The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (60 page)

But drugs weren’t the only way to make money. As the Burmese Road to Socialism was jettisoned out the window, the new Burmese Road to Capitalism offered quick riches for those well connected. And the Was were the newly well connected. Foreign exchange policies were liberalized. More important, banks were allowed to take deposits of “uncertain” origin, so long as a tax to the government was paid. Funds poured in. And by 1994 house prices in Rangoon and Mandalay had skyrocketed, with a four-bedroom in a nice neighborhood fetching as much as a million U.S. dollars, cash. Around the same time, the Was set up shop in Rangoon, investing in real estate, mining, hotels and tourism, food processing, and transportation and establishing branch offices in Thailand, Hong Kong, and elsewhere overseas. They wanted to establish a bank as well, but heroin warlords with a bank were too much even for the Burmese authorities, and permission was quietly denied. The erstwhile headhunters (or at least their Chinese fellow travelers) were now Burma’s most successful entrepreneurs. The Kokang Chinese also were having their day, owning everything from the Mitsubishi Electric’s Burmese franchise to producing and selling Myanmar Rum and Myanmar Dry Gin. Other warlords like Lo Hsing-Han (now with his own
Asia World
business empire) and Khun Sa (once the powerful head of the rebel Mong Tai Army) also joined the ranks of the new and somewhat shady business elite.

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All this was happening within the context of a much wider liberalization, one aimed at unraveling nearly thirty years of self-imposed isolation and economic stagnation.
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In 1988 the Burmese army officer corps
wanted a freeing up of the economy as much as anyone. Some seemed to have in their minds a sort of market-based military authoritarian government along the lines of neighboring Thailand with the armed forces keeping a comfortable slice of an increasingly prosperous pie. I remember that a year before the uprising an army captain told me, over a cup of weak coffee at the then paint-peeling Strand Hotel, of the need for change, saying that no one was happy with Ne Win’s so-called Burmese socialism. “What we really want,” he said hopefully, “is to change from being an isolated left-wing military dictatorship to a pro-American right-wing military dictatorship.” He looked around at the stained carpets and rickety chairs and rolled his eyes. Now they had their chance.

In the weeks after the uprising, in the last months of 1988, foreign exchange reserves fell to nearly nothing. Simply to keep the army afloat, the government needed hard cash to buy petrol and spare parts and ammunition from overseas. Foreign debt, at six billion dollars, needed over two hundred million dollars a year just to service. Western aid had been worth about five hundred million dollars a year, but this was now almost entirely cut. West Germany, Japan, and the United States together provided the country with 90 percent of its foreign exchange income.
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It looked as if the government were on its knees and that the financial crisis alone might force a more compromising position.

But in stepped the Thai army commander in chief, General Chaovalit Yongchaiyudh, looking plump and cheerful in his tight brown uniform, who flew to Rangoon in December 1988 and came back with a handsome line of business deals, including several lucrative logging concessions. Favored Thai firms would get rich, the Burmese army would receive just enough money to survive, and huge areas of forest would be cut down at an unprecedented rate.
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A year later there was a hundred million dollars in the bank. After logging, the government turned to oil, and contracts for oil exploration were signed with a number of companies eager for a foot inside one of the world’s last oil frontiers. Easiest of all was the sale of part of the Burmese embassy property in Tokyo. Tokyo real estate prices and the value of the yen had reached astronomical heights in the late eighties. A part of Burma’s embassy garden—a gift of the Japanese government during the Ba Maw years of the Second World War—was sold for $200 million.
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But the new government wasn’t interested just in money to stay afloat. It genuinely wanted to move away from the autarkic policies of
the past. The officers in charge were no democrats, but many were keen to see economic progress and an end to the disastrous isolation of the last quarter century. But how to do this? Nobody in the government had the appropriate training or experience to oversee an overhaul of the economy. And now, with Western sanctions, the foreign advisers and the international banks and the extra aid and loans that might have helped were gone. The ruling generals and colonels were also afraid. Having come that close to a successful popular revolution, one that could have seen each and every one of them arrested, imprisoned, or worse, they would make sure any reform was tentative, with the possibility of rollback kept securely in the back pocket.

Over the early 1990s there was a big freeing up of social and cultural life. Before, one needed a permit even to travel within the country; this was abolished. And obtaining a passport to travel abroad was made much easier. Burmese exiles were welcomed back. Tourism was encouraged, and visas made easy; whereas before, foreigners had been largely limited to Rangoon, Mandalay, Pagan and the Inle Lake area, now they were allowed to venture off into dozens of towns and villages that hadn’t seen Westerners for more than a generation. Sports were newly emphasized, and soon there were over six hundred football clubs with nearly twenty thousand players. And a hint of Rangoon’s more freewheeling days were revived, with nightclubs and karaoke bars, some offering more than just karaoke, and rock concerts, hosting bands with names like Empire and Iron Cross, were allowed to dazzle the crowds.

Central Rangoon was transformed. Private business was encouraged for the first time in thirty years, and there was a wholehearted push for foreign investment. Dozens of four-star and five-star hotels, with luxury spas and inviting swimming pools, sprouted up around town. The Strand Hotel was bought up by international hoteliers and remade into a jet-set oasis. Crumbling colonial-era mansions were fashioned into boutiques and trendy restaurants offering everything from Korean to Italian cuisine. Nationalized firms were sold off. There was talk of a stock market. There were new cars, new traffic jams, new cinemas, and new things to buy. Burma’s first shopping malls finally offered teenagers wearing hundred-dollar Levi’s 501s a place to hang out. The social pages of the foreign-managed
Myanmar Times
cheerfully reported on cocktail parties and fashion shows. And there was satellite television, with MTV and CNN, and the very beginnings of Internet access. For many life eked on
as before. For some of the urban poor it was worse, with rising prices and new developments forcing them out of the city center. But for thousands of people in the middle class there was a bittersweet taste of what had been missing and a cautious air of possibility.

