The Hidden History of Burma

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

  In the late 1990s and 2000s, Ja Nan was a teacher at the Kachin Theological College in Myitkyina, the capital of Kachin state, only a few miles from the ceasefire line. Though it was in name a theological college, many different subjects were offered, from English to mathematics, and the college attracted students from over the Kachin Hills. The junta saw it as a training ground for rebels but, as the ceasefire was intact, tolerated it nonetheless.

  “We read the Bible according to the local context,” explained Ja Nan, moon-faced and soft-spoken. “There was the idea of contextual theology. We used sticky rice and rice wine at communion instead of bread and wine. We connected what was happening around us to what we read in the Bible. A rights language developed linked to Christian beliefs. The idea of ‘walk another mile,’ from the book of Matthew, for example, was placed in the context of local forced labor.

  “We were part of the North American Baptist Convention, not the more conservative Southern Baptist Convention,” she continued, “so we had ties to the ideas of Martin Luther King, his ideas on nonviolent resistance. ‘Social rights’ and ‘civil rights’ became part of our vocabulary. Some teachers gave after-school classes at their homes, for discussions about injustice. Kids connected this to their own experiences growing up. Kachin nationalism became stronger over these years.”

  Ja Nan believed that the Kachin had not been prepared for the economic changes that came with the 1994 ceasefire. The thinking had been political and military; there wasn’t a clear economic agenda. The jade industry boomed, and though the Kachin Independence Army continued to profit from it, the lion’s share now went to outsiders. Big machines were brought in from China, and the mainly Kachin people who had been working the mines were thrown out of work. Commercial logging also grew exponentially. Land was confiscated for watermelon and banana plantations. A new capitalist class—Kachins, Burmese, and Chinese, with ties to armies on either side of the ceasefire—became rich, while everyone else stayed poor.

  Ja Nan said that up to 2009, the Kachin Independence Organization had the idea of “change from within.” Unlike the NLD, they participated in the junta’s Constitutional Convention to the very end. They even participated in the referendum held in the days after Cyclone Nargis, the chairman of the Kachin Independence Organization casting the first ballot (in favor of the constitution) at the polling station in Laiza, their headquarters. A Kachin State Progressive Party was formed. But by 2010, there was no agreement on the Border Guard Force proposal, which would turn insurgent armies into smaller militias under the army’s command. As a result, the junta refused to allow the Kachin State Progressive Party to register. Ja Nan felt that, despite the political differences, relations between the Burmese army and the Kachin Independence Organization were still amicable. “They had been doing a lot of business together,” she told me. But by late 2010 tensions were mounting fast.

  FOR CHINA, the possibility of fresh fighting along the border was a growing irritant. Beijing had bigger things in mind. Over the past twenty years, the Chinese economy had grown by leaps and bounds, and was now the engine powering much of global growth. The 2008 financial crisis in the West seemed to presage a more general Western decline. In 1990, Deng Xiaoping had ordered the Chinese to “hide your strength, bide your time,” but now China was moving into a higher gear and making its ambitions better known. Remaking Burma was one of its ambitions.

  On a map, Burma and China are neighbors, and it’s easy to assume that this has always been the case. But the borders of both are new, and until modern times China was a faraway place, with many other kingdoms belonging to other peoples, neither Burmese nor Chinese, like the Yi, Dai, and Naxi, in the high mountain valleys in between. Whereas India was a few weeks’ sail away, across warm and pacific waters, reaching China meant months of arduous travel by foot and mule. It was this geography that was now being altered. Yunnan, the Chinese province closest to Burma, had only a minority Han Chinese population until the 20th century. Now it was fully integrated into the People’s Republic. It was also industrializing rapidly, tying its markets closely to Burma’s.

  By the 2000s, the Chinese were hoping that Burma would provide a route to the Indian Ocean. This was a very old ambition, going back to the first Chinese explorers two thousand years ago who searched for a way from today’s Yunnan, via Burma, to the sea. Burma served as a back door to China during the Second World War, when the Americans trucked supplies over the Burma Road to Chiang Kai-shek’s besieged forces at Chungking. In the 1990s, Chinese scholars began discussing what they termed “the Malacca Dilemma,” the fact that nearly all China’s shipping and energy supplies depended on the narrow Straits of Malacca, a potential chokepoint that could be blockaded by the American or other navies. Beijing wanted a new Burma Road, a permanent one, and much else.

