 associate here at the Carnegie Dumpf International Peace and the Chair in Southeast Asian Studies and I'll be moderating today's event. The event, this event is part of a series that we're holding right through the year called Myanmar Votes 2015 which is supported by the Asia Society Policy Institute as well as the Department of Southeast Asian Studies at SICE in Johns Hopkins University down the road. We're also very deeply grateful to the Japan External Trade Organization or JETRO for supporting this this series. Carnegie has a special website on Myanmar Votes 2015 and I would urge all of you to take a look at it when you have time. It has background papers on the on the elections, the electoral process, the personalities, the issues, the role of military and so on so forth and we hope to keep adding to the information on that website as time goes by so you might want to go back and periodically revisit it. The event today will be live streamed and as on the website there are video recordings of previous events. This event will also eventually be posted on that website so in case you want others to to take a look at what goes on today you might want to mention that to them and I will and I sort of normally post daily updates on what's happening in Southeast Asia but also in Myanmar on Twitter so you might want to take a look that too. The elections are now in Myanmar going to be held on November the 8th. By my count the 1,122 seats will be up for grabs at the center as well as the states and the regions. Around 83 political parties have registered so far and they are currently in the process of finalizing their candidate lists which they have to eventually put forth by August the 8th according to the according to the schedule. The campaigns will begin 60 days before the elections why did a quick count and that means the campaigns will begin on September the 9th and it'll be a very interesting and important date. Now there are many moving parts in this election that bear close scrutiny not least of which of course is going to be the electoral process itself. Lots of people will be keeping a close eye on how the elections are conducted but there are many other moving parts and today we hope to examine some aspects related to the ethnic communal and human rights issues which are going to be critical in the run-up to the elections because any of these issues could actually pose a challenge to the elections themselves and to examine these issues we have an outstanding panel. Today we have Christina Fink who's a professor of practice in international affairs at George Washington University. Susan Hayward from the US Institute of Peace and Kelly Curry from the Project 2049 Institute. You have your bios in the paper that was distributed to you or if you haven't got one there's one outside waiting for you outside. So without further ado we'll begin with the panel I've asked all of them to speak initially for a few minutes give us their initial thoughts then we'll have a conversation amongst ourselves and finally I'll open it up to the audience for a Q&A and we hope to close certainly latest by 1230 but we might close earlier than that. So let me head it over first to Christina. Thank you Vikram and thank you to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace for hosting this event. It's an honor to be here. I wanted to focus on the ethnic political parties and then we'll go on from there and I wanted to start by giving you a little bit of background about the parties and then talk about their role and relationship with other political parties and then a little bit about their potential role in selecting the next president and then end with their relationship with the ethnic armed groups and their role in the peace process to date. So to set this up there are a number of ethnic political parties who ran in the 1990 election but did not run in the 2010 election. So they form one grouping together with the NLD they boycotted the 2010 election but most of them are planning on running in the 2015 election. At the same time you have a group of new ethnic parties that formed in 2010 and did contest the 2010 elections and those groups are also planning on contesting the 2015 elections. So in many of the ethnic states you have a situation where you have two or more ethnic parties representing the same ethnic group who will be competing against each other. Many of the political activists in those ethnic states have urged their parties to form an alliance or to unify into one party so that those parties would not be competing against each other for votes and in Rakhine state that actually happened. So the 1990 party and the 2010 party merged and now there's a Rakhine national party that will be the only large Rakhine ethnic party that will be running in that state. But in the other states the ethnic parties were not able to make that kind of agreement. In some cases they have made an agreement that some of the parties will not run in the same constituency. So if one party is running in ABC constituency the second party won't run in those constituencies they'll run in DEF constituencies. But in other cases they will be competing in the same constituencies and there will be other parties the NLD and the USDP who will also be competing in those constituencies. So they run the risk of having their votes split and possibly the larger parties winning the vote. The 1990 parties are more closely affiliated with the NLD. They boycotted the 2010 elections together with the NLD and they had an alliance that started from before the 1990 election and has continued until today. And many people seem to see those parties as maybe more sincere, more truthful, more deserving of votes than the parties that ran in the 2010 election which in some cases are seen by people as being too closely allied with the USDP and the old regime. So there's been some movement of support from the 2010 parties to the 1990 parties that will be also running in this election. But regardless of that all of these parties are fighting for the same things that the ethnic armed groups are fighting for which is to see a genuine federal system of government instituted in Myanmar. And so that means both greater political autonomy for the ethnic states as well as more power over the resources in those ethnic states and language and cultural rights. I want to go on to the relationship between the parties, the ethnic parties, the NLD and the USDP. So as I said the 1990 ethnic parties have been close to the NLD but not in the Parliament currently. So now you have a situation where the NLD is in the Parliament with the ethnic parties that were elected in the 2010 election and although they have you know interacted in the Parliament the relationship has not been very close. From the NLD perspective these parties are more associated with the USDP and took advantage of the situation to run in the 2010 election when other parties were boycotting in order to signal their unhappiness with the 2008 Constitution and the way that the election was being run. But those parties often don't see themselves as particularly close to the USDP. For them they felt that this was an opportunity to get into Parliament and perhaps be able to have a say over ethnic affairs at the national level. So for them they often see themselves as kind of caught between these two big parties the NLD and the USDP and not really sure whether either of those parties is going to really fight for their interest in the coming years. I want to go on to the role of the ethnic parties in potentially selecting the next president. So the selection for the president is a complicated process. The president is not directly elected by the citizens of Myanmar but by the members of Parliament and so what happens is that after the Parliament is elected the elected representatives in the lower house choose one candidate. The elected representatives in the upper house choose one candidate and the military representatives from both houses combined choose one candidate. And then those three candidates will become president and vice president one and vice president two. The Parliament as a whole will meet together and vote and whoever receives the most votes will become the president and then the next two will be the vice president. There are two conditions for the president. One is that the president must have familiarity with military affairs and the second is that the president does not have to be an elected legislator. The president could be somebody who comes from outside the legislature. So what's interesting is to think about who is going to be selected by the upper house and the lower house and then who will the military put forward as their candidate and then how might the votes align because it's likely that no one party is going to be able to determine who will become the next president. There may have to be a coalition in which case the ethnic political parties may play a very important role. So we don't know how the election is going to turn out but it seems likely that the NLD will win more than 51% of the votes of the lower and upper house combined. But perhaps not enough to be able to ensure that they can vote their own candidate into president without the military votes or the other party's votes. It's likely that the ethnic minority party candidates will do quite well in the upper house. The upper house has 14 representatives per state and per division. So it's likely that in the states and the ethnic states the ethnic parties will take many of the seats. Perhaps not all but many of those seats. So they may have a sizable block of votes in the upper house. In the lower house they're also likely to do much better than they did in the last election where the USDP took a number of votes in the ethnic states. In fact what's likely to happen is that the USDP is going to lose votes to both the NLD and the ethnic political parties. So in the 2010 election the ethnic nationalist parties won 29 seats out of 168 in the upper house and 43 out of 325 seats in the lower house. So that's about 70 something votes, 70 something seats. But it's likely they'll get maybe closer to 100 seats in the upcoming election and may be able to play a kingmaker role. And it's not clear who they would go with. It's possible that the military may be trying to woo ethnic parties to vote for their candidate. It's possible that the NLD may be trying to woo ethnic parties to vote for their candidate. Or that there may be an agreement that the upper house would put forward an ethnic minority candidate in the condition that the lower house they would support the lower house NLD candidate. So that one of the vice presidents would be an ethnic minority representative and perhaps there would be an agreement that some of the members of cabinet would also come from the ethnic minorities. And now I want to turn to the relationship between the ethnic parties and the ethnic armed