Under the military junta, people were frequently jailed for their beliefs, but only after they had expressed them in public. Opinion was never as tightly controlled in Myanmar as in North Korea or Saudi Arabia. “It’s always been a pleasure working here compared to Cambodia, for example, where the intelligentsia is restricted,” said Vicky Bowman, a former British ambassador. “Here, the intelligentsia has always been visible. Sometimes it’s been in jail; sometimes it’s had to wait to publish. But it has always been around.”
Although the generals who seized power in 1988 kept the borders largely closed, the attention of the outside world remained vital to their opponents. “Please use your liberty to promote ours,” Aung San Suu Kyi famously said in 1997. The opposition no longer needed that outside amplification so urgently by 2014. There was a great deal of parsing this change among the people I met and a great many attempts to quantify it. The poet and activist Maung Tin Thit quipped that people who used to be arrested secretly for their radical views would now be arrested publicly. The artist Aye Ko, a leader in the 1988 uprising and later a political prisoner, said, “I won’t believe this government until they are out of power.” The comedian Lu Maw drew upon his reserve of catchphrases to characterize the ostensible reforms. “Snakes shed their skin, but they are still snakes,” he told me. “From 1952 up to now, same military. Only a new uniform every so often. Now, same guys but without the uniform.”
Ko Minn Latt, the young, dynamic mayor of a township in Mon State who hopes to run for Parliament, said, “As the people get less frightened, they get more angry, because it’s safe to be angry now. Ten percent are busy with religion, ten percent with getting rich, and the other eighty percent are furious. But problems built during the last sixty years can’t be solved within three. This is a ‘distorted democracy’—not only because these changes are led by the military government, which is still in power, but also because the people don’t yet know how to function in a democracy.” Still, he believed that the leadership had become too attached to their newfound status on the world stage to relinquish it; reform now afforded the ego boost once achieved through the brutal exercise of power.
Moe Satt, an independent art curator, told me that Burmese artists had begun to talk about postmodernism. “But how can we make postmodern comments on a premodern society?” he asked. “There’s a lot of catching up to do first.” He felt that many Burmese artists and intellectuals were unready to create work from the vantage of authority. “We resist the end of pressure,” he explained, commenting on how artists can do their best work under oppression, be it political oppression or market oppression. Nay Phone Latt, who served four years of his twenty-year sentence for blogging about the Saffron Revolution, said, “The people are not accustomed to taking responsibility; they imagine it will be done for them. If there’s not yet democracy here, that is not only the fault of the generals.”
Even the partial and flawed reforms, however, have made for palpable change. Author and presidential adviser Thant Myint-U said, “For ordinary people, especially the bottom fifty percent, daily life is not much better at all. But the country was based on fear, and now the fear has been taken out of the equation.” Sammy Samuels, a Burmese Jew who owns a travel agency called Myanmar Shalom, said, “Two, three years ago, every time I come back from the United States, I am so scared at the airport even though I have nothing on me. The immigration officer starts asking, ‘What were you doing there?’ Now, they’ve start saying, ‘Welcome back.’ ” Even pessimists do not predict that things will slip back to the previous level of oppression; they worry about how reform might stall, not about how it might regress.
As the government began loosening its reins, people developed absurdly high expectations that foreign investment would pour in, new airports would be built, and everyone would become wealthy. A friend commented to a cabdriver on how bad the roads were, and the cabbie said, “If Aung San Suu Kyi is elected, this will all be paved.” In reality, the absence of basic services continues to impede authentic progress. Many have been disappointed to realize how slow development is anywhere. The Burmese call the Internet the Internay—nay being the Burmese word for “slow”—and the Web is accessible to only about 1 percent of the nation’s 60 million people. “Nothing works here,” said Lucas Stewart, literature adviser to the British Council in Yangon. “Everything breaks. Everything has been illegally bought so it’s all secondhand, broken crap from China and Thailand. Skype doesn’t work here. It takes a day to download a three- or four-minute video clip.” A recent survey showed that mobile-phone usage was lower in Myanmar than even in North Korea or Somalia, though the price of a SIM card has recently come down from over $1,500 to less than $15. Most cars are secondhand Japanese models outfitted with right-hand drive, even though traffic regulations are set up for left-hand drive. Automobiles are still unaffordable for most people, but much less out of reach; the streets, long empty, are now often choked with traffic.
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Many great wars and revolutions are catalyzed: the assassination of Franz Ferdinand started World War I; the kidnapping of Mikhail Gorbachev heralded the demise of the Soviet Union; Mohamed Bouazizi set himself afire in Tunisia and launched the Arab Spring. The reforms in Myanmar seemed to materialize out of the blue. There is no consensus about the reasons for these changes, no agreement about why they happened at the precise time they did. They were not the consequence of a groundswell, but a top-down affair, a controlled process of reconfiguring national policy. US ambassador Derek Mitchell said, “Myanmar might have had a Tiananmen-like moment of voices coming up from the ground in 1988 or even 2007. But now it’s a bureaucratic move from on high.” He added that the regime could probably have limped along for a while, just as the Soviet Union might have persisted if Gorbachev hadn’t started to dismantle it. Openness can sometimes seem like the best option even to dictators.
