by Amitav Ghosh
The irony is that nothing better illustrates the passing of these values than Suu Kyi's predicament. In the postmodern world, politics is everywhere a matter of symbols, and the truth is that Suu Kyi is her own greatest political asset. It is only because Burma's 1988 democracy movement had a symbol, personified in Suu Kyi, that the world remembers it and continues to exert pressure on the current regime. Otherwise, the world would almost certainly have forgotten Burma's slain and dispersed democrats just as quickly as it has forgotten many others like them in the past.
The golf-playing generals who run Burma are, of course, well aware of this situation. If it were not for Suu Kyi and the increasingly vocal support for her abroad, SLORC's leaders would have scarcely a worry as they tee off on the links. Under house arrest, Suu Kyi was a living reproach to the regime and a bar to many foreign investors. By releasing her, the junta achieved a minor propaganda coup.
SLORC is headed by four of the Burmese Army's senior generals. The man who is widely believed to be the brains behind the regime's adroit maneuverings over the past several years is Lieutenant General Khin Nyunt, the longtime chief of Burma's intelligence apparatus and a political operator of formidable skill. After the events of 1988, SLORC moved quickly to "liberalize" the economy and invite foreign investment. No one knows exactly how much money the regime has attracted (the government claims to have got $3 billion), but the single largest investment is a billion-dollar gas pipeline financed by the French company Total and the American energy conglomerate Unocal.
SLORC takes particular pride in what it has done to end the forty-eight-year-old civil war with the country's ethnic insurgents. Again through shrewd political maneuvering, SLORC has forced many of the country's insurgents to negotiate. Fifteen groups have concluded ceasefire agreements with Rangoon, and the official press frequently claims that these agreements show that the insurgents have entered "the legal fold."
When I mentioned the ceasefires, Suu Kyi said, "There were reports in the Thai papers a couple of weeks ago that there is a constant flow of arms across the border, which indicates that the insurgents are continuing to accumulate arms. That does not sound very much as though they were preparing for permanent peace." I had already decided that I wanted to investigate the government's claims for myself.
In SLORC's official usage, Burma is now Myanmar, Rangoon is now Yangon, Karenni is now Kayah, and so on. But most of the people I spoke to used the old forms. As I was rising to leave, I asked Suu Kyi to resolve the dilemma; since she is effectively the country's elected leader, she had as good a right as anyone to decide what it should be called.
"I think it's very foolish," she said. "The excuse [that the authorities] gave was that Burma was a colonial name and referred only to the Burmese people, and Myanmar included all the other ethnic groups. This is just not true. Myanmar is a literary form of Bama, which means Burmese. So what it is all about I do not know. Some people say it is yedea—a propitiatory rite, something to prevent bad fortune. The authorities believe a lot in astrology."
"Would you rather I used the old names?" I asked.
She laughed. "Yes, please use the old forms," she said. "As support for a sensible way of looking at things. I do not like narrow-mindedness. Even if these names were given by the British colonialists, so what? After all, India is called India and not Bharat, and China is China. I think if you have enough confidence in yourself, you should not worry about what you are called."
Among the Insurgents
Two days after my meeting with Aung San Suu Kyi, I heard that fighting had broken out between the Burmese Army and a contingent of Karenni insurgents. The Karenni were supported by a regiment of dissident Burmese students, and the fighting was concentrated in a remote and mountainous border region adjoining northwestern Thailand. The official Burmese media had listed the Karenni among the groups that had been brought back into the legal fold through SLORC's ceasefire policy. There was no mention of any fighting.
I found myself wondering, What is Burma (or Myanmar, for that matter)? Who are the Karenni insurgents? What has driven them to fight for so long, with such tenacity? Are the two aspects of Burma—the areas under the control of Rangoon and those claimed by the insurgents—really so distant from each other? I recalled an anecdote told to me by a senior diplomat in Bangkok, about Thailand's immensely revered monarch, King Bhumibol, who had personally overseen his country's passage to democracy. The king had remarked that an overhasty transition to democracy in Burma might produce a situation similar to the one in Bosnia, only worse. If this was so, what were the prospects of democracy in any multiethnic society?
