ၿပီးခဲ့တဲ့အတန္းတုန္းက တင္ရတဲ့ စာတမ္းတစ္ေစာင္နဲ႕ ပတ္သက္ၿပီး ဒီေန႕ ဆရာ့ကို သြားေတြ႕ပါတယ္။ ဆရာ မွတ္ခ်က္ေရးထားတဲ့ မူရင္းစာတမ္းကို ျပန္ေပးလိုက္ပါတယ္။ ေရးထားတဲ့ အေၾကာင္းအရာက Pogge ရဲ႕ World Poverty and Human Rights စာအုပ္ထဲက Achieving Democracy ဆိုတဲ့ အခန္းကို ေ၀ဖန္သံုးသပ္တဲ့ စာတမ္းျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ မူရင္းပညာရွင္ တင္ျပထားတဲ့ အယူအဆေတြနဲ႕ ကိုက္ညီတာေတြရွိသလို မူရင္းပညာရွင္ ေရးသားတင္ျပရာမွာ အားနည္းခ်က္ရွိတဲ့ လစ္ဟာခ်က္ရွိတဲ့ အခ်က္ေလးေတြကို ျမန္မာ့ဒီမိုကေရစီအကူးအေျပာင္း အေတြ႕အႀကံဳနဲ႕ ခ်ိန္ထိုးသံုးသပ္ ေရးသားခဲ့တာပါ။ ဆရာ့မွတ္ခ်က္က ပံုမွာ ပါတဲ့အတိုင္းပါပဲ။ သိပ္ေကာင္းတဲ့စာတမ္းတစ္ေစာင္ပဲ ဆိုတာကေတာ့ ေက်ာင္းသားေတာ္ေတာ္မ်ားမ်ားကို ေပးေလ့ရွိတဲ့ မွတ္ခ်က္လားေတာ့ မသိပါဘူး။ ကြ်န္ေတာ္ေရးတဲ့ စာတမ္းမွာ ေရွ႕ေနာက္ မညီတာေလးေတြကိုလည္း ေထာက္ျပထားပါတယ္။ အႀကိဳက္ဆံုး မွတ္ခ်က္ကေတာ့ ၿပီးခဲ့တဲ့ ေဆာင္းဦးရြက္ေၾကြတန္းတစ္ေလွ်ာက္ အတန္းထဲမွာ တက္တက္ၾကြၾကြ ပါ၀င္ေဆြးေႏြးခဲ့တာကို အသိအမွတ္ျပဳထားတာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ဆရာ့မွတ္ခ်က္အရ ေထာက္ျပထားတဲ့ အခ်က္ေလးေတြကို ျပန္လည္မြမ္းမံၿပီးရင္ေတာ့ စိတ္၀င္စားတဲ့ မိတ္ေဆြမ်ား ဖတ္ႏိုင္ေအာင္ ကြ်န္ေတာ့္ ဘေလာ့စာမ်က္ႏွာမွာ တင္ထားေပးမယ္လို႕ စိတ္ကူးထားပါတယ္။
Introduction
In this small paper, I would like to express my arguments on the
topic of Achieving Democracy from the point of view of human rights and global
justice. My paper will be based on the subject matter of the chapter of Pogge’s
work on “Achieving Democracy”. I will try to access the argument of the author
and try to make my counterargument on his work.
There are some reasons of why I chose this topic for my paper. The most
significant reason is that “Myanmar”, my own country, is now in the democratic
transition process (Pogge called it fledgling democracy), and I took this
advantage to access my own country’s situation.
Myanmar Democracy
Transition
Myanmar former military regime and the current democratic transition should be
introduced in this place. After gaining independence from the British in 1948,
Myanmar practiced parliamentary democracy system for some years. In 1962,
military backed Myanmar Way to Socialism Party took the power and exercised one
party system. The political system at that time did not bring prosperity to the
country and the socialist regime was removed by the people uprising movement in
1988. Unsurprisingly, the military took the state power and the opposition was
not allowed to form government even after the free and fair election sponsored
by the military government in 1990. The military government invited the elected
representatives to draw a constitution for the country. Unfortunately, the
opposition group did not go on participating the National Convention for
drawing the constitution. The withdrawal of the opposition party, NLD (National
League for Democracy), created a chance for the military government to make the
constitution whatever they wanted.