groups. So at a personal level many families have members at least in their broader family network who are in the armed groups and who are in the political parties. So in some ways there's a very close connection between the parties and the armed groups and certainly in terms of their overall aims which are to achieve federalism. But there are a couple of laws that have really prevented closer contact between the ethnic political parties and the armed groups. One is the unlawful associations law which makes it a crime to have any kind of communication or dealings or provide any kind of support to the armed groups. And also the political parties registration law says that political parties who have contacts with unlawful associations will be deregistered. So in fact during the Thames St administration there's been a relaxation of this policy and there has been quite a bit of contact but those laws are still hanging over the ethnic political parties and have been used in some cases to arrest members of parties and individuals who have had that contact. So there has been less coordination at an official level than they would perhaps like. And finally in terms of the peace process the ethnic political parties have not been involved in a formal way so far because the ceasefire agreement, ceasefire agreements which have been negotiated, have involved the government, the military and the ethnic armed groups and there has been no formal role for the ethnic political parties in this part of the process. Once a national ceasefire court is reached the next stage is to drop a framework for the peace talks and the ethnic political parties will play a role in that process and then in the peace talks going forward. But that is something that is going to take a number of years. If we're lucky there will be a national ceasefire court before the election but that is not guaranteed and I'm going to stop there. Thank you. Susan. So we split this up imperfectly ahead of time with Christina speaking about the ethnic issues, me speaking about some of the communal issues and the role of Buddhist nationalism and Buddhist monks and then Kelly's going to be speaking to some of the overall human rights concerns but I'm sure there will be a little bit of overlap between all of us. So thank you Vikram and thank you to all of you for joining us today and that was a really wonderful presentation. I'm going to step back a little bit and speak a little bit to some of the historical more meta-level relationships between various groups in the country and especially between Buddhist and Muslim groups in the country and think about how that's going to impact the elections and how the electoral process is also going to impact some of those relationships and cleavages because we all know democracy can sometimes especially electoral politics can sometimes exacerbate polarization and competition between groups and there's certainly a threat of that happening over the next several months in the run-up to the election. So stepping back recall this is an incredibly diverse country with over 130 ethnic groups and there is a long history in the country of competition and contestation between the various groups and this has been festered and exacerbated at times or even made more complex by the influence of foreign elements that have come in whether it's been colonizing forces whether it's been migrants and traders who've come in in more recent decades it's been some of the Chinese immigrants who have come in during the British colonial period it was some of the Indian administrators who came in from the British colonial process and that has fed and complicated some of the relationships between various ethnic groups within the country but it's also there is a long history being a country that was subject to a lot of colonial rule of suspicion and concern about the role of some of these foreign influences that have come in particularly of course political influences with with the colonial forces but also concerns about the impact on some of the cultural religious and social elements that that are that happen when some of these foreign influences come in so in some of these concerns have arisen in the past four years because what has happened in the fast in the past four years is that there has been tremendous social political economic change over a relatively short period of time and the new spaces within the media the new spaces for political mobilization have given space to the expression of some of these long-standing prejudices and concerns both within the country between various groups but also about external influences and concerns and then there's also been like you see in a lot of countries undergoing political transitions of some sort and especially when you see a transition from an authoritarian role to a democratic process there's been a lot of competition between groups as they determine who's going to win and who's going to be left behind in the reform and the peace processes that are taking place and so that's fed some of this competition between the the various groups and as much as possible the new democratic system has has sought to sort of manage some of these competitions and contestations between groups but of course it's a very imperfect nation system that is only four years old at this point and so there have been ways in which even the democratic process itself hasn't been able to manage some of these some of these conflicts in in a constructive way but of course most striking and especially what's been followed the the most closely in the western media has been the what's called the communal conflict which is the imperfect term that's used to refer to some of the competition that's been taking place between Buddhist and Muslim communities particularly affecting in egregious ways the Muslim minority community within the country began with with localized violence in Rakhine state in the west between Rakhine Buddhists and the Rohingya Muslim community there but it then spread throughout the country and unaffected Muslim communities of many different ethnic backgrounds and heritage and and spread to include some some Buddhists and other communities who are not Rakhine and this then was spearheaded and led to the development of a real Buddhist nationalist movement or Buddhist activist movement that is constituted and led by monks within the Buddhist monastic community began with 969 which is led by Ashin Werthu who's a self-proclaimed leader of it which is very much a kind of narrowly focused on an anti Rohingya anti Muslim concern about the influence of the Muslim community internally and externally on the Buddhist religion and culture but it then transformed into what's known as the Mabata movement the the organization for the protection and promotion of Buddhism and the race so I want to take a quick moment and talk about the development of these groups before I move to talking about their influence on the electoral process the development of these groups within the historical because oftentimes I hear the you know the question why are Buddhist monks mobilizing against various groups and why are they mobilizing in ways that seem very anti the democratic principles when our image of them at least before the last few years was of the saffron revolution 2007 mobilizing in response to community needs and in support of democracy in Aung San Suu Kyi so again this needs to be situated within and understood within the larger historical trends and experiences and concerns and debates within the country so during the colonial process when the colonial times especially during the British period when there was the separation of the state with the with the monastic community historically the state had propagated had been responsible for propagating for ensuring the economic viability of the monastic community and ensuring order within the monastic community but when the Brits came in they separated church and state or go down state and as a result there was a perception that the monastic community had weakened and that Buddhism as a result had weakened within the country and this was exacerbated by Christian missionaries who were coming in so there there was a sort of strong Buddhist revivalism movement like you sound Sri Lanka and other places in order to protect and promote Buddhism in the midst of the colonial period from external influences that that seem to threaten it and at the same time you have the rise of the the lame the lame meditation movement in the country which if any of you have been there you know that it's it's incredibly influential and incredibly important to so many of the lay community within the country to practice meditation and to study the Buddhist texts on your own which is within wider Buddhist world that's pretty unique to Burma that's generally has been seen as the responsibility of the monastic community that's why they're monks or nuns because they're they set their household lives aside in order to focus on practice of meditation and the scriptures for the benefit of the wider community but in in Burma what you had was this democratization of Buddhism in a sense where it became everybody's responsibility to study Buddhism to practice Buddhism and to ensure its health and this happened during the colonial process but you can kind of see where this is going right so this was all done as a as a response to foreign outside influences and concerns about its influence now fast forward to the current moment where we've had these incredible changes over the past four years that again have given a rise to some of these old concerns but at the same time you have a lot of foreign influences coming into the country that weren't previously there including you know folks like me who've been going into the country and other international organizations coming in foreign governments coming in but aside from the political you also have a lot of new social and cultural influences coming in the the opening up of media global media in in the country and so on and so there's been a concern you hear from a lot of people a concern about what this means for for Buddhism and for traditional cultural practices in the country how can we ensure that we protect the integrity of of of bourbon culture of of Burmese Buddhism in the midst of all these changes and then on top of that you have some of the global geopolitical narratives that are playing into that and influences playing into that which particularly comes into play with some of this some of these the relationships are the the attitudes about the Muslim community and you know the rise of Islamic extremist movements don't help in terms of seeing the Muslim community in particular as a threat to Buddhism within the country and seeing the incredible political economic and other influences or other forms of power that the Muslim community is seen to have within the world within Asia in particular that makes that that