Note. Might Burmese military intelligence know what they’re doing? [0007]

The short answer: it’s complicated.

Jurisprudence quiz: who said this? ‘The Constitution is the mother law for all laws. So, I’d like to note we all need to abide by the Constitution. If one does not follow the laws, such laws must be revoked. I mean if it is the Constitution, it is necessary to revoke the Constitution. If one does not follow the law, the Constitution must be revoked.’

Quite obviously, not the brightest chappy about; more specifically, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, who took three attempts to be admitted to the Defence Services Academy (Mclaughlin and Webb, Senior general emerges), has generals detained (Irrawaddy, Myanmar Junta Detains Generals Who Surrendered to Resistance in Laukkai) and executed for following his orders to surrender (Irrawaddy, Defeated Myanmar Junta Generals Given Death Sentences), and is notoriously superstitious (Irrawaddy, Rituals and Yadaya; Kavi, Behind the Boasts, Myanmar’s Junta Boss Is a Superstitious Mediocrity).

This, in addition to the junta’s inability to decisively crush even ex-urban bourgeois armed with, er, hunting rifles (Fishbein and Vahpual, ‘Our only option’: Myanmar civilians take up arms for democracy), has created the impression that the Sit-Tat does not really know what it’s doing.

It was with that assumption that I began my perusal an exposé of a supposedly régime-linked group of media outlets controlled by the Swe family (Win, The shadowy past—and present—of the Myanmar Times and Frontier). Before reading it, I sent it to two friends who know something of Burma, both of whom concurred with my initial assessment: surely they couldn’t be that clever?

To my perhaps unwarranted surprise, Win wasn’t making much up. One has to scroll to the section titled ‘Happy stories’ for the salient evidence, but the gist of it is that military intelligence was, by organisational design, able to censor articles to its desires. Unless these documents were made up, and Frontier’s response (Kean, The other side) makes no such suggestion, Win is clearly right.

In 2004, some years after the establishment of the first Swe-aligned paper, the Myanmar Times, the junta arrested and jailed Swe fils. One vindication of the Swes would be if they were to have broken with the junta. But such ‘assurances were called into question two years later when Thein Swe, now 80, and former junta spokesperson Hla Min toured China on behalf of the Paragon Institute—a secretive think-tank close to the junta. During the trip he reportedly discussed Myanmar’s “national security” and the deployment of private Chinese security firms, preparing the ground for Min Aung Hlaing’s first visit as junta leader a week later.’

This, however, leaves a question: what’s the point of running what is, by all accounts, a fairly impressive media outlet (qua régime critic), in the form of Frontier Myanmar, if the Swes really are aligned with the junta?

One explanation is that Swe fils has broken with his father to the extent he can. I should like to believe this, because I should quite like to imagine I’d be such a person. Unfortunately, I don’t.

Another is that the Swes were a relatively moderate or liberal faction in the régime. Maggie, then, would not have been wrong, just before her time: ‘I think there are probably two parts to the Khmer Rouge: there are those who supported Pol Pot and then there is a much more reasonable grouping within that title “Khmer Rouge”’ (3:40). This doesn’t strike me as an especially plausible proposition, given the Swes’ continued alignment with the junta after the coup.

My working explanation now is that the Swes are an unusually sophisticated faction of the régime. There is no point in regarding them as more ‘liberal’ ideologically, but they are certainly more sophisticated (e.g. Swe père appears to be competent enough at English in the leaked documents). The reading that follows is that Frontier was indeed a bona fide opposition-aligned outlet, but it was also an insurance policy. And if you were relatively intelligent and on a ‘dominant’ side incapable of decisively defeating urban bourgeois with homemade rifles, you might also want such an insurance policy.