Gwynne Dyer:缅甸军人将再次赢得胜利

果敢林枫

来源：番外联邦

     所有的缅甸学生工会联合会的成员走向仰光大学53周年1962名学生起义。美联社照片/ Maung赢


      这是游戏,设置和匹配的缅甸将军。周三他们终于宣布大选的日期,一度被视为真正的黎明在缅甸的民主:11月8日。但是军队再次将成为赢家。


      创建的政党支持将军,联邦团结与发展党,不会赢得议会多数席位。事实上,它可能赢得很少。但是在职军官仍然有25%的席位,依照


2008年宪法所写的(军事),这将足以维持军事统治。


        缅甸总统的发言人,前将军登盛,试图把一种积极的笔调来描绘这个上个月在接受采访时说。“过去军队控制了100%的国家,”他告诉彼得波的独立。“今天只有25%控制。”


但那不是真的:它在控制仍然是100%。


      那些军官(穿制服在议会投票在联盟军队统帅部命令)将继续主导政治,因为25%的选票,根据2008年宪法,可以阻止任何修改宪法。
如果他们找不到或购买足够的盟友在议会召集多数,通过立法,军方想要的,他们有一个保底。宪法仍然允许军队只是暂停政府和接管每当他们喜欢。嗯,只要他们认为“安全威胁”,从技术上讲,但是士兵通常很擅长这样做。


       两周前平民党在议会试图改变宪法的那些部分。他们还试图删除该条款,写停止“缅甸曼德拉”,诺贝尔和平奖得主昂山素季成为总统。与英国护照(她有两个儿子,宪法规定,没有人可以总统“外国”的关系。)士兵们只是用他们的25%阻塞少数拒绝的所有更改。
昂山素季现在直到星期六决定是否将她的全国民主联盟在11月的选举,或抵制2010年一样。原则上,它不应该是一个很困难的决定。她的党将赢得压倒性的胜利——事实上,它可能——但她仍然不能成为总统,和任何NLD-led政府将永久的威胁下切除将军如果挑战他们的特权。


      当她被问到去年在一次新闻发布会上民主项目是如何表现,她给的答案是一个单词:“停滞不前”。4月,在一次采访中她把原因归咎于国家用于支持她:“我只是想提醒你,我一直说自2012年以来,一些健康的怀疑会非常,非常好,和太多的西方朋友对这里的民主化过程过于乐观。”


很真实的承诺民主化足以结束长期以来西方对缅甸的经济制裁和释放外国投资的浪潮。经过五十年的军事统治期间,士兵们非常丰富,缅甸是东南亚最贫穷的国家(它曾经是最富有的),但它确实有巨大的,主要是未开发的自然资源。


     因此,外国投资者积累和经济转变,尽管军方仍然真正负责。但昂山素季也犯了一些严重的错误。她把将军们认真承诺足以让她的政党在2011年补选,甚至自己在议会中的席位。无疑,她明白,这是一场赌博,但不幸的是它失败了。


     所以现在她没有实际行驶的替代2011年她选择:参加11月的选举尽管限制平民的权力,和工作的变化在military-designed系统即使她借由她的合作信誉。


      昂山素季曾是一个伟大的道德地位的象征性领袖;现在,她是一个务实的政治家,她不得不把她的手弄脏。它不能感觉良好,但最终必然会或多或少这样的如果她在努力做过任何进展让缅甸民主国家。她已经取得了一些进展,都不可避免地要反击。他们从未想过她是他们的朋友或者他们的盟友。


      缅甸军队统治五十年的国家,并且做的很好。它赢得了这一轮的斗争,但缅甸正在改变:所有的外国的影响,所有的新钱,或多或少的新闻自由在社会创造新的动力。昂山素季还在游戏中,游戏还没有结束。


