The Hidden History of Burma
Page 12
Nine days later, Aung San Suu Kyi was arrested and charged with breaking the terms of her house arrest. She was transferred to the notorious Insein jail north of the city. Her trial, which lasted several weeks, became an international sensation. Gordon Brown, then UK prime minister, wrote in a public letter to her that “the clamour for your release is growing across Europe, Asia, and the entire world.” With her sixty-fourth birthday approaching, he promised to “do all we can to make this birthday the last you spend without your freedom.” David Beckham, Daniel Craig, Kevin Spacey, and George Clooney all sent words of encouragement.
On August 11, in a damp colonial-era courtroom packed with diplomats and media, the ceiling fans whirring overhead, the presiding judge sentenced Aung San Suu Kyi to three years of hard labor. Then, minutes later, the home minister himself made a dramatic entrance and announced that Than Shwe was personally halving her sentence and allowing her to serve the remaining time in her Rangoon home. She would be released in November 2010, just after the elections.
The National League for Democracy was in a grim state. Hundreds of their members were among over 2,000 men and women behind bars for their political beliefs. They included many of Aung San Suu Kyi’s lieutenants, who were now in far-flung prisons with little or no contact with one another.
Yettaw was sentenced to seven years’ hard labor, pardoned after two months, and sent home in the company of visiting US senator Jim Webb. He later told Newsweek that his conversations with Aung San Suu Kyi were “personal” and that he would never tell a soul, including his three ex-wives. “I will never be at peace, emotionally or psychologically, until that woman is free, until that nation is free.” He also said, “I am not crazy. I am not insane.”
SENIOR GENERAL THAN SHWE’S retirement preparations were now complete. The junta would soon be dissolved and replaced by a new constitutional set-up. At the core of the constitution was a power-sharing arrangement between the army and a semi-elected parliament. The army would remain autonomous under its own commander-in-chief. Elections would fill 75 percent of the seats in a two-chamber parliament. The army would appoint the other 25 percent from within its own ranks. Parliament would elect the president, who in turn would appoint ministers. But the ministers of defense, “border affairs,” and “home affairs” (in charge of the police and local administration) would be military men nominated by the commander-in-chief. The president would also appoint the chief ministers in charge of the country’s fourteen states and regions.
The constitution was virtually identical to the one first proposed by the army in 1993. The National League for Democracy had rejected this, and years of attempted mediation by the UN on a constitutional process acceptable to both sides had led to nothing. Now Than Shwe pushed through what he and the other generals had always had in mind.
The constitution enshrined basic rights, including the rights to free speech, association, and peaceful assembly. The constitution also prohibited discrimination on the basis of “race, birth, religion, and sex.” It did, however, add the qualifier that nothing should “prevent the appointment of men to positions that are suitable for men only.”
The constitution was also concerned with identity, sanctifying a concept of the Burmese nation that had been fermenting for decades. The first sections included a summary of Burmese history up to independence in 1948, which began with the lines:
Myanmar is a Nation with magnificent historical traditions. We the National people have been living in unity and oneness, setting up an independent sovereign State and standing tall with pride. Due to colonial intrusion, the Nation lost her sovereign power in 1885. The National people launched anti-colonialist struggles and National liberation struggles, with unity in strength, sacrificing lives and hence the Nation became an independent sovereign State again on 4th January 1948.
The “Basic Principles” went on to declare: “The State is where multi-National races collectively reside.” The “multi-National races,” or taing-yintha, were now at the very center of the state narrative. In this worldview, Burma was less a community of equal citizens than an amalgamation of the “multi-National races” that had lived side by side since time immemorial, except for the period of “colonial intrusion.” Resurrecting and protecting this unity was paramount. “National race affairs” was listed in the constitution as a primary issue, alongside foreign affairs and the economy.
