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Will nascent reforms enable Myanmar to avoid a repeat of Cambodia’s notorious term?
In November 2012, U.S. President Barack Obama made a stop in Myanmar before attending an ASEAN summit in Cambodia – the first time a sitting U.S. president had visited either country. While Obama’s appearance in Yangon represented the growing, if cautious, international recognition of Myanmar’s moves toward reform and engagement with the world, White House staff made it clear that Obama would not have come to Phnom Penh had it not been hosting the summit as 2012 ASEAN chair. In a brief, tense meeting with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, Obama called out Cambodia’s numerous human rights failings. During the summit, Cambodia came under fire for hampering civil society meetings, as impoverished residents, threatened with eviction to make way for airport expansion, painted “SOS” on their roofs in an appeal to foreign leaders.
As Myanmar prepares to take on the 2014 ASEAN chairmanship, it would do well to learn from Cambodia’s 2012 experience if it hopes to continue improving its reputation. From Cambodia, Myanmar could learn “not a lot of good things, but at least they could learn what to avoid,” Ou Virak, president of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights, said recently with a laugh. Like many, Virak is optimistic that Myanmar will do its best to avoid a chairmanship like Cambodia’s rather infamous tenure. But it is worth considering exactly how Myanmar might achieve this aim given its similarly low levels of development, ongoing issues with repression and human rights violations, and strong Chinese economic influence.
Prior to Obama’s November 2012 visit, Cambodia had already drawn plenty of criticism for its obstruction during an ASEAN ministerial meeting of discussion about the South China Sea, where China has overlapping claims with multiple ASEAN members. The impasse led to the group’s failure, for the first time in ASEAN’s more than four decades of existence, to issue a joint statement at the meeting’s conclusion. Other ASEAN countries and observers accused Cambodia of acting under the influence of China, a major donor. At the same meeting, Myanmar President Thein Sein and then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met to discuss renewed foreign investment in Myanmar – their second ever meeting, following their first in Naypyidaw the previous November.
These concurrent events demonstrated the way in which Myanmar’s reputation has inched up against Cambodia’s since Naypyidaw began reforms in 2011. Ko Ko Hlaing, chief political adviser to Myanmar President Thein Sein, recently asserted that Myanmar is now more open than Cambodia when it comes to freedom of the media, civil society, and elections. This was by most accounts an exaggeration. But in spite of ongoing concerns about ethnic violence and abuse of power, Myanmar’s international image has largely trended upward recently, while Cambodia’s has remained consistently poor. This past year, Myanmar passed Cambodia on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, making Cambodia the lowest-ranking ASEAN member, tied for 160th place in the study of 177 countries.
Myanmar showcased its re-entry into the international community by hosting the World Economic Forum in June and then, for the first time in over 40 years, the 2013 Southeast Asian Games, which have just wrapped upin Naypyidaw. But it will be Myanmar’s ASEAN chairmanship that will really give the country a chance to highlight its political progress. Internally, Myanmar’s reforms are threatened by ongoing ethnic conflict – particularly violence and discrimination against the Rohingya Muslims – as well as political obstacles. The country’s 2008 constitution currently reserves 25 percent of parliamentary seats for the military and would bar those with foreign spouses or children, including opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, from running for president in the upcoming 2015 elections.
When it comes to ASEAN, however, Myanmar has indicated that it will do its best to meet regional standards as chair. Myanmar’s director general for ASEAN Affairs, Aung Lynn, has said that Myanmar has carefully observedpast ASEAN summits and will work closely in the coming year with other members on a code of conduct for the South China Sea, a long-time goal of countries like the Philippines whose claims overlap China’s. Myanmar set up a group of experts and officials in January to study the matter ahead of its chairmanship.
Carl Thayer, a Southeast Asia expert and emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales, said that because Myanmar wants to continue to benefit from renewed international rapprochement and investment, it will likely do its best, unlike Cambodia, to appear as an independent ASEAN chair and an “honest broker” for the South China Sea issue. He observed that while the 2013 chair, the developed and stable though not democratic Brunei, was expected to be a competent host, the apparent commitment to balance is more notable in Myanmar, which will be chairing ASEAN for the first time.
