The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (63 page)

The first is the long history of failed state building. The nineteenth-century kings Mindon and Thibaw attempted to remake traditional institutions and create new ones to deal with the fast-changing world, but these initiatives in the end went nowhere because of the steady approach of British imperialism. The traditional order collapsed entirely. The British Raj then tried, as in other parts of its Indian domain, to transplant familiar institutions—a civil service, a judiciary, a professional police force and army, and eventually an elected legislature—but these remained largely alien institutions, unwedded to local society, and the abrupt end of colonial rule meant that they didn’t long survive the British withdrawal. Then there was the attempt in the U Nu days to fashion a democratic state, but these efforts were crippled from the start by the civil war, the Chinese invasions of the 1950s, and the steady growth of General Ne Win’s military machine. Today the military machine is all there is, with only the shadow of other institutions remaining. In Burma it’s not simply getting the military out of the business of government. It’s creating the state institutions that can replace the military state that exists.

The second factor is more in the realm of ideas. In the way that Burma’s royal institutions collapsed in the wake of Thibaw’s exile, the onset of colonial rule meant the fast disappearance of many earlier notions of kingship and the relationship between government and society. An entire tradition of learning, subtle and complex, based on centuries of court and monastic scholarship, ended almost overnight. In its place a militant nationalism came forward, merging at different times with different visions of the future. There is also a strong utopian streak, going back to the Student Union days of the 1930s, a proclivity for abstract debates, on communism, socialism, democracy, endless conversations about diverse constitutional models and long-term political schemes,
which never see the light of day. What is altogether missing is a history of pragmatic and rigorous policy debate, on economics, finance, health care, or education as well as a more imaginative and empathetic discussion of minority rights and shared identities in modern Burmese society.

Of course some things could change overnight for the better. Political prisoners (there are estimated to be more than a thousand) could be released, restrictions on the media relaxed; there could even be fresh elections leading to a new civilian government. But what then? All these things could be overturned, also overnight, in a new coup, as in 1962. The army would still be there, lurking in the wings. There is a tendency to see Burma as a failed Eastern European–style revolution, where all it will take are new crowds to take to the streets, when a more apt comparison is with similarly war-torn societies like Cambodia or Afghanistan, where only a multifaceted path of institution building, social change, and economic development can lift the country from a long history of ills. And in the case of Burma this can only begin with breaking down Burma’s isolation, reviving connections with the outside world, bringing in new ideas, providing fresh air to a stale political environment and—in the process—changing long-festering mentalities.

If Burma were a country where those in charge wanted to engage with the wider world or had much to lose by being isolated, then a policy of sanctions might make sense. If the ruling caste in Burma were actually committed to the benefits that more trade and interaction with the West could bring, then sanctions might be seen as a type of pressure. But this is not the case. Since 1988 and the first attempts to liberalize the economy and climb out of isolation, the officer corps had been at best halfhearted in its desire to actually open up and engage with the world. Many would prefer to keep the West at arm’s length and deal only with China and perhaps a few other neighbors, worried of the dangers to the status quo inherent in allowing foreign businesses and foreign tourists to descend in large numbers and (to borrow a phrase from a different conflict) create new facts on the ground.

What is sometimes hard to perceive from the outside is just how damaging forty years of isolation—in particular, isolation from the West and the international scene—has been to those trapped inside. Trade with China and a few other (still developing) economies is no substitute for renewed contacts with people and places around the world. It is this isolation that has kept Burma in poverty; isolation that
fuels a negative, almost xenophobic nationalism; isolation that makes the Burmese army see everything as a zero-sum game and any change as filled with peril; isolation that has made any conclusion to the war so elusive, hardening differences; and isolation that has weakened institutions—the ones on which any transition to democracy would depend—to the point of collapse. Without isolation, the status quo will be impossible to sustain. This is not to say that problems will disappear overnight, but rather that solutions, so elusive today, will become more apparent and easier to reach.

In isolation, though, the army will simply and quite confidently push forward its agenda. A new military-dominated constitution will be adopted. And a new military-dominated government put in place. More statues of long-dead generals will go up, and the opposition will be largely decimated, the armed groups in the hills being forced to give up their arms and accept a new order. But of course that wouldn’t be the end. Grievances would only fester underneath. Some might try their hand at terrorist tactics, something that has thus far remained nearly absent from the political scene. And all the while whatever governing institutions outside the army still exist will become even more enfeebled, as the last generation educated abroad reaches retirement age or dies.

When General Ne Win came to power in 1962, there were military regimes everywhere in Asia. The difference between the Burmese military regime and its counterparts in South Korea, Thailand, and Indonesia is not that the Burmese regime has been any more repressive, but that the others trusted the advice of technocrats, presided over long periods of economic growth, and allowed for the development of civil society. All these things were possible because these countries were not isolated from the international community, and because trade and tourism strengthened rather than weakened the hand of those who eventually demanded political change. If Thailand and Indonesia had been under U.S. and European sanctions the past twenty years, they would not be democracies today. Would China be better off today if it had been kept poor and isolated since the demonstrations of 1989?

