Burma: The Stone Age
The military strongmen who rule Burma have made the country a global
byword for backwardness and brutality
By ANndrew Marshall
April 19, 2004
Whenever I visit Burma, I have a ritual: I look up a name in the Rangoon
telephone book. Every year a new directory is published, but the listing
remains "Aung San Suu Kyi, Daw," followed by Rangoon's most famous address "54
University Avenue" and a telephone number. The number never seems to work. When
I tried it during my recent trip, the Nobel laureate and leader of the National
League for Democracy (NLD) was enduring her third stint under house arrest
since 1989. But seeing her celebrated name in the book always seems both
extraordinary and reassuring.
I had returned to Burma to see old friends. Last year was particularly terrible
for the long-suffering nation. In February came the near collapse of the
private banking system, then in May the savage "Black Friday" attack on Suu Kyi
by state-sponsored thugs, who killed or injured scores of her supporters and so
provoked tough new economic sanctions by the U.S. In the past, either event
might have sparked a popular uprising on the scale witnessed in 1988, when the
Burmese military shot and jailed thousands of demonstrators. The reaction this
time is nothing, not a peep of protest reflects how ruthlessly the Burmese
junta has terrorized its own people. Washington's sanctions have boosted morale
among Burma's embattled democrats, but they promise little apart from further
poverty and desperation in a country ravaged by military greed and
incompetence. The military is now a state within a state, with the best
housing, education and healthcare reserved for soldiers and their families.
In downtown Rangoon, the effects of economic stagnation are easy to spot.
Unfinished office and apartment blocks loom over the skyline like Olympian
tombstones. With most international companies long departed, billboards
advertise mostly local products, such as Spirulina ("Beer That Makes You Young
Forever"), or nothing at all. Like in a city at war, fruit and vegetables are
cultivated in the grounds of public buildings. Part of the front lawn of the
seldom-visited Drug Elimination Museum, built to whitewash the regime's dubious
antinarcotics record, has been turned into a pomelo orchard. Power shortages
still plague the capital, as they did during my first visit more than seven
years ago, and emergency generators clog the pavements. With municipal water
supplies equally erratic, joke the Burmese, it's lucky the government isn't
responsible for providing air.
Rangoon has grown seedier without becoming more prosperous. Karaoke pickup
joints have spread like a nasty rash across the city from their original
reserve in Theingyi Bazaar, a multistory firetrap of sex clubs run by Wa and
ethnic-Chinese drug traffickers under the protection of Burmese military
intelligence. Even the few positive changes seem, on closer inspection, not
much to shout about. For example, Rangoon now boasts a dozen or so cybercafes,
but they charge a dollar an hour more than the average daily wage and deny
access to hundreds of sites deemed "inappropriate." Who surfs what is easy to
plot, because Burma has only two Internet-service providers: one state run, the
other owned by the son of military-intelligence chief General Khin Nyunt. The
universities, traditionally crucibles of antigovernment protest, are open again
but only for master's students; the rest must study by correspondence or at
campuses far from the city. Job prospects for graduates remain bleak, which is
why Rangoon's taxi drivers are the world's most overqualified. "Everyone is
misplaced in this country," shrugs a young cabbie with a master's degree in
marine biology. "Graduates drive taxis; soldiers run the government."
If you want to eat the best pickled-tea-leaf salad in Rangoon, possibly in all
of Burma, go to Mrs. Greedy's tea shop, a collection of plastic furniture
occupying the pavement opposite Sule Pagoda. And if you want to talk without
fear of being overheard, do what my Burmese friend Ko Myo did when I met him
there one evening: lift up one of Mrs. Greedy's tables and set it down several
feet from the nearest customers. Even then you talk in an undertone. It's a
reminder that despite Burma's tourist-friendly veneer. How many dictatorships
have inspired so many coffee-table books? The junta has not gone soft in its
dotage. "They watch us all the time," says Ko Myo (which, to protect him, is
not his real name).
Young, handsome and smarter than a truckful of generals, Ko Myo is a teacher by
profession and my guide to the arcane politics of Burma. Thankfully, he's a
patient one. On my first trip to Burma, he had bravely taken me to the house of
a prominent democrat. Stupidly, I had no idea who she was or what risks Ko Myo
had taken to bring me there. Today, he takes a spoonful of tea-leaf salad and
shakes his head in mock disgust. "To think I risked a 10-year prison sentence
for that," he says.
