Thein Sein had been prime minister in the old system and number four in the junta hierarchy, below Shwe Mann. Sixty-five years old, mild-mannered and owlish, Thein Sein was slightly built and suffered from a heart condition. Whereas Shwe Mann was ambitious, Thein Sein had long sought a quiet retirement. He had a reputation for being extremely hardworking. He also had a reputation as “Mr. Clean,” as one of the very few in the military top brass whose family had no business ties whatsoever.
The plan unfolded. In his aim of fracturing power, Than Shwe had placed the less ambitious man in the most powerful new position and the more ambitious in charge of the weakest institution. The new cabinet was packed with ex-generals (all chosen by Than Shwe), some in the very same posts they had held under the old regime, a mix of personality types that were meant to offset one another: conservative types were given deputies who were eager for change, and vice versa. “He’s locked everyone in place, to make sure nothing can change very quickly,” marveled a businessman over dinner one evening.
Than Shwe then abolished the junta, formally retired, and appointed General Min Aung Hlaing, twenty years younger, as the new head of the armed forces. Min Aung Hlaing was a protégé who had personally led the recent offensive against the Kokang militia.
Those who had predicted “old wine in new bottles” seemed exactly right.
But then words began to change. In February and March, the six hundred or so members of the new parliament met almost daily in their cavernous, air-conditioned complex. Almost all were middle-aged or elderly men, a good proportion former army officers or businessmen, clad in the white cotton jackets, silk headdresses, velvet slippers, and patterned longyis of Burmese officialdom. The majority were from the ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party. The rest were from ethnic minority parties (with appropriately different headgear) or the NLD breakaway National Democratic Front. These opposition MPs tabled discussions on a range of until now sensitive issues, from tax evasion to low Internet connectivity, the high cost of schooling, press censorship, and even a possible amnesty for political prisoners. The discussions were not only freely debated but reported almost verbatim the next day in the state-run media. This was extraordinary. No one had heard anyone in an official capacity talk about the real problems people were facing in decades.
Shwe Mann, wounded by being denied the presidency, was keen to show that the institution he had been given, the parliament, would quickly come to life.
On March 30, the new president gave his inaugural speech. He highlighted the need for both “good governance” and “clean governance” and vowed that his administration would be “transparent” and “accountable.” He also underlined the urgent need for economic reform, saying that “there are still many people whose life is a battle against poverty, whose life is a hand-to-mouth existence,” and that one of his principal tasks would be “reducing the gap between rich and poor.” He even called for robust protection of the environment.
In many countries, this would be run-of-the-mill political talk. But this was Burma, whose rulers had for half a century banned any suggestion that things were not exactly as they should be. Thein Sein also said that he wanted to cooperate not only with other political parties but also with other “political forces and well-meaning individuals”—meaning, implicitly, Aung San Suu Kyi. An American diplomat who had served in Moscow in the late 1980s told me it reminded him of the beginnings of glasnost.
Then came a bigger turn: the appointment of outside advisors. In the 1960s, the then-dictator General Ne Win had gutted the civil service. The top bureaucrats, graduates of Cambridge and London universities, were summarily dismissed. Many went into exile. Unlike other military-run governments in Asia—say, South Korea or Indonesia, with its “Berkeley Mafia” of economists—Burma’s regime relied on no experts, sought no outside advice. The army knew best, always. An anti-intellectual instinct was strong.
So when U Myint, a Berkeley-educated former UN economist was appointed chief economic advisor (and one of several new outside advisors) there was a feeling that the ground was beginning to shift, a tremor before the bigger quake. For U Myint was not just any economist. He was a friend of Aung San Suu Kyi who pulled no punches in his criticism of the junta’s policies. He talked openly of cronyism and high-level corruption. He had worked closely with Noeleen Heyzer in setting up the Joseph Stiglitz conference just months before. The president now tasked him with drawing up plans for economic change.
