 y twijthau, byddwn i'r f 굴au cyffredinol ysgol, debyg y gwriol clwyddu reineid, ac mae'n gweld i'r tawch. Mae hynny'n golygu ddiolch. Byddwn ni'n deunydd o'n ddweud, maen nhw'n meddwl y byddwn ni mwyaf. Y tawch yn gofyn ni wedi'u dod i'ch digwydd, ac mae'n gwell wjud Saber ychydig yma felly mae'n gweithio'r cyflwysoedd cymder o'r unedig ac mae'r teimlo'r fitn ac ar y cyflwysoedd here today come up so that they be views like that now usual things can you turn your phones off please we won't do what they do at the theater or the opera and stop while the phone rings you'll notice that there's a bit of a change in the programme i'm sorry about that i will explain that as we go but several speakers dropped out at short notice and including one at 36 hours notice Mae'r Llyfr oedd Wrongbcyn Fe wneud bod rhai o'r sydd wedi'u cyfnod o'r program, mae'r cychwyn o'r Ffrasiech Pwy, mae'n unrhyw o'r cyfnod o'r ffaith a fyddwn cyfnod i fod yn ymddangos chi'n gwech angen i ddweud. Felly mae'r Hwyl Ddechrau Ourentl yn ymddangos, sydd mae'n ddweud y rheiddiw sydd yn gweithio'r ffordd i'r ffordd o'r cychwyn o'r ffordd ymddangos. I don't think I can advertise it more strongly than that. The format consists of some talks. There will be time at the end of those for questions. Don't be shy because the audience is quite large. Remember any question you think of. Somebody else will stand up and ask if you don't. There will be breaks with tea and coffee and refreshments in the foyer just outside. I'll deal with lunch when we get to that. If you hear a fire alarm, the fire exits are there and there. I'm told that there's no practice fire alarm today. So if it goes off, it's for real. I think that's really all I need to say. I'd like to introduce our first speaker, Patrick Meehan, who is a post doc in the Department of Development Studies here at SOAS. His PhD analysed the political economy of the illegal opium and heroin economy in Myanmar. His research interests are on the political economy, violence, conflict and development of drugs and state formation in post-colonial Burma or Myanmar, especially around the Shan State, the Thai-Burma border and Myanmar's borders with China. His work engages with the processes of state building, the dynamics of borderland and frontier regions and the mechanisms surrounding illicit economies and the associated violent conflicts. Now, he's not only agreed to talk to us at very short notice today, but also agreed to move the timing of his talk. And I'm very grateful to Patrick for talking to us about the problems of Myanmar today. Patrick, thank you very much indeed. What I want to talk about today is the current democratic transition that's going on in the largest country in Southeast Asia, Burma or Myanmar. Before I go further into the talk, I want to just start with a slight caveat around the actual name of the country, because this sometimes causes quite a lot of confusion. So the name Burma was the English name given to the country by Britain when they colonised Burma in the 19th century. It remained the name of the country after the country gained independence in 1948, right up until 1989. In 1989, the government that was in power at that time changed the name of the country to Myanmar. But it was quite a controversial issue because the government that was in charge at that time was a military dictatorship. And for a long time, the decision over whether you called the country Burma or Myanmar was seen as quite a politicised issue. If you called it Burma, you were rejecting the legitimacy of the military government. You were championing human rights and democracy. If you called it Myanmar, you were seen as not necessarily defending the government, but accepting that they still had a legitimate role to change the name of the country. So what you'll see as I go through the talk is I sometimes interchange between Burma and Myanmar, which is just a sort of slightly lazy habit. But you'll see that in a lot of talks around Burma. So, before I go into a little bit more detail around the specific issues that are facing Burma today, I thought I wanted to begin by giving a little bit of a backdrop about the country itself. So Burma or Myanmar is located in Southeast Asia. And as you see on this map, although it's quite a large country in relation to Southeast Asia, it's dwarfed in size by China to the east and India to the west. So it's very strategically located, which is both a benefit and a danger to the country in the way that the government sees it. It also shares a long border with Thailand, a very short border with Laos and also a small border with Bangladesh, which is something that will come on to because it's quite significant about what's happening at the moment. In terms of the size of the country, it's about four times the size of the UK. The population is a little bit smaller than the UK, just over 50 million. One of the key, very important characteristics of the country is that it has huge amounts of diversity within it. There's many, many different languages spoken within the country, many different ethnic minorities. Although it's a predominantly buddhist country, there are also many other religious minorities. So one of the issues that we're going to come on to in this talk is the challenges of governing, the challenges of managing violence and conflict in a country that has huge diversity, because this has brought many, many challenges to the country. So I won't go into this in detail here, but the main ethnic minority within the country is known as Burman, which is where the name comes from, which is the white area of the country. But what you see is that there's this whole arc of highland areas around the rest of the country's borders, which are made up of people whose first language isn't Burmese, who some of them are Christian, Muslim, animist. Some of them are also buddhist, but that's not necessarily the case. So you see a country that has a huge amount of internal diversity. I thought I'd just add a little bit of colour before I get into the detail of the country. So a lot of buddhist, there's also huge rural areas. This isn't actually