KRAMER: “Myanmar … isn’t that the discount pharmacy?”
In the summer of 1988, before the fall of the Berlin Wall and almost exactly a hundred years after Harry Prendergast’s field force had landed at Mandalay, the Burmese people took to the streets in their tens of thousands to demand an end to decades of military dictatorship and international isolation. The protests had been rumbling on for months, starting with students at the select Rangoon Institute of Technology, spreading through the sprawling capital and then up-country. In March riot police had arrested dozens of students after unrest around the Rangoon University campus. Over thirty suffocated to death in a police van on the way to detention. More protests followed. The price of food skyrocketed, and a mood of opportunity and imminent upheaval fused with long-pent-up anger and resentment against the authorities. There were rumors of strikes and rallies in different towns. Those who could listened every night for the latest (and uncensored) news on the Burmese-language broadcasts of the BBC. Even in the homes of the urban well-to-do, senior civil servants and professionals who lived in relative comfort, there was a sense that “something had to change.” A revolutionary atmosphere had developed.1
On 23 July, not long after the monsoon rains had started in earnest, General Ne Win, the man who had seized power in 1962 and had ruled single-handedly ever since, took to the podium and addressed the hundreds of assembled delegates. Rangoon was hot and muggy, but this meeting was in a cavernous air-conditioned chamber, built next to the old racetrack, with wall-to-wall carpeting and rows of neatly dressed men (and a few women), a rare picture of modernity in a country that had seemingly turned its back on the twentieth century. General Ne Win had called an extraordinary session of his Burma Socialist Programme Party Central Committee. The party was his personal creation and the only legal political party in the country, made up almost entirely of ex-military men as a sort of civilian facade for the armed forces.
And there, in front of his cooled and pliant audience, and after a short speech on recent events, General Ne Win, the dictator of Burma, said something no one expected. Speaking in clear, measured tones, he called for a popular referendum on a return to democracy and outlined a very specific process that could lead to “a multiparty system of government” within months. He said that he took responsibility for the deaths of students in police custody in March. But continued demonstrations and violence had shown that people had lost confidence in the government more generally. If the referendum opted for change, a parliament would have to be elected that would then write a new constitution. He himself would stand down immediately, together with his top aides.
Whether Ne Win meant what he said that day is impossible to tell. In resigning, he chose as his successor an old subordinate, General “the Lion” Sein Lwin, a man not known for his liberal ways. It was, in any event, an incredible speech. The ruling elite in front of him sat in amazed silence. Looking straight at the television cameras, he also included a less than veiled threat: “Although I said I would retire from politics, we will have to maintain control to prevent the country from falling apart, from disarray, till the future organizations can take full control. In continuing to maintain control, I want the entire nation, the people, to know that if in future there are mob disturbances, if the army shoots, it hits—there is no firing into the air to scare.”
Burma’s democracy movement began that day.
Rangoon was electric. Normally a sleepy city of perhaps two million people, with lush tree-lined streets, crumbling masonry, and endlessly repaired 1950s sedans, the Burmese capital was now primed for action. People did not either trust or want to wait for the process Ne Win had outlined. Underground student groups began mobilizing and busily distributed leaflets calling for a general strike. A small stream of foreign journalists slipped through the decrepit Mingaladon Airport. Outside the capital sporadic protests continued.
And then, on 8 August 1988, at eight minutes past eight in the morning, a day and time deemed auspicious by the student organizers, dockworkers along the Rangoon River walked off their jobs. When word spread, people began marching toward the city center, waving flags, banners, and placards. With no one to champion, many carried portraits of the 1940s nationalist supremo Aung San. From the northern suburbs, long columns of university and school students ambled down the leafy boulevards that led to the city center, and by noon the broad expanse around Bandoola Park was crammed with sarong-clad crowds of cheering people. Apartment balconies and rooftops across the old colonial downtown area filled with onlookers. Makeshift podiums were put up in front of City Hall, and one speaker after another pushed forward to denounce a government that had oppressed and impoverished them for more than a generation. The call was clear and echoed Ne Win’s: a return to multiparty government. Thousands moved toward the Shwedagon Pagoda about a mile away, where more fiery speeches were given. Hawkers sold cigarettes and drinks, and no one doubted that the country was at a watershed.
The demonstrations were not confined to Rangoon. Across every major city in Burma that afternoon big crowds of ordinary people left work and gathered on the streets to voice their frustrations against Ne Win’s regime. Nothing like this had happened in decades.
All day the military had stood around and watched. There had been no incident. The army had allowed the demonstrations to take place. But at 11:30 p.m., with thousands still milling around in front of City Hall, it decided to draw the line. Across downtown the electricity was turned off, and big mobile loudspeakers ordered the crowd to disperse. No one budged. Then, in the dark muggy night, Bren gun carriers and trucks heavy with combat-ready troops in olive-green fatigues and steel helmets wheeled out onto the main square, and the young crowd, refusing to be cowed, began singing the Burmese national anthem. The army opened fire. The firing continued until the next morning. Dozens were believed to have been killed and wounded that first night, but there was never any proper count.