Building on the Stiglitz conference, a second conference, on rural development and poverty alleviation, was held in May. Tight timetables were set for new policy papers, workshops, consultations, presidential decisions, and if needed new laws, on everything from banking and currency reform to encouraging foreign investment and environmental protection. The mood was transformed. Civil servants dared for the first time in their careers to challenge the status quo and suggest alternatives. And people outside government started speaking openly, including to the media, about their ideas on what needed to change.
Doubters were still unconvinced. John McCain warned the authorities: “Governments that shun evolutionary reforms now will eventually face revolutionary change later. This choice may be deferred. It may be delayed. But it cannot be denied.”1 The authorities, keen to show they were different from the old regime, responded by reporting his remarks in full in the state media.
By early July, words were turning into actions. The president announced a massive boost to state pensions, significantly reduced tariffs on imported goods, liberalized the trade licensing system, and, most importantly, took the first steps toward currency reform. These last three seemingly technical measures were actually direct assaults on the existing system of regime privilege. Though Burma’s currency enjoyed an official exchange rate of 6 kyats to the dollar, the market rate was about 750 to the dollar. Those with the right connections, who could buy dollars at 6 kyats, made a killing every time. Currency reform was also a crucial first step to properly accounting for the state’s multi-billion-dollar annual natural gas revenues. The president officially asked for help from the International Monetary Fund. There was feverish opposition from within his own government and parliament, but the president pushed these reforms through nonetheless.
No one had seen anything like this in decades. Those hoping for bold steps on the economic front were encouraged. But would anything happen on the political front?
OVER THAT SPRING and early summer of 2011, Aung San Suu Kyi was not quite ready to accept that real change was taking place. She was working hard, catching up with her party members (those not still in prison) after years of separation, and spending long hours at the NLD headquarters, a small, unprepossessing concrete building next to a furniture shop, with exposed electrical wires, dusty tables stacked high with papers, and a flight of rickety stairs to her little office above. Her physician, Dr. Tin Myo Win, regularly monitored her blood pressure, occasionally giving her injections of a “cocktail drip”—a blend of vitamins, proteins, and glucose—to keep her from collapsing from exhaustion.2
She knew she had to carefully calibrate her next steps and judge whether recent developments amounted to something more than the cosmetic changes she’d expected. Some of her supporters wanted her to be more active in challenging the new government. She considered traveling outside Rangoon, something that in the past had provoked her arrest. Others wanted her to be more conciliatory and call for an end to Western sanctions. Was the new president someone she could work with? There was fear of a trap.
IN MID-JULY, I met ministers Aung Min and Soe Thane for the first time. Both had been senior military men. Aung Min was a retired major general and had been minister of railways for many years. Soe Thane had been minister of industry for a couple of years, since retiring as navy chief. Both were now plotting to take the country along an entirely new and uncertain path.
I had heard of Aung Min from Nay Win Maung. “You should really meet the railways minister,” he told me repeated
ly over many months. “He’s not like the other generals. He listens very carefully and takes notes of everything. You will see.” We met in a downstairs meeting room at his ministry. There was a painting on the wall of a big train. Sweet, milky tea and little fried vegetables were placed on the coffee table in front of us. As I had never met the two men before, throughout the meeting, I didn’t know who was who.
They started by saying that they were my parisad, my audience. The person I later knew was Soe Thane said, “We have read your books and your articles. We have been isolated all our lives. We need new ideas, new knowledge. Please let us know what you think we should know.” It was a disarming introduction. He continued, “We are at a really important moment in the country’s history. Anything can happen. But we have to push for change. We don’t know where we’ll be in six months, we might be in prison, but we have to try.” They explained that their focus was on persuading the president to move fast in a “reformist” direction.
The other man, Aung Min, was the quieter of the two, studying me. He had been an intelligence officer before becoming an infantry commander. He prided himself on being a simple soldier. “I’m not educated,” he said. His interest now was in helping his friend, the president. They had known each other for decades, fighting together against the Communists, living together in remote villages.
