Who are the Military Delegates in Myanmar’s 2010-2015 Union Legislature? (2015)

SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia Vol. 30, No. 2 (2015), pp. 338–70 DOI: 10.1355/sj30-2b© 2015 ISEAS ISSN 0217-9520 print / ISSN 1793-2858 electronic

Who are the Military Delegates in Myanmar’s 2010–2015 Union Legislature?

Renaud Egreteau

Made available in 2012, short biographies of 166 officers permit examination of the sociological profiles of the Burmese military officers seconded to Myanmar’s Union parliament. Data cover the five socio-demographic variables of gender, age, ethnicity, religion and education, as well as the positions that these officers occupied at the time of their secondment to parliament. These data show that, as a group, the initial cohort of military legislators constitutionally appointed to the two houses of Myanmar’s inaugural “post-junta” Union parliament had a younger and relatively better-educated profile than their elected peers. The most senior officers also had had long careers in the bureaucracy of the armed forces and in its training and educational institutions. Yet as a group they proved far less ethnically and religiously diverse than the civilian representatives, as the substantial majority of them were ethnic Bamar and Buddhist.

Keywords: parliament, legislator, sociological profile, defence representative, civil-military relations, Myanmar, Tatmadaw.

In 2011, Myanmar’s armed forces, or Tatmadaw, initiated a process of gradual disengagement from day-to-day politics.1 The military-written constitution ratified after a referendum of much-disputed legitimacy in 2008 provided all the instruments for an incremental withdrawal of the Burmese military from political activity (Prager Nyein 2011, pp. 28–29; Bünte 2014, pp. 751–52; Taylor 2015, pp. 1–5). Yet, despite the disbanding in March 2011 of the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC, or the “junta”), the Tatmadaw has not fully retreated to the barracks. Its hierarchy still assumes that

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Who are the Military Delegates in Myanmar’s 2010–2015 Union Legislature? 339

the military must as an institution continue to play a leading role in state policymaking.2 It now shares power with civilians in a new post-SPDC hybrid political system (Callahan 2012, p. 122; Maung Aung Myoe 2014, pp. 238–40; Steinberg 2015). Under the terms of this system the armed forces have constitutionally secured, among other preserves, not only control of three ministries in the Union executive branch — Home Affairs, Defence, and Border Affairs — but also a quarter of all seats both in the Union parliament and in the fourteen state and regional legislative assemblies (or hluttaw).

This article is concerned with the military officers seconded to the bicameral Union legislature, the Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, formed after the general elections of November 2010. Located in Naypyitaw, Myanmar’s national capital since 2005, the parliament features a lower house, the Pyithu Hluttaw, with a maximum of 440 representatives and an upper house, the Amyotha Hluttaw, with 224 representatives. It first convened in January 2011 (Horsey 2011; ICG 2013, p. 2). In both chambers, the Tatmadaw controls a fourth of all seats — a maximum of 110 military members of parliament in the Pyithu Hluttaw and fifty-six in the Amyotha Hluttaw (Articles 109b and 141b of the 2008 Constitution). All 166 military legislators are appointed by the commander-in-chief of the Tatmadaw.3 Indeed, Article 33 of the Pyithu Hluttaw Election Law and Article 33 of the Amyotha Hluttaw Election Law stipulate that the army commander needs only to inform the Union Election Commission of nominations to parliament. The duration of the mandates of the military representatives is not delineated; the army commander can remove and replace them at will. Since the first parliamentary session, held in January–March 2011, military legislators have been replaced on a regular basis, unlike their civilian colleagues. The mandates of the latter are aligned with that of the legislature; they thus serve five-year terms. All replacements of military MPs are announced the day after they are made in parliamentary publications, as well as in the state media.

Along with the new executive power, a presidential cabinet led since March 2011 by U Thein Sein, Myanmar’s parliament

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has attempted to play a leading role in the post-SPDC transition. A number of studies have explored the recent re-emergence of parliament in a country long deprived of any meaningful legislative processes (Moe Thuzar 2013; Kean 2014; Egreteau 2014b). Some have provided preliminary insights into the legislative behaviour of the army representatives (ICG 2013; Egreteau 2013, forthcoming 2015). The present article builds on a recent examination of the sociological profiles and demographic characteristics of the 658 Union-level legislators in Myanmar’s parliament after the by-elections of April 2012 (Egreteau 2014a). Narrowing the focus to just the 166 military representatives in both chambers of the Union-level legislative body at that same moment, it delves into the profiles and occupational backgrounds of military officers seconded to Myanmar’s re-emergent legislative branch. The analysis here is limited to the Union parliament, to which I was granted access. It does not treat the fourteen state and regional assemblies, on which data remain scarce.

The objective of this article is to develop a better appreciation of the backgrounds of the Burmese military officers assigned to non-combat and bureaucratic roles and ordered to perform civilian and policy functions in Myanmar’s newly formed legislative bodies. How senior are these officers? What are their ranks, and at which stages of their careers were they ordered to join the new parliamentary institution? What educational paths have they followed, and in which areas of specialization have they been trained? What are their ethno-religious characteristics? Can we identify patterns in the selection of military appointee in the first post-SPDC legislature? Is there any archetypal profile for the Burmese military officer sent there?

The article starts with a methodological clarification and a critical discussion of the principal source from which data are drawn. The Burmese armed forces remain a closed institution. The disclosure of information about their internal functioning and personnel is uncommon. Yet, a document released in 2012 offered brief biographical information on all 166 military appointees and on the 492 elected parliamentarians sitting in the two chambers of the Union parliament during the third parliamentary session, which

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ended in May 2012. The current analysis therefore draws on a single document, one whose origin remains unclear. Uncertainty about the information provided is frustrating. Despite its flaws, however, this is the sole source from which one can have a glimpse of the basic sociological profiles of the military officers seconded to Myanmar’s new legislative body, at least at a particular moment of time.

