Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change

by Solomon, Andrew

  More than a quarter of Myanmar’s gross domestic product comes from natural resources. Major corporations have begun to invest there: consumer-product manufacturers such as Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and General Electric; financial-services companies such as Visa and MasterCard; and extraction companies such as ExxonMobil and Chevron. Businesses without so much leverage are wary of Myanmar’s persisting violence, lack of governmental transparency, erratic policy, and unreliable utilities. Many skilled people left the country after 1988, creating a vacuum of competence. Some hundred thousand Burmese professionals are living in Singapore alone, working as construction supervisors, accountants, dentists, and doctors. Without them, foreign companies struggle to set up shop, but likewise, until foreign companies begin operations, many emigrants have no incentive to return. Foreign governments are also hesitant in this uneasy dance. As Derek Mitchell told me, “The international community has dealt with Myanmar as a cause, and now has to deal with it as a country.”

  Political activists in Myanmar posited that a third of the people in the government, including Thein Sein, were reformers; a third still favored military strong-arming; and a third were on the fence. “If you make the wrong choice in this environment, you lose big,” Mitchell observed. Thein Sein has never been a heroic figure, but he has pushed back against hard-liners; one of his associates told me that he wanted to make the changes irreversible. Since 2011, he has met with Suu Kyi numerous times, but onlookers believe she doesn’t trust him. “She is extremely decisive, and she often treats his cautiousness as indecision,” one diplomat said. “She didn’t hope for the compromise she has been handed; she hoped for a revolutionary reversal.” The popular narrative in Myanmar speaks of “The Lady and the hunters”—of Suu Kyi and a corrupt military. Ma Thanegi characterized the stereotype as “the beautiful-victim-and-the-thugs story that has served her so well.” Once Thein Sein reined in the hunting, The Lady had to sully herself with politics, even before achieving official power. That imperative was not entirely welcome.

  Turnout for the 2012 by-election had been huge. Everyone I met agreed that if a proposed election were held in 2015, the hint of self-determination would ensure an avalanche of voting. The urgency of that excitement echoed what I had heard in South Africa in the lead-up to the pivotal 1994 elections, for which millions of people waited in line for three days to vote. In Yangon, however, I heard near-unanimous concern that the election would be rigged. Suu Kyi’s NLD seemed destined for victory, but members of Thein Sein’s Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) appeared to be banking on the very real possibility that the NLD might prove incompetent at governing, and that—as in Korea, Taiwan, and Mongolia—overthrown oppressors might reorganize and win in elections. Among the most surprising reformers in the ruling party has been Shwe Mann, speaker of the Parliament. When he took that role, it was assumed that he would endorse the military agenda as his predecessors had. Instead he sought to transform Parliament into a forum for actual debate and refused to hew to edicts from on high. But Shwe Mann told Derek Mitchell, “We tried socialism; we tried a military government; both failed. We believe democracy will make us strong. If the people don’t have a voice in their affairs, it will be an unstable country, and no one will invest here.” Suu Kyi, by then a member of Parliament, formed an alliance with him, by which he effectively acknowledged that the only path to long-term relevance was to stick with her.

  It’s hard to overstate the status of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi (daw is a term of respect, Aung San is her father’s name, Suu Kyi is her given name, and she is commonly called simply “The Lady”). “She is not treated like a rock star,” Derek Mitchell averred. “She’s treated like the Second Coming.” Her father spearheaded the revolution and masterminded the multiethnic pact through which Burma achieved independence from the British; after his assassination, he achieved mythic status. Suu Kyi was raised by her mother, Khin Kyi, first in Rangoon (now called Yangon), then in India and Nepal (where Khin Kyi was successively appointed ambassador).

  Suu Kyi received her degree from Oxford University in 1969. After a brief sojourn in New York, she returned to the UK, eventually marrying Michael Aris, a British fellow student at Oxford, with whom she had two children. By happenstance, she was visiting Burma to care for her hospitalized mother when the 1988 uprising began, and after a few weeks, she gave her first speech, asking for “unity.” When the revolution was squashed, she banded together with some of her father’s former acolytes in the pro-democracy movement and made a sacrificial decision that took on the shimmer of revelation: to stay in Myanmar rather than return to England to be with her husband and sons. Commanding more and more attention, she was put under house arrest a year later, and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. Although she was released from 1995 until 2000, after which her house arrest was reinstated, she was never permitted to travel freely. These circumstances contributed to her aura of virtue, and she has proven to be perceptive and charismatic. I have never met anyone who was unimpressed after meeting her. Thant Thaw Kaung, who works with her, said to me reverently, “You cannot find another such person in the whole world.”

