Within a few years, “boycott Burma” campaigns mushroomed across the US. Divestment campaigns against apartheid in South Africa had proved successful, leaving campus organizations in search of new targets. Burma seemed a fitting replacement. By the mid-1990s, these campaigns became Internet campaigns and Burma became one of the very first causes to gain traction over the World Wide Web. The few American companies that had ventured into Burma, including Pepsi, Levi’s, Wal-Mart, Reebok, and Eddie Bauer, pulled out by the mid-1990s, most citing public opinion as the reason.9
US senator John McCain visited Rangoon in June 1995 and met spymaster General Khin Nyunt, who made him watch a gory video of protesters in 1988 beheading suspected government informants. His wife, Cindy, had to leave the room. McCain was furious. “These are very bad people,” he said. He pushed for sanctions.10
Aung San Suu Kyi was released just weeks later. Madeleine Albright visited in September of the same year, after attending the UN Conference on Women in Beijing, and brought with her a poster from the conference signed by Hillary Clinton as well as a letter from President Bill Clinton to Aung San Suu Kyi. About the generals, Albright said, “I think they might have been surprised that I wasn’t a little bit friendlier, and that I delivered a pretty tough message.”
An Associated Press clip of the visit shows Albright, then US ambassador to the UN, sitting across the table from khaki-clad generals, everybody stony-faced, then meeting Aung San Suu Kyi, this time everyone all smiles, before cutting to a scene of the ambassador at a random Burmese village, the villagers, men, women, and children, laughing and smearing sandalwood paste (a traditional sun-block) on Albright, who asks, “Is it good?”, to which they reply, “Hla-de” (“You’re beautiful”). This was the image of Burma that was being carved in stone: wicked generals, a faultless icon, and an innocent people waiting for salvation.
The image of Burma in the UK and the US had always been an unusual one. In the 19th century, before the British expeditionary force snuffed out what remained of the Mandalay kingdom, Burma was presented as a naturally rich country of tremendous potential held back by a despotic and singularly inept regime. During colonial rule, the theme was summed up by the title of a well-known book about the country, A People at School: Burma was a country of pleasant people, cheerful and politically unsophisticated, in need of extensive tutelage before any possibility of self-government could even be considered. Herbert Hoover, who made a fortune in Burma as a mining engineer, said the Burmese were the only “truly happy people in all of Asia.”
In 1993 Than Shwe convened a national convention to draw up a new constitution. The National League for Democracy was invited to join, but with only a minority of places, even though they had won a majority of constituencies in the 1990 elections. The generals saw this as a compromise. Shortly after Aung San Suu Kyi was released, Than Shwe and the other top generals met with her over dinner. There was hope of dialogue, and Aung San Suu Kyi showed signs of wanting to find a middle ground. She spoke at every opportunity of not seeing the army (“my father’s army”) as the enemy. But after the Albright visit, the NLD took a harder line, buoyed by the solid backing they believed they now had from the world’s sole superpower. In November 1995, they boycotted the National Convention. A day later, they were expelled.
“Please use your liberty to promote ours,” Aung San Suu Kyi wrote two years later in an op-ed in the New York Times.11 The Clinton administration responded by banning all new investment in Burma. At the time, the US was Burma’s biggest investor. By then, Aung San Suu Kyi was back under house arrest. In 2000, Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in absentia, warning that the generals would be “outcasts” until they ended tyranny in their “land of inherent promise.” Of Aung San Suu Kyi he said, “her struggle continues and her spirit still inspires us.”
The net result was a stalemate. The democracy movement was in tatters, facing severe repression, with hundreds of activists in prison. But the growing and almost messianic status of Aung San Suu Kyi at home, now coupled with the vociferous support of top political figures in Washington, meant that the generals’ political agenda could not easily move forward either.
Change, though, was happening in Burma, though it was coming from an entirely different direction. The epicenter was not Rangoon but the far-flung hills along the China frontier, areas that colonial mapmakers had marked “unadministered.”
