A Norwegian Fairy Tale
Coming Soon…
“It’s now time to be more principled and say, ‘We would like to support democracy.’” Audun Aagre, former head of the Norwegian Burma Committee, thus distills three decades of Norway’s checkered involvement in Burma into a succinct statement of credibility and purpose. Aagre has witnessed how his country’s once idealistic involvement with Myanmar has become mixed with compromise, weakening trust among the very people Norway claimed to support. His narrative describes how Norway’s engagement with Myanmar illustrates the ways in which idealism, business, and politics can get tangled, and how only principled, credible support for democracy can avoid undermining the very causes it aims to help.
Aagre’s decades-long connection to Burma began as a 19-year-old in Norway in the early 1990s, when a teacher at his school was tasked with training Burmese exiles to become Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) journalists in the wake of Aung San Suu Kyi’s 1991 Nobel Peace Prize. He became friends with a DVB journalist, and through this friendship, he hung around DVB’s tiny, cramped studio and saw how the Burmese exile media bootstrapped its broadcasts: the journalists created cassette tapes, then sent them by mail or train across the country to have them broadcast from Oslo via shortwave transmission. Aagre traveled with a group of fellow university students to the Thai–Myanmar border a couple of years later to meet exiles and learn the political terrain. On returning to Norway, he formed a Burma support group.
Aagre then discusses the Norwegian Burma Committee (NBC), which he was tapped to lead. Initially an advocacy NGO founded by Norwegians personally close to Aung San Suu Kyi, it focused on the democratic struggle, personified by Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD, as well as on maintaining pressure on the junta. Under Aagre’s leadership, the NBC broadened its scope to helping strengthen political parties as institutions, and working with civil society organizations. NBC’s work, he says, was unglamorous but urgent: getting parties to write real platforms, build internal accountability, and prepare to govern before elections arrived. In ethnically diverse states, this meant facilitating cooperation (even mergers) among multiple small parties, work that was sometimes inspiring and sometimes painfully hard, such as in Kachin, where different parties struggled to unite before 2020.
Up to this point, Aagre has described Norway’s engagement with Myanmar as being strongly oriented around solidarity with the opposition: DVB, NBC, NLD, Suu Kyi, exile communities, etc. But everything began to change with the supposed democratic opening under President Thein Sein. First, foreign policy shifted towards more connection to the military leadership. He recalls being jolted on hearing Norwegian diplomats unequivocally claiming that Suu Kyi was no longer as popular as the military, that the generals had somehow seen the light. He calls this a “fairy tale… a military that admits that they have been running the countries really badly, and they would like to change.” He says that the regime’s real intent was to lure more Western investment in order to reduce dependence on China, so they were temporarily acting and speaking towards that end —but only as far as they deemed necessary, and never to really surrender power.
Despite these policy shifts, Norway did not fully abandon its peace efforts. Through the Myanmar Peace Support Initiative (MPSI), it funded liaison offices and brought ethnic armed organizations and the military into more regular contact. Yet even this commitment to democratic ideals became skewed. As Aagre explains, MPSI leaned heavily toward the military’s preference for short-term fixes, pouring aid money and small development projects into ceasefire areas as “peace dividends.” New schools, roads, and clinics created the appearance of progress, convincing communities that reconciliation was within reach. In truth, it was little more than a strategy for the military to tighten its grip. The deeper questions—federalism, democracy, autonomy—were left untouched. That illusion of peace, Aagre stresses, only deepened mistrust on all sides and ultimately crippled the process.
And while MPSI exposed the limits of what could be accomplished in facilitating peace talks with the junta, the Rohingya crisis shattered any illusion that cooperation with the military could ever be compatible with human rights. Aagre here takes a moment to dismantle the narrative that assigns primary responsibility of the spread of hate speech and resulting moves against the Rohingya to Facebook algorithms, which has caused some to misunderstand the military’s central role in the crisis. Although a UN fact-finding mission did conclude that Facebook was slow to respond to the explosion of Rohingya-related hate speech on its platform, Aagre says that the anti-Rohingya campaign “was not a Facebook thing. That was a deliberate political move from the Commander in Chief!” The mass expulsions, rooted in prejudice and chauvinism, were an intentional operation ordered by military leadership, who labeled it “unfinished business” from World War II. Yet even Aung San Suu Kyi forcefully backed the military in its anti-Rohingya campaign, and the NLD and broader Bamar democratic movement failed to speak early and clearly for Rohingya rights… a failure many of those politicians have now come to rue.