“I am very impressed with Myanmar’s diplomats,” Thayer said. “They see it as in their interest to reflect what ASEAN wants, but are also aware of huge Chinese pressures bearing down on them.” Due to Myanmar’s need to balance these pressures, Thayer predicted that Myanmar “will follow ASEAN’s line on the South China Sea, but it’s not going to be a priority.” It may not need to be, he said, given that the dispute now is moving – albeit very slowly – through certain diplomatic and legal channels. In Brunei, China agreed to hold official talks with ASEAN on a formal code of conduct to govern the waters. Thailand, as the coordinating country for China-ASEAN relations, will continue to be largely responsible for overseeing negotiations of the code. The Philippines has brought a case accusing China of encroachment to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea – a move rejected by China – but the court may well not rule until after the end of 2014.
The main development that could cause the issue to flare up again and affect Myanmar’s chairmanship, Thayer said, would be if China declared an Air Defense Identification Zone in the South China Sea, as it did in late November over an area of the East China Sea that overlaps with Japanese and South Korean claims. Givenconcerns that China may make such a move, and strategic shifts by Tokyo and Washington toward the region, Myanmar will face increased pressure to not appear to side with China in maritime matters, as Cambodia did. Analysts stress the limits of Myanmar’s power as chair, but they say it would do well to continue with the balanced approach it began alongside other reforms in 2011 with the apparent aim of reducing economic and strategic dependence on China.
“The lesson for Myanmar here is to respect ASEAN tradition, which is to take tiny little diplomatic steps without creating political friction among other ASEAN members, and to know its strategic limits,” said Peter Tan Keo, an independent analyst who focuses on ASEAN. “It would behoove the country to understand its role in stewarding issues, not to stifle them for its own strategic gains or interests, as was clearly the case with Cambodia.” Myanmar, like Laos and Cambodia, could ill-afford to be uncooperative given that it is “knee-deep in debt and heavily dependent on foreign aid,” he said. “Rather, it must continue building trust and reciprocity with key strategic partners within and outside of ASEAN, and that includes authenticating the inclusionary voices of human rights and civil society groups.”
The Myanmar government so far has responded positively to such appeals for greater inclusion of civil society in ASEAN, although experts warn that its actions may not live up to its words. Aung Myo Min, director of the NGO Equality Myanmar, said the government has given permission for an ASEAN People’s Forum (APF), a set of civil society meetings held each year in the ASEAN chair country, to go ahead in March. Through the APF, activists will to develop an agenda to present political leaders ahead of the governmental summit in May and are working with Myanmar government officials to choose a time for such an interface.
This is very good news, Aung Myo Min said, because “in previous meetings, not in Brunei, but it happened in Cambodia, the government just invited government-selected representatives, not truly civil society representatives,” to share their input with leaders. At the April 2012 summit in Phnom Penh, in fact, the Cambodian government staged its own APF meeting to rival the civil society-organized meeting and dilute independent voices. The Myanmar government, realizing that a similar approach would cast serious doubts on the robustness of its reforms, has pledged to “recognize the work of the civil society and not (have) any intervention from the government,” Aung Myo Min said.
Even if the government goes back on its word, Myanmar activists hope that the way it has organized the conference will prevent the government from employing divide-and-conquer techniques. “We don’t want some groups close to the government to organize one conference and others not close to the government to organize one conference, like in Cambodia,” said Kyaw Lin Oo, a coordinator for the Myanmar People Forum Working Group. “In Myanmar for 2014, we decided for all civil society groups to be united, so we only organized one civil society conference for 2014.” He noted that during the November 2012 summit in Cambodia, which he attended, Phnom Penh authorities had pressured several venues and guesthouses to shut out APF participants or expel them. The Myanmar government, by contrast, has said it will help provide a venue and security for the APF, Aung Myo Min said.
