Next week, Myanmar President Thein Sein will arrive in Washington, DC, for a historic visit and meeting with President Obama. It will be the first visit by a Myanmar president to the United States in nearly fifty years. Only three years earlier, nearly every top Myanmar leader had been barred from entering the United States (and most other leading democracies) due to sanctions on the country’s military-ruled government and on nearly all exports to and imports from the country. U.S. congresspeople regularly castigated Myanmar as one of the most tyrannical societies on earth, and when former president George W. Bush found himself in a room in the mid-2000s, at an Asian summit, with Myanmar’s then-leader, he essentially refused to even acknowledge the other man’s presence.

Now, the situation had reversed itself so rapidly that many longtime Myanmar-watchers in Washington cannot even keep track of the changes. In these days before the visit, Myanmar is being portrayed positively by nearly every American official. While once American policymakers had blasted Myanmar and its government as a tyranny, now they paint it as a model of emerging democratization, a potential bright spot in a world where democracy has regressed for the past seven years, according to global monitoring group Freedom House.

Yet as this incredibly well-researched new Reuters piece shows, Myanmar actually is poised on the abyss of implosion. A new kind of apartheid against Muslims is being instituted across the country, Reuters reports, leading to growing interreligious and interethnic violence. In some cases, this violence may be encouraged, or at least tolerated, by the state security forces, as Human Rights Watch showed in its own report last month. Will any of these serious, dangerous challenges be brought up during what is expected to be a triumphant visit by Thein Sein? Will President Obama even mention the exploding violence in Myanmar while the president is here? Don’t count on it.

On May 5, Malaysians went to the polls in what was expected to be the closest national election since independence. Massive turnout was reported, particularly in urban areas, with many districts reporting that over 80 percent of eligible voters came to the polls. In the early part of the vote counting, opposition supporters seemed jubilant, and opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim even announced that he believed his three-party opposition alliance had taken down the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition, which has dominated the country since independence, never losing an election. Of course, BN has used massive gerrymandering, enormous handouts from state coffers, thuggish election day tactics, and outright vote-buying in the past to secure its victories. Still, the May 5 vote seemed to be a potential watershed, putting the opposition into power and putting Malaysia onto the path of a real, consolidated two-party democracy.

Unfortunately, the election seems to have solved nothing, and may only exacerbate Malaysia’s serious internal problems. Although the ruling coalition claims victory, Anwar and the opposition allege massive fraud that could have cost them the win. So, the status of Malaysia’s electoral institutions has been badly damaged. Indeed, the opposition coalition appears to have won a higher percentage of the popular vote, yet gerrymandering and potential frauds have given the BN a majority of seats. Since the election commission is run by the prime minister’s office, and thus by the BN, it’s almost impossible anyone is going to overturn the election results.

So, for one, Malaysia now enters a period in which huge percentages of the population—particularly in urban areas—did not vote for the government and are extremely angry about the result. Anger is going to simmer for weeks or months, and is already growing fiercer on Malaysia’s free online media. This anger could lead to renewed street protests, a completely ineffective national government, or greater capital flight and educated Malaysians emigrating, already one of Malaysia’s biggest challenges. Without domestic capital being reinvested in the country, it will be impossible for Malaysia to escape the middle-income trap that it has been caught in for years.

Second, the election now has torn apart any remaining fictions about interethnic harmony in Malaysia. The ruling coalition used to be comprised of ethnic Malay, Indian, and Chinese parties, but the BN’s ethnic Chinese components were all but wiped out in this election by the opposition’s ethnic Chinese party. At the same time, the BN expended far more of its resources in ethnic Malay-dominated districts, and so instead of being a multiethnic coalition, the new BN government is really just one party, the Malay-dominated UMNO. A graph on New Mandala shows the correlation between BN victories and percentages of Malays in each district.