In 2008, the constitution was promulgated by a referendum and the military
government held the election in 2010. Again, the military backed Union
Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) won the election and formed a
government. International community especially the west including the United
States, the European Union, the United Kingdom and some countries did not
recognize and
did not believe that the
constitution drawn by the military government would bring genuine democracy to
Myanmar.
Unexpectedly, the new civilian government in which most of the members are
ex-military officers could proceed a democratic transition. The new government
could do very well and attract the international awareness to recognize the
dramatic transformation. In spite of many challenges, the government is
believed to pass the democratic transition.
According to the experience we have passed, I would argue that democracy is not
just a political system. It cannot be assumed by merely changing the
authoritarian to democratic government. Democracy cannot be born overnight. It
takes time to be a rich or mature democracy. In the introduction part of
Pogge’s work, he just mentioned that what democracy is, and he failed to
mention that how democracy can be pursued. As I have said that democracy is not
just a political system, it is far beyond a political system. Democracy really
is exercising the political power in a clever way by the people. If the people
are not able to manipulate the power in their hand, democracy will produce a
negative result rather than positive outcome.
In Myanmar, people could enjoy democratic rights such as peaceful assembly and
demonstration. However, there are many shortcomings in exercising these rights.
People were very restricted to demonstrate their beliefs and their wills some
years ago, and now they are too free to express their beliefs. The parliament
has adopted a law for that purpose but people think that the law limited their
citizen basic rights. Some people do not want to go to the police station to
get permission for their demonstration even though the parliament has made
dramatic changes to liberalize the permission procedure. This is just an
example of how people need to practice democratic rights in a proper way.
We, Myanmar people, are now in a real world of what Pogge has imagined a
typical transition-to-democracy scenario. Pogge has raised some considerable
questions concerning with the establishment of the essential elements of
democratic government including civil and political rights and the rule of law,
and the former authoritarian rulers and their supporters. Pogge focused on the
legacy of an authoritarian past which was related to the elements what Pogge
called the enemies of democracy. He grouped those specific considerations under
three distinct headings.
The first set of consideration concerns the possible resistance or support
generated by particular policies we might pursue. If we try to punish abuses
that officers committed during the period of military rule, then it will create
a threat to the military and it might encourage the military to take control of
the state power again. On the other hand, if we leave the abuses unpunished,
the victims of the former regime will not satisfy with the situation. If the victims
are not pleased with the current policy, their opposition may endanger the new
democratic order. Pogge proposed two options between the prior regimes is
thoroughly destroyed and the prior military juntas have turned over power to
civilians and returned to the barracks. He failed to point out a third option
which is really happening in Myanmar. Myanmar story is similar to neither Nazi
Germany where the former regime was completely destroyed nor Latin America
where the military had handed over the power to the civilian and returned to
the barrack. Myanmar case can be labeled as a special case where the former
military regime has handed over the political power to the civilian, but the
civilian here means semi-civilian because the retired military officers could
take the important positions in the government as well as in the parliament.
Additionally, the constitution which was adopted by the former regime stated
that
“All policy guidelines, laws, rules, regulations, notifications and declarations
of the State Law and Order Restoration Council and the State Peace and
Development Council or actions, rights and responsibilities of the State Law
and order Restoration Council and the State Peace and Development Council shall
devolve the Republic of the Union of Myanmar. No proceeding shall be instituted
against the said Councils or any member thereof or any member of the
Government, in respect of any act done in the execution of their respective
duties.[1]
The above provision of the constitution clearly
stated a guarantee for the action of the former regime. On the other hand,
let’s look at the flick side. How about the victims of the former regime?