While these promises are encouraging, they may be a method of muffling the meetings’ impact, Ou Virak of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights suggested. By shutting venues and blocking meetings, the Cambodian government ended up drawing more attention to the APF, he said. “If they actually could have held those civil society meetings, they would have had very, very little impact on how Cambodia was seen as chair.”
Myanmar’s more accommodating tactics in 2014 might cause less of a stir, but the broader issues behind the meetings are common in both Cambodia and Myanmar and indeed span ASEAN, said Aung Myo Min. Chief among them is the absence of land use rights for the poor, he said. In his view, one reason Cambodia so vigorously obstructed the APF was its desire to divert attention from the many forcible evictions it authorized to make way for development. In Myanmar, too, projects like the Chinese-backed Myitsone hydropower dam have drawn large-scale protests over concerns about environmental damage and the forcible resettlement of nearby residents. Declarations that the government’s suspension of the Myitsone project in 2011 was a sign of its reformist attitude now have been called into question by indications that construction might begin again. It will therefore be particularly important that Myanmar’s chairmanship does a better job addressing land rights issues than Cambodia’s, Aung Myo Min said.
Noting that “human rights has never been at the top of the ASEAN agenda,” Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch, said that indications about Myanmar’s approach to its chairmanship seem promising but that “nothing is really a done deal in Myanmar until we see it taking place.” Yuyun Wahyuningrum, senior advisor on ASEAN and human rights at the Human Rights Working Group, an Indonesian NGO coalition, agreed and said that Myanmar’s political will may well help determine whether AICHR, the ASEAN human rights body, becomes more “inclusive or exclusive, participatory or closed” when it comes under review in 2014. Added analyst Peter Tan Keo, Myanmar would do well to remember the criticism of Cambodia’s handling of such issues in 2012, when leaders signed an ASEAN Human Rights Declaration without input from civil society groups.
Myanmar’s capacity to promote unity, Keo noted, will be particularly important in light of ASEAN’s plans for integration into a single market and production base by the end of 2015. “Stronger ASEAN countries – Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia – should not hesitate to remind Myanmar about the importance of maintaining ‘ASEAN solidarity,’ particularly in building trust and reciprocity in preparation for the 2015 connectivity,” he said. “Don’t be selfish and short-sighted like Cambodia, who is likely to remain on ASEAN’s naughty list for quite some time.”
While the ASEAN chairmanship is a chance for Myanmar to further bolster its international image, the reality on the ground is unlikely to improve at the same pace. Inadequate infrastructure and services during ASEAN meetings in Myanmar’s less-than-decade-old capital may dampen perceptions of Myanmar’s progress, but such inconveniences are nothing compared to the issues facing the country’s largely very poor population, which so far has seen few benefits from the reforms. “The West is just looking for excuses to get back into Myanmar, meaning the progress doesn’t have to be all that significant as long as they indicate they are making reforms,” Ou Virak said. Joshua Kurlantzick, senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, recently wrote: “Many Myanmar economists and officials worry that the huge amounts of donor aid will turn Myanmar into another Cambodia, where decades of aid have fostered economic expansion but also have caused inflation, distorted the economy, and helped create a small elite who primarily benefit from investment and assistance.” Kurlantzick said that he doubted Myanmar was equipped to capably handle the 2014 ASEAN chair while occupied with its domestic concerns.
Cambodian officials declined to comment on what lessons Myanmar could learn from Cambodia’s ASEAN chair experience. Government spokesman Ek Tha said simply: “Cambodia always supports solving any problems through peaceful means.” But it is worth noting that as a result of Shinzo Abe’s outreach to ASEAN, both Myanmar and Cambodia have recently signed new agreements with Japan. Myanmar made an investment deal; Cambodia agreed to increase maritime security cooperation. Japan is already one of Cambodia’s largest donors, but this new agreement, evidently based on aggressively nationalistic Abe’s desire to contain China, was notable given Cambodia’s blockage of any talk about the South China Sea conflict at the foreign ministers meeting just the year before. Perhaps in such moves toward balancing its external relations, Cambodia is now following Myanmar.