  In November 2009, Burma and China finalized plans for a $2.5-billion oil and gas pipeline that would connect a port in Arakan to refineries in Yunnan and beyond. A tenth of China’s imported energy would flow across central Burma. Gas from Burma’s newly discovered offshore natural gas fields would do the same. New highways and railway lines would run parallel to the pipeline. In addition, China began work on a massive $3.5-billion hydropower project in Kachin state, four times the size of the Hoover Dam and projected to be the fifteenth biggest in the world. A slew of other dams were also planned, along the Irrawaddy and Salween rivers, as well as a giant nickel mine worth $1 billion.

  In Burma itself, China’s push was controversial, to say the least. Given Western sanctions, the junta felt it had little alternative. The junta had few qualms about the environmental destruction some of these projects would cause, or the land confiscations they would entail, but many ordinary people did have qualms. An image of a rapacious China, taking advantage of Burma’s international weakness, took root.

  In Beijing, I met with both government officials and analysts. They understood far better than their counterparts in the West that change was on the horizon. At a seminar I attended, a scholar working on Burma said, “After the elections there will be an end to sanctions and a normalization of Burma’s international position. The West will not only accept the process but will welcome it and respond positively. After all, Burma will have elections with different parties, and though it’s a scripted process, there will be different possible outcomes. This is much more than the Chinese or Vietnamese (or the North Koreans!) will do for decades.” There was much laughter in the room.

  Earlier that year, Barack Obama became president of the United States. His secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, quickly ordered a review of American policy on Burma, saying that the “path we have taken in imposing sanctions hasn’t influenced the Burmese junta.”4 Just as Than Shwe was embarking on his transition, the US was also looking for a way to change tack. What Than Shwe had in mind was still far from anything that could easily justify fresh US engagement with Naypyitaw. But an opportunity was emerging.

  Over the spring and summer of 2009, I traveled over a dozen times to Rangoon and Naypyitaw, meeting with generals and other high officials, trying to get a better sense of what they had in mind. In formal meetings, they spoke admiringly of their new constitution, the economic achievements of the regime, and the prospects for rapid development. In informal meetings, they said that what was intended was “new system, old people.” There would be a genuinely new set-up but, for the first five years, perhaps ten, ex-military men would dominate institutions, to break them in. They wanted to make sure reform didn’t lead to revolt, to protect their families and safeguard their wealth. Not all generals were corrupt, but many had family members who had profited from their positions. Perhaps more than anything, they seemed to want their legacy respected. But beyond that, they were open to ideas.

  In all my meetings in Burma, I tried to repeat my primary message as many times as I could: any steps away from military dictatorship were good, but they had to be accompanied by economic reforms that would genuinely benefit ordinary people and bring
a just end to decades of internal conflict. I had no idea if anyone was listening.

  Over those same months, in both Western and Asian capitals, I met with more than a dozen government ministers. The international media at the time were almost unanimous in saying that the new system would be nothing more than a fig leaf for Than Shwe’s continued dictatorial rule. I suggested that what was taking shape was the best chance in a very long time to influence Burma. Speaking at the European Union parliament in Brussels in June 2009, I argued that the new constitutional set-up would not lead to democracy, but would be the biggest shake-up in the Burmese political order in a generation. I advocated trying to take advantage of this shake-up, thinking not just about politics but also about the economy and the armed conflicts. I also said that China should loom large in anyone’s analysis of Burma’s future.

