The False Hope of American Support for Myanmar Democracy vs. Political Realism of Asian Giants: The Two Interviews

Dr Maung Zarni is a dissident intellectual who is permanently exiled in UK since 2005. As a young student in California where he began his American education in 1989, he was a staunch supporter of the Burmese Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who fast emerged as a rallying figure and a global icon for anti-authoritarianism.

When Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy party called for economic sanctions and other punitive measures he sprang into action as a foot soldier.

But his irreversible twofold disillusionment with her leadership with its pro-sanctions policies and Washington’s brazen hypocrisy on human rights, democracy and rule of law, he publicly broke with Aung San Suu Kyi’s “sanctions orthodoxy” and voluntarily renounced his political asylum in the United States, after the 2nd US invasion of Iraq, which led to the destruction of an Iraqi society and its dismemberment.

He did so at a time when no Burmese dissident in exile dared to even disagree publicly with the increasingly autocratic leader on her sanctions advocacy.

As a staunch opponent of genocidal racism towards Myanmar’s indigenous Rohingya Muslims and general Islamophobia, he openly condemned Myanmar’s military and political leaders, starting with Aung San Suu Kyi as early as 2013. In his view, both camps of military generals and anti-junta democrats have led Myanmar public down the genocidal racist path.

[See Aung San Suu Kyi and the world of Buddhist Islamophobia, Aljazeera, 3 Nov 2013]

In the two recent interviews, Zarni analysed US policies towards Myanmar, in terms of how the policies were made to what impact on society at large, whether there were any democratic dividends. He lived in Washington, DC and worked with various executive and congressional offices, advocating for punitive measures against Myanmar junta as endorsed by Suu Kyi and her NLD party.

Additionally, he offered a rational analysis of a typical realist stance which Myanmar’s powerful neighbours such as India and China has long adopted.

In his widely viewed Burmese language interview with a UK-based Myanmar journalist Ko Thet Htwe Naing, Maung Zarni shared with his fellow Myanmar people an unvarnished view on what drives US policies towards Myanmar – namely narrow American corporate and strategic interests. He told his Burmese audiences that Myanmar resistance movements – and the public – must wean themselves from their policy fantasies of USA (or Europe) supporting their democratic and ethnically federalist aspirations.

Watch the interview (56 minutes) here or below –

In the second interview with India’s leading news media The Hindu, the veteran dissident said India’s policy towards Myanmar is Indian security-focused, not democratization or ethnic federalism for Myanmar people.