Myanmar’s ASEAN Chairmanship: Lessons from Cambodia | The Diplomat
In November 2012, U.S. President Barack Obama made a stop in Myanmar before attending an ASEAN summit in Cambodia – the first time a sitting U.S. president had visited either country. While Obama’s appearance in Yangon represented the growing, if cautious, international recognition of Myanmar’s moves toward reform and engagement with the world, White House staff made it clear that Obama would not have come to Phnom Penh had it not been hosting the summit as 2012 ASEAN chair. In a brief, tense meeting with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, Obama called out Cambodia’s numerous human rights failings. During the summit, Cambodia came under fire for hampering civil society meetings, as impoverished residents, threatened with eviction to make way for airport expansion, painted “SOS” on their roofs in an appeal to foreign leaders.
As Myanmar prepares to take on the 2014 ASEAN chairmanship, it would do well to learn from Cambodia’s 2012 experience if it hopes to continue improving its reputation. From Cambodia, Myanmar could learn “not a lot of good things, but at least they could learn what to avoid,” Ou Virak, president of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights, said recently with a laugh. Like many, Virak is optimistic that Myanmar will do its best to avoid a chairmanship like Cambodia’s rather infamous tenure. But it is worth considering exactly how Myanmar might achieve this aim given its similarly low levels of development, ongoing issues with repression and human rights violations, and strong Chinese economic influence.
Prior to Obama’s November 2012 visit, Cambodia had already drawn plenty of criticism for its obstruction during an ASEAN ministerial meeting of discussion about the South China Sea, where China has overlapping claims with multiple ASEAN members. The impasse led to the group’s failure, for the first time in ASEAN’s more than four decades of existence, to issue a joint statement at the meeting’s conclusion. Other ASEAN countries and observers accused Cambodia of acting under the influence of China, a major donor. At the same meeting, Myanmar President Thein Sein and then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met to discuss renewed foreign investment in Myanmar – their second ever meeting, following their first in Naypyidaw the previous November.
These concurrent events demonstrated the way in which Myanmar’s reputation has inched up against Cambodia’s since Naypyidaw began reforms in 2011. Ko Ko Hlaing, chief political adviser to Myanmar President Thein Sein, recently asserted that Myanmar is now more open than Cambodia when it comes to freedom of the media, civil society, and elections. This was by most accounts an exaggeration. But in spite of ongoing concerns about ethnic violence and abuse of power, Myanmar’s international image has largely trended upward recently, while Cambodia’s has remained consistently poor. This past year, Myanmar passed Cambodia on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, making Cambodia the lowest-ranking ASEAN member, tied for 160th place in the study of 177 countries.
Myanmar showcased its re-entry into the international community by hosting the World Economic Forum in June and then, for the first time in over 40 years, the 2013 Southeast Asian Games, which have just wrapped upin Naypyidaw. But it will be Myanmar’s ASEAN chairmanship that will really give the country a chance to highlight its political progress. Internally, Myanmar’s reforms are threatened by ongoing ethnic conflict – particularly violence and discrimination against the Rohingya Muslims – as well as political obstacles. The country’s 2008 constitution currently reserves 25 percent of parliamentary seats for the military and would bar those with foreign spouses or children, including opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, from running for president in the upcoming 2015 elections.
When it comes to ASEAN, however, Myanmar has indicated that it will do its best to meet regional standards as chair. Myanmar’s director general for ASEAN Affairs, Aung Lynn, has said that Myanmar has carefully observedpast ASEAN summits and will work closely in the coming year with other members on a code of conduct for the South China Sea, a long-time goal of countries like the Philippines whose claims overlap China’s. Myanmar set up a group of experts and officials in January to study the matter ahead of its chairmanship.
Carl Thayer, a Southeast Asia expert and emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales, said that because Myanmar wants to continue to benefit from renewed international rapprochement and investment, it will likely do its best, unlike Cambodia, to appear as an independent ASEAN chair and an “honest broker” for the South China Sea issue. He observed that while the 2013 chair, the developed and stable though not democratic Brunei, was expected to be a competent host, the apparent commitment to balance is more notable in Myanmar, which will be chairing ASEAN for the first time.
