The Hidden History of Burma

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

  A couple of days later, the ’88 Students Generation led a march down Rangoon’s main avenue. These were the youngsters who had led the nearly victorious 1988 uprising. Now in their forties, and released from prison only a couple of years before, they saw the political impasse between the junta and Aung San Suu Kyi and tried unsuccessfully to find a fresh way forward. They saw as well the extreme hardship facing poor people and suggested a mechanism involving both the generals and the opposition to “attract and coordinate” international aid. They had avoided confrontation but now decided they might as well roll the dice.

  They were soon arrested. Ko Ko Gyi, one of the ’88 leaders, knew what was coming. When the police arrived at his apartment, he had a bag packed with two sets of clothes, a toothbrush, and a copy of the Oxford English Learner’s Dictionary.16

  Sporadic demonstrations continued, but the authorities were responding harshly, rounding up dissidents and using thugs to break up gatherings. It looked as if things were dying down. Then came an unexpected turn.

  On September 5, far to the north in the dusty riverside town of Pakkoku, not far from Mandalay and home to dozens of Buddhist monasteries, hundreds of saffron- and crimson-clad monks organized a protest of their own, to show their support for the detained demonstrators in Rangoon. Monks were close to ordinary people. Across the country, monasteries provided the social services the state did not, including education for orphans and children whose parents were too destitute to look after them. They provided adjudication at a time when courts were corrupt. And they depended on alms, which were now drying up. They knew well how desperate many people were.

  Police beat three of the monks who took part in the protest. Word spread among Burma’s approximately 400,000 monks, and Buddhist leaders demanded an official apology from the government by September 17. When the day passed without an apology, monks took to the streets in Rangoon, Mandalay, and towns across the country. They also refused to perform rituals for government officials, army officers, and their families, an exceptionally serious step in a fervently religious society.

  By September 22, thousands of shaven-headed monks, a sea of reddish hues, walked along Rangoon’s glistening, rain-swept avenues, chanting the Metta Sutta, an ancient discourse on compassion, which includes the lines:

  sabbe satta bhavantu skitatta [May all beings enjoy happiness and comfort]

  sukino va khemino hontu [May they feel safe and secure]

  A line of monks passed in front of the house of Aung San Suu Kyi. Under house arrest, she had not appeared in public in years, but now, under a monsoon downpour, she opened her gate and stood by the roadside to accept their blessing.

  Within a week, the crackdown began, with the army opening fire on protesters, raiding monasteries, defrocking and arresting monks. Dozens of people are believed to have died, but as with almost every event like this in Burma’s recent history, there are no confirmed figures.

  Burma became the focus of global media attention just as world leaders were congregating in New York for the annual UN General Assembly. The Dalai Lama issued a statement expressing his solidarity with his Burmese brethren. The actor Jim Carrey taped an appeal to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on YouTube. George Bush made Burma the centerpiece of his UN speech, announcing yet more sanctions and saying that “the people’s desire for change is unmistakable.”

  On UN Day (October 24), Charles Petrie and the heads of UN agencies in Rangoon issued a statement drawing attention to the plight of the country’s poorest, saying this had been the purpose of the Buddhist monks’ protest. The statement included a figure for poverty that was far worse than the government’s official statistics. Within days, Charles Petrie was told to leave the country. What really riled the junta was not criticism of their repression, but criticism of their economic performance.

  The protests were rooted in the economic desperation of the poor, but the West chose to see these events as a pro-democracy uprising that was crushed. The protests were retroactively termed the Saffron Revolution, to draw parallels with the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the other “color revolutions” in the former Soviet bloc. The economic dimensions of what was happening in Burma were almost entirely lost.

  I REENTERED THE Burma scene around this time. From 1988–91, I had campaigned in Washington and London for the harshest possible stance against the junta. By 1992, though, I was feeling increasingly uneasy about aid restrictions and sanctions, in part because of their unintended humanitarian consequences but also because I felt anything that pulled the country out of its shell was a good thing, including the right kind of trade, investment, and even tourism. I wrote an article saying this, upsetting colleagues who still advocated an embargo, and then said nothing publicly about Burma for fourteen years. Instead, I wrote a PhD dissertation and then a book, The Making of Modern Burma, about 19th-century Burmese society and the transition to colonial rule. I studied the legacy of British control. In 1996, I was allowed by the government to visit for the first time in eight years. In writing a second book on Burmese history, The River of Lost Footsteps, I began to understand more clearly that the roots of Burma’s problems lay not just in its military dictatorship but in the peculiar nationalism that had led to war, isolation, and impoverishment. What Burma needed was not simple regime change but a more radical process of transformation.

  Over these same years I worked on and off for the United Nations. I served five years on peacekeeping operations, in Cambodia and the former Yugoslavia, and seven years at the UN’s headquarters in New York. I had worked in different departments and finished as head of policy planning in the Department of Political Affairs. I saw close up how international diplomacy worked and the limitations of our global institutions.