I focus in this study on the five socio-demographic variables of gender, age, ethnicity, religion and education, as well as on the important professional question of the positions in which officers served at the time of their secondment to parliament. These variables are usually considered as constitutive of the “social background” of a legislator or a policymaker (Putnam 1976, p. 43). I will draw a comparison between the profiles of the 166 Tatmadaw legislators and those of the 492 elected parliamentarians also serving in 2012. If and when further data become available, I plan to study the ways in which the profiles of Tatmadaw legislators may differ from or be similar to those of the military officers occupying other positions in the Tatmadaw. In the meantime, this article serves as a useful starting point for comparative research on the continuing — and very much evolving — intervention of the Burmese armed forces in Myanmar’s “post-junta” political, legislative and civilian affairs.

Research Design

In addition to interviews that I carried out with elected and military MPs between 2013 and 2015, this article draws primarily on a single document compiling short bio-sketches of the Burmese legislators in the first “post-SPDC” Union-level parliament (The Parliaments of Myanmar 2013). The term of this parliament was from 2010 to 2015.4 How this document was compiled and why it was approved for public release in 2012 remain a mystery. Even officials from the Ministry of Defence recently queried seemed quite unsure why the military hierarchy agreed to the release of the document.5 One can speculate that the bureau responsible for the promotion, selection and secondment of commissioned Tatmadaw officers may be the

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source of the data on the 166 army members of the hluttaw. While the original document was in Burmese, the Yangon printing house MCM has prepared and released an English translation, as The Parliaments of Myanmar (ibid.).6 Burmese translators who quite obviously lacked familiarity with Myanmar’s myriad of non-Bamar proper names and geographical terms prepared this version of the document. One therefore needs to decipher the many inaccuracies, mistakes and typos that riddle it.

Nevertheless, and notwithstanding its intrinsic ambiguity, this single document is in itself a welcome source of knowledge about the Tatmadaw, whose affairs remain hidden from domestic and foreign observers alike. Scholarship on Burmese military politics has long stressed the difficulty of gaining direct access to the army’s top brass, and more generally of obtaining reliable data or developing expertise on the Tatmadaw (Callahan 2003, pp. xii–xiv). The 2012 document offers a wealth of unsuspected information and anecdotal evidence to those readers able to pay attention to its details or to read between the lines. Beside the full name, most recent home address, date of birth, ethnic background, religious faith, and level of educational achievement of each Union-level legislator, the document offers more or less extensive chronologies of their professional activities. It provides the military positions that all army appointees occupied at the time of their secondment to parliament. It also contains information on their post-secondary education: the military academies or specialized schools that they attended, the degrees — including foreign degrees — that they were awarded and their areas of military or civilian specialization. The army or state decorations awarded to these officers are sometimes emphasized, and, here and there in the document, even more surprising anecdotal details are to be found.

This article offers a snapshot of the contingent of the military representatives sitting in the two chambers of the Union parliament at the end of the third session in May 2012, when their biographies seem to have been gathered and published. The assembly of the data followed the commander-in-chief’s replacement of fifty-nine mid-ranking officers appointed in January 2011 with the same number of

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officers of higher ranks, including eight brigadier-generals, as well as the entry into parliament of forty-one representatives from Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) who had won the by-elections held on 1 April 2012. Since that time, many more military representatives have been replaced.7 While biographical data on these new military MPs have not been released, it nonetheless remains valuable to explore the data on the full contingent of military MPs at a specific moment, not least in search of collective profiles of their background and origins. These biographies, with all their flaws and with the unanswerable questions that they raise, represent an historical artefact of considerable comparative value.

Military Legislators: A Brief Review of the Literature

The presence of army officers in legislatures has been a relatively rare institutional arrangement in modern polities (Kornberg and Pittman 1979). Very few modern armed forces bother to have a physical presence in elected assemblies. Soldiers often construe the latter as arenas of divisive politics, in which the armed forces should not be engaged. Nevertheless, in some cases the armed forces appear willing to participate directly in legislative activity. The reservation of seats for soldiers in elected assemblies offer in such cases a significant instrument of input into policymaking for the military’s leadership.8

Western liberal democracies have long since withdrawn the respective officer corps from their parliaments. Red Army delegates long peppered the Supreme Soviet, the state legislature of the Soviet Union. Likewise, Tanzania’s armed forces enjoyed seat reservations in the national parliament until a new constitution curbed this prerogative in 1992 (Luckham 1994, p. 45). China’s People’s Liberation Army still boasts a significant contingent in the current national legislature.9 Ten parliamentary seats out of 375 are reserved for army officers in Uganda’s current national assembly, which was last elected in 2011 (Makara 2010, p. 85). In Thailand, between 1932 and 2000, the legislature — whether unicameral or bicameral — was systematically influenced, if not fully dominated, by the Royal Thai

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Army (Chambers 2009, pp. 9–10). The Indonesian military also enjoyed legislative power until 2004 (Ziegenhain 2008, pp. 87–88). Under General Soeharto’s administration (1965–98), Indonesian army officers were delegated to legislative bodies as well as to the civilian bureaucracy, following the official doctrine of dwifungsi. Between 1977 and 1997, 20 per cent of the seats in the national assembly in Jakarta were reserved for senior army officers. The number of military representatives was however reduced from one hundred, out of 500, to seventy-five in 1997 and to zero in 2004, in the midst of the country’s democratic consolidation (Mietzner 2011, p. 131; Rüland and Manea 2013, pp. 126, 130).

Military legislators are generally appointed — and removed — by the military hierarchy, particularly when soldiers do not enjoy the right to vote in elections, as was the case under the Soeharto regime. Sometimes, however, a predefined military electorate selects these legislators. The representation of the military in parliament reinforces the image of the army as a special and privileged caste of decision-makers. This privilege is characteristic of the “guardian” military, as defined by Eric Nordlinger in his threefold typology of military interventions in politics (Nordlinger 1977, pp. 24–26). Between the “moderator” army, which is reluctant to be directly involved in government but has enough clout to influence policymaking, and the “praetorian” ruler, which controls all state structures and usually denies elected assemblies their very existence, the “guardian” armed forces commonly seek to negotiate power-sharing with civilians and, along with making other institutional arrangements, anoint themselves legislators.