all that far from the China border, but you see vast areas of rural hill areas. This is downtown Yangon, the old name for it, the Burmese name is Rangun. This is also a very famous buddhist temple, the Shwedagon. The challenges that I want to talk about are really focusing very much on contemporary events which are happening in Burma today, but these can really only be understood through understanding the history of Burma, which I'm going to spend most of my talk talking about. Just to give a very brief backdrop, the country was colonised by the British through the 19th century, it gained its independence in 1948. It's actually a potentially very wealthy country. It has very large resources, offshore oil, natural gas, precious gems, jewels, forests. It's also very productive agriculturally. Just before World War II, it was actually the world's largest exporter of rice. Huge amounts of the rice in the world came from Burma at that time. Yet for most of the last five, six decades, the country has been under military rule. Today it is one of the poorest, least-developed, most corrupt countries in the world. It also is home to one of the longest wars in the world that has been going on since the 1940s, that pitches the central government versus an array of armed groups based in the country's borderlands. In recent years, you may have begun to come across Burma and Myanmar a lot more because it's a country that has been in the news over the last few years. For a number of very positive reasons that in 2010 and 2015 it held general elections. Ong San Suu Chih, who was under house arrest for many years, is now the leader of the country. There's been a whole array of very positive changes over the last five years. A democratisation, a civilian government that has officially replaced the military government. Ong San Suu Chih, who you may well have heard of, the democracy leader was released and now leads the country. There has been a peace process going on to try and address some of the conflict. There is much more freedom of speech in the country, there's much more investment going on. Alongside that, you may have also come across, over the last few years, Burma being in the news for many of the wrong reasons, that there's been renewed violence through large areas of the country, both the borders with China and Thailand, and especially over the last few months, the border area between Myanmar and Bangladesh. You may have come across some of the news stories about the Rohingya Muslims who have been very heavily persecuted over the last few months, and literally hundreds of thousands have fled the country to cross the border into Bangladesh. There has also been various communal violence over the last few years, and a growing threat of terrorism, both buddhist terrorism and other forms of terrorism throughout the country. Really what I want to talk about today is trying to understand this apparent paradox in contemporary Burma. Why is it that Myanmar's transition at the moment that is seen as something that is so positive, this transition from military rule to democracy, to efforts to promote peace and development, has actually coincided with many very significant problems within the country, rising tensions between buddhist and Muslims, renewed violent conflict throughout large parts of the country, because this challenges many of our assumptions, I think, that democratisation can necessarily always lead to positive change. I think this is something that Burma is currently grappling with at the moment and is an issue that I want to reflect on more in the time I have in today's presentation. In order to do that, I think, and this is an issue that is relevant not only if you're looking at Burma, but really if you're looking at any country that you're interested in at the moment, whether it's Syria, whether it's Korea, Afghanistan, is that history matters. A lot of the analysis that we get, whether you're looking at BBC News or anywhere else, is often quite superficial. It's focused very much on the here and now. There's often not such a reflection on the historical roots of a lot of these issues, and one of the big takeaways I'd like you to have today is when you're looking at the news, whether it's on Asia or anywhere else, is if there's a story that you're interested in, take time to look at the history, to dig deeper than just the headlines, and look through that. And I really, in terms of understanding where Myanmar is at now, I really want to develop two kind of key issues that I think frame this. The first is understanding the country's colonial history, and the second is understanding why the military is such a dominant part of Burma's current political system. And I don't have a huge amount of time to go into this, but there were a number of very important issues that came out of Burma's colonial experience. So Burma was gradually colonised by the British throughout the 19th century, and eventually the whole country was colonised in 1885. And the challenge that this brought is that the way the British understood the country was they wanted very clear territorial lines. They wanted to know where Burma ended, and China or Thailand or India began. So they went about setting very clear boundaries around the country. The challenge with that is that previous to that, a lot of these border areas, so the areas of Sika Chinch, were much more fluid. They sometimes were under greater control of China or Thailand. Sometimes they were under greater control of the Burmese. But they also saw themselves as quite independent. They didn't necessarily see themselves as part of a single country. And yet the way that the British ruled was to effectively put all of these different old kingdoms, different peoples, different languages into a single state. And yet alongside that, they ruled the country in very different ways. So this is a very old colonial rule, and the White's area is not very clear. But the White's area is where the British governed more directly. So they actually dismantled the monarchy. They set up their own education systems, their own government system, their own civil