The junta has claimed that liberalization is a seven-step process initiated in 2003, so it is possible that, like Gorbachev’s glasnost, the loosening was started by people who did not realize how far it would go. The final step on the 2003 road map was to vest power in a new government—but it was supposed to be a government of the military leaders’ choosing. President Thein Sein, who assumed power in 2011, is the first leader of Myanmar who has avoided the taint of corruption. “They erroneously chose a good guy instead of a corrupt one,” Ma Thanegi said. “So now they have to live with the consequences.”
Some Burmese feel that international sanctions were the triggering factor, impoverishing the country and isolating its rulers. As Myanmar became noticeably poorer than neighbors such as Cambodia and Laos, and dramatically more so than Thailand and Singapore, its leaders lost face, and their choke hold on the country became less attractive even to them. Many people were chronically malnourished; according to UNICEF, one in four Burmese children is underweight and about a third have stunted growth. Many lack reliable access to clean water. The crushing of the Saffron Revolution of 2007 was widely covered by the foreign press, blackening the junta’s already dismal international image.
Perhaps most significantly, global isolation had made the country dangerously reliant on China, which in a long and contentious mutual history has never prioritized Myanmar’s interests. One government official complained to me of expectations that the Burmese would supply their Chinese overlords with drugs, prostitutes, and a venue for gambling. The Arab Spring had been instructive, too, and the junta may have thought it better to initiate concessions than to wait until the restive population became ungovernable. Members of the junta and their “cronies”—the corrupt businessmen, many ex-military, who have profited under the regime—had witnessed the pathetic demises of Muammar Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein; they apparently preferred to go the way of Suharto’s circle in Indonesia, who had retained their wealth and influence even after he finally ceded power in 1998. No military regime goes permanently unchallenged, and a gradual exit can forestall a harrowing one. As the writer Pe My
int drily put it, “The leaders know that the people can lose several times, but the ruler can lose only once.”
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Myanmar’s isolation, though it has come at a steep price, has preserved the mystical inwardness of the country’s Buddhist majority. Shwedagon Pagoda is among the holiest sites in the land, and people come from near and far to worship at it. The generals are said to have embellished the central stupa with many tons of gold—not gold leaf, but thick plates of solid gold—and receptacles full of jewels hang near its apex. Many Burmese maintain that the pagoda is worth more than the Bank of England. Incongruous in the modernizing city of Yangon, it stands momentous and transcendent, the St. Peter’s Basilica of Theravada Buddhism. Golden stupas glitter in the sun wherever you go in Myanmar. In the shadow of these hallowed towers, peasants labor in rough conditions. One local mordantly remarked to me that the country is rich, but the people are poor.
For many, life seems to have gone on largely unchanged for centuries: peasants, oxcarts, the same staple diet and simple clothes, the same glittering pagodas, gilded in the richer towns, merely painted in the poor ones. Nothing ever happens when it should; it’s amazing that the sun sets on schedule. The country strikes an uneasy balance among this past way of life, still extant in the present; a present life of nascent contact with the outside world and the stirrings of reform; and a fully imagined future of democracy and prosperity about which many people spoke as though it were both incomprehensible and inevitable.
Tourists, who bring in a large share of Myanmar’s official revenues, come to marvel at historical relics that its citizens often undervalue. Thant Myint-U observed that no one in Myanmar had ever had a pleasant experience living in a building over thirty years old. Some seven hundred significant structures have been demolished in the historic center of Yangon over the past fifteen years. Many of the grand colonial buildings that remain belong to government ministries, but in 2005, the government decamped to Naypyidaw, leaving their fate uncertain. Those that are privately owned are often encumbered with lawsuits, rent-controlled tenants, and nonresident rights holders (including defunct government agencies), creating a legal mess for any prospective preservationist.
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Myanmar was a British colony until 1944, known as Burma until 1989. The British occupied part of the territory in 1834, then cobbled the multiethnic country together as a buffer for the Raj in India, expanding to the country’s current borders by 1885. The colonial administration ruled the various ethnic groups directly, demanding only loyalty to the crown. Burma became a major battleground between the Allies and the Japanese in World War II, and the country lost hundreds of thousands of civilians. Military hero General Aung San—the father of Aung San Suu Kyi—forged a pact of ethnic unity as a means to gain independence from Great Britain, but promised the ethnicities regional autonomy if they would support him, assuring them that they could withdraw from the federation after a decade if they were unhappy with the centralized government. Then Aung San was assassinated even before independence was granted in 1948, and a dysfunctional democracy emerged. The Karen, the Shan, and the Kachin ethnic groups declared their independence. All wanted to break away from this artificial country that had not, they felt, fulfilled its promises. In 1962, the failed democracy collapsed in a bloodless coup led by Ne Win, former head of the Burmese army. He controlled the country for a generation of entrenched isolation and economic mayhem under the banner of socialism. By the mid-1980s, Ne Win, in power too long, resorted to increasingly brutal tactics, with intense censorship, pervasive graft, and oppressive control: citizens had to register everywhere they went.
