The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (64 page)

That road was also at the epicenter of Burma’s last big protests, in 1988. Apart from the international context, the protests of the fall of 2007 seemed strikingly similar to those of nineteen years ago: the rain-washed streets, the dilapidated buildings, the determined young protesters, the eerie silence from the regime, and the sense of the crackdown to come. It was like a play being performed all over again, with fewer and more interesting actors (the Buddhist monks in the lead this time), but for a more attentive audience.

For me, it was hard to imagine the ending would be any different. When the 1988 protests began, I found myself on Lake Lugano, at the beautiful mountainside home of Sir Peter Smithers, the renowned horticulturist, retired spy, and diplomat, friend of Ian Fleming and supposed inspiration for James Bond. We listened together to the news reports on the BBC. Despite Sir Peter’s words of caution, I expected an unstoppable revolution, leading to democracy and independence. I doubted that the military government could simply put an end to demonstrations or that it would be able to live with the public-relations consequences of a crackdown. A few days later, having traveled to Bangkok, I felt irritated when a foreign journalist told me that the army could still stage a comeback. Even after the protests were crushed, I was angry when a Korean diplomat told me that democracy in Burma would take “another twenty years.” It must be just around the corner, I thought.

This time I had no such feelings, only a terrible sense of the lives that would be lost or destroyed. The protests seemed less a catalyst for change than an awful sign of how low things had sunk. They had begun with anger at a sudden rise in fuel prices, a tipping point for many urban workers who are barely eking out a living on a dollar a day. Then Buddhist monks began to join in, their numbers growing exponentially after government forces brutally attacked some of their brethren in the provincial town of Pakkoku. The monks asked for an apology; the people asked for a better life. I had hoped all along I would be wrong, but few in Burma could have been surprised when, in 2007 as in 1988, the army reinforcements approached, the shots rang out, the curfew was imposed, and the arrests began.

Unlike 1988, however, condemnations came swift and thick. The government of Singapore organized a statement of fellow ASEAN members declaring their “revulsion” at the recent violence, and the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, welcomed the condemnation as appropriately “incendiary.” The first lady of the United States, Laura Bush, published an op-ed in
The Wall Street Journal
, and a new group on Facebook (Support the Monks’ Protests in Burma) attracted nearly half a million people. The UN Security Council was convened to discuss the crisis and the secretary-general’s special adviser, the former Nigerian foreign minister Professor Ibrahim Gambari, was soon dispatched.

By early October, the news cycle had moved on, Burma slipped from the front pages, and as the skies finally cleared over Rangoon, the city sulked back to a grim reality.

I don’t think it is impossible that street protests might one day lead to a successful revolution against Burma’s military government. I just think it is unlikely. Most scenarios for regime change rest on some sort of coup d’état by one army faction against another. But these are armed forces organized specifically to prevent any such internal challenge from ever occurring. Another scenario involves a change of heart by the military establishment as a whole—that faced with the possibility of carnage on the streets, they will give way to Aung San Suu Kyi and make way for democracy. Nothing in Burma’s recent past suggests this will happen.

And so we are left with the same question—what to do about Burma? As I have tried to argue in this book, the answer lies in part in seeing Burma differently. The more we focus on the politics at the center, the more we will reach for the easy condemnation or economic sanction and hope that somehow things will change. So we need to expand the picture.

It was striking during the days of heightened commentary on Burma that almost no one mentioned the civil war. In many ways, this sixty-year-old war is at a watershed. The cease-fires between many of the insurgencies and the army remain, but there are new tensions as the government tries to move toward a new constitutional order, one granting at best very limited local autonomy, while disarming its former battlefield enemies. The prospects for peace are remote, the possibilities of renewed violence perhaps greater. Whatever happens, the evolving relationships between the army and the myriad other armed groups in the country will do as much to shape Burma’s future as anything else.

Then there is the economy. And it has been easy to forget that the state of the economy first triggered the recent unrest. For years the government had claimed significant economic growth, based in part on expanding sales of natural gas. No one knows exactly how much natural gas there is, but at the higher end Burma could be sitting on top of one of the biggest gas fields in the world, worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Existing production is sold to Thailand, helping to light up Bangkok and providing more than two billion dollars a year in hard currency. And there are big plans for the future. China wants to build a pipeline capable of transporting the bulk of its Middle Eastern oil from the Indian Ocean across Burma to southwestern China, avoiding the potentially hazardous Straits of Malacca. With the pipeline would come roads and rail links and the pulling of Burma ever closer toward China’s giant industrial revolution.

But few in Burma may benefit from this. The building of a new capital city—Naypyitaw (meaning simply “the capital”)—about halfway between Rangoon and Mandalay, has almost certainly proved an enormous drain on public resources. These kinds of wasteful projects, combined with continued economic mismanagement and debilitating Western sanctions, have set the stage for a peculiarly regressive political economy. With the current boycotts and sanctions in place, Burma simply can’t compete with China or Vietnam or many other neighbors
in sectors such as textile production or tourism, even if the right economic policies were in place. So it turns to extractive industries and products—such as energy resources—where there is high regional demand and a fairly direct link to state coffers.

