Myanmar’s U Thein Sein: The Unlikely Reformer

March 20, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com

New York Times-Article by Thomas Fuller

by Thomas Fuller

FOR most of his career, he was a loyal apparatchik in one of the most brutal military regimes in the world. But in the 12 months since he became the President of Myanmar, U Thein Sein has been leading this country of 55 million down a radical path from dictatorship to democracy, vowing, as he told the country this month, to “root out the evil legacies deeply entrenched in our society”.

There are no pat answers about why Thein Sein, a bookish 66-year-old with a sphinx-like smile, decided to shake up one of Asia’s poorest and most hermetic countries. And little has been published about the President, a former general who has been called the Mikhail Gorbachev of Myanmar.

But a trip to Kyonku, his birthplace, located in a remote corner of the country, offers some insights into his character and clues as to what prompted him to embark on such an ambitious reform programme.

Kyonku is a small village in the delta of the Irrawaddy River, an area connected by a vast network of canals, inlets and rivers. Four years ago, Thein Sein returned to the delta after a cyclone swept in from the Indian Ocean and devastated the area. It was by far Myanmar’s worst natural disaster, killing more than 130,000 people.

At the time, Thein Sein was the head of the country’s disaster-preparedness committee and thus the leader of the military junta’s emergency response. But as he crisscrossed the delta in a helicopter, he saw how unprepared the impoverished country was for such a catastrophe.

Cyclone Nargis was a “mental trigger”, said U Tin Maung Thann, the head of Myanmar Egress, a Yangon research organisation that provides policy advice to the President. “It made him realise the limitations of the old regime.”

Thein Sein may have had other realisations. As Prime Minister for three years, he represented Myanmar abroad, a contrast to other senior officials in the junta who rarely left the country.

Those who followed Thein Sein’s rise through the ranks of Myanmar’s military describe him as extremely loyal but also more conciliatory than other senior members of the junta. As the head of the Triangle command, a region in northern Myanmar rife with drug trafficking and home to a number of minority ethnic groups, Thein Sein was remembered as “less cruel” than other men who held the same job, said Khuensai Jaiyen, an editor of an organisation that reports news about the Shan ethnic group.

Thein Sein owes his rise through the military ranks to his former boss, Senior Gen Than Shwe, the dictator who led the junta for almost two decades until his retirement last year.

Than Shwe, who was widely reviled in the country for his suppression of democratic forces, is believed to have engineered Thein Sein’s selection as President. One Adviser says that the selection of Thein Sein and the start of the reform process were designed to allow the aging dictator to slip quietly and peacefully into retirement.

“Than Shwe is safe due to these reforms,” said  U Nay Win Maung, who is also a speechwriter to the president. “It creates a safe haven for him. An uprising is not realistic any time soon.”

Reform in Myanmar, to paraphrase Victor Hugo, was in some ways an idea whose time had come: Thein Sein’s government responded to the bottled-up ambitions and desires of small businesses, Buddhist monks and ordinary citizens who suffered under the junta and were somewhat inspired by the Arab Spring of last year.

But analysts say Thein Sein’s role should not be underestimated. The major breakthrough of this government was convincing Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the country’s democracy movement, to rejoin the political system, a coup that gave Thein Sein considerable credibility at home and abroad.

Thein Sein is also often described as “clean”, a standout in a kleptocratic military junta that doled out contracts and concessions to friends and family. A year after Thein Sein took power, the country is in a halfway house between authoritarianism and democracy.

“Have we already completed building a new nation where genuine democracy and eternal principles flourish?” Thein Sein said in a televised address to the country this month. “No, we still have much more to do.”

He vowed to put in place a system of universal healthcare. Spending on healthcare would increase fourfold in the next financial year and spending on education would double.

Thein Sein made similarly bold and ambitious pledges during his inaugural address last March, but at the time, sceptics wondered whether his words were simply meant to appease a country hankering for change after nearly five decades of military rule and inept economic management.

Towards the middle of last year, however, Thein Sein began convincing sceptics by reaching out to Suu Kyi, lifting most censorship on the media, freeing political prisoners, suspending work on a Chinese hydroelectric dam project, rewriting land and labour laws and encouraging more open debates in society.

Many analysts say they are concerned that the reform process is highly personalised and overly dependent on the success of Thein Sein and a handful of his Advisers and pro-reform Ministers.

There are concerns that political will could dissipate. The euphoria of increased political freedoms could soon give way to the realities of a country with grinding poverty, something that will take years to change.–http://www.nytimes.com