by Amitav Ghosh
Sonny had grown up in a tiny provincial town, Loikaw, the capital of Burma's erstwhile Karenni province. While he was attending the university in Rangoon (he studied physics there for four years), he championed the cause of Karenni and other minority students. With the start of the democracy movement, in 1988, he returned home and helped to organize peaceful demonstrations in Loikaw. He was arrested on September 18 and released ten days later. Fearing rearrest, he immediately planned his escape to the border.
On the night of October 6, Sonny left Loikaw with a group of activists. They made their way to a rebel base, where Karenni insurgents gave them a warm welcome and provided them with land and supplies so that they could set up bases of their own. Sonny and his fellow activists had never held a gun.
After eight years of fighting, Sonny has no illusions about the "armed struggle." "We're fighting because there is no other way to get SLORC to talk," he told me. "For us, armed struggle is just a strategy. We are not militants here—we can see how bad war is."
I asked, "Have you ever thought of trying other political strategies?"
"Of course," he said. "Do you think I like to get up in the morning and think of killing? Killing someone from my own country, who is forced to fight by dictators? I would like to try other things—politics, lobbying. But the students chose me to command this regiment. I can't just leave them."
Sonny has paid a price for his decision to leave Loikaw. His girlfriend, a Burmese in Rangoon, gave up waiting for him and married someone else. In 1994 his mother died of a heart attack; Sonny found out months afterward from a passing trader. She was, he said, the person he was closest to.
The student dissidents are now in their late twenties or early thirties. They had once aspired to become technicians and engineers, doctors and pharmacists. Those hopes are gone. They have no income to speak of, and their contacts with Thai society are few.
The truth is that they now have very limited options. Legally, they are not allowed either to work or to study in Thailand; to seek asylum abroad as refugees, they would have to enter a holding camp in southern Thailand while their papers were processed. Those whose applications were rejected would risk being deported to Burma, and once there they would almost certainly be imprisoned, or worse. The alternative is to join the underworld of illegal foreign workers in Thailand, vanishing into a nightmarish half-life of crime, drugs, and prostitution. They have been pushed into a situation where the jungle is the sanest choice available.
For the insurgents, Aung San Suu Kyi offers the only remaining hope of returning to their country with dignity and reclaiming their lives. When Sonny heard that I had met Aung San Suu Kyi in Rangoon, he wanted to know exactly what she had said. I played him some of my tape, including a segment in which she answered a question about her commitment to nonviolence.
"I do not think violence will really get us what we want," she said. "Some of the younger people disagree. In 1988, a lot of them went across the border because they said the only way you can topple this government is by force of arms. And not just the younger people. Even very mature, seasoned people have said to me, 'You can't do it without arms. This government is the type that understands only violence.' But my argument is: All right, supposing that all those who wanted democracy decided that the only way was through force of arms and we all took up arms. Would we not be setting a precedent for more violence in the future? Would we not be endorsing the view that those who have the superior might of arms are those who will rule the country? That is something that I cannot support. But we have always said that we will never, never disown those who have decided to take up arms, because we understand how they feel. I tried to dissuade some of the young people who fled across the border, but who am I to force them to stay? If I could guarantee their liberty and their safety, if I could say to them, 'You will not be arrested, you will not be tortured,' I would. But since I could not, I did not even think I had the moral right to stop them leaving."
When the tape was finished, I asked Sonny what he would do if he was pushed out of Thailand as well. "What if the Thais decide to cut off your supplies or starve you out of Thailand?"
"It wouldn't be easy to starve us out," Sonny said. "We've been here a long time. We now have many connections with the people of this region; some Burmese students have married Thai villagers. We can survive in the jungle—we are used to it now. That is why our camps are self-sufficient. We could disappear into the jungle for a long time. We are not unprepared."
If it came to the worst, Sonny was saying, he and his men would disappear into the jungle to carry on their war from behind the lines. And it made sense: the poppy fields of the Golden Triangle, with their warring drug lords, were just a short walk away. Someone as resourceful as Sonny could disappear there indefinitely if he was pushed; the jungle was all too ready to claim him.
It was cold in the camp that night, with a bitter wind blowing through the slatted bamboo walls. I spent much of the night awake, trying to think of what it meant to live in a circumstance in which the jungle seemed to be the best of all available options.
I awoke next morning to find a pile of books by my head. Sonny had wrapped a few books in a towel as a makeshift pillow, and the bundle had come undone at night. The books were language primers, workbooks, and the like, except for one: a hardbound 1991 edition entitled The Transformation of War. The author, Martin van Creveld, I discovered later, is something of an oracle among doomsday theorists.
I flipped the book open, and I became riveted. I began to make notes in my diary. "Van Creveld is arguing that the state's historic monopoly of violence ended with the 'Thirty Years War of 1914–45'; that nuclear weapons have rendered war, as waged by states, nearly obsolete, because inconceivable; that the world will now be dominated by low-intensity conflict; that states in the conventional sense will give way to bands of warlords; that the distinction between government, army, and the people will begin to fall apart as never before, especially in the Third World; that groups such as private mercenary bands, commanded by warlords and even commercial agencies (like the old East India Company), will once again take over the function of war-making; that 'existing distinctions between war and crime will break down.'"