Malaysia now has a situation in which ethnic Malays totally dominate the ruling party, and minorities, including the Chinese, have almost completely gone to the opposition. Not a recipe for interethnic harmony. Private companies run by ethnic Chinese, already tired of affirmative action laws favoring Malays, are even more likely to close up and leave. Meanwhile, since the BN did not deliver an overwhelming victory, current Prime Minister Najib Razak, a relative moderate, is likely to lose his job to a figure in the BN who is more hard-line pro-Malay and less willing to promote reconciliation among all ethnic groups in Malaysia.

All in all, not a situation with a lot of bright sides.

Today, China—and to a lesser extent other successful authoritarian capitalists—offer a viable alternative to the leading democracies. In many ways, their systems pose the most serious challenge to democratic capitalism since the rise of communism and fascism in the 1920s and early 1930s. And in the wake of the global economic crisis, and the dissatisfaction with democracy in many developing nations, leaders in Asia, Africa, and Latin America are studying the Chinese model far more closely—a model that, eventually, will help undermine democracy in their countries.

On the site China-US Focus, I expand on my argument about the China model in a new piece. Read it here.

On April 22, at a packed, black-tie ceremony in New York City, the Myanmar president, represented by minister Aung Min, accepted an award from the respected global NGO International Crisis Group for the “pursuit of peace.” The award, given annually by the group, is meant to honor someone who promotes change and reform, and helps end violent conflicts, like the ones that have ranged along Myanmar’s borderlands for decades.

Over the past three years, since Myanmar began its transition from one of the most repressive military regimes in the world to a civilian government, such honorifics—both for civilian President U Thein Sein and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, freed from house arrest and able to travel the world—have become common. While only three years ago, nearly every leading democracy maintained strict sanctions on Myanmar, and portrayed the country as an isolated land run by a thuggish regime, now foreign donors, investors, and officials are rushing into the country and portraying Myanmar as the next giant emerging market and example of democratic change.

In its annual report on human rights, released last week, the U.S. State Department noted, “Burma [the old name for Myanmar] continued to take significant steps in a historic transition toward democracy … its democratic transition, if successful and fully implemented, could serve as an example for other closed societies.”

Yet neither the cartoonish portrayals of Myanmar in the past nor today’s idyllic pictures of Myanmar’s future are correct.

While the country has taken important steps towards democracy, its opening also has unleashed dangerous forces that, in recent months, have led to scores of violent attacks against Myanmar’s Muslim minority. Overall, at least 100,000 Muslims have been made homeless in the past two years by violent attacks on them and their homes, and hundreds if not thousands have been killed. Left unchecked, with Myanmar attempting to make the transition to democracy from one of the most repressive regimes on Earth, this rising ethnic hatred and attacks could turn the country into at twenty-first century version of post-Cold War Yugoslavia.

Read more of my new piece on Myanmar’s challenges here.

This week, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a detailed, and devastating, report on abuses against Muslim Rohingyas in western Myanmar’s Rakhine (also known as Arakan) State. The report claims that the most heinous of all crimes—crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing—were committed against Rohingya last year. It conclusively shows that, contrary to the Myanmar government’s claims that the violence against Rohingya last year erupted spontaneously, monks and local political parties had been agitating for ethnic cleansing against Rohingya well in advance of last year’s violence, in some cases with local government complicity. It also reveals that once the violence started, local security forces in Rakhine State did little to stop the burning of mosques, evictions of Muslims, and killings of Muslims. In some cases, HRW shows, the security forces actively participated in the orgy of violence and then rounded up almost only Rohingya, while leaving Buddhist perpetrators untouched. Even now, it finds, in villages in Rakhine State where Rohingya have not been forced to flee, they are still being subjected to draconian restrictions by local officials and security forces.

HRW probably released the report this week because they wanted to time it to a decision being made by the European Union on whether or not to lift nearly all remaining sanctions on Myanmar. The decision was supposed to be released this week, and indeed it was. Unfortunately, HRW’s report seems to have little impact on the EU—or on any other Western democracies, which have shifted 180 degrees, going from viewing Myanmar’s government as nothing but thugs to viewing it as unwaveringly set on reform. The EU still went ahead and lifted most sanctions. Still, HRW shows that, contrary to this new view, Myanmar still faces enormous hurdles, and the government is hardly comprised of simply technocrats and reformers.

