Human rights campaigner Igor Blazevic has warned that Myanmar’s democratic transition will not be easy and that citizens must strive hard to overcome the many challenges for reforms to succeed.
Human rights campaigner Igor Blazevic has warned that Myanmar’s democratic transition will not be easy and that citizens must strive hard to overcome the many challenges for reforms to succeed.
Blazevic is the director of the Educational Initiatives, a training program for activists based in Thailand, and was delivering a talk in Yangon on June 26.
“There are many challenges to Myanmar’s democratic reform,” he said. “Having bad neighbours is one of the many obstacles that countries undergoing democratic transitions face,” he explained, mentioning the thorny transitions of Georgia, Ukraine and Belarus who each share a border with Russia; as well in Bahrain, Iran and Syria who are neighbours with Saudi Arabia.
Myanmar is also surrounded by difficult neighbours such as India and China. The first a democracy but where hard-line Hindu nationalists just came into power; and the other embodying an authoritarian, single-party state under free market capitalism.
To the east, Thailand is struggling with frequent military coups, and to the west and south, both Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are facing growing religious fanaticism.
Blazevic said he was confident that Myanmar’s ruling party will try to hold on to power at any price in the upcoming 2015 election. The risk of political conflict is high if the election becomes a winner-takes-all game so it must be mitigated by compromise and concessions from both the ruling party, military and government, as well as opposition groups.
He suggested that the opposition allow the military to retain its 25 per cent stake in parliament. Likewise, the government must allow for constitutional amendments and relax the limitations of the Article 436 as well as abolish the Section 59 to allow for a free and fair election.
Concerning the peace process, Blazevic was adamant that to build mutual trust between ethnic groups, the government needs to do more to promote ethnic languages and cultures. Furthermore, for the peace process to succeed the military must stop all offensives and attempts to gain territory under ethnic control.
Igor Blazevic is a human rights campaigner from Bosnia and Czech Republic and is well-known for his studies on democratic transitions.
He is currently the director of the Educational Initiatives as well as the founder and longtime director of One World, Europe’s biggest human rights documentary film festival.