During the 1990s, the junta began to speak of “135 National Races.” There was never an exact list, and the lists that were produced were nonsensical mixes of apples and oranges: dozens of language dialects alongside overlapping ethnic designations. What was important was the concept that the country was comprised not just of the Burmese and a few other major peoples (who might then deserve equal billing) but of a jumble of tiny races that needed to be welded together.
What was unspoken was a racial feeling. The “Europeans” were long gone, and the sizeable Anglo-Indian and Anglo-Burmese population had either emigrated, over the 1940s and 1950s (mainly to Australia and the UK), or had blended into Burmese society, taking on Burmese names and intermarrying. There remained only those accepted as part of the 135 and those who were left out, people deemed Indian or Chinese. A negative identity grouped all the “National Races”: they were neither kala nor tayok, centuries-old terms for those from across the Bay of Bengal or from over the Shan and Yunnan hills. The kala and the tayok looked different and acted differently. This was a distinction that superseded language or religion or culture. It wasn’t based on anything like the race science of the early 20th century, but it was about identity and physical appearance and its relationship to biology and ancestry. The root of the Burmese word for “national,” myo, originally meant “seed” and is a cognate of an older word for semen.1
The constitution also included an arcane formula tied to race. Any taing-yintha “whose population constitutes at least 0.1% of the national populace” (around 50,000 people in 2010) was entitled to representation in local legislative assemblies and ministerial portfolios in local administrations. If a taing-yintha constituted more than half of two contiguous townships, it was entitled to an “autonomous zone.” So, in addition to ethnically-based states for the Shan, Kachin, and five others, there would now be “self-administered zones” for the Nagas, Danus, and a few smaller ethnic groups.
I’ve heard many Burmese warn that giving Muslims in northern Arakan taing-yintha status, as “Rohingya,” would lead automatically to their being entitled to a zone of their own. “A part of Burma would fall under sharia law,” a university lecturer whispered. To consider the Muslims of northern Arakan as one of the “National Races” fused anxieties around both race and religion. The ethnonym “Rohingya” was particularly toxic for this reason, as it means literally “of Arakan” and therefore implied that those to whom it referred were indigenous. On the other hand, if they were called “Bengalis,” they could be seen—like the other kala and tayok, who were believed biologically as well as culturally distinct—as immigrants and not natives deserving special protection and special rights.
THAN SHWE ALSO retired dozens of generals and promoted in their place a new generation of officers, men in their late forties and early fifties (Than Shwe was then seventy-eight). This was critical for the retirement scheme: for the foreseeable future, until he was in his afterlife, the men in charge of state violence would be men who were unreservedly loyal, protégés whom he had himself pulled up through the ranks. They would be the steel frame. They were told they were the “guardians” of the new constitution. And for the coming elections a new party was created: the Union Solidarity and Development Party, or USDP. “Solidarity” meant the solidarity of the taing-yintha. It was well funded (from the junta’s coffers) and sought to coopt as meaty a slice of Burmese civil society as possible, by reaching out to local worthies—businessmen, doctors, schoolteachers, retired civil servants—and encouraging them to run under the USDP banner.
By late 2010, Naypyitaw was looking finis
hed. The few visitors were welcomed at a new airport (my favorite in the world—where one can arrive twenty minutes before a flight, check in, speed through security, shod and with little hassle, enjoy a good espresso, and board). There was a zoo and “night safari,” several golf courses, a big fountain, and even bigger statues of the warrior-kings who had crafted past empires. There was a sprawling Legoland parliament complex with thirty-one buildings, representing the thirty-one planes of existence in Buddhist cosmology. About a mile away was a hundred-room presidential palace with a state-of-the-art fitness center and, in the main hall, a golden replica of the throne of the last king of Burma.
Than Shwe didn’t want to be president. He would watch the stage he had set from behind the scenes. And so he built a house for himself nearby, overlooking a 400-foot-high gilded pagoda, an almost exact replica of the centuries-old Shwedagon in Rangoon.