Building on, among others, Donald Matthews’s work on legislative elites in the post-war United States, an extensive body of scholarship has examined the profiles and backgrounds of professional legislators in comparative perspective (Matthews 1960; Edinger and Searing 1967; Ruchelman 1970). It has underscored a direct link between the socio-economic background of elected legislators and the way that they successfully run for office and then perform their legislative functions. In the Western liberal world, one specific and

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quite unambiguous profile — the middle-aged, well-educated and wealthy white man — dominates the policy, military and legislative decision-making elites. This profile seldom mirrors the society or population that these elites are meant to represent or lead.

A third body of literature also serves as a theoretical backdrop for this article. Scholars of civil–military relations have critically examined the social origins and ethnic backgrounds of military men, especially in the United States, and evaluated the impact that the sociological and demographic characteristics of senior army officers have on their behaviour. This work draws mostly on early sociological analyses of military personnel first outlined in the 1960s by Morris Janowitz (1960) and Charles Moskos (1966). Recent research on the social origins of military officers has focused on modern societies in which the armed forces continue to play major policy roles, such as Israel (Barak and Tsur 2012) and Pakistan (Siddiqa 2007), as well as on contemporary Myanmar (Tin Maung Maung Than 2001; Selth 2002; Maung Aung Myoe 2009). Drawing on these bodies of scholarship, this article throws comparative light on the sociological profiles of the Burmese military legislators and explore the potential implications of the appointment of officers with such profiles as appointed parliamentarians in Myanmar’s new legislative branch. The sections that follow examine five socio-demographic variables, all commonly considered in comparative legislative studies, in no specific order of importance: gender, age, religion, ethnicity and education. I also highlight another characteristic of military officers: their posts in the armed forces at the time of their secondment to parliament.

Gender: Military Men in the House

Women seldom populate the inner sanctum of policymaking circles in modern societies. Myanmar is no exception, despite the charisma of its sole Nobel laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi. Only eighteen women were elected to the Union parliament in the November 2010 polls. All were civilians. All of the 166 military representatives appointed

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to the bicameral legislature by Senior General Than Shwe in January 2011 were male officers (New Light of Myanmar 2011a, 2011b). After by-elections were held in April 2012 to replace legislators who had resigned and joined regional or Union ministerial cabinets, twelve more female politicians from Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD entered the parliament — including “the Lady” herself.

A year and a half later, the Tatmadaw leadership appointed two female army officers to the lower house. In January 2014, Lieutenant Colonel Soe Soe Myint and Lieutenant Colonel San Thida Khin were chosen to replace two male army majors (New Light of Myanmar 2014a). Not only was this the first time that two female officers were appointed to parliament, but these officers appointed proved to be of higher ranks and seniority than the male legislators that they replaced. One could interpret their appointment as a strategic move on the part of the top commanders of the Tatmadaw to diversify the military delegates in parliament and, hypothetically, to thwart criticism of discrimination in a military institution traditionally — like any other around the world — dominated by male officers. As of early 2015, female legislators in both houses of Myanmar’s Union parliament represented less than 4.9 per cent of the total number of Union-level parliamentarians, and the two female military appointees themselves represented only 1.2 per cent of the military bloc in the Pyidaungsu Hluttaw.10 In comparison, China’s People’s Liberation Army sent twenty-nine female officers, or 10.8 per cent, out of a total of 268 military representatives, to the Twelfth National People’s Congress in March 2013 (Xinhua 2013). In Uganda’s national parliament, where the armed forces have constitutionally secured ten out of a total of 386 seats, two of the army legislators appointed in 2011 were women; they were of lower ranks than the eight male officers delegated to parliament (IPU n.d.).

Age and Seniority of Military Appointees

The 166 military MPs in the two houses of Myanmar’s Union parliament appear on average to have been younger than their

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elected colleagues. In 2012, at the date of the public release of their biographical data, the average age of the Burmese military members of the Pyithu Hluttaw was 42.5 years old, that of those in the Amyotha Hluttaw was 43.5 years. The average age of the other 492 civilian parliamentarians considered as a group in the same year was indeed much higher: 56.9 years for members of the lower house, and 58.1 years for members of the upper house (Egreteau 2014a, p. 102). As professionals of the armed forces commissioned to an active duty position by their hierarchy, Tatmadaw appointees remain constrained by a strictly enforced retirement age, which is fixed in the Burmese army at sixty years old. This partly explains a lower average age observed for the military MPs in both houses. Another reason that can be put forward is the presence in parliament of only a very small number of high-ranking senior officers currently in the last stage of their military careers. Most military MPs seem indeed to have been drawn from the younger age groups of the Tatmadaw. This is not the case in China, for instance, where seniority seems to commonly prevail among the army delegates elected to the national legislature. In the National People’s Congress formed in 2013, their average age was 53.1, ten years above the average age of their Burmese counterparts.11

The eldest of the 166 Burmese military representatives appointed to the upper and lower houses in 2012 were born in 1954 and 1955, respectively. These two eldest Tatmadaw officers were also the highest-ranking ones: Brigadier General Wai Linn, Deputy Regional Commander of the Triangle Region Command based in Kyaingtong in northeastern Shan State, of the Pyithu Hluttaw and Brigadier General Kyaw Oo Lwin, Deputy Regional Commander of the Coastal Region Command based in Myeik, in the Tanintharyi region, of the Amyotha Hluttaw (The Parliaments of Myanmar 2013, pp. 159, 291). Figure 1 shows the age distribution of the military appointees, by year of birth, to both chambers of the Union parliament. A substantial majority of them were born in the 1960s and early 1970s and had consequently never experienced life in a parliamentary Myanmar — before, that is, 1962. They were only

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young adults — and also already army officers — in the late 1980s when the Tatmadaw last staged a military coup d’état.

Quite logically, the youngest military delegates were to be found among the captains and majors. In 2012, the seven youngest officers in the Pyithu Hluttaw had been born in 1980; two majors in the Amyotha Hluttaw had been born in 1979. As emphasized in Table 1, the lower house also included more relatively young officers than the upper house. One may attribute this outcome simply to the higher number of military MPs in the Pyithu Hluttaw and to their resultant greater diversity. Table 1 also shows that a substantial majority of military MPs were, nevertheless, appointed whilst in their forties: 56.4 per cent in the case of the lower house and 62.5 per cent in that of the upper house.