feels a sense of anxiety amongst the the Buddhists within Myanmar and I think within other Theravada Buddhist communities in in Asia as well about how they can how they can protect Buddhism in the midst of those those huge influences. So the the question is then turning to how this is all going to influence the electoral process. Now when it when it arose it moved from 969 which is more just focused on sort of social through sermons kind of feeding this need to protect Buddhism and the anti-Muslim narratives are a part of it. Mabata is it evolved it was much more of a political activist organization that has really in some ways I've said to others they're doing democracy better than anybody else in the country in some ways because they really figured out how to mobilize the community, how to craft legislation and lobby for it in the parliament, how to put pressure on parliamentarians to be able to vote for the particular laws that were there putting forward. The most well-known are the four race and religion laws in particular which taken as a package are seen to target the Muslim minority community. They restrict interfaith marriage between Buddhist women and Muslim or or non-Buddhist men. They put more regulations around conversion around how many children people can have and on monogamy and they've they put forward these bills and then they they lobbied and got a lot of signatures over over two million signatures from around the country for people supporting it and then they've been able to put a lot of pressure on various parliamentarians to pass these laws. So one of them has been passed already the what's called the population health care bill which is the restriction on the number of children that women can have and then the one being debated right now in the lower in the upper house has been the interfaith marriage law. There's been a lot of concerns in the international community about the human rights human rights concerns about these bills especially as it relates to women's rights and religious freedom but there's for the most part within the country there's some widespread sympathy for the bills that builds on this whole idea that we need to take special measures in order to protect the religion and protect the culture in the midst of this time. So in terms of how this plays into the electoral process or the electoral campaign process there's a lot of pressure on all of the candidates particularly for the Berman majority in order to show that they're good buddhists. This is not particular to the current moment we saw this in the past in the in the early independence period as well but to to voice opposition to these laws in particular to voice support for the Rohingya or for the Muslim community at large in the country is to be seen as somehow not taking seriously the threats against buddhism and the foreign influences and to be seen as suspect in terms of moving forward the degree to which he'll take seriously the concerns of protecting buddhism in the midst of the changes that are taking place and this this this helps to explain I hope some of the concerns that have been raised about particularly Aung San Suu Kyi and her unwillingness to speak prophetically or directly about about these concerns which have been concerning to a lot of people and I think disappointing to a lot of people but I hope makes a little bit more sense when you think about the electoral pressures that some of the politicians are feeling as they try to create these coalitions and recognizing the influence that that Mabata and some of these buddhist nationalist groups have on public attitudes but on the legislative process right now in parliaments as it is so I can speak more about some of that but I'll stop for you. Thank you Susan. Okay it's nice to be batting cleanup on this panel I get to kind of fill in when and pick and choose the things that I talk about so that's that's great and it's a real honor to be with my fellow panelists and to congratulate Vikram on his all female panel okay um I'll show you that wasn't the criteria oh it's nice to see anyway um I'll kind of start out um off of human rights and then just kind of pivot to a few other issues um the I'm going to focus on the human rights issues around the election since that's kind of the focus of our our discussion today and those would primarily be the political and civil rights that you would expect to have as a voter or as a citizen participating in a democratic process and some of the biggest problems are going to be around who gets to run and who gets to vote and these are the being the fundamental issues in a democratic election these are pretty serious problems so um if you're looking at who gets to run just for parliament you have problems there with some of the candidates some of the potential candidates who are people who are former political prisoners who may have problems meeting certain criteria for candidacy also returnees who have spent time out of the country and are coming back this includes not just Berman political activists but also a fair number of ethnic political activists who because of conflict or other reasons were forced to leave their their homeland and are now trying to go back and participate in politics but there are certain restrictions on how long you have to be in residence prior to running for office that are causing problems for candidates and then there are also people who just had their citizenship unilaterally abolished by the government this includes like I said returnees it also includes the Rohingya and people who are who in ethnic nationalities areas again especially if they were involved in any kind of armed conflict or any kind of activity opposing the state so you have this whole category of people who've been kind of blacklisted by the government in the past who have questionable political backgrounds or who have not been present in Burma for the past 20 years consistently who are going to have some difficulty should they desire to run for office the NLD is right now in the process of choosing their their candidates they have a rather elaborate bottom-up and top-down kind of process that's selecting candidates based on each constituency recommending the the executive committee from each constituency will recommend two candidates and then the central executive committee of the the NLD the the senior leadership of the NLD which is about a hundred people will also be able to recommend candidates and recommend themselves for a candidacy and they have a right to kind of jump in pole vault over the the local recommendations but many of those people who I talked to especially the older generation and the EC have said that they have made the decision not to run in order to bring grassroots people up but again some of these people are going to have problems you also have people who are coming in from outside of the NLD wanting to run 88 generation leaders such as Coco G and some of these other individuals again many of them are former political prisoners many of them have you know a long history of conflict with the authorities and so it's going to be interesting to see when the NLD posts its candidate list where they put these people on it in terms of the the constituencies that they put them in as well as whether they have any problems with with who they choose as their candidates and then of course the same issues are applying to people who have who are trying to vote who have unilaterally been stripped of their citizenship or have had problems regaining it because they were outside of the country. In some cases you're seeing you also have issues with with current detainees people who have been put in prison in the past year and a half including the student activists who were recently arrested there has been an escalation in the past year over of political detainees after a period where they were mostly there was a big focus on them being released you now in the past year have seen a major increase in the number of political prisoners new political prisoners and we are looking at around 200 people who are are currently charged tried and convicted and serving political sentences and around 400 who are awaiting waiting sentencing or who are in some stage of the trial process and these numbers are according to the assistance association for political prisoners. The conditions are terrible they they continue to have problems with torture during interrogation maltreatment under detention all of these things that that are characteristic of the old regime continue to be characteristic of how political detainees are treated today at Burma and the trials have been a joke in many cases it's ruled by law not rule of law there is the the access to justice remains extremely problematic for these individuals and when you link that up to their their right to vote their right to run for office these things become they take on a broader significance especially when you consider that the people who were talking about these former and current political detainees are many of the most politically active people in the country they're the people you would like to see running for office they are the the you know educated and interested and active concerned people in the country and they have they're going to have serious problem they potentially will have serious problems then you have the overall issues with the voting list which many people have commented on as the voting lists have been publicized the and people have started to look at them they found error rates of between 40 to 80 percent depending on where you're looking some of the groups that I spoke to when I was in Rangoon last week were saying that when they go out into the countryside to kind of analyze what's going on with these voting lists they find that there are green villages and red villages the green villages for the error list on the error rate in the voting list is smaller it's around 20 30 percent tend to be villages with strong usdp support and and have that have been kind of brought over to the usdp side whereas the red villages are those that have a history of strong and ld or ethnic support so you see that the voting they they've documented some of these groups are starting to document trends on how the voting lists are being corrected and how they're being managed so this is problematic and it's something that people need to keep an eye on and then with regard to campaigning as Vikram noted there's a 60 day campaign period but that only applies to people who are not already in the government the government can already is is already campaigning and this is something that I don't think that that people really understand the usdp is out campaigning because they control the ministries they control the the means of the government and so they are effectively using that for election airing right now and that is happening on the ground it's not really being talked about I'd also like to talk a little