The Hidden History of Burma

by The Hidden History of Burma (retail) (epub)

  That spring, things came to a head. Aung Min said he would resign unless the reforms already underway were further strengthened. The president took his side. The vice president then felt cornered and even feared arrest. In May, he retired to a Buddhist monastery and became a monk.

  Thein Sein now had a freer hand. The reformist agenda was ascendant. Aung Min and Soe Thane were moved from their ministries (railways and industry) and placed in charge of the president’s office as “coordinating ministers.” Aung Min was responsible for all aspects of the peace process. Soe Thane was the economic czar. “We formed a protective layer for the president,” explained Soe Thane. The reorganization also allowed the president to focus on the most strategic issues: he went from being nearly overwhelmed with decisions to dealing with a maximum of ten files a day.19 Around the same time, the Myanmar Development Research Institute was established, as a think tank on the economy. The president also expanded his advisory team to include me and others as part of a new National Economic and Social Advisory Council. It was my first official appointment. At our first meeting, I argued that the proper management of new international aid was important, and that aid should be connected to a clear government agenda to fight poverty. I also said that international interest in Burma might not last long and that we had a very narrow window of opportunity, perhaps a year, to get things right.

  The president’s office was soon beefed up with the addition of Waiyan Moethone Thann, all of twenty-two years old and a recent graduate of Singapore Management University. Waiyan acted as assistant to both Aung Min and Soe Thane, and kept in touch daily, sometimes hourly, with me and with other advisors in Rangoon. His little office was about ten yards away from the ministers, and behind the office was a tiny room with a mattress on the floor. Fluent in both Burmese and English, Waiyan literally worked around the clock, taking calls overnight from Western capitals.

  Foreign governments began offering ideas and assistance. So, too, did individuals. George Soros met the president and asked what might be most useful. Soe Thane requested experts to help reform public finances. Tony Blair came with suggestions on a range of issues, from cabinet procedure to communications. There were proposals to place people in the president’s office for short periods as experts in different fields, such as communications. I asked a colleague whether having foreigners in the president’s office was wise, from a security perspective. The colleague replied, “Don’t worry. It will take any foreigner at least five years to understand anything about what’s really going on here.”

  On April 1, 2012, by-elections were held, and the National League for Democracy won a landslide forty-three out of forty-five seats. Aung San Suu Kyi became member of parliament for Kawhmu, a small town south of Rangoon. It was, as much as anything, a referendum on half a century of army rule. People were thrilled to be able to vote freely and show their disdain for the generals. There was growing, begrudging, respect for the ex-general Thein Sein, but he enjoyed nothing like the adulation reserved exclusively for Aung San Suu Kyi. What was clear in those days leading up to the polls was that the fear so prevalent just a year ago had disappeared. I remember jubilant NLD supporters, confident of victory, cheering wildly as they drove around downtown Rangoon in open-air trucks. Expectations were also rising, among many ordinary people and foreign observers, that all Burma’s problems would soon be solved. The Americans and the European Union almost immediately relaxed sanctions. Burma was rejoining the world.

  Aung San Suu Kyi then took her victory lap, with Thailand her first stop. It was her first time outside the country since 1987. Departing from a Rangoon plagued by chronic electricity shortages, and allowed by the pilot of the Thai Airways flight to join him in the cockpit, she found herself “completely fascinated” by the bright lights of Bangkok. She attended the East Asia Summit of the World Economic Forum, and received a standing ovation as she entered the conference hall to give a keynote address.20

  She soon flew to Oslo to finally accept in person her 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, more than twenty years after the award was made. Just outside Oslo, she attended a conference on peace mediation. I was there, too, as was Soe Thane. One of the other attendees was Bono, who seemed curious about Soe Thane—the former junta man turned reformist—and asked to see him in private. I joined them, at Soe Thane’s request. And so, for about an hour in a little room, the windows revealing a brightly lit Norwegian forest just outside, Soe Thane, Bono, and I talked about Burma and its potential. Bono was excited and drew attention specifically to a UK-led effort called the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, which aimed to improve the management of natural resources worldwide. “We’re already working on it, Mr. Bono!” said Soe Thane. “Please come to Burma, Mr. Bono, and help us. We are trying our best and need all the help we can get.”

