The Hidden History of Burma

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

  In a state-run newspaper, a cartoon showed smiling Burmese people being led by the military across the referendum toward a shining city of skyscrapers (“peace and development” in the distance), with threatening black demons coming from the coast labeled “Nargis and Internal and External Destructive Elements.”

  At the same time, more and more countries, including the US, did what the Burmese regime wanted, and flew in supplies to Rangoon. The UN’s World Food Programme established an air bridge from Bangkok and requested permission to bring in heavy-lift helicopters to transport aid from Rangoon to the main towns in the delta. On May 18, General Than Shwe himself traveled to the affected areas for the first time, and was shown on national television meeting with survivors and inspecting relief efforts. But hundreds of thousands were still believed to be without any help. Nearly two weeks into the disaster, no one knew how many more were dying, or if an outbreak of disease was imminent. And the Western fleet was still hovering offshore, ready for action.

  May 19 was the turning point. At a meeting of the foreign ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Singapore, the Burmese were presented with a clear choice: allow a UN-led humanitarian operation, allow an ASEAN-led operation supported by the UN and other international agencies, or have ASEAN simply stand back and see where Western pressure would lead. The Burmese chose option two. ASEAN’s charismatic secretary-general, Surin Pitsuwan, was appointed head of a task force to oversee the effort, and jetted off to Rangoon to discuss next steps with Burmese ministers.10

  Then came Ban Ki-moon, the first UN Secretary-General to visit the country since my grandfather was last there in 1970. With an entourage of aides and New York-based journalists, he was flown by helicopter over the delta and shown a neatly organized government-run camp. He then went to Naypyitaw and met with Than Shwe in the general’s private residence. In all the frantic diplomacy of recent days, Than Shwe had remained elusive, but everyone knew that for real access to be granted, his personal stamp of approval was essential. After a cordial and frank hour-long discussion, the world’s top diplomat emerged to tell the press, “I had a very good meeting with the Senior General. He has agreed to allow all aid workers regardless of nationality.”11

  Two days later, Ban Ki-moon presided over a hastily scheduled international donor pledging conference organized by the Burmese government in Rangoon.12 It was an unprecedented spectacle. Sitting with Ban in the ballroom of the swish Sedona Hotel was the Burmese prime minister Thein Sein, together with the chair of ASEAN, the dynamic and forthright Singaporean foreign minister George Yeo, and high representatives of friendly Asian governments. Also in the room were an array of Western development ministers and senior aid officials, including some from countries such as the UK, Norway, and Sweden that had long been among the regime’s most vocal critics. All the visitors wanted to demonstrate that politics had been placed to one side, and were anxious not to endanger the fragile opening that a week of mediation had apparently created. Money was pledged and handshakes extended.

  At a national security meeting that week, the junta appointed Kyaw Thu, the deputy foreign minister, as chair of a body through which the UN, ASEAN, and the Burmese government would coordinate all international aid. Kyaw Thu told several of the top generals that he had no experience in disaster response and requested guidance on what to do. They looked at one another and smiled. Shwe Mann, the number three in the army hierarchy, said, “Neither do we. So just go down to Rangoon, try to understand the situation, and do the best you can.”

  Trips to the delta were organized for visiting VIPs. Within days, nearly all visa requests from UN agencies were granted and helicopters from the World Food Programme began flying directly into the delta.

  It seemed like a breakthrough, and in a way it was. Diplomatic tensions were reduced dramatically and Burma returned to the back pages of the newspapers. In the end, though, nothing had been achieved that couldn’t have been achieved without all the brouhaha. All aid was coming in via Rangoon, which had been the junta’s main demand all along. The reason this didn’t lead to a further crisis was because there was, so far, no “second wave” of deaths following the initial disaster.