bit about the donors and the role that the international community is playing in this whole landscape because it's quite problematic at this time my last few visits to Burma over the past year the complaints about the way that the international community is engaging civil society have just gotten more and more severe over the past year as I've been talking to civil society organizations that work in political activity they are very bitter they've gone from being very excited to have these opportunities to partner with international organizations that they've been denied all these years to being quite bitter and really kind of disgusted almost with the way the donor community has treated them they feel that they've been talked down to that they've been instrumentalized when they are just when they are engaged it's in a very patronizing and instrumental way and many of the groups that I've been working with for years now have decided that they are not interested in taking international funding for their activities because they are so frustrated with the way that donors engage them they're also very frustrated with the overall policies of the donors that they see as heavily weighted towards the authorities and heavily benefiting the authorities this cuts across ethnic lines it's is true with the Bermans that I talked to as it is with the ethnic nationalities it may even be more true with the ethnic nationalities because they see this as an aspect of the peace process where they are being further disadvantaged as donors poor resources through government ministries that then impact on the peace process as the government ministries try to push administration out into ethnic areas and this creates conflicts where these ethnic nationalities had built up institutions or were providing services however meager and not great but they were doing something there and then the government sends out administration that effectively railroads over what they were doing and they do it without seeking without any consultation or permission or coordination with the ethnic nationalities and this has undermined trust in the peace process and it's created enmity on the ground so this and donors seem to be completely either unaware or unconcerned about the effect that this is having and this is something that has been flagged for me both in my last visit and the one that I just concluded as being a real problem particularly as it relates to the peace process but not exclusively so I wanted to also talk a little bit about the role that the peace process is playing with the elections and this kind of interplay that Christina mentioned the ethnic armed groups are in Rangoon this week actually the national the national C-STAR coordinating team NCCT led by Zipporah Sain the current leader is in the capital or in the old capital for talks with the the government's negotiating team this week to relate their position on the draft ceasefire that was signed on March 31st and my I met with Zipporah during my last trip and had an opportunity to I don't know you know she didn't tell me what she was going to say but the overall demeanor did not give me a lot of confidence that this was going to be a positive interaction. There are serious differences very serious differences fundamental differences remaining between the ethnic nationalities side and the government side on the text of the draft ceasefire agreement it is there some of them they feel that could be managed with language but some of them are not and the main one being the who signs it and this is one of these things that they feel cannot be finessed and so this is where you have the immovable object and the irresistible force I don't know what's going to happen here but as I said it wasn't a very positive vibe that I received there's also an issue around who's monitoring the implementation of the ceasefire and again this one it's going to be hard to finesse the government has proposed that the United Nations ASEAN and China be the three observers to the ceasefire you can obviously see the problem with this for the ethnic nationalities they've proposed six countries the United States the UK Japan India Thailand and the UK what did I say EU no I can't remember Norway sorry sorry to remember all six of them Norway so they've proposed these six countries the government has flatly refused those and has told the ethnic nationalities in no uncertain terms that some of these the reason they are refusing them is flatly because the Chinese have objected to them so we have a real problem here about even issues of who's going to absurd the ceasefire we also have issues about you know where this is going one of the biggest issues and again this relates to the conflict on the ground is this issue of DDR versus SSR and one of the biggest you know this is a good example of how the language and the donors and kind of the the peace industry sorry gets in the way of these processes you had the the the government side come in proposing DDR demobilization disarmament and reintegration too early in the process and making the ethnic nationalities very uncomfortable the donors jumped in behind the government on this DDR issue and started pushing it made the ethnic even more resistant and more uncomfortable and you know this whole time this past three four years we should have really been talking about security sector reform in a meaningful way with the authorities and really kind of having this big structural discussion that I don't think really took place in all the euphoria of the past four years and now the ethnics are saying we need to be focused on security sector reform and so now security sector reform versus DDR has become this dynamic in the peace process and it's now become an area of kind of conflicting goals so this is one of these examples where everybody's good intentions tend to get in the way because they don't really understand the underlying dynamic of what's going on in these processes. There are I don't want to be so negative because I think that despite how the overarching structural problems make this a deeply problematic election and the human rights situation remains extremely problematic especially in the conflict areas especially in Rakhine state there are serious deep-rooted human rights issues abuses continuing sexual violence and serious problems in these places including what I mentioned before but I do want to point out some bright spots that are happening because I feel like it's it's important to see where where the good things are. One of the one of these things is the role that civil society has been taking. I mentioned before how irritated they are with the donors but at the same time if if you could see how amazingly diverse and just incredibly creative Burmese civil society has become in the past five years and since it's been given this space it would give you so much confidence in the future of this country because you know there's the civil society of Mabata which is you know racist and and not democratic because it doesn't have any democratic values it uses the tools of democracy but doesn't have the values of democracy. These civil society organizations most of them do have incredibly democratic values they operate with internal democracy they're very creative in the way they go about things they're very political they're many of them are very savvy and they are trying to do things in a very independent way as I said they don't want donors telling them what to do they know what they need to do and they are they just want to get on with it and they're doing really great things with looking at photo lists helping to educate people in civic education around the elections and doing a lot of other things that are really great including a lot of peace building activities from the ground up such as the panzagar flower speech movement and some of the other this my friend campaign this this viral campaign where people take friends with their or take selfies with their friends of different religions and then post them on facebook this kind of thing is really you know very bottom up it's very organic and it's really remarkable to see how it's developing the other the other thing that I've seen that's been really kind of nice has been how that you know there's a lot to criticize but the way the NLD has been running for the past couple years but this past effort to to develop candidates from the bottom up and get recommendations from the bottom up is a really interesting mechanism that they're creating and I also thought that the announcement the more formal announcement that they are reactivating the CRPP the Committee for the Restoration of the People's Parliament which is the old alliance with the ethnic nationalities that Christina mentioned for the election and that they are entering into formal talks with the ethnic nationalities parties is a very positive sign the Sean National League for Democracy the unified Rakhine party and the parties in Kaya and and Kate and Kachin and Maan I'm sorry and Karen and Maan State are going to do I think very well in their respective areas and that NLD would be very wise to you know to take advantage of their support rather than run against them and it remains to be seen how this is going to work out in practice but I think that this move is a good one and I think that beyond that I do I do have a lot of concerns about these recent statements that the military has made about you know that we won't back off of the basically mental line recently saying there won't be any reduction in the military's role until we've secured you know national peace and this kind of stuff which kind of bootstraps these processes and when the ethnic nationalities when you talk to them they they don't trust anybody but they do trust that they still continue to trust the the democratic movement more than they trust the military at this point at least that's my read on it Christina may have a different assessment based on her her discussions with them but the the sense that I got from them is that they still are hoping that that things will get better for them after the election but their their biggest fear is continues to be with the military and how the military will respond to any you know any threat or effort to to diminish its its authority and then how that reflects back on them because these things are always interconnected you cannot disaggregate the elections from the peace process in any meaningful way because they all in the back of the military so with that slightly depressing ending I'm going to stand it back to you thank you very much so we've had tremendous and quite an in-depth view from all these three all these three dimensions the ethnic issue the communal issue and the broader human rights questions but I sense a slight difference and I'm going to try and exploit it between your position Christina and I think what Kelly is just enunciated but actually the question is initially