  I was in Sarajevo during the Bosnian War. At the time, I wanted nothing so much as NATO-led armed intervention on the side of the Bosnian government, to stop the atrocities and bring about a just settlement. But by 2007, I was extremely skeptical that any outside intervention could work, anywhere, unless it was part of a peace accord already agreed upon by all parties. I advised that the Iraq invasion would be a disaster, not because the US didn’t have the might to overthrow Saddam Hussein, but because the “international community” would have next to no ability to deal with the day after. One of my last projects was to try and improve the UN’s understanding of the countries it was working in. The project was a failure. Deeper understanding added layers of complexity for which few international institutions were ready.

  By then I had visited Burma several times as a private citizen, reuniting with family and friends and traveling around as much as possible. Seeing the country’s extreme poverty, at a time when neighboring Asian economies were doing so well, was difficult to stomach. Many of my own relatives were in dire straits. I left the UN because I wanted a break from the bureaucratic politics and a chance to try something different; I expected to go back after a year or two. I was troubled by Burma’s descent and even more by what I saw as a completely counterproductive approach from the West, of further isolating a self-isolated nation. I didn’t think revolution was possible. That meant some kind of engagement with the powers that be. I thought I’d see if I could help.

  Few in Burma then knew who I was. But they all knew of my grandfather, the former UN Secretary-General. Because his burial had led to protests, anything to do with him (including me) was seen as potentially anti-regime. So when I began reaching out to Burmese diplomats abroad, they were guarded. But as I began writing op-eds opposed to sanctions, the regime grew curious.

  A month after the monks’ protests were crushed, I was invited to Naypyitaw. The new capital was still far from finished. It was immense. The hotel zone was the size of the Upper East Side, with dozens of hotels. Some were rows of bungalows; some, with outlandish domes and turrets, looked like something out of a drug-induced nightmare; one was in the shape of a plane. I stayed at the Royal Kumudra, comfortable enough and empty except for a group of Russians from a Kazakh oil and
gas company. I met a serving general and a government minister as well as other high officials. They were all polite, wary of me, and not sure where to take our relationship. The general told me he was meeting me on the express authority of Than Shwe himself.

  Nearly all were incredibly distant from the outside world and had little understanding of Western politics or policy-making. They tended to deliver long monologues on Burmese history. Very few understood English. They also thought that they were fundamentally misunderstood. One general said, “If I were a Western policy-maker and only knew what was written about us in their media, I would do the same as them. I would be even tougher against us! But the media reports are wrong. We’re not who they think we are.”

  After the protests, the UN Security Council had issued its first ever statement on Burma. The officers I met were incensed, saying that they had tried to work with envoy Ibrahim Gambari, and had even appointed an interlocutor with Aung San Suu Kyi a few months before, as he had requested. I told them that given what had happened and the depth of international feeling, they should be pleased with the statement; it was the very least that could have been expected. That was news to them.

  I could tell even from these early meetings that their instinct was never to show any weakness. Change was possible, even desirable, but it could never seem to have come under pressure. “We’ve spent our lives on the battlefield,” said one senior officer. “Stand and fight to the death is what we’ve always been told to do.”

  Over the same months, I traveled to Washington, Ottawa, London, and capitals around Europe, meeting with foreign ministers and development ministers and anyone else interested in Burma. I had a think tank fellowship at the time but did this on my own, reaching out through old friends and contacts I had from my time at the UN. I argued that sanctions and aid restrictions were simply not working and were only hurting the poorest. Addressing long-standing interethnic violence, as well as ending poverty, should be front and center of any international policy. A big hurdle was the bizarre psychology that had evolved during Burma’s isolation. We should be looking for ways to break down that isolation, I said, including the right kind of economic engagement. No one really disagreed. But no one wanted to rock the boat. Burma was just not important enough. Showing solidarity with the democracy movement was politically expedient. Results didn’t matter.

  In the Asian capitals I visited, the view was different if no less cynical. There was no interest in “promoting democracy,” but also not much interest in trying anything particularly innovative. Most felt the generals would muddle through and that was that. The exception was China, which had its own schemes in the making.

  A referendum on the new Burmese constitution was set for May 2008. Opposition groups and supporters in the West denounced the charter as nothing more than a fig leaf for continued army rule. Jennifer Aniston and Woody Harrelson uploaded a video to YouTube entitled “Burma: It Can’t Wait.” On May 1, George Bush announced fresh sanctions. The next day, in New York, the UN Security Council adopted a US- and UK-backed statement again calling on the Burmese government “to establish the conditions and create an atmosphere conducive to an inclusive and credible process.” It was a mild statement, watered down to gain Chinese and Russian approval. Nevertheless, it alarmed the Burmese generals, who were always fearful that the world was ganging up on them.

  It was then Friday night in Rangoon. Cyclone Nargis had just made landfall.

  FOUR

  TEMPEST

  THURA AUNG GREW UP in a little village named Amakan, near the town of Bogalay, deep in the delta, where the Irrawaddy River, from its snow-fed Himalayan sources a thousand miles to the north, after dividing and subdividing innumerable times, empties into the warm waters of the Bay of Bengal.

  The Irrawaddy delta—about the size of West Virginia or southern England—was a swampy backwater until colonial times, when a combination of Anglo-Indian financing and migrant Burmese labor turned it into the most profitable rice producing area in the world. Ever since the Great Depression, the area had become increasingly destitute, though at the same time more crowded. As land became scarce, poorer people moved near the coast, cutting down the mangrove forests that separated the land from the water.

