Most national capitals are accused of being out of touch but few are actually designed to be. Myanmar’s capital, Naypyidaw, is. Official buildings are scattered across former scrubland, each separated from the next by a distance that is too far to walk in the midday sun. Parliament is surrounded by a giant moat and special permission is required to visit. The discussions inside its 31 buildings — one for each plane of existence in Theravada Buddhist cosmology — bear only the slimmest connections to the world beyond its boundary fence.
Under the current constitution, one quarter of parliament’s members are military officers, and the constitution cannot be changed unless more than three quarters of MPs vote in favour. The constitution also says the ministers of defence, home affairs and border affairs must be serving military officers, and it gives the head of the armed forces the right to take over the country in a state of emergency. The army has the country in a headlock.
These are all things that Myanmar’s de facto civilian leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, wants to address; but discussions are going nowhere. Four years after her party, the National League for Democracy, won an election landslide, and with less than a year to go before the next national vote, there is little sign of change. Meanwhile the rest of the country is growing frustrated and angry at the amount of time devoted to constitutional change while so many day-to-day problems remain unaddressed.
This political stalemate is key to understanding why Aung San Suu Kyi has so conspicuously failed to address what the rest of the world regards as the country’s key crisis: the military’s crimes against its Muslim Rohingya minority. Suu Kyi believes the only way she can persuade the army to relax its grip on politics is to stand steadfastly with them in the court of public opinion. This week she also stood with them in the International Court of Justice, where the country is facing charges of genocide.
The case has been brought by Gambia on behalf of the 57 members of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC). It is not a whimsical venture: Gambia has brought some of the world’s top lawyers to The Hague. Its minister of justice, Ba Tambadou, was formerly a prosecutor at the Rwanda war crimes tribunal and Gambia has hired the Washington firm Foley Hoag as its advisors. The company won famous victories for Nicaragua against the United States in 1986 and for the Philippines against China in 2016. ‘Rockstar’ counsel Philippe Sands is acting for Gambia in court.
That the Myanmar military — the Tatmadaw — has committed massive human rights violations over decades is beyond doubt. The abuses peaked around August 2017 during a massive security operation in the north-western part of Rakhine state. Amnesty International estimates that around 10,000 civilians were killed. Over 700,000 Rohingya Muslims were expelled to Bangladesh in what the former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights called a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”.
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