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Throwing Water at The Sun
Human Rights in Burma:
Theoretical & Conceptual Issues:
The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights established an international standard of 'civilised conduct' 43 over how states should provide for and protect citizens. In the period since there has been a progressive strengthening of international human rights law, as well as a growing moral awareness of these norms in a diverse range of communities around the globe. To numerous states, in the First and Third worlds alike, international human rights norms fundamentally challenge dominant Westphalian notions of state sovereignty. These notions relate to the principle of non-interference in the domestic affairs of the state, as well as a state's subsequent claims to legitimacy. It can be said that states differ considerably, in the first instance in how far they engage with human rights debates, and in the second, how they live up to internationally recognised human rights standards.
Recent theorising about human rights, particularly from critical & post-modern traditions, has brought the foundations on which the international human rights system has been built into considerable question. While international human rights can be seen as a response to the 'universal social facts' of torture, starvation, human degradation and violence, it is the very claim to universality, which has been most contested & debated. Further, individual states increasing use of human rights rhetoric as a foreign policy tool has worked to undermine the salience of internationally recognised human rights standards.
International norms of human rights, like those about state-hood and sovereignty, are also frequently invoked as institution and codified into law, but are in the same way socially constructed. Booth (1999) asserts that discourses of human rights are important to human history because they are part of the language of "the human species' self-creating emancipation from natural and societal threats." 44 Human rights are arguably an important set of moral concerns in international politics out of which have grown a number of key international institutions and activities, such as the Commission on Human Rights, as well as other numerous treaty monitoring and resolution drafting processes. Human rights norms in many ways contradict realist notions of state sovereignty and legitimacy, and have had a powerful impact on a post Cold War understanding of sovereignty- a notion that allows for increasing intervention in the internal affairs of states on human rights grounds 45. In addition, human rights norms have had some impact on the behaviour of states towards citizens 46. Yet, throughout history the moral imperatives attached to notions of human rights have been strongly contested.
Dunne & Wheeler (1999) argue that "(d)evelopments in post-modern social and political theory challenge the very quest for moral certainty which underpinned the vision of the post-1945 human rights regime" 47. In many ways, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was a response to European and North American concerns post World War II and the specific occurrence of the Nazi Holocaust. While it represented a powerful consensus statement about the dignity inherent in all human beings, the idea that we all have rights and responsibilities by virtue of our common humanity, must be acknowledged as masking a particularly Western liberal notion of what is 'humanity' and what are 'rights'.
In this section of my paper I will critically reflect on both the foundation claims of human rights to universality, and interrogate cultural relativist claims by the Burmese military that, "(t)he global colonialist group is widely using the word 'human rights' as a weapon to interfere in the affairs of other nations. But the basic rights of all the Myanmar people have already been provided wisely in Myanmar Society" 48. It is between these polarised claims of universalism and cultural relativism that discussion on human rights in Burma is locked. But it is somewhere in the spaces in between these debates that a more useful debate about human rights in Burma can occur.
Human rights discourse is a language of meanings within which new understandings of the 'states' and 'citizens', and the 'rights' and 'responsibilities' of global citizenship, may be thought, organised and circulated within the international system. While language constitutes social reality for many human beings and becomes a site of struggle where competing 'truths' fight for sovereignty, Foucault suggests that discourse is the place where knowledge is ultimately produced, truth established and power exercised 49. Making a claim 'to know' is an exercise of power in that by making such claims, alternative and competing understandings of that same subject are excluded or marginalised. Much has been written on how neo-liberalism deploys the power to govern in discursive spaces, which form the basis for 'the international system' and 'human rights' as a field of knowledge' 50. It does this by the same means by which neo-liberal ideas of statehood and state sovereignty are constructed.
However, Mohanty (1988) warns of the dangers of writes of western Philosophical thought's privileged assumptions and 'ethnocentric universality'. She warns against failing to see the material effects of western scholarship on the 'third world' in the context of a world system dominated by the west, who constantly and strategically fail to name its race, class and ethnic position 51. While Said (1978) has argued that orientalism is "a way of coming to terms with the Orient, largely a Western construct, that is based on the Orient's special place in European Western experience" 52, prominent Burmese scholar, Michael Aung-Thwin (2002) suggests that an, 'orientalist image of Burma' has come to dominate understandings of Burmese politics and Burma's place in the modern world. He argues that students of Burma have deeply misunderstood and failed to engage with important Burmese social and political values in their pursuit because of 'Pax Americana', a term used to describe the declaration of "the Western ideals of democracy and human rights as universal doctrines" which the US strongly markets throughout the world and is expressed through US influences international bodies 53. Aung-Thwin goes on to raises a crucial point- that the result of a "contradictory principle- the idea of national sovereignty on the one hand and universalism on the other- is hypocrisy" 54. For example, this is evidenced in US bi-lateral foreign policy towards Burma which, while continuing to appeal to the notion of state sovereignty, channels 'democratic' and 'humanitarian' funds largely to opposition groups aimed at displacing it from power. Aung-Thwin writes, that,
"Perhaps the most destructive aspect of democratisation is that invariably means decentralisation, which, in most non-Western contexts today, encourages social and political anarchy. In countries such as Burma, anarchy is feared far more than tyranny, so that if there exists a genuine desire to promote freedom from fear, issues important to Burmese society should be addressed, not assumptions concerning the universalism of western values" 55.
Aung-Thwin, despite almost sounding like an apologist for the military regime does raise a good point. What we can take away from his ideas is that in a discussion of human rights change in Burma, first direct ideological engagement with Burmese social, cultural, moral and political values is required. But the challenge lies in finding the terms of which ideological engagement can produce results.
In international human rights discourses, a key measure of a states ability to defend human rights is reflected in the level to which civil society 56 is allowed to flourish and influence the state. Repeated UN resolutions on Burma have called for the restoration of civil society in Burma, which has not existed for some decades. Civil society is seen as crucial element in a cosmopolitan democracy 57, however Steinberg (2001) notes that the term 'civil society' is a particularly subjective, Western concept that does not have a Burmese language equivalent 58. Aung-Thwin notes that Burmese language today deploys a Western definition of 'civil' because the concept of society in Burma had never separated 'civil' from state, military or religious components of society. For example, the equivalent of Western civil law is in Burmese 'social law' 59. The term civil society is likewise not employed by the military regime, although the National League for Democracy has used the term in a limited way 60, perhaps in recognition of it's limited domestic usefulness.
While the international community deploys ethnocentric universalisms about human rights, so too the Burmese military deploys it's own ideology in discursive spaces to achieve legitimacy and power. Houtman (1999) argues that there have been two approaches to the institutionalisation of tradition in Burma- on the one hand, the military regime's preoccupation with pagoda reconstruction, museum-building and other 'myanmafication' projects, and on the other, Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy's 'universalist mental culture' which steeped in a Theravada Buddhist tradition 61. He sets out the ways in which the military regime has attempted to re-define history 62 to bring it into line with its own national ideology. For example, the regimes preoccupation with history - the 'proof' of museum building, pagoda reconstruction, archaeology etc- makes sense when seen in the context of the regimes need to show it is a legitimate government based on an ancient culture. But, in the words of Nobel peace laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, 'national culture' like the ideology behind 'myanmafication' can become "a bizarre graft of carefully selected historical incidents and distorted social values intended to justify the policies and actions of those in power" 63.