  Although most Burmese who are not beholden to the junta would like Suu Kyi to be president, Myanmar’s constitution is designed to frustrate such hopes. Clause 59F forbids anyone married to a foreigner, or whose children are of foreign birth, from running for office—a prohibition inserted specifically to exclude Suu Kyi. When I was in Yangon, the question of whether 59F would be repealed was a constant topic of conversation. Any election in which she is not allowed to participate is sure to seem hollow in Myanmar and internationally. Conversely, her election would serve as a magnet for international aid and economic revitalization, but she has remained tangled in constitutional bureaucracy. Many expressed concern that she had not built a team of experts nor designated a second-in-command. NLD insiders have fretted that the stubbornness that allowed her to survive for so long under house arrest, apart from her family, does not serve her so well now.

  She looks to other people’s ability to help her cause rather than seeking intimacy. I did not meet anyone who felt he or she had a personal relationship with her. Burmese entrepreneur Misuu Borit described her as having a “kind of lonely style”; others said she seemed unable or unwilling to build the trusting human relationships that are required of a leader. “She keeps her own counsel. Everything runs to her,” Mitchell said. “It’s an authoritarian structure in that way.” A British diplomat pointed out that the next Parliament might include more pro-democracy seats, but would have fewer members with experience as public servants. “They were in jail, and since they came out, they’ve been running tea shops,” she said. “Bright, good intentions, courageous, but to run a government?” The NLD was officially registered as a political party only in 2012, though it counts core members who were involved long before registration. “How fast can you recruit all the smart people?” Borit asked. “You can’t make a baby by making love with nine women and waiting one month. These things take time—and if you have no money, it doesn’t make the recruiting any faster.” Others echoed that sentiment.

  The constitutional barrier to Suu Kyi’s eligibility for election reflects larger problems with the country’s legal system. Robert San Pe, one of her legal advisers, mooted the question of whether to institute common law or civil law—the concern being that there may not be enough case history for common law. San Pe notes that many badly drafted laws are being rushed through the legislature. In 2013, Shwe Mann built a vast research library and hired fifteen hundred new parliamentary staff, but research efforts were stymied by the impossibility of locating information in an uncatalogued collection organized by donor, rather than by author, title, or subject. Laws are drafted in Burmese, with no official translations; foreign investors find themselves subject to regulations they cannot understand. One can find street vendors selling English translations of the investment laws to desperate foreigners at traffic lights in Yangon.

  “Our people
do not trust the courts; we do not believe in justice as delivered by the courts,” Suu Kyi has said. The constitution was ratified in September 2008, when Myanmar was reeling from Cyclone Nargis, which had killed some 140,000 people less than six months before. A recent joint committee was established to consider revising the constitution. Lawyers insisted that it must be easier to amend, and that the mandate reserving one in four legislative seats for the military should be scrapped. They objected to the lack of checks on the power of the president during a state of emergency. The president appoints both the chief justice and the rest of the Supreme Court, and the members need not have any legal background. The 109-member committee for revision of the constitution has invited suggestions from ordinary citizens, and more than forty thousand have poured in.

  Ma Thida argued that constitutional reform would be required for Suu Kyi to run; that such reform would require the cooperation of the junta; and that if the junta enacted this reform, she would emerge as part of their plan rather than their fierce opponent. “She saves them,” Thida said, and seemed pleased at the thought that Shwe Mann might run against Suu Kyi.