When the Burmese offensive was in its second week, I flew to the border town of Mae Hong Son, in northwestern Thailand. It was a clear day, and I watched in awe as the red riverine plains of the south changed into jagged, densely forested mountains, a pristine landscape of misted valleys and towering ridges. I could see no sign of any habitation until Mae Hong Son itself appeared suddenly in my window, a string of teakwood buildings nestled in a deep valley.
At first glance, Mae Hong Son seemed to be a quiet and prosperous frontier town. It was hard to imagine that a war was being fought in the surrounding mountains. I was surprised by the number of hotels on offer. I picked a Holiday Inn. From my room I glimpsed a turquoise swimming pool ringed by European tourists sipping vividly colored drinks in umbrellaed glasses. Within half an hour, my contacts in Mae Hong Son, members of a Burmese student group, sent a guide to take me back across the Burma border into a Karenni-held area that was currently under attack.
We rented a motor scooter and went rattling off down a dirt track that ended at a village near the foot of the mountains. We waded across a stream and started climbing. It was about five in the afternoon, and the sun had already dipped behind a ridge. Following a steeply ascending trail, we stepped from twilight into the darkness of a densely canopied forest. Neither my guide nor I had thought to bring a flashlight; he was wearing rubber sandals and I a pair of thin-soled leather shoes.
I began to regret my precipitate departure from the Holiday Inn. Clawing at the undergrowth to keep from falling, I feared I would end up with a snake in my fist. By the time we stumbled into the students' base camp, hours later, exhaustion had erased every thought from my mind. It was all I could do to stay on my feet.
Half a dozen young guerrillas dressed in camouflage fatigues were squatting around a campfire by a bamboo hut, playing guitars. A heavyset, thickly bearded man detached himself from the group and stepped over to meet me. He introduced himself as the commander of the regiment. He looked me over as I sat panting on a rock. After a moment's hesitation, he asked, a little shyly, "Are you Indian?" I then noticed that his spoken English sounded oddly like my own. I nodded and, through a veil of exhaustion, took another look at him. Suddenly I sat up. "And you?" I asked.
"My parents were Indian," he said with a smile. "But I'm Burmese."
After my ordeal in the jungle, I was not quite prepared for such an eminently postmodern encounter. My astonishment must have been evident in my face, for the commander began to laugh.
He was called Ko Sonny, but his given name, I learned, was Mahinder Singh. He was in his early thirties and had been "in the jungle" almost eight years. His family had been settled in Burma for three generations. His parents were born there; his father was Sikh and his mother Hindu, both from families of well-to-do Indian businessmen.
I was disconcerted listening to Sonny in the flickering firelight. I was sure that our relatives had known one another once in Burma; his had chosen to stay and mine hadn't. Except for a few years and a couple of turns of fate, each of us could have been in the other's place.
I spent the night on a bamboo pallet in Sonny's hut. The next day I was jolted awake before dawn by the sound of a Burmese Army artillery barrage. After groping for a match, I stepped outside to find Sonny talking into a walkie-talkie. The Burmese Army had launched an assault on a Karenni position in an adjoining valley.
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br /> The fighting was a good distance away, but the sound of gunfire came rolling up the misted mountainside with uncanny clarity, the rattle of small-arms fire clearly audible in the lulls between exploding artillery shells. The noise sent flocks of parakeets shooting out of the mountainside's tangled canopy.
With daybreak I had my first look at the camp—a string of thatched bamboo huts arranged along a mountain stream. A great deal of thought had gone into the camp's planning. The plumbing was far from rudimentary: water was piped directly into bathrooms and showers from the stream. There was a dammed pond teeming with fish and, nearby, a pen full of pigs.