The response was not what the army had in mind. Rather than curtail the demonstrations, the bloodshed incited people further, and for the next five days the death toll rose as soldiers used lethal force to break up the mounting protests. On 10 August troops opened fire on a group of exhausted doctors and nurses in front of Rangoon General Hospital who ventured out to call for an end to the violence. Many of the dead around the city were high school students or young men from the poorer neighborhoods; they had shown themselves the bravest or most foolhardy in facing the German-manufactured G-7 rifles of the Burmese army. Some placed the number of dead and wounded well into the hundreds.
Finally, on 13 August, as if the men in charge had themselves had enough of the bloodletting, the army called a halt to its actions and announced the resignation of General Sein Lwin. Everywhere the army was ordered to return to the barracks, and soldiers quietly and quickly crept out of Rangoon. A close civilian associate of the old dictator’s, an English-trained jurist, was appointed president, and he gave a hearty and conciliatory speech over the radio. But the public was not impressed. Instead a feeling of imminent victory filled the air.
Over the next many days civil administration in Burma collapsed in practically every city and town in the country, as millions of people happily strolled out of their homes and did what they had not been able to do for so long: organize as they wished and speak their minds. It was no longer just the students or the workers, but people from every walk of life. Rangoon developed a carnival atmosphere. Trade unions developed overnight. And in a country where the press had been tightly controlled for a generation, dozens of newspapers and magazines, laboriously mimeographed, suddenly appeared in shops and on sidewalks. In Mandalay the army retreated behind the walls of the old palace as committees of students, workers, and Buddhist monks took over the management of Thibaw’s town. When the still-government-controlled radio and television claimed that the demonstrators did not represent the silent majority of law-abiding housewives and others, the All-Burma Housewives Association was formed, and hundreds of middle-cla
ss women, happily clanging pots and pans, marched with the teeming crowds under their newly furled banners. Soon the government itself broke ranks. In ministry after ministry civil servants and clerical workers left their offices and joined the throngs in the street. At the Foreign Office top-ranking diplomats signed a letter saying that the policies of the military regime had destroyed Burma’s once-proud international reputation. Eventually the staff of the Burmese Broadcasting Corporation walked off their jobs, and the official media were suddenly silenced. Even the police went on strike. The revolution seemed on the verge of success. But who would lead it?
One by one, old and new politicians came forward. First it was Aung Gyi, once Ne Win’s own deputy in the armed forces. Then, on 25 August, Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of Aung San, spoke for the first time to a massive gathering along the western slope of the Shwedagon Pagoda. And on 28 August, U Nu, in his eighties and the last democratically elected prime minister, announced the formation of his new League for Democracy and Peace. A number of those who came into view were old leftist or Communist leaders, including several old men who had helped lead the insurrections in the 1950s. Thakin Soe, onetime Stalinist agitator and guerrilla strategist, now eighty-three, issued a rousing call to revolution from his hospital bed. General Strike Centers were set up in more than two hundred towns. But it seemed to many students (and others) that the politicians were only grandstanding. No single party or organization enjoyed the broad support needed to deal the final blow. And after the initial euphoria of revolt, many, especially in the middle classes, began to be fearful of a coming anarchy.
By late August the violence had spread to the working-class suburbs of Rangoon, and food shortages led to rioting. Rumors spread that Ne Win’s spies had secretly poisoned the water supply or had infiltrated the student leadership. On 25 August, prisoners were released or broke free everywhere in the country, adding to a growing sense of insecurity. On more than one occasion suspected government agents were gruesomely beheaded or hacked to death in front of cheering crowds. What had begun as a political revolt by disaffected students was now on the verge of becoming a bloody social revolution.
Many realized that time was running out. There were hundreds of political meetings a day, in smoke-filled living rooms and corner tea shops, as men and women in cotton longyis engaged in passionate and sometimes ill-tempered arguments about what should happen next. On 17 September a huge mob gathered outside the Trade Ministry and disarmed the soldiers guarding the building, the first time soldiers had peacefully given up their arms. Another crowd almost stormed the War Office, the very headquarters of the armed forces, but were dissuaded from doing so by politicians who promised that the government would soon resign voluntarily. These same politicians—Aung Gyi, Aung San Suu Kyi, U Nu, and others—agreed to meet together with student leaders on 19 September to form a revolutionary transitional government. Foreign embassies in Rangoon were approached to ensure immediate recognition. But General Ne Win and his men, shocked at recent goings-on, had devised other plans.
On 18 September, after more than a month of protests, the army moved back, confidently and in force. This time the bloodshed lasted two days. But it was no use. The old constitution was formally abolished, and in place of the old regime was established the State Law and Order Restoration Council headed by army chief General Saw Maung. The army claimed to be taking power “to prevent the disintegration of the Union.” Hundreds of people were believed to have been killed in Rangoon alone, with at least several dozen in other cities and towns. The protests collapsed. The country was at once outraged and exhausted. The revolutionary moment was over.