Ethnic and Religious Backgrounds

It remains unclear whether military MPs provided the data on their ethnic backgrounds given in The Parliaments of Myanmar12 or

FIGURE 1 Age Distribution of the 166 Military MPs in the Pyidaungsu Hluttaw (as of 2012)

Source: Derived from data in The Parliaments of Myanmar (2013).

(6) (3) 0 3 6 9 12 15

1952

1954

1956

1958

1960

1962

1964

1966

1968

1970

1972

1974

1976

1978

1980

1982Number of military MPs

YEAR

of

BIRTH

Pyithu Hlu�aw

Amyotha Hlu�aw

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officials from the military bureaucracy filed the data for them. In any case, one finds in their biographies many instances of a “double” racial identity, such as Shan-Bamar, Rakhine-Bamar or Mon-Bamar. In principle, these identities are seldom accepted in official data in Myanmar. Each Burmese must usually declare only one of the 135 “national races” that the state administration recognizes when officially registering to get his or her national identity card. As this document does not comply with that norm, its socio-demographic data on military legislators provides not only a wealth of information on a military institution still very closed to the outside world but also a unique glimpse into the diversity of its personnel.

Of the Tatmadaw MPs sitting in Pyithu Hluttaw in 2012, 86.4 per cent were ethnic Bamar. The figure for the Amyotha Hluttaw was 91.1 per cent. The scholarship on the Tatmadaw has long emphasized the fact that, despite the utter dominance of Bamar senior officers at the highest levels of the Burmese army, racial background has been less an issue in promotion than social and religious background. Rakhine, Mon and Shan officers could indeed reach the ranks of colonel and above, as long as they could prove that they were Buddhist, well-educated and wed to similarly educated spouses (Selth 2002, p. 173; Maung Aung Myoe 2009, p. 199). The breakdown of ethnicities in the contingent of military representatives in the two

TABLE 1Age Composition of Military MPs in the Pyidaungsu Hluttaw (as of 2012)

Age Range(years)

Pyithu HluttawNumber of MPs

Amyotha HluttawNumber of MPs

30 – 34 16 (14.5%) 2 (3.6%)35 – 39 12 (11%) 8 (14.3%)40 – 44 29 (26.4%) 19 (33.9%)45 – 49 33 (30%) 16 (28.6%)50 – 54 16 (14.5%) 10 (17.8%)55 – 59 4 (3.6%) 1 (1.8%)TOTAL 110 (100%) 56 (100%)


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houses of parliament in Figures 2 and 3 seems to confirm what the scholarship has argued.

Whilst the great majority of the 166 military appointees in 2012 — 87.9 per cent — were ethnic Bamar, nonetheless a few non-Bamar Tatmadaw officers were delegated to the Union parliament, including twelve Rakhine, one Shan and one Kayin (Karen), as well as six MPs who were identified as “mixed race”, each of whom is identified in the document as half-Bamar. The concentration of the Bamar group in the higher spheres of the Tatmadaw hierarchy appears not to have changed much since General Ne Win’s times, when for instance between 80 and 90 per cent of the senior army officers sitting on the Central Committee of the ruling Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP) were ethnic Bamar (Nakanishi 2013, p. 185).

However, a comparison with the elected civilian MPs sitting in the same parliament is instructive. According to a recent study examining the same source of biodata as this article, 66.8 per cent of the 325 elected civilian MPs registered in the lower house in 2012 and 55.7 per cent of their counterparts in the upper house were ethnic Bamar

FIGURE 2 Ethnic Composition of the 110 Military MPs in the Pyithu Hluttaw (2012)


95

1 9

1 2 1 1

Bamar

Shan

Rakhine

Kayin

Shan-Bamar

Mon-Bamar

Rakhine-Bamar

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(Egreteau 2014a, p. 106). In the absence of official, and reliable, data on ethnicity in the country,13 conventional wisdom has long suggested that the Bamar majority has also consistently represented some two-thirds of the population of post-independence Myanmar. In his thorough analysis of the one-party parliamentarian system established during the second half of General Ne Win’s autocratic regime (during, that is, 1974–88), Nakanishi Yoshihiro has found similar proportions of Bamar representatives in the then unicameral assembly: 66.9 per cent in the parliament elected in 1974, 67.7 per cent in that chosen in 1978 and 66.3 per cent in that of 1981 (Nakanishi 2013, p. 183).

Furthermore, Myanmar is regarded as one of Asia’s most profoundly Buddhist societies. That a great majority of Union-level representatives claim to be Buddhist themselves is therefore not surprising. As of 2012, among the 658 MPs in the first post-SPDC legislature, there were only fifty-two Christian and three Muslim legislators (Egreteau 2014a, p. 110). Dazzlingly, however, all 166

FIGURE 3 Ethnic Composition of the 56 Military MPs in the Amyotha Hluttaw (2012)


51

31 1

Bamar

Rakhine

Kayah-Mon

Kayin-Bamar

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military MPs were Buddhists. None of them belonged to any religious minority (see Table 2).

This observation seems to substantiate the widely shared opinion that, to be granted promotion to senior ranks in the Tatmadaw, officers must above all follow the Buddhist faith. Indeed, it has proven more essential than belonging to the dominant ethnic Bamar group. One of the four brigadier generals of the upper house in 2012, Min Thein Zan, was for instance an ethnic Rakhine — and a Buddhist — and had nonetheless found himself in the position to be promoted to one-star general.14

Educational Backgrounds of Military MPs

Level of Educational Achievement

Social scientists have long emphasized the value of educational achievement level for top decision-makers, including legislators and high-ranking military officers (Matthews 1960; Ruchelman 1970; Palen 1972). Maung Aung Myoe, who has taught in various military colleges in Myanmar, is one of the very few scholars to have thoroughly examined the educational background of Tatmadaw senior officers in the 1990s (Maung Aung Myoe 2000). In addition, a more recent study has highlighted the relatively high numbers of university certificates and diplomas held by members of the current legislature, both elected by the people and appointed by

TABLE 2Religious Composition of the Pyidaungsu Hluttaw and Amyotha Hluttaw (2012)

Pyithu Hluttaw Amyotha HluttawCivilian MPs Tatmadaw MPs Civilian MPs Tatmadaw MPs

Buddhist 295 (90.8%) 110 (100%) 141 (84.4%) 56 (100%)Christian 27 (8.3%) 0 25 (15%) 0Muslim 2 (0.6%) 0 1 (0.6%) 0N.A. 1 (0.3%) — — —TOTAL 325 (100%) 110 (100%) 167 (100%) 56 (100%)Source: Derived from data in The Parliaments of Myanmar (2013).