to Kelly to what extent in the discussions the ncct have you have you got any impression that the impending elections do impose some kind of a deadline some kind of pressure to reach a ceasefire agreement or is that not a factor in their concerns in their discussions they were very careful not to give that impression and I don't know if that's because it's the truth or if it's just because they don't want to give that impression I think that there are a lot of things putting pressure on the ethics right now and including their own internal dynamic which is not an easy one the um they recently re-shuffled their whole negotiating team to put Zephora saying back and in charge basically and they're I think that their pressures are more more internal than anything else but I think that because the election has taken over the political discourse in Burma for all intents and purposes right now it has an impact on what they're doing and they do know that you know and they are being told by the government negotiating team that you should take this deal because you may not get a better deal after the election that's the message that they're getting from the negotiating team and because the the contacts between the ncct and the nld are quite limited by you know it's just a functional situation the way it is they it's harder for them to to know for sure their sense seems to be that they would be you know that they'll get as good if not better deal from the from the from an nld-led government but nobody knows that that's something that can happen or that you know after the elections the military may just you know further retrench because the situation is so unstable the sense that I get is that they're trying to go back and figure out okay what are our core interests here what are we really trying to accomplish in this process and I there was a sense before the around the march 31st signing that they were pressured into that quite heavily and there was some buyers remorse around that I think and there were some cultural pressures I will say that that led certain people to feel that they should do make this make this agreement that don't really that other people within the ethnic negotiating team don't feel those same cultural pressures to accommodate the government's positions or to sign this agreement in order to you know make make an agreement that things saying can put out there that's not a unanimous feeling among the groups so it's yes no I it's hard to say Cristina what is what what is your sense of this issue and can I add another question to it as well what is the nld's position towards the peace process I mean how much validity do we give to this view that if there were to be an nld-led government perhaps after the selection they won't be as much emphasis on the peace process as been accorded by the USDP well first I think it's important to separate out the government into really two actors you have the government's peacemaking team and you have the military and they do not always have the same view about the peace process and so really in some ways the government's peacemaking team can be seen almost as a kind of mediator between the ethnic armed groups and the military with the military taking a much more hardline position and the government peace team understanding accepting some of the conditions that the ethnic armed groups have put forward but then telling them well you know we see what you're saying but the military is never going to accept this and you know we can't really persuade them and so the question is in the next government you know right now you've got a government where everybody who's leading the the current government basically comes from the military they come from the former government so there is some kind of unity between the military and the current government although positions have diverged a bit over the past five years but let's say you have an nld-led government next is the military going to be responsive to the nld peacemaking teams agreement that it makes with the ethnic armed groups let's say the nld and the ethnic armed groups can come to some kind of agreement the military may well be interested in not going along with that because they don't like the nld government so i think there's a question not only about what will the nld position be if they are the government going forward but also what's the relationship going to be between the nld and the military and you know is there a possibility that they would work together or are they going to be trying to undermine each other and really without the military's agreement there's no agreement so this is really a fundamental factor that the ethnic armed groups have to take into consideration along with well what really is the nld position and to say something about the nld i would say that you know there has been no formal role for them in the peace process so far that hasn't been permitted or created but it's also true that the nld has really not focused on this issue their main focus has been on changing the constitution and everything else has been something we'll deal with later we've got to change the constitution first and so some of the ethnic groups do feel that their issue has been marginalized in the eyes of the nld and particularly the ethnic political parties that ran in the 2010 election and are in parliament with the nld they feel that the nld really hasn't taken much of an interest in their issues they're just focus on this constitutional issue and everything else can be dealt with later so that's been a frustration um i want to come back to the communal issue if i may susan for a second you know i i have some sympathy with kelly's point about the mabata being using the democratic system rather than being democratic itself i said they're doing democracy in the sense of mobilization but not that they reflect democratism there's a news item today from the bbc or maybe it was yesterday i'm not quite sure which makes the point that the mabata for example has been spreading the word that the nld is a party of the muslims in order to push its nationalist nationalist agenda and that brings me to a sort of a broader point as to the the way the buddhist sort of movement has unleashed this tremendous hatred against the rohingyas but against muslims more broadly in general and what you haven't talked what you didn't talk about in your remarks was what has the government done about this what has been the response of government you know clearly it's fallen short but how do you see the government perhaps in a post election administration deal with this issue these are sort of undissolved and big questions yeah the government response has not been consistent and it has not been as forceful as we would have liked in order to oppose this movement and to restrict this movement when you when you talk to people in Myanmar when the when the movements first arose there there was a good deal of sympathy for it for the reasons that i said and there was also a strong cultural and religious pressure on people not to criticize not to criticize the monks because you don't criticize monks and because during the the military period the monastic community was the one that really responded to the needs of the community so in the absence of public health and the absence of education and so on they were the ones who who who address that gap for the community so there's a great deal of both cultural deference religious deference for the monastic community but also sympathy for the community that they really are concerned about the needs of the community and represent them so there was there was very little criticism that was made of of these movements when they first arose even if people sort of appreciated the cause but didn't appreciate the manner in which it was being expressed and in the manner in which it was being advocated for and then there is all of this late intention but the the government itself so when you talk to people they often say we sense that there's dark forces behind the movement that's supporting it they have had a great deal of financial support they've been able to get in order to put out a lot of these tracks in order to mobilize people have their theories there's a lot of conspiracy theories and in rumors of Myanmar but people have their theories about different economic elites and military elites some of the spoilers to the reform process and the peace process at large who are losing out because of these changes that are happening that they're somehow behind and and and egging on and funneling some of these movements because they see them playing into this this sort of polarization within the country the destabilization within the country in ways that will benefit them economically militarily and so on but there's been no direct links that have been found or evidence that has been found to link it so it's all it's all a bit opaque right now but the the government has the president has it has at times said statements that have tried to promote tolerance and have been sort of soft criticisms of the movements without anything forceful and without anything being done to hold accountable some of the the speeches that are being made and some of the actions that have been taken by the by the movement so it's it's problematic well you also find interesting though of course nothing is monolithic so the government's not monolithic you have these different elements that are sometimes in competition with each other within within the government but the same thing goes with the monastic community and so even within within the wider monastic community of course there's monks that have been doing incredible things in terms of protecting muslim communities bringing muslim communities into their monasteries when the violence has taken place that have spoken out in opposition to mabata they're limited and what they can do too because they'll say mabata is incredibly powerful it has these forces behind us if we push too much then we risk backlash that can discredit us our legitimacy and that can even put us at at larger risk so they so they feel very restricted but then you you also have sorry i lost my train of thought at the second point i was going to make well while you're thinking about that let me ask you another question because there's something that has been puzzling me in the i want to focus particularly on the ruhinja and the fact and the sole issue about ruhinja and citizenship and so forth right so there are two questions here first is i mean this is not a it is a discrimination issue not a citizenship issue for example there have been some ruhinja or called themselves begolis who have actually acquired citizenship but still complain of discrimination so notwithstanding the fact that they supposedly have rights they still are not given those rights by other communities and i want to specifically ask you about this column by mariana rosenblatt i pointed this