By: Tettoe Aung

Tettoe Aung — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 09:33:09 +0000

Dear Ethan,
You may have been confused the military in Burma with the one in neighbouring Thailand. In Thailand, staging a coup has almost become a ritual just as military stages ‘military exercises’. In the Burmese military everyone is checked and counter checked with everyone that it is almost like George Orwell’s 1984.
To me, it is unlikely but not impossible. According to some sources the military regime has no other choice but to re-instate former retired/sacked deputy intelligence chief Major General Kyaw Win and some of the former intelligence officers, which indicates that the apparatus that the regime have was not up to the task. Good if they can be trusted. Than Shwe, on the other hand, might be using the second law of power which says, “Be wary of friends – they will betray you more quickly, for they are easily aroused to envy. They also become spoilt and tyrannical. But hire a former enemy and he will be more loyal than a friend, because he has more to prove. In fact, you have more to fear from friends than from enemies. If you have no enemies, find a way to make them.”
Inside the Burmese military one can not be free from being monitored when he reach the stage of Lt-Col. For someone to stage a coup, they must not only be daring but young and fully committed to sacrifice their lives for the country. Pigs might fly but you won’t find any. One of my colleagues who left us to join the OTS reminded us that he made the choice not because he love the country but because he loves ‘himself’. His explanation is this, once he is in the military and if by any bad luck he became wounded and discharged for his disability he will still have the opportunity to become an Officer on Special Duty (OSD) in the public service. The only time it wouldn’t work to his favour was that if he was captured by the communists and then released. He won’t be trusted any more.
Ethan, I think you should put yourself in the shoes of a military official in Burma and stop thinking like one in any other military. These are war fighters in uniforms who took the form of a military but in fact they are just a bunch of thugs with arms.

Comments on: STAGE A COUP today AND BECOME HEROES tomorrow

By: Tettoe Aung