The Hidden History of Burma

by The Hidden History of Burma (retail) (epub)

  In 1982, a new citizenship law was enacted. There is a common perception that the Rohingya were stripped of their citizenship by this law. That’s not true. Under the previous law, enacted in 1948, more or less anyone who was living in Burma at the time could register to become a citizen. Under the new law, taing-yintha natives were automatically citizens, and others, for example Indian immigrants, who had become citizens under the older, more liberal law were still citizens. Complicating the picture, though, were many undocumented people who were not considered native, like most Muslims in Arakan. If they or their ancestors had arrived in British times (the “Chittagonians”), they could become naturalized as “guest” citizens. Their descendants by the third generation would be considered full citizens. Thus, by today, seventy years and three generations after independence, citizenship should be equal for everyone except actual and recent illegal immigrants. But that’s all in theory. Practice was and is different, and discriminatory.

  Membership in a native race—being a taing-yintha—was not the only basis for citizenship, but it was the best and easiest. Blood now defined belonging. By the late 1980s, enthusiasm for socialism was fading fast. The door was opening to a new vision of the future.

  A TURNING POINT came in 1988. I was back in the United States, in my last year at university. A couple of family acquaintances, Tin Maung Win and Ye Kyaw Thu, had recently established the Committee for the Restoration of Democracy in Burma, known as the CRDB. They were in their forties and their fathers had held senior positions in government before the military takeover. We met over dinner at an all-you-can-eat seafood restaurant in Arlington, Virginia. They told me their desire to see a return to elected government, through a revolution, an armed revolution if need be. The CRDB would play only a marginal role in the dramatic events to come, but for me their ideas were electrifying, instilling a sense that anything was possible, that Burma could be remade.

  That summer, I was interning at a UN-related think tank in Geneva (the Independent Bureau) and spending a long weekend near Locarno at the home of Sir Peter and Lady Smithers. Sir Peter had been a friend of Ian Fleming and an inspiration for the character of James Bond. The home was in the Japanese style and built against a mountainside overlooking the little Italian villages far below. Sir Peter had the habit of wearing a kimono and listening to the BBC World Service news over a small short-wave radio on his veranda. We listened together to the news of growing protests in Burma, a stunning announcement by General Ne Win that he would resign, and his even more shocking suggestion that a return to a multiparty system of government be considered. His underlings accepted his resignation but voted in an emergency meeting against any moves toward democracy.

  Rangoon erupted. Students organized anti-government demonstrations. Dozens were killed but the momentum for change only increased. On August 8, 1988, the protesters called for a nationwide general strike to bring down the Ne Win dictatorship. Hundreds died in early confrontations with the security forces. But by late August, hundreds of thousands of people were taking to the streets daily, emboldened by the thought that the regime was on its final legs. Everywhere were banners calling for democracy. One by one, government ministries, then the state media, and even the police joined the protests. Civil administration buckled across Burma. For a few days the country seemed on the edge of revolution.

  I didn’t want to miss my chance to be part of the big change, so I quit my internship and flew to Bangkok. On the very morning I was meant to continue on to Rangoon, the Rangoon airport was shut down by a general strike. Two weeks later, as the protests turned violent and the newly emerged leaders could not agree among themselves on next steps, the army reasserted control. Students and ordinary workers resisted the crackdown. Thousands may have been shot dead. This was the end of what became known as the 1988 Uprising. The uprising failed, but the old socialist state was formally abolished. The army—through a junta named the State Law and Order Restoration Council, or SLORC—now took direct control.

  I was marooned in Bangkok. Within days, a tide of young Burmese, around my age, began arriving at jungle camps controlled by ethnic minority rebels all along the Burma–Thailand border. A few dozen became a few hundred, then swelled by December to over 10,000. Over the following year I raised money from the Burmese diaspora and brought food and medical supplies. I was at the founding meeting of the All Burma Students’ Democratic Front, or ABSDF. The goal was revolution.

  After the first few months of extreme anger and a desire to see change at any cost, my thoughts diverged from those of the ABSDF and other would-be revolutionaries. The idea of an armed insurrection seemed far-fetched. However, I still wanted a strong response from the Western democracies and so, over the next couple of years, in Washington and London, I helped organize the first Burmese advocacy campaigns, encouraging US congressmen and UK members of Parliament to support the nascent democracy movement, impose economic sanctions, and shame and ostracize the new junta to the maximum extent possible.

  IN RANGOON, the National League for Democracy, or NLD, had been formed, with Aung San Suu Kyi, then forty-three years old, at the helm. She was the daughter of assassinated independence hero Aung San, photogenic, charismatic, Oxford-educated, and recently returned from a life abroad. She seemed the perfect antidote to years of austerity and isolationism.

  Aung San Suu Kyi came to prominence in Burma in 1988. Until then she had been living overseas, having left the country as a child in the 1950s when her mother was appointed ambassador to India. She went to school in Delhi and university at Oxford, where she followed her mother’s advice to read politics, philosophy, and economics (PPE), abandoning her own wish to study English literature.