At a time when strongmen like Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe were hanging onto office well into their eighties, and others like Muammar Gaddafi were being hunted down and killed in the street, Than Shwe concocted his own exit. His predecessor, General Ne Win, had died eight years before, powerless to stop Than Shwe from arresting his kin. Than Shwe didn’t want another military dictator to come after him and do the same to his family. He preferred to engineer a very specific transition, to a more diffuse and popularly acceptable structure of power.
He thought for a while of creating a “Defense Commission” that he would chair and that would oversee the army—an insurance policy in case the rest of the retirement scheme didn’t go according to plan. But in the end he decided against it. Things seemed to be falling into place.
Almost everything. A few days after Aung San Suu Kyi and John Yettaw were arrested, junta leaders and their wives led a special ceremony at the 14th-century Danok Pagoda on the outskirts of Rangoon. The pagoda had been renovated, and dignitaries including Than Shwe’s wife were there to install a new diamond-encrusted spire. On June 6, during Aung San Suu Kyi’s trial, the pagoda mysteriously collapsed, killing twenty people and injuring dozens more. There were rumors of a supernatural cause. In a very superstitious country, it wasn’t a good omen.
There remained, as well, two outstanding questions, neither one minor: how to deal with China and, relatedly, the country’s unfinished civil war.
In the early 1950s, when Than Shwe first became a soldier, the entire country was a sea of rebellion. Half a century of pitiless counterinsurgency campaigns followed. By the beginning of the 21st century, the authority of the Burmese army alone ran over the entire Irrawaddy valley. The delta and nearly all the coastline were also in the hands of the generals. In the west, toward India and Bangladesh, there were a few small militant outfits. Most, like the United Liberation Front of Assam, were fighting the Indian state, using bases inside Burma to attack Indian positions across the border. In the southeast, in the hills bordering Thailand, were the Burmese army’s oldest foes, the Karen National Union. They had been formidable adversaries, but their headquarters had been overrun in the 1990s and much of their territory seized.
In the north and northeast, big ethnic-based forces remained. All, however, had agreed to ceasefires in the late 1980s and early 1990s. There had since been little or no fighting. The focus of elites on all sides had been making money. Villages on the Chinese border became boomtowns.
The biggest of these rebel forces, by far, was the United Wa State Army. It was the largest of the successor armies to emerge from the old Communist insurgency, fielding over 25,000 well-armed men. The Wa are a mountain people of the China–Burma borderlands who speak a language more similar to Khmer and Vietnamese than either Burmese or Chinese. Some had become Lutheran in the early 20th century. Drugs—heroin, and more recently methamphetamines—were now a major part of Wa business, making their rulers rich. The Wa had their own television station, schools, and hospitals. More importantly, they enjoyed a good relationship with their patrons in Beijing. The “Wa state” was on the Chinese telephone and electricity grid, and they came and went from China as they pleased. From a Wa perspective, the past twenty years had been good. The last thing they wanted was to surrender power to Naypyitaw. A Burmese army officer I met in 2009 told me, “We don’t lose much sleep thinking about the West or Aung San Suu Kyi. But we really don’t know how to deal with the Wa and the Chinese.”
In the mid-2000s, the junta were hopeful that the Wa and other insurgent armies would accept the new constitution, disarm, form their own political parties, and contest the elections. By 2008, it was clear that wasn’t going to happen. The junta then suggested they become “Border Guard Forces”: they would only partially demobilize, but their remaining troops, though still commanded by their own officers, would come under the ultimate authority of the Burmese army. Four rebel groups accepted. More than a dozen others refused.
In June 2009, Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa made an official visit to Naypyitaw to meet Than Shwe and cement the already close ties between the two countries. He also came to give advice. Just weeks before, Rajapaksa’s army had wiped out the Tamil Tiger rebels, ending a bloody, quarter-century-long war. As many as 40,000 civilians, as well as Tamil Tiger fighters, died in the onslaught. Rajapaksa told Than Shwe to forget about negotiation and do the same.
