Why is this country in SE Asia economically and politically so utterly wretched? On the face of it, the country is well endowed with natural resources - good agricultural land, valuable forests, offshore oil and gas, sapphires and rubies ... It also has a wealth of tourist attractions. One might have expected the country to be among the Asian 'tiger' economies.

What interests me isn't the precise chain of events that have made this country so poor and an international pariah state, but the underlying causes. Anyone got any theories?

Yes, at the risk of over-generalizing a bit, I will proffer a few opinions on this matter. Please forgive my omission of key details in this post, maybe we can discuss them later.

In terms of Myanmar's history, it's not difficult to discover why there was instability right from the beginning of the country's formation. It would be easy to blame the country that took on Myanmar as a colony in the 19th C, namely Britain, for all of Myanmar's troubles, but I think the problems are equally rooted in the history of the area. The area currently governed by Myanmar is blessed (or cursed, from another perspective) with much ethnic and religious diversity. The ethnic Burmese make up the majority there, with their traditional stronghold being along the lower reaches of the Irrawaddy. They have been the dominant ethnic group in the country for hundreds of years now. Along with the Burmese, there are Karens, Kachins, Shans, and several other major ethnic groups, most of whom reside in the north. As can be imagined, a history of ethnic conflict in the country dates back many centuries. Not only did this conflict occur within the current borders of Myanmar, but also along and inside the current borders of Thailand, Laos, India and China, as various peoples vied for position and power. The animosity that developed from these rivalries still exists today and the resentment of the dominant Burmese lingers perhaps stronger than ever before.

When the British arrived and eventually conquered Burma, after several small wars, they inherited the problems that already plagued the last Burmese dynasty, the Toungoo. It's safe to say that the British exacerbated some problems by playing one ethnic group off of another, similar to what had occurred in other areas dominated by colonial powers. British rule was typically exploitative and demoralizing for the locals in Myanmar, perhaps a little bit worse than average among the various colonies of southeast Asia. Unfortunately, I think the British failed to really build up the infrastructure in Myanmar, they were really concerned about having a buffer colony between British India and French Indochina.

After suffering through WW2 and Japanese occupation (Burma was a key battleground because supplies were gotten by the nationalist Chinese regime via the 'Burma Road') Myanmar became an independent state, in 1948. U Nu, the first Prime Minister, inherited the same problems that the British had been forced to deal with, namely ethnic conflict. In addition, economically Myanmar was a shambles following WW2. It was not long before Ne Win took control via military coup, and Myanmar has been under military rule ever since.

Why has military rule been so long-lasting in Myanmar? I think the military leaders have been able to convince many of the ethnic Burmese people that a strong military is necessary in order to control the ethnic tensions within Myanmar's borders, and also to deal with the drug trade, which is also blamed on the ethnic minority peoples. The military build-up, supported by China as a way of buffering China's rival India on the east, has been able to not only maintain power, but also a very large standing army. Any flare-ups of democratic or human rights movements have been easily crushed by the powerful military appartus in the country. So much money flows into the military that it has become one of the key industries in the country...similar to North Korea, although Myanmar is better off economically than NK. Other areas of the economy and infrastructure have been neglected, relatively speaking.

I'm not really sure what the solution is for Myanmar, I'm not an expert when it comes to this country and hence certainly wouldn't venture to make any major predictions. The world seems to have hope in Aung San Suu Kyi (daughter of the 'father of Burma') as a potential beacon for democratic and human rights in Myanmar. I'm a little more reserved about this, Suu Kyi has never really talked about the problems of ethnic conflict, she's more concerned about democratic rights for the people in general. Certainly the problems of ethnic conflict wouldn't go away simply as a result of a regime change. Other people point to the eventual breaking up of Myanmar into various parts, more representative of ethnicity. I can't imagine something like this going smoothly...see Yugoslavia.

Anyhow, enough for now...I'd like to see some other opinions on this topic...

Hi Jazz. Many thanks for your explanation. I now feel much better informed about the situation and the reasons. Obviously if the key problem is severe ethnic tensions it very bodes indeed ill for the future, and presumably we haven't seen the worst yet. Btw, it's one of the very few countries that the British Foreign Office's tourist website tries to persuade people not to visit on *moral* grounds - which is most unusual. For example, visitors are are told that many hotels have have been built by 'slave labour' , though that must surely apply to quite a number of other countries too ...

Jazz that was a tour de force! I knew that Bloomsby's question was motivated by some concern and your explanation fit the bill.
It reminded me of dealing with visa applications for students to certain places and wondering why I was hitting a wall with certain countries then checking into the history and current situation and bingo! It all became clear.

I looked into the Burmese question a while back as I knew some people from there.
What strikes me when I read of any conflicts now and then go and research the history of them, no matter where on the face of the globe you pick...totally at random...it all boils down to feuds between villages and factions!
I mean that whenever you have two villages sharing space, and this can be read as country, you'll always have a territory battle. You'll always have differences between people and the people in power use these to their advantage.
No matter how hard people will try to unify people with one government, they will always have different divisions and factions. This is in my opinion why in some instances, only military rule seems to outweigh that tendency to fraction things and cling to ones' own customs, religion and be incapable of forming one collective govt.

When I stay in a village anywhere in the world, such as for example Kandy in Sri Lanka, I see that the Tamils are the servants of the Buddhist bigwigs and they are treated with disdain.
Or I stay in an Italian village and hear that the men from each village were arch rivals because the one village had a better water source than the other one. And the rivalry dates back several centuries!

Burma looked like a clearcut case of trouble brewing for the tribal past but I didn't know that much about the British intervention.

It did strike me as odd that with all those resources they were so poor.