Next to each hut was a vegetable patch. Once Sonny had ascertained that the fighting was not headed our way, he picked up a watering can and waded into a patch of bok choy. Following his lead, the others put aside their battle gear and disappeared into their pumpkin trellises and mustard beds like a troop of Sunday gardeners.
"Growing food is as important to our survival as fighting," Ko Sonny explained apologetically. "We do this before we go on patrol."
We set out an hour or so later, a detachment of half a dozen student fighters, with Sonny in the lead. Once we had crossed the border, an unmarked forest trail, Sonny and his men reclaimed a cache of aging M-16s and slung them over their shoulders.
We climbed onto a ridge, where I found myself gazing at a majestic spectacle of forested gorges, mountain peaks, and a sky of crisp, pellucid blue. The shelling was sporadic now: occasionally the forest canopy would silently sprout a mushroom cloud of smoke, the accompanying blast climbing leisurely up the slope moments later.
Mae Hong Son was clearly visible, a smudge in the floor of a tip-tilted valley. While Sonny counted off the caliber of the exploding shells—120mm, 81mm—I turned his binoculars on the town and spotted my hotel.
Sonny pointed to the Karenni post we were to visit. It was called Naung Lon and was built around a peak that reared high above the surrounding spurs and ridges. We entered through a gate hidden in a wall of bamboo stakes. After crossing a moat and a barbed-wire barrier, we made our way cautiously past a ring of heavily sandbagged gun emplacements and were met by a Karenni officer, a tall, stooped man with melancholy eyes and an air of regretful doggedness. The officer and his men, like most Karenni insurgents, were devout Christians. The officer himself happened to be a Baptist. His eyes flickered constantly as we spoke. His arm describing a semicircle, he pointed to the Burmese Army positions on the mountaintops around us. The Burmese Army had concentrated ten thousand men in the area, he explained. The Karenni army had a force of about six hundred. He knew that he was defending a hopeless position and had already made plans to evacuate.
Later, on the way back to the student camp, I remarked to Sonny that I didn't see how the Karenni army could possibly escape defeat.
Sonny laughed. The Karenni, he pointed out, had been fighting against dire odds for fifty years. Many regarded the war against SLORC as a direct continuation of the war against the Japanese. Some Karenni families had been at war for three generations, and many of their fighters had spent their entire lives in refugee camps.
What does it take, I found myself wondering, to sustain an insurgency for fifty years, to go on fighting a war that the rest of the world has almost forgotten? What did freedom mean to the Karenni—democracy or simply the right to set up an ethnic enclave of their own?
The next day I returned to Mae Hong Son and went to see Mr. Abel Tweed, the foreign minister of the Karenni National Progressive Party, in his small back-alley office. A voluble square-jawed man, Mr. Tweed delved into a makeshift archive housed in a cupboard. "We have always been independent," he announced, "and we have the documents to prove it."
Leafing through the papers he handed me, I saw that he was right: the British had clearly recognized Karenni autonomy in the late nineteenth century and had rejected the option of annexing the Karenni territories to Burma proper. Their reasons were not altruistic. "It is evident that the country is perfectly worthless in itself," one British administrator wrote of the Karenni area. "It is almost impracticable, for even an elephant."
It was the Second World War that thrust the Karenni's "impracticable" country center stage. Looking for Asian partners in the struggle against the Japanese, the Allied powers encouraged several ethnic groups along the borders of Burma to rise against the occupying army. The Karenni, the Karen, and the Kachin eagerly embraced the Allies. A number of British and American military personnel took up residence in their villages, and some of them virtually assumed the role of tribal elders.
The Karenni, along with the Karen and the Kachin, were spectacularly effective guerrillas, and their loyalty proved to be important to the Allies. The payment that these groups expected was independence. To this day they nurture a bitter historical grievance that the debt was never paid.
Abel Tweed was born long after the war, but his voice shook as he talked of the British departure from Burma. "The British knew that the Karenni were not a part of Burma," he said. "But the Karenni are a small people; they forgot us."
