By SETH MYDANS, The New York Times, May 01, 2010.BANGKOK — It is an obvious move when generals in a military junta decide to step aside in favor of civilian rule: shed military ranks and uniforms and transform themselves into civilians.
Last week, several cabinet members in Myanmar’s junta did a quick change, resigning from the armed forces, apparently in preparation for parliamentary elections expected later this year.
Under a new Constitution adopted in 2008, the military that has ruled Myanmar, formerly Burma, since 1962 is preparing to replace itself with a civilian government that includes a 440-member House of Representatives.
The new legislature will set aside 25 percent of its seats for serving military officers, a number that could be augmented by former officers in civilian clothes.
Many foreign analysts, as well as Myanmar’s opposition party, the National League for Democracy, have called the elections a false front intended to put a civilian face on the military’s continued grip on power.
According to the official press, the prime minister, Gen. Thein Sein, and 22 cabinet ministers gave up their uniforms on Monday, a move that was not unexpected in advance of the elections. They maintained their cabinet positions, however, perhaps a foretaste of the civilian governments to come.
The addition of those and any other newly resigned officers would ensure an even greater role for the military in the legislature, which in any case is not expected by foreign analysts to be independent of the country’s top leadership. Under the new Constitution, that leadership will also be dominated by serving military officers, with the armed forces chief remaining the country’s most powerful figure.
The Constitution requires a candidate to be a member of a political party, and last week the official press reported that after shedding his uniform, Prime Minister Thein Sein, now a civilian, had applied to form a new party.
On the opposition side, the National League for Democracy, headed by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, has announced that it will not participate in the elections, which it condemned as unfair and undemocratic.
That party won the last elections, in 1990, by a landslide but was prevented from assuming office by the ruling junta, which maintained its grip on power.
Many of the party’s members have been arrested since then, and Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi has spent most of the past 20 years under house arrest. The Constitution bars people with criminal records from running for office.
Analysts say Myanmar’s half-step toward democracy could begin a long, slow process of greater accountability, at least on a local level. In any case, the military so thoroughly permeates the government, bureaucracy and economy of Myanmar that it is likely to retain vast influence in all areas of life, no matter what shape the government takes.
It has been a long-term project for the military junta to seek the legitimacy, at least in form, of an electoral mandate. Its goal is what it calls “discipline flourishing democracy,” which would presumably avoid the undisciplined clash of interests in more open Western-style democracies.
Its neighbors in Southeast Asia present a range of democratic and nondemocratic formulas of government, including the disciplined parliamentary systems of Singapore and Cambodia, with their virtual one-party rule.
But since the overthrow of President Suharto in Indonesia in 1998, none of them have been governed by the military, which analysts say is still likely to be the case in Myanmar despite its civilian format.
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