Bangkok,Tthailand – Hunkered down in their war rooms hundreds of miles from mass protests, the aging, hard-line generals in Myanmar are known as a suspicious lot who view the West with disdain and depend on browbeaten advisers and even an astrologer to guide them.
Much like Myanmar’s former kings, they see themselves as the only ones capable of ruling and their army as the only force that can transform the country into a modern state. Anyone questioning their 45 years of supremacy is simply seen as a threat and dealt with by the same brute force.
“They are moving to put down what they consider a threat to the nation,” said Mary Callahan, a Myanmar expert at the University of Washington. “I think these senior officers really believe they have done right by their country and (that) the protesters are threatening the stability of the country and threatening what they consider the progress they brought.”
The demonstrations are the stiffest challenge to the ruling junta in two decades. The heavy-handed response, analysts said, was not surprising given the junta’s long history of snuffing out all dissent since the country’s independence in 1948.
For decades, they have also waged a brutal war against ethnic groups in which soldiers have razed villages, raped women and killed innocent civilians – atrocities that continue to this day. Since the 1980s, they have detained and tortured thousands of political prisoners, including Aung San Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy leader who has been under house arrest for almost 12 of the past 18 years.
When hundreds of thousands of citizens took to the streets peacefully in 1988, the military opened fire, killing as many as 3,000.
Senior Gen. Than Shwe, who heads the regime, “believes himself to be very much a patriot, a nationalist. He speaks often about the sacrifices that he and his generation and his soldiers have made,” said Razali Ismail, a former U.N. special envoy to Myanmar.
The junta claims credit for modernizing Myanmar. It has doubled the size of the army to 400,000 and opened the isolated, impoverished country of 54 million people to foreign investment. It also built scores of new roads, bridges, pagodas and schools.
But its aggressive push to develop the country was not matched by progress in the political arena. Fearful of another 1988 uprising, it responded to its loss of the 1990 elections by refusing to hand over power and imprisoning Suu Kyi.
History suggests the military will stay united. Soldiers have plenty of incentives to remain loyal – they and their families get better food, housing, health care and other benefits than ordinary Burmese.
