The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (62 page)

Was there now a way forward? And whatever happened to General Ne Win?

THE LONG ROAD FROM HAINAN

For many years those who wanted reform in Burma waited, very patiently, for General Ne Win to leave the scene. He had been born in 1911 and by the 1988 uprising was already an old man. In that year he had officially retired and then rarely appeared in public, but few suspected he had relinquished any real power. He lived, as always, in a heavily guarded compound on Ady Road, on the opposite side of the big swampy Inya Lake (on the outskirts of Rangoon) from Aung San Suu Kyi. He must still be calling all the shots, people said. All the while there was still the sense, a quarter-century-old optimism, that things would change when he died.

Then he died, quietly, peacefully, in bed, in December 2002, aged ninety-one. And nothing happened. It seems that he had in fact left political life a while ago, not immediately after the uprising in 1988 but a few years later, intervening now and then to settle disputes within the senior brass, but then fading away entirely to his own private world. When dictators die while still in power, regimes tend to crumble at the same time, but Ne Win had stepped back while still very much alive and allowed a transition to consolidate itself while he was still around. And then he apparently lost interest. Singapore’s former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew saw him a couple of times in the nineties. In 1994 Ne Win, looking haggard and unwell, told him that after the uprising had been crushed, he had been in torment, “fretting and worrying” about what to do. But then he had discovered meditation, and meditation began to calm him. When Lee met him again in 1997, he said the old soldier looked much better. Ne Win wanted only to talk about meditation, giving Lee advice and saying that he himself spent many hours, mornings and afternoons, in silent concentration. He no longer worried about anything, friends, family, or the country. When his generals came for advice, he said, he sent them away.
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When he died, the man who had led his country to isolation and
poverty was virtually unmourned. In his final few months his protégés in the army had moved against his family, locking up his son-in-law and grandsons and placing his daughter under house arrest, more to shut down their crooked business dealings than anything else. The Ne Win era was over, but a whole new Burmese army had already come to the fore.

And this army that had come to the fore was a generation or more removed from its founding, in the rain-drenched Japanese training camps on Hainan Island, where the importance of unquestioning obedience and unwavering loyalty, not to any higher authority but to the army itself, had first been programmed into the minds of eager young nationalists. Since then the army had gone through a lot and had battled incessantly for six decades against dozens of enemies, from the marshlands along the Bengal border to the foothills of the Himalayas. Along the way it had changed, from a few lightly armed (and nearly overwhelmed) infantry battalions to one of the biggest armed forces in the world and one that was involved in every aspect of the country’s economy and administration. The Burmese military dictatorship is the longest-lasting military dictatorship in the world, and it is also its purest. It is not an army regime sitting on top of an otherwise civilian state. In Burma by the 1990s the military was the state. Army officers did everything. Normal government had withered away.

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When the men in uniform looked to the past, they saw a country that tended to fall apart into little pieces and that had always needed to be melded together by force. They saw themselves in a long line of national unifiers and saw their task as unfinished. The Communists—always their biggest enemies—had collapsed, and nearly all their other battlefield foes were at most shadows of their former selves. The soldiers were on top for the first time. And in their imagination there remained the challenge of nation building, of creating and promoting a new
Myanmar
identity, based on Buddhism and what was perceived as correct and traditional Burmese culture, unmuddied by the humiliating days of colonial rule, something plain and simple and straightforward, like the army itself. These were men, for the most part, who knew no other life, had joined the armed forces as teenagers and never left, had fought in the mountains and forests for years, killing and seeing
their fellow soldiers killed, living entirely apart from the rest of Burmese society. They had created a sort of military fantasy world, where everything was about making enemies and making war and everyone else had a supporting role, like camp followers in a Mongol horde. Perhaps to some, democracy sounded like a good thing, a worthy goal, but for many, imagining democracy was as hard as imagining a more democratic barracks. It just didn’t fit in with the rest of the picture.

There were certainly those in the regime who wanted less isolation, who believed that some contact and some communication with the wider world were for the better, that Burma had fallen too far behind its old neighbors—the Chinese and the Indians and the Thais—and needed to catch up. The Asian economic miracle was all around. General Ne Win’s Burmese socialism had been an economic catastrophe, and in these new times a new economic approach was needed. But how to do this? No one knew. And there were even those in the armed forces who thought that some sort of accommodation was possible with Aung San Suu Kyi as well as with the insurgent groups in the hills. In 2000 serious reforms had started. In 2003, Aung San Suu Kyi and a convoy of her supporters had been attacked on a dirt road by government-backed thugs. But even then talks continued, and there was an air of urgency. A new understanding seemed close at hand. But then things turned around yet again. A much expected release of Aung San Suu Kyi in the spring of 2004 never happened. And in October of that year, the prime minister, General Khin Nyunt, the man behind the talks, was himself sacked and detained, together with dozens of his aides.

The top general, Than Shwe, and many other combat-hardened army chiefs had felt there were too many risks involved in any compromise. The memory of 1988, when the country had come so close to revolution, the fear of retribution, was still fresh on their minds. There was also an impression that the outside world was out to get them no matter what. When the talks with the NLD and the ethnic insurgents were still progressing, Washington had imposed new, debilitating sanctions. Many felt that turning inward again was safer, more secure. There were venal motives as well, but the deeper source of today’s conservatism is the contentment of too many in the officer corps with what they see, who admire the military state and military-led society, or at least who could not easily dream up anything much better.

This was the result of long years of isolation since 1962. It was not an ideology but a mentality that had grown up and become dominant. Isolation had placed anyone with a more progressive mind-set at a a disadvantage, and had fueled the attitudes that entrenched the status quo. And yet the response of the West was to isolate the country further.