service. In a lot of these dark areas, they did a strategy that was known as indirect rule, where effectively they allowed the existing systems of governments and the various princes and rulers in these areas to continue to govern these areas as long as they accepted Britain as their sort of overrulers. So you have a system where in the centre of the country you had very clear direct rule that led to very significant changes. Whereas in a lot of the border areas, not a huge amount changed under the British. There were certainly changes, but a lot of the old systems of rule remained. And this had a number of issues that when the country gained its independence in 1948, the country that became Burma included all of those areas. Everywhere that was once British Burma became independent Burma. And yet this put together a whole array of different people who didn't necessarily see themselves as part of that nation's state. So the government that emerged had huge challenges of actually building a nation's state, creating a common nationalist identity throughout the whole country. And a lot of what underpinned nationalism within the country was really a rejection of British rule. So it was what was felt much more in the centre of the country, whereas in a lot of the border areas, this sense of being part of a single nation wasn't particularly powerful and wasn't particularly strong. And I won't go into it now, but the whole country was also a major battlefield in World War II. It was invaded by the Japanese, the Japanese colonised Burma, then Japan was defeated, the British came back in and retook the country. And then a few years after World War II, the country gained independence. But the war had left a huge legacy. Rangun, as it was called then, the capital, was one of the most bombed cities in the whole of Asia during the Second World War. So the country that gained independence was not only trying to forge a national identity, it was also trying to rebuild the huge damage that came after the Second World War. And during the late 1940s and 1950s, Burma was a democracy. So the country gained independence, led by somebody called Ong Sam, who was actually Ong Sanzuci's father. He led a lot of the independence movement, but quite tragically he was assassinated on the eve of independence, which many people within Burma kind of lament as they felt that had he survived and had he become the first leader, the history of Burma may have been quite different. But the first decade within Burma's post-colonial history was very problematic. That a lot of the border areas were quite reluctant to become part of the central state. And often the way that the central government responded to this was through the military, that often in some of these areas it used the military to go in and to pacify and to control these areas. So not only were there long-standing reluctance to be part of a single Burmese state, but in a lot of the more remote border areas, their first experience of the post-colonial state was actually military control, military coercion, the extension of military control through these areas. And as a result of that, you had a growing insurgency throughout a lot of the country that there were large numbers of ethnic armed groups who challenged the legitimacy of the central government and started to fight against it, either for a more federal system where they would have more power or for outright secession that they wanted to become their own independent countries. All of this came to a head in 1962 where General Ney Nguyen, who was the head of the army, launched a military coup and replaced the democratic government in Burma with a system of military rule. And for the next three decades he led the country through quite a brutal dictatorship that dismantled the democratic system, refused to tolerate any forms of opposition and continued to fight an internal war against a lot of the armed groups on the country's borders. A lot of these opposition groups incidentally had support from China, from India, from Thailand. They were based on the border. And I don't have time to go into it now, but the whole sort of Cold War geopolitical dynamics played into Burma and into the sort of internal civil wars that were going on in the country at that time. The other key issue that General Ney Nguyen tried to do was to isolate the country. He wanted a form of socialism that didn't embrace international trade, but instead tried to isolate the country. And that was an economic disaster. The country became hugely poor. As I said, just before the Second World War it had been a major exporter of rice. By the late 1980s it almost wasn't able to produce enough rice to actually feed its own population. So a huge economic problems. And this finally kind of came to a head in 1988, which is a very famous date in Burma's history. And it's sometimes known as 8888, because the major protest was launched on the 8th of August, so the 8th of the 8th of month, 1988. And there were huge protests, especially in the cities but throughout the whole country against military rule. And for a long, for a good few weeks it was unclear what was going to happen. And Olsan Tsuqi, who was actually just back in the country nursing her ailing mother, she was living in the UK before that in Oxford, she was married to a British academic. She launched an opposition movement against the military government, formed a political party called the National League for Democracy and claimed that she wanted to lead Burma's second independence. So not only had they gained independence from the British in 1948, the country now needed a second independence from military rule. Very sadly, the military responded brutally. It put down the opposition through the use of force. Nobody knows how many were actually killed, but huge numbers were also arrested. And Olsan Tsuqi herself was placed under house arrest for most of the next 20 years. So she didn't go to prison but she wasn't able to leave. And during that time her husband contracted cancer and sadly died in the UK. And the government said to her, you can leave the country to see