  Bono then whisked Aung San Suu Kyi off in his private plane to Ireland, where she received a prize from Amnesty International in a packed Dublin theater. Three hours of special performances followed, including songs by Bono and the cast of Riverdance. Bono admitted he was star-struck. A couple of days later, on her sixty-sixth birthday, Aung San Suu Kyi received an honorary degree from Oxford. John Le Carré, who also received an honorary degree that day, said, “It was magic.” Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former head of MI5, was also there, and said, “I don’t think there was a dry eye in the house.”21

  In London, Aung San Suu Kyi was given the very rare privilege of addressing both houses of Parliament. John Bercow, the Speaker of the House of Commons, described her as “the conscience of a country and a heroine for humanity.” When she met Prince Charles that day at Clarence House, nearly all the staff gathered outside to watch her plant a tree in the garden. The prince joked, “Is nobody doing anything in the office today?” before turning to Aung San Suu Kyi to say, “They are all very pleased to see you.”

  In September, she was in Washington. At the White House, President Obama expressed his admiration for “her courage, determination, and personal sacrifice.” And at the Capitol rotunda, in front of a packed gathering of American political leaders, she was given the Congressional Gold Medal, the country’s highest civilian award, which she had been awarded in absentia four years before; George Washington, the Dalai Lama, and Pope John Paul II were past recipients. “It’s almost too delicious to believe, my friend,” said Hillary Clinton.22 John McCain called her his “hero.” Mitch McConnell compared her to Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Laura Bush was there, too, and credited her for “breaking the legitimacy” of the military regime. Aung San Suu Kyi called the day “one of the most moving days of my life.”23 She thanked everyone for their steadfast support during the dark days of dictatorship, and graciously acknowledged “the reform measures instituted by President U Thein Sein.” Aung Min was in town on a separate trip, and watched from the side.

  THERE IS A MYTH in the West that Burma’s reforms in 2011 were the result of a desire to tilt away from China. The truth was much more complex. But there was one person in the top leadership who, though not anti-China, was keen to bring the country as close to the West as possible. That person was Soe Thane.

  Soe Thane was born a little more than a year after Burma’s independence, at the height of the civil war, in Twante, a little town just west of Rangoon. From childhood he knew that he wanted to join the navy. After graduating top of his class at the Defense Services Academy, he took part in operations around the country, against Karen rebels in the Irrawaddy delta, bandits in Arakan, and around the islands off Mergui. This was in the 1960s and 1970s, when Burma had few international contacts.

  In 1979, the up-and-coming naval officer was chosen to be part of the Burmese military delegation that attended the funeral of Earl Mountbatten of Burma, a much-loved figure in Burma. As Allied commander in Southeast Asia during the Second World War, he had decided to aid the Burmese partisans led by Aung San (Aung San Suu Kyi’s father), at a time when many British Army chiefs wanted them strung up as erstwhile Japanese collaborators. Unt
il he was assassinated by the Irish Republican Army near his summer home in Ireland, Mountbatten maintained a friendly relationship with Burmese leaders, including the autocrat Ne Win.

  The trip was Soe Thane’s first time overseas. Together with five other young officers, Soe Thane arrived four days before the actual funeral, staying at a little bed and breakfast in Bayswater, central London. The Burmese embassy had given them only three pounds a day to live on, so the men settled on daily meals of fermented fish paste (the Burmese condiment of choice) which they had brought in a little jar from home, spread over nan bread bought from an Indian restaurant next door. London in the late 1970s was an eye-opener for them. Soe Thane visited the British Museum, Madame Tussaud’s, and Foyle’s bookshop. “And the buses ran on time!” he told me. He was very impressed.