There are six thousand or so displaced Karenni refugees, and they are divided among five camps. Until fairly recently, these camps were in Burma, on a narrow tract of land controlled by the insurgents, but the steady advance of Burmese troops has gradually pushed the camps back over the border into Thailand. The camps are now clustered around Mae Hong Son, a tourist town that promotes an activity known as "hill-tribe trekking." The camps have come to be linked to this tourist entertainment through an odd symbiosis. The women of one Karenni subgroup have traditionally worn heavy brass rings to elongate their necks, and these women are now ticketed tourist attractions, billed as "giraffe women"; their refugee camps are a feature of the hill-tribe trekking routes. In effect, tourism has transformed these camps, with their tragic histories of oppression, displacement, and misery, into counterfeits of timeless rural simplicity—waxwork versions of the very past that their inhabitants have irretrievably lost. Karenni fighters returning from their battles on the front lines become, as it were, mirrors in which their visitors can discover an imagined Asian innocence.
I had come to the border hoping to find that democracy would provide a solution to Burma's unresolved civil war. By the time I left, I was no longer sure what the solution could be.
"The majority of Burmans think that democracy is the only problem," a member of the powerful Kachin minority reminded me. "But ethnic groups took up arms when Rangoon had a democratic government. A change to democracy won't help. The outside world expects too much from Suu Kyi. From our point of view, we don't care who governs—the weaker, the better."
There are thousands of putative nationalities in the world today; at least sixteen of them are situated on Burma's borders. It is hard to imagine that the inhabitants of these areas would be well served by becoming separate states. A hypothetical Karenni state, for example, would be landlocked, with the population of a medium-sized town: it would not be less dependent on its larger neighbors simply because it had a flag and a seat at the UN.
Burma's borders are undeniably arbitrary, the product of a capricious colonial history. But colonial officials cannot reasonably be blamed for the arbitrariness of the lines they drew. All boundaries are artificial: there is no such thing as a "natural" nation, which has journeyed through history with its boundaries and ethnic composition intact. In a region as heterogeneous as Southeast Asia, any boundary is sure to be arbitrary. On balance, Burma's best hopes for peace lie in maintaining intact the larger and more inclusive entity that history, albeit absent-mindedly, bequeathed to its population almost half a century ago.
Aung San Suu Kyi is the one figure in Burma who has popular support, both among ethnic Burmans and among many minorities, to start a process of national reconciliation. But even Suu Kyi would find it difficult to alter the historical borders. In the event of a total military withdrawal, it is possible that some insurgent groups would attempt to reclaim the territories they once controlled.
A rekindling of the insurgencies would almost certainly lead to a rapid erosion of Suu Kyi's popular support. Suu Kyi is aware that she cannot govern effectively without the support of the army, and she has been at pains to build bridges with middle-ranking officers as well as with the rank and file, repeatedly stressing her heritage as the daughter of the army's founder.
Somewhere in the unruffled reaches of her serenity, Suu Kyi has probably prepared herself for the ordeal that lies ahead: the possibility that she, an apostle of nonviolence, may yet find herself constrained to wage war.
I spent a lot of time with Sonny. He was very good company: always witty, ready to laugh, enormously intelligent, and so devoid of macho posturing that it was easy to forget he was a hardened combatant. When we were in the mountains, he would go striding along at the head of a column, looking every inch the guerrilla, with his dangling cheroot and his cradled M-16. When he came down to visit Mae Hong Son, he would exchange his fatigues for jeans and a T-shirt, and it was hard to tell him apart from a holidaying business executive.
I asked him once, "As someone of Indian descent, do you ever feel out of place as the commander of a regiment of Burmese students?"
"You don't understand," he said. "I don't think of myself as Indian. I hated being Indian. As a child, everywhere I went people would point to me and say kala [foreigner], although I had never left Burma in my whole life. I hated that word. I wanted to show them: that is not what I am; I am not a kala. This is why I am here now."