“I am very impressed with Myanmar’s diplomats,” Thayer said. “They see it as in their interest to reflect what ASEAN wants, but are also aware of huge Chinese pressures bearing down on them.” Due to Myanmar’s need to balance these pressures, Thayer predicted that Myanmar “will follow ASEAN’s line on the South China Sea, but it’s not going to be a priority.” It may not need to be, he said, given that the dispute now is moving – albeit very slowly – through certain diplomatic and legal channels. In Brunei, China agreed to hold official talks with ASEAN on a formal code of conduct to govern the waters. Thailand, as the coordinating country for China-ASEAN relations, will continue to be largely responsible for overseeing negotiations of the code. The Philippines has brought a case accusing China of encroachment to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea – a move rejected by China – but the court may well not rule until after the end of 2014.
The main development that could cause the issue to flare up again and affect Myanmar’s chairmanship, Thayer said, would be if China declared an Air Defense Identification Zone in the South China Sea, as it did in late November over an area of the East China Sea that overlaps with Japanese and South Korean claims. Givenconcerns that China may make such a move, and strategic shifts by Tokyo and Washington toward the region, Myanmar will face increased pressure to not appear to side with China in maritime matters, as Cambodia did. Analysts stress the limits of Myanmar’s power as chair, but they say it would do well to continue with the balanced approach it began alongside other reforms in 2011 with the apparent aim of reducing economic and strategic dependence on China.
“The lesson for Myanmar here is to respect ASEAN tradition, which is to take tiny little diplomatic steps without creating political friction among other ASEAN members, and to know its strategic limits,” said Peter Tan Keo, an independent analyst who focuses on ASEAN. “It would behoove the country to understand its role in stewarding issues, not to stifle them for its own strategic gains or interests, as was clearly the case with Cambodia.” Myanmar, like Laos and Cambodia, could ill-afford to be uncooperative given that it is “knee-deep in debt and heavily dependent on foreign aid,” he said. “Rather, it must continue building trust and reciprocity with key strategic partners within and outside of ASEAN, and that includes authenticating the inclusionary voices of human rights and civil society groups.”
The Myanmar government so far has responded positively to such appeals for greater inclusion of civil society in ASEAN, although experts warn that its actions may not live up to its words. Aung Myo Min, director of the NGO Equality Myanmar, said the government has given permission for an ASEAN People’s Forum (APF), a set of civil society meetings held each year in the ASEAN chair country, to go ahead in March. Through the APF, activists will to develop an agenda to present political leaders ahead of the governmental summit in May and are working with Myanmar government officials to choose a time for such an interface.
This is very good news, Aung Myo Min said, because “in previous meetings, not in Brunei, but it happened in Cambodia, the government just invited government-selected representatives, not truly civil society representatives,” to share their input with leaders. At the April 2012 summit in Phnom Penh, in fact, the Cambodian government staged its own APF meeting to rival the civil society-organized meeting and dilute independent voices. The Myanmar government, realizing that a similar approach would cast serious doubts on the robustness of its reforms, has pledged to “recognize the work of the civil society and not (have) any intervention from the government,” Aung Myo Min said.
Even if the government goes back on its word, Myanmar activists hope that the way it has organized the conference will prevent the government from employing divide-and-conquer techniques. “We don’t want some groups close to the government to organize one conference and others not close to the government to organize one conference, like in Cambodia,” said Kyaw Lin Oo, a coordinator for the Myanmar People Forum Working Group. “In Myanmar for 2014, we decided for all civil society groups to be united, so we only organized one civil society conference for 2014.” He noted that during the November 2012 summit in Cambodia, which he attended, Phnom Penh authorities had pressured several venues and guesthouses to shut out APF participants or expel them. The Myanmar government, by contrast, has said it will help provide a venue and security for the APF, Aung Myo Min said.