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the military (Egreteau 2014a, p. 113). According to that study, 82.5 per cent of the 658 Union-level MPs registered in 2012, including the 166 military delegates, had been awarded one or several university degrees, chiefly from domestic academic institutions in Myanmar. This statistic represents another feature distinguishing the Burmese legislators from the rest of Myanmar’s society as an “elite” in the making.

What is more, as a group the 166 military MPs appear to be by far the most educated delegates in Myanmar’s new legislature. The Ministry of Defence has argued that military officers seconded to parliament need to be particularly well versed in state affairs and policy matters.15 All military MPs covered by the 2012 data held at least Bachelor of Arts or Bachelor of Science degrees, or the equivalent degree in medicine (M.B.B.S.). Two-thirds of them — 67 per cent, or 111 army parliamentarians — stopped their studies at this level. But fifty-one military MPs — 30 per cent of the contingent — had been awarded a master’s degree or the equivalent. Holders of master’s degrees fell into two categories. First were the youngest officers sitting in parliament, mostly born in the 1970s or in 1980, who had benefited from the expansion of military education opportunities provided by the Tatmadaw’s Directorate of Military Training from the mid-1990s onwards and pursued postgraduate studies before being commissioned. Second were the most senior officers, who had earned master’s degrees, typically in defence studies, at a later stage of their careers. Interestingly, four officers held doctorates — in engineering, physics, public health and history. The officer with a doctorate in public health was a medical doctor, and the major with a doctorate in history served as an assistant lecturer in the history department of the prestigious Defence Services Academy (DSA) in Pyin U Lwin (The Parliaments of Myanmar 2013, p. 188). Figures 4 and 5 show the proportions of holders of bachelor’s degrees, master’s degrees and doctorates among military MPs in each chamber of the legislature as of 2012.

A few army officers appointed to the parliament had also been trained abroad. One medical doctor, a lieutenant colonel in the Pyithu

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FIGURE 4 Educational Level of the 110 Military MPs in the Lower House (2012)


FIGURE 5 Educational Level of the 56 Military MPs in the Upper House (2012)


32. 57%

23. 41%

1. 2%

Amyotha Hlu�aw Tatmadaw MPs

BA / BSc / LLB / MBBS /B.V.Sc / B.Com

MA / Master

PhD

79, 72%

28. 25%

3, 3%

Pyithu Hlu�aw Tatmadaw MPs

BA / BSc / LLB / MBBS /B.V.Sc / B.Com

MA / Master

PhD

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Hluttaw, had obtained his master’s degree in public health from Prince Leopold Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium (The Parliaments of Myanmar 2013, pp. 170–71). The biographical data on another lieutenant colonel, also sitting in the Pyithu Hluttaw, state that he had taken a six-month armoured warfare training course at a military college in Beijing (The Parliaments of Myanmar 2013, p. 172). Lastly, three majors and two officiating majors16 held master’s degrees from institutions in Russia, including the Moscow Institute of Electronic Technology and the Moscow Aviation Institute (The Parliaments of Myanmar 2013, pp. 195, 200, 304, 307).

Initial Formation and Specialization

Armed forces depend on personnel with a wide range of professional and specialization backgrounds. As a military institution does not merely consist of combat soldiers, it needs to promote occupational diversity within its ranks in order to benefit from the expertise and know-how of engineers, doctors and administrators. Morris Janowitz described the emergence of “managerial” senior officers in the modern world, serving alongside the traditional “heroic” and combat-oriented soldiers (Janowitz 1960, p. 21). Figure 6 highlights the areas of university specialization of the 166 military Union-level military MPs covered by the 2012 data. It shows a remarkable diversity in the recruitment policy of the armed forces.

Only one army legislator, a major seconded to the lower house, had received a university degree in law, while three others had earned one-year diplomas in law. The lack of technical knowledge of legislative and legal affairs was obviously not a hindrance to the secondment of a Tatmadaw officer to the parliament or, as a matter of fact, to his or her participation in parliamentary activities. Notwithstanding their very diverse university backgrounds, army officers delegated to Myanmar’s legislative bodies have received training in political science, law and other fields relating to legislation before and during their postings as parliamentarians (Sandar Lwin 2012). Dozens of workshops and seminars on the matter have been offered to both civilian and military MPs by an array of domestic and international

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FIGURE 6 Areas of University Specialization of the Military MPs in the Pyidaunsu Hluttaw (2012)


0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16

Maths

Physics

Chemistry

Marine sciences

Textile

Mechanical

Electric Power

Science (gen.)

Aerospace

Medicine & Public Health

Computer & Electronics

Nuclear sciences

Civil Engineering

Veterinary sciences

Botany

Zoology

Arts (gen.)

Myanmar language

English

History

Law

Geography & International

Defence

Philosophy

Number of military MPs

Amyotha Hluttaw Pyithu Hluttaw

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organizations and governments since the first parliamentary session convened in 2011.17

Army appointees with initial academic specializations in the hard sciences (physics, maths, chemistry and nuclear science, among others) and engineering (civil, mechanical and electrical) dominated the cohort of military MPs serving in 2012. Backgrounds in the hard sciences characterized fifty MPs, or 30.1 per cent of the group, and in engineering twenty-seven MPs, or 16.3 per cent. Degrees in civil engineering and physics accounted for 11.5 per cent and 9.6 per cent, respectively, of the military representatives’ educational backgrounds. In addition, and rather enigmatically, sixteen appointees, or 9.6 per cent, had studied botany, zoology or veterinary medicine. A minority of their colleagues had even received extremely focused technical educations. A major who was previously posted to the Tatmadaw’s paint factory had studied textile science. One legislator had studied philosophy. And a navy officer had studied marine sciences. The social sciences and humanities — notably history, literature and languages — are well represented in the group; seventeen military MPs, or 10.5 per cent, had university degrees in history, whilst three had received bachelor’s degrees in geography and two in English. Lastly, thirteen army MPs, or 7.8 per cent, had graduated with degrees in Myanmar language and literature.