All the while people will get poorer. A good fraction are now living below the poverty line. The health and education systems are disintegrating. For a while international assistance had expanded, both through UN agencies and nongovernmental organizations, but the space for aid has diminished in recent years, as some on the outside oppose working in any way with government institutions (such as the health ministry) and the government itself grows suspicious that aid is only an adjunct of a broad regime-change conspiracy.

The nightmare scenario for Burma is this: repression and outside condemnation, tighter sanctions, a political economy that benefits only a few, declining health and education, an impoverished population for whom “democracy” can hardly be the only answer.

Not all is necessarily gloom and doom. I was last in Burma for a few weeks over the winter of 2006–2007. When I arrived at Rangoon’s Mingaladon Airport, I found myself waiting for my luggage alongside hundreds of young Muslim men and women, members of the Shwebo Muslim Association (it said on their boxes and bags). They had chartered a flight and had just returned from a pilgrimage to Mecca. They were in high spirits. At my hotel, nearly every day, I saw lines of neatly dressed twenty-something-year-olds, CVs in hand, waiting for job interviews that might take them to Doha or Singapore. Another twenty-something told me he had trained as a pizza chef, for no other reason than that he liked pizza. The week I left, there was a big hip-hop concert at a local convention center, the biggest ever, I was told, which would bring hip-hop artists from around the country. I went to local Internet cafés and noticed I could access almost any site on the Web. Everywhere I saw people glued to a Korean soap opera or an English Premier League soccer match. In the newsstand I saw the supercensored official papers, but also gossip magazines (in Burmese) with stories about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s latest adoption.

I say all this not to deny the importance of politics or to say that this, rather than the Burma of protest and repression, is the “real Burma.” I mention these little observations and draw attention to the armed conflicts and the unfolding economic picture to underline that Burma is a
complex place, and until there is an appreciation of that complexity, international policies will continue to come up unhappily against Burmese realities.

This is equally true for policies of so-called constructive engagement as for policies that rely on sanctions, condemnation, and revolutionary change. Both are flawed, as both begin and end with a narrow political focus, differing only in their dependence on either persuasion or pressure to change the regime. But this misunderstands the nature of the regime entirely. The Burmese military machine is geared only toward identifying and either destroying or managing its enemies. The men in charge are soldiers and warlords, not political visionaries or ideologues or businessmen-in-uniform looking for an easy fortune.

If change comes it will not be through the front door but through the back, as part of a changing economy and changing society. A generational shift in Burma is inevitable—both in the armed forces and more generally. Where this shift will take us will depend in no small part on the international environment. Will the new generals see a way forward or will they fall back on tried and tested isolation? Will a new round of diplomacy remember the economic desperation that first sparked the recent protests, redouble efforts to expand humanitarian assistance, and find ways to alleviate poverty? Will the international community understand the importance of the armed conflict and prioritize the need for a just and sustainable peace? Will international policies stoke the regime’s xenophobia or find ways of bringing Burma back into the global mainstream? Will people see that greater openness, connectedness, and exposure are by far the most potent force for unraveling the status quo?

Burma has had a lot of bad luck for a very long time, ever since Thibaw’s government refused the terms of Lord Randolph Churchill’s ultimatum and the country collapsed into years of upheaval and conflict. At almost every important turn since then, things could have gone differently and the country would have been better off. Perhaps Burma’s luck will soon change. It’s not too late.

 *

Thant Myint-U

15 October 2007 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am very grateful to Jane Elias, Kevin Doughten, Cara Spitalewitz, and their colleagues at Farrar, Straus and Giroux for their first-rate work and all their assistance this past year. I’d like to thank Walter Donohue at Faber and Faber for his insightful suggestions, as well as Sofia Busch and David Harland, both of whom read early drafts of several chapters and gave me their thoughtful and incisive comments.

I’d also like to say thank you to my parents, Dr. and Mrs. Tyn Myint-U, and other relatives and friends in Burma who shared with me their stories and the stories of my family’s past, some of which I have tried to include faithfully in this book.

My special thanks go first to my agent, Clare Alexander, without whom I would never have started writing
The River of Lost Footsteps
and whose encouragement and astute counsel I have valued greatly. And a special thank-you to my editor, Paul Elie; Paul’s patient attention, guidance, and steady hand have made this a much better book than it would otherwise have been.

INDEX

Abbasid caliphate,
1

Abhiraja, prince,
1
,
2

Abyssinia, invasion of,
1

Adul Razak,
1

Afghanistan,
1
,
2
,
3
,
4
,
5
,
6
,
7
,
8
,
9
,
10
,
11