The armed forces in Myanmar politics : a terminating role?
While Myanmar's constitution under which the current government of President Thein Sein was created in 2011 has all the characteristics expected of a modern republic, the continued autonomy and political role of the armed forces are perceived by opponents of the regime as an anomaly. Despite this apparent anomaly, the speed and thoroughness with which the transition from military authoritarian rule to most, if not all, of the features expected of a system of ""democratic"" rule has surprised most observers and analysts of the current Myanmar situation. The root of their surprise comes from their seeing the transformation as being driven by either endogenous or exogenous forces outside the historical experience and understandings of the leadership of the Myanmar armed forces. However, it is in the history of the armed forces and its role in protecting the state from threats to its internal security, territorial integrity, and external security that the basis of the transformation can be found. Also, ensuring the continued viability of the armed forces and the security of its leadership and integrity is also a continuous concern. The twenty years between the annulled 1990 general election won by the NLD, and the 2010 general election, boycotted by the NLD and won by the army-generated USDP, were spent by the armed forces creating the conditions which allowed the later transition from military to constitutional rule to take place.
Myanmar's Parliament: From Scorn to Significance
Like much about Myanmar's transition to discipline-flourishing democracy— as the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC, 1997–2011) so regularly called it—the hluttaw (parliament) established under the 2008 Constitution was widely written off before it even came into being. The conventional wisdom among commentators, analysts, and politicians was that the constitution was designed to perpetuate decades of military rule, the 2010 general election would be a sham, and the hluttaw would be a rubber stamp for the new military-backed national government. The one-sided result of that general election, the rules of which heavily favoured the military-aligned Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), only served to reinforce this view. Despite the strong majority enjoyed by the USDP, and the presence of appointed military representatives, who fill 25 percent of all seats in each national, state, and region parliament, over the past two-and-a-half years the hluttaw bodies have been anything but a rubber stamp. On the contrary: one of the defining features of the Pyidaungsu Hluttaw , or National Parliament, has been the regular tension, and even conflict, with President U Thein Sein's government and other institutions in Myanmar's political landscape, including the judiciary, political parties, media, and civil society. The parliament has vigorously asserted its independence from these other institutions—to the point of potentially harming the reform process—and its members have taken particularly seriously the task of acting as a check on the Union government, cutting budgets and discussing and investigating reports of corruption and illegal land confiscations. As writer and historian Thant Myint-U has noted, because it is a new institution the parliament does not suffer in the same way as the judiciary and bureaucracy from corruption, red tape, and other legacies of decades of military rule (Kean 2012). For the same reason, however, the hluttaw and its members are still feeling their way around a system bequeathed by the SPDC through its tight management of the constitution-drafting process. Inevitably, this has led to some missteps and misunderstandings. Given Myanmar's fraught political history and the binary nature of post-1988 politics, particularly in areas dominated by ethnic Burmese, a surprising degree of cooperation between its representatives has characterized the parliamentary system at the national level. Even after the addition of representatives from the National League for Democracy (NLD) in May 2012 there has been a consistent and notable lack of adherence to party political lines.
Similarities in protozoan and flatworm habituation behavior.
ONE problem in the study of habituation in protozoa is that similar results, given the same experimental manipulations, may not be obtained in metazoa. I shall compare habituation behaviour in the protozoan Spirostomum with that in the micrometazoan Rhabdocoel flatworm Stenostomum; it remains to be shown whether there is a correspondence between protozoa and metazoa both in behaviour and in their underlying chemical processes. Both these organisms contract in response to mechanical and touch stimuli: when subjected to repeated stimulation, they habituate1. Furthermore, the more intense the stimulus, the longer it takes for habituation to occur1.