ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 31 NO 6, DECEMBER 2015 29 SEEKING AND AVOIDING THE LAW IN BURMA A comment on Judith Beyer [AT 30(4)] Judith Beyer’s article on Myanmar’s legal system evocatively illustrates the confusion and ambiguity that exists for those trying to ‘find the law’ in Burma today. After listing the ‘palimpsest’ of statutes and directives that constitutes the law on the books, Beyer searches through Yangon’s roiling streets, under-resourced universities, byzantine law offices, and deserted libraries to encounter a similar problem: a law that seems to refuse to be found, pinned down, made to speak clearly. For Beyer, essential conclusions derive from this evasiveness: ‘In contemporary Myanmar, it is proving difficult even to find the law, a necessary precondition before one can hope for justice’. Yet this claim – that achieving justice requires knowing the law – seems more like a universalist assertion than an analytical conclusion. And while Beyer’s informants (who include a group of Burmese lawyers and internet denizens writing in English) may hold this belief, a focus only on these actors obscures the everyday functions of the law in Burma, where in my own fieldwork (with Burmese social activists and legal aid pro- viders) the claim that the law in any way leads to justice, or is even meant to do so in the first place, is refuted as often as it is confirmed. For instance, research in 2013 with legal aid lawyers advocating for marginalized defendants (such as men who have sex with men, com- mercial sex workers, and drug users) found that lawyers described themselves as brokers man- aging the flow of bribes between accused and accuser. 1 In fact, they stressed how they must know everything – whom and when to bribe, when to conserve resources for use once a client is imprisoned, how to marshal sympathetic character witnesses – except for the law. Their goal is never to win, only to work to reduce the sentence. They say that for their clients, the only hope for justice is to avoid the law (whatever it says or wherever it is) at all costs. Such sentiments about the law extend beyond ‘criminals’ and into Burma’s main- stream society. Activists, for their part, point out that even in this moment of putative transi- tion, new laws are written to criminalize not only their political conduct, 2 but also the ability of normal people to experience justice. A state- ment signed by 34 of Burma’s most radical grassroot activist groups, written in late 2014 to mark the two-year anniversary of govern- ment violence against 99 Buddhist monks and nine civilians who were protesting against a land grab and subsequent copper mine project in central Burma, made the following com- mentary on today’s legal regime: ‘The current government, in order to oppress and suppress the citizens, expands all kinds of laws and car- ries them out, and those laws are being carried out with the intention to give suffering to the native people of the country’. 3 In that document the activists directly referenced a new educa- tion law that they called undemocratic, but they implicitly indexed a host of other new laws, including those requiring nightly guest registra- tion with the state, 4 those restricting women’s reproductive and religious choices, and taxa- tion codes targeting the poor. These Burmese lawyers and activists there- fore have an intensely ambivalent relation- ship with the law, seeming to see it as deeply unstable: not something that only exists to be found, but something that must be performed anew in every encounter. In response to my queries about what the law says, how a case will go, or whether someone will get arrested during a protest, the refrain is often the same: ‘It depends on the situation’. While Beyer’s analysis is that senior Burmese lawyers hold the law as precious, looking through a perspective in which everything ‘depends on the situation’ provokes an additional interpretation: the law rather becomes valuable as a part of the mas- ter’s performance of it. Indeed, the lawyer’s own power and skill animate the law; his or her ability to wield it in an argument (and often as part of a number of other strategies including negotiation, using the media, and encouraging tactical payment of bribes) makes it relevant. This is, of course, at first glance much the same as in other legal situations: law is always a competitive terrain where statutes and proce- dures are tools which skilled jurists manipulate to best their opponents. But in many of those systems (e.g. those in the West from whence so many so-called ‘rule of law’ reformers are descending upon Burma in droves today) there is a sense that such lawyerly improvisations are mere momentary derivations from a core system that is fundamentally just – despite repeated evidence to the contrary. 