out to you before this discussion it appeared in the diplomat and i want to quote what she says she says the mianmar government is not denying ruhinja citizenship it is denying them citizenship as ruhinja yeah do you subscribe to that view do you think that's a correct description of government policy yes but i want to complicate it a little bit and i want to finish the thought that i had last before sorry which is that the complexity of the situation sometimes i get lost in it too one that it's it's difficult for because of the electoral politics in the public sentiment it's difficult for the government too to speak in too much opposition to it just like it is frangsan suchi because that can have a backlash politically but you also see within mabata now there's been a lot of disagreements that have been surfacing and there is actually a sense from some of the leadership that mabata has also been infiltrated and exploited some of them are saying by some of these troublemakers who are trying to exploit the political situation and so there was actually a meeting between some of the mabata leadership and the islamic council recently in yangon that happened it's an attempt by some of the mabata leadership to express that they're not they're not as anti-muslim as some are painting them to be and that they're concerned about some of this really overt hate speech that's coming out so even it's it's complicated even within and it's not monolithic even within okay now on the issue of rohingya and their citizenship so there too it's it's complicated and of course it's deeply problematic from a human rights perspective it's deeply problematic in terms of social and cultural prejudice against the rohingya which is just it's so deep all pervasive it's all pervasive i mean even from folks like from the adh generation and so on you you hear some of these anti rohingya in particular um sentiments being expressed and it's really disheartening when when you're there to understand or just to see just how how how deep some of these um some of these prejudices lay and the time it will take in order to to promote pluralism and tolerance and the concern about how democratic processes and electoral processes can can actually entrench some of these things when you're trying to promote coexistence and tolerance especially when political parties are so ethnicized but then what you have going on too in rakhine state is that you have multiple forms of oppression first that are taking place there and there's a great deal within the rakhine community which is the majority community in rakhine state but is a minority overall they have long-standing grievances against the bermans and against the center and it's one of the most undeveloped states it's incredible poverty they have you know if you go to mandalay and you go to mahabharat statue there i mean they have these these their own historical narratives of the bermans coming in and stealing their culture and then claiming it as their own and and so there's a very strong political um political mobilization and political set of grievances amongst the rakhine and the rohingya issue fuels and exacerbates and plays into that to to a large degree and so it's prevented the government from taking the kind of human rights oriented strong stances that that i and i think others would like to see them take on these issues so with for example with the issues of the white cards and the green cards and the various forms the various terms that are being used to refer to them or not they can't register as rohingya if they register as bangali which is what the the government is is permitting them to register as now in order to be able to vote which is their way of saying we don't recognize rohingya and kind of failing to claim them as an indigenous ethnic group within Myanmar then they have rights so they they can get the right to vote if they register as bangali but not if they register as rohingya but it's not full citizenship it's a second-class citizenship they are they become naturalized citizens which means is a and there is a huge gap between what it means to be a naturalized citizen and what it means to be a native born citizen in Burma and to have full Burmese citizenship you cannot run for office for instance i mean there's a whole range of things and it doesn't also stop the local ordinances that have been put in place against them which which can would continue regardless of what you know if they were registered as bangali or registered as rohingya they would continue to face this very specific persecution and i have to argue with you a little bit Susan because the government hasn't just been kind of passively sitting there oh we can't do this they've they drafted those four laws on race and religion and they put them forward in the parliament and their party has backed them this is not a passive government it's just allowing racism and feeling like it can't do anything because it's paralyzed electorally it is actively courting this this this few times it says one thing to the international community and it says something very different at home so i i really have to push back on that because i find it a little bit specious to say that they're just you know paralyzed by the overwhelming racism in Burmese society they they are doing things that are actively promoting it i think that they are trying to benefit from buddhist nationalism as they seek to use that card in order to ensure that they get some of the votes that they would not otherwise get and that's what i said so i think we're in agreement about that i just felt like you were giving them a little too much credit there i'm sorry all right let's let's i want to i want to i want to stop this conversation because you've been very patient i want to open up the floor for questions from you remember that this is being uh uh streamed so you wait till the microphone gets to you give us your name and your institutional affiliation and then since there are so many hands up i would appreciate it if you ask a relatively short question that'll help so let's have john brandon at the back and we'll have this gentleman up in the front but let's first have you the back john thank you vik rom and thank you to all the uh the panelists i was going to ask two questions but in light of your institutional affiliation john i'll ask one your institutional oh pardon me i'm with the asia foundation um kelly when you were talking about the um the disappointment that civil society was feeling uh in bermany and mar about the donor community being very ham handed uh about matters i i've heard the same thing i went back there about four months time before that i was there was about a year and a half and it was a very different story my question to you is this i've seen some statistics which shows what all the money that has been committed to me and from all the various donor countries um only about 25 27 percent is is is being spent and so how much of that if you could provide a sense of weight maybe uh how much of that is uh because the civil society doesn't want to take um the aid they feel it's just too difficult and how much is that i mean one thing that was not mentioned was um and which has been talked about for years is the lack of capacity uh in um uh in civil society and also in government but um but if you could address that i'd appreciate it thank you okay do you want to keep an answer short as well so we can get more questions i haven't done the empirical research but just kind of my anecdotal impression is that there are definitely problems with the fact that some of the larger and more capable civil society organizations are refusing to take donor funds at this point including groups like punk who that does have capacity to spend funds and has shown that capacity to take donor money directly and is not receiving it other other organizations i know they're fully capable of receiving funding directly from bilateral donors or even from the un that have you know they've held off on it or they're they don't want to take that money through two or three intermediaries which is how it's going into Burma right now and so you actually you know what's being spent it's very hard to to tell there's certainly a lot of expats a lot of NGO types like myself you know in the bars and restaurants that have sprung up like mushrooms in Burma and you know and the nice hotels now are full of people so some money is getting in there somewhere and you know you do hear reports about large grants to this organization or that organization and i think that the capacity on the ground is tremendous but i think that you have a problem that is a global structural problem with how aid is distributed that you know is nothing really to do with Burma but it's playing out in a very ugly way in Burma right now because it is a donor darling and there was a lot of pledging and a lot of enthusiasm and everybody kind of rushing into what they saw as this void this tabla rasa and thinking they could just take their toolkits and plop it right on the Burmese because they are just clueless people who've never had any exposure to the international community before 2010 which is utter nonsense when you really think about it but that's how the donor community almost to a person reacted when they went in there it was really disappointing because they should have known better than to behave this way but they did and now we're seeing the the consequences of it where yeah people are having trouble spending money or when they do spend it they're spending it badly because they've they've disaffected so many people around them so i now as to the government's capacity most of the problems in Burma are not money problems this is the other issue Burma could be a rich country it could be the richest country in southeast asia and it used to be they are political problems the civil society or the the civil service in Burma is enormous they have so many people relative to what actually is produced by that civil service they have massive redundancies in their civil service they have huge problems but they you know there hasn't been the kind of you know there there are capacity issues in the government there are capacity issues in civil society but the problems aren't money problems and donors coming in with lots of money you know lex wrote a report about too much too soon i think they're just too much period i mean you don't most of these problems aren't money problems and so throwing money and a lot of them is not going to make them better it has the potential to actually make them worse okay let's let's continue yes please deaf car chief economist at global financial integrity and formerly of the international monetary fund one of one of my remarks would be just a comment and the second one would be actually a question i'll start with the question first well i mean i've never i didn't hear any of the panelists talk about corruption in the