Ko Myo and I share an obsession with George Orwell's 1984, though, unlike him,
I don't have to live it. He insists that Burma resembles Orwell's dystopia more
with each passing year, from its crippling power cuts to the desperate popular
obsession with the lottery. (Everyone in Burma seems to play the numbers.) But
when I compare him to Winston, the rebellious protagonist who dares to trust
his co-worker Julia, Ko Myo frowns and looks uncharacteristically glum. "There
are no Winstons in this country," he says quietly. "People here don't even
trust themselves anymore." Although he supports the U.S. sanctions, Ko Myo does
not believe they will topple the regime, and now after years of staying to help
his country he is one of many Burmese leaving in desperation and disgust. It
takes hundreds of dollars and months of waiting to get a passport, and the
Rangoon office that issues them is now besieged by applicants. It helps to be
male. Stung by foreign criticism that Burma is exporting sex workers, the
regime now makes it nearly impossible for young women to go abroad. Ironically,
this is fueling the local sex industry, which employs burgeoning numbers of
painfully young girls.
At Mrs. Greedy's, Ko Myo lent me his copy of 1984, one of a collection of
banned or sensitive books that he disguises in brown paper and risks another
lengthy prison term for circulating. I reread it one afternoon in my hotel room
with the curtains drawn, emerging hours later to discover that two
military-intelligence agents were harassing the staff about my identity and
movements. Their timing was unnerving. Orwell's "Hate Week" parades have a
modern Burmese equivalent. Mass rallies had been staged at stadiums nationwide
to support a "road map" to democracy launched by Khin Nyunt, one of Burma's
ruling troika of generals, just weeks after U.S. sanctions were announced. The
rallies were organized by the regime's political wing, the Union Solidarity and
Development Association, which has millions of members but only because state
employees must join or lose their jobs. At one meeting in the ancient capital
of Pagan, thousands of people "enthusiastically and unanimously" approved Khin
Nyunt's scheme, reported the New Light of Myanmar. The newspaper's photos
showed people sitting rigidly in perfect rows, looking miserable. Pagan is not
a populous town, so to meet the Wagnerian standards set by meetings elsewhere
in the country, people had to be ferried in from Mandalay in hundreds of
minibuses requisitioned by order of the regional commander.
Khin Nyunt's road map envisages elections and a new constitution but mentions
neither a credible timetable nor Suu Kyi, who led the NLD to a convincing
victory in the 1990 election. My Burmese friends regard the whole scheme as a
sop to the regime's supporters in Asia or just another stalling device either
way, more of a roadblock than a road map. (The U.S. State Department recently
dismissed it as "hype.") The late dictator General Ne Win, who seized power in
1962, launched the disastrous "Burmese way to socialism," which bankrupted the
country. Now his successor Khin Nyunt is effectively peddling the "Burmese way
to democracy." No wonder people have to be press-ganged into cheering for it.
They are also being press-ganged into something else: national service. Last
year, the regime ordered civil servants to undergo a month of military
training. Teaching a restive, resentful population how to fight seems a
tactical blunder, but trainees are only given sticks, not rifles, and I hear
that those with 15,000 kyat (about $17) can buy themselves out. The Burmese
military is stronger than ever nearly 40% of the national budget goes to the
armed forces, making them the second largest in Southeast Asia after Vietnam's
but also more paranoid than ever. The state-run media is obsessed with Iraq:
newspapers carry dozens of articles about suicide bombings, tumbling U.S. troop
morale and rising casualties while state TV lifts footage from CNN and dubs
over its own gloating commentary. The specter of military intervention has
haunted the generals since the 1988 uprising, when the U.S. parked an aircraft
carrier in the Indian Ocean. The toppling of Saddam Hussein raises genuine
hopes among Burmese that their despots will be next. The U.S. embassy in
Rangoon even received messages reading "Please invade us." But the saturation
media coverage of Iraq has served a domestic purpose. "This is our government's
way of telling us, 'America has its hands full, so don't expect it to come to
your help,'" says a Burmese journalist.
I headed north for Mandalay, Burma's second-largest city, which I had first
visited via dilapidated train from Rangoon, a trip so punishingly long that
giant spiders had spun terrifying webs from the luggage racks by the time we
arrived. On this occasion, I went by air, which meant landing at one of the
most eerie monuments to Burma's economic mismanagement: Mandalay International
Airport. Topped with baroque spires to recall the palatial splendors of Burma's
royal past, the airport was completed in 2000 at an estimated cost of $150
million. Today, ox carts ply its grand, four-lane approach road while the
building slumbers in near darkness. The departure and arrival boards are empty,
possibly nonfunctioning. Passengers check in for a handful of daily flights,
then clump down a dormant escalator to a stifling departure lounge, where they
fan themselves with their boarding cards.