For the government, development primarily meant roads, bridges, airports, and dams, and dozens of infrastructural works were begun and completed with all the enthusiasm of a well-laid battle plan. Just south of Ava an enormous new airport, capable of handling a fleet of 747s, was built, and every day in
The New Light of Myanmar
were pictures of severe-looking generals and colonels inspecting new irrigation works or giving instructions for the completion of a new port. For the generals a better life also meant better golf courses, a legacy of British Burma’s strong Scottish influence; the Burma Golf Club was spruced up, and new, swankier courses popped up around Rangoon and around the country. There were even daily articles covering the game, the no-nonsense government-run paper, for example, cheerfully reporting on 29 April 2005 that “U Nyunt Aye scored a hole-in-one while he was playing together with his partners U Sein Than and U Thein Toe at the City Golf Resort. He drove the ball with wood 3 Callaway stick to the 16th hole from 167 yards away.”

But sustainable (not to mention equitable) economic progress was elusive. There seemed no willingness to make tough decisions. Corruption was rife. Foreigners were allowed to own businesses, but in practice they needed a local partner, and better yet, a local partner well connected with the powers-that-be. The government also maintained a monopoly on rice, teak, and mineral exports. Agricultural production, nearly half the economy, was hardly free. And though the foreign exchange market had been liberalized, the government still maintained a complex system, with an official rate that stood at a tiny fraction of the market rate. Education and health care remained starved of funds and expert attention. Most fundamentally, this was still an economy run by soldiers deeply suspicious of technocrats, and there were, as always, few, if any, in the top leadership with even a rudimentary knowledge of economics. By the late 1990s, with new American sanctions, foreign investment dwindling, and no help from international financial institutions on the horizon, the wheels of development had slowed yet again.

Where there
was
change was within the armed forces, which over the 1990s dramatically increased their size and strength. The number of military personnel, almost entirely in the army, jumped from approximately 180,000 before 1988 to over 400,000 in 1996. At the same time, hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on buying new airplanes, ships, tanks, and armored personnel carriers. New factories to supply arms and ammunition were set up, and services for soldiers and their families were improved.
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And with this bigger and better-equipped army, the balance of power firmly shifted to Rangoon. With the ex-Communist cease-fires in place, the Burmese army was able to pressure or cajole nearly all the various ethnic-based insurgencies to agree to similar accords. Seventeen in all agreed to stop fighting, including the formidable Kachin Independence Organization, which had been in revolt since the early 1960s. Those that didn’t came under withering attack, like the Karen National Union, losing all its bases along the Thai border and then finally entering talks at the end of the decade. By the mid-1990s the fighting had, at least temporarily, stopped, bringing for millions of people in the uplands the first feeling of day-to-day security, however faltering and incomplete, in nearly a lifetime.

At the same time, the former Communist forces, the Was and the others, moved ever more firmly in a money-oriented direction. Burma and China had opened up their border to trade. Until then poverty-stricken little mountain villages in Communist-held areas had a closed-off Cultural Revolution–wrecked Maoist China to their backs. In the 1990s they became gateways to the wheeling-dealing superpower of the future. These same mountain villages became, virtually overnight, vibrant international cities, with big-wheeled trucks lumbering past, carrying Burma’s natural inheritance in one direction and the goods of the Chinese Industrial Revolution in the other. At Ruili, opposite Kokang, banks and restaurants now stay open well into the night, and discos, once an unheard-of thing, keep the clients coming until well after sunrise. At another town, Mongla, a special transvestite cabaret attracts coachloads of gawking tourists from far into the People’s Republic and even South Korea, the “ladyboys” of Mongla being at the most innocuous end of a ever-expanding sex and entertainment trade, with prostitutes from as far away as Russia and the Ukraine. Criminal gangs, many from Fujian Province, opposite Taiwan, have inevitably
become active and entrenched, offering up a new heyday for Chinese mobsters, perhaps their best since the 1930s, when the godfather Du Yuesheng and his Green Gang ruled the Shanghai Bund.
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But from the outside world, there have been no words of congratulation or encouragement for the cease-fires, no real offers of mediation, or even an insistence that both sides keep on a road to peace. No apparent interest in ending the world’s longest-running conflict or concern that the whole thing could still unravel. No thought as to how this tentative peace and move toward a market economy could be made irreversible. Only deafening silence. Instead, for the outside world, there was really only one story in Burma in the 1990s, the story of Aung San Suu Kyi and her struggle against the ruling generals.

AUNG SAN’S DAUGHTER

On a sweltering April morning in 1989 Aung San Suu Kyi and a group of her party activists set off on a trip to the Irrawaddy Delta. Their aim was to mobilize support and also to test the army’s limits in the Gandhian tradition of nonviolent resistance. It was on the second day of this tour that they arrived by boat at the town of Danubyu. Danubyu was already famous in Burmese history, as the place where Thado Maha Bandula, driven from Rangoon, had made what was to be his last stand against the rockets and steamships of General Archibald Campbell during the First Anglo-Burmese War. Now it was to be famous again, for a very different resistance. As Aung San Suu Kyi and her young followers walked along the street and toward the local National League for Democracy office, they found their way blocked by a small company of soldiers, kneeling and with automatic weapons pointed toward them. Aung San Suu Kyi told her people to keep moving. The captain in charge threatened to shoot. She spoke calmly and asked that they be allowed to pass, all the while moving forward. Just then a superior officer rushed to the scene and ordered his men to stand down. Courage had triumphed over repression. Aung San Suu Kyi’s fame soon spread.