  The situation was still urgent. Hundreds of thousands of farmers had lost all their seeds. If they weren’t replaced within weeks, they would miss their seasonal planting deadline and have no chance for a new crop. At a time when many aid officials were looking at longer-term planning, Debbie Aung Din pushed for an immediate focus on seeds. Debbie Aung Din was a Burmese-American who, with her husband, Jim Taylor, ran Proximity, one of the very few NGOs working on agriculture in Burma at the time. At one aid coordination meeting, she said, “Look, if there are no seeds in two weeks you guys can just forget it, the assessments, everything, it’s as simple as that.” The US Agency for International Development (USAID) stepped in to help, but in a low-key way, without any US flags; working through Proximity, they quickly got seeds to 55,000 homes in 1,200 villages. It was an important success. A month later, Debbie Aung Din was invited to meet George Bush.

  The president and Laura Bush were in Thailand on an official visit, staying at the Four Seasons Hotel in Bangkok. Debbie Aung Din first met Laura Bush, who was very inquisitive. The next morning, the First Lady flew to the Burmese border to meet with Karen refugees and others. Aung Din was given fifteen minutes to speak to the president, as part of a meeting that also included an American army colonel and a senior USAID official. It was all carefully scripted, but in the end she took up the entire forty-five minutes. She remembers George Bush as “super friendly and really curious,” welcoming her by saying, “Hey, you’re the first person from Burma I’ve ever met!”

  The president seemed amazed that a person like Debbie Aung Din, a smart, articulate American, actually had her home in Rangoon. “How do you live in Burma?” he asked. He had only heard horror stories. “Just normally,” she replied. “I have a house, we send our kids to school, go to the office.” He was astonished and peppered her with questions.

  “I’m really glad for your help with all these facts,” President Bush told her. “Why then are these generals all dragging their feet?” He knew that aid access was still slow.

  “Only good news gets to the guy at the top.”

  “I get that! Hey, if you were me, what would you do?”

  “Lift sanctions.”

  “But we have just targeted sanctions.”

  “No, not really. There are trade and investment sanctions, sanctions on development assistance.”

  The president then turned to Chris Hill, his assistant secretary of state for Asia. “Hey, do we have trade sanctions on Burma?”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  President Bush began pondering his next steps. “I’m going on VOA [Voice of America] soon, what should I say?” he asked Aung Din.

  “That the US cares about you and wants to help,” she replied. Later that day, he said exactly that. He also said, “Our aid is getting to people.” This was an important thing to mention. Around that time, there were many stories saying that all aid was being stolen or siphoned off by the military.

  At a lunch afterward with Debbie Aung Din and several exiled Burmese dissidents, the president reflected, “The further you get away from Burma, the more you really don’t get all the facts.”

  A MODICUM OF AID was finally getting through. A new disaster was averted. But in the years to come, the victims of Nargis would receive nothing like the assistance they might have had if not for the political situation. And because of sanctions, there were limits to the type of relief that could be given. Housing, for instance, was a no-go area for Western governments, as it seemed to go beyond emergency aid and drift toward development assistance, which was forbidden. Aceh in Indonesia had received billions of dollars to rebuild after the 2004 tsunami. Burma’s total foreign aid went up slightly in the months after Nargis, but slid back down again by late 2009 to around $5 per capita, a tiny fraction of what was bein
g given to people in Vietnam and Laos next door (both countries under Communist regimes). Politicians in the West had contemplated using force to deliver aid, but when the door opened, few cared to follow up.13 Two years after the cyclone, more than 100,000 families still didn’t have a roof over their heads.14

  If the monks’ protests had wrecked the regime’s legitimacy, the response to Nargis laid bare the state’s weak institutional capacities. When outsiders imagine a military dictatorship, they imagine an all-powerful police state. The truth in Burma was very different. The army and the bureaucracy simply didn’t have the wherewithal to do anything approaching what was needed, and so turned in panic to their cronies and other businessmen, who were each assigned a township to rebuild.

  The generals also began to give both local and international charities far more room to operate. This was incredibly important. Burmese NGOs were now able to receive outside funding and shore up their institutional strength.

