The Hidden History of Burma

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

  The bill passed overwhelmingly in both houses of Congress. Senator Mitch McConnell, the primary sponsor of the bill, said, “We must never tire in the pursuit of justice in long-suffering Burma until Suu Kyi is free and the struggle for freedom is won.”6 Senator McConnell, later Senate Majority Leader, was a diehard fan of Aung San Suu Kyi; on his office wall hung a framed letter she had sent the year before, thanking him for his support.7

  On signing the law, President Bush issued a statement declaring that the “United States will not waver from its commitment to the cause of democracy and human rights in Burma.” The aim was not simply to punish a rogue regime. The aim was to make a democracy in the heart of Asia.

  Burma seemed to be a place where there was no downside to “doing the right thing.” There were few business interests and no calculation (yet) that Burma was strategically important. In the UK, there was the added dimension of colonial ties, remembered in a rosy way, and the personal link to Aung San Suu Kyi, a fearless Oxford-educated heroine standing up to the most thuggish group of men imaginable in a faraway land. There was no attempt to analyze the roots of authoritarianism or Burma’s complex interethnic relations. Nor was there an effort to understand the country’s traumatic past or reflect on the legacies of colonialism. To the extent that people thought about Burma’s myriad “ethnic groups,” they were seen as victims too of military repression and on the side of “democracy.” The ceasefires along the China border remained out of sight and mind. The seductively powerful Manichean narrative trumped all other considerations.

  In May and September 2001, Buddhist–Muslim riots broke out in Pegu, Toungoo, and Prome, following news of the destruction by the Taliban of the Buddha statues at Bamiyan in Afghanistan. That same year, in Akyab (the main city in Arakan, also known as Sittwe), the army intervened to quell days of violence between Buddhists and Muslims that left at least a dozen dead. Human Rights Watch reported that “resentments are deeply rooted and result from both communities feeling that they are under siege from the other.”8 Few took notice.

  In January 2005, at her Senate confirmation hearing, incoming secretary of state Condoleezza Rice listed Burma as an “outpost of tyranny,” together with Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Belarus, and Zimbabwe, augmenting the original “Axis of Evil.” In London, activists organized an “I’m Not Going” campaign, an effort to stifle any possible development of the country’s embryonic tourism industry. In a special show of cross-bench unity, prime minister Tony Blair, Conservative leader Michael Howard, and Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy all pledged to boycott holidays in Burma, together with a raft of celebrities including Ian McKellen, Honor Blackman, Robbie Coltrane, and Joanna Lumley.

  Voices in the West for democracy in Burma were growing louder.

  MEANWHILE IN BURMA ITSELF, Senior General Than Shwe was quietly preparing his retirement. In the 1990s, he had been head of a collective; the other generals in the junta were only slightly junior in age and rank. Most were at the same time ministers and “regional commanders” in charge of large parts of the country. General Tun Kyi, for example, was both Minister of Commerce and the army chief in Mandalay. General Kyaw Ba was minister of hotels and tourism as well the head of the army’s Northern Command. They were viceroys with unlimited power. Some amassed fortunes.

  Slowly and methodically, Than Shwe removed the other generals in power. He started with those closest to him in seniority, and the most corrupt. One general after another was purged. In 2002, as the old dictator Ne Win lay on his deathbed, Than Shwe arrested Ne Win’s family. Until then, observers suspected that Ne Win was still wielding power and his family was still influential. Than Shwe demonstrated plainly who was now on top.

  Next to go was the intelligence chief Khin Nyunt. The trim, bespectacled Khin Nyunt was for many foreigners the man in the regime they knew best. He was the one who met John McCain and Madeleine Albright. He liked watching himself on TV. He ran a vast network of well-trained spies and informants who were feared even within the army. Under him was an Office of Strategic Studies, with five departments, which monitored the opposition and plotted strategy. Some were urbane men who spoke English and presented themselves as reformers. Others ran the torture centers. This intelligence service, formally the Directorate of Defense Services Intelligence but colloquially known as MI from its earlier, British-bred incarnation, was the weapon used to grind down the democratic opposition.