The 1988 student uprisings, in which Aung San Suu Kyi first emerged as a significant figure, sought to replace Ne Win’s autocratic version of socialism with democracy. They were galvanized by a fight in a tea shop during which a student was killed by police. The students were young and inexperienced, however, and after several months of burgeoning protests during which Ne Win resigned, the military responded with a violent crackdown (believed to have been orchestrated by Ne Win), indiscriminately killing students, monks, and even schoolchildren. Students had led the uprising, so the new military government restricted education, believing that uneducated people were easier to rule. They thereby dismantled one of Asia’s fine educational systems, with literacy at the time approaching 80 percent. Initially, universities were shut down; then private and missionary schools were shuttered as well. In 1990, the country held its first free elections, in which Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD won a landslide victory, but the military refused to relinquish control.
A country that the British had left with reasonably well-managed institutions had morphed into one with no human infrastructure, no legal infrastructure, and only a dilapidated physical infrastructure. There was no education, no health-care system, no railway service. Once-maintained roads, bridges, and railways soon deteriorated to near impassibility. This police state relied on a network of informers. Tea shops where students had once gathered were targeted by military intelligence. Fortunately, informers were fairly easy to spot: members of the military were the only ones who regularly wore socks, to keep their boots from rubbing against their feet. A knowing eye could identify even snoops in sandals by the rings around their ankles.
The so-called 88 Generation always remained active; some set up radio stations in neighboring countries to keep opposing viewpoints in circulation. The spirit of protest never disappeared, and after another two decades of subjugation, discontent boiled over with the Saffron Revolution in 2007, after which a quasi-democratic constitution was introduced in 2008. It is in some ways an admirable document, but it contains deeply troubling clauses. One stipulates that the military is guaranteed 25 percent of the seats in Parliament, while another blocks any changes to the constitution unless they are supported by more than 75 percent of the parliamentary vote. This creates a broad military veto. There is popular debate about how exactly the constitution should be changed, though there is broad agreement that the role of the military should be reduced and that government processes should be more democratic. Can the constitution be amended to enshrine rights for ethnic minorities? Can the military veto be restricted? Can urgent environmental issues be addressed? How should the constitution be enforced? At least four hundred laws remain on the books that contradict the basic rights it establishes.
Nor has education recovered from the systematic attack it endured, though literacy has improved in recent years. The government now pays young people to study, but many still choose not to do so. Most schooling is focused on rote learning, and most teachers can be bribed, given their measly official salary of $60 a month. Progressive teachers complain that it is nearly impossible to teach critical thinking to students who have never heard of dissent. The urban university campuses were reopened as institutes of higher learning only in 2014. “In a democracy, the people are the key players,” Nay Phone Latt commented, “and if they are not educated, how can they fulfill this function?” Ko Minn Latt, the ambitious mayor in Mon State, became involved in politics after seeing a seventh-grade schoolgirl shot down by police in 1988. “I was at first one of the activists. I want this and I want this. No compromise, no discussion,” he said. “What I am trying to do now is to help people to become democrats.”
The country that is now Myanmar has rarely focused its military power outward; it could never stand up to China or India, the leviathans between which it is sandwiched. The military’s main preoccupation is securing the borders with Bangladesh and Thailand and quelling the various ethnic militias that have doggedly struggled for generations to gain autonomy. Burmese exiles interviewed in camps in Thailand some years ago said they wanted only to return home, no matter what the government did or said. These days, popular sentiment holds that the junta leaders should apologize, but need not stand trial or be punished. The generals can see that sentiment is moving in the direction of accountability, and they react with a not entirely irrational paranoia.
American Buddhist monk Alan Clements interviewed Suu Kyi in 1995 for his book The Voice of Hope. Clements wondered how she would reconcile the Buddhist idea of forgiveness with the need to punish oppressors. She said that if the generals would confess to their crimes, it would be easier to forgive them. The result was an immediate crackdown. No South African–style “truth and reconciliation committees” will be forming anytime soon in Myanmar. Everyone understands that the generals will walk away only if their bank accounts are secure. “They’re old and they don’t want to go through the effort of looking after the country again,” Ma Thanegi said. “They’re not interested. In fact, they were never interested. At this point, I don’t care if they are not punished. It’s a luxury to punish them, and we don’t have that luxury.”
The government of Myanmar, long based in Yangon, was moved abruptly in 2005 to the brand-new planned city of Naypyidaw, about two hundred miles north in what had previously been wilderness. The United States had built a highly fortified embassy in Yangon after the September 11 attacks and declined to move to the new capital. I attended one demonstration in Yangon, the organizers of which—having obtained the requisite permits—were protesting the requirement to obtain permits to demonstrate. The crowd was angry and their message was clear, but the government officials and legislators at whom it was aimed would neither hear nor see it. Naypyidaw is a city of government functionaries, largely out of reach of the radicals in Yangon and Mandalay. This geographical buffer protects the government from its own people.
Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change Page 50