ON APRIL 16, 1989, the Communist Party of Burma, for decades the country’s biggest insurgent organization, imploded.
Forty years earlier, the Communists, mainly middle-class Burmese Marxist intellectuals from Rangoon, had managed to mobilize the support of millions. In 1948, they attempted to seize power through a nationwide insurrection, but they failed and became a guerrilla insurgency. In the late 1960s, when they were on their last legs, a heavily armed Communist force crossed the border from China—with the direct support of the Chinese military and with hundreds of Chinese “volunteers” at the helm—and established a “liberated zone” for the Burma Communist Party in the far northeast. By the 1980s the Communists, wiped out elsewhere, held only these mountain strongholds, remote places that were home not to the Burmese Buddhist majority but to culturally distinct peoples like the Kachin and the Wa. These upland peoples, who now made up nearly all their armed force, were used as cannon fodder. China, once an enthusiastic supporter but now moving in a reformist direction under Deng Xiaoping, cut off military aid.
The Communists were still, however, a force to be reckoned with, controlling 20,000 or so well-armed troops and a territory the size of Wales or Massachusetts along the Burma–China border. Harsh taxes on local villagers were imposed to make up for the lost support from Beijing. When some commanders turned to the lucrative drug trade, the party leadership threatened “stern measures.” These commanders mutinied, overthrowing the party leadership.
The mutineers (key figures in the dramas to come) stormed the party headquarters, taking control of the armory, burning Communist literature, and smashing portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao Zedong. The Marxist intellectuals who had headed the party, mainly men in their seventies, fled to China. The 20,000 members of the rank and file split up. The Communist insurgency was no more, but in its place were four formidable replacement armies, all uncertain of what to do next.
This took place over the same months in which the junta in Rangoon, after crushing pro-democracy demonstrations, was trying desperately to survive. The government’s coffers were empty. The generals first turned to Thailand and secured lucrative deals to sell timber, allowing Thai firms linked to that country’s military to clear-cut forests in the southeast. But the key to the junta’s survival would be a historic understanding reached with the ex-Communist armies. This understanding was the kernel of the Burma to come.
The broker was a Kokang Chinese man named Lo Hsing-han. Kokang is a small mountainous region along the border, whose people are ethnic Chinese claiming descent from a Ming dynasty loyalist who fled the Manchu conquest in the 1600s and the assortment of freebooters who accompanied him. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Kokang Chinese provided the mule trains that carried opium to heroin refineries in the Golden Triangle, the area straddling Burma, Thailand, and Laos. Lo had his own militia and was a Golden Triangle kingpin.
In 1989, Lo Hsing-han teamed up with General Khin Nyunt, the junta spymaster who would irritate John McCain. Khin Nyunt convinced his junta colleagues that a deal with the ex-communist armies was vital for the army regime’s future success. There were other insurgencies to deal with, the democracy movement was still gaining steam, and the West was making threatening noises. Domestic and international pressure would only heat up. Lo arranged the talks. Both sides agreed to a ceasefire. Both agreed, too, that the ex-Communist forces could do business as they pleased. Each successor army was given a “Special Region.”
At the same time, the border with China was opened. After the Tiananmen Square protest in 1989, China’s government
made a clear choice to combine political repression, a market economy, and globalization. Growth became white-hot. Burma became a backyard to the world’s biggest ever industrial revolution. The result was a transformation of the Burmese economy and society.
“The seed capital of the Burmese economy is heroin,” said Ronald Findlay, a Burma-born professor of economics at Columbia University. “If that’s an exaggeration, it’s not a huge one.”12 The cultivation of opium and the production of heroin in the Golden Triangle was nothing new. But with the collapse of the Communist insurgency and the newly agreed ceasefires, the illicit narcotics trade boomed liked never before, with tacit if not explicit official sanction. In addition to the former Communist forces, dozens of smaller militia, many of which had been set up by the army to fight the communists, settled into a new money-making existence. There’s nothing to suggest that the top army brass set out to boost the drug economy and then profit from it; instead, it’s likely they were motivated first and foremost by a desire for regime survival and their perceptions of national security. But the upshot was the same.