Military Academies

All military MPs appointed were commissioned officers. The Tatmadaw offers a number of paths towards that latter status, however. Three core military training schools have since the country’s independence shaped the Tatmadaw officer corps: the Officer Training School (OTS), the DSA and, until its dissolution in 2002, the Teza programme (Maung Aung Myoe 2009, p. 145). In the 1990s, new specialized military institutes were also established, including the Defence Services Institute of Medicine for army doctors (established in 1993 and later renamed the Defence Services Medical Academy, or DSMA) and the Defence Services Institute of Technology (established in 1994 and later renamed the Defence Services Technological Academy, or DSTA). The Tatmadaw also operates schools offering

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post-commissioning training for mid-ranking officers who seek more rapid promotion. These schools include the National Defence College (NDC), created in 1958 (Selth 2002, p. 85).

The OTS was founded a few months before Myanmar’s independence in 1948. Today, the school is meant to train officers ranging from those drawn from rank-and-file soldiers with low levels of education to non-commissioned officers with university degrees and fresh university graduates new to military service. It graduated its one hundred and seventeenth intake in April 2014 (New Light of Myanmar 2014b). The most senior military officer serving in the Union parliament in 2012 was an OTS graduate. Brigadier General Wai Linn indeed entered the school in September 1976 and was commissioned in June 1977. The seven other brigadier generals sitting in the two houses of the Union legislature included three other OTS graduates. Brigadier General Win Myint (commissioned in 198118) and Brigadier General Min Naung (1984) sat in the Pyithu Hluttaw, and Brigadier General Myat Kyaw (1985) in the Amyotha Hluttaw (The Parliaments of Myanmar 2013, pp. 159–60, 291–92).19

The DSA is Myanmar’s most prestigious military academy, the distant relation of West Point, Saint-Cyr and Sandhurst. Opened in 1955, the academy is now located in Pyin U Lwin, the former British hill station near Mandalay previously called Maymyo. Recruits for all three branches of the armed forces study there (Maung Aung Myoe 2009, pp. 71, 91). Its first intake of forty graduates was commissioned in 1959 (Selth 2002, pp. 83–84; Maung Aung Myoe 2009, p. 147), and the fifty-sixth intake graduated in December 2014. In the first post-SPDC parliament, only one DSA graduate numbered among the highest-ranking officers: a brigadier general appointed in the upper house.20 All other military-MP graduates of the academy were of lower ranks, from colonel down to captain. The youngest military legislator serving in 2012, a man born in 1979 and a member of the forty-third DSA intake, had received his commission in 2002 (The Parliaments of Myanmar 2013, p. 301). Interestingly, among the DSA graduates, the second tier of senior officers — that is, the lieutenant colonels and colonels — sitting in parliament had all attended the academy during the major upheavals that Myanmar experienced in

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the late 1980s and early 1990s, starting with the coup d’état staged in September 1988 by General Saw Maung.

The third path towards commissioned-officer status, the “Teza” recruitment programme, dated from 1971 and was originally designed for high school leavers aged 16–19 (Selth 2002, p. 84; Maung Aung Myoe 2009, pp. 145–46). Would-be commissioned officers in the programme commonly followed courses at both the DSA and the OTS before being sent out for a year of service with a Tatmadaw battalion. The programme was, however, ended in 2000, and the last officers commissioned in 2002. About 5,000 Teza officers were thus commissioned for the Tatmadaw in four decades.21 In the 2012 Union legislature, three Teza-trained officers sat alongside the four OTS graduates and one DSA graduate among the most senior military MPs. These were Brigadier General Kyaw Oo Lwin (commissioned in 1976) and Brigadier General Aung San Chit (1983) in the upper house and Brigadier General Tauk Tun (1982) in the lower house (The Parliaments of Myanmar 2013, pp. 159, 291). Determining the existence of any pattern in the secondment to parliament of commissioned officers trained in the OTS, the DSA and the Teza programme must however await the longitudinal analysis not yet possible today.

Lastly, ten 2012 military legislators of rather lower ranks — majors, mostly — were technicians and engineers trained at the DSTA, which recruits 500 cadets a year (Maung Aung Myoe 2009, p. 144). Four medical doctors — three serving in the upper house, one in the lower house — were graduates of the DSMA. Since 1994, the National Defence College has offered one-year courses for officers above the rank of colonel. Several military MPs — products of the DSA, the OTS, and the Teza programme alike — had earned master’s degrees from the NDC, mostly in defence studies, during their careers in the armed forces.

Military Posting at the Time of Secondment

Figure 7 shows the postings of the 166 military officers serving in the Union parliament in 2012 at the time of their secondment to parliament. Information is lacking for three of those officers.

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FIGURE 7 Occupation of Military Legislators in the Union Parliament (2012).


0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70

Deputy Regional Commander

Principal/Deputy of military training schools

Department Head/Instructor in military schools

Head/Deputy of (Army) Administrative Office

General Staff + Naval/Air Bases Officer

Deputy Commander, Light Infantry Division

Officer in Chief-of-Staff (Adm)

Commander/Deputy of Company/Army Unit

Company/Unit Officer

N.A.

Number of military MPs

PYITHU HLUTTAW AMYOTHA HLUTTAW

Three interesting patterns emerge from these data. Only time will tell, however, if these patterns endure.

