Myo and the monks, Bagan, Burma, ©2002, James A. Clapp
I had just finished saying, sotto voce, to Myo, my guide from Rangoon, that I was surprised at his candor about politics during our dinner at a street-side restaurant when, suddenly, all the lights went off. There are spies everywhere in Burma. I flinched. Myo said, “don’t worry, it’s just the power going off for the city. It happens every day around 8PM. That explained the large generators cranking up. They are outside all of the shops and restaurants. That’s Burma.
I wonder about Myo, a very nice, gentle, man with a degree in Biology, which he can’t use, who trades on his English to survive as a guide. He has written to me a couple of times, and I write back, but I don’t know whether he ever gets anything. [2] I wanted to send him a computer, but he said it would be ripped-off before he ever got it. Myo was the one who showed me the pagoda outside which a thousand or so protesters were gunned down by the military in 1988, the last time these people tried to throw off the oppressive yoke of the junta that has ruled there for sixty years.
Burma is as beautiful as it is brutal. I had wanted to go there for a long time, not just because of cities with exotic names like Rangoon and Mandalay and its varied landscapes, but also because my uncle Nick had served there for over three years in WWII, fighting the Japanese. The Chinese, the Indians, and the Brits were in there fighting them, as well. But the Burmese were trying to get rid of their British colonial oppressors (a bit more on that below) and were helping the Japanese. At the end of it General Aung San came out as the country’s leader, but he was quickly assassinated and it has been downhill into an Orwellian nightmare ever since. The country should have Aung San’s daughter, Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Aung San Suu Kyi,[3] as their president since she won eighty-percent of the vote when elections were tried, but the junta slapped her under house arrest and there she has remained for years.
Monks, Buddhas, and pagodas are everywhere in Burma. It seems like half the men are in the cinnamon monks robes (close to the other half may be in the army). There are huge pagoda complexes like the world-renowned Shwedagon in Rangoon, to the thousands of smaller pagodas in the plains of Bagan. The landscape is that steamy S.E. Asian hothouse, and a ride up the broad Irrawaddy, as I did from Amarpura to Mingun on a rickety riverboat, is an experience right out of Conrad. But always lurking is an experience right out of Orwell. The northern jungles have some of the most remote terrains on the planet and have claimed a lot of the lives of those who thought they could conquer and hold it. [4] This is where there are exotic tribes of minorities like the Padung, [5] the Wa, the Shan, and the Karen, where women still wear those brass rings that stretch their necks, and some tribes still fight from trees and are reputed to take heads. It is where the best jade – the Stone of Heaven – is mined by slave labor the Burmese army hooks on heroin. [6]
There is the apt Orwell of his 1984 and Animal Farm. But Orwell was here as a British cop in the colonial days, what he wrote about in his novel, Burmese Days. You can find copies of Burmese Days in Rangoon bookstores because it is very anti-colonial; but not the other two Orwell books. That is because it is as though present-day Burma used 1984 and Animal Farmas blueprints for the society. [Cf. DCJournal Archives 23. 1: Finding Orwell in Burma, by Emma Larkin, 2005].
In the current protests, it seems unlikely that sanctions [7] will put much pressure on the ruling junta unless China decides to put some real pressure on them. What needs to be realized here is that one, the junta does not give much of a damn for the people and their condition. They closed their university, engage in genocide against the minorities in the north and the Muslim Rohingya in the South and have the most repressive authoritarian state after N. Korea. Second, the generals are quite well off, thank you. They are loaded with money they steal and get from activities in drugs and gems, among other things. Just last year a general blatantly spent something like a million bucks just a jewels for his daughter’s wedding. There isn’t any way of causing them much deprivation by way of sanctions, which will probably hurt the common people. Three, Burma is a member of ASEAN, the organization of nations for its region, but they have a policy of non-interference in one another’s internal affairs. They didn’t do anything the last time the junta called out its thug-army, and if you listened to a representative from Indonesia who was interviewed on PBS manage to mealy-mouth paragraphs of absolutely nothing and looking totally unconcerned, you know that nothing will come from that quarter this time. It is obvious that George Bush, and Laura Bush as well, jumped on it because it is a welcome diversion from the Iraq and domestic disasters they have created.
