Why Myanmar needs a leader, not an icon

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The voting is done and the counting will finish soon.

In a few days, the world will know just how many seats Aung San Suu Kyi has won in Myanmar, whose Sunday election stands to hand power to a non-military-backed government for the first time in more than five decades.

But for the democracy icon, the hard part has yet to begin. It's not merely the political wrangling she faces to choose a president and cabinet, or the poverty and primitive infrastructure that will take at least a generation to address.

The biggest challenge will not be building roads or electrical lines. It will be finding a way to bring peace and new wealth to a country damaged by flagrant corruption, six decades of fighting, an entrenched military and increasingly prominent cultural and religious fault lines.

"Social cohesion has been totally dismantled," said Ma Thida, a Burmese writer and one of the country's best-regarded intellectuals.

The most obvious example lies in the divisive rise of extreme nationalist Buddhist ideology. A cohort of well-organized monks has stoked hostility toward Muslims and successfully lobbied for discriminatory race and religion laws.

But Myanmar is home to 135 ethnicities – a number set by the British in a 1921 census – many of whom speak different languages and worship different gods.

Authoritarian rule provided a common enemy. With the end of military dictatorship, local identities have strengthened and fragmented. Even in Myanmar's most socially progressive urban centres, mutual dislike has fomented separation between people of different ethnicities who live and work next to each other – particularly between the Buddhist majority Bamar and minority groups, who live socially distinct lives.

Ms. Ma Thida calls it "the beginning of a crisis."

"We need to seriously talk about this issue: What's our collective vision for our society? What kind of society do we really want to build here?"

History stifled that conversation for a long time. The British first took control of small parts of the country, then known as Burma, in the 1820s; in 1948, an independence movement won a civilian government for less than a decade before the military took over.

Only in the last few years have democratic reforms created a new opening for a discussion on how to shape the country's future.

With rich agricultural land and large energy and mining resources, Myanmar is gifted by geography, wedged between India, China and Thailand. But it courts trouble if it flings open borders without establishing what historian Thant Myint-U calls "an inclusive 21st-century identity" that moves beyond a century of anti-colonial feeling.

"At the core of the Burmese political DNA is this sense of exploitation by outsiders, which then fed into the isolationist policies and that nativism of the late 20th century," he said.

If Myanmar fails to establish a more accommodating sense of self, "it's really hard for me to see how the country is going to de-isolate from the rest of the world – at a time when it's the poorest and weakest country in the region – without feeling somehow that the rest of the world is exploiting it, and without there being a nationalist backlash."

It's a question of more than economic welfare. Myanmar has endured ethnic strife and civil war for more than six decades now. The military-backed government failed in its attempts to broker a national ceasefire. If Ms. Suu Kyi is to succeed in its place, she needs to bridge long-standing animosities – not only to win peace, but also to achieve a freer democracy.

The generals who still control a quarter of the seats in parliament "want to create a successful story of peace before they step down," said Khin Ma Ma Myo, a Rangoon specialist in security and military studies.

And that's unlikely to happen unless the soldiers and the ethnic fighters can share some kind of what Ms. Khin Ma Ma Myo calls a "national vision for the country."

Ms. Suu Kyi, then, may find her future measured in very different terms from what got her elected. Voters flocked to the Nobel laureate on the strength of her charisma and story.

But her nation needs a leader, not an icon.