First is the dominance of “managerial officers” (Janowitz 1960, pp. 3, 21) and of army bureaucrats among the highest ranking officers sitting in the two chambers. Six of these “managerial officers” sitting in the Pyithu Hluttaw and the Amyotha Hluttaw were deputy regional commanders when seconded to the Union parliament; five were high-ranking officers serving in the offices of the chiefs of staff of the Navy, Air Force or Army; seven were heads or deputy heads of directorates in the Tatmadaw general staff and quartermaster general’s office; and twenty-two were general-staff officers. One has to notice that, when seconded to either Union or provincial hluttaw, military officers do not resign from their current posts. They are assigned to the parliament when the latter is in session, but between plenary or emergency sessions they are ordered back to their units.22

A second pattern observed in these data relates to the relatively high number of senior officers — those above the rank of lieutenant

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colonel — assigned to parliament from military training and educational institutions. Twenty-eight military legislators in the lower house (or 25.5 per cent) and nine in the upper house (16 per cent) came from the Tatmadaw education sector. Two of the four brigadier generals serving in the Pyithu Hluttaw in 2012, as well as two of the four of their counterparts of the same rank in the Amyotha Hluttaw, were principals of army-run training schools located in Ba Htoo, Bayinnaung, Thanbyuzayat and Kyaingtong. What is more, nineteen military appointees to the lower chamber, as well as seven to the upper house, were instructors (including flight instructors), battalion combat training chiefs or assistant lecturers in one of the country’s military academies. These representatives also proved to be the most educated among the military MPs, with a high numbers of master’s degrees and doctorates.

In a third pattern, the substantial majority of majors, officiating majors and captains — fully 41 per cent of the military contingent in the two houses of the Union legislature — served as commanding officers or deputy commanders of basic army companies or units stationed throughout the country. It nevertheless remains difficult to know the extent to which these officers had seen combat.

The military officers seconded to parliament formed a diverse tribe but one already very much involved in the military’s bureaucratic machine, as well as in its higher educational institutions. Nonetheless, these patterns remain hypothetical, suggested on the basis of evidence for just one moment in time. There is no indication whether the armed forces will maintain the selection policy that resulted in these patterns as it appoints officers to legislatures in the future. One may nonetheless speculate that the defence services may want to continue appointing well trained and experienced bureaucrats to legislatures, which are one of the rare open arenas in which Burmese soldiers publicly mingle with civilian politicians.23

A Few Anecdotal Details

The biographical data on military members of the Union parliament released in 2012 are also peppered with anecdotal details. Under the

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names of many officers are listed the medals and titles that they had been awarded by their commanders or even by the Tatmadaw top brass in the course of their military careers. Decorations seem to have been bestowed not only for bravery in combat but also for excellence in their studies in the case of National Defence College awards — and for outstanding administration. A major serving in the lower house, Thein Aung, was one of the two military MPs boasting a “hero” certificate bestowed by the commander-in-chief of the Tatmadaw himself. He most probably received this decoration for his service during the rescue operations that followed Cyclone Nargis in 2008, to judge from his bio-sketch. An ethnic Rakhine, he had passed his matriculation exam at the end of secondary school in the city of Pathein in the Irrawaddy Delta and was involved in various rehabilitation programmes set up by the Tatmadaw in the Irrawaddy region (The Parliaments of Myanmar 2013, p. 193).24

In contrast, and quite puzzlingly, the reprimands that several military representatives had received from their commanding officers during their careers are noted here and there in the biographical data provided in The Parliaments of Myanmar (2013). The reason for this must remain a matter of speculation. Did the officers in question receive orders to mention these reprimands? Were the compilers in whatever bureau was responsible for assembling the data collection compelled to state them, in order to present more “transparent” profiles to the public? For instance, a regional commander had reprimanded one infantry major seconded to the Amyotha Hluttaw for providing “late salary to the service personnel” (The Parliaments of Myanmar 2013, p. 311). Another major in the upper house seems to have been criticized for “unsystematic implementation of welfare works when serving at the military paint factory” (The Parliaments of Myanmar 2013, p. 309). Two army officers sitting in the lower house also received criticisms from their respective commanding officers and regional commanders, but without the reason appearing in the source drawn on here (The Parliaments of Myanmar 2013, pp. 182, 188).

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Conclusion

The gradual disengagement of the Burmese armed forces from politics has been much commented on, in Myanmar and abroad, since 2011. Many authors have tentatively explored the reasons behind the incremental withdrawal of the Tatmadaw from political life, as well as the process by which it has effected that withdrawal (Prager Nyein 2011; Callahan 2012; Bünte 2014; Maung Aung Myoe 2014; Taylor 2015). The transition from direct military rule to a quasi-civilian regime has generated much hope for the country’s future. Yet the Tatmadaw remains an important policy actor, and this article has aimed to contribute to the emerging literature on its continuing political and legislative salience in “post-junta” Myanmar. It has placed special focus on the country’s newly formed legislative branch, in which the armed forces hold a quarter of all parliamentary seats. More information is available today about the members of Myanmar’s rising legislature than about the leaders of the executive that succeeded the SPDC in 2011 — cabinet ministers and their entourage of bureaucrats, as well as the contingent of retired generals-turned-policy-advisors. The biographical data provided in 2012 on Burmese Union-level legislators, and in particular on the 166 military MPs serving at that time, thus offer a very welcome wealth of information about Myanmar’s evolving circles of decision-makers.

This article has sought to gather and analyse original background data on the military officers seconded to the Union parliament as of 2012, hoping these data — however ambiguous and uncertain — may be meaningfully related not only to the scholarship on comparative legislative behaviour, but also to the most recent literature examining the evolving intervention of the Tatmadaw in Myanmar’s post-2010 politics. The findings show that the Burmese military legislators seconded to both houses of Myanmar’s first “post-junta” legislature have been predominantly male officers; only two female appointees, out of 166 in total, have been nominated to the Union parliament, and that was in 2014. They are also much

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younger than their civilian colleagues; most are in their mid-forties. And they present a relatively better-educated profile; all are actually graduates from Burmese institutions of higher education, regardless of what one makes of these institutions. The most senior officers in the parliament have had long careers in the bureaucracy of the Tatmadaw as well as in its training and educational institutions. Yet the 166 army representatives serving in 2012 proved a less ethnically and religiously diverse group than their elected counterparts; they were chiefly ethnic Bamar, and none was drawn from the country’s religious minorities. All, without any exception, were Buddhists.