Over the past three years, the Arab uprisings have created the idea that the climate, internationally, for democracy and human rights has been improving. As I write in my new book Democracy in Retreat, the Arab uprisings have been essentially canceled out by regression, over the past ten years, in parts of South and Southeast Asia, Eastern and Southern Europe, and Africa. Many other reports have come to similar conclusions, including Freedom House’s annual report and the new Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) study of global democracy, released earlier this month.

Now the U.S. Department of State weighs in. Its annual country reports on human rights are necessarily more politicized than Freedom House or the EIU—there is lobbying inside the State Department about the reports that never would happen at a nongovernmental reporter, and it is loath to condemn some of the United States’ closest allies. Still, its report notes similar trends as Freedom House and my book. Globally, civil society, the lifeblood of democracy, is being challenged more than ever, the report states. “Increased headwinds buffeted civil society in 2012, as governments continued to repress or attack the means by which individuals can organize, assemble, or demand better performance from their rulers,” it notes in the overview of the report. “From Iran to Venezuela, crackdowns on civil society included new laws impeding or preventing freedoms of expression, assembly, association and religion; heightened restrictions on organizations receiving funding from abroad; and the killing, harassment, and arrest of political, human rights, and labor activists.”

Meanwhile, although reforms in Myanmar and some Arab countries appear promising, other once-promising young democracies like Sri Lanka, Kenya, Hungary, and many others continue to stagnate or backslide toward repression. Even in the Arab world, retrenchment by autocrats and cynicism by populaces about democratic governance already threatens hard-fought gains. And while I think it is highly doubtful that the change is Myanmar is due much to the “sustained U.S. and international pressure to reform [there]” that the report offers credit to, it is true that the country has witnessed dramatic shifts since 2010. Still, the possibility of Myanmar disintegrating into a failing state remains just as high as it prospering into a stable democracy.

On the CFR site, I have an expert brief up on the surge in ethnic and religious unrest in Myanmar. You can read the expert brief here.

The anger seems to be building, despite some efforts by the government, Muslim leaders, and Buddhist leaders to cool tensions. (Aung San Suu Kyi, who had said virtually nothing about the violence for two weeks, did finally step forward and say that Myanmar needs to promote a stronger rule of law to prevent future violent outbreaks, a somewhat mealy-mouthed response.) One of the leading militant monks—a phrase that just sounds bizarre—this week gave an interview to the Irrawaddy in which he was essentially unrepentant about the attacks on Muslims. Other militant Buddhist leaders have been similarly unrepentant, and I would not be surprised to see a new wave of attacks after the quiet of Burmese New Year. It seems that the security thus far are primarily going to blame Muslims for the violence, having now arrested and charged the Muslim owners of a gold shop in Meiktila without doing much to investigate Buddhists involved in the violence there.

In thinking about the role of foreign donors and investors in Myanmar, and how they could help reduce the violence, I had several other prescriptions beyond the expert brief. For one, donors should more thoroughly scrutinize the backgrounds of people who come to the numerous new mediation and peace-building efforts in the country that are designed to facilitate better interethnic and interreligious relations. Not a few times, religious leaders involved in these efforts have now turned out to be some of the same ones promoting violence, which delegitimizes the entire mediation/peace-building efforts. Second, as donors did with some success in Indonesia, major donors to Myanmar should shift away from military-military cooperation to focusing on rebuilding the Myanmar police force, including creating entirely new, effective units trained in the latest methods of nonviolent crowd control. Far too much time has been spent by U.S. diplomats and officials from other Western countries now engaging with Myanmar on military-military cooperation; the military is critical to the transition, but at this point close cooperation is not practical and risks supporting the most recalcitrant members of the armed forces. Instead, creating a better police force will reduce the power of the military and avoid the need for military-dominated martial law in conflict areas. This new police force should necessarily include recruits drawn from all of Myanmar’s main religions and ethnic groups. Finally, donors and investors are going to have to be more vigilant about where their funds go, to avoid perceptions that money is being directed primarily to Burman-dominated areas.