Logging became another big business. Burma in the early 1990s still had vast areas of virgin forest, with more than 90 percent of the world’s teak and many other hardwood trees as well. Forests were cut down on an unprecedented (and unsustainable) scale.
In 1994, another insurgent group, the Kachin Independence Army, with up to 10,000 troops in the far north of the country, agreed to a ceasefire as well. They had stayed separate from the old Communist insurgency and enjoyed considerable support from their largely Christian communities. The Kachin region includes spectacularly rich jade mines, the stuff of legend—the only source anywhere of what the Chinese call imperial jade, more valuable to Chinese connoisseurs than diamonds. These mines now came under the control of the Burmese army, with the Kachin army taking a cut. Companies linked to either or both dominated sales to China. More forests were cut down. No one knows how much money was made from drugs, timber, and jade, but it was doubtless in the billions, possibly tens of billions of dollars a year over the 1990s and 2000s. This, in a country where the average income was then less than $1,000 a year.
Consumer goods flooded in from China. This was a good thing for many ordinary people, and in the years to come would provide affordable motorbikes, phones, electric fans, solar panels (the only source of electricity for most), and more or less everything else anyone wanted to buy. But the imports also decimated local industries.
Under the Burmese Way to Socialism, nearly everyone was poor together. Even top officials had little more than a modest house, a car, perhaps air-conditioning and a TV. Now there were at least two paths to getting rich, very rich. The first was in the northern and eastern uplands, where men with guns were kingpins and their associates ran the rackets. Alongside drugs, timber, and jade came a host of other illicit and illegal operations.
A man named Lin Mingxian headed one of the ex-Communist militias, the salubriously named National Democracy Alliance Army. Lin was Chinese and had been a Red Guard during the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. In his revolutionary fervor he had joined the Burmese Communists and their fraternal fight for a dictatorship of the proletariat. In 1989, he was one of the mutineers. He set up a successor army, agreed to a ceasefire with Rangoon, and set up his own fiefdom, Special Region 4. Far from the jade mines and with few forests to chop down, Lin pioneered a new way to make money: gambling. Mongla, in the center of Special Region 4, became a booming casino town replete with brothels and eateries offering exotic animals, attracting gamblers by the thousands from across China.
Another way to make money was through a relationship with a Burmese army officer, if possible a very senior officer in an administrative position, ideally a minister or a regional commander. Some generals made money directly, through kickbacks (some were eventually sacked for corruption). Many more allowed their wives, children, and hangers-on to profit from their positions. Money could be made from a government contract (for example, to build a road, charging a few times more than the actual cost), getting land (say, a fifty-year lease on state-owned land which could then be subleased for a handsome profit), or gaining an import license. An import license for a single car might be worth $100,000 or more. A road contract could bring tens of millions of dollars from state coffers. And access to state projects could mean access to the official exchange rate of 6 kyats (the local currency) to the dollar, at a time when market rates were at least a hundred times more.
These two worlds interacted. Warlords who made “black money” (for instance, from heroin) could launder their profits through new banks by paying a tax (of around 30 percent). A warlord could then buy a fleet of expensive cars. The “national entrepreneur” who had the license to import the cars could make a killing. The warlord could also use money from his bank account to buy a nice house in Rangoon. Those already on the Rangoon real estate ladder would get rich too. By the late 1990s, the United Wa State Army, one of the successor armies to the Communists, owned both the Mayflower Bank in Rangoon and an airline company, Yangon Airways.
There were men in the insurgent armies who fought to protect their communities, and in the hope of a brighter future for their people. There were also men in the Burmese army who were good soldiers and who believed they were serving their country in the best way they could. But on all sides, there also were men with venal motives. For many, with markets opening and fortunes there for the making, temptations became too great.
