Generals' murderous arithmetic by Mary Long

Dictatorships have a peculiar talent for turning human beings into statistics. A village becomes an “area of operation”, a funeral becomes a security incident, a bombed marketplace becomes collateral damage, and the dead acquire the bureaucratic dignity of a number. Myanmar’s military has perfected this grim arithmetic for years. What is changing now is not the cruelty but its intensity.

The escalation reported since the military’s new chief assumed command is a reminder that authoritarian systems do not become moderate merely because their uniforms are freshly pressed. The generals may reshuffle titles, rearrange offices and manufacture a civilian-looking administration, but the machinery underneath remains the same: fear, artillery, air power and the conviction that the population exists to obey.

There is something almost grotesque about the timing. As neighbouring governments increase diplomatic engagement, Myanmar’s military appears to be increasing the pressure on the people it claims to govern. This is the oldest trick in the authoritarian manual: conduct diplomacy abroad while conducting war at home. Foreign ministers receive polished explanations about stability and sovereignty while civilians receive the less polished version, shelling, displacement and terror.

The international community often finds itself strangely susceptible to this performance. A new leader arrives, a new political arrangement is announced, and diplomats suddenly discover vocabulary such as “opening”, “transition” and “engagement”. The language is comforting. It suggests that history has turned a corner. But history does not turn corners simply because generals change desks.

Myanmar’s tragedy is that the military has repeatedly demonstrated an almost pathological inability to understand legitimacy. It can occupy towns, imprison opponents and terrorise communities. What it cannot manufacture is consent. Every attack on civilians therefore achieves the opposite of what military rulers presumably desire. It deepens hatred, enlarges resistance and makes reconciliation harder.

And yet the generals continue. That is partly because repression can become a self-feeding system. Once an army has defined dissent as treason, every act of resistance becomes proof that still more repression is necessary. The government creates the rebellion it invokes to justify its violence, then cites the rebellion as evidence that its violence was justified. It is a political snake eating its own country.

The civilians caught inside this circular logic have no such luxury. They cannot retreat into abstractions about national security. They bury relatives. They abandon farms. They sleep in forests and improvised shelters. Children learn the sound of aircraft before they learn the geography of their own country.

Diplomacy remains necessary, but diplomacy without pressure can become theatre. Myanmar does not need another procession of solemn statements followed by polite handshakes. It needs sustained international insistence that civilian suffering is not an unfortunate side effect of governance. It is evidence of governance gone monstrously wrong.

The military may change its chief, its slogans or its constitutional costume. But until it abandons the belief that Myanmar can be ruled through terror, nothing fundamental has changed. A dictatorship can rename itself. It cannot rename the dead.