  * * *

  Myanmar has two primary paranoias: that it will be overrun by China and that it will be overwhelmed by Bangladesh’s 160 million Muslims and those within their own territory. Many Burmese Buddhists—like anti-immigrationists in Europe and the United States—contend that Muslims don’t assimilate. In Burma, the complaints are that they keep their wealth to themselves (though most are impecunious), engage in moneylending, and, worst, take several wives to build an eventual majority that might sweep away the Buddhists. The Burmese do not like darker-skinned people, so racism comes into play as well. Racism is acceptable at almost every level of society in Myanmar. For example, in 2009, Myanmar’s consul general in Hong Kong wrote to his whole staff that the Rohingyas’ dark complexions made them “ugly as ogres,” unlike the “fair and soft” Burmese.

  Muslim descendants of Bengali settlers—many of whose families have lived in Burma for over a century—mostly live in Rakhine State. Although they identify themselves as Rohingya, they are referred to as Bengalis by nationalists who would label them foreigners. “The Burmese don’t understand that this attitude, rather than saving them, will ruin their society, their reputation, and their ability to develop,” Mitchell said. “They would say that the issue over Rohingyas and Muslims is an issue of national identity. And I say, ‘You’re right. What kind of country are you going to be? Are you going to be one based on lawlessness and violence against a whole category of people because you distrust them, or are you going to respect due process, humanist values, all the things that we thought you were fighting for?’ ”

  Myanmar is extremely religious, and most young men serve time as monks. Wealth is concentrated ostentatiously in the pagodas. The fear that Buddhism is in danger permeates the culture. Many consider Myanmar and Sri Lanka the last two bastions of Theravada Buddhism in a world dominated by Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. According to this narrative, although Buddhism was born in India, invader Muslims destroyed its classical context, uprooting the faith from its homeland. (Many Buddhists did, in fact, flee Mughal India for Tibet.) As Thant Myint-U explained, “The Burmese self-identity is rooted in the idea that this is a bastion of the true religion and nowhere else in the world is.”

  The Burmese state now known as Rakhine was known as Arakan as recently as 1989. Once an ancient and powerful coastal empire, Arakan had counted Muslims among its inhabitants since at least the seventeenth century. It was then conquered by the Bamar, the dominant Buddhist ethnicity for whom Burma was named, in 1784. It was sparsely populated at the time of the British conquest forty years later, consisting primarily of forests and marshes. The British granted plots to settlers to clear, importing Bengali immigrants to labor there. After this first modern Muslim migration into the region, northern Arakan became predominately Muslim. The early twentieth century witnessed a growing sense among Buddhist Burmese that British colonizers and Chinese and Bengali immigrants were thriving across the colonial state while they were being exploited. During the 1920s, a new wave of arrivals shifted the demographics further. Two million Indians a year immigrated to Rangoon, the globe’s largest current population shift; the capital was 80 percent Indian by the end of the decade. Since many resident Indians had fought for the British against Burmese independence groups, nationalists asserted that anyone except the ethnic Bamar, or Burmese, was a foreigner, even if born in Myanmar.

  After the 1947 partition of India, a separatist group of Muslim guerrilla fighters seeking union with Pakistan drove many Buddhists from the north of Burma, stoking outrage. Their uprising was put down fairly quickly, and since the mid-1950s no further Muslim insurgencies have occurred. Many Burmese allege that the Rohingyas have links with al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups; in fact, some Rohingyas did fight with the mujahideen in Afghanistan against the USSR during the 1980s, and for the Taliban later on, though in negligible numbers. Although descended from Bengalis, most Rohingyas have no claim to Bangladeshi citizenship; although born in Myanmar, they remain without a country as long as Myanmar classifies them as aliens. Without national identification cards, they have no access to education and live in unrelenting poverty. Since the recent liberalization began, some of the 2 million Buddhists living in Rakhine have subjected the nearly as numerous Rohingyas to pogroms, setting fire to neighborhoods, villages, and mosques in broad daylight.

