Sub-title:
Avenues for reform and decentralization and steps towards a federal system.
Description:
"Ever since the Panglong Agreement was signed on February 12, 1947, only two weeks after
the Aung San - Attlee Agreement on Burma’s Independence of January 27, 1947, the issues of
federalism, minority rights and self-determination have been central to Myanmar politics, confict
and military-civilian relations. Accordingly, relations between the center and the periphery are
at the core of the constitutions of 1947 and 1974, as well as the 2008 Constitution. Yet, by any
standards, the Myanmar state has been unitary, and indeed centralized to an extreme degree,
since independence in 1948, leading to 70 years of confict.
To a large degree, the confict explains the other defning trait of the Myanmar state: for most
of the last seven decades, it has been dominated by the military. Relations between the military
and state institutions have been shaped by the relationship between the central government and
Ethnic Armed Organizations (EAOs).
The issues of democracy, federalism and the role of the military cannot be separated, and
together they form the basis for modern Myanmar politics. In this context, it is not surprising
that organizations representing the interests of ethnic nationalities spent the last two decades of
military rule, after the emergence of the democracy movement of 1988 and the NLD’s victory in
the 1990 elections, calling for a “tripartite dialogue” among the NLD, the military and themselves.
It is no coincidence that these were also the decades when the military was drafting the 2008
Constitution.
The current peace process was initiated by President U Thein Sein in 2011, the year Myanmar
embarked on its transition to democracy. Although democracy and the pursuit of peace are
undoubtedly two of Myanmar’s most pressing issues, the fact that two distinct processes – which
will be referred to in this paper as the political process and the peace process – developed from
there raises a number of issues..."
Source/publisher:
Konrad-Adenauer Stiftung Ltd (Yangon)
Date of Publication:
2018-01-04
Date of entry:
2020-02-17
Grouping:
- Individual Documents
Category:
Countries:
Myanmar
Language:
English
Local URL:
Format:
pdf
Size:
368.39 KB (82 pages)
Resource Type:
text
Text quality:
- Good