There s considerable confusion in the western press about Burma. The press shows a near martyred daughter of an idolized national hero and sacrificing Buddhist monks confronting a corrupt military. The reality is quite different. Aung San, the father and national hero was a socialist and head of a party that saw the future of Burma freed of foreign control and of Buddhist secular power. He believed the monks were parasites living off the people and their control of land and its production were an impediment to both freedom and progress. Foreign interests colluded with the military and the Buddhists. Aung San paid with his life for his idealized project of national liberty.
As a result of Aung San Suu Kyi being in prison all this time and her political movement paralyzed and decimated of militants and supporters, she can be released. No one wants her to succeed as it is not in the interests of any of the power groups that she do so. China has accommodated with the military and western corporations are profiting nicely from their arrangements while the ethnic groups have been silenced. She is a symbol, a symbol for the west perhaps, of a reformed Burma that will now be open for more investment and tourism. The symbolic nature she holds for Burmese power brokers, however, remains that of land reform, social justice and the socialism of her father.
Melford E. Spiro has produced a comprehensive work, Buddhism and Society focused on this problem and its history. One has to realize after a study of Buddhism, how many trends appear also in the history of Christianity, they are both evangelical and militant state builders.
Presently the conflict in Burma (Myanmar) has been represented in rather stark black and white terms. An evil military and a freedom-loving Buddhist movement. The situation is much less clear and the origins of this conflict are to be found in the Second World War and British colonialism. The British invaded Burma from India 1852, but only seized the country in the Third Anglo-Burmese War which lasted one month in 1885. The country was then subjugated by the British Army over 4 years in a horrific series of massacres which did not end in the Kachin hill areas until 1896.
Resistance continued, especially provoked by the use of Burmese as slave labor in British tea companies and Teak logging, but also by what the Buddhist monks saw as daily insults over violations of religious shrines. By the 1930s thousands of Burmese rebels fought colonial forces. Aung San, the father of Aung San Suu Kyi, was one of the leaders of a group called the Thirty Comrades and founded the Burmese Independence Army in 1940 with the aid of the Japanese. While he was a nationalist, he was a founding member of the Burmese Communist Party, later renamed the Socialist Party after the WWII. With the help of the Japanese Army, Aung San's forces defeated British colonial forces and drove the British out of Burma, seizing Rangoon in March of 1942. Burma declared its independence on August 1, 1943. Always a nationalist, Aung San decided to switch sides as Allied victories showed the Japanese were vulnerable.
Aung San's forces were instrumental in the defeat of the Japanese in Burma, but after the war the British attempted to isolate him. This was especially due to British commercial interests in logging, oil, tea and other natural resources, who saw him as a potent impediment to development. He was accused of repressing the Karen people who had rebelled against the Japanese during the war. Winston Churchill called Aung San a "traitor rebel leader" for refusing to accept partial independence under the Commonwealth system. Fearing he might lead another insurgency it was widely suspected the British engineered his assassination on July 19, 1947. In one way Aung San won, for on January 4th 1948 Burma became an independent nation outside of the Commonwealth, but the repression of Aung San's associates, the Communists and Socialists and many nationalists at the hands of British anti-insurgent forces created the foundations of the brutal military rule Burma has suffered under to this day.
However, the Buddhists, always supreme since the conquest of the Mon capital and the domination of the Burmese. Suppression of native animism as well as attempts of Islam and Christianity to gain footholds, religious persecution and a theocratic state have gone hand in hand. The British played on ethnic rivalries for a time in the 1950s but eventually lent support to the Burmese finding the other minorities’ leaders susceptible to either anti-British nationalism or brands of socialism. Buddhism was one means of social control and has benefited from the dictatorships fearing also the socialist tendencies of rebels like Aung San. Wen Wu played with the idea of limiting the power and control of the monasteries in the early 1960s and paid dearly for it by their riots.
Currently the army is in the unpleasant position of being pressed to open the economy and democratize the country at a time when international resource corporations are reaping vast profits from their secret (and some not so ) contracts with them. Any change in the current status quo is also seen by the Buddhist community as a threat to their control over the people, especially the spectre of religious freedom but also the loss of control over food production. In many ways modern Burma is a creature of the British colonial system, but its current structure is organized around indigenous actors who have little to gain from change, and we should reflect on this as we view current events unfolding. We should consider who benefits from actions. In the present case of Real Politics we have to realize that China, like the oil producing countries of OPEC have a tremendous amount of Western currency, especially dollars. Their "sovereign funds" have been buying up Western economic assets including banks and other financial institutions. Recently this has produced calls to halt these purchases as they are believed by some to compromise capitalism and national states as well as the "way business is done in the West." As some believe that all is fair in war, and economic war is simply war without shooting, supporting rebellions within their territory is good "business." The British have applied this strategy for over two centuries, their support for Native American tribes during the Revolutionary War and after (which caused tensions along the Canadian border part of what led to the War of 1812) was one way of conducting silent disruption as was their interference in India to the result that its textile industry collapsed under British pressure.
The militant history of Buddhism is well documented, the most readable are Edwin O. Reischauer and John K. Fairbank, East Asia, The Great Tradition (1958) and Ryusaku Tsunoda and W.T. de Bary's Sources of Japanese Tradition (1964). In both China and Japan secular forces eventually intervened against warring sects, or to end corruption and violent dissension.