brutal generals and dissenting monks

Brutal generals and dissenting monks

If priesthood forms an alliance with the winner of 1990 election, a 'very significant force' would be born

TIMOTHY APPLEBY

September 27, 2007

Penniless, devout and thoroughly dangerous.

Amid reports of mounting violence inside isolated Myanmar, that assessment now seems to be the ruling military's view of the unarmed, maroon-robed Buddhist monks leading the popular revolt against 45 years of dictatorship.

Numbering 400,000 to 500,000 in a country that is 90 per cent Buddhist, with a monastery in virtually every community, the monks in what used to be called Burma command huge respect, providing spiritual guidance and a ubiquitous role at weddings, funerals and other events in the community.

The monks are traditionally aloof and secretive, and the absence of foreign correspondents in the country makes their aims hard to read, said A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi, a professor of international development studies and Asian specialist at Trent University.

In the first weeks of the protests, he noted, the priesthood known as the sangha appeared anxious to keep some distance from pro-democracy leader and Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who won the 1990 election and has spent most of the intervening years under house arrest.

But recent reports of an alliance with the famous dissident suggest a shift in the landscape.

"This is the most surprising development if it turns out to be the case," Prof. Akram-Lodhi said.

"Together they would be a very significant force ... and the military would have to use a lot of violence."

Sixty years after Burma secured its independence, the generals running one of Asia's most repressive nations have changed its name to Myanmar, built a shiny new, eerily empty capital city 320 kilometres north of Rangoon (now called Yangon) and struggled to persuade their few foreign friends the current upheaval can be contained.

But in many regards, Myanmar's crumbling infrastructure and its 50 million impoverished, ardently religious people remain stuck in a time warp in which Buddhism remains the basis of daily life.

Thus it was hardly surprising that the army held its fire for several weeks, as throngs of demonstrators led by monks choked the streets of Rangoon, Mandalay and other cities, galvanized over a 500-per-cent jump in fuel prices last month.

"An attack on the monks is an attack on people's faith, and that's where there's going to be a lot of problems," Prof. Akram-Lodhi said.

It is thought that about 10,000 monks have been taking a role in the protests. And they know how to yank the military tiger's tail.

Dependent entirely on donations for their livelihood, the monks' recent announcement that they would no longer accept handouts from the junta struck a particular nerve, said Myint Swe of the BBC's Burmese-language radio service.

"The government wants the image they are pious and helping the monks."

Drawn from the Theravada, or southern, school of Buddhism, Myanmar's monks have long been politically active - "the worst of all" the trouble makers, George Orwell wrote in Burmese Days, his 1934 novel about British imperialism's fast-fading glories.

From the British colonial era, through to the 1988 rebellion in which an estimated 3,000 civilians died, non-violence has been the monks' hallmark.

And by every estimate, the support they enjoy is near universal.

"The country is very devout. It's also incredibly poor and unequal, and people find solace in their faith," Prof. Akram-Lodhi said.

the sub-prime financial crisis

Summer has come to an end, and, in the aftermath of Labour Day, we can start to look forward to the autumn. Over the course of the summer, the global economic event that will most be remembered has been the sub-prime financial crisis in the US. It is an event that will continue to reverberate for some time; and yet it is not well understood. Moreover, the relationship of the sub-prime financial crisis to globalization and international development is all but absent in most commentary. Yet the relationship is key; in order to understand the sub-prime financial crisis, you have to understand its international (development) dimensions.

First, though, it is important to be clear about what the crisis in global financial markets is all about. The answer is simple: people in the US are borrowing too much. Many of the people that have been borrowing have been those that previously would not have passed a credit check--they were 'risky'. The US mortgage industry constructed a set of complex financial instruments to 'tap' this segment, and thus created a new financial market--the sub-prime mortgage. Sub-prime is a nice way of saying that the US financial system started making what Barbara Enhrenreich has called NINJA loans--'no income, no jobs or assets'. Why did people take these loans? The answer is simple: the US financial sector offered them the loans. This was not a silly choice on the part of poor households. Those who had nothing were given the chance to get a loan to buy a house, the price of which has been going through the roof, and which therefore offered the poor their first real chance of benefiting from the financial speculation that they see all around them. It was a wholly rational choice. Remember, in any financial crisis that is driven by people borrowing too much, their are two culprits: those that do the borrowing; and those that do the lending, that is to say, in this case, US finance capital. How did the crisis get out of hand? Intermediaries between borrowers and lenders encouraged both to undertake speculative investments, so that they could rake in their commissions.