corruption issue in and Myanmar it is a huge problem it's one of the most corrupt countries in the world we recently finished a report on Myanmar it's going to be published in about a couple of weeks that look that quantified the corruption problem and the and also captured the interaction of corruption with the underground economy and smuggling and all of that and so much so that we look upon the corruption illicit flows as a human rights problem because it takes away funding from such things as a primary education for example Myanmar has one of the lowest primary education expenditure in the world okay so that has to have an impact so i think so that is i'm sure that you know you will in your future work would sort of make an endeavor to sort of bring in this corruption issue in your work the second is a comment basically i myself i was born in Myanmar and our family had to leave Myanmar in 1960 when the junta was coming into power ironically my father was involved in the Burmese independence movement and also the Indian independence movement and but he had to leave Burma because things were very difficult as i see the the problem there was no Burma before 1946 as you know it was all one country India it was all one country and the the problems that we see today that think problems i think rises partly because there was a Burmanization imposed on diversity you always had the diversity because there were no borders so Rohingya Muslims came from say Bangladesh because there were no borders there was no Bangladesh also so after the fact when the Burmanization started it only made a bad thing worse that that that's a commentary good Krishna would you like to respond to that sure i am just going to respond in a very small way relating your question about corruption to the elections and one important factor that relates to Kelly's point about citizenship and being able to vote in the elections is that in Myanmar you're required to have a citizenship card and in order to get that card you have to apply at the township office and in reality it's supposed to cost something like seven jot i mean like pennies but in practice you have to pay a huge bribe in order to be able to get that card and so one thing i found in my research is for instance in shan state people were going to the local ethnic political parties office and getting a letter of recommendation from that party that they then took to the township office which they felt could help them reduce the bribe so that they were only paying 15 000 jat which is you know about 15-20 dollars for their ID card and their household registration rather than much much more than that if they didn't have that and another example is from just outside of yangon in legu township where the nld mp and his township committee actually went out and did citizenship registration for people in the villages around that town because again they could not the farmers could not afford the bribes they were being required to pay in order to get their citizenship document which every citizen has to have and you need it to be able to vote susan do you want to respond to davka's point that he made rather than the question that that you know ethnicity and diversity has been with Myanmar for a long time it was the barbarization that sort of that was imposed that has led to these tensions i think there's historical roots of ethnic competition between groups that happened before modern nationalism but i think with with the introduction of the modern nation state and the ways in which then bourbonization became institutionalized in the state structures and ways that disenfranchised groups that's how that's what's fed ethnic competition that's sort of the form it takes now then we're seeing it cross it process in different ways through the democratic process right now and then on corruption i just want to say it's so huge and it's so pervasive and when we did we did these um discussions all around the country throughout outlying areas trying to have local communities identify what were their primary concerns related to justice and security at the local level and corruption was almost always number one or number two but also concerns recognition that corruption is also fueled by the sense that local administrators local police and so on don't have a livable living salary and so understanding some of the long-standing institutional things that need to be transformed in order to to rid corruption and i thought that it was implicit very much in what kelly had earlier talked about when she said resources were not the issue it was really governance that was the question that was the issue let's continue lady there at the back i have yes please hi i'm suvina one i always learn so much from listening to all of you from institutional affiliation suvina from open society foundations um kelly i was interested to hear your views on donor engagement and i share them and now i'm a donor so it's an interesting place to be in grant making circles we talk about participatory grant making so where we sit down with the community and really listen to their needs and try not to be as donor directed as you know western donors tend to be can you give us some specific pieces of advice that civil society gave you in terms of how donors could do this better and the second question is are donors funding like the really hot potato issues like the rohingya issue like the political issues i know there's a lot of stuff going to sort of service delivery and health and things like that that are important but what about the political issues thank you um i'll answer the second question first because i have to think about the first one a little bit um what i heard from some of again this is all very anecdotal i would love to be able to do a deeper dive into this but it just was so overwhelming on this last visit that you know it really grabbed me um that the the donors especially the large bilateral donors and the large institutional donors are sticking with what's safe um they'll fund gender but they won't you know but it's to do stuff like lobby on on the violence against women laws and and things like that they won't fund more politically risky or or political work um and i think that that you see this in in various ways they'll fund voter education they'll find other things and one of you know for me one of the biggest problems started when the the donor community decided we're going to do nonpartisan political assistance um around the elections and the idea that you put the usdp and everybody else on the same level playing field when that is so manifestly not what is happening in the country and that you provide everybody with equality of opportunity to take advantage of the same trainings is is has turned out to be quite problematic to the point where the the donors especially you know including the ones that are supposed to be working on the most political issues of candidate training and party building and these kinds of things end up focused on the number of people who show up at their trainings rather than making sure that the right people are are being trained and that they're engaging with the the key people in the political parties and in the political um scene so it's it's it's a little bit of a a problem with with regard to how donors can engage i mean it really just comes down to listening and respect it being willing to support core costs for office running things like this are just huge these organizations know that the pass-through organization the big ingo that is coming to them for money is getting a huge cut off the top of whatever funding they got from the bilateral donor to run a big office in rangoon to pay a bunch of expats whose housing is paid for whose school for their children is paid for whose vehicles and driver and cook all of that stuff is paid for hundreds of thousands of dollars per person for each white person who shows up to help the poor brown people and that's the mentality that i hear from my my colleagues on the ground that's how they see this they are perceiving it like that so whatever you can do to not give that impression to people including maybe not setting up a big office in rangoon maybe that's not where you should put your resources it's not necessary these people aren't living under a rock most of them are not in a war zone you don't have to be there all the time to have contact with them it may make you feel like you're more connected as a donor but it's not necessarily going to give you a better product at the end the organizations that i find they're doing the best work on the ground which includes osf i will i will give you guys credit they don't have a big office they have either a small or a non-existent staff in the country and they're doing great work i agree entirely with that in terms of empowering the local communities one thing that was really heartening to me when i went out there in 2012 is that they saw that the international community was about to descend upon them and they were already thinking about how can we manage it and so we don't get love to death yeah and they particularly they pointed to me what happened in Sri Lanka in the post tsunami period when so much funding came in and it ended up exploiting a lot of the tensions the same thing happened and but they pointed to Nargis and said we we tried as much as we could to direct it in certain ways and it actually helped that there were sanctions in part because it went directly to them and they right through not through the government so they were able to control it better okay but but there are questions of capacity in terms of working with the local organization so what we've tried to do with our grants is we're in and i think OSF does this too but to work really really closely with the local organizations to at the same time that we're giving them the funding for projects to develop their capacity to be able to manage that money in the way that's required quite frankly because we have congressional funds for example so so rather than sending it through a western organization who knows how to talk the talk and do the kind of financial accountability to actually take the time and it's hard it takes a lot more time in order to walk the walk but it creates sustainability in a way you don't otherwise have absolutely so we're running a bit out of time and there are lots of hands up so i want to take three questions this time we've got michael here the lady here and i'll come back in a second the lady here and we'll have bill wise so the three of you michael first michael martin congressional research service i want to bring the discussion back to the elections and in particular a couple aspects kelly you mentioned the voter registration roles which has been a source of problem in today's local press that is the burn law press a lot of stories about ethnic parties being concerned that the usdp and uec are going to work together to once again rig