By Trefor Moss
It’s hard to imagine a more dramatic shift of tactics. Less than five years ago, the Burmese military, the Tatmadaw, greeted popular calls for change with batons and bullets, crushing the “saffron revolution” with its trademark brutality. But at the weekend, the men in khaki were conspicuous by their absence during elections that were relatively free and that appear to have swept Aung San Suu Kyi and other National League for Democracy (NLD) candidates into parliament.
Nonetheless, it would be naïve to imagine that an institution that held absolute power for the last half century would now meekly accept the role of wallflower at Burma’s democracy party. The military remains a key actor in national affairs, and the reform process can only succeed if the Tatmadaw is made to feel that it, too, stands to be one of the winners in the country’s transformation. And that means two things: that the Tatmadaw has to be compensated for its loss of political power; and that the civilian government has to refrain from crossing any of the military leadership’s red lines.
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