The junta evidently believed a lavish new airport would transform Mandalay into
a regional business hub. However, most goods still arrive in the city by the
usual overland route. Mandalay is the terminus of the Burma Road, its trading
lifeline to neighboring China, and the main reason the economy has plodded
along without ever breaking down catastrophically (so far). Another reason is
the nation's staggering agricultural wealth.
For centuries, travelers have depicted Burma as an agrarian paradise so fertile
that, as one saying goes, a farmer tickles the earth with his hoe and it laughs
a harvest.
Although nobody starves in Burma, poverty and malnutrition exist and are by
some accounts increasing. Outside Mandalay, I visited the families of migrant
workers who live in squalid lean-tos on the wide, refuse-strewn banks of the
Irrawaddy River. They labor for subsistence wages, shoveling sand from dredging
boats or hauling illegal timber. Often there's not enough work to go around,
and sometimes for example, when the dredgers run out of fuel there's none at
all. Sickness is everywhere. "I have a husband and three children," said a
woman dressed in rags, "and one of us is always ill." Nearby, a dying
18-month-old child, as skeletal as a famine victim, clung to a slightly older
sister pot-bellied with disease. Just offshore, tourist boats skimmed past on
day trips to more photogenic places.
What wealth exists in Mandalay belongs to Chinese immigrants, who arrived in
their hundreds of thousands in the 1990s and now dominate the city's commercial
life such to the resentment of its original residents. The city is also a
favored refuge of Wa and Chinese drug traffickers, who cruise the city's
free-for-all intersections in dark-windowed late-model Land Cruisers and
Pajeros. Like native Mandalayans, I negotiated the streets by bicycle or
trishaw, or else flagged down a 40-year-old Mazda B600 taxi, Burma's answer to
the Trabant. Exploring the pot-holed backstreets, I came across extravagant
faux-classical mansions towering over otherwise destitute neighborhoods where
poor sanitation feeds regular outbreaks of cholera and pariah dogs nose through
uncollected rubbish. In Burma, it seems, there are only two kinds of new
buildings: museums constructed to celebrate the elimination of the narcotics
trade and drug villas built on its proceeds.
Mandalay might be Burma's second-largest city, but its community of democrats
is small and easily terrorized. A local NLD leader was jailed for five years
for seeing a foreign reporter. I arrived in Mandalay to news that Win Mya Mya,
a prominent NLD member who had had both arms broken in the Black Friday attack,
had been shifted from a military hospital to a prison cell at nearby Shwebo.
Her relatives were still forbidden to see her.
By the time of the attack, Suu Kyi had been attracting large and increasingly
bold crowds. The enthusiastic response from ethnic areas was especially galling
to the generals, because it challenged their long-cherished notion that only
the Burmese military can unite the country's disparate ethnic groups. The
regime's emphatic response to this rising euphoria was an assault so
calculating and sadistic that skull fragments and clumps of bloody hair
littered the road where it took place. Suu Kyi was detained with about a
hundred of her party members, including elderly deputy Tin Oo; both Suu Kyi and
Tin Oo are still under house arrest. The authorities shut NLD offices
nationwide, although last week the party's Rangoon headquarters was allowed to
reopen. The party rank and file remains traumatized. Later, I would meet a
stalwart too fearful to carry his NLD membership card but who instead defiantly
scratched his membership number from memory on the corner of a newspaper.
Since Black Friday, more state-sponsored violence had erupted. The evening
before my arrival, a hundreds-strong posse of government thugs had razed a
Muslim neighborhood in Kyaukse, a town not far from Mandalay. Ten people had
burned to death, including a pregnant woman. Burma is home to anywhere from 2
million to 8 million Muslims. It's impossible to be more accurate because most
are denied Burmese citizenship and therefore don't appear in official records.
They are often the target of state-orchestrated violence incited (the theory
goes) to distract everyone else from their own meager lot. An older Burmese
friend reminded me how Ne Win had provoked anti-Chinese riots in 1967 to divert
attention from the rising price of rice.