Why did the crisis break? Simple. You are given a mortgage at a low ('sub-prime') interest rate for a year. You take it, hoping that you will be able to pay your mortgage once the temporary low interest rate is removed. However, when the interest rate rises, and you don't have the cash, you start to have problems meeting your interest payments. One in 7 US homeowners with sub-prime mortgages failed to keep up their payments during the second quarter of 2007 and 619000 mortgagees face repossession. Multiply this more than a million times--some 6 million US households, or 2.5 million people, are in risk of mortgage default when their interest rates are reset in the next 18 months, sitting on debts of US$1,000 billion--and all of a sudden there is a US debt crisis. The onset of the debt crisis frightens the banks, who immediately want to sell the claims they can make on the mortgages provided by specialist lenders, and who thus provided the foundation on which the sub-prime mortgage market was built. In the debt crisis, then, there is, by the financial institutions, a 'flight to quality': that is, they want to sell risky high return assets and buy safer, lower return assets.

Why then has the sub-prime financial crisis gone global? How did 'contagion' take place? The answer is that the sub-prime financial crisis is the mere tip of the iceberg--the global financial crisis runs far, far deeper. In order to understand the global dynamics of the sub-prime crisis, it is important to ask: how has it been the case that US households have been able to incur such massive debts? In the world of global finance, someone, somewhere has to be providing the money that temporarily allows people and countries to spend more than they have. Where, then, is this money coming from?

There is, globally, a glut of savings. In Asia in particular, but also in parts of Latin America,
peasant farmers, urban workers, street vendors and sex workers, amongst others, are saving large proportions of their incomes, because they have no security for the future . These savings have flowed, through financial intermediaries like banks, insurance companies and the like, from China, Brazil, India and other countries to the US, as non-Americans buy US assets at an historically unparalleled rate. In other words, capital from around the world has been flowing into the US, financing the purchase of assets that allows US banks and other financial intermediaries to lend on to groups within the US that are also spending more than they earn. Pay-day loans, rent-to-buy furniture, easy credit cards with exorbitant interest rates--US financial capital has been increasingly seeking to lend money to those who could least afford to pay the interest because money has been flowing into them from the developing world. They have done this is in the knowledge that the US government will not allow the US financial system to fail should poor borrowers default: it will, if necessary, bail out financial capital threatened with default. Thus, when Long Term Credit Management threatened default, Wall Street made sure it was bailed out; and this would happen again. Thus, no one does not expect that the US Federal Reserve, the US central bank, will not to cut interest rates, because this will shore up over-extended US finance capital. A rate cut is inevitable, will lower the cost of borrowing and lending, and thus benefit overstretched US finance capital.

Global financial crises are always about excessive credit being made available to borrowers, followed by a speculative splurge, falling prices, default and hysteria. This one is no different. Nonetheless, it is important to be precise and clear about the details of this crisis. Poor farmers and dispossessed workers save; their savings flow to the US; this helps US finance extend credit to poor people who cannot pay; they are unable to pay; and the Federal Reserve steps in to ensure the viability of global finance, US banks, and the US economy. The fact is, though, that poor US households need jobs, not credit, in order to be able to buy; that peasant farmers and dispossessed workers in developing countries need security that their savings, unfortunately, do not secure; and that global finance capital needs to be disciplined, so that its excesses, which are so recurrent, do not continue.

humanitarian intervention after Iraq

Readers of this weblog will know that I was deeply hostile to the invasion of Iraq, that I remain staunchly opposed to its conduct, and that I foresee that the eventual US defeat in Iraq will herald a reconfiguration of global forces on a scale not seen since the US defeat in Vietnam. However, it would be a mistake to equate my opposition to the war in Iraq with an opposition to militarily intervene in the affairs of another country. One of the outcomes of the disastrous US/UK intervention in Iraq has been that it has once again forced people such as myself, who are basically pacifists, to clearly elaborate when and where there is a need for military intervention by the international community.

That the international community has an obligation to intervene in cases of humanitarian catastrophes was brought home to me during the Balkan Wars. Raised on stories of World War II, and deeply doubting Gandhi's believe that non-violence could have defeated fascism, these wars I found deeply debilitating on a personal level: genocidal conflict was raging in Europe, once again, less than 2 days away by car, and yet there seemed to be nothing that could be done to either stop it or indeed contain its spread. I will never forget asking John Loxley in 1992 what he thought should be done; he was, as ever, extremely clear: 'I think Thatcher is right; we need to bomb the hell out of them'. At the time, I was opposed to international intervention in the Balkan Wars, and yet it is true that the wars continued, ferociously, until the US started dropping bombs on the Serbs. Once that happened, the Serbian government, the sponsor and orchestrator of the Balkan Wars, quickly embraced negotiation, and the Dayton Accords were the result.