  One local organization was Paungku, meaning “bridge” or “connection.” Its founder, Kyaw Thu, tall, ponytailed, and with a trim beard, black T-shirt and jeans, looked the exact opposite of an army officer (and was no relation to his namesake the deputy foreign minister). He had for years been working with the poorest both in ethnic minority communities and around Rangoon, assisting them with small amounts of money he had raised to strengthen their own self-help networks. Those he assisted included sex workers, who were already looking after one another, for example with informal arrangements to take care of one another’s kids. A small grant could make a big difference. Now he organized a major effort to aid villages in the delta, for the first time with international funding, and under the wary eye of the authorities.15

  Four months after Nargis, I met the social welfare minister, a serving general, who told me that the junta had first been afraid of NGOs: “We didn’t know what they were, what they would do.” But now, a few months later, he felt much more relaxed about opening the door wider. Another minister was still distrustful, but said the government had to live with the new reality. It was, he said, “like feeding a tiger.”

  Into this picture stepped Noeleen Heyzer.16 An energetic, Cambridge-educated Singaporean, she was the head of the UN’s regional economic commission. She had been to Burma several times over two decades, and knew only too well the depth of the country’s poverty. She was also a supporter of democratic change. She had previously been head of UNIFEM (the UN organization working on women’s rights), and after the landmark Beijing Women’s Conference of 1996 organized a big exhibition in New York, with a “Wall of Shame” showing ways in which women around the world were suffering discrimination and repression, and a “Wall of Hope” which featured Aung San Suu Kyi. The Burmese ambassador in New York told her to take it down. She agreed to do so but said that “UN bureaucracy takes a long time.” It stayed up. Now, Noeleen Heyzer thought that the key was to see things from the Burmese junta’s perspective, to talk in a language they understood, and thereby break the impasse. The goal was democracy, but the goal was also a better life for the poorest in Burma as soon as possible. She thought this post-disaster situation was a good opportunity.

  In October 2008, Heyzer organized a big conference in Bangkok on post-Nargis recovery. Her UN colleagues were unhappy, believing she was wading into dangerous political waters. Almost anything to do with Burma involved huge risks—one was clobbered either by the regime or by the regime’s detractors. A key interlocutor was Deputy Foreign Minster Kyaw Thu, now coordinating international assistance. They got to know each other well. Kyaw Thu was an urbane, even liberal figure, but was tired from bearing the brunt of criticism from all sides.

  The evening before the conference, Heyzer and Kyaw Thu had a lively discussion. Kyaw Thu complained that the international community only wanted to see the bad things his government did, and not the good. Heyzer replied that people understood the challenges the government were facing but couldn’t compromise on matters of principle. The conversation became heated.17

  The next morning, Kyaw Thu failed to show up for the opening session, for which he was the main speaker. Even the Burmese embassy staff present became worried. At the coffee break, Heyzer saw him pacing up and down the corridor. He came in, put aside his prepared speech, and, to a packed audience of diplomats and aid officials, he spoke from the heart, saying that everyone was letting down the Burmese people. He pointed to the plastic water bottles in front of the delegates in the big air-conditioned hall and said, “You probably don’t even notice them. They have no value to you. But in the delta, hundreds of thousands of people still have no clean water.” People in the hall were almost in tears.

  I worked closely with Heyzer in those months. I also met Kyaw Thu on several occasions. For two years I had been trying to explain Burma to policy-makers at the UN and in foreign governments, and at the same time explain the UN and foreign governments to policy-makers in Burma. I had no clear idea what would turn Burma around. But with every interaction I was increasingly certain that the current approaches, economic sanctions and international ostracism, weren’t working and could not work in the future. The lives of millions of poor people were being impacted every day as a result of restrictions on aid. And Nargis had revealed clearly the weakness of state institutions. The country was far more mentally isolated, and more fragile, than most on the outside could imagine.