  I also met Jim Webb, US senator from Virginia. Webb was a Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War and a former secretary of the navy. In 2009, he was leading efforts to rethink policy on Burma. Webb called sanctions “overwhelmingly counterproductive.” He pointed as well to China’s growing economic footprint and argued that America should speak to the Chinese rather than simply isolating Burma from the West.5 And he said that the United States needed to develop clearly articulated standards for its relations with the nondemocratic world. In an op-ed in the New York Times, headlined “We Can’t Afford to Ignore Myanmar,” he wrote, “Our distinct policies toward different countries amount to a form of situational ethics that does not translate well into clear-headed diplomacy.”6

  In mid-August, Jim Webb flew to Burma and met with both Than Shwe and Aung San Suu Kyi, becoming the first senior American political figure to do so. This was at the height of the Kokang fighting, something perhaps not lost on the Chinese. On his return, he held hearings on Burma policy. I was invited, and in my testimony said that Burma was at a watershed and that any effective policy would need to address seven decades of ethnic-based armed conflict as well as half a century of isolation.7

  The Norwegians were also very active. Development minister Erik Solheim visited in early 2009, together with his Danish counterpart, Ulla Tørnæs, and toured villages devastated by the cyclone. As the first European ministers to visit Burma in well over a decade, they attracted criticism for doing so. Erik Solheim returned a year later. He was convinced that an end to Burma’s isolation was a prerequisite for any progress. Norway, which had previously taken the hardest line on Burma, not only pivoted toward a new approach, but tried to persuade counterparts in Washington to do the same.

  Most governments, however, followed the old approach. It was easy to see why. There was no reason to trust anything the junta said. They were inarticulate in English and anything in translation was at best garbled. Few could see the granular changes already taking place in Naypyitaw. The visits of people like Jim Webb and Erik Solheim did have an important effect, however: they demonstrated to the regime that taking the first steps out of dictatorship would be recognized. These early moves would prove a crucial ingredient for the transformation to come.

  NEW STRATEGIES were emerging within Burma as well. A central character was the erstwhile businessman, magazine publisher, and think tank founder Nay Win Maung. A small, wiry man with a cigarette always in hand and a chain-smoker’s cough, he was gregarious and good-humored, and by the late 2000s single-minded in his desire to find a way out of his country’s political and economic morass. His life story made him a good fit for the role he would come to play.

  Nay Win Maung grew up in the 1960s and 1970s in the old colonial hill station of Maymyo, a rambling collection of mock-Tudor homes and once well-manicured lawns. A century ago, it was where the British went when Rangoon was too hot. His parents were lecturers at the Defense Services Academy, Burma’s equivalent to West Point or Sandhurst, known to generations of army officers. He was a reasonably good student, but he was also rebellious, always questioning both his teachers and his parents, something not often done in conservative Burmese society. He read Harold Robbins and Arthur Hailey in translation and later tried his hand at writing fiction. After graduating with a medical degree, he decided not to practice as a doctor and turned to business instead. There were ups and downs. He became fascinated by the world of business—or, more precisely, the dysfunctional world of Burmese business and the policies behind its dysfunctionality.

  In 1997 he founded Living Colour magazine, which focused mainly on stories about the economy. Starting a private publication wasn’t an easy thing to do under the dictatorship. But the magazine did well, and it allowed Nay Win Maung to meet often with an ever wider circle of people. Whereas others saw the economic mess and threw up their hands, Nay Win Maung began scheming quietly. For him, the faceless generals were not faceless. Some he knew through his parents. What he lacked was any real background in public policy, so in 2004 he accepted an offer to be Maurice R. Greenberg World Fellow at Yale, spending four months intensively studying and discussing comparative politics. It was a turning point.

  When he got back, he teamed up with Tin Maung Thann, an old school friend and an ichthyologist. Like Nay Win Maung, he was, he said, part of the “hopeless generation” that grew up under the Burmese Way to Socialism.8 After university in Rangoon, he continued his studies in aquaculture in Thailand. He worked in Vietnam, Bangladesh, Laos, and Cambodia before returning home to promote tilapia farming. Soon he was caught up in Nay Win Maung’s plans to change the country. In November 2006, Nay Win Maung set up a think tank called Egress. Tin Maung Thann was a founding member, together with Hla Maung Shwe, a successful shrimp exporter and former political prisoner. Both would play pivotal roles in the politics to come.

