

The Democratic Period

Three main problems hindered the chances for the success of the Nu Government in the 1950s. First, civil war broke out in force soon after independence as disenchanted people from across the political and ethnic spectrum took up arms against the government. The absence of central coordination amongst the rebels made it just as difficult for the government to defeat them as vice versa. Second, rampant corruption worked against administrative efficiency. At the same time, the military, built up a strong institutional base to wage war with insurgents. Third, Weak democratic traditions contributed to political divisions within the AFPFL and their polarization into two main camps, ultimately leading to a bifurcation into two separate parties, the clean and the stable AFPFL. Each would resort to undemocratic means to hinder the other fostering severe political instability. 
Between 1958 and 1960, after AFPFL problems appeared headed towards the emergence of a civil war within a civil war, Nu gave army head General Ne Win and his officers control of the civilian administration in order to restore political stability. The so-called caretaker regime they established held on to power longer than its initial six-month mandate, but undertook measures that did improve the economy, staved off the administrative collapse of the regime, and cleaned up the streets. 
Although surrendering political control again to Nu in 1960, the military was unhappy with Nu’s repeals of certain economic measures and the politicization of Buddhism. The issue of ethnic autonomy, favored by Nu and feared by the military, led to the final confrontation between the two. In March 1962, Ne Win launched a coup, arresting the civilian leadership and re-establishing military control. The military’s unwillingness to make political concessions to the ethnic minorities fostered an expansion of armed opposition to the government amongst the latter, while the military’s paranoia about foreign domination, a legacy perhaps of colonial rule, would lead to a significant degree of isolation of the country from the outside world. 

The Ne Win Era

From 1962 until 1974, Burma was formally under the control of the Revolutionary Council. As the title indicates, Ne Win and his friends were unhappy with the conduct of Burma’s national affairs in the 1950s and sought to make major changes in Burmese politics, economy, and society, but what types of changes would be undertaken remained unclear for some time. For example, at first the government encouraged foreign investment and promoted industrialization, but then in 1963 did an about-face and pursued a Marxist-style reorientation of the economy and promoted agriculture. Initially, the government sought the support and cooperation of the major political parties and then banned them altogether. Nu and other members of Burma’s civilian leadership remained in jail in the first few years of the regime and then were released to form a consultative group to advise on government reforms. Everything indicated that insufficient long-term planning had taken place before the coup for what to do with the country afterwards. 
Although the one-party “civilian” state led by the Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP) that ran Burma until 1988 was formally established by the Constitution of 1974, it emerged gradually and had roots in the early 1960s. The Revolutionary Council had created the BSPP to replace the banned existing civilian political parties with a single party that would represent the worker and peasant masses. Over the course of the 1960s, the party base steadily expanded until it opened up for mass membership in 1971. The constitution drafting process was also intended to demonstrate that the BSPP government, when it emerged, would be a truly representative government. Unwilling to transfer actual power, Ne Win and his officers nonetheless dropped their military titles in 1972 and exchanged their uniforms for civilian clothing to serve as the civilian political elite of what would remain a Ne Win-controlled dictatorship.
The BSPP period had little hope for success. Economic mismanagement and global economic fluctuations meant that the Burmese economy went into decline. Labor strikes in 1974 accompanied food shortages and harsh government suppression. Although the government admitted at the BSPP Congress in 1977 that isolationist policies were in error, it was reticent to launch a major reform of economic policies encouraging the dramatic expansion of both the country’s foreign debt and the black market. Matters spun out of control over the course of 1987 and in November, the United Nations granted Burma Least Developed Country status. The civil war remained a stalemate while Ne Win directed the state’s forces to weed out emerging potential political rivals from within the BSPP and attempting to bring the monastic order under state domination. 
The period between the popular demonstrations that broke out in the summer of 1988 and the national elections of May 1990 was ripe with opportunities to change the trajectory of Burmese politics and economy. Several bloody confrontations between security forces and students in March 1988 and after led to protests that gradually increased in scale and scope into the summer. These culminated in a mass movement for democratic change, ultimately finding voice in Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of the late Aung San, who happened to be in Burma at the time visiting her sick mother. Charismatic and capable, she and several other unhappy observers of years of Ne Win’s misrule formed the National League for Democracy (the NLD), which would gradually emerge as the main opposition party to the government. Although Ne Win formally resigned from national leadership a few weeks earlier, he left power in the hands of close associates whom he clearly controlled from behind the scenes. The same appears to have been true as well of the State Law and Order Council (SLORC), a governing council established in November, when the military launched a coup for fear of letting civilian leaders get too far. Over the course of the next year and a half, leading up to elections promised to determine Burma’s political leadership, the military engaged in a dogged attempt to confuse the electoral base and eliminate civilian political rivals to army front parties. In 1989, Aung San Suu Kyi and other civilian politicians were placed under house arrest on trumped up charges intended to keep them from campaigning. Nonetheless, the NLD won a landslide victory in May 1990. For the first few days after the election, the military admitted defeat. The SLORC, renamed a few years later as the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), however, quickly demonstrated that it did not intend to surrender authority to the NLD or to any other civilian politicians in the near future.

Burma Since 1990

For the past seventeen years the ruling Council has periodically taken steps towards Democratic reform and then delayed again or retracted the concessions or promises altogether. For much of this period, these fluctuations were partly due to shifts in power amongst the different cliques in the military leadership, headed by rival officers among Ne Win’s lieutenants. For many years, Ne Win kept these men, including Than Shwe and Khin Nyunt, in check, although at the end of the 1990s the aging man’s powers waned and he and his family’s influence was subverted. So too, in October 2004, when rivals toppled Khin Nyunt, who had favored more engagement with Aung San Suu Kyi and the international community in pursuing a road-map to Democracy, the country again took a step back. Beyond behind-the-scenes power plays, however, the slow pace of political reform also appears to have been a purposeful part of enriching the military elite at the expense of national prosperity. Despite claims made in 1990 that the civil war was a major justification for continued military control, the decline in fighting resulting from ceasefire arrangements in the mid-1990s provoked no greater determination to transfer power to a civilian government. 
In recent years, the government has eagerly entrenched the military’s long-term position. In 2005, it removed the capital of the country to a new, more secure complex called Naypyidaw, far from the former capital at Rangoon, historic home to the major events of Burmese nationalism and 1988. In response to the Saffron Revolution, so-called after the garb of the monastic protestors who took to the streets to protest the impoverishment of the general population, the government began a crackdown with shocking violence in late September 2007. While the government attempted to spin events in a favorable direction, it was surprised to find that over the course of years of exerting control over media, mobile phones and other devices exposed huge gaps in its ability to screen information going to the outside world. In the face of intense world criticism, the government sped up the drafting of the new constitution, which outlined a nominally civilian, elected government, but blatantly guaranteed military control. The fact that the government held a sham referendum in the midst of arguably the country’s worst natural disaster of modern times, the devastation wrought by Cyclone Nargis in May 2008, demonstrated both its callous disregard for the wellbeing of the general population and its intent on securing military control over Burma’s future at all costs. With the “approval” of the Constitution, Burma waits to enter yet another phase of military control, as in 1962, 1974, and 1988. 

Michael W. Charney
School of Oriental and African Studies