This is not to say that every type of interaction with the outside world is a good one or that there should not be ethical standards for trade and investment. But to say that companies should not tarnish themselves by doing business in a politically repressive country is very different from saying that sanctions on business will actually effect positive change.

So what of the future? There are no easy options, no quick fixes, no grand strategies that will create democracy in Burma overnight or even over several years. If Burma were less isolated, if there were more trade, more engagement—more tourism in particular—and if this were coupled with a desire by the government for greater economic reform, a rebuilding of state institutions, and a slow opening up of space for civil society, then perhaps the conditions for political change would emerge over the next decade or two. Though not a particularly encouraging scenario, it is a realistic one, however much it might lack the punch of more revolutionary approaches.

There is a second and much worse possible scenario—that Burma’s international isolation will only deepen through an unholy alliance between those outside who favor sanctions and inside hard-liners who advocate a retreat from the global community, that this isolation will further undermine institutions of government, that a new generation will grow up less educated and in worse health, and that a decade or two from now, the world will be staring at another failed state, without any prospect of democratic change and with the military no longer holding things together. There would be a return to anarchy and the conditions of 1948, only this time with more guns, more people, and strong, confident neighbors unlikely to idly stand by. If that were to come to pass, the remaining years of this century would not be enough time for Burma to recover.

Notes – 13: PALIMPSEST

1
. Terry McCarthy, “The Twin Terrors,”
Time Asia
, 7 February 2000.

2
. Lintner,
The Rise and Fall of the Communist Party of Burma
, 39–46.

3
. James George Scott,
Gazetteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States
, vol. 1 (Rangoon: Printed by the Superintendent, Government Printing, Burma, 1900), part 1, 496.

4
. Ibid., 499–500.

5
. Ibid., 500.

6
. For an overview of Burma in the 1990s, see David Steinberg,
The Future of Burma: Crisis and Choice in Myanmar
(New York: Asia Society, 1990).

7
.
Financial Times
, 9 November 1989, 6;
Far Eastern Economic Review
, 21 December 1989, 22.

8
.
Financial Times
, 21 June 1990, 6.

9
.
Far Eastern Economic Review
, 21 December 1989, 22;
Financial Times
, 19 May 1990, sec. 2, 1, and 25 May 1990, 6.

10
. Andrew Selth,
Burma’s Order of Battle: An Interim Assessment
(Canberra, Australia: Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University, 2000).

11
. Anthony Davis, “Law and Disorder: A Growing Torrent of Guns and Narcotics Overwhelms China,”
Asiaweek
, 25 August 1995.

12
. Aung San Suu Kyi,
Freedom from Fear and Other Writings
, ed. Michael Aris (New York: Penguin Books, 1991).

13
. Yew,
From Third World to First
, 323.

AFTERWORD

F
or a few days in September 2007, Burma stood for the first time in the international spotlight, the people and places of what had been a small and peripheral story suddenly on a global stage. Television sets around the word were filled with images of crimsonrobed Buddhist monks and tens of thousands of ordinary
longyi
-clad Burmese, walking defiantly along monsoon-soaked streets, calling for a better life and greater freedom. Millions of people around the world saw the steel-helmeted young soldiers and riot police jumping off their trucks and brandishing automatic weapons. News analysts spoke of the generals in their remote jungle lair and wondered aloud whether the military regime would finally crack. And there was the fleeting, almost ephemeral picture of Aung San Suu Kyi, shown just inside her University Avenue compound, paying her respects to the column of quietly chanting monks outside. Whether on cable or on the Internet, it was easy to feel the tension, the sense of good versus evil, and the hope that Asia’s next revolution was soon at hand.

The timing was almost perfect. Whilst the 1988 uprising had been at the height of the summer holidays, this time the peak of the protests and the beginning of the crackdown coincided exactly with the first day of the UN General Assembly in New York. There were few other crisis stories in the news. At the UN, where he had a longstanding speaking engagement, President George Bush made Burma a centerpiece of his speech and said that the “people’s desire for change is unmistakable.” Whereas in other circumstances Burma would have been at best a minor talking point at a few bilateral meetings, it now topped the agenda. Heads of government hurried to express concern and diplomats telephoned one another. The actor Jim Carrey even broadcast an appeal on YouTube to Ban Ki-Moon.

The images were poignant in themselves, and perhaps it wasn’t important for outside observers to know that the protests were taking place over a special landscape in Burmese history. Many of the pictures were taken from or near the Sulè Pagoda, at the heart of Rangoon’s downtown. Nearly two centuries ago, this was where the musketeers and war elephants of Thado Maha Bandula met the East India Company troops of General Archibald Campbell. It was where hundreds of thousands of ethnic Indians made their home in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, only to be expelled later. The Sulè Pagoda Road was the same road down which General Aung San had led nationalist demonstrations, where there would later be massive Communist rallies, and where, in late 1946, the Labour government of Clement Attlee sent a battalion of West African Rifles to help restore calm and order.