him, but you will never be allowed back in. And she ultimately made the decision that she wanted to stay in the country and be the figurehead for the democratic opposition. But that obviously came at huge personal costs to herself. For the next 20 years in Burma's history, you saw a continuity of military rule. There was a very repressive military system of rule. Most of many of the democracy leaders were given huge prison sentences of 90 years or more. There was a very extensive rooting out of opposition forces throughout the country. And the military went on a very large spending spree. It spent much more money on empowering itself. The army grew to about 400,000 men, some women as well, but mostly men. For a country who didn't officially have any external enemies at this time, there's a huge army to have. And a lot of that was focused on trying to consolidate control over the country's border areas. The military that was in charge at that time also changed its economic strategy and began to generate much more income from trading with its neighbours, from India, with India, with China, with Thailand. It began to capitalise on the huge natural resources that it had, but in a way that didn't really go into the national budget. You had huge amounts of money being generated from logging, from the construction of oil and gas pipelines, which go right across the country now and deliver offshore oil and gas to China. Whereas in other countries, a lot of this money would go into the national budget and would then be used to spend on education and health, on development, but vast amounts of this money either went into the military or went into enriching military generals. So you have the country producing huge amounts of wealth, but at the same time very little of this actually being invested in the people at this time. The levels of poverty stagnate and some cases get worse. The education budget is absolutely tiny, the health budget is tiny, and yet large amounts of money is spent on strengthening military control over the country. To many people's surprise, in the mid-2000s, having been in power for decades, the military, which is led at this time by this guy, Senior General Tan Shway, announces in a fairly Orwellian term that the country is going to embark on a transition to a discipline flourishing democracy, which at the time many international commentators think, this is just, it's never going to actually happen. But over the next few years it does actually happen. The military brings in a new constitution in 2008. It has the first general election for many years in 2010. There had actually been a general election in 1990, that Ong San Suu had won by an absolute landslide, but the military then refused to acknowledge the result of that, placed under house arrest and continued to rule. 2010 marked the first election since 1990. Ong San Suu she, at that time, refused to take part in that election. But in 2015 there was a second election, which she did take part in and won, and the National League for Democracy became the civilian government of the country. So this is bringing it up to the last couple of years. It's sort of been a very quick whistle-stop tour of the history. And this leads us back to those initial slides that I put up about the success stories and the problems facing contemporary moment. That the 2015 election was an absolutely profound moment for many people in Burma to actually have Ong San Suu she as the democratically elected leader of a country that had experienced decades of military rule, was something that was extremely profound. Many families had had people who had been arrested for political crimes. They'd had people who had suffered from bad education, bad health. And there was a real feeling that this was the dawn of a new moment in Burma's history, that this marked an opportunity for huge transformation and change. And that was something that was also taken on by many governments around the world. You have the good and the great going to Burma, Burma, Hillary Clinton, Cameron, Boris Johnson, turning up pledging kind of support to this new democracy. But there was a slight issue in the way that that was presented that a lot of the analysis around this was in quite a triumphalist rhetoric that finally the country has seen the light. Finally it's realised that democracy is better than military dictatorship. Finally they've realised the problems and they've accepted a Western way of doing things in many ways. Sort of democracy, economic reforms. And I think this misjudged the transition in Myanmar in some ways. That what you've actually seen is that although there is now a civilian government in charge, the military remains very powerful. I'll come back to this slide in a second. That although the country did bring in a constitution, 25% of the seats in parliament are reserved for the military. So you can see here the white people wearing white at the civilian parliament. Those in the green are the military. And any attempt to change the constitution requires more than 75% approval. So the military haven't inbuilt veto to any constitution change. And this constitution itself gives the military a lot of power. It retains control over a large number of government ministries and it effectively retains control over the civil service. So if you think in your everyday life, you're actually often more dealing with the civil service or with local councils, you're not necessarily always dealing with your elected politicians. And throughout Myanmar it's the military that retains that control over the everyday workings of government. So actually bringing change to a country like this is very difficult because you now have a democratically elected government at the top, you have Aung San Suu Kyi. But real power in many ways still really lies with the military. And the military continues to be shaped by a particular ideology that has a number of characteristics. One of them is the memories of British colonialism. The sort of the humiliation in some ways the shame of being invaded and controlled has led to a powerful legacy that the military feels of the