In Myanmar, one of the world's worst regimes rules one of the world's most beautiful countries. What can we do to help?
News values are cruel. On May 6 this year, opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest. The iconic heroine, with flowers in her hair, was greeted by enthusiastic crowds in Yangon. This would normally have been front-page news, followed up for several days. But that same afternoon, the Dutch populist politician Pim Fortuyn was assassinated. In journalism, death trumps life, so the Suu Kyi story was bumped onto the inside pages. Since then, we have read almost nothing about Myanmar. Myanmar is again forgotten, like most suffering countries of the world.
But something is happening in that enchanting, haunted land, and we should take note. Last week, Aung San Suu Kyi returned from a trip to the country's second city, Mandalay. This may not sound much, but in September 2000 she was put under house arrest simply for trying to leave the capital to visit Mandalay. In fact, she has not been allowed to make any such trip since she was first put under house arrest during a wave of popular protest in 1989. Now, after 13 years, she has visited the offices of her embattled National League for Democracy to be feted by a crowd of more than 5,000. The military regime even facilitated -- savor that word, facilitated -- the journey. In return, she graciously agreed to visit a government hydroelectric dam along the way. On the road to Mandalay.
ILLUSTRATION: YUSHA
Burma is a place that gets under your skin. I went there two years ago to talk to Aung San Suu Kyi and write about her beautiful country and its hideous regime. If I close my eyes, I can still see the endless green and emerald patchwork of paddy-fields, the brilliant white pagodas, the boy monks in their crimson robes walking rhythmically down the dusty roads. I can see the great royal palace of Mandalay, shimmering across the moat. And I can still hear the voice of a brave man telling me how he was locked up in a nearby prison for supporting the National League for Democracy. They were so badly fed, he told me, that they were reduced to eating rats, which they caught with their hands and baked in the dust by the heat of the sun. And the voice of a young woman who described to me how, rising above the torments of jail, she had found, through intensive meditation, the highest Buddhist state of nirvana. Afterwards -- she smiled gently at the recollection -- she had thanked her bemused jailers for helping her to attain nirvana.
Aung San Suu Kyi may be relatively free, but many of her supporters are still in prison -- people like U Win Tin, a veteran journalist incarcerated since 1989, and student activist Min Ko Naing. And her country has been ruined through 13 years of misrule by an exploitative, brutal and short-sighted military, following after 26 years of surreal isolation under the half-crazed Burmese road to socialism of General Ne Win. From being one of the richer countries in Southeast Asia, Myanmar has fallen to being one of the poorest; from being the rice basket of India it has become the opium bowl of the world.
"Fingers or spoon?" they ask in the villages. "Fingers" is good, because it means you still have some rice to eat, but now the answer is more often "spoon," meaning some watery gruel.
Malnutrition, malaria, infant mortality, an AIDS epidemic in which more the half a million people are HIV positive; some 3 million people driven out of their homes in a decades-long civil war with the country's large ethnic minorities; rampant corruption, drug abuse and the drugs trade, sexual exploitation, forced labour, banditry, and most recently, allegations of the systematic use of rape by army units, as a weapon of war: every curse and plague of the world, every horseman of the Apocalypse, seems to be marching through Burma's jungles. Behind the appearance of heaven is a certain hell.
For years, the generals have seemed indifferent to the worsening plight of their people. They have done well for themselves, exploiting the country's rich natural resources, appropriating whole industries, taking a cut on every foreign investment, and playing golf -- a game they inherited from their former British colonial masters. Now, it appears, the country's economic and humanitarian plight is so desperate that even they see the need for more external assistance. And everyone knows that the key to external assistance is held by "the Lady," as most ordinary Burmese call her, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and acknowledged leader of the opposition, Aung San Suu Kyi. Hence her release. Hence Mandalay.
Burmese roads range from bumpy to impassable, and the political road from Mandalay is no exception. The first steps are relatively clear. There has to be a political dialogue, including the further release of political prisoners. In return, Aung San Suu Kyi will give the green light for more humanitarian assistance. She has already met with representatives of charities and the UN. More progress in the dialogue could be met with permission for more assistance, ranging from medical aid and help for the desperately run-down education system to larger development assistance and, finally, investment.
But somewhere along this road, the power question will be posed. No one has yet plausibly sketched out how a power-sharing arrangement, let alone a peaceful transfer of power, could happen. At the moment, the army-state has the power, Aung San Suu Kyi has the legitimacy. Now there are two equal and opposite dangers. One is that she cannot mobilize sufficient peaceful popular pressure, along the lines pioneered in Central Europe in the 1980s, to compel the regime to negotiate a peaceful transition. Instead, Japan and other Asian countries will seize the pretext of her release to increase their investment in Burma -- a little of this has happened already -- and the most acute pressure on the military will be relieved without real political change. In the short term, of course.
The other danger is: explosion. Some 40,000 people turned out to see her on a recent trip to a hospital in Yangon. What if it's more next time? And what if there are some hotheads among them? The recent history of Myanmar has oscillated between long periods of peaceful, Buddhist endurance and moments of violent explosion. And the people of Myanmar have every just cause to explode.
What can we do from outside? Very little, alas. We can support some of the charities that really help, such as Prospect Burma, an organization that provides scholarships for students from Burma. We can keep an eye on our governments, to make sure they don't sacrifice principles of democracy and human rights to short-term national and corporate interests. In this, as in other such struggles, we should take our cue from those fighting for freedom in the place itself. They know best what is good for them. Beyond that, we can simply, occasionally, buck the news blackout and remember. This may have no immediate effect at all, but some in Myanmar listen to foreign radio stations. The worst insult to the oppressed is to forget them altogether.
Timothy Garton Ash is a fellow at St. Antony's College, Oxford, and the Hoover Institution, Stanford.
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