Long before the invasion of Iraq the former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, made a speech in Chicago in which he asked a question that is of critical importance in the early 21st century: what are 'the circumstances in which we should get actively involved in other people's conflicts'? He went on, correctly, to stress that 'acts of genocide can never be a purely internal matter'. I have believed this for a very long time indeed; it was the principal reason that I supported the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia that overthrew the Khmer Rouges. While the international community stood head to shoulder with a genocidal government that killed a third of its own population, the Vietnamese were totally ostracized for an act that saved, probably, hundreds of thousands of lives. Further back, when Milton Obote returned to power in Uganda following the ouster of Idi Amin, things started to go bad very quickly. I will never forget Tanzania intervening to overthrow Obote as a way of stopping a descent into what could have became a genocidal conflagration. I have clearly witnessed times when their is a need to citizens to support a military intervention by their government in the affairs of a sovereign state. Genocide is the starkest example; who does not want international forces in Darfur to stop the killing?

Elements within the international community have supported the need for humanitarian military intervention since the 1980s, when the then French President, Francois Mitterand, enunciated a concept that he labeled 'the right to intervene'. The problem was that this right was never codified or ratified internationally, and no one really knows when it does and does not apply.

It clearly did not apply, however, to Iraq, for many reasons. The military coup that brought the Baath Party to power in the first place was heavily promoted by the CIA. When Saddam Hussein seized control of the Baath Party there was nary a whimper from the West; indeed, when he invaded Iran in 1979 Hussein was seen to be the front line in halting the spread of the Islamic Republic, and he was rewarded by being heavily armed by the West to continue a war that he started, and which cost millions their lives. Just prior to his invasion of Kuwait he was still receiving senior Western politicians, including, for example, the then-British foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, who came bearing arms and ammunition for a dictator that had killed his own people as well as citizens of the West. Hussein was thus very much a creation of the West: it supported him, it armed him, and it allowed him to wage war against his own people without challenging his actions.

What changed after the invasion of Kuwait was that Hussein was quickly turned into an enemy. However, rather than punishing the regime, it was the people of Iraq who were punished by more than a decade of sanctions that probably killed upwards of half a million children. Little wonder, then, that the US and the UK face such hostility in Basra and Baghdad: first, the West supported a dictator that mercilessly killed his own people; then, we by-passed the dictator to kill his people ourselves. Then we get rid of the dictator and send the military in, with the result that hundreds of thousands more people lose their lives. The West has been deeply involved in the deaths of hundreds of thousands in Iraq. And we are still doing it...

No, the war in Iraq cannot be justified. However, this does not mean that the idea of the need for humanitarian military intervention is totally discredited. What is required is a clear mandate from the international community, in the form of clear approval from the United Nations (flawed as that institution might be); a clear mandate for the UN force going in; a political strategy to remove the genocidal regime that is in place; an economic strategy to sustain livelihoods torn asunder by conflict; and an exit strategy. It requires proper resourcing, and not the begging bowl mentality that facilitated the genocide in Rwanda and the carnage in the Congo.

Unfortunately, these conditions are unlikely to find much international support after the war in Iraq comes to its logical conclusion, which is a deepening of the ongoing civil war. One casualty of Bush's war has been a strengthening of a retreat into isolationism, particularly in the US but also in the UK; and such a retreat bodes ill for the millions of people who continue to live in fear of their government.

smaller bombs are not the answer

The head of NATO this week announced that in an effort to shore up the faltering mission in Afghanistan NATO would reduce the size of the bombs that it was using. By using smaller bombs, the reasoning goes, there will be fewer civilian casualties, and hence less of a drop amongst ordinary Afghans for the NATO-led ISAF.

The logic is mind-blowing. That the present dilemma in Afghanistan is a man-made mistake, predictable, and will continue to deepen Afghanistan's many conflicts was foreshadowed by me in an on-line column in October 2001. That it was written almost 6 years ago is a reminder that what has happened did not have to happen as it happened. This was, to use a phrase of Donald Rumsfeld, 'a known known'.

The link to the original article, 'Attacking the Pakhtuns', is:

http://www.theglobalsite.ac.uk/justpeace/110akram.htm

Check it out.