In recent weeks, the Buddhist-Muslim violence that last year seemed mostly confined to Rakhine State has been spreading across Myanmar, even entering Yangon and other large cities. Muslim leaders in some parts of the country are warning Myanmar’s Muslims not to leave their homes, while many mosques and shops owned by Muslims have shut their doors for now.

The danger is that, in the vacuum created by the end of Myanmar’s highly repressive state three years ago—and abetted by a climate of hateful speech and xenophobia on Myanmar’s mushrooming Internet—these episodes of interreligious and interethnic violence are going to expand, consuming the country in chaotic violence before it has time to build democratic institutions and a capable police force. In a new CFR Expert Brief, I analyze Myanmar’s rising ethnic violence and offer prescriptions for cooling today’s violence. Read it here.

At the National Endowment for Democracy this Monday, I met with a large group of democracy promotion specialists from all over the world. They offered valuable insights about how their work was affected by the weakness of democracy in many developing nations, by the pushback against democracy promotion by several major autocratic powers, and by the growing influence of money in politics in nascent democracies, where opportunities for vote-buying and graft actually seem to increase as compared to the period of authoritarian rule. Following the meeting, NED blogger Michael Allen posted several of my prescriptions for reforming democracy assistance. You can read them here.

Over the past two weeks, anti-Muslim violence in Myanmar, which last year had seemed confined to the western state of Rakhine where the religious conflict was intertwined with issues of residency and citizenship, has exploded across the country. Mobs of Buddhists, some with ties to the militant Buddhist group 969 Movement, have attacked Muslims in Miktila, Naypyitaw, Bago, and now in Yangon. Many Muslims in Yangon, Bago, and other large towns are afraid to go to the mosque, enter shops catering to Muslims, or show displays of their faith outside their homes or stores. Aung San Suu Kyi has been notably quiet, and she is rapidly losing much of the moral and political capital she amassed during her long years in detention.

One of the most striking aspects of the recent anti-Muslim violence, which has seemed to take the government, the army, investors, donors, and Aung San Suu Kyi by surprise, is that many Muslim organizations and Muslim leaders in Myanmar had been warning of such attacks for months if not a year. Although the government had tried to tell donors, investors, journalists, and foreign diplomats that the anti-Muslim violence in Rakhine State was an issue localized to that area, in reality even last year there had begun to be attacks on mosques and some Muslim shops in other parts of the country. Not a few donors and investors believed this reassurance because of the enormous opportunities in Myanmar, which are chronicled thoroughly and with cutting insight in a new report released by Lex Rieffel of the Brookings Institution.

Yet even if the Thein Sein government, the opposition, and outsiders had ignored the warnings from prominent Myanmar Muslim leaders, it should have been even harder to ignore the climate of hateful speech and anti-Muslim sentiment (and, at times, anti-Chinese, anti-Indian, and anti-anyone-who-is-not-ethnic-Burman sentiment) that has exploded in Myanmar over the past two years. The 969 Movement’s activities were not hidden; they have been giving anti-Muslim speeches, holding anti-Muslim rallies, and distributing DVDs full of vitriol for at least a year. Such paraphernalia was easy to buy when I was in Myanmar two months ago. Meanwhile, the Myanmar Internet, though only accessed by less than 5 percent of the population, already is overwhelmed by hateful screeds against Muslims, non-Burmans, Indians, and Chinese, among others. There are few Myanmar sites like the kind run in the West by groups such as Human Rights Watch and dedicated to exposing rights abuses and the real causes of inter-ethnic or inter-religious violence in any one case; on many Myanmar sites, Muslims or other “outsiders” are blamed for every clash that takes place across the country. Even in the pro-democracy National League for Democracy, I have found worrying levels of prejudice against Muslims and non-Burmans. It is time for the government, the opposition, and outsiders to wake up and realize that, while Myanmar has made great strides in the past three years, the country could as easily descend into chaos and violence as it could be an example of successful democratization.