Rule of law within the context of military-drafted constitution
Aung San Suu Kyi on a lot of occasions said that the
rule of law within the context of military-drafted, 2008 constitution should be
adhered in striving to achieve a federal form of government.
She said this when meeting with the 8 Ethnic Armed
Organizations (EAOs) that have signed the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA),
on 28 June, and again when she met the non-signatory EAOs of United
Nationalities Federal Council (UNFC), on 17 July.
On 28 June meeting with the 8 signatory EAOs, Suu Kyi
said: “Some could ask, why we go along with this (constitutional) law even we
don't like it. It is because the future of a country, vested with equality,
cannot be stable without the rule of law. Laws will be amended and made through
the given legal channel and want our ethnic brothers and sisters to think the
same.”
Let us ponder on this argument if it makes sense,
particularly from the point of the peace process and national reconciliation.
According to Khu Oo Reh, spokesperson of the UNFC,
“The rule of law is not only concern with the armed organizations, but
tranquillity, termination of armed conflicts, protests, blood-letting are all
included. In a country there are a host of problems and (having) the rule of
law is only real if such (mentioned) issues are absent (resolved). And the
peace we want is the one that happens under such conditions”.
But we cannot just jump on to the rule of law issue
without clarifying or agreeing on the ownership of the country's sovereignty. The ruling Bamar-dominated,
National League for Democracy (NLD) government, including the military,
considers itself to be the sole ownership of the sovereignty, while the ethnic
nationalities staunchly believed that it is a shared-ownership, which has been
robbed by the majority Bamar that let them to the political and armed
resistance, in the first place.
The non-Bamar ethnic nationalities said that the
independence from the British in 1948 is a co-independence, which in turn, gave
them the entitlement as the co-owner of the country, leading to the notion of
“shared-sovereignty”.
If the regime in power considers itself to be the sole ownership, issues like
taxation and usage and extraction of the natural resources by any other party
would mean breaching the given laws and thus must be punished.
But on the other hand, if the outgoing point is from
those of the shared-sovereignty position, the EAOs have every right, within
their inherited territories from their ancestors, to make use of the taxation
of the population under their control, as revolutionary tax to defend their
turfs, which the government is keen to dub as protection money or "Set
Kye" in Burmese. The same goes for
making use of the natural resources such as mineral extraction and
logging for examples.
Thus we could see that even during the transition
period of peace negotiations this kind of problems popped up frequently, as the
military launched attacks and conduct offensives in the name of upholding sovereignty
and protecting the population.
Seen from this perspective, this seemingly unrelated
question of sovereignty becomes a core crucial issue that is connected to the
drawing of a federal constitution.
This, in turn, pushes us further to consider if what
Suu Kyi has been advocating to achieve constitutional amendment through
adherence of the rule of law that is anchored in the military-drafted
constitution could be tangible, which is neither federal nor equitable form of
governance that the ethnic nationalities have been striving for.
It is important not to forget that the EAOs' armed
resistance is due to the fact that they were unable to push for the realization
of their political aspirations through legal channel and that was why they have
to resort to such actions.
And if it is the government's wish to resolve the
ethnic conflict through peaceful settlement with give-and-take negotiations,
implementation of this rule of law literally with rigid principles would only
contribute to more failure than success.
But this is not to say that lawlessness must be
glorified and tolerated, but only to work out a transitional period solution,
to be as tolerable as possible for all parties concerned, while casting an eye
on the constitutional amendment that all could live with.
In sum, rule of law must prevail but exceptional cases
like the sustainment of the EAOs and their
dependants for the transitional period have to be worked out, before
political settlement is reached. Otherwise, the government will have to act
against the EAOs each time they make a move to survive as fighting forces and
the progress made at the negotiation table will go down the drain and have to
restart it all over again.
Tags: Opinion