One of the groups that refused the Border Guard Force proposal was the fetchingly named Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army. It was the army of the Kokang warlord and heroin producer Peng Jiasheng. At a meeting in June 2009, Peng met with a Burmese general and told him that his militia had no desire to change current arrangements. Some members of his Executive Committee differed, so Peng expelled them. The split provided an opportunity for the Burmese, who began making allegations about drug trafficking and illegal arms production. On August 22, police issued a summons ordering Peng and his two sons to appear in a Burmese court. They refused. A warrant was issued for their arrest.
Heavy fighting soon erupted between the Burmese army and Peng’s militia. The faction that wanted to accept the Border Guard Force proposal fought alongside the Burmese army. Nearly 40,000 civilians fled to China. Than Shwe personally directed the attacks, even telephoning the battalion commanders on the ground. The fighting ended when 700 Kokang fighters—the bulk of Peng’s troops—crossed the border and were disarmed by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.
The Chinese government was extremely unhappy. They had maintained close relations with all the armed groups along the border and wanted the Burmese to find a negotiated way forward. The images of ethnic Chinese refugees fleeing Kokang, shared widely over Chinese social media, were particularly galling and had inflamed Chinese nationalist sentiment against Burma.
The Burmese were unhappy, too, feeling that it was exactly these close relations with China that were keeping the rebel militias going. A couple of weeks after the clashes ended, the junta organized a special tour of Kokang for ambassadors in Rangoon. The Chinese sent their most junior diplomat, saying their ambassador was busy with a visiting Inner Mongolia Cultural Troupe. The same week, state-controlled media in Rangoon ran a story about the Dalai Lama visiting Taiwan, the first mention of the Dalai Lama for over twenty years in any Burmese newspaper.2
THE CIVIL WAR in Burma had started in the late 1940s primarily as a Communist insurrection. But soon there were other armed factions that rallied people around rival identities. Burmese nationalism called for the assimilation of all who were deemed to belong to a timeless Myanma nation. But there were other nationalisms, too, such as the growing nationalism of the Kachin. “Kachin” is a Burmese word for the peoples living in the northern hills. They speak different languages, all related to Burmese, some distantly, some quite closely. But their culture, tied to their upland ways of living, is sharply different from Burmese. Previously animist, they are today predominantly Christian, of various denominations. Little wooden churches take pride of place in nearly every Kachin village.
The Kachin experienced colonial rule very differently from the
Burmese. The Kachin Hills had never been ruled by an outside power, either Burmese or Chinese. And the British administered the hills with a light hand: an occasional ‘tour’ and not much else. There was little development, which meant little capitalist intrusion. American missionaries in the early 20th century converted the majority. And during the Second World War, Kachins fought with distinction against the Japanese alongside British and American special forces (unlike the nascent Burmese army, which fought on the side of the Axis powers until the final months of the war). At independence, Kachin chiefs agreed to be part of the new Union of Burma on condition of equality and a state of their own. They received a separate state, but over the 1950s saw any dream of real equality fading into the distance. In the 1960 election, the leading political party campaigned in part on a platform of making Buddhism the state religion. Kachin Christians were appalled. Some drew inspiration from the Karen ethnic rebellion far to the south. By the early 1960s, a Kachin Independence Organization was organized and in full revolt against the dictatorship of General Ne Win.
Thirty years of bloody fighting followed, with thousands killed or wounded and thousands more displaced or used as forced labor, to build roads or carry army supplies. Finally, in 1994, five years after the ceasefires between the government and the ex-Communist forces along the Chinese border, the Reverend Suboi Jum, a former general secretary of the Kachin Baptist Convention, mediated a separate ceasefire between the Kachin Independence Organization and the junta. Over the decade or so that followed, his daughter, Lahtaw Ja Nan, noticed an ever stronger spirit of Kachin nationalist sentiment.3