OVERSEAS, A SMALL but growing number of Burmese also realized that a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity might be around the corner. One was Min Zaw Oo, then working with aid agencies in Afghanistan. At the time of the abortive uprising in 1988, he was fifteen years old. He soon joined an underground movement and later the All Burma Students’ Democratic Front, or ABSDF, an insurgent group on the Thai–Burmese border. For years, he and a ragtag group of mainly boys from the area lived on a hilltop. There were many close calls. Once, during a firefight with government soldiers, six bullets missed his head by inches, lodging in a jackfruit tree just behind him. He nearly died several times from malaria and typhoid. He began to wonder: what I am doing on this hill? Many Western embassies, including the American, were in regular touch with the ABSDF as well as other rebel groups along the border, via their liaison offices in Thailand. One day, he received word from the ABSDF liaison office of a scholarship opportunity to go to America. “For everyone in the camp there were two habits: one was not to talk about family back home, to prevent breakdown in morale. The second was not to think about the future.” But now he did. He went to Bangkok, got an application, and filled out the forms in his hut on the muddy hillside.
Before long, he was at the University of Maryland, where the political scientist Ted Gurr was working on state failure. “Somalia was then big in the news and the US government was setting up a Somalia-linked ‘state failure task force,’ ” he told me. Ted Gurr was involved in it, so Min Zaw Oo became involved too. He eventually completed a PhD at George Mason University in conflict analysis and resolution.
By this time, Min Zaw Oo knew that sanctions and isolation weren’t the way forward for Burma. The 2003 attacks by the junta on Aung San Suu Kyi’s convoy had angered him deeply. But the weakness of the democracy movement also suggested the need for a strategic review. “The army’s plan for a new constitutional set-up needs to be used in some way,” he thought. Then he met Nay Win Maung at a conference outside London. I was there too. They kept in touch. In 2008, he met his future wife, a Burmese woman living in the US. He told her he might not be a good boyfriend, let alone husband, as he was determined to go back to Burma one day and become involved again in political work.
Min Zaw Oo’s idea was that any change would be an elite-driven transition. He felt there were two requirements: “a more open political space and the emergence of new agents for reform.” By 2010, he was seeing both taking shape.
IN MARCH 2010, after months of internal debate, the National League for Democracy’s leaders who were not in prison met and called for a boycott of the coming elections. This was Aung San Suu Kyi’s wish, which her physician was able to convey to the others. A minority disagreed, left the NLD, and formed a new party, the National Democratic Front. This was good news for the junta. According to new election laws, all parties had to take part or face automatic dissolution. The NLD was officially dissolved.
Win Tin was a journalist who had spent nineteen years locked up for his beliefs, often beaten, denied medical care, and kept in terrible conditions. He was now out of prison and eighty years old, with a shock of white hair and clad always in a sky blue prison shirt that he wore as a show of solidarity with those still behind bars. He told the New York Times that taking part in the elections would mean “giving up all of our political convictions.” Instead, he urged the international community to “please put more pressure on the government.” “For me it’s as if I were still in prison,” he said. “I feel like the whole country is imprisoned.”
In September 2010, the official campaign period began. In addition to the regime’s own Union Solidarity and Development Party and the NLD’s breakaway National Democratic Front, a total of forty parties were registered for the polls. One was the National Unity Party, a resurrection of General Ne Win’s old ruling Burma Socialist Programme Party. Many were ethnic minority parties, some genuinely independent, others created by the junta to give them a local front.
Than Shwe’s intent was that his Union Solidarity and Development Party win the election. But he wanted the party to win cleanly, if possible. The odds were already stacked in its favor. It had lots of money to spend. And with the NLD out of the picture, there were few nationwide rivals.
There was real campaigning. Recently retired generals were now parliamentary candidates. After a lifetime in uniform, some were not entirely comfortable wearing civilian longyis in public; they chose safari suits instead. They toured constituencies, shaking hands and kissing babies, promising better roads and better schools.
On November 7, 2010, the elections went ahead. The result was a landslide win for Than Shwe’s Union Solidarity and Development Party. There were probably some who voted for the USDP because they genuinely supported the regime, or wanted to be on the winning side, and the NLD’s call to boycott the election took away many potential votes from the other opposition parties. Added to this was outright fraud and vote rigging, which was engineered almost entirely via “advance votes” (absentee ballots). When preliminary returns suggested significant wins for the National Democratic Front (the NLD breakaway), including in key Rangoon constituencies, the top generals suggested a helping hand. By morning, a wave of additional ballot papers had swung the results in the other direction. A few weeks later, when Myanmar lost a soccer game to Vietnam, the joke in Rangoon was that Myanmar first lost 2–0 but then won 3–2 on advance votes.
The election was also something of a watershed for the Muslim communities of northern Arakan. The junta not only granted them the right to vote but sought to win their votes as well, promising better times ahead. To mobilize the Rohingya, they used Rohingya real estate tycoons from Rangoon. The USDP won all three majority-Rohingya constituencies. Rohingya politicians would soon join the new parliament.
