Fog of ethnicity weighs on Myanmar's future

One of the hackneyed themes of contemporary Myanmar politics, repeated so often and so rarely questioned that it seems a truism, is the supposed conflict between the Burman majority and the various other ethnic groups lumped under the labels Kachin, Chin, Karen, Shan, Rakhine, Mon, and Kayah.  Fog of ethnicity weighs on Myanmar's future

    A similarly repeated truism is that the central government and army are dominated by the Burman group (also known as the Bama or Bamar), which is set on obliterating the ethnic diversity of the country through a process known as Burmanization. These related themes are advanced to justify the persistence of nearly perpetual low-level guerrilla warfare between the central government and armed groups that adopt the names of the various ethnic groups.

     Can this simplistic account of Myanmar's politics be questioned? If so, how? Well, for one thing, the Nov. 8 elections which produced an overwhelming majority for the National League for Democracy, a party often described as an essentially Burman organization no different from the governing establishment it is to replace, suggests that ethnicity is not as salient in Myanmar's politics as these cliched themes suggest.

     Ethnically designated parties did remarkably badly in the elections. They won only 11.2% of the seats in the bicameral national parliament (Pyidaungsu Hluttaw) and are in no position to claim to dominate the state legislatures that bear the labels of the seven largest ethnic categories, other than Burmans. In these legislatures, ethnically-designated parties won just 2 of 18 seats in Chin, 7 of 40 in Kachin, none of 15 in Kayah, 1 of 16 in Kayin, 3 of 23 in Mon, 22 of 35 in Rakhine, and 47 of 103 in Shan. (In the last case, the Shan-designated party was only one of a variety of ethnically designated parties that managed to win seats.) (Courtesy of Nikkei Asian Review)

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