The Hidden History of Burma

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

  There was, though, a school, and at school Moe Moe dreamed of being a doctor. “Not just any doctor. I wanted to be an army doctor. I watched movies on video and saw doctors who were looking after soldiers on the front lines. I wanted to do that too.” But when she was in the seventh grade her father disappeared. He was, she said, a “simple man” who “fell into a bad crowd.” As she was the eldest of three children, she felt she had a responsibility to help her mother as much as she could and look after her siblings. “I couldn’t think of university any more. We were so poor. We sold what we could. Some days we had nothing to eat.”

  In 1996, when Moe Moe was seventeen, she got a job at a factory making T-shirts for export to America. She made 20,000 kyats a month (about $150) and gave all of it to her family. “It was a tough life, but I was okay and was able to provide for my mother and sisters.” In 1997, though, as campaigns against doing business in Burma gained steam and the Clinton administration imposed sanctions on new investment, the garment factory shut down.

  After a few months of occasional work, earning small amounts here and there, Moe Moe took a friend’s advice and went to Victoria Point in the far south of Burma, then crossed a narrow estuary to the Thai port of Ranong. She thought she was going to waitress in a restaurant, but when she arrived, she discovered it was a nightclub where men paid to spend time drinking with women. Extras couldn’t be refused. She was told she would receive 5,000 kyats a month (about $5). She was also told that if she wanted to leave before doing a year’s work she would have to pay 300,000 kyats “compensation” to the owner. “It was a terrible life, spending hours every day with drunken men, both Burmese and Thai.”

  As soon as the year was up, she left. Determined to find decent employment, she worked for a while on a rubber planation, in a little eatery, and as a babysitter for a Thai family, before finally being arrested as an illegal immigrant.

  It was her first time in jail. She shared a big room with many other women, mainly Burmese held on drug charges. She spoke little Thai and so could barely communicate with her jailers. “It was a really hard time, initially,” she told me. But the prison staff were not unkind. They helped her learn Thai and soon she was able to read the alphabet and then cartoons. In August 2005, as part of a prisoner amnesty marking the queen’s birthday, she was released.

  “I was taken to one detention center after another and then left in the middle of the water, in the estuary between Thailand and Burma,” she said. The reason that detainees like Moe Moe were often left in the middle of the water was so that “brokers,” in collusion with immigration officials, could fetch the recently “returned” illegals and bring them back to Thailand for more illegal work. It was a racket. Moe Moe considered herself now savvy in the ways of the illegal migrant world of southern Thailand and thought she could do better the second time around. So she hooked up with a broker and went back to Thailand.

  She was right. After some trial and error she found her way to Phuket, the resort island, and found work in a garment factory where she laundered clothes. Her boss was nice, and the salary was good. After a couple of years, she sent a message to her family in Rangoon through a woman who was traveling back from Phuket. Months later, she got a message back that her mother had died and that her brother had enlisted in the army. Only her sister was left. With the savings she had accumulated, she went home.

  Being back in Rangoon was both good and bad: good, because she met the man who became her husband, a government telephone department worker, and bad, because a job at the government telephone department meant only 20,000 kyats a month (less than $20). “We had a lot of difficulty making ends meet. My savings were gone after not very long and we were borrowing at 20 percent interest a month. I couldn’t see how we could get out of debt,” she told me.

  Burma’s banking system was a mess. Almost no one had a bank account or access to formal loans. Poor people turned to informal moneylenders, who were sometimes poor people themselves with some extra cash to lend. Interest rates were astronomical. Some paid day rates of 20 percent—borrowing the equivalent of five dollars in the morning, spending one or two dollars in bus fares to and from whatever work they had, and paying back six dollars in the evening. Some had to borrow hundreds of dollars if they or a relative fell ill and needed medicine. Once in debt, it was nearly impossible to recover.

  Soon, a childhood friend appeared and offered Moe Moe a job in Lashio, a town on the old Burma Road connecting Mandalay with Yunnan province in China. “She said I could get 200,000 kyats a month to help an old lady,” she said. “My dream was to buy a sewing machine for 100,000 kyats and set up a small business. I wanted this so much. I thought this would be the way.”

  On the way to Lashio, her friend told her to drink from a small vial, telling her it was medicine for carsickness. Almost immediately, Moe Moe fell asleep. When she awoke, she was no longer in Burma.

  “All around me was Chinese writing. All the people in the car were Chinese too. I had been taken to a small village and once there was told, ‘Make yourself look nice or else we will beat you.’ I still wasn’t sure what was happening. Then I was put out for sale to visiting men like morning glory at the market.” She tried to flee through a back door but was caught. She was kept in the village for a month and then sold for 40,000 yuan to a man who took her to his home near Shanghai, more than a thousand miles away.

  “He wasn’t bad to me,” she said. “He was trying to make me like him. I didn’t speak any Chinese so when he and I communicated it was just through gestures. His relatives were nearby and in the village were other Burmese girls. We were not allowed to speak to each other. I was there about three months.