Outside the hut, Sonny and his men were busy in the crisp sunlight, tending their patches of cauliflower and mustard. Until then I had looked upon Sonny as an anachronistic remnant of a dwindling series of "dirty little Asian wars." I now saw that I was very likely wrong: what Sonny represented was not the past but a possible future.
Suddenly the question of Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma's future assumed an urgent, global dimension. Legitimate, consensual government is the one bulwark between us and the prospect of encroaching warlordism and ever-increasing conflict; in embodying that possibility, Aung San Suu Kyi represents much more than the aspirations of Burma's people.
Daughter of Destiny?
I returned to Burma during the last week of July. In the past couple of months there had been a number of disquieting developments. I wanted to see for myself what the consequences were, for both Aung San Suu Kyi and the country.
Last May a conference called by Suu Kyi to mark the anniversary of her party's victory in the 1990 election was disrupted when the government arrested more than 230 party delegates who planned to attend; many were arrested at their homes or on their way to Rangoon.
Suu Kyi, unable to convene all the delegates, held the conference anyway, as scheduled, between May 26 and May 28. Thousands gathered outside her gates, one of the largest crowds since her house arrest ended last year. On the last day she announced that her party would draft a new constitution—a democratic alternative to the one that was being slowly deliberated by the government. Like the party conference itself, the call for a new constitution was a provocative gesture, and for Aung San Suu Kyi an unusually confrontational one. For the first time since her release, Suu Kyi had wrested the initiative away from the government, pushing it onto the defensive. Her party was reinvigorated
.
Two weeks later the government responded. It issued a decree that effectively banned Suu Kyi's gateside meetings: all speeches and any statements that were seen to undermine "the stability of the state" were prohibited. In case there was any doubt about its objective, the law also prohibited the drafting of a new constitution without the authorization of the state. The decree was issued on June 7, but it was not immediately put into effect. The government appears to have been unprepared for the vehemence of the international criticism that its actions provoked.
The criticism had been mounting since April, when, as part of an effort to harass and intimidate Suu Kyi's supporters, the authorities had arrested one of her close family friends, Leo Nichols, for operating an unauthorized fax machine. Nichols, an Anglo-Burmese businessman who had served as honorary consul for the Scandinavian countries, was sentenced to three years in prison on May 17. Five weeks later, he died while in police custody, and the government's account of his death was unsatisfactory. Protests widened. Denmark called for economic sanctions and asked the European Union to impose them; in the United States, a similar motion was debated in Congress.
The government's reaction was seen at the time to be oddly contradictory. There was even the suggestion that it might be ready to compromise. The likelihood is that the generals were largely indifferent to the international outcry; their concern was that the outcry might influence the leaders attending the July meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Jakarta. Burma was still not a member of the association—a legacy of its years of isolation—and membership was essential to establishing the country as a full trading partner in the region. Burma was seeking observer status, the first step in gaining membership. The talk among the Asian nations was now of "constructive engagement"—the soft diplomacy that only successful trade makes possible. On July 20, Burma got the recognition it sought. The regime, it seems, was set on buying its own legitimacy.
I arrived in Rangoon on Sunday, July 28, just in time to make it to the gateside meeting on University Avenue. The week before, the American secretary of state, Warren Christopher, had been in Jakarta and had censured the government of Burma, but his censure was largely rhetorical and ineffective. He stopped short of sanctions, and I wondered what Suu Kyi's response would be. In the past she had characteristically hesitated to call for any kind of economic boycott; she had now changed her position. The new wave of foreign investment, she had concluded, merely "put more money in the pockets of the privileged elite. Sanctions," she said, "would not hurt the ordinary people of Burma."
The meeting was a large one—about six thousand people. Looking around, I spotted the familiar faces of several people, some of them occupying the same spots as before, like restaurant regulars. Suu Kyi was, as before at the Sunday meetings, flanked by two senior colleagues from the National League for Democracy.
On my previous visit I had been astonished by her performance. She was full of merriment, giggling and flirtatious. Several months later she was still animated, but the lightheartedness was no longer there.
She had changed. So too had the city. The next day I went downtown, into the main business district, and found that an entire block had been transformed. The graceful but shabby old colonial arcades—untouched, like so much of Rangoon, for decades—had been torn down, and in a matter of months had been replaced with a maze of office buildings, hotels, and shops. In a nearby marketplace I discovered that the value of the currency had dropped by a third and that the price of foodstuffs had risen dramatically.
I was taken to one of Rangoon's new coffee bars by Ma Thanegi, a friend from my last visit. Ma Thanegi is an artist. She joined the democracy movement in 1988 and became an extremely active member; she even worked as an assistant to Aung San Suu Kyi and was a close friend. But then she was arrested and imprisoned for three years. By the time of her release, she had had enough of politics—she wanted to look after her own interests—and she opened an art gallery with an American expatriate.