  Thura Aung’s family had taken part in clearing the area around Amakan when he was a teenager, in the early 1990s. After trying and failing to grow sesame, they turned to rice. This was a success, and the family came to own several dozen acres of paddy land. Thura Aung, a man of middling height and a ready smile, had a pleasant childhood, with four siblings, and attended school nearby and then Dagon University in Rangoon, where he studied history. He chose history, he said, because it was the easiest course. Rangoon was a new experience. He had never before been to a big city and during his first months there, he rode the buses for fun. As soon as he finished his course, he went back to Amakan to help on the family farm.

  Amakan in the mid-2000s was a village of around four hundred people. Most families owned ten to fifteen acres. By this time, Thura Aung’s parents owned ten times that. Each season they hired around twenty people, some from outside the village, to plant and harvest the rice crop. With the money they made, in a village of wooden and bamboo houses, they built the first brick house. There wasn’t much to do at the end of the day except watch movies on a video player or by using a small satellite dish they had installed. They also had a karaoke machine. “This was the big new thing then,” he remembered when I met him in Rangoon years later. After all expenses, the family was still able to save around 100,000 kyats a month, then equivalent to a few hundred dollars. By the standards of Burmese villagers, they were prospering.

  On May 1, 2008, Thura Aung was visiting his grandfather’s village, a few hours away by boat. Boats were the only way to get around the more remote parts of the delta, as roads and bridges only connected the main towns. Thura Aung’s grandfather wanted to introduce him to a young woman, Wa Wa Khaing, whose family had a shop in the village. Both families thought the young people might be a good match. There were pleasantries over a Burmese meal of curries, salads, and light soups. Then it started raining heavily. Everyone advised Thura Aung to stay the night, so he did.

  The next day, though the rain was tapering off, Thura Aung noticed that the water levels in the creek next to the village were still rising when they should have been falling with the tide. This was unusual, and reminded him of the tsunami six years before. He wondered whether another tsunami might be taking place. Though the tsunami of December 26, 2004, had been devastating in Indonesia, Thailand, and Sri Lanka, it hadn’t done much damage in Burma. Thura Aung wasn’t especially worried.

  By 5 p.m., however, the wind was blowing extraordinarily hard. He again put off returning to Amakan. The creek overflowed onto the road. He tried to listen to the radio but couldn’t hear anything. Then the phones lines went dead. At 7 p.m., a gust of wind tore off the roof of his grandfather’s house. He and his grandfather, aunt, and younger sister huddled together, sitting on little plastic chairs under a tarpaulin, as a wall of seawater pushed past the house. “Outside was pitch black and the sound and strength of the wind like nothing we had ever experienced,” he told me.

  Three days before, on April 28, the Indian Meteorological Department in New Delhi had noticed a potentially threatening storm emerging in the Bay of Bengal. They named the storm Nargis, from the Persian word for daffodil, which was the name of a Bollywood movie star. They tracked the evolving system closely, worried at first that it might make landfall along India’s Coromandel coast, then watched it veer north, gathering immense strength and causing panic in Bangladesh.1

  On April 30, Bangladesh’s military government met in emergency session, schools were closed, and hundreds of thousands of people in low-lying areas took shelter. Then, on May 1, Nargis, now upgraded to a “severe cyclone,” suddenly made a very unusual ninety-degree turn and moved directly east, feeding off the steamy waters and building up a vicious intensity. At about six the next mor
ning, Nargis slammed into Burma’s southwestern coast, with winds of up to 215 miles an hour. An enormous storm surge followed, and a wall of water twelve feet high pushed as far as twenty-five miles inland. On the evening of May 2, the cyclone passed over Rangoon, weaker but still able to lash the city of five million with torrential wind and rain, felling thousands of trees and damaging hundreds of buildings, before disappearing over the eastern hills. For the delta—a level landscape of five million people nearly all living in rickety wooden houses—Nargis was a disaster of epic proportions.

  At 8 p.m. that evening, cousins of Thura Aung arrived at his grandfather’s house in a little boat. In their village, a few miles away, every single house had been destroyed. They had no idea what had happened to their neighbors. Thura Aung began to worry for his own parents. “Until then, I still wasn’t really understanding what was going on, and in my mind kept thinking only our small area was affected.” He and one of his cousins tied small LED flashlights to their heads and went outside to search for survivors. The water was over five feet deep and the currents powerful. Only with great effort were they able to inch through the water, moving from one coconut tree to another. It took them two hours to reach a relative’s house just three hundred yards away. When they arrived, they found the house obliterated but four of their cousins, including two children, hunched inside the silo beside it. They all made their way back to the grandfather’s house, carrying the children on their shoulders.

  The grandfather’s house was now the safest place, because a silo full of rice just behind it offered some protection from the wind. One of Thura Aung’s cousins, weeping and very distraught, begged him to go out again to search for her father, his uncle. So he went out again, this time alone. He didn’t find his uncle, but found seven other people huddled under a tree, and brought them back.