Thein Sein had wanted Aung Min to be the ruling party’s general secretary.3 The other generals questioned whether Aung Min knew enough about the policy challenges ahead and pushed back. Aung Min now wanted to prove his doubters wrong. For months he had been secretly meeting with Nay Win Maung and others in the Egress team, listening to briefing after briefing on every imaginable topic, using a back room in his house. “It was like an intensive care unit,” said one Egress member. “We sat him down and used a projector to show him one PowerPoint after another, for hours a day.” Now Aung Min wanted to hear from me as well.
“Old mentalities need to be overcome!” said Soe Thane. They asked me for my wish list. I had met several generals over the past three years, but no one had ever asked me for anything like an agenda going forward. Not having prepared anything, I simply suggested it would be best if the new government could show initiative in many different areas at once: a release of political prisoners, an outreach to Aung San Suu Kyi, continued economic reform, the beginning of fresh peace talks, and visas for international journalists. “You need the outside world to understand what’s happening,” I argued. I had no expectation that any of my suggestions would go any further than the little Railway Ministry meeting room we were in.
“It’s bad karma to be bayins in Burma,” said Soe Thane. Bayin means “king.” He meant that the country’s problems were almost impossible to fix. He said the new constitutional government, like the army regime, felt it had to prioritize security over everything else. I suggested that the concept of security could be looked at more broadly, as human security, and include new challenges such as climate change. They liked that.
Two weeks later I met them again, this time at Aung Min’s home in Rangoon. It was a suprisingly modest house, smaller than an average middle-class house in an American suburb, surrounded by a high wall. Soe Thane and a number of Egress members, including Nay Win Maung, were already there. There was much discussion of the various reform processes underway and possible next steps. Aung Min and Soe Thane showed me a loose-leaf binder with printouts of foreign news reports welcoming the new president’s actions. They had shown the same loose-leaf binder to the president. It was a way of encouraging him to do more. Aung Min also took out a little notebook, read the suggestions I had made two weeks before, and said they were now working on all of them.
Were these actually the ministers at the heart of the shifts taking place? What really was their relationship with the Egress people I had come to know? Was it all a confidence trick, or the beginning of historic political change? I wasn’t sure. What was clear was that Aung Min and Soe Thane were now working hand in glove with Egress. And they wanted me to be involved and give them ideas on how best to engage with the West.
The mood was informal and candid. Indian dishes were available in the dining room for anyone who wanted to eat. Though everyone was respectful of the former general and admiral, everyone also spoke his mind. There was talk of “hardliners” and “corrupt interests” that were already trying to scuttle the president’s agenda. Aung San Suu Kyi was seen as a possible ally.
On July 14, Aung San Suu Kyi was invited to the annual Martyrs Day ceremony in Rangoon. The ceremony marked the assassination of her father and his colleagues in 1947, but she had been barred from attending it during her years of house arrest. Permission was given, too, for NLD party members and supporters to march to the tomb where the ceremony was held. For the past twenty years, any NLD procession would have been met by police with batons or worse. A day later, Aung San Suu Kyi was allowed to travel to the nearby city of Pegu and give an open-air speech to over a thousand well-wishers. Her staff worked with the army to ensure security. Private newspapers and magazines were for the first time permitted to report her activities.
Changes unthinkable just a few months before were coming thick and fast. In mid-August, the president invited all “armed groups” to peace talks. He said he would soon appoint his negotiation team. He also welcomed back the previously banned UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights, Tomás Quintana, who had not long ago called for a war crimes tribunal against the former regime. The Red Cross was given access to the country’s prisons. That same week Thein Sein, in a speech to an unprecedented gathering of Burmese charities and activist groups, including ones closely affiliated with the opposition, encouraged exiles to return, stating that only those who had committed serious crimes such as murder risked prosecution.
