Policy Conflict over the U. S. Intervention in Myanmar and the “Reconstructions of the Past”

Abstract

Although not widely recognized, Washington's intervention in Myanmar's democratization process during and after 1987-90 was not a recognized U. S. policy. Testimonies during the hearings at the U. S. Congress on September 13, 1989 reveal that the Political Bureau of the Department of State (DOS) was squarely against the intervention, which some Congressmen, the Bureau of Humanitarian Affairs of the DOS, and the ambassador to Myanmar were advocating and had unilaterally been putting into action. The interventionists' behaviors were based on the idea that Myanmar's military government—successor to Ne Win's dictatorial regime, which took power by means of the 1988 coup that brutally cracked down on the pro-democracy demonstrations—not only violated human rights but had also been engaged in narcotics trafficking, and that U. S. cooperation with Myanmar for the purpose of narcotics eradication should be postponed until a civilian democratic government was established with extended U. S. support to the protesters and economic sanctions should be imposed on the military government.The Political Bureau of the DOS had no intention of intervening. Instead, they denied the military government's involvement in narcotics abuse, which is ascribed to the country's ethnic insurgents by most of the researchers on Myanmar (Burma) and on the “heroin politics” in Southeast Asia, and claimed that the reasons for the crackdown were due to the military's apprehension of foreigners and political parties sowing dissent within the ranks of the military as well as within the nation. They also asserted that the U. S. needed to resume good relations with Myanmar (Burma) in order to continue to cooperate in the country's narcotics eradication efforts.In this connection, the article mentions two basic historical facts. One is that the problem of the narcotics industry in Myanmar is a by-product of the CIA-backed KMT operations— an unconventional covert intervention during the early Cold War days for the purpose of turning the ethnic insurgents into anti-communist paramilitary forces— that overrode the traditional, legitimate policy of the DOS towards Myanmar. The other is the Anti-Narcotics Abuses Act of 1986, which legally obliged the U. S. president to impose sanction against the narcotics-producing countries, including Myanmar, and thereby trapped the whole U. S. government in the dilemma of the by-product of the covert KMT operations, the secrecy of which is legally not allowed to be disclosed.A close comparative examination of the U. S. official documents related to human rights practices and the narcotics eradication efforts in cooperation with Myanmar before and after the passage of the 1986 Act discloses what Robert Taylor describes as “self-serving, distorted and overly-simplified reconstructions of the past, ” which led to the above-mentioned contradictions in perception and in policy. The article concludes that the traditional, legitimate policy was defeated once again by the unconventional covert interventionist policy in dealing with what Taylor and M. Reisman call “low-intensity warfare.”