NEW DELHI : In October last year, India’s foreign secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla and Army chief Manoj Mukund Naravane teamed up for a visit to a crucial neighbour—Myanmar—that raised eyebrows due to its rarity.
The uncommonness of the visit underlined the state of politics in Myanmar—where the military and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), co-existed in an uneasy space till the military retook power on 1 February.
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The Shringla-Naravane visit—seen as prescient given the military takeover—also reflected India ‘s strategy to deal with Myanmar: engage the military while being supportive of democratic forces. It’s a policy that has worked for New Delhi since the early 1990s.
“India has been cognizant of the power centres in Myanmar—that power has been with the military and that the civilian institutions are gradually coming into their own,”. Therefore, India has been balancing its outreach to both sides and it seems like a sensible idea given our interests in Myanmar.
A resurgence of the insurgency in the northeast and an assertive China which has been making increasingly determined inroads into India’s periphery are India’s main concerns. In fact, some analysts have pointed out that Suu Kyi has been on more cordial terms with China than the Tatmadaw (the army) given the latter’s suspicions about Beijing’s tacit support for rebel groups such as the Arakan Army.
This puts a question mark on how close Beijing and the new regime will get to each other. But tightening global sanctions could potentially force a rethink. The military’s takeover also comes at a time when New Delhi’s efforts to get Indian industry to do business in Myanmar was just starting to pay off. There are currently over 100 private Indian companies in the country, with investments to the tune of $1.2 billion.
Trouble in Myanmar
In the days since the military takeover, three pro-democracy protesters have died. There is no sign of a let up in protests. The crowds joining in only seems to be getting bigger and, among them, are members of the minority groups and the revered Buddhist monks—suggesting broad-based support across society.
According to the military and its head, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, the November 2020 elections in which Suu Kyi’s NLD won more than 80% of the vote was flawed. It said it was forced to step in because Suu Kyi’s government had failed to investigate allegations of fraud. Analysts, however, hold the view that Min Aung Hlaing was more worried about the marginalization of the military since the army backed Union Solidarity and Development Party was trounced by the NLD for the second time in 2020. In the 2015 polls too, the NLD had won by a landslide.
Predictably, the developments have drawn global condemnation. The US, UK and Canada have called for an immediate restoration of democracy and swiftly backed it up with targeted sanctions. The European Union is expected to follow suit.
China, which is heavily involved in infrastructure projects in Myanmar (as well as its 5G telecom network, has been largely silent, citing its policy of non-interference. Its state-backed media referred to the military takeover as a “cabinet reshuffle”. Of the total foreign direct investment in Myanmar, China accounts for over 25%.
Analysts, however, are divided over whether the military takeover will mean the rekindling of “familial ties” between the Myanmar and China. For one, military leader Min Aung Hlaing is widely seen to be suspicious of Beijing’s possible support to Kokang rebels, who are ethnically Chinese, as well as others. The Myanmar-Russia defence relationship has also been deepening in recent years—an effort by the army to swing away from Beijing. But biting sanctions can bring the Tatmadaw back into the Chinese orbit, analysts say, which will be worrisome for New Delhi.
“The generals would not like to turn to China for support in the first instance, but forced to a corner, (they) may have no choice,”
The stakes for India
“China’s primary interest in Myanmar is to pursue its strategic and economic projects under the Belt and Road Initiative and the China-Myanmar economic corridor that includes the Kyaukphyu deep sea port,”. The port, seen as a key outcome of Chinese president Xi Jinping’s visit to Myanmar in January 2020, is of strategic significance as it will give Beijing a foothold in the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean.
Suu Kyi’s government had greenlighted the port project. If built, it will be the third Chinese-built port in India’s immediate neighbourhood—after Gwadar in Pakistan and Hambantota in Sri Lanka.
Myanmar’s entry into the ASEAN in 1997 meant that the economically vibrant grouping is at India’s doorstep. It’s a linkage that Delhi values greatly, given its priority to develop the northeast with help from ASEAN. But for that, keeping a lid on insurgency is a prerequisite—for which Myanmar’s generals hold the key.
In the late-1980s, India had firmly backed Aung San Suu Kyi. In 1993, Suu Kyi was awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru award for international understanding. But almost immediately after, New Delhi changed tack when the insurgency in its north-eastern region took a serious turn, coinciding with a blow-up of militancy in Kashmir. New Delhi concluded that it needed to befriend the Tatmadaw since insurgents from the north-east were using Myanmar as a base to launch attacks against India. Some groups also used Myanmar as an escape route to China. With the Myanmar military in its corner, New Delhi launched coordinated joint operations against the insurgents in the mid-1990s. And these have continued.
“Today, there is substantial military cooperation between the Myanmar and Indian armies to curb militancy,”
Indian security personnel have handed back or even eliminated Arakan rebels crossing into India for shelter, just as the Myanmar Army has handed over or eliminated Indian separatists hiding there.
The tricky act of cooperating with the Burmese military while simultaneously nudging the country towards a democratic transition has been a 30-year tightrope walk that India has indulged in. “There have been many conversations (about democracy) but they have always been quiet ones,”. India has shied away from ‘megaphone diplomacy,”; referring to the global condemnation of the generals.
Economic links
India’s use of “development projects as the main instrument of its diplomacy to engage the then military government began after the pro-democracy agitation of 1988. This has expanded over time, especially over the last 10 years.”
The Indian foreign ministry says that around $1.7 billion has been spent in development partnership, which include connectivity and infrastructure projects like the Kaladan multi-modal transit transport project connecting Kolkata port to Sittwe port in Myanmar. Another major connectivity project is the India-Myanmar-Thailand trilateral highway, which is to be later extended to Vietnam.
Most of the big-ticket economic investments in Myanmar have been shepherded by India’s state-backed firms, primarily in the area of energy. Private firms had, for long, been reluctant to get caught up in the crosshairs of international sanctions.
But this had just started to change. The India private sector’s presence went up after 2016, when the last round of sanctions imposed by the US on Myanmar was lifted. Nearly all of the 100 Indian companies have a presence in Yangon, Mayanmar’s financial, commercial and logistics nerve centre. A decade of peace and democratic stability had begun to transform Yangon’s skyline, with glitzy hotels and a newly established stock exchange vying for attention. Irrespective of which side comes on top in the street protests, stability is likely to go for a toss in the near term.
For India, private sector involvement is crucial to supplement government investments as a counter to China’s efforts to co-opt Myanmar into its multi-billion-dollar BRI.
Going forward, India’s well-entrenched dual track approach won’t sit well with new allies like the Quad, a grouping of US, Japan, Australia and India. The new Biden-led US administration has forcefully come out against the military takeover. Most notable has been the US reference to Myanmar as “Burma”, the name the country was known by before 1990 when the military changed it.
India’s national interests should be paramount. We are reaping the dividends now of befriending the military for decades. Even now, the task (of eliminating insurgencies) is not over. New Delhi should not let considerations about the US stand in the way of Indian interests.
For now, the protesters and the military seem to be exercising restraint. “The Myanmarese military are very disciplined, guided by the ideology that they are the custodians of the state and the people are their children,. On the other side is a mostly young population, exposed to some level of democracy and new technology.
There are three possible outcomes- The military will prevail, the people will prevail or, the third, an impasse. For anyone wanting to know how this will end—keep a close eye on the crowd size on Myanmar’s streets.
Recent Posts
The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.