Oliver Slow on the Mindset of Myanmar’s Military

• Published in: Diplomat (Rozelle, N.S.W.)
• Main Author: Strangio, Sebastian
• Format: Magazine Article
• Language: English
• Published: Tokyo Tribune Content Agency LLC 15.02.2023
• Subjects: Armed forces; Colonialism; Decades; Democracy; Violence; Myanmar (Burma)
• ISSN: 1446-697X

How the Myanmar armed forces got there, and have since sustained their control over Myanmar and its people – even during the country’s decade of supposed reform in the 2010s – is the subject of a new book by the British journalist Oliver Slow, who lived and worked as a journalist in Myanmar between 2012 and 2020, several years of which he spent as an editor at Frontier Myanmar. When the military seized power on February 1, 2021, many observers struggled to understand why the military leadership had taken such a disastrous step, after a decade in which Myanmar had opened its economic and political system. The transition/roadmap – whatever you wish to call it – was to be achieved through its own rules, by adhering to the 2008 Constitution, which it had passed in a sham referendum just months after Cyclone Nargis devastated large parts of the country. [...]just this morning I was reading a piece in state-run media to mark Union Day that essentially blamed “capitalist invaders” for the issues the country is facing.