Vietnamica

I have recently come across a very good blog on Vietnam's social development, run by a staff member of the BBC Vietnamese service. It is up-to-date and intellectually curious. For example, the link

Vietnamica: Peasant protests in Vietnam

discusses ongoing peasant protests in Ho Chi Minh City, making reference to my own BBC Vietnamese service interview, as well as an unobtainable article from Reuters. If you are interested in Vietnam, I highly recommend it.

international views on land issues in Vietnam

The BBC Vietnamese service has followed up my earlier interview with a further series of questions regarding international attitudes towards land issues in Vietnam. In English, here and the questions and the answers that I gave:

1. Do academics have the same mind about this issue, or is there a
debate? For example, does your view encounter any objection from other
academics or donors?

Within the academic and donor community there is a serious debate about the meaning of shifting access to land in Vietnam. This is slightly different than the issue of land disputes, which are indeed generally viewed as being symptomatic of general failures to deal with corruption. The key distinction here, then, is the extent to which people within the academic and donor community feel that it would be possible for the existing institutional structure of state and party to deal with corruption around land. There are some that a reasonably optimistic: that the state and party are, at the very top, led by senior cadres that recognize the legitimacy of peasant grievances and want to solve problems in a way that does not undermine Vietnam's ongoing transition. Indeed, some have argued that Vietnam's transition is itself the outcome of an implicit political agreement between reform-minded senior cadres that have bypassed the bureaucracy in the state and the party in order to meet the demands of the peasantry, who in turn have sought reform because they know the ways in which the political economy does not work and seek changes to it in order to improve their lives. At the other end of the spectrum there are those who believe that the inability to deal with corruption around land disputes signals a more systemic failure that is incapable of being resolved. People recognize the failure of the system; however, they basically go about their business, and try and avoid the state and party as much as possible, in order to create a better life for themselves and their families. According to these commentators, political opposition is limited because of the risks it entails, but the lack of an opposition does not signal an acceptance of the political and economic order in contemporary Vietnam.

The views I expressed in the last interview on the character of land disputes would and would not be challenged within the academic and donor community. My views on peri-urban disputes and disputes in the Central Highlands are pretty well accepted; my views on landlessness are not accepted by donors, but are accepted within some academic circles, and particularly, in my experience, within Vietnamese academic circles.

2. The agrarian transition and its impact on rural Vietnam for the past
20 years must have attracted attention from international donors like
the World Bank and international NGOs. Are their assessments largely
positive or negative? And do they have any say on the government's
policies?

This is a very, very broad question--we could spend days discussing it. The first point to stress is that the donor community in Hanoi is not a homogenous or monolithic block. There are differences of opinion within it, between, say, the World Bank and UNDP, between international NGOs and some of the multilateral donors. What the donor community has tried to do for the past decade is to develop, as much as is possible, a consensus between the multilateral donors, the bilateral donors and the international NGOs regarding how best to move forward to continue the transition. The purpose behind this consensus-building exercise is to have a greater impact on government. My experience with government is that it listens very carefully to what the international community says, it often takes elements of the advice that is offered, but the Vietnamese government is not reliant on the international community to any great extent. The Vietnamese government is far more independent of the international community than many of the other partners around the world serviced by the international community.

Now, on the issue of the agrarian transition: here, there are major differences of opinion. The World Bank is fairly explicit in its views: changing access to land, and particularly rising landlessness, signals the success of the transition. It demonstrates a responsive market economy in which people shift their occupations in order to do the best for themselves. What is therefore necessary is an appropriate social safety net and social investment that facilitates this process of shifting jobs into better paid activities. UNDP in Hanoi, on the other hand, takes a different view: that the argumentation offered by the World Bank is based upon a very limited and questionable set of evidence, and thus that outsiders have very little understanding of social and economic dynamics in the countryside. Bilateral donors and international NGOs seem to treat changing access to land as an issue of poverty alleviation, and not inequality creation. This is, it should be said, at odds with my own views on changing patterns of access to land and landlessness in rural Vietnam, which is, in my view, constructing a significant set of social issues that the government will have to face in the future. Indeed, senior researchers at the World Bank in Washington have written a working paper that is, in part, designed to explicitly rebut my propositions. What am I saying? Putting it bluntly: Vietnam is becoming a much more unequal society, and while a significant part of this inequality is urban-rural, there has been a major increase in inequality within the countryside. Rising landlessness in the countryside is a sign of this increasing inequality. The political and social issue that the state and the party will have to face is that in the countryside those who are doing well or indeed very well often have connections to the state and the party--particularly in the Mekong River Delta, but also elsewhere. This means that the state and the party are, in the countryside, associated with rising inequality. That is a big political problem if the peasantry starts to see the rise in inequality as a systemic issue.