  “One day we went for a drive. He said he would show me the big city. He pointed to one place and said, ‘That’s where Jet Li lives.’ At a tollgate, I gestured to my stomach and said I had a pain and needed to use the toilet. We stopped and as soon as I saw him going into the men’s room, I ran as fast as I could. Several minutes later, I snuck inside a bookstore. The owner saw me and asked what was happening. He didn’t understand me and I didn’t understand him. I said ‘Burma’ in English. An older lady was in the bookstore and realized what I was trying to say, that I was from Burma, and told me to hide and call the police. I didn’t understand what they were saying so she spoke for me. They gave me an egg and some maize and some water.” At 6:30 that evening, the police came.

  Moe Moe was held in a detention cell before being flown from Shanghai to Yunnan, and then driven to the border at Muse. Two Chinese police officers accompanied her the whole way, saying it was for her own safety in case her “husband” came looking for her, but also because some Burmese girls tried to flee. Back in Rangoon, she was reunited with her family. She also discovered that she had contracted HIV/AIDS.

  MOE MOE MYINT AUNG’S life was not dissimilar to the lives being lived by millions of young men and women throughout the country. In the early 2000s, Burma’s estimated per capita GDP was little more than half that of Cambodia or Bangladesh, and less than half that of Laos or Vietnam. It was the poorest country in Asia. There was almost no electricity outside the main cities, and even in the cities power was available at best for only a few hours a day. Inflation was the highest in the region, running at nearly 40 percent a year. Shockingly, 73 percent of spending in the average Burmese household was on food (compared with, for example, 52 percent in Bangladesh). For some it was closer to 100 percent.

  Skyrocketing poverty meant fast-rising malnutrition. More than 30 percent of children under five were malnourished. Burma was the only country in the world where the main cause of infant death was beriberi, a vitamin B deficiency. Extreme poverty also exacerbated the crisis in education; 40 percent of children were taken out of school by parents who couldn’t pay the cost of a uniform or books, or who couldn’t afford the time to walk a young child hours every day to the nearest school.2

  HIV/AIDS was rampant. By 2003, Burma had the third highest rate of infection in all of A
sia, after Thailand and Cambodia. Some of the worst-affected areas were along the China border, in the mining towns and smuggling hubs where migrant workers from around the country shot up heroin nightly and where sex workers knew little about protection from sexually transmitted diseases. Only an estimated 3 percent of those needing retroviral treatment were receiving drugs. About 20,000 people a year were dying.

  In the early 1990s, Rolf Carriere, then UNICEF’s country director for Burma, warned of a “silent emergency” facing the country’s children. He was appalled at the level of need and at the minuscule levels of international assistance the country was receiving. Carriere argued passionately for a different approach, saying that without urgent help the lives of Burmese children would only worsen and that providing humanitarian assistance shouldn’t wait for the “right government” to be in place. Few listened.

  Would anyone listen now?

  The generals wanted a modern future. But their vision was one of growth and the development of “the nation.” This they would do through big infrastructure projects that would spur a Burmese industrial revolution. Individual people mattered little. There were corrupt motives, too. In any case, their underlings, drawing from a hodgepodge of statistics that were dubious at best, were telling them that the economy was growing at 10 percent plus per annum.

  The opposition—the National League for Democracy and their supporters abroad—prioritized politics. Only a regime change, they felt, could lead to other improvements. There was, of course, something to this. Systemic change, even revolution, might be a good thing. It was not impossible, but it was improbable. And as the political stalemate wore on, year after year, and a merciless capitalist system took root, a generation of young people was fast losing whatever future they had.

  The opposition offered no theory of how things might actually improve. By the early 2000s, the generals were more firmly ensconced than ever before. Isolation (except for the back door to China) was, if anything, cementing the environment in which the generals and their cronies were doing very well. Was tightening that isolation from the rest of the world likely to spur a different momentum?

  There was also little thought given to what landscape could best prepare the country for democratic change and make change sustainable if and when it ever came. Legions of dirt-poor, uneducated, ill-fed, and sickly people were unlikely to undergird a robust democracy. And there was no thinking about whether democracy itself was really the best initial exit from military dictatorship. Could there, instead, be a combination of other steps: New ceasefires that actually benefited local communities? Economic reforms that lessened inequalities coupled with fresh international assistance, aimed especially at public health and education? Efforts to combat discrimination and address deep-seated issues around race and identity? Could there be a different conversation about Burma’s future that placed front and center the lives of the poorest and most vulnerable? No one knew. But trying would mean engaging the generals. And that was anathema to many in the opposition, who believed engagement would only weaken the hand of the National League for Democracy.

  THE NATIONAL LEAGUE FOR DEMOCRACY was in dire straits. Hundreds were locked up in the early 1990s and still serving long prison terms. There was no longer any countrywide organization, only a little office in Rangoon, and even less space to mobilize. And the incessant repression—the omnipresent spy networks, years of hiding, fear of the midnight knock on the door—meant that for many the rational thing to do was to quit, emigrate if possible, seek asylum in the West, or quietly move on to other things, perhaps business. Some stayed the course. They were the stalwarts, willing to make any sacrifice for what they believed was the highest public good. They also developed absolute faith in Aung San Suu Kyi.