据戴尔是一个独立的新闻记者的文章发表在45个国家。


wynne Dyer: Burma's generals win again
1:45 PM Friday Jul 10, 2015
LinkedIn
Democracy
Diplomacy
Gwynne Dyer on global affairs
Myanmar (Burma)
World
Members of the All Burma Federation of Students' Unions march towards University of Yangon to mark the 53rd anniversary of 1962 students uprising. AP photo / Maung Win
Members of the All Burma Federation of Students' Unions march towards University of Yangon to mark the 53rd anniversary of 1962 students uprising. AP photo / Maung Win
It's game, set and match to the Burmese generals. On Wednesday they finally announced the date of the general election that was once seen as the real dawn of democracy in Burma: November 8. But the army will emerge as the winner once again.
The political party that was created to support the generals, the Union Solidarity and Development Party, will not win a majority of the seats in the new parliament. Indeed, it may win very few. But serving military officers will still have 25 per cent of the seats, in accordance with the 2008 constitution (written by the military), and that will be enough to preserve military rule.
The spokesman of Burma's president, former General Thein Sein, tried to put a positive spin on this in an interview last month. "In the past the military was 100 per cent in control of the country," he told Peter Popham of The Independent. "Today it is only 25 per cent in control."

But that's not true: it is still 100 per cent in control.
Those military officers (who wear their uniforms in parliament and vote in a bloc as the army high command decrees) will continue to dominate politics, because 25 per cent of the votes, according to that 2008 constitution, can block any changes to the constitution.
And if they can't find or buy enough allies in parliament to muster a majority and pass legislation that the military want, they have a fall-back position. The constitution still allows the military to simply suspend the government and take over whenever they like. Well, whenever they perceive a "security threat", technically, but soldiers are usually pretty good at doing that.
Two weeks ago the civilian parties in parliament tried to change those parts of the constitution. They also tried to drop the clause that was written to stop "Burma's Mandela", Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, from becoming president. (She has two sons with British passports, and the constitution says that nobody with "foreign" ties can be president.) The soldiers just used their 25 per cent blocking minority to reject all the changes.
Aung San Suu Kyi now has until Saturday to decide whether she will lead her National League for Democracy into the November elections, or boycott them as she did in 2010. In principle, it shouldn't be a tough decision. Her party could win by a landslide - indeed, it probably would - but she still couldn't be president, and any NLD-led government would be permanently under threat of removal by the generals if it challenged their privileges.
When she was asked in a press conference last year how the democracy project was faring, she gave a one-word answer: "Stalled". And in an interview in April she put the blame squarely on the countries that used to support her: "I would just like to remind you that I have been saying since 2012 that a bit of healthy scepticism would be very, very good, and that too many of our western friends are too optimistic about the democratisation process here."
It's quite true that just the promise of democratisation was enough to end the long-standing Western economic sanctions against Burma and unleash a tidal wave of foreign investment in the country. After fifty years of military rule during which the soldiers got very rich, Burma is the poorest country in South-East Asia (it used to be the richest), but it does have huge, mostly unexploited natural resources.
So the foreign investors piled in and the economy is being transformed, even though the military are really still in charge. But Suu Kyi has made some serious errors too. She took the generals' promises seriously enough to let her party run in by-elections in 2011, and even took a seat in parliament herself. She undoubtedly understood that it was a gamble, but unfortunately it failed.
So now she has no practical alternative to going down the road she chose in 2011: taking part in the November elections despite all the limitations on civilian power, and working for change within the military-designed system even though she lends it credibility by her cooperation.
Aung San Suu Kyi used to be a symbolic leader of great moral stature; now she is a pragmatic politician who has to get her hands dirty. It cannot feel good, but it was inevitably going to end up more or less like this if she ever made any progress in her struggle to make Burma a democratic country. She has made some progress, and the military were inevitably going to push back. They never thought she was their friend or their ally.
The Burmese army has ruled the country for fifty years, and it has done very well out of it. It has won this round of the struggle, but Burma is changing: all the foreign influences coming in, all the new money, and a more or less free press are creating new dynamics in the society. Aung San Suu Kyi is still in the game, and the game is not over yet.

Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.