How did Aung San Suu Kyi go from being the next Nelson Mandela, with pop stars and world leaders queuing up to have their photos taken with her, to become a figure of universal disdain, presiding over a humanitarian crisis she seemed to refuse to believe was happening? Well, obviously, that has a lot to do with our own insatiable appetite for heroes and villains and our reluctance to read long foreign policy analyses, but it also has something to do with the realities of governing postcolonial countries, where the legacy of generations of inequality, poverty, lack of education and the complexities of geography, religion and ethnicity cannot simply be magicked away by the first free election.

Thant Myint-U, as U Thant’s grandson, a former UN official in his own right and a senior adviser to the transitional government of ex-General Thein Sein, has his own stake in Burmese politics and is not exactly a neutral outsider, but he does give us a very clear summary of the country’s history and its problems, as well as a lively memoir of the period in the early years of this century when he was personally involved.

When the British withdrew in 1948, Burma was given borders which roughly corresponded to the area that had been under the control of the Myanma kingdom that came to power in the late 18th century. The cities and the Irrawaddy valley and delta in the centre of the country formed a reasonably homogeneous area, Burmese-speaking, mostly Buddhist apart from Indian workers brought in by the British, and with a legacy of British administration. But the border areas, west, east and north, were ethnically diverse and had not been under colonial administration. After 1948, all these areas came under the control of a patchwork of local militias, most of which have been in a state of civil war or at best uneasy ceasefire with the Burmese government ever since. In the west there were tensions between Buddhists and Muslims, some of whom were the descendants of people who had been living there for centuries, others more recent immigrants from Bengal. In the east the militias had important economic links with China, controlling activities such as narcotics, gambling, logging and mining. Burma came to be governed by an authoritarian military dictatorship that more or less kept the lid on the civil war, taking rake-offs from these illegal activities, and violently suppressing political dissent.

The country’s political and economic isolation, and the extreme poverty of most of the population, were only increased by the sanctions the international community used to try to pressure the leadership into democratic reforms. The dictator Than Shwe attempted to find a way out of the impasse by setting up a succession plan for his own retirement that would lead to a new constitution with the appearance of democracy but all the real power still in the hands of the army, but events moved much faster than he had anticipated, partly due to the great popularity of the leader of the main democratic opposition party, Aung San Suu Kyi, who found herself de facto head of government at a moment when the country was still far from being governable in any meaningful way, with an army that was not under her control, and rebel forces on all sides ready to take advantage of the apparent weakness of the state. Tragically, the crisis that exploded first was in the west, with attacks by Muslim separatists provoking brutal army repression and resulting in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of refugees to Bangladesh.

Very interesting, both in filling in a lot I didn’t know about Burma, and as a first-hand case study of the realities of postcolonial states. ( )

All the basic information is here but not a compelling read. ( )