Talk by Amartya Sen on the need for global action for democracy in Burma

Listen to the keynote lecture by Amartya Sen at the conference "A Return to Civilian Rule? The Prospects for Democracy and Rights in Burma After the Election" on 20 October 2010 at Washington DC.

Full audio of the lecture on Burma by Amartya Sen

20 October 2010

[Excerpts from the transcripts of the talk by Amartya Sen]

It is difficult for me to talk about Burma without a deep sense of nostalgia. My earliest memories are all of Burma, where I grew up between the ages of three and six. My father was a visiting professor at the Agricultural College in Mandalay, on leave from Dhaka University. My first memory of striking natural beauty is that of sunrise over the Maymyo hills seen from our wooden house at the eastern edge of Mandalay. It was a thrilling sight even for a young boy. My first recollections of warm human relations stretching beyond my own family are also of kindly Burmese society. Mandalay was a lively city in the 1930s, and Burma a magically beautiful country. The richness of the land and the enormous capacity of the Burmese people to be happy and friendly shone brightly through the restraining lid of British colonialism.

After a short period of independence from British rule and a brief experience of democracy, Burma has been in the grip of a supremely despotic military rule for almost half-a-century now. The country is now one of the absolutely poorest on the globe. Its educational and health services are in tatters. Medicine is difficult to get, and educational institutions can hardly function. There is viciously strict censorship, combined with heavy punishment for rebellious voices. The minority communities—Shans, Karens, Chins, Rohingyas and others—get particularly cruel and oppressive treatment. There are shockingly plentiful cases of arbitrary imprisonment, terrifying torture, state-directed displacement of people, and organised rapes and killings. And when the population faces a catastrophe, like in the hurricane Nargis in May 2008, the government not only does not want to help at all, its first inclination is to ban others in the world from helping the distressed people in the country.

The military rulers have renamed Burma as Myanmar, and the renaming seems perhaps understandable, for the country is no longer the Burma that magnificently flourished over the centuries. New Myanmar is the hell-hole version of old Burma.

What is striking is that tyranny has grown steadily in Burma precisely over the decades in which democracy has made major progress across the globe. One of the foundational questions is how has the long process of the Burmese descent into hell been possible in a world that has been moving exactly in the opposite direction. What does it tell us about global relations?

Individuals and groups act on the basis of reasoning in undertaking reflected actions. These reasonings often go by the name of “incentives†. When we are concerned with changing behaviours and policies, we have to examine carefully what incentives the different agents involved—the Burmese government, the citizens, the neighbouring countries and the world at large—have in contributing to changing things in Burma.

[. . .]

Three final observations. First, it is hard to persuade governments like India, Thailand, or for that matter China, that their policies regarding Burma are valuationally crude and gross, if the western countries, which are sharp on rhetoric in denouncing Myanmar’s rulers, do not do what is entirely within their power to do with their own Burmese involvement. Several European countries as well as countries elsewhere have strong business relations with Burma, for example, extensively in oil exploration and use. At a different level, neither the European Union, nor the United States, nor indeed Switzerland, Australia or Canada, has used the power of financial sanctions against the regime, demanding substantial change in their policies. This makes it harder to press the offending neighbours, when global action is so limited.

[. . .]

We can confront the tyrants and do our duty to Burma only if we do not lose focus. The need for that concentration has never been greater than it is today, when the monstrosities of the regime continue undiminished, when sops like preordained electoral arrangements confuse and confound well-meaning people, and when the world seems at a loss about what can be done to help the Burmese people. There is everything to fight for—with clarity and reason.