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In the years since the uprising, interest in Burma’s plight has mushroomed. Many have now heard of Aung San Suu Kyi and are vaguely aware of the reluctance of the ruling generals to give up power. Almost no one, though, is aware of the civil war or the reasons why Burma’s military machine developed and the country became so isolated in the first place. The paradigm is one of regime change, and the assumption is that sanctions, boycotts, more isolation will somehow pressure those in charge to mend their ways. The assumption is that Burma’s military government couldn’t survive further isolation when precisely the opposite is true: Much more than any other part of Burmese society, the army will weather another forty years of isolation just fine.

The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Aung San Suu Kyi in 1991 raised her profile enormously around the world and has been a great boost to a growing confederacy of Burma activists in London, Washington, and elsewhere. A few of these Burma activists were older Burmese exiles, people who had stolen away during the ironfisted days of General Ne Win, including many from the ranks of the U Nu government, and their children. But many more were from the much younger generation of the 1988 uprising, university students and others who had taken to the streets that summer and then decided to leave the country illegally, winding up in Thailand and India and then eventually emigrating to other countries, like Australia and the United States.

Little communities grew up. In America, the biggest concentrations of Burmese expatriates were to be found in New York, Washington, and Southern California, but many hard-core activists wound up in places like Fort Wayne, Indiana, today an unlikely hotbed of Burmese exile action. Boasting Glenbrook Square (“the largest shopping center in Indiana”) and Jefferson Point (with “trendy eateries and Mediterranean atmosphere”), this midwestern town of two hundred thousand is also now home to over three thousand refugees—Burmese, Mons, and Karens. There are no less than four Buddhist temples as well as services
in Burmese at both the Lutheran and Baptist churches. Little Burma on South Lafayette Street sells a range of familiar groceries, from pickled tea leaves to sticky rice.

Like activists everywhere, by the late 1990s they were aggressively using the Internet, which soon sprouted hundreds of specialized Burmese political sites, chat rooms, newspapers, and message boards. They were joined by many non-Burmese, Americans, Australians, British, Scandinavians, and others who have often worked selflessly and with great dedication; together with the exiles, a formidable Burma lobby has slowly taken shape. As in any activist group, there are differences of opinion, on strategy and tactics, but the Burma lobby, with growing celebrity and high-level political support, has managed to largely stay on message: the military government is bad, Aung San Suu Kyi is good, and the international community needs to apply pressure on Rangoon and pressure means no aid, trade sanctions, and more isolation.

Most aid had been suspended since 1988, but by the late 1990s many private companies, who had rushed into Burma earlier in the decade, began to pull out, at least in part because of activist pressure. From the United States, Wal-Mart, Kenneth Cole, Tommy Hilfiger, Jones New York, and Federated Department Stores (owners of Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s), Pepsi Cola, Amoco, Levi Strauss & Co., Liz Claiborne, and Eddie Bauer ended their Burma operations. And in 1998 the U.S. government imposed a ban on new American investment in Burma. Campaigns to boycott tourism to Burma were also ratcheted up, and government attempts to attract more visitors have been only marginally successful. Tour companies began to shy away from business in the country, and many of the hotels, inns, and little guesthouses that had been built expectantly in the early 1990s remained largely empty. Other contacts were shunned. Visa bans were imposed so that officials of the government would not be able to visit the West, and scholarships and academic exchanges have remained virtually nonexistent. More damaging for the already poverty-stricken economy, assistance by the World Bank and other international financial institutions and aid agencies was largely prohibited, with even attempts to provide emergency humanitarian aid sometimes drawing censure.

In 2004 a new sanctions law was enacted by Washington, restricting Burmese imports into the United States and prohibiting almost any payments into the country. The already struggling textile industry was
crippled. Those in Rangoon who argued that recent reforms would lead to an easing, rather than toughening, of sanctions quickly lost ground. Burma was labeled an “outpost of tyranny,” bundled together with North Korea and Iran.

And in 2005, even the Global Fund (which fights the spread of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria) withdrew under heavy political pressure from pro-democracy activists.

In the inner meeting rooms of Rangoon’s War Office, the hardliners saw their paranoia justified and their intransigence easier to defend. While the Americans and the European Union cut off aid and imposed sanctions, the government started to benefit from new economic opportunities. For a while, there was investment from the region, but this largely dried up, partly as a result of the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, but mainly the result of a still poor business environment. But by the late 1990s, discoveries of huge offshore natural gas fields, valued in the tens of billions of dollars, suddenly meant a steady supply of hard currency, more than enough to keep the military machine going. Voices that had called for free-market reform quieted down. The economy that was evolving under sanctions was exactly the opposite of one that could create a strong middle class and pave the way for progressive change.

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In almost every way, this policy of isolating one of the most isolated countries in the world—where the military regime isolated itself for the better part of thirty years, and which indeed has grown up and evolved well in isolation—is both counterproductive and dangerous.

That a democratic government for Burma should be the aim is not in doubt. Especially for a country as diverse as Burma, with so many different peoples, languages, and cultures, only a free and liberal society can provide a lasting stability and lead to real prosperity. What needs to be asked is: What sort of transition to democracy is possible, what are the actual obstacles, and what international policy will work best?

Any transition to democracy is always difficult. In many places around the world, attempts to transform dictatorships into democracies have led to many new problems, including interethnic violence and civil war. Burma’s transition will be especially difficult. This is a country that has
already
been at civil war for sixty years and where that civil
war is not yet concluded; where there are hundreds of different ethnic and linguistic groups, many inhabiting remote mountain areas; where poverty is endemic and where a humanitarian crisis is looming; where there are hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the fighting and tens of thousands more who are refugees; and where there is a resilient narcotics industry and where some of the richest businessmen (always the most likely to be influential in a democracy) are tied to the drugs trade. And there are two especially difficult factors, legacies of Burmese history.