One final point I should stress: as an outsider, I am aware that my own knowledge is extremely limited even if I have been working in rural Vietnam for almost a decade. However, I am quite confident in my arguments because Vietnamese academics that I discuss these issues with find my views to most closely mirror their own understanding of the social and economic processes at work in rural Vietnam.

land disputes in Vietnam

Last week the BBC's Vietnamese service did an interview with me on land disputes in Vietnam. The full text, in Vietnamese, is available at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/vietnamese/vietnam/story/2007/07/070710_land_disputes_interview.shtml

The English-language version of the interview reads as follows:

1. What do you think are the roots of the problems?

The roots of the problems differ somewhat around the country, and particular between the peri-urban regions around Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, the Central Highlands, and the rice basket in the Mekong and Red River deltas. In the peri-urban areas, despite property rights that are in theory much more secure than in China, by way of comparison, there is still a large degree of discretion on the part of local communes with regards to their ability to administratively acquire land at a less than market price. This means that the acquisition of land is a significant source of earnings from corruption, and many disputes in Vietnam, particularly those staged in Hanoi or in Ho Chi Minh City, reflect peasant resistance to corrupt practices on the part of local government. In the Central Highlands, the issue of corruption is also there, strongly there, but it is also tied in to how land has been allocated to incoming migrants to the area at the expense of indigenous peoples that in many instances have cultivation practices at odds with those suggested by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development. Finally, in the deltas, there is the issue of rising landlessness. For many this is a reflection of increased prosperity. However, for far more, I think, this is a reflection of debt-induced distress, distress that peasants would like to see addressed by local governments, but which are not, in part because it is local party people who acquire the land to add to their own--party people can be big farmers in rural Vietnam.

Many would argue that these failures in rural 'governance' reflect the lack of an independent judiciary and the rule of legally-binding contracts in Vietnam. The rule of law is highly politicized, all the more so in the countryside. I would agree with this, but would also suggest that more is going on, most particularly massive rises in rural inequality and in urban rural inequality that the government seems powerless to address--or indeed does not want to address because so many local cadres are implicated in benefiting from rural inequality.

2. Based on your observation over the years, are land disputes in
Vietnam likely to get worse, to the level of what happens in China
currently?

This is an interesting question. Land disputes in China are well known and documented--the figure that I commonly quote is around 87000 a year. In Vietnam we do not know the extent of land disputes. However, for land disputes to be on the scale that they are witnessed in China would require only 5075 disputes a year in Vietnam. I suspect--but I have no basis to substantiate this--that land disputes each year number far more. In other words, I believe the land dispute situation to already be worse in Vietnam than in China.

3. Are there any solutions, or this is an inevitable result of the
current transition in Vietnam?

Peasant unrest is very cautious in rural Vietnam. Cautious in the sense that it is rare for it to take issue with either the state or the Party. Rather, it takes on the whole issue with individuals (although there are well documented instances of state and party property being vandalized, and state and party cadres being held in forced captivity). In part, this reflects the highly decentralized character of the Vietnamese state--local government officials in most of the country tend to come from the area that they run. They know their neighbours and their families, and people resent people that they know using the state to get rich. So the issue, particularly in rural areas, is personalized. This is important for the government--it does not call into question the system as a whole. If, then, the government could make a serious effort at tackling corruption, the problem would be significantly affected.

However, and this is the important part, corruption is endemic. The relationship between the party and wealth accumulation is so completely interwoven that to try and tackle corruption must mean, eventually, tackling the position of the party in the state--and that is not tenable at this current stage. Moreover, in my view, many people in the party and the government know that the current system is not sustainable. It will collapse, it is just a matter of time. They therefore are using their connections to make as much money as they can while they can before this source of patronage disappears. This is why, for example, the private sector in Vietnam is built by those with party connections, to see them through its eventual demise and to ensure that their wealth continues beyond. In this light, it is no coincidence that those in the countryside with the largest landholdings are always those with party or state connections (or both).

The problem for the party, from a sustainability point of view, is that the government's rule is built upon bringing prosperity to the countryside. If, for whatever reason, this is called into question by the peasantry, there are implications for social stability that the party knows far, far too well. So they have to do something about rural unrest, and their answer is get more wealth to the countryside--as in China. However, this does not do anything about specific land-based grievances, and thus does not tackle some of the systemic issues facing rural Vietnam.

So, is there a solution? In theory, yes. In practice, not that I can see.