  After the funeral, he stayed on as an official guest of the British government, which put him up at the Hyde Park Hotel (“full of sheiks”). He was now with his boss, Admiral Chit Hlaing, who told him it was English custom to slip ten pounds under the pillow every morning for the maids (“Don’t forget!”). They traveled together to Portsmouth for a naval exhibition, and the British sold them a corvette warship on loan. These were the days when Western militaries had no compunction about helping the Burmese. He rode in a hovercraft for the first time.

  A few years later, he went to Denmark to buy an Osprey gunboat with a loan from the Danish governmental aid agency (ostensibly to guard fisheries), and spent a month training in the North Sea. Soe Thane loved his time in Denmark. He remembers the cleanliness, the well-lit highways, and the “well-to-do people who rode public transportation.”

  Soe Thane didn’t care much about politics. “I joined the navy to see the world,” he said. He rose through the ranks, and by 2005 was navy chief and a member of the ruling junta. By then the West was off-limits, so he encouraged ties with India, visiting the country often and sending his men there for courses. By 2010, Soe Thane was the only Western-trained officer left in the Burmese military leadership. By 2011, he was the principal architect of the normalization of ties with the West.

  Soe Thane was very unusual for a Burmese minister. Whereas others tended to shun foreigners, he sought them out. At diplomatic receptions, other ministers liked to stay in a penned area together with just their host ambassador. Soe Thane eagerly mixed in the crowd. He deliberately imitated what he considered the ways of a Western government or organization. He had visitors sit around a “working table.” And he wanted to send a generation of Burmese youngsters to the best universities in Europe and America.

  In 2012, Soe Thane was pushing hard on multiple fronts for an end to Western sanctions. He went to Davos for the annual economic forum and hobnobbed with top businessmen and political leaders. Short, with little round glasses and a ready smile, he became Burma’s main cheerleader abroad, speaking frankly but optimistically about the country’s prospects and the challenges facing his boss, whom he referred to as “Mr. President.”

  He negotiated the visits of a slew of Western leaders, and was keen to direct the aid that was now beginning to flow into the country. At a meeting with visiting Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, he responded to her comments on democracy, media freedom, and the remaining political prisoners by saying, “Don’t worry, we will take care of all that. From Denmark what we need is help with dairy. Please help us set up a dairy industry.” He would not take no for an answer.

  He also arranged President Thein Sein’s trips to London, New York, and Washington. I worked with him in writing speeches and talking points. In New York, Henry Kissinger dropped by to “see with my own eyes the generals who were giving up power.”

  BARACK OBAMA CAME to Burma in November 2012. Ulysses Grant had visited in 1879 as part of a post-retirement round-the-world tour. Herbert Hoover worked in Burma as a mining engineer at the turn of the century. And Richard Nixon made a trip as vice president, stepping out of his motorcade to confront left-wing student protesters on the side of the road. But Obama was the first sitting US president to visit Burma.

  From the airport to Rangoon, tens of thousands lined up to cheer the leader of the free world. His arrival represented for many Burma’s readmission to the international community, after a quarter century of self-imposed isolation and then twenty more years of Western sanctions. Along the way, he turned to his assistant secretary of state for Asia, Kurt Campbell, and said, “Tell me about Burma.” In his memoir, Campbell wrote that he gave the president a ten-minute “abbreviated history of this most enchanting, vexed place.” He told Obama of the country’s “still pristine hardwood forests, raging rivers, and native tigers,” the “many contending and distrustful ethnic groups,” and “years of brutal, unrelenting military rule.”