  At tea at home with David Rockefeller in early 2003, Aung San Suu Kyi joked about those who advised her to be “patient” with the generals and to “go slow,” saying, “Slow is one thing, a snail’s pace is another.” The longer it takes, she warned, the more difficult it will be to “restart” the country under a new government. She worried about the state of the education system and expressed concern that Burma would soon become a country of “uneducated people,” with terrible consequences for the nation’s political and economic future.3

  She was right. But it was not apparent what the NLD could do. Aung San Suu Kyi’s core strategy was to demonstrate popular support, ask for dialogue, and hope the generals would respond. By 2003, it was clear that the generals were thinking no such thing.

  On May 30, near the small town of Tabayin, not far from Mandalay, a swarm of men, many possibly drugged or drunk, and armed with makeshift weapons, ambushed a convoy carrying Aung San Suu Kyi and her supporters. She had been released in 2002 from her latest bout of house arrest and was traveling around the country giving open-air speeches calling for an end to military rule, and receiving a rapturous welcome from people wherever she went. Dozens were killed in the ambush. Aung San Suu Kyi escaped unharmed but was subsequently jailed.

  The regime was testing its limits. The movement for democracy was effectively crushed. Could the outside world still help?

  The Bush administration was keen to make a difference in Burma, in large part because of the personal interest of First Lady Laura Bush. A Bush cousin, Elsie Walker Kilbourne, who had for many years been drawn to Buddhism, introduced Laura Bush to a Tibet activist, Michele Bohana, who was also active in the Burma cause. Laura Bush began reading Aung San Suu Kyi’s writings, including her collection of essays Freedom from Fear. They made a deep impression. At a time when her husband and his national security aides were firmly focused on the Middle East, she tried in her own way to help Burma. For her, Burma meant Aung San Suu Kyi and, using a “back channel,” she sent private notes of encouragement and items she thought might be hard to get in Rangoon, including books, fabrics, seaweed tablets to “share with friends in prison” who were in need of iodine, and aloe to “heal wounds.” For now, all this was kept secret from the media, in order “to protect those who helped along the way.”4

  Support for Burma’s democracy movement was bipartisan. It was also transatlantic. Tony Blair’s government in the UK was a staunch ally of Aung San Suu Kyi, leading every effort within the European Union to impose ever tighter sanctions. Campaign groups targeted companies doing business in Burma with vigor. The Norwegian government not only awarded Aung San Suu Kyi the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 but funded both a Burmese government in exile, headed by her exiled cousin Sein Win, and an exiled radio station, the Democratic Voice of Burma. In 2002, Bono won the Grammy Award for Record of the Year for “Walk On,” a song he composed in Aung San Suu Kyi’s honor.

  America had just invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, and the idea that Western coalitions might successfully impose democracies around the world was still riding high. A decade before, the scholar Francis Fukuyama had written about the “universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”5 Neocons like Paul Wolfowitz were now in the uppermost echelons of the administration, motivated by a desire to aggressively promote liberal democratic ideals throughout the world.

  The US was still the world’s sole superpower. The Soviets had been vanquished, Russia seemed eager to embrace the West, and China was still little more than a giant new market for multinational companies. In 1999, NATO intervened in Kosovo to protect human rights, without a mandate from the UN Security Council. In 2003, Saddam Hussein was captured and later hanged. It seemed possible that the days of tyranny everywhere were numbered.

  But then, over the following years, the interventionist tide waned. The disbanding of the Iraqi Army and the cavalier attitude taken toward other Iraqi institutions were based on an assumption by American planners that the country was a tabula rasa, needing only new constitutions and fresh elections. The assumption was wrong, and over the next few years the perils of state-building became clear. Afghanistan proved no easier. Neither did Somalia or Libya. Understanding grew that these places that
needed fixing had their own histories, their own unseen and complex dynamics, and that any intervention might well do more harm than good.

  Except in Burma.

  ON JULY 28, 2003, a little less than a month after declaring the war in Iraq “mission accomplished,” President George Bush imposed on Burma the toughest economic sanctions in the world.

  The Burma Freedom and Democracy Act banned all Burmese imports to the United States, froze assets, and banned remittances to Burma, effectively preventing any financial exchanges involving the US banking system. The law also required the American government to block any loans from the World Bank and other international development banks. Coming on top of existing Clinton-era sanctions, the new act virtually cut Burma off from the global economy.

  The new American law charged the ruling junta with failing to transfer power to Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy and for “egregious human rights violations” against its own people. The law also stated that the regime had been guilty of ethnic cleansing, which constituted a “crime against humanity.”

  This was a reference to army offensives over the 1990s and early 2000s against Karen rebels. The Karen are a partially Christian minority people spread across the south of Burma. Whereas ex-Communist and other armies in the north had signed ceasefires, the Karen National Union, an insurgent group with more than 8,000 men under arms and considerable local support, refused to do the same and bore the brunt of brutal counterinsurgency operations. Thousands of civilians were press-ganged into carrying army supplies. An estimated 700,000 people were forced to flee their homes, including 100,000 who sought refuge across the border in Thailand.