Some, though, had an intimation that things were not quite right. Tin Hlaing was a Muslim businessman in Sittwe, the capital of Arakan. He was part Rohingya and part Kaman. The Kamans were a separate Muslim community living mainly in the south of the state. He had grown up in Sittwe and remembers only “a happy time” in school, which was about two-thirds Muslim. “There was no discrimination, either from teachers or the other kids. I had good friends from all communities and backgrounds. In town there might occasionally be a fight at a bar between people of different religions, but nothing too serious. Up to 1990, we could also travel freely, including to Rangoon. It was in the 1990s and 2000s that things gradually became difficult.”9
Tin Hlaing went to university in Sittwe, studying mathematics. He taught himself Hindi on the side, from books and watching Indian films, becoming almost fluent. His English was also good. These language skills won him a job with an Indian company, ESSAR, helping them rent houses and hire workers.
During the approach to the 2010 election, things began to change. While dining at the Mayu restaurant, he overheard a discussion in an adjoining room organized by the main Arakanese party, the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party. There were Arakanese Buddhist leaders from Rangoon as well as from around the state. “They talked about the need for a lu-myo seit [a “racial” or “national” spirit—the words are interchangeable in Burmese]. They said, this is our land. It’s a Buddhist land. Some said, ‘We need to be careful about the kala.’ Hearing this made me uneasy for the first time.”
Several months earlier, in a letter to all heads of foreign missions in Hong Kong and the local media, the Burmese consul general Ye Myint Aung pushed back against reports alleging discrimination against Rohingya Muslims in Arakan. He said that the Rohingya were not one of “Myanmar’s ethnic groups” and compared their “dark brown” complexion to that of the Burmese, which was “fair and soft, good-looking as well.” For good measure, he noted that his own complexion was a “typical genuine one” for Burmese “gentlemen”: “You will accept how handsome your colleague Mr. Ye is.” The Rohingya, by contrast, were “as ugly as ogres.”10 Mr. Ye was never reprimanded. Instead, he was promoted.
ON NOVEMBER 13, 2010,
a week after the election, Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest. She spoke that evening to a weeping and cheering crowd outside her gate, saying, “People must work in unison. Only then can we achieve our goal.”11 Many in the crowd wore T-shirts with her image and the slogan “We stand with Aung San Suu Kyi.”
Six weeks later, she was connected to the Internet. In an interview with the BBC, she said her hope was still for a “nonviolent revolution.” She didn’t know how long it would take, but she would take “any opportunity to speak to the generals.” She added, “I don’t want to see the military falling. I want to see the military rising to dignified heights of professionalism and true patriotism.”12
The stage was set, but the script was unfinished. Than Shwe and his cohort could still have calibrated the transition in different ways. A new element weighing on their minds was the news they watched on their television sets every evening: the Arab Spring. In January 2011, Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was overthrown and chased into exile. A month later, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak was ousted and jailed. In March, a revolt began against Bashar al-Assad in Syria. By the summer, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi would be dead, killed by a mob. All this focused minds in Naypyitaw. They were ready for help.
At this point, Noeleen Heyzer (the head of the UN’s regional economic commission, who had played an important role after Nargis) stepped up her dialogue with the generals. After traveling around the country in 2009, she told them: “You really have a big problem. Kids are not in school. People don’t have enough to eat. You say you’re building dams, but there is not enough water in most villages. Do you really want to have an economy that’s only about exporting cheap labor and raw materials? Or do you want something different? We can bring the best minds here to work with you.”
Heyzer invited Joseph Stiglitz to visit Burma. Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and former chief economist at the World Bank, was (and is) a heavyweight. The generals hesitated to allow him to come, then relented. It was an incredibly big step. These were the same generals who had kicked out Charles Petrie just three years before for saying that poverty was worse than the junta were prepared to admit. And it wouldn’t just be a flying visit. Stiglitz would speak at a grand conference with Burmese civil society organizations as well as with government officials. The generals were nervous, and only at the last minute did Than Shwe allow his prime minister, Thein Sein, to attend.
In the Chinese-built Myanmar Convention Centre in Naypyitaw, Stiglitz talked to the assembled participants about the need to increase spending on health and education, invest in agriculture and rural development, and use new revenues from oil and gas wisely. He stressed the need to help the poorest and drew attention to the appalling state of rural credit markets. There were many questions. Afterward, at a press conference in Singapore, he said, “There is the hope that this is the moment of change for the country.”
In most countries, a lecture and discussion with a prominent economist, even a Nobel Prize winner like Joseph Stiglitz, would barely count as news. But in Burma, after decades of isolation, it was a tipping point. It wasn’t what was said that was important; it was that an analysis implicitly critical of the regime’s record was aired in public—and reported. What had been taboo was suddenly appearing in state-run media. The retired United Nations economist U Myint, who had helped organize the event, said at a press conference afterward: “I hope it is realized that Professor Stiglitz’s visit here is not only to share his knowledge with us but to help create this space, for us as well as for others in the country who want change.”13
As 2010 turned to 2011, Burma was in limbo. Aung San Suu Kyi was free. Than Shwe was about to give up the reins of power. New structures were taking shape. And those focused on profits were busy filling their pockets. There was a fire sale of state property, and businessmen close to the generals were able to buy prime real estate at bargain-basement prices. Forests were cut down at a ferocious pace. To me, this was the clearest sign that something would change. Like frogs picking up positive ions in the atmosphere weeks before an earthquake, it was the businessmen who sensed most clearly that the old way of doing things was about to end.