Next came a watershed. U Myint, the former UN official and now chief economic advisor to the president, had organized a National Workshop on the Reforms for National Economic Development. Aung San Suu Kyi was invited to attend. On August 19, after days of quiet meditation, she traveled to Naypyitaw for the first time, arriving in an official motorcade accompanied by the chief of the Special Branch (the secret police). Hla Maung Shwe, the shrimp merchant, Egress leader, and one-time political prisoner, helped make arrangements.4
Once in Naypyitaw, she met Thein Sein in his office for over an hour, just the two of them. A photograph released to the press afterward shows them standing together, smiling, underneath a portrait of her father. Thein Sein then walked her over to his private apartments and introduced her to his family. His wife embraced her. Aung San Suu Kyi told journalists afterward that she was “happy and satisfied” with this first encounter.5
The workshop itself was a big success. Several hundred people attended, including leading government officials, businessmen, and scholars who had been in exile until just days before. There was open and often heated debate. Aung San Suu Kyi attended two of the sessions, escorted by a beaming U Myint. During the coffee break she met separately with Aung Min and Soe Thane. The ministers said they wanted to work with the Nobel laureate. “Let us know how we can assist,” they said.
The next month, I met Aung San Suu Kyi myself for the first time in over twenty years. She had lived in New York from 1969–71, working at the UN, and some of my earliest memories were of seeing her at our home in Riverdale. In the 1980s I visited her a couple of times in Oxford. And in 1996, on my first trip back to Rangoon after the 1988 uprising, I tried to see her again. We spoke over the phone and she invited me to lunch the next day, but at the army checkpoint near her house I was told in no uncertain terms that I was not allowed to proceed. The regime made it a condition of any future trip back to Burma that I was not to communicate with her in any way.
I met her at her little office upstairs at the NLD’s headquarters. She was relaxed and friendly, asking after my family, in particular my parents, who had been her contemporaries back in her New York days. She said, “Come over for a meal soon, so we have more time to pr
operly catch up.” I assured her I would be pleased to help in any way I could.
Nearly everyone in the country now felt a positive momentum. A door that no one thought would ever open was being unlocked. But the question remained: was Thein Sein, a career Burmese army officer and former junta member, genuine in his desire to move the country toward true democracy?
THEIN SEIN WAS BORN in a little village next to a creek at the western end of the Irrawaddy delta, not far from the sea. Just offshore was the island of Negrais, where in 1759 over one hundred English traders and their African servants were massacred by a Burmese king. For half the year, the village baked in the hot sun. During the other half, monsoon rains flooded the seemingly endless paddy fields and turned the roads to mud. In the 1950s, when Thein Sein was growing up, there was no electricity, only wood and bamboo huts. His parents were landless and poor, doing odd jobs when they could. Thein Sein was the youngest of three, with an older brother and sister.6
Thein Sein did well at the village monastery school and so the headmen sent him to Bassein, the nearby town. It was a precarious existence. After the fifth grade he had to drop out for a time and work back in the village because of lack of money. When he finally finished, rather than going to university, which he thought would be too expensive, he took the entrance exam for the Defense Services Academy. He was accepted, and became an officer.
From graduation in the late 1960s onward, the army was his life. He was posted all around the country. In the 1980s, he fought in pitched battles against Chinese-backed Communists. It was in those years that he first met Aung Min. In 1995, he received his first regional command, in the eastern highlands near Laos. By then he was a senior figure in the military hierarchy, having been promoted step by step by Than Shwe. Than Shwe asked him to chair the National Convention that drafted the constitution, and in 2007 appointed him prime minister. He ran day-to-day administration, traveling extensively to every corner of the country.7 Around 2008, a businessman told me that Thein Sein sometimes phoned him after visiting a village to tell him how desperate the people were and that there was no budget to do anything, and asking if the businessman could make an urgent donation. The businessman said that no other general ever made that kind of request.
The Hidden History of Burma Page 15