the election come november by various means um maybe not the means they used last time which involved stuffing the ballot box but other methods that are going on and then so the speaking on behalf of what i understand from the congressional community their focus is on free and fair the administration seems to have shifted over to credible transparent and inclusive and kelly there is an also aspect of the disenfranchisement of the rahinja and other groups that's going on in the run up to the election so there's one of the panel could comment on how serious are the concerns that the 2015 election is not going to meet either of those thresholds however you define them and then the second what actions can be done between now and then to see that the elections get closer to those levels thank you michael lady here hi my name is livia david i'm with the american jewish committee i was just wondering given what all three of you said about the upcoming elections what do you think the prospects are for the muslim community in berma what are they now what will they be after a new government comes into power thank you and bill bill wise john sotkin says we talked about a lot of groups but very little about the military other than to simply describe them as the military wonder uh and i know how difficult it is to look inside of that kind of black box but to the extent that you have impressions i wonder if you could tell us first of all how the relationship has evolved between the military leadership and the active and retired officers who serve in the administration and the parliament second between the military leadership and the deployed military commanders in the areas in the regions we've been talking about and third between deployed military commanders and local leaders and populace in the same areas okay um may i suggest we just go this way and we'll end with you kelly christina why don't you pick whichever questions you want to answer and respond okay i'm going to talk briefly about the first and the third so in terms of preventing fraud and the elections civil society organizations are extremely robust on this front and have developed a network of organizations that are going to be monitoring the advanced votes and the polling on the day of the election the counting of the votes etc and they are being trained by international donors and also people in the region the problem that they face is that there are so many polling places around the country and many of them are in very remote places and so in those areas they may not be able to reach there and there are concerns of those places being places where fraud could happen and then i'm going to skip to bill wise's question on the military the relationship between the tamada commander men online and the president has been quite good the relationship between men online and shwayman who is the head of the parliament the speaker of the parliament and also the chair of the usdp party has been quite difficult and so i think that there's a lot of concern if we bring it back to the election from the military side that they would not like to see shwayman become the president at this point although who knows that could change after the election happens but at this point there's a concern that he has really not acted in the interests of the military in the way that they had expected him to and so the relationships have been much more tense than were expected in 2010 with the commanders in the regions i think the relationships between the men online and the commanders has been pretty good they're younger but there has been a problem between the the commanders in the field and then the the other political forces and in particular one issue has been the chief ministers of the states so the chief ministers are actually appointed by the president and those can be people who came from the parliament the local parliaments or they can be other people and in two cases right now you have active duty military generals who are serving as state ministers in current state and in rakhine state and so there was a motion in parliament as part of the package of proposed amendments to the constitution to change this and have that person be elected by the state parliaments the military was absolutely against that and it didn't go through so there's a lot of tension around that decision Susan could you perhaps focus on this issue about the prospects of the muslim community would you like to do that yeah i would like to do that but i would also just like to say one thing about the the free and fair elections because one of the concerns i know um looking at this is also where they will postpone the elections or where they will cancel them outright in the past they did that in places where the usdp wasn't allowed to campaign and so they they claimed that there wasn't free and fair elections because the usdp wasn't able to to campaign there and so they shut down elections there so what are going to be the criteria for where they do shut down elections claiming security concerns or claiming that there there hasn't been free access for all political parties i think is something that they need to clarify soon and be transparent about those processes to ensure that that's not used as an excuse for political purposes on the muslim community i'm just i'm i'm sorry to say that i'm i'm not very optimistic that there's going to be a lot of great movement on ensuring on both dealing with the issues of social intolerance but also the issues of political inclusion political rights human rights as it relates to the muslim community broadly or the ruhinja community in particular in the run-up to the election because as i keep saying that's not in the political calculations of anybody really moving forward to be able to advocate for that community and so i'm i'm not optimistic in the short term about about the the right to the muslim community in their place within society but i am because there are some of these elements within civil society that are very concerned about the the human rights of the muslim community are concerned about national inclusion and trying to create a nationalism that's more inclusive and pluralistic i think there's still a lot of indigenous places where some of that can be fostered in the aftermath of of the election and moving forward i think it's just a long-term process can i ask you a question which is related to what michael how independent is the union election commission it's not that's an easy one it's not i mean it's not i think they're they're they know they're being watched and that's about as as good of a check as we're gonna get at this point but it's still you know it's a creature of this of this of this government of these authorities um i'm just kind of you know it i think that by some measures you could say that to michael's question they've already failed both tests because you know they these elections can't be fair because of the institutional structural problems constitution you know the the way that this the playing field is so heavily weighted the 25 for the military you can't have a free and fair election under according to international standards under these circumstances what you can have is a technically you know for the 75 of the seats that can be elected those seats may be elected through a technically competent mechanism that broadly represents the will of the bermes people that that's possible i think um but there are both these technical barriers with the whether it's the voter list or the the intentional barriers that are being put up by those who wish to control the the results and you know that's that's a real serious problem and then you have these other issues of disenfranchisement that are intentional so you have both the technical capacity issues that are going to to disenfranchise and and harm the election and i i fear that the international community will continue to focus on those at the exclusion of focusing on the intentional and politically motivated efforts to disenfranchise and manipulate the elections because it's easier to talk about the technical problems because we can fix those especially since we're smart international community people who have experience fixing these things it's harder to talk about the political and the intentional disenfranchisement and then manipulation can't fix that as easily from the outside um so i worry about the international monitoring and how that comes out and i share christina's concerns that the least monitored places the the places that are going to be you know if they even get to have a vote in rakhine and kachin and areas of shan state these places are going to have serious you know disenfranchisement issues um and a lot of these places have disproportionate seats compared to the number of people there and some of these sparsely populated areas where they've been gerrymandered to have a lot of seats and you can expect the usdp to concentrate their efforts in places where they can maximize their their returns um the as far as the the i want to address this because one thing that did come up in my last trip was this sense among at least some people that there is some overreach by mabata and that they have overplayed their hand um susan alluded to this but you see it more broadly in terms of how political actors are and even monks saffron revolution monks people who are distancing themselves from mabata or feel like they can pull some of their brethren out of mabata or reorient mabata away from its racist roots um and so there is this sense that mabata has overreached and that this you know this by with the violence and the being so close to the usdp that actually seems to be more of a problem for people than the violence interestingly that that they are they they've kind of attached themselves by advocating on behalf of the usdp and criticizing the nld so that that's an interesting dynamic at work there and then on the military um you know i don't really have much to add to what christina said except that i i do believe that there's still a fairly strong unity of purpose at work there and a fairly strong ethos that them you know that believes that the military is the force that holds the country together and that this is still you know that it is still necessary for the military to play this role for the foreseeable future and this cuts across very broadly all levels of the military and the former military officials and it's not limited to the military it you know persists in in in various in you know in segments of the society beyond the military as well all right look i have to apologize to all of those who wanted to ask questions but we have come to the witching hour and we i'm we must stop i want to thank you all for being such an engaged audience but please join me in thanking the panelists for an absolutely outstanding session and by all means feel free to ask them questions now after you know on a bilateral basis see michael