  The first recent outburst against the Rohingyas, in June 2012, was triggered by the rape and murder of a Buddhist woman, allegedly by Rohingya Muslims. The next round, later that year, sprang from extremism and political expediency stoked by the Buddhist monk Ashin Wirathu, who exhorts his followers to “rise up” and “make your blood boil” to quash a supposed international Muslim conspiracy to destroy the “golden Burmese” way of life. In sermons, interviews, and a logorrhea of online postings, he refers to Muslims as kalar (the Burmese equivalent of “niggers”), “troublemakers,” and “mad dogs.” Pamphlets distributed at one sermon warned, “Myanmar is currently facing a most dangerous and fearful poison that is severe enough to eradicate all civilization.” In the Western press, he has been compared to Hitler. Wirathu initiated the 969 movement to mark stores and houses and even taxis where Muslims are unwelcome. The name of the movement played on Muslims’ use of the number 768 to identify stores that sold halal meat—which Wirathu labeled an act of separatism (although halal grocers never excluded non-Muslims). Practically every taxi in Myanmar displays a 969 sticker; one driver ranted to me that the fact that Muslims may take more than one wife proves that Buddhist women were being abducted and forced to bear Muslim children.

  While the paranoia is absurd, the basic concern can be tied to historic events. Muslims forced Buddhists out of Afghanistan a thousand years ago; the Taliban more recently destroyed ancient Buddhist holy sites in Pakistan; and radical Islamists have denounced Burma’s “savage Buddhists” to encourage Indonesia’s acceptance of Rohingya refugees. Relaxed censorship means that marginal opinions are more openly circulated, to incite prejudice as much as to promote pluralism. Nay Phone Latt said, “Some think that the lifting of censorship is a mandate to insult one another.”

  Wirathu and his camp have waged an aggressive campaign on Facebook. In Myanmar, those who do not have Internet access get their news from those who do. Allegations go viral even among those who have never seen a computer. Wirathu had been sentenced for inciting hatred, but was freed in 2012 under the general amnesty and went straight back to his rabble-rousing, claiming that the new freedom of expression had made his crusade legal. Monks in Rakhine began to distribute pamphlets asking Buddhists not to associate with Rohingyas. Neither the government nor, significantly, Aung San Suu Kyi has denounced the genocidal stirrings in Rakhine. It appears clear that doing so would imperil votes.

  As Rohingya neighborhoods in Rakhine towns have been burned and looted, Rohingyas have been moved to refugee camps, where they l
ive in appalling conditions. A sixty-year-old Rohingya teacher described seeing a student she had taught and liked setting fire to her home. Rakhine Buddhists suspected of doing business with Rohingyas have had their houses burned down. The hospital in Sittwe, capital of Rakhine, has only ten beds for Muslims. In the city’s overcrowded camps, medical attention consists of one doctor visiting once a week for an hour. Ambassador Mitchell described seeing children dying from easily curable illnesses.

  Internecine violence has also broken out in the Rohingya camps. One UN aid worker said he had observed rape, incest, and alcoholism among these desperate people, though the violence from guards was far worse. Many are starving; some have seen their children killed. The camps are mostly in low-lying areas that flood during the summer monsoon, when it rains more than three feet a month; even in January, when I visited, they were muddy and squalid. Because these camps are adjacent to the Rohingya neighborhoods, many refugees can see their former homes and their mosques from them; the old Muslim ghetto is now cordoned with barbed wire. Many Rohingyas have fled Myanmar, but no neighboring country wants to give them asylum, so a good number are dying on overloaded boats as they seek a safe port. Their desperate wanderings have become an international crisis. Meanwhile, the price of fish in the province has doubled, given that half the fishermen are in detention camps. Likewise, no lower-wage workers are available to harvest the rice paddies.

  The conflict triangulates among the Bamars, the Rakhines, and the Rohingyas. The Bamars believe they are the natural rulers of an empire that includes the Rakhines; the Rakhines, mostly Theravada Buddhists, believe they should have dominion over the Rohingyas. The Rakhines, whose ancestral Arakan empire encompassed much of Burma, hate the Bamars almost as much as they do the Rohingyas. Theravada Buddhism, like many ideological doctrines, claims religious and racial superiority, but it was also the basis for the Saffron Revolution, which proposed that the military government had violated the precepts of Buddha sasana, or righteous moral rule. Suu Kyi uses Buddhist rhetoric in her speeches and draws on Buddhist ideals in her quest for democracy. Her politics and her religion are inseparable. In what appears to be an electoral calculation, she has refused to condemn the mistreatment of Rohingyas outright. What would be the place of Muslims in such a vision?