Already in Myanmar’s Reformation, an Impasse

 April 22, 2012, 12:29 am

HONG KONG — Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and 42 members of her National League for Democracy insist they will not take the oath of office on Monday unless a single problematic word is changed: The newly elected members of Parliament are refusing to swear that they will “safeguard” the Constitution. Instead, they want to say they’ll “respect” it.
The deadlock is serious enough that an N.L.D. spokesman said Friday that it was “highly unlikely” that his party’s members would be sworn in. The Constitutional Court is said to be considering the matter.
In recent months, international observers and diplomats have been nearly giddy about democracy breaking out in Myanmar (which a few nations still insist on calling Burma). When the N.L.D. won a by-election in a landslide earlier this month, it signaled the kind of truly nonviolent revolution that the West has been pining for. Senior Western envoys and even heads of state have been showing up at Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s house like starry-eyed pilgrims arriving at Lourdes.
Many political analysts have been “heralding a new political dawn in Burma’s history,” as the Burmese editor Kyaw Zwa Moe puts it. “But things appear precarious at the moment” over the swearing-in issue.
Some see the widely revered Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi making a major political misstep over a minor point of contention.
“By participating in the election, Aung San Suu Kyi chose to play by the regime’s rules,” said the analyst Min Zin, writing on the Transitions blog of Foreign Policy magazine. “Now she needs to pick her battles rather than wasting valuable energy in a fight over symbolism.
“There’s an old Burmese proverb: ‘If you choose to live like a bug inside a chili pepper, you can’t really complain if you start feeling hot.’ ”

If the deadlock over wording sounds like a splitting of political hairs, it does present at least two causes of realpolitik concern for Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi and her colleagues.
First, she made a rewriting of the Constitution a principal promise of her recent campaign. The document — drafted by the military and passed in a heavily manipulated referendum in 2008 — is not exactly the Magna Carta. For one thing, it automatically tithes one-fourth of the seats in Parliament to the military.
Swearing to “safeguard” the Constitution is not exactly how she and the others in the N.L.D. want to begin their historic legislative tenures. On the other hand, if they don’t take their seats and boycott the session, they’ll have no way at all to amend the Constitution. (Even so, it will be a challenge: The opposition only holds about 7 percent of the seats in Parliament.)
Second, if the opposition lawmakers, having sworn to safeguard the Constitution, then try to amend it, hard-liners in the government could use that “betrayal” as a legal pretext for unseating them, bringing charges, or even locking them up. Worse and stranger things have happened in Myanmar over the past half-century.
Plenty of generals retired from the military to take up seats in the new Parliament in 2010, and they presumably have little patience for Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi and her democratic inclinations. They know that she’ll gore their ox, given the chance. She has promised as much.
Most Burma-watchers are anxious to see if the military will remain the black spot on the X-ray of a democratic Myanmar. It does not appear that the generals will go quietly: In a recent speech, Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the commander in chief, reiterated the importance of the military’s continuing role in politics and its dedication to preserving the existing Constitution.

By MARK MCDONALD