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In the wake of violent police crackdowns on protesting students in Burma this week, much local anger over the beatings and arrests of protesters has been directed not just at the Myanmar Police Force, but at the European Union, which began training Burma’s police in crowd-control tactics in 2013.

The EU has responded with appropriate contrition, saying in a statement that the violence was of “great concern.” However, EU officials in Rangoon should learn that in providing support to government entities, they can’t be ignoring Burmese civil society and the concerns of local activists. 

That said, ultimate responsibility for the use of force by the police rests not in Brussels, but with the office of the Minister of Home Affairs Lieutenant General Ko Ko. The Home Affairs Ministry, reserved under the 2008 constitution for a serving military officer, controls not just the national police and the paramilitary units that were involved in Tuesday’s baton charge in Letpadan, north of Rangoon, but the police Special Branch and the wide-reaching General Administration Department (GAD), which is a key instrument in local surveillance of the population.

Forces under Ko Ko’s command have been implicated in the wrongful use of force previously. A recent Harvard University Law School Human Rights Clinic report connects him to war crimes committed during a military offensive in eastern Burma a decade ago. His warning to student activists in February that protests “threaten(ed) national stability” presaged the police’s excessive use of force in the past week.

The Burmese police force is a weak, ill-equipped, and corruption-riddled entity. It passively watched – and sometimes actively participated in – the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Arakan State in 2012, and anti-Muslim violence in the central town of Meiktila in 2013. The police also took part in the brutal suppression of demonstrating farmers at the Letpadaung copper mine project in December, which resulted in the shooting death of a woman protester. Yet the police have proven they can ensure security when it suits them: when ultra-nationalist Buddhist monks whipped up anti-Muslim violence in Mandalay in 2014, the police re-established order and maintained a heavy presence under a curfew for several weeks, averting further violence between Buddhists and Muslims.

Disturbing but unverified reports that the government is transferring military personnel from the army to the police would stymie efforts at police reform unless these new police recruits shed their military approach and become fully trained in policing and human rights standards. Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who had originally requested that the EU provide police training, failed to publicly condemn Tuesday’s violence.

Fundamental changes in policing won’t come about, however, so long as the military effectively controls Burma’s government under the country’s constitution. The police need to be under civilian authority, not overseen by abusive armed forces. That means transferring control of Burma’s police to a genuinely elected civilian government.

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