need to be powerful, the need to control the country and the need to make sure that the country isn't internally divided. I didn't have time to go into this, but on the eve that Britain finally took over all of Burma, the internal politics within the country was utterly fragmented. There was huge divisions. And I think that has left a legacy of feeling that the country cannot be internally divided. Otherwise it runs the risk of being invaded or exploited. And as a result of that, it's taken a very quite aggressive approach to a lot of the opposition that it faces within the country. That the pressures from many ethnic minorities within the country to demand greater rights, greater political power has been viewed by the military as a threat to its own control. And as a result of that has been dealt with quite aggressively. The other issue is that as a result of this nationalism within Burma is based on quite a narrow vision of what the Burmese state should be that doesn't create a lot of space for minorities within the country. This is something that's come out very problematically recently with the huge violence that has been deployed by the military against one of Burma's minorities, which is the Rohingya Muslim population, which lives in western Burma close to the border with Bangladesh. And this is linked with very much a strong sense that these people are still outsiders, that regardless of the truth and the inaccuracy of this claim, they're very much seen as not being true part of Burma's history, that they are linked with the swathes of people that came in during British colonialism or afterwards. And that they are seen as sort of an internal weakness to creating a powerful Burmese state that should be based on internal strength and also on Buddhism. So, just to conclude now, this is kind of the final couple of slides. I think if you're reading news stories about Burma in the coming months, I think it's worth thinking critically around to what extent is the transition in Myanmar actually a triumph of democratisation, of human rights, of liberalism, or how far is it quite a carefully calculated strategy by the military as a way of encouraging investment, encouraging good news stories, removing the sanctions that were placed on the country without necessarily relinquishing the power that it has. And it's thinking a little bit more around who has control in the country, the role that the military plays in this, the challenges of managing a country where you have huge variations in the people within a single country, how do you build a nationalist identity where you have a country of people who speak many different languages, have many different religions, have many different histories and don't necessarily see their government as the legitimate rulers over them and whose experience of the central government has often been violent and coercive, that this creates huge challenges for countries like Myanmar. And aware of the fact that some of you may have no interest in Burma at all, I wanted to broaden this out in the final slide to think if you have a particular interest about a different country or something else that's going on in the news. I think there's a few issues that my own understanding and my own interest of Burma that came from initially reading news stories at your age, beginning to read a little bit more and gradually studying it in more and more depth than eventually doing my own PhD and now lecturing on it. I think there's a few things that I learned from this over the years. The first point I already mentioned, that history matters, dig deeper than the stories that you're looking at and look at the long history of some of these events, that we often have quite short memories, but a lot of what is happening in Burma has relevance to what happened over a century ago, if not longer. The second issue is that maps are important, they can tell you a lot, but they also don't tell you the whole story. If you look at Burma, you would see this very neat, sort of carved out area of Burma that wouldn't tell you the very different histories of these different parts of the country, the fact that there are many parts where people actually speak Chinese. There are parts of Burma that are actually on Chinese time that use Chinese currency. That sort of very clear delineation of this is China, this is Burma, this is India. Doesn't tell you a lot about the actual internal realities of how people live in a country. The other issue is linking the local, the national and the global dynamics. What is happening in Burma, say around the Rohingya issue or around democratisation, is the result of both very local factors, national factors, but also global dynamics that are going on, that it's worth thinking through. And also where does power lie? I think always interrogate the power relations, the power dynamics that are going on in particular countries. And also thinking a bit more critically, whose viewpoint are you reading? This is something that's come out very recently in Burma, that it's very, very hard to get a clear analysis of what's going on in some of the conflict affected areas of the country because you can't get access there as a foreigner. So that means you're often reliant on reading people's accounts who visited there, but they will often also have their own interests, their own story to tell. So it's thinking critically around whose viewpoint are you reading. And I guess the very final point is the need to understand the tensions and the trade-offs surrounding anything that you're looking at, whether it's the peace process in Syria, whether it's trying to get greater stability in Afghanistan, or Libya, or whether it's looking at Burma. There are always conflicts, trade-offs, winners and losers of these processes, and it's worth sort of thinking through those as you reflect on whatever you're reading in the news or in your A-level studies. But I'll finish there. Sorry, I've gone over a time a little bit. And I'll just end with that quote, because I think in some way she's becoming a victim of her own words in doing this. Patrick. Thank you very much indeed.