Another key shift in Norway-Myanmar relations was a blurring of the lines between politics and business. Aagre notes how senior Foreign Ministry officials left their government posts to take positions in major Norwegian firms setting up shop in the country, and describes how large corporate actors came to symbolize both promise and unfortunate compromise. Two key areas he discusses in this regard are telecommunications (the company Telenor) and the energy sector.
In Telenor’s case, its entry on the Myanmar scene was viewed as a form of civic empowerment. SIM-card prices, which had once been in the hundreds of dollars, suddenly dropped to mass affordability; for the very first time, millions of Burmese could communicate freely and cheaply. Yet it was not all positive. Aagre notes that a Norwegian directorate trained the military in how to draft telecom law right before it won its license to operate in Myanmar, and while that might have appeared benign in Norway, he says, the optics screamed “quid pro quo” in Myanmar, which began to erode trust in Norway among long-time democracy activists. Moreover, the company began to follow the military’s marching orders, such as extended internet shutdowns in Rakhine State, illustrating the constraints on corporations in authoritarian settings. And even though it eventually withdrew from the Myanmar market ostensibly because it could no longer guarantee its stated commitment to human rights in the face of the military’s demands to share data for its surveillance measures, the sale still passed on the customer database through shell companies to the military.
The energy sphere also illustrates how political compromise insinuates itself almost unavoidably into even well-intentioned business interests. One such example is hydropower. Norway’s state-owned SN Power pursued a dam project in Shan State, insisting after its assessments that there were no political “red flags.” Aagre was stunned by this claim, since ethnic armies and the military had long been in conflict in the area, and questions of resource ownership— whether revenues should go to the central government or local authorities— were far from settled. What SN Power saw as a climate-friendly energy investment was, in reality, a flashpoint in an active war zone. The project inflamed tensions, fueled mistrust, and became an emblem of how even well-intentioned business ventures can deepen rather than ease Myanmar’s conflicts.
Oil and gas were another example. The Norwegian energy giant Statoil (now called Equinor) briefly explored Myanmar’s offshore fields. And although offshore drilling did not directly involve contested ethnic territories like SN Power’s initiative, the company entered Myanmar through production-sharing contracts that necessarily involved joint ventures with local state-owned or military-linked entities, all of which are connected to MOGE (Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise), which itself is fully controlled by the military. That means any revenue from exploration automatically flowed to the generals, thereby making Statoil complicit in the regime’s ongoing oppression. While Statoil eventually pulled out of the country, it did so only for profit-related reasons (it failed to find commercially viable reserves), and not because of its unseemly entanglement with the military.
Aagre here draws on Norway’s own wartime past as an object lesson, describing the story of the “boys in the woods.” The “boys” were ill-equipped resistance fighters in World War II who, while making little military difference, gave a nation back its pride in the face of the German invasion. That memory, he suggests, should remind outsiders who preach patience or urge compromise with killers to think twice. Whatever strategic debates rage among activists or diplomats, patronizing lectures from abroad land as insults to people who cannot choose peace on command.
Regarding the question of what he believes Norway’s current policy on Myanmar’s situation should be, Aagre admits he doesn’t know. But he is clear about what Norway should represent: a principled supporter of democracy rather than a laboratory for “trickle-down” realpolitik. That calls for backing the democratic movement in ways that can be articulated to Burmese partners, untethered to business interests in the country. Media must be independent from all power centers; party support must be substantive; peace facilitation must look (and be) balanced; economic projects must avoid even the appearance of buying political influence. And above all, outsiders should resist the condescension of prescribing long-term development “first” while people plead for survival “now.”
Coming full circle, Aagre contrasts the clarity of the 1990s and the fledgling DVB, to the murky complexity of the 2010s. If the 1990s were Norwegians’ “voice from London” moment for Myanmar— clear moral lines, a brave opposition, a righteous cause— the 2010s taught messy lessons about how hopes, investments, and geopolitical rivalries can so easily get entangled. His final message to Norway— and by extension, to any state tempted by clever grand strategies— is simple. In a world of resurgent authoritarianism, hedging and hoping are not enough. “If the military was able to turn Norway, then you can turn any country in the world. The symbolism of turning Norway was very high.”