  On October 18, 2004, Khin Nyunt was detained by army officers at the airport in Mandalay, flown to Rangoon, and placed under house arrest. The next day, the state-controlled newspapers reported that the sixty-five-year-old had been “permitted to retire for health reasons.” Within weeks, hundreds of military intelligence officers were arrested, interrogated, charged with economic crimes and other sometimes minor offenses (for example, illegal possession of a handgun), and sentenced to up to thirty years in jail. The entire secret police system, the bedrock of repression since the first days of army rule in the 1960s, was disbanded. More than 30,000 junior officers and soldiers in the intelligence service were summarily dismissed. Khin Nyunt’s once ubiquitous image was everywhere taken down, and the cabinet and civil service purged of his supporters.9

  Some might have worried that knocking off such a potent institution would lead to a backlash, but Than Shwe was by now confident in his dominance. He even left the country for India a few days later, posing for a photograph with his wife in front of the Taj Mahal and worshipping at the Mahabodhi temple in Bodh Gaya, where the Buddha attained enlightenment.

  What had been a gang of generals was reduced to Than Shwe and his deputy, General Maung Aye. Before his ouster, spy chief Khin Nyunt had announced a Seven-Step Road Map to Democracy. This was kept intact. The government promised there would be a new constitution, fresh elections, and then (at some future, unspecified date) a transition to civilian government. A slew of political prisoners were released, though not Aung San Suu Kyi. In 2004, Than Shwe ordered army officers to buy their own personal computers and start surfing the Internet.

  He did something else too: he built a new capital city, Naypyitaw. Various Burmese rulers had built new capitals in the past: Amarapura in the 18th century and Mandalay in the 19th were both the projects of kings who wanted to leave behind a special legacy. The word Naypyitaw simply means “the capital” and is normally only part of the appellation (e.g., “Mandalay Naypyitaw”). Perhaps Than Shwe was unable to come up with a good name. For the location, he chose an area smack in the middle of the country, halfway between Rangoon and Mandalay, bounded by a teak-clad ridge to the west and a limestone escarpment to the east, an area that at the height of the civil war in the late 1940s had been a stronghold of Communist insurgents.

  Naypyitaw was far from the reach of George Bush’s warships. The idea that the Americans might invade may have seemed risible in New York or London, but in the mid-2000s, it wasn’t an entirely outlandish idea to a country which was the target of increasingly harsh rhetoric by an administration that had already invaded two countries, and was certainly not something that a risk-averse army would easily shrug off. A Wesley Snipes film that featured a cruise missile attack on a city that looked like Rangoon seemed to underline the danger, as did Rambo IV, which was set in the Burmese jungle.

  Naypyitaw also created a revolution-proof geography. Far from the centers of population, the new capital stretched over an area almost as large as New York City but with a tiny fraction of the population, nearly all of whom were soldiers and bureaucrats. There were ten- and twenty-lane asphalt boulevards, government offices set apart by hundreds of yards of shrubbery, a vast expanse of concrete buildings (in a sort of cost-cutting tropical brutalist style) and little else. Street protests in 1988 had come within striking distance of overthrowing the government; a mob had disarmed soldiers guarding the Trade Ministry and nearly stormed the War Office itself. There was now no chance of a repeat.

  At the astrologically auspicious time of 6:37 a.m. on November 6, 2005, on
the Senior General’s orders and with no forewarning to the general public, ministries began their move, with over a thousand army trucks carrying files, typewriters, and furniture up to what was still a colossal construction site.

  Than Shwe was now in complete control. The new constitution would soon be finalized. It would be a hybrid system, with the army and elected institutions sharing authority. The plans were set. Events, though, would soon get in the way.