While these promises are encouraging, they may be a method of muffling the meetings’ impact, Ou Virak of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights suggested. By shutting venues and blocking meetings, the Cambodian government ended up drawing more attention to the APF, he said. “If they actually could have held those civil society meetings, they would have had very, very little impact on how Cambodia was seen as chair.”
Myanmar’s more accommodating tactics in 2014 might cause less of a stir, but the broader issues behind the meetings are common in both Cambodia and Myanmar and indeed span ASEAN, said Aung Myo Min. Chief among them is the absence of land use rights for the poor, he said. In his view, one reason Cambodia so vigorously obstructed the APF was its desire to divert attention from the many forcible evictions it authorized to make way for development. In Myanmar, too, projects like the Chinese-backed Myitsone hydropower dam have drawn large-scale protests over concerns about environmental damage and the forcible resettlement of nearby residents. Declarations that the government’s suspension of the Myitsone project in 2011 was a sign of its reformist attitude now have been called into question by indications that construction might begin again. It will therefore be particularly important that Myanmar’s chairmanship does a better job addressing land rights issues than Cambodia’s, Aung Myo Min said.
Noting that “human rights has never been at the top of the ASEAN agenda,” Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch, said that indications about Myanmar’s approach to its chairmanship seem promising but that “nothing is really a done deal in Myanmar until we see it taking place.” Yuyun Wahyuningrum, senior advisor on ASEAN and human rights at the Human Rights Working Group, an Indonesian NGO coalition, agreed and said that Myanmar’s political will may well help determine whether AICHR, the ASEAN human rights body, becomes more “inclusive or exclusive, participatory or closed” when it comes under review in 2014. Added analyst Peter Tan Keo, Myanmar would do well to remember the criticism of Cambodia’s handling of such issues in 2012, when leaders signed an ASEAN Human Rights Declaration without input from civil society groups.
Myanmar’s capacity to promote unity, Keo noted, will be particularly important in light of ASEAN’s plans for integration into a single market and production base by the end of 2015. “Stronger ASEAN countries – Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia – should not hesitate to remind Myanmar about the importance of maintaining ‘ASEAN solidarity,’ particularly in building trust and reciprocity in preparation for the 2015 connectivity,” he said. “Don’t be selfish and short-sighted like Cambodia, who is likely to remain on ASEAN’s naughty list for quite some time.”
While the ASEAN chairmanship is a chance for Myanmar to further bolster its international image, the reality on the ground is unlikely to improve at the same pace. Inadequate infrastructure and services during ASEAN meetings in Myanmar’s less-than-decade-old capital may dampen perceptions of Myanmar’s progress, but such inconveniences are nothing compared to the issues facing the country’s largely very poor population, which so far has seen few benefits from the reforms. “The West is just looking for excuses to get back into Myanmar, meaning the progress doesn’t have to be all that significant as long as they indicate they are making reforms,” Ou Virak said. Joshua Kurlantzick, senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, recently wrote: “Many Myanmar economists and officials worry that the huge amounts of donor aid will turn Myanmar into another Cambodia, where decades of aid have fostered economic expansion but also have caused inflation, distorted the economy, and helped create a small elite who primarily benefit from investment and assistance.” Kurlantzick said that he doubted Myanmar was equipped to capably handle the 2014 ASEAN chair while occupied with its domestic concerns.
Cambodian officials declined to comment on what lessons Myanmar could learn from Cambodia’s ASEAN chair experience. Government spokesman Ek Tha said simply: “Cambodia always supports solving any problems through peaceful means.” But it is worth noting that as a result of Shinzo Abe’s outreach to ASEAN, both Myanmar and Cambodia have recently signed new agreements with Japan. Myanmar made an investment deal; Cambodia agreed to increase maritime security cooperation. Japan is already one of Cambodia’s largest donors, but this new agreement, evidently based on aggressively nationalistic Abe’s desire to contain China, was notable given Cambodia’s blockage of any talk about the South China Sea conflict at the foreign ministers meeting just the year before. Perhaps in such moves toward balancing its external relations, Cambodia is now following Myanmar.
Myanmar’s ASEAN Chairmanship: Lessons from Cambodia | The Diplomat