With a clearer picture of the Burmese military appointees in parliament, of their sociological profiles and of the career paths that they have followed before their secondment to the legislature, one may anticipate understanding their legislative behaviour better, whilst at the same time appreciating the new functions they have been ordered to perform in parliament. By examining more closely the social origins and backgrounds of the men in uniform who are to serve as policy-checkers and law-makers in Myanmar for the foreseeable future, one can also expect better to comprehend the evolving patterns in the ongoing — even persisting — political intervention of the Tatmadaw. Indeed, the Burmese military institution has little inclination to retreat fully to the barracks. It will continue to seek influence over policy and legislative matters in the years to come.

Many grey areas and black spots continue to limit our understand-ing of the men in uniform tasked to sit in Myanmar’s re-emerging parliament. These include, but are not limited to, the way in which the Tatmadaw hierarchy manages military MPs, the bases on which officers are appointed and removed from the legislature, and the weight given to parliamentary experience in officers’ later careers in the armed forces. The examination of the actual legislative behaviour of the military officers in parliament — serving behind closed doors on parliamentary committees, participating not only in the Union parliament but also in Myanmar’s fourteen provincial assemblies, voting on and (potentially) vetoing constitutional amendments,

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drafting and supporting bills, making speeches — represents another line of captivating inquiry.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Michael M. Mezey, David I. Steinberg, Maung Aung Myoe, Andrew Selth, Mael Raynaud, two anonymous reviewers and the editors of SOJOURN for having read and provided insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article. Parts of this study were presented during the Eleventh Burma Studies Conference, held in Singapore during 1–3 August 2014.

Renaud Egreteau is Research Associate at the Center for International Research (CERI), at Sciences Po, Paris, and Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 30 Heng Mui Keng Terrace, Pasir Panjang, Singapore 119614; email: [email protected].

NoTES

1. The terms of “Myanmar” and “Bamar” have been used in this article. The English adjective “Burmese” refers to the citizenship and common language of the people inhabiting Myanmar, while “Bamar” — or “Burman” in English-language scholarship — designates the ethnic majority of the country, in which non-Bamar ethnic minorities, such as the Kachin, Rakhine, Karen (Kayin) and Shan, also dwell.

2. Interview, deputy defence minister, Naypyitaw, February 2015. 3. For the names and ranks of the first 166 military legislators ever nominated,

see The New Light of Myanmar (2011a, 2011b). 4. I leave aside in this article the 222 military representatives appointed

to the country’s fourteen state and regional parliaments, on which data remains scarce or approximate.

5. Field notes on discussions held at the Ministry of Defence, Naypyitaw, February 2015.

6. One may browse online, and in Burmese, the biographies of 314 civilian members of the lower house of the Union parliament at “Pyithu Hluttaw Representatives” (Pyithu Hluttaw n.d.).

7. On the most recent substitutions of army representatives, see, for instance The New Light of Myanmar (2014a, 2014c) and Global New Light of Myanmar (2015).

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8. Myanmar’s 1974 constitution reserved no seats for the Tatmadaw. Yet active military officers could be nominated as candidates by the ruling Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP) and thus elected to the unicameral People’s Assembly. In the first elections, held in January 1974, forty-seven high-ranking officers on active duty — representing 10 per cent of the parliament — were elected (Silverstein 1977, p. 136).

9. They were 268 out of 2,987 delegates (9 per cent) to the Twelfth National People’s Congress held in February 2013 (Xinhua 2013).

10. In Yangon’s regional parliament, there was in 2015 one female army officer among the thirty-one appointed military MPs; interview with the Speaker of Yangon’s regional hluttaw, Yangon, March 2015.

11. The average age of military legislators in China also appears to be continuously increasing; it was for instance 52.8 years old when the Eleventh National People’s Congress convened in 2008 (Xinhua 2013).

12. In this case, they may have specified their ethnic backgrounds in ways that they considered correct rather than according to established categories such as those drawn from Myanmar’s official census.

13. The first results of the nationwide census conducted in March 2014 were made public in August 2014, but Myanmar’s central authorities, as well as the United Nations agencies involved in the project, have decided to postpone the announcement of the results relating to ethnicity and religion until after the general elections scheduled for late 2015.

14. Born in Yangon in 1959, he graduated from the DSA in 1982 (The Parliaments of Myanmar 2013, p. 292). He was however removed from parliament and assigned to another army position in June 2013 (New Light of Myanmar 2013).

15. Interview, deputy defence minister, Naypyitaw, February 2015.16. Officiating posts are similar to one-year probationary periods in the

Tatmadaw. For instance, officiating majors are captains enjoying pay equivalent to that of majors but not entitled to wear the insignia of that rank for one full year — until their commanding officers endorse their promotion from captain to major (Bo Htet Min 2010).

17. Notes on informal discussions held at the U.S.-funded Parliamentary Resource Center, Naypyitaw, February 2015.

18. In July 2012, Brigadier-General Win Myint was replaced in the lower house by Colonel Tin San Naing (New Light of Myanmar 2012). Colonel Thet Tun Aung, also an OTS graduate, was thereafter promoted to brigadier general. As he remained in the upper house, parliament continued to have the same number of active-duty generals in the parliament among its members. (Interview with author, Naypyitaw, February 2015).

19. I look only at active-duty officers commissioned to parliament. I have

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also interviewed several retired army officers with OTS, DSA and Teza backgrounds among the civilian parliamentarians elected in the 2010 general elections, but I do not include them in this study.

20. Brigadier-General Min Thein Zan, who was however removed from parliament in June 2013.

21. Interview with a Teza graduate and former army lieutenant colonel, now an elected Union Solidarity and Development Party member of the upper house of the Union parliament, Naypyitaw, July 2014.

22. Interview, brigadier general seconded to the upper house, Naypyitaw, February 2015.

23. Interview, deputy defence minister, Naypyitaw, February 2015.24. Another officiating major was awarded the same decoration in 2010 (The

Parliaments of Myanmar 2013, p. 199).

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