We hear a lot these days about the “trust deficit” and “the loss of social capital”. Thanks to a succession of royal commissions, parliamentary inquiries, media investigations and revelations by whistle blowers, many Australians have lost confidence in their most cherished institutions. Faith in politicians, public servants, bankers, churchmen and other traditional authority figures is said to be at an all-time low.
This phenomenon has real world consequences. According to Jerry Useem, writing in The Atlantic, high levels of trust are important for social cohesion, political stability and even economic growth. A downward trust spiral, on the other hand, has the opposite effect. One study has found that, more than 30 years after the Berlin Wall came down, fully half of the income disparity between East and West Germany could be traced to the legacy of informers employed by the Stasi, East Germany’s notorious Ministry for State Security. As Useem wrote, “The legacy of broken trust has proved extraordinarily difficult to shake”.
This statement prompts a comparison between East Germany under the communists and Myanmar under successive military regimes. Both countries had (and, in Myanmar’s case still has) the reputation of being brutal police states. Both regimes relied on hundreds of thousands of informers to spy on their fellow citizens, undermining social cohesion.
It has been estimated that in the 1980s, when the Stasi was at its most powerful, there were 200,000 inoffizielle mitarbeiter, or “unofficial collaborators”. In a population of 16 million, that was one informer for every 50 to 60 people.
The equivalent statistics for Myanmar are more difficult to estimate, but by some calculations the ratio is even higher. Under the Ne Win regime (1962–88), it was widely believed that one in ten Burmese were dalan, or informers. After the 1974 U Thant disturbances in Rangoon, for example, Western diplomats estimated that 20% of the country’s tertiary students were informers. Some of them actively supported the generals, but most were forced to cooperate with the regime.
The junta places a high priority on the identification, location and removal of anyone deemed a threat to the regime, a definition with a very wide meaning.
After the abortive 1988 pro-democracy uprising, the Directorate of Defence Services Intelligence (DDSI) expanded, extending its reach across the entire country. As part of that process, it recruited even more informers. In those pre-digital days (in Myanmar, at least) their contribution to the regime’s mass surveillance of Burmese society was critical. In 1998, one observer wrote that “one in seven (or even one in five) Burmese are informers”.
This claim is valid, but a little misleading. The number and concentration of informers varied between locations, with far fewer located in the rural districts where most Burmese lived. Even so, as another Myanmar watcher suggested in 2001, it was commonly believed that in the urban areas there was one informer for every ten houses. If this was true, then it means that the ratio of informers to other citizens in Myanmar was higher than in East Germany, a country where, in Timothy Garton Ash’s words, the Stasi became “a default global synonym for the secret police terrors of communism”. Under successive military regimes in Myanmar, the DDSI could claim a similar standing.
In one sense, however, the actual numbers do not matter. It is the perception that counts. This was a key feature of both the East German and Burmese surveillance systems. Because no-one knew who was an informer, it was widely assumed that they were everywhere. This had the effect of sowing suspicion and shutting down discussion of politically sensitive subjects.
As a Burmese journalist told the writer Emma Larkin: “It doesn’t make any difference whether they have informers or not. It is enough that we believe their informers are everywhere. After that, we do their work for them.” As Larkin noted, even without the technological means available to other oppressive regimes, in Myanmar “Big Brother really is everywhere”.
This situation only eased slightly under Aung San Suu Kyi’s quasi-civilian government, between 2016 and 2020.
Since the 2021 military coup, the level of surveillance in Myanmar has greatly increased. The country is thick with spies and informers, both paid and unpaid. The junta places a high priority on the identification, location and removal of anyone deemed a threat to the regime, a definition with a very wide meaning. The regime now has greater technical means to monitor the population, but it still relies heavily on human intelligence.
As so often happens in these circumstances, the competition between informers and those secretly working against the regime has turned into a nasty war within a war. The resistance knows that informers pose perhaps the most serious threat to their lives and ability to continue their struggle. Like so many insurgents before them, in many different countries, they have retaliated against informers with a campaign of “targeted killings”.
Many in the resistance appear to subscribe to the views of the legendary Irish guerrilla leader Michael Collins, who said in 1920 that “There is no crime in detecting and destroying, in war-time, the spy and the informer.” Male and female, young and old, service and civilian, no-one has been spared by the opposition’s so-called urban guerrilla units.
Even before the coup, levels of social trust in Myanmar were very low. In 2014, for example, the Asia Foundation conducted a nation-wide survey and asked the question: can most people be trusted? 77% of respondents answered “no”. To a similar question about their close neighbours, 43% still answered in the negative. Trust in government institutions varied but they also fared badly in the survey.
The 2021 coup, and the bitter civil war that has followed, has clearly made this situation much worse. Many communities, normally divided by other things, have been brought together by their shared fear and hatred of the junta. However, in other ways deep divisions have opened up in Myanmar over political allegiances, military tactics and social mores.
To return to the arguments made by Jerry Useem, the lack of trust that has blighted Myanmar for more than half a century will need to be taken into account in any consideration of the country’s future. Myanmar badly needs leaders in whom most people can put their trust. In the past, Aung San Suu Kyi has filled this role, but she will be in prison for the foreseeable future.
Meanwhile, as the civil war grinds on, Myanmar's social capital diminishes further and the trust spiral continues downwards.