The unrest mutated and spread in the following days. I watched truckloads of
armed soldiers thunder through Mandalay's ill-lit streets. Some areas were
placed under curfew; people said it had been more than a year since the city
had been so tense. Then troops opened fire on a crowd of protesting monks,
killing at least two and injuring many. From nearby towns came reports of more
disturbances, news of which arrived in Mandalay on buses and trucks and spread
with viral stealth through the city's network of trishaw drivers. Hiring one to
check out the dark, deserted streets, I was struck by how well suited trishaws
were to disseminating news. With me leaning forward in my seat and the driver
bent slightly with the exertion of pedaling the rutted tarmac, he could whisper
into my ear without anyone noticing, let alone hearing. He told me that eight
charred bodies from Kyaukse had arrived at the city morgue. "The government
killed them!" he said in a Gollum-like hiss. "The government killed them all!"
I returned to Rangoon, and the unrest seemed to follow. Muslim businesses in
the capital were attacked by what observers claimed were soldiers disguised as
monks; monasteries were under a heavily guarded curfew; bars and tea shops were
closing early. Later, two bombs exploded, one on the outskirts of the city,
which injured many people, the other outside an army museum. Then, last month,
came reports of small demonstrations on campuses as far north as Myitkyina.
Despite all this, none of my Rangoon friends were predicting an imminent
1988-style uprising. "People are just too scared," said one. DONATE BLOOD,
urged the ads in state newspapers. Burma's democrats already have, by the
bucketful.
Much of this shadowy violence was probably perpetrated by the state itself and
conceivably augured a distant leadership conflict. Some Burma watchers talk of
a split between the regime's hard-liners and moderates, a wishful hypothesis
that essentially boils down to two people. The so-called moderate is the
ageless, reptilian Khin Nyunt, the newly fashioned "Prime Minister General,"
who is always conspicuously equipped with a sidearm during official visits,
even to kindergartens. His rival is Than Shwe, the top general and archetypal
hard-liner. To encourage unity, the Burmese military has always promoted
loyalty before brains, and Than Shwe is the result. He is even the thinly
disguised butt of a joke in a popular Burmese magazine in which three students
are boasting about their uncles. The first says, "My uncle has no arms, but he
has swum across the Irrawaddy River five times." The second says, "My uncle has
no legs, but he has climbed the Golden Rock Pagoda 10 times." The third says:
"So what? My uncle has no brain, and he runs the country." If that joke seems
spiteful, consider this: diplomats report that Than Shwe firmly believes that
Union Solidarity and Development Association rallies are genuine expressions of
mass support.
Walking through downtown Rangoon, I noticed with horror how acres of historic
buildings have been demolished to make way for the modern towers the junta
hopes will dominate the capital's skyline by 2006, when Burma is to chair the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and host its the summit. Most of
these projects, including the inauspiciously named Twin Towers, sit idle for
lack of investment. Ordinary Burmese feel baffled and betrayed by the
encouragement their oppressors get from Asia's leaders. Privately, Southeast
Asian diplomats insist they are heaping more backroom pressure on Burma than
their abysmal public showing suggests. One dearly hopes so. ASEAN now faces the
prospect of showcasing its member states' considerable achievements in a
country that is a global byword for backwardness and brutality.
The junta promises to reconvene next month a national convention on a new
constitution. Yet the arrest, surveillance and intimidation of opposition
figures continues, Amnesty International notes in a March 31 report, while as
many as 1,400 political prisoners, many of whom should by rights participate in
the convention still languish in prison. Ambiguous public remarks by Burmese
Foreign Minister Win Aung, followed by the release from house arrest of two
senior NLD leaders last week, have raised hopes that Suu Kyi and party vice
chairman Tin Oo will soon be freed, too. We'll see. The convention's success
depends on much else besides. It is far from clear whether Suu Kyi, even if
freed, would be allowed to attend or whether delegates will be able to speak
freely. Some delegates were sentenced to long jail terms for criticizing the
last convention, which collapsed in 1996. All this fuels the suspicion that the
generals merely want the upcoming convention to rubber-stamp a constitution
that would preserve their grip on power.
The military has already proved false an age-old Burmese saying, "The night
cannot get darker after midnight." Poverty, fear, the paucity of opportunities,
the remorseless persecution of the best and the brightest, the slow
extinguishing of hope: what was once unimaginably bad in Burma has grown worse
with each passing year. And yet, while writing this, I receive an e-mail sent
at great risk by Ko Myo in which he has listed the names of 10 men, women and
children, aged 13 to 70, along with their professions: housewife, merchant,
student, mother-to-be. These people, he says, were all incinerated by the state
thugs at Kyaukse. For their sakes, I believe, pessimism is not an option. We
have a duty to hope. I pick up the phone and try that number on University
Avenue again. It rings.
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