Ma Thanegi was concerned about recent developments, especially Western trade sanctions. Her view was that a trade boycott would work only if it was a total boycott, involving all countries. And was that realistic? If only Western companies pulled out, there would be many Asian ones prepared to take their place. These new companies, Ma Thanegi said, would have less regard for Burmese workers and the local environment than those they had replaced.
Ma Thanegi had lived her whole life in Rangoon. She came of age during General Ne Win's Burmese Way to Socialism. "We lived under self-imposed isolation for decades," she said. "There was absolutely nothing, no opportunities at all, but we struggled on. Ma Ma," as she refers to Suu Kyi, "says we have to tighten our belts and think about politics. But there are no more notches to tighten on our belts."
Ma Thanegi wasn't a member of an especially privileged elite—she was middle-class. She wasn't a selfish international trader, eager to devour Burma's natural resources. She wasn't looking for a quick and easy return. Ma Thanegi was tired of coping with scarcity.
I saw Aung San Suu Kyi the next day. As I walked through the familiar blue gates, I noticed a striking new addition: a large bam-boo-and-thatch pavilion. It had been built to house the delegates of the party conference; most of those who had originally been invited did not get to see it.
When Aung San Suu Kyi appeared, I congratulated her on the success of the conference. With a self-deprecating smile, she described it as "routine party work." The achievement, she said, was in SLORC's reaction: it showed "how nervous SLORC was of the democracy movement."
Suu Kyi's face seemed strained and tired. It was now more than a year since she'd been freed from house arrest, and I found myself wondering whether her freedom was not in its way as much a burden as a release. It seemed as though the impossibly difficult task of conducting a political life under the conditions imposed on her by SLORC had proved just as hard as the enforced solitude of the preceding years. Those conditions seemed to be making her into a different kind of political figure.
She was quick to confirm the change. After she was released, she said, she made a point of being conciliatory, "but SLORC did not respond. And we have to carry on with our work. We are not going to sit and wait for SLORC to decide what we want to do ... That's not the way politics works."
Suu Kyi had not, as far I knew, responded publicly to the recent ASEAN meeting, in which Burma was granted its new observer status, and I was eager to know what her thoughts might be. I asked her if she was surprised by the warmth of Burma's welcome.
She dismissed my question. It was only normal that the association should welcome a new member.
Her reply surprised me.
No, she said, really. There was nothing unusual about it.
I persisted. At a time when many nations were talking about taking actions against Burma, the Southeast Asian leaders spoke about a policy of constructive engagement, which seemed like an endorsement of the regime.
Again I was dismissed. Picking her words carefully, Suu Kyi said, "I don't quite understand why one talks about constructive engagement as being such a problem. Each government has its own policy, and we accept that this is the policy of the ASEAN nations. I sometimes think that this problem is made out to be much bigger than it really is ... Just because [these governments] have decided on a policy of constructive engagement, there is no need for us to think of them as our enemies. I do not think it's a case of us and them."
I was witnessing, I realized, Suu Kyi the tactician. She was choosing her words with such care because she wanted to ensure that she did not alienate the leaders of nations who might otherwise think of her as a threat.
I was struck by the differences in Suu Kyi's manner. That other time I had had several glimpses of her earlier selves—the writer and researcher, the scholar trying to reach for the right words to articulate subtle gradations of truth. She now seemed much more the politician, opaque and often abrupt in her answers. The change was inevitable, perha
ps, and possibly necessary, but I still found myself mourning it.
Suu Kyi now had a party line. "We think," she said, "that sanctions are the right thing. Further investment in Burma is not helping the people." It is, she said, serving only a privileged elite. "It is increasingly obvious that investments made now in Burma only help to make SLORC richer and richer. And that is an obstacle to democratization."
I mentioned some of the arguments I had heard—that sanctions will lead only to the Western companies being replaced by their Asian counterparts—and this remark too was peremptorily dismissed. Without Western investment, she said, "I think you will find that confidence in the Burmese economy will diminish. It is not going to encourage the Asians to come rushing in. On the contrary."
At my previous meeting with Suu Kyi, I'd asked her whether she was contemplating a call for mass civil disobedience. She had remarked that she couldn't tell me even if she had been, but she'd gone on to add, on a note of barely disguised frustration, that if the people wanted democracy, then they were going to have to do something to get it. When I asked her about civil disobedience this time, my question was curtly dismissed. "We never discuss our plans in advance," she said. "You know that."
Even so, I was left wondering. That morning I had talked to a diplomat who was certain that if Suu Kyi called for civil disobedience, the country would follow. It would grind to a complete standstill, he said. I asked myself if that might be the future.
I left Rangoon the next day, feeling discouraged. The business-class section of the plane was full to capacity, its seats occupied by trim men in suits. They all looked as if they had flown in from the great boom centers of Asia. They were in town to do a deal. I looked down on the receding city, and I thought of a comment that Suu Kyi had made at the end of our meeting. "I've always told you," she said, "that we will win ... that we will establish a democracy in Burma, and I stand by that. But as to when, I cannot predict. I've always said that to you."