  As they passed the towering Shwedagon Pagoda, Campbell declared, “No visit to Burma is complete really without a visit to the Shwedagon.” Obama replied, “If it’s so amazing, why aren’t we going?” The Secret Service had earlier vetoed the idea, not least because it meant they and everyone else would have to enter the pagoda precincts barefoot. Obama insisted. And so they made an impromptu stop, performing a little ceremony at the shrine for people born on a Friday (as Obama had been) and ringing a giant bronze bell with a wooden stick.24

  Obama then called on Thein Sein, remarking on “the incredible potential of this beautiful country.” Thein Sein said his meetings with Obama “were the best of all his meetings with foreign visitors”: friendly, businesslike, and productive. Obama then met Aung San Suu Kyi, who spoke at length about the minutiae of the current political scene. “The young people have very high expectations,” she told him, “and of course we don’t want to let them down.”25

  The highlight of the short (six-hour) visit was a speech at Rangoon University. The messaging was perfect: it was the site of first anti-colonial and then anti-military regime protests; its sorry state was symbolic of all that was wrong with Burma’s past. Hundreds of leading figures from across Burma’s political spectrum were in the spruced-up Convocation Hall, with Hillary Clinton sitting next to Aung San Suu Kyi.

  I was there too. Obama gave a stirring speech. In a country used to generals and bureaucrats reading long-winded papers, it was without a doubt the best speech any Burmese in the room had ever heard. “Something is happening in this country that cannot be reversed,” Obama said, “and the will of the people can lift up this nation and set a great example for the world.

  “It was here that U Thant learned the ways of the world before guiding it at the United Nations. . . . This country, like my own country, is blessed with diversity. Not everybody looks the same. Not everybody comes from the same region. Not everybody worships in the same way. . . . I say this because my own country and my own life have taught me the power of diversity.” He received a standing ovation.

  An hour later, on Air Force One, Obama went over to his close aide Ben Rhodes and said, “That was worth doing.”26

  THE STORY HAD CHANGED, but the world saw only a fairytale. Few did their homework to really understand what was driving the positive momentum and how best to keep it going.

  By 2013, there was a deepening split between the president and Soe Thane on the one side and Shwe Mann on the other, more a personal falling-out than a difference in worldview. As Aung San Suu Kyi drew closer to Shwe Mann, her relationship with Thein Sein steadily deteriorated. In September 2012, Aung San Suu Kyi was still very positive about the government and her partnership with it. A few months later, she was warning Obama, “We have to be very careful that we are not lured by a mirage of success.”27 Those wanting simply to support change found themselves divided between the two different camps. After our first meeting I tried several times, over many months, to see Aung San Suu Kyi again as she had suggested, but without success—likely because some around her felt that I had become too close to a presidential team she no longer trusted.

  There were also other warning lights flashing. Over the summer of 2011, the seventeen-year-old ceasef
ire in the north between the army and the Kachin Independence Organization broke down, leading to all-out war. In Arakan, over the summer and autumn of 2012, savage clashes between Buddhist and Muslim communities left almost 200 people dead and around 140,000 displaced. And in Rangoon and Naypyitaw, with the easier economic reforms out of the way, the entire future of the economy seemed up for grabs.

  There had been an alignment of the stars: at exactly the same moment when Washington was looking for ways to engage the Burmese generals, the generals did just enough to justify that engagement. This dynamic led to greater political freedom for the Burmese than any time in half a century, and a rapprochement with the West. But now, deeper issues around race and money were coming to the fore.

  SEVEN

  BLOOD AND BELONGING

  TO ACHIEVE SUCCESS, it was worth trying the unexpected. Aung Min told me he had watched Lawrence of Arabia and drew lessons from the Englishman’s unorthodox ways. In 2011, he became the government’s chief peace negotiator. Whereas Soe Thane was an extrovert with long-time experience of the West, a halting English speaker who enjoyed foreign company and thought in broad strategic terms, Aung Min was the opposite, an introverted former intelligence officer who spoke next to no English, had never been to the West, and who always looked for tactical advantage.

  Aung Min was a much decorated soldier who had survived a Communist ambush that killed all twelve others in his column, then killed seventeen of the insurgents single-handedly before help arrived.1 He was also an intensely practical man. In the late 2000s, as minister of railways, he was keen that his ministry win at least one medal in the annual inter-ministry sports tournament. To ensure this, he had an aide go to Chinatown in Rangoon and find the best ping-pong player he could, give him a contract as a Railways Ministry employee, and enter him in the tournament. He won a gold medal.