  FAR FROM THE general’s gaze, the country was careering toward a full-blown humanitarian crisis. Aid restrictions imposed by Western governments had reduced international assistance to approximately $3 per person per year, compared with $9 per capita in Bangladesh, $38 in Cambodia, $49 in Laos, and $22 in Vietnam.10 The junta did little to help. The government’s coffers were improving from their bankrupt state in the early 1990s, but next to nothing was spent on education and health care. In 2000, the World Health Organization had ranked Burma’s health care at the very bottom, below Angola, the Central African Republic, and even the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of Congo.11

  The Bush sanctions decimated Burma’s nascent manufacturing industry, the garment sector in particular. At least 200,000 young women, most from impoverished rural backgrounds, were thrown out of work. Said Richard Horsey, the representative of the International Labour Organization in Rangoon, “When they lost their jobs, they had no safety net, because nearly all savings were sent home. They were mostly too ashamed to return to their villages and admit they had lost their jobs, and see the impact of that on their families.” Many made their way to Thailand.

  In 2004, Charles Petrie, a veteran of UN operations in Africa who had been in Rwanda during the genocide, was appointed the UN’s first humanitarian coordinator for Burma. UN assistance in dozens of townships around the country was quietly expanded. The regime, though, was suspicious. Whereas before they had pleaded for international aid, now they drew back, as critics in the West started to use the idea of a humanitarian crisis in Burma to demand intervention. Charles Petrie and others in the Rangoon foreign aid community had to walk a fine line, attacked on one side by the government as a fifth column for a Western regime-change agenda, and on the other by the opposition and sympathetic Western politicians for being too willing to work with the generals in power.

  The Global Fund, set up by Bill Gates and several European governments to combat HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, began providing help, but in 2005 withdrew its $98 million in grants to Burma under heavy pressure from pro-democracy activists in the West.

  Some within the democracy movement tried to do what they could in extremely precarious circumstances. In 2002, Phyu Phyu Thin, then thirty years old, founded Rangoon’s first hospice for HIV/AIDS patients, and over the following five years cared for more than 1,500 patients unable to get help from either government hospitals or international organizations. Even though she had been detained for over a month by the authorities (for organizing a prayer in support of Aung San Suu Kyi), she still believed that some collaboration with government to tackle urgent humanitarian needs was possible. “Let’s set aside who you are and on which [political] side you stand,” she said. “We are ready to cooperate not only with the government but also with any organizations to combat HIV/AIDS.”12

  Millions were now on the move. One was Maung Than. His parents were poor farmers who split up in 1982, when he seven years old. After dropping out of school in the sixth grade, he did what he could to survive, herding cattle, sweeping floors in Rangoon tea shops, then working for a while in construction, before traveling down south to clear forests for a logging company. In 2005, with little prospect of employment in Rangoon, he signed up for a job on a Thai fishing boat. He wound up a slave.13

  Thailand is the world’s fourth largest exporter of seafood, providing fish to supermarkets around the world. In the 2000s, this industry depended on thousands of Burmese men who were tricked, drugged, and kidnapped and forced to work for years at a time in brutal conditions.

  The fishing boats sailed as far as Indonesia, fleeing at the first sign of a police boat. Maung Than and the other Burmese, when not working, were kept behind two sets of locked doors. The captain, his deputy, and the engineer were Thai; the workers, about a dozen, were Burmese. For two years they were paid nothing. They were fed irregularly. There were constant beatings. There were different captains over time; some “treated us humanely, but some were brutal,” he told me. “We worked at times twenty-four hours straight, sometimes longer, with no rest. Some lost consciousness while working. If a net was broken, it might be days, literally days, of work. Sometimes we could take turns to sleep a few hours. We were given coffee and stimulants.” Maung Than once saw four of his fellow Burmese workers shot dead. He was finally rescued by Issara, a charity devoted to helping Burmese migrant workers and the Thai military. By then he had spent ten years as a slave.

  THE UN LIKES TO SAY that its mission everywhere is conflict prevention and peace-building. At UN conferences, nations agreed that the goals of peace, development, and respect for human rights were intertwined and must be addressed together in “holistic” ways. These lofty ideas were born of decades of experience in war-torn societies. They were, however, thrown out the window in the case of Burma, where the goal was democracy and little else.

  Every year, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution drafted by the European Union that essentially called on the junta to give up power to the National League for Democracy. There was rarely any mention of the armed conflicts, or even of the country’s dire poverty. There was certainly no discussion of how sanctions and aid restrictions might be tipping the country into a humanitarian disaster.