According to Pogge, we might face possible resistance from the victims of the
predecessor regime. However, Myanmar case could not be generalized to the
examples of South Africa or Latin America, because Myanmar people have an
unusual national character, forgiveness[2]. The religious teaching has taught that
we should forgive our enemies, and Myanmar people never claimed for the
punishment to the former regime. It does not mean that Myanmar people happily
forget every bad experience of the former regime. They know what was good and
what was bad for them as well as for the future of the country. However, they
never claim for revenge but just try to take lessons from bad experiences. It
could be concluded that in Myanmar case there is neither punishment to the
former regime nor resistance from the victims of the predecessor regime as
Pogge has imagined.
The second concern of Pogge is a future-oriented consideration. It could be
argued that if the former abuses are left unpunished, it would encourage the
next military coup. This concern is logical but in Myanmar case, the
constitution is specially designed to avoid future military coup. The
Commander-in-Chief of the Defense Services who is also the Supreme Commander of
the Union is allowed to nominate 25 percent of the members of parliament.
Moreover, the three ministers, defense minister, home affair minister and
border affairs minister are also nominated by the Commander-in-Chief. The
design of Myanmar constitution is not democratic very much, but unexpectedly,
Myanmar could make a dramatic reform with this constitution. All the leaders
including the President, the speakers of the parliaments, the
commander-in-chief have made a commitment that the role of the military in the
politics will be reduced gradually through constitution amendment.
I agree to the third set of Pogge consideration. He gave the example of South
Korea where the former military rulers were treated too harshly, and it would
make it harder to get other authoritarian rulers to step down. I also would
like to point out very recent current example of that scenario. In Egypt, the
former authoritarian had been treated harshly, and it affected the domestic
politics of Syria. The Syria president Basher al-Assad is now struggling to
maintain his power at any cost. Now the civil war breaks out in Syria but the
president will never step down because he understood very well that if he gives
up the power, he would be treated very harshly.
The next sub-topic Pogge discussed is reducing the expected rewards of coup
d’état. He pointed out the proposal of Tom Farer and Stanley Hoffmann. What
they have proposed is that a fledgling democratic government could preauthorize
to intervene in the event that it is overthrown by a predator. However Pogge
admitted that the proposal by Farer and Hoffmann is not likely to be widely
adopted because the rich democracy country like the United States’ military
intervention and foreign policy is not reliable since it has often supported,
historically, the enemies of democracy rather than its friends.
In Myanmar case, I would argue that the proposal of Farer and Hoffmann is
hardly acceptable. Historically, Myanmar was under British colony for over one
hundred years and under Japanese Imperialism for about three years. Even after
the independence, some remote area of Myanmar was occupied by the Kuomintang of
China with unofficial assistance of the United States in 1949, and Myanmar
Tatmadaw (Defense Services) had to sacrifice to kick them out. Myanmar had
experienced the bitterness of colonial status and foreign intervention. Similar
to Myanmar, some countries which were once the victims of colonialism will not
accept the proposal. Moreover, the United States, European Union and the other
western countries imposed economic and other sanctions on Myanmar. Their
intention was to force Myanmar military regime to give up power and to step
down. However, they came to know that the sanctions did not work well and that
kind of pressure was not proper for encouraging Myanmar democratization.
Therefore my conclusion is that preauthorization to intervene in the event that
it is overthrown by a predator is not a proper way to guarantee a country’s
democracy, or to reduce the expected reward of coup d’état.
Pogge proposed other ways of affecting the dispositions of foreign states in
ways that would reduce the rewards of an undemocratic takeover. One measure of
his proposal is a constitutional amendment requiring that debts incurred by
future unconstitutional governments must not be serviced at public expense.
I would argue that Pogge’s proposal has many weaknesses. The most obvious
weakness is that the predators can not only suspend but also repeal the whole
constitution, then who can guarantee that the previous constitution will be
resumed after the predators have stepped down. According to our Myanmar, and
Thailand experiences, the militaries of both countries declared the existing
constitution repealed, and those constitutions were never be resumed. The
military drew new constitutions and handed over the power to the new
established civilian governments which were founded by the new constitutions.