  After a short stint at the UN, Aung San Suu Kyi married a British scholar of Tibet, moved with him to Bhutan (where he tutored the future king), then settled back in Oxford, where she and her husband enjoyed a quiet, bookish life and raised two sons. When the anti-military protests began in 1988 she was, by pure chance, in Rangoon, looking after her ailing mother. She gave her first public speech, calling for unity and siding firmly with those seeking democracy. She injected an air of youth and vigor into an opposition patchwork then comprised mainly of green students, ex-army officers, and elderly left-wing intellectuals. Even though the uprising had been crushed, the army came to fear her, for her popularity and her willingness to speak her mind. She became a legend.

  Or, more properly, the continuation of a legend. Her father and namesake, General Aung San, was a no-nonsense, single-minded product of the late 1930s, turning alternatively to Communism and Fascism for inspiration, but settling on a simple, unwavering commitment to an independent Burma at all costs. He founded a militia (the Burma National Army) that first sided with the Japanese and then turned against them just in time, joining the Allies in the spring of 1945. His battalions would form the nucleus of the future Burmese army. When the British prepared to quit Burma, he was there to take charge.

  He was then all of thirty-three years old and, in his final months, seemed to have mellowed considerably, no more the samurai sword-carrying, shaven-headed warrior but a charming, quick-witted politician, parleying with Clement Attlee and Labour government ministers in London. He embraced a socialist vision of the future, one in which all of Burma’s many different ethnic communities might have a place. But then, just months before the actual handover of power, he (along with most of his cabinet) was assassinated by a jealous rival.

  Aung San’s life became the country’s founding story—of a man who devoted himself unswervingly to his country’s struggle for independence and who was able almost single-handedly (so goes the story) to bring down the might of the British Empire. The auxiliary to the story was that if only he had lived, things would have been different: the civil wars avoided, prosperity ensured, Burma today standing proud in the family of nations, an alternate reality that could have been if things had gone otherwise on that fateful day in July 1947.

  With the emergence of Aung
San Suu Kyi, people began to believe that the story could be replayed, this time with a happy ending.

  In the West, Aung San Suu Kyi was for more than two decades seen as a fighter for liberal democracy and human rights, a strikingly attractive icon of “universal” values in a distant corner of the world. But her starting point was always a more local context. In the 1980s, before her first foray into politics, she wrote several academic papers about the nationalist movement and “the progressive attempts of the Burmese people to reassert their racial and cultural identity.”2 She argued that, in the early 20th century, the threat of Burmese “racial survival came not so much from the British as from the Indians and Chinese who were the more immediate targets of twentieth-century nationalism. Not only did these immigrants acquire a stranglehold on the Burmese economy, they also set up homes with Burmese women, striking at the very roots of Burmese manhood and racial purity.”3

  She also placed first and foremost the idea of personal courage and determination triggering social change. There is a link to Buddhist ideas of courage and determination, ideas normally meant for an inner journey; for her, what was important was the effect of an individual’s pursuit on society. At a book festival years later, in 2012, she mentioned her lack of admiration for the character of Ulysses in Tennyson’s poem and her preference for Jean Valjean in Les Miserables, the difference being the latter’s struggle against the odds to improve not only himself but the world around him.4

  Aung San Suu Kyi saw her father as someone who had been on “a pilgrimage in quest of truth and perfection.” He wanted, she wrote on the eve of her political career, to “carry his country with him in that quest.” He trusted “the people” and “the people reciprocated by giving him their full understanding and placing their united strength behind his endeavors.”5 She wrote of those “rare moments in history” when the “leaders of a people” understand “the people’s aspirations” and there “is an inner harmony and a climactic release of spiritual and physical vigor.” During her father’s short period of leadership, “the people of Burma” were “filled with hope and purposeful energy” and the memory of this now constituted “a reservoir of strength and pride” from which to draw.6

  In 1988, she talked of a “second struggle for independence.” There would be a new version of 1947—determination, the forging of national unity, defeat of foes who would part on good terms, but in this 21st-century version the hero survives and leads the nation to a brighter tomorrow. She spoke about democracy: less about specific institutions or ways of government, more about the idea of power returning “to the people” via an elected leader. She spoke about discipline and a willingness to stick to principles through thick and thin. The ends could never justify the means.

  Sacrifice was important, too. All Buddhists in Burma know the story of Gautama Siddhartha, the prince who shed his princely existence for a greater pursuit. Buddhist monks leave their families and worldly possessions in their journey toward higher goals. The idea of giving up material comforts in service of a spiritual quest is a strong one. And in Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese saw the daughter of their national hero denying herself what everyone assumed would have been a pleasant life with her family in England, not for a personal spiritual quest, but to help her fellow countrymen. When her husband was dying from cancer in 1998, she declined to visit him for fear of not being able to return. This special sacrifice made ordinary Burmese believe even more that she was the only one steadfast and selfless enough to take down the military dictatorship.

  The junta—now without Ne Win and headed by a new generation of generals—fretted that she might soon lead another uprising. In July 1989, they placed her under house arrest. In 1990, they held promised elections, but when the NLD won handily, they declared that power could not be transferred until a new constitution was written. Thousands more were detained or jailed. The following year, Aung San Suu Kyi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Draconian martial law restrictions would remain in place for years, banning, for example, gatherings of more than five people.