  The UN had a string of special envoys and special advisors on Burma. In the early 2000s, the UN special envoy was the Malaysian diplomat Rizali Ismail. He remembers his first meeting with Aung San Suu Kyi:

  “After a period of waiting she emerged, cool and composed, in a traditional blue blouse and sarong, with bunga melor [jasmine flower] in her hair. Call it a grand entrance, if you like. There was no question about it. She looked very attractive, what with the scent of the melor in the air at close quarters. At an early part of my conversation with her, I said, ‘You are not only courageous but also attractive.’ It was obviously an unthinkable faux pas.”14 He saw his role almost exclusively as one of facilitating dialogue between Aung San Suu Kyi and the generals. He didn’t get far.

  In April 2005, Kofi Annan became the first UN Secretary-General to meet Than Shwe himself. This was in Bandung, Indonesia, during a fiftieth-anniversary commemoration of the Bandung Conference, which launched the Non-Aligned Movement. Annan was meeting dozens of heads of government, and had been advised to speak first in his meeting with Than Shwe and to only mention Aung San Suu Kyi toward the end of what was meant to be a twenty-minute meeting. Tired from jet lag and hours of meetings, he asked Than Shwe to speak first. Than Shwe held forth, for nearly an hour, on the history of Burma (from the army’s perspective) since the Second World War. Finally, Annan got a word in edgewise and asked about Aung San Suu Kyi. Than Shwe closed his big notebook and indicated that the meeting was over.

  The next envoy was Ibrahim Gambari, a good-humored Nigerian scholar and former foreign minister. His first trip in 2005 had been a success. He met Than Shwe and was able to meet as well with Aung San Suu Kyi, then under house arrest and incommunicado. The regime thought they were making a concession, but when Ibrahim Gambari briefed the Security Council a few weeks later, the generals were livid. For them, any Security Council discussion on Burma was the first step on a ladder that could lead to international intervention. Kofi Annan tried to telephone Than Shwe. Than Shwe didn’t take the call.

  There was pressure on the UN from the pro-democracy camp, too. In May 2006, a little over a year into her tenure as secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice sent Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy, a videotaped message of support. During this period of her house arrest, the party was being led
by a group of septuagenarian “uncles,” mainly ex-military men who had thrown in their lot with the Nobel Prize laureate. They were “delighted” with the message, they told the Washington Post. “Her words boosted our morale at a time when we were feeling ill at ease.” They also told the Post that they were unhappy with Charles Petrie (the UN humanitarian coordinator), as he was more interested in humanitarian assistance than the political issues that were all-important, and were “not satisfied” with Kofi Annan. “Just get us in a meeting room [with the junta],” they said, “and we will do the rest.”

  In July 2007, the Chinese entered the fray and arranged direct talks in Beijing between the Burmese and American governments. The talks didn’t achieve much but both sides agreed to meet again, with China hosting if necessary. Around the same time, the Elders, a new grouping that included Bishop Desmond Tutu, Jimmy Carter, and Kofi Annan (who had just retired from the UN), probed for ways to become involved in Burma.

  Then, ordinary people tried to make their voices heard.

  By early 2007, the Rangoon poor, mainly migrants from the countryside who had lost their land to army and crony capitalist confiscations, were desperate. Inflation was at an all-time high, shooting up nearly 50 percent over the course of twelve months. “Why is there severe malnutrition in this Garden of Eden? Because people are poor,” said Frank Smithuis, a Dutch physician who had worked in Burma since 1994 and headed the medical charity Doctors Without Borders. “People are going from three meals to two meals to one meal. One meal a day just isn’t enough.”15

  In February, there was a small demonstration, and in April, another. Twenty-two people were detained for calling for lower prices and improved health, education, and electricity. Protesters carried placards with slogans such as “Down with consumer prices.” On August 15, without warning, the government hiked fuel prices by 500 percent, leading to an immediate spike in bus fares. Buses were the only transportation available to most workers to get to work.