  FOR THURA AUNG and his family in Amakan, late 2008 and 2009 were all about restarting their lives as best they could. Local charities and some foreign aid workers came, bringing food and other assistance. He married Wa Wa Khaing, the young woman he met at his grandfather’s house the night of Nargis. Finding enough workers to work the land was a major challenge. “Even those who survived, like the ones who lost all their kids, their parents, they really couldn’t think of working anymore.

  “Our mentalities changed after Nargis,” he told me. “We now save everything we can, and spend very little. We always feel there might be another disaster around the corner. Many over the years in our village became alcoholics. Some went mad.”

  By 2009, Burma was an impoverished country, with a sinister economic system and a mosaic of generals, warlords, and ethnic rebels, with millions more now traumatized by a natural disaster of unimaginable proportions. At the same time, Burma’s isolation was being chipped away, ever so slightly, and civil society groups, which had started out as aid charities, were feeling their way into a new political environment.

  January 22, 2009, was the centenary of my grandfather U Thant’s birthday. Since the 1974 protest surrounding his burial, no one had dared to publicly commemorate his life in any way. My family and I suggested a simple reception for a few dozen diplomats, UN officials, and an assortment of Burmese: writers, heads of charities, businessmen, and political figures. The junta agreed and even sent representatives to take part. Erik Solheim, Norway’s development minister, was in Rangoon that week—the first Western minister to visit Burma in decades. He came too. There had been no gathering like it in a very long time.

  Burma was sliding in a new direction. There was the potential for something new. The risks, though, were greater than ever.

  FIVE

  FIGHTING CHANCE

  ALL THIS TIME, Aung San Suu Kyi was under house arrest, at her stately colonial-era villa on the south shore of Rangoon’s Inya Lake. She lived with a staff of two women, a mother and daughter. She was also visited regularly by her physician, Dr. Tin Myo Win, who brought her news from the outside and packages, mainly books, sent by friends overseas. She kept a strict regimen and listened at set times to the BBC and the Voice of America over her short-wave radio.

  She played the piano as well, an assortment of classical pieces on an old upright Yamaha that had belonged to her late mother. Her favorite, she later told an interviewer, was the “Canon” by Baroque German composer Johann Pachelbel. She read voraciously. And she enjoyed an eclectic collection of more contemporary music, from Tom Jones to Bob Marley and the Grateful De
ad. From her window she would have seen the little amusement park by the side of the expansive lake, children and their parents on the rickety Ferris wheel, hawkers selling fresh coconut juice, couples holding hands on the benches along the embankment.

  She was scheduled for release from house arrest on May 27, 2009. The regime was just then trying to get its ducks in a row for the planned elections. Releasing Aung San Suu Kyi would be extremely risky. But, under the law, they would need a good reason to extend her confinement.

  In 2008, John Yettaw, a fifty-two-year-old army veteran from Missouri suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, developed an obsession with Aung San Suu Kyi while traveling around Thailand by motorcycle with his teenage son. Believing he had to help her, in October that year he flew to Rangoon and managed to get inside her house by swimming through a culvert and scaling a low fence. The house staff prevented him from seeing Aung San Suu Kyi. He left her the Book of Mormon. The authorities were informed but did nothing.

  Back in Missouri, he saw visions that told him to try again. He was nervous but determined. He borrowed money for a plane ticket, downloaded Michael Bublé and Mormon sermons using the free WiFi at his neighborhood Hardee’s, and set off.

  On May 4, 2009, John Yettaw swam for a second time to Aung San Suu Kyi’s house. The staff threatened to call the police (there were armed guards less than a hundred yards away), but when he complained of exhaustion, leg cramps, and low blood sugar due to diabetes, Aung San Suu Kyi saw him and agreed he could stay overnight. The next day, he was arrested as he tried to swim to an American diplomatic residence nearby. He was charged with several offenses including “illegal swimming.”