These businessmen had enjoyed a good run over the past couple of years. But, to be fair, so had many others. Moderate economic growth had led to noticeable changes in Rangoon. Hotels were spruced up and there were more restaurants to choose from, along with first-rate supermarkets and a sleek and efficient airport terminal, as good as any in the region. Much of the new money was tied to jade and a related inflation of the city’s real estate prices. The building of the new capital, financed in part by rising natural gas prices, also enriched a select few. A house worth $200,000 ten years ago now fetched ten times that amount. There was a trickle down to an incipient middle class, though very little trickled down any further. Inequalities remained colossal.
Over the previous two decades, ever since the jettisoning of the Burmese Way to Socialism, money had reshaped the political landscape. Everyone—soldiers and civilians, government and rebel armies, Burmese Buddhists and ethnic minorities—was dependent on the market. A few made money honestly. Many with access to guns or high office did not. Collusion and racketeering knew no linguistic, racial, or religious divides.
But what of the future?
Would money continue to shape the next iteration in Burmese politics? Or would race thinking trump all?
Meanwhile, nearly four decades of repression and impoverishment had produced a psychological impact. I saw this in my own extended family as well as in others, where each generation had enjoyed fewer opportunities than the last and there was no one to hold to account. The anxieties of the free market were coupled with a sense of impotence. Many people turned to Buddhism or other faiths. Burma in 2010 was as religious a society as it had ever been. Millions also spent time each week in charity work, either at their local monastery or church or in one of the many parahita (literally “the welfare of others”) associations that had sprung up. Millions more coped by keeping their heads down and minding their own business.
The generals themselves lived in a hermetically sealed world. They lived together, their wives socialized together, they attended the same religious ceremonies, and their children went to the same schools and married one another. They told themselves that they were the true patriots and their opponents were traitors.
Over that winter some of the generals, now ex-generals, crept onto the new stage. Two of them came quietly to listen to lectures at Egress. The more optimistic observers hoped for at least some economic reform, an easing of political restrictions, and an outreach to the West. What came next went far beyond anyone’s wildest imagination.
SIX
ALIGNMENT
OVER THE FIRST FEW MONTHS of 2011, the doubters, those who had dismissed the new constitutional set-up as a sham, seemed to be proven right. Many of the generals were now ex-generals, but there was little sign that much beyond the change of clothes was likely to be different.
Rangoon gossip was focused on which of these ex-generals might wind up as the first, nominally civilian president under the new constitution. Than Shwe had made it clear in private meetings that he had no desire to take the top job. For years, his only rival had been his deputy, Maung Aye, just a few years his junior and a powerful figure with his own network, in business and in the army. Than Shwe’s aim was to retire and to make sure Maung Aye retired as well. He also intended to fracture power between the army and the two new institutions he was creating: the presidency and the parliament. He wanted to live out his last years confident that no new strongman could emerge. He felt he had already outmaneuvered Aung San Suu Kyi.
The smart money had been on Shwe Mann, number three in the junta hierarchy, just below Than Shwe and Maung Aye. Born in 1947, he had spent most of his life in combat, fighting Communists in the teak-forested hills south of Mandalay and leading bloody campaigns against Karen insurgents in the steamy, malaria-infested jungles nea
r Thailand. He was awarded the rare title Thura, meaning “brave,” for distinction in battle. By the mid-2000s, he was in charge of all day-to-day military operations and was increasingly seen as Burma’s next leader, trusted by both Than Shwe and Maung Aye. Square-jawed, with a soft-spoken charisma, Shwe Mann seemed to fit the part. A UN diplomat who met him together with other generals in 2006 remembered him as friendly and inquisitive, asking many questions and taking extensive notes. During his visit to Beijing in 2009, the Chinese rolled out the red carpet for the man they believed was the heir apparent.
Shwe Mann was also in close touch with Nay Win Maung and Egress. Nay Win Maung sent him notes at least every week on almost every conceivable policy issue, from liberalizing car imports to relations with the new Obama administration. Shwe Mann’s son sat in on Egress classes and sent taped recordings of the lectures to his father. Like a slew of other generals, Shwe Mann formally retired in 2010 to contest the elections, won a seat, and waited for his moment.
So, at the end of January when parliament was convened and another ex-general, Thein Sein, was chosen as president, many were left scratching their heads. Shwe Mann was given what was seen as a consolation prize and made Speaker of the lower house of parliament. Nay Win Maung was discouraged. I remember many discussions with him over the preceding months on likely presidential picks. None had included Thein Sein as a possibility.
The Hidden History of Burma Page 14