5 The point is that many Burmese actors understand their situation as different. When the law is improvised it may actually change in the process as a result – and may never go ‘back’ to what the statute originally said, or to what people may consider just. Hence, in Burmese activist and lawyer performances (whether in a negotiation in court or in a pro- test in a paddy field) the lawyers and activists often simultaneously present law as a norma- tive goal to be aspired toward, and as a pure tactic whose rules one must master in order to survive. 6 The necessity of seeing the law as nothing more than a tool gnaws away at the idea of any pure and perfect law, thus leaving open the broader question of whether law is the appropriate tool for delivering justice. It is this question that reappears again and again, and must be integrated with Beyer’s impor- tant contribution about Burma’s formal legal sphere. l Elliott Prasse-Freeman Yale University elliott.prasse-freeman@yale.edu [Prof Judith Beyer has been offered a right of reply. Ed.] 1. Prasse-Freeman (2015b). For a broader treatment of Burma’s justice system, see Cheesman (2015). 2. See AAPPB (n.d.). 3. From Lekpadaungdaung kyayni simangein hpyet thein hpek hkan ya thi hna hnik nainganludu akyo pyu kunyek inasu thamekga ahpwemya ei thabaw hta kyay nya gyet [The Country People’s Benefit Network Force and Unions’ declaration on the Letpadaung Hill Copper Project’s two full years of violent destruction], 25/11/2014. 4. Fortify Rights (2015). 5. For poor people’s denial of justice in America, see Butler (2013); Shapiro (2014). For African-Americans see The Sentencing Project (2013). American President Barack Obama’s comments after citizen Michael Brown’s murderer was not indicted are telling in this regard. He said: ‘We are a nation built on the rule of law, and so we need to accept that this decision was the grand jury’s to make’. 6. For a short treatment of activists and the law in the context of protests against land grabs, see Prasse-Freeman (2015a). AAPPB n.d. Repressive domestic legislation. http://aappb.org/ wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Repressive-Legislation.pdf. Butler, P.D. 2013. Poor people lose: Gideon and the critique of rights. Yale Law Journal 122: 2176-2204. Cheesman, N. 2015. Opposing the rule of law: How Myanmar’s courts make law and order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fortify Rights 2015. Midnight intrusions: Ending guest registration and household inspections in Myanmar. http://www.fortifyrights.org/downloads/FR_Midnight_ Intrusions_March_2015.pdf. Prasse-Freeman, E. 2015a. Revolution from below. Foreign Policy, 20 April. – 2015b. Myanmar conceptions of justice and the rule of law. In D. Steinberg (ed). Myanmar: Dynamics, changes, continuities. Boulder: Lynne Rienner, Shapiro, J. 2014. As court fees rise, the poor are paying the price. National Public Radio, 19 May. http://www.npr. org/2014/05/19/312158516/increasing-court-fees-punish- the-poor. The Sentencing Project 2013.Report of the Sentencing Project to the United Nations Human Rights Commission regarding racial disparities in the United States criminal justice system. http://sentencingproject.org/doc/ publications/rd_ICCPR%20Race%20and%20Justice%20 Shadow%20Report.pdf. news cont’d from p. 30 AAA CLOSER TO ISRAEL BOYCOTT At its best-attended business meeting in years, American Anthropological Association (AAA) members overwhelmingly voted in favour (1040 cf 136 against) of a resolution to refrain from formal collaboration with Israeli academic institutions, w.o. targeting individual scholars. This will now be put to its 10,000+ membership Spring next year. Another resolution calling for rejection of any boycott of Israeli institutions was defeated with a vote of 1,173 against and 196 in favour. The cam- paigning group Anthropologists for the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions referred to this as ‘historic’. If it passes, the AAA would be the largest academic organization to support such an action. Other academic groups – including the Association for Asian American Studies and the American Studies Association – have adopted similar boycott proposals. Ahead of the vote, a coalition including the Academic Council for Israel and Scholars for Peace in the Middle East issued a joint state- ment opposing the boycott resolution. The vote follows on from October report by the AAA Task Force on Israel-Palestine Engagement. http:// www.americananthro.org/stayinformed/newslist. aspx?&navItemNumber=570 [GH] comment