  Around this time, the junta ended the Burmese Way to Socialism. A couple of years before, an army officer had told me, “What we really want is to go from being a left-wing isolated dictatorship to a right-wing pro-American dictatorship.” The 1988 uprising hadn’t brought about democracy, but it did bring about a new military regime and an end to socialist hibernation. Opportunities for private businesses were opened up for the first time since the early 1960s, allowing foreign trade and investment after decades of autarkic policies, and eagerly welcoming foreign tourists (by extending visas to “twenty-eight days renewable”). Black market smugglers were rebranded “national entrepreneurs” in state media. Pent-up desires to reboot the economy and make money were springing to life.

  Nativism was at the same time also springing to life. The junta officially changed the name of the country in English from Burma to a variant of its ancient Burmese-language ethnonym, Myanmar. It was something that would lead to endless confusion and debate in the years to come. The junta claimed to be ending a colonial legacy. But as “Myanma” refers only to the majority Burmese people, not to the Shan, the Karen, or others, the move also signaled the revival of a nationalism centered squarely on a Burmese–Buddhist racial and cultural core.

  Continuing in this vein, the old Mandalay palace was rebuilt (in a shoddy way, with the original teak beams resurrected in painted concrete). Buddhist stupas were regilded and the official press regularly carried photos of generals prostrating themselves before elderly saffron-clad monks. As if to further shore up their ethno-nationalist credentials, an operation in 1992 against the Rohingya Solidarity Organization insurgency triggered yet another flight of 200,000 or so Muslims from Arakan. By this time, the conventional wisdom in Rangoon was that northern Arakan had been deluged over the past twenty years or so with illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, swamping whatever Muslim population had been there before. Few, if any, in the incipient democracy movement thought much about these people’s rights. The Iranian foreign minister, Ali Akbar Velayati, however, called on the UN to halt what he called “the genocide of Burmese Muslims by the military government.”7

  Sixty-year-old Senior General Than Shwe took over the junta just after the 1992 Rohingya exodus. Stout and square-jawed, Than Shwe was not the creator of the military dictatorship but a product of it. He was born at the tail end of British rule, in a village just south of Mandalay, a parched region with slender streams that turned to sand during the hot weather, soaring toddy palms, and little golden pagodas. He would have been a child during the war—seeing the troops of a dozen nations, perhaps even American GIs—and a teenager when the country became first independent, then toppled into anarchy. In 1953, at the height of the civil war, he trained to be an officer. His trainers were men trained by the Japanese Imperial Army. He would remain in the army for nearly half a century.

  Life in the Burmese army in the 1950s and 1960s, even for an officer, was harsh. It meant months if not years at a time in disease-ridden jungles, surviving with few supplies, and fighting foes often better equipped. In 1958, Than Shwe was assigned to the Psychological Warfare Unit in the War Office. He attended a special course in the Soviet Union and then became a psy-ops officer attached to different brigades.

  After General Ne Win’s takeover in 1962, Than Shwe taught for a while at the newly established Central Political College, imbibing the Burmese Way to Socialism. By the 1980s, he was a battalion commander and part of an unsuccessful attempt (Operation Min Yan Aung, or “King Conqueror of the Enemy”) to capture the stronghold of the insurgent Communists, up in the mountains on the Chinese border.8 He is described by former colleagues as the kind of man who kept his head down and didn’t make a fuss, a dependable organization man who watched and waited, always careful of his next move.

  By the time of the 1988 uprising, he was already a general, a vice minister of defense, and a member of the ruling party’s central executive committee—one of sever
al fifty-something-year-old officers in the shadow of the dictator Ne Win. By 1992, Than Shwe had made it to the top of the pecking order as the new chairman of the State Law and Order Restoration Council.

  Than Shwe promised a new direction. As one of his first acts, he quietly allowed the UN to repatriate the Rohingya refugees. Other changes followed, though not quite the ones Aung San Suu Kyi and the West were hoping for. Foreign investment was prioritized and 1995 branded “Visit Burma Year.” The army was transformed from a ragtag force of around 150,000 light infantry to a far larger and more modern force of perhaps over 300,000 men, supplied with new tanks and other armored vehicles, a growing navy and air force, little compunction in mobilizing forced labor, and a voracious appetite for land.

  Than Shwe was trying to follow the well-worn path of an Asian strongman: allow no political dissent and focus on an exports-based industrialization. This path led some countries, like South Korea, to development and democracy. The same path led others, like China and Vietnam, to economic growth without political liberalization. Wherever it might have led, it was a path denied to the Burmese.

  SHORTLY AFTER the failed 1988 uprising, the United States cut off all aid to Burma and downgraded relations. In 1990, George Bush nominated Frederick Vreeland, a former clandestine agent of the Central Intelligence Agency and the son of Vogue magazine editor-in-chief Diana Vreeland, to be his ambassador in Rangoon, but the appointment was never confirmed. By then, Senator Daniel Moynihan and other members of Congress were taking a hard line against the junta and looking for ways to show their displeasure.