  I first visited Egress in 2007. It was located in a warren of rooms and corridors at the back of the Thamada, a dilapidated 1970s hotel with a movie theatre at one end and the 365 Café on the other. Across the street was the red-brick Presbyterian church. Egress was partly a school offering short courses in “capacity-building,” an innocuous term used to hide its teaching of comparative politics. Hundreds of young people attended.

  One of the lecturers was Kyaw Yin Hlaing, a jovial and loquacious PhD from Cornell University who had just returned from a teaching position abroad. He believed that Burma was “in a social and political deadlock” and in desperate need of “a critical mass of young people who could think critically and differently and become agents of change.” He focused on issues of identity: “Young people didn’t have access to new ways of thinking. They hated the military. But they still had the same idea as the military of a Burma that was unchanged from millions of years ago. They didn’t know what had been the product of the British and what was not. We talked about all these things. About how the country’s borders themselves were new. This opened their eyes. Some were very upset. ‘No, Myanmar was always there!’ some said. But then they changed. With that they came to accept a more pragmatic approach. It wasn’t going to be about bringing back a glorious past.”

  Egress was also a think tank aimed at influencing regime policy. “The regime’s information systems were down,” one former Egress member told me in 2018. “They had no intelligence service, no one to explain their options. If we can manipulate that, we push them toward reform. If we make one mistake, though, we’ll wind up in jail.” Nay Win Maung was by that time writing hundreds of short papers with ideas on every aspect of government policy, and sending them to top generals. He also had a weekly newspaper, Voice, in which he tried, carefully, to challenge official thinking. He even wrote to Than Shwe. He got away with much of what he was doing only because so many of the generals had been students of his parents. In Burma, the teacher–student (saya-tabè) relationship is considered second only to the one between parent and child.

  For many in the democracy movement, Egress represented nothing less than a sellout. By implicitly accepting the new constitution, it was turning its back on the National League for Democracy and its goal of revolution, at a time when the NLD and Aung S
an Suu Kyi were especially vulnerable. The other side was also suspicious. Nay Win Maung and other Egress officials were interrogated several times by the police Special Branch (responsible for monitoring dissent) and briefly detained in the summer of 2010.

  By then, a growing circle of people were working together informally. It included Egress, along with Burmese exiles, political figures outside the NLD, Western diplomats and aid workers in Rangoon, and an array of people in various capitals, from desk officers to ministers. They shared the beliefs that sanctions were counterproductive, that revolution was not around the corner, and that the opportunities around Than Shwe’s impending retirement could be used to push Burma in a reformist direction.

  Egress was also active in Bangkok, running a series of quiet meetings (“the Bangkok process”) with Burmese exiles gearing up to return. Nay Win Maung was almost manic in those days, working incessantly. He started wearing short shorts all the time. He fell asleep once while smoking and typing, setting fire to his laptop. He changed his email address, without explanation, to brattpytt@gmail.com. He emailed me and dozens of others every day, maneuvering between diplomats, generals, aid officials, businessmen, and exiles, trying to get the next steps just right. His hope wasn’t radical change in 2011, but a gradual evolution that would lead to democracy by 2016.

  My personal desire was to see discussions broaden away from politics and toward the economy and the armed conflicts. Then, as now, I felt that the plight of the poorest needed to be placed front and center, together with new ways of thinking about race and identity. In May 2009, in Bangkok, I organized the first ever conference on economic reform in Burma, bringing together the UN, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and Burmese economists from both inside and outside the country. I also became a part-time advisor to the Livelihoods and Food Security Trust Fund, or LIFT, commuting weekly from Bangkok to Rangoon. LIFT was a several-hundred-million-dollar fund set up by the European Union, the UK and Australia in the aftermath of Nargis to address extreme poverty in rural Burma. I acted as a bridge, working to convince the government that this was a good thing, at a time when most generals were still extremely suspicious of the West. Conversely, Western governments needed reassurance that aid under the military regime was not further entrenching the status quo. LIFT was a test. As part of the LIFT team, I traveled to some of the most destitute villages in the country. I hoped and believed that, at the very least, in the years to come, the situation of the poorest would improve.