Myanmar: The Flood Before the Storm

Massive flooding in Myanmar has adversely affected over one million people, creating a humanitarian crisis in the run-up to general elections scheduled for early November. While certain reports have lauded President Thein Sein’s openness to foreign assistance, a break from the previous junta’s insular indifference to mass human suffering, his government’s inability to deliver sufficient aid belies his military-backed Union Solidarity Development Party’s (USDP) campaign strategy to win the polls on a technocratic ticket.

The floods represent the worst calamity to hit Myanmar since 2008, when Cyclone Nargis killed some 138,000 people and wrought damages estimated at over $10 billion. The previous ruling junta initially blocked foreign assistance partly due to paranoid fears that donor nations, led by the U.S., would use access given for aid deliveries to topple their isolated autocracy. Junta rulers eventually reversed course but international relief was guided largely to military members impacted by the storm or pilfered for personal profit by unscrupulous officials.

Thein Sein, who served as prime minister during Cyclone Nargis, has changed course on the floods, underscoring his USDP’s hope to turn the natural disaster into an electoral opportunity. The United Nations praised Thein Sein’s quick appeal for international assistance and offer of logistical support, including military planes, helicopters and naval boats, to reach inundated areas. Top officials have openly acknowledged the scale of the devastation, a reversal of the official denialism and obstruction that hampered the international response to Cyclone Nargis.  

The media, moreover, has been allowed to travel and report freely on the floods, including in regions where officials have wholly failed to provide food, medicine or shelter to flood-hit communities. Social media has also been unfettered, including posts depicting foreign assistance crudely rebranded with USDP insignia. Critical reporting on the previous junta’s inept and callous response to Cyclone Nargis landed journalists in jail. Nor have officials, unlike in 2008, impeded citizen groups from filling the governmental gap by collecting donations, transporting supplies, and assisting flood-affected communities.

The floods have injected a dramatic element into what was already a highly contentious electoral process. Both the USDP and opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) have struggled to strike an appropriate balance between genuine humanitarianism and political opportunism. Senior leaders from both main parties have made high-profile visits to affected areas to hand out supplies in the eye of the media. Information Minister Ye Htut, known for his gruff manner, issued a rare and emotional public apology for the government’s shortcomings in handling the disaster.

Despite decades of military misrule and neglect, a legacy laid bare by the official failure to manage the floods, the USDP is appealing to the Myanmar electorate on its technocratic competence and continuity. It is a campaign strategy that many observers presume the Washington-based Podesta Group lobby firm helped the government to devise. (The terms of a $840,000 contract between the government of Myanmar and the Podesta Group, announced in April, have not been publicly disclosed.) The message has taken cynical aim at the Aung San Suu Kyi-led NLD opposition, which overwhelmingly won general elections in 1990 but was never allowed to govern after the military annulled the result and maintained iron-fisted power for the next two decades.

Military persecution drove many of the NLD’s best and brightest members into exile or out of politics. Apart from the 43 elected to parliament in the 2012 by-elections, NLD candidates for the upcoming polls, while popular perhaps for their pro-democracy activism, are unproven in terms of actual governance. The NLD is campaigning instead on the enduring, albeit somewhat diminished, grassroots popularity of party leader Suu Kyi, a former political prisoner and daughter of a national independence hero. On the campaign trail, Suu Kyi has called for a “landslide” win in what would equate to a popular vote against six decades of military or de facto military rule.   

Thein Sein’s USDP-led government, elected in polls widely perceived as rigged in 2010, has tried to rewrite that history through mildly more responsive governance. While political and economic reform initiatives have won kudos from foreign governments and investors, the notion that the USDP has delivered economic goods to the local masses does not stand up to scrutiny. In a July interview with the Asian Nikkei Review, Thein Sein acknowledged falling well short of his stated aim of raising GDP per capita from $800 to between $3,000-$5,000 over his five-year term. The figure has barely eclipsed $1,000 per capita, one of the lowest levels in Asia despite the country’s rich bounty of natural resources.

Myanmar’s entrenched poverty is a direct result of decades of corrupt and profligate military misrule. Diversion of funds to military budgets and top brass pet projects, including the establishment of a garish and largely empty new capital city at Naypyidaw, crowded out spending on the basic physical infrastructure and public services that have been so glaringly lacking in the official response to the floods. Thein Sein, a 45-year military veteran, was quoted in local media advising Irrawaddy Delta residents to evacuate the flood-prone area ahead of the storms without offering any means or ways to take safe shelter. When Myanmar’s bedraggled masses head to the polls on November 8, alas, there will be no technocratic choice on the ballot.