drugs is destabilizing Myanmar and drug dealing has now crossed the border to Thailand, Laos
and China and is destabilizing the entire region.
The conflict concerning the democratization of Myanmar can also be viewed as ideological/powerpolitical.
In 1990 parliamentary elections were held for the first time in decades. However, the military
government formed two years earlier under the State Law and Order Restoration Council
(SLORC)12 annulled the results because the National League for Democracy (NLD) won the elections.
Announced in 1992, the revisions to the Constitution have still not taken place today. In
September 2007, the democracy conflict entered a new phase when the dissidents' concerns
linked up with the protests by Buddhist monks against economic conditions in Myanmar. However,
after only a few days, the protest was forcefully crushed by the military government.13
Ad 2) The overall conflict setting within the second ethno-nationalist conflict scenario is exceedingly
complex, particularly because of the large number of different ethnic groups and the degree
of splintering involved amongst their parties and armies. Whereas the country's central plain is
inhabited by the Burmese majority of the population – the Bamar represent around 70 percent of
the overall population – the "periphery", the mountainous border regions in the west, north and
east, are peopled by numerous different ethnic groups with various linguistic preferences. The
Bamar are uniformly Buddhist. Some of the minorities practice other religions, for example, the
Rohingya (Muslims) and the Karen (in many cases, Christians). The ethnic minorities with the largest
numbers are the Shan, representing nine percent of the overall population and the Karen at
seven percent.
The ethno-nationalist conflict scenario was already present directly after Burma's independence.
And although the first constitution with its federal concept envisaged autonomous status for most
ethnic groups even before the abolition of this arrangement in 1962 there was discrimination
against the minorities. The first democratic government under Prime Minister U Nu advanced a
"nation-building project" aimed at “Bamarization” and “Buddhization” of the entire country (Sai
Kham Mong, 2007). This culturally centralist policy, discriminating against the "ethnic minorities"
with their linguistic and religious differences on the geographic periphery was continued by the
autocratic government and is still valid under the military regime (Steinberg, 2007).
Accordingly, consistent culturalist elements in political policy is one of the factors in the emergence
of the ethno-nationalist conflict scenario. This goes hand-in-hand with a second causal factor: the
autocratic nature of the government itself. The lack of possibilities for expressing democratic views
at either a central or a federal level is causing the "ethnic minorities" to be excluded from any opportunity
of participating in the distribution of resources, goods and power in Myanmar (see Smith,
2007). The country's specific political setup thus conditions political and economic marginalization
and the cultural discrimination of minority groups. Not the cultural differences per se, but their ap-