The other point Pogge failed to mention is that not all the countries in the
world value democracy and human rights. When the United States and some other
countries were heavily focusing on democracy and human rights norm, some
countries like China did not take care of that norm, and they took care only
their economic development. That is the main reason of why Myanmar military
regime lasted very long. While Myanmar was under the western group economic
sanctions, the neighboring giant China was very reliable economically as well
as politically.
Pogge’s another proposal is the creation of a standing Democracy panel under
the supervision of the United Nations. In his proposal, Pogge suggested that
the panel should monitor the democratic circumstances of that country. As I
have already pointed out, establishment of a Democracy panel is a kind of
foreign intervention, and it will be very hard to accept for those countries
which had colonial experiences.
Similarly, Pogge also suggested the founding of what he called “International
Democratic Loan Guarantee Fund” (Democracy Fund). This idea is very similar to
what he had proposed earlier in the chapter, and I will not repeat the same
argument.
The last thing he pointed out is the correlation between the so-called Dutch
Disease and authoritarianism. He proposed a constitutional amendment which is
expected to deter undemocratic seizure of the state power although he admitted
that his proposal was not really workable. I totally agree to this point. My
country, Myanmar, is rich of natural resources and that resources become an
obstacle to growth, because they foster insurgency, oppression and corruption.
Here I would like to mention a point I have discussed earlier. The United
States and the western group imposed sanctions on my country for many years,
and then Myanmar had unfortunately to rely on the neighboring giant China.
China did not take care of human rights and democracy, and China focused only
on exploitation of our natural resources. If the United States which is
believed to be more responsible to the economic activities did not impose
economic sanctions and the US government allowed its companies to invest in
Myanmar, in my opinion, Myanmar Dutch-Disease can be cured to some extent.
Therefore I would argue that imposing economic and other sanctions is not an
effective weapon to destroy an authoritarian regime, and it could produce
opposite result of the initial objectives of imposing sanctions.
The most important concept that Pogge pointed out is that “Democracy involves
the fulfillment not only of important rights, but also of important
responsibilities of citizens.” This argument is similar to what I have
discussed earlier in this paper, it said that democracy really is exercising
the political power in a clever way by the people. If the people are not able
to manipulate the power in their hand, democracy will produce a negative result
rather than positive outcome. If we focus just on our rights and ignore our
responsibilities, there will be democracy deficit in Pogge’s term.
Conclusion
In this small paper, I made my arguments based on the work of Pogge. Some of
his ideas are agreeable and some of his proposals have weaknesses. I tried to
point out the shortcomings of his arguments and I proposed my own arguments on
achieving democracy. In the developing countries like Myanmar, we are facing
many challenges as Pogge had suggested and we need to consider how we could
develop our democratic culture, and how we could deter the enemies of
democracy. This paper made me consider those important factors very critically
based on the real experience of my own country’s former authoritarian regime
and current democratic transition. My conclusion is that it would be very hard
to build a democratic society without active participation of the people.
Reference
Pogge, World
Poverty and Human Rights, pp. 52-70, 118-167; Follesdal and Pogge
(eds.), Real World Justice, pp.2-11.
Constitution Commission.
"Transitory Provisions." Constitution of the Republic of the
Union of Myanmar. Nay Pyi Taw: Ministry of Information, 2008. Print.
"Burma." Wikipedia.
Wikimedia Foundation, 14 Dec. 2014. Web. 14 Dec. 2014.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burma>.
[1] Constitution of the Republic of the Union
of Myanmar (2008)
[2] Unlike Korea and other victims of Japanese
Imperialism, Myanmar can forgive and forget the bitter treatment of the
Japanese brutal rulers in the colonial period between 1943 and 1945. No
one in Myanmar claims for the legal apology of the Japanese government for the
ill-treatment during the war.
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