As one sector of the economy after another was deregulated, new opportunities emerged. Some businessmen built up big portfolios. In addition to the warlords, kingpins, and cronies, there were also a few businessmen and women who played by the book and were largely free of army connections (though no one could be entirely free). Often, they tried to rely on new foreign investment and sectors like tourism. There were ups and downs. The 1997 Asian financial crisis and American sanctions wiped out many companies. Sanctions in particular made it almost impossible for the more independent businessmen to survive, leaving the field clear for those close to power.
By the early 2000s, billions of dollars’ worth of new offshore natural gas finds were added to the mix. Global oil companies (specifically exempted from Washington sanctions) had discovered and developed the fields and built pipelines to export the gas to Thailand. Burma’s share of the profits went straight to offshore accounts controlled by the junta for “special projects.” A good relationship with the army meant access to a lucrative special project.
Rangoon mutated. As black money entered its veins, hundreds of charming colonial-era bungalows were torn down and in place of both the bungalows and their surrounding gardens sprang up gargantuan mansions of concrete and tinted glass.13 Old hotels were given makeovers, a new cable TV service offered CNN and BBC News, and a gleaming new airport provided many daily nonstop flights to Bangkok, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
Land everywhere became more valuable as speculators speculated and those close to decision-makers grabbed hundreds, sometimes thousands of acres of farmland or forest in the hope of future windfalls.
Some ordinary people benefited. There were new jobs, especially in construction. There was a sliver of a new middle class. And there was growth in the narrow sense of more economic activity. At the same time, millions were impoverished. As land became commercialized, rural families across the country lost rights to their ancestral farms (a bribe could turn someone’s ancestral land into “vacant” land ready for leasing by the state). The same families were broken up as one or more members migrated to Rangoon, Thailand, or overseas in search of work. Rivers were contaminated by mining runoff and forests cut down on an epic scale. Even tigers were not spared, as their habitat was wrecked and they themselves hunted for the sale of their body parts to an insatiable Chinese market. By the 2000s, Burma’s tigers were on the verge of extinction.
A kind of capitalism was being restored. Some like to put an adjective in front: “crony capitalism,” “ceas
efire capitalism,” “army capitalism.” It wasn’t the socially responsible capitalism the World Economic Forum might want to promote, but it wasn’t too different from the system in colonial days: an extractive economy that benefited office-holders most, then a handful of businessmen, with infrastructure built to serve exports, and with little or no concept of the state as something meant to serve popular welfare.
By the turn of the millennium, no one thought anymore of Communism or socialism, the ideologies that had dominated politics for most of the 20th century. Democracy was the new buzzword. People wanted change and an end to military rule. But the iron fist of the junta meant that, in Rangoon at least, opposition became less a mass movement and more the symbolic resistance of one person, Aung San Suu Kyi. The combination of ceasefires, the opening to China, and Western sanctions threw up a rapacious new market dynamic. Power and money reconnected. And there was, as well, a rising ethno-nationalist impulse, grounded in older ideas about race and identity. Over the coming years, all these elements would congeal.
The future seemed bleak. But there were still opportunities to turn things around.
THREE
DRIFTING TO DYSTOPIA
MOE MOE MYINT AUNG was born in Rangoon in 1979, during the tranquil, stagnant days of Burmese socialism, and grew up in a leafy neighborhood of little wooden houses, close to the river and not far from the sea. Her father was a Karen Christian. Her mother was Shan, another minority people, from the hills east of Mandalay. Small and slender, with sharp features and neatly combed hair, she was wearing simple Burmese clothes, a cotton sarong and blouse, when we met in 2018.1
She told me that the first convulsion in her life took place in the late 1980s, when she was in the fourth grade. The army had just crushed anti-government demonstrations, and, to prevent the possibility of further unrest, hundreds of thousands of people were forced from downtown areas to makeshift townships miles away. Bulldozers flattened Moe Moe’s home and her family was ordered to the newly created Shwepyitha or “Golden Pleasant City,” a collection of hovels with little electricity and no running water.
The Hidden History of Burma Page 6