Much of the world it seems has been lulled by the fact that the junta really has no external enemies. It is not like Iraq or Iran; it doesn’t bother its neighbors much. Their army is for controlling their citizenry. They stay off the radar as much as possible. Even changing its name to Myanmar seems to have helped; a university student asked me the other day if Myanmar was “anywhere near Burma,” and then asked what countries were near Burma. One really has to go there and experience the fear—the truly Big Brother fear—that the Burmese people live under in order to appreciate what a vicious, authoritarian police state this is. One needs to go there to understand why they would come up with an acronym like SLORC [8] as their version of “homeland security.”
Burma again emphasizes the unconcern and ineptitude of the international community in dealing with political leaders who brutalize their own people. For all the blather about human rights, we let warlords rape and slaughter people in Somalia, Mugabe starve his people to death in Zimbabwe, as does Kim Il Jong in N. Korea, and the Burmese junta make monks and dissidents disappear and imprison an elected leader for nearly eighteen years.
I personally had only minor experience with the arrogance of the contemporary political leadership in Burma. A Burmese general and his wife had been passengers on the flight of the seventy-passenger turboprop I was taking from Mandalay to Rangoon. The general, a larger than average Burmese, wore military khaki, three stars on his epaulets, and so many bogus campaign ribbons that he would have to have fought in every military engagement since the Second Punic War to be worthy of them. More likely his only “combat” was shooting democracy demonstrators in 1988. The “general” and his bejeweled, plumpish missus were boarded first, and alone. They sat in the front of the plane. However, when we arrived at Rangoon, everyone was required to remain in their seats while Mr. and Mrs. General were allowed to waddle aristocratically down the aisle and deplane first. At the foot of the stairs awaited a large bus that is used to ferry passengers across the sun-baked tarmac to the terminal. They boarded the bus and the general promptly ordered the diver to shut the doors and drive off, leaving the rest of the passengers standing with dazed looks in their eyes in the blazing Burmese sun. When I told Myo about it he showed no surprise at the behavior.
One is left to fantasizing about some finely directed missiles, or crack units of commandos, that would take out the brutish monsters that run these regimes. Unfortunately, there are no states clean enough, disengaged enough, or, in the case of the USA, smart enough, to do it.[9]
The poor Burmese will be left to being gunned down for our evening new amusement and tsk, tsks. They will likely be crushed and removed from our news attention deficit syndrome.
So I close with this poem,
In The Quiet Land, by Aung San Suu Kyi
In the Quiet Land, no one can tell
if there’s someone who’s listening
for secrets they can sell.
won’t stand.
In the quiet land of Burma,
no one laughs and no one thinks out loud.
In the quiet land of Burma,
you can hear it in the silence of the crowd
In the Quiet Land, no one can say
when the soldiers are coming
to carry them away.
The Chinese want a road; the French want the oil;
the Thais take the timber; and SLORC takes the spoils…
In the Quiet Land….
In the Quiet Land, no one can hear
what is silenced by murder
and covered up with fear.
But, despite what is forced, freedom’s a sound
that liars can’t fake and no shouting can drown.
___________________________________
©2007, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 10.1.2007)
[1] Mingalarba means “hello” in Burmese.
[2] Come to think of it, I haven’t received anything for some time from my interpreter in Nepal, Suresh, since the politics got rough up there lately.
[3] See Aung San Suu Kyi, Letters from Burma (Penguin Books, 1998.
[4] Stephen Brookes, Through the Jungle of Death, a Boy’s Escape from Wartime Burma, 2000)
[5] From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey by Pascal Khoo Thwe (2003)
[6] Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark, The Stone of Heaven (2001). This is a marvelous book, by journalists who risked their lives to uncover this outrage
[7] The Bush administration’s protests over recent events have a very hollow sound. A nice distraction from the Iraq mess, Bush denounces the junta and threatens pushing for sanctions. They probably couldn’t give a damn, and he probably doesn’t either. One can’t recall his ever mentioning Burma before; they’re Buddhists, not Muslims, and they are mostly a police state that torments its own people.
[8] State Law and Order Restoration Council
[9] Please don’t bring up the USA in Iraq; it’s about the oil, stupid.