*
There was a muted international response. The United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, and Germany suspended bilateral aid. But there was no pronounced outcry, certainly not from the general public, in Europe or in North America. Nothing like the reaction to the massacre at Tiananmen Square a year later. There were no calls for United Nations action. No urgent transatlantic diplomacy. Part of the reason was simple: there were no television cameras present in the country at the time. There was no CNN and no nightly news stories showing the depth of popular feeling or the violence that followed. There were no pundits demanding retribution and little attention on Capitol Hill or at Westminster. Much of the uprising had been in late August and early September, just in time for the late-summer holidays.
But the lack of response wasn’t just attributable to the absence of television or to the fact that important people were vacationing in Martha’s Vineyard or Tuscany. It was also because Burma was almost entirely unknown. To the extent that it was thought about at all, it had the image of an exotic and dreamy backwater, a gentle Buddhist country, lost in time and quietly isolated, hardly the sort of location for a foreign policy crisis. It was an offbeat tourist destination, unspoiled compared with neighboring Thailand, perhaps even a model of an alternative approach to life, unhurried and without the extremes of modern capitalism and communism. Prodemocracy demonstrations in Burma? It was like hearing about a coup in Shangri-La. What was to be done with a place like that?
*
I was then twenty-two. I had been born on a snowy January morning very far away from Burma at the Columbia-Cornell Medical Center on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. At the time my maternal grandfather, U Thant, was serving as the secretary-general of the United Nations, a job he had held since 1961, since the death of his predecessor, Dag Hammarskjöld, and would continue to hold until his retirement a decade later. He was presiding over the UN during a decade of considerable change. Dozens of newly decolonized Asian and African countries had recently filled the ranks of the world body, and their concerns—mainly to reduce the inequalities between rich and poor nations—fueled much of the organization’s quickly evolving agenda. There were also political challenges during this height of the cold war, from the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Cuban missile crisis to Vietnam and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Then, as now, the UN was often marginalized and occasionally scapegoated. But perhaps more than now there was a recognized value in maintaining the secretary-general as an impartial arbitrator and neutral voice and as a backdoor channel when more public diplomacy proved impossible. Like today, there were calls for reform and many who would throw their hands up in despair at the inability of the organization to tackle this or that problem. But the 1960s were less than a generation away from the fifty million dead of the Second World War, and there remained, perhaps, in every quarter a more heartfelt desire to make the UN work.
Of course I knew none of this growing up in Riverdale, a solidly middle-class neighborhood about forty-five minutes by car or subway from midtown. My parents, both Burmese, had met and married in New York and were living with my grandfather and grandmother in what was then the secretary-general’s official residence, a rambling seven-bedroom red-brick house, partly covered in ivy and set on a grassy six-acre hillside along the Hudson River. On the map it was part of Riverdale, but in most other ways it was a small slice of Burma. In addition to my parents and grandparents (and later three younger sisters), there was always an assortment of Burmese houseguests, who stayed anywhere from an evening to many months, and a domestic staff (all Burmese as well) of nannies and maids, cooks and gardeners as one might expect in any Rangoon pukka home. Burmese dancers and musicians sometimes performed at parties on the lawn. A Buddhist shrine with fresh-cut flowers graced a special area on the first floor, and a constant smell of curries drifted out of the always busy black-and-whitetiled kitchen. The UN security guards at the gate—mainly Irish and Italian Americans—wore uniforms of light and navy blue, but inside the stone walls a Burmese sarong or longyi, even in the Northeast winter, was the more predictable sight.
U Thant died of cancer soon after his retirement, and my family moved not long after to Thailand, where I lived until university, first at Harvard and then at Cambridge. But many summers during those years were spent in Burma, in Rangoon, where my mother had close relatives,
and in Mandalay, where my other grandfather still lived. We often traveled around, and one year—when I was fourteen—I spent a short period as a novice monk, something all Burmese Buddhist boys are meant to do. For me those trips to Burma were always a surprise, a surprise that the inside world, inside the walls in Riverdale, had become the outside world, of people on streets and in markets, in trains and in homes. What was particular to my family was suddenly public and everywhere, in a world that was at once strange and new and yet intimately familiar. I still feel that sense of surprise in Burma today when I walk outside and down the pavement in my longyi or talk to shop assistants or taxi drivers in my mother tongue.
When the 1988 uprising began, I was only a few weeks out of college and at the very beginning of what would later be my own career at the UN, working in Geneva as an intern for Prince Saddrudin Aga Khan, then the UN’s coordinator for humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan. I listened many times a day to the BBC and read about the first wave of military violence while spending a weekend with friends in Lausanne. Within a week I had decided to give up my internship and booked myself a plane ticket to Bangkok, determined to be part of what every Burmese believed was a turning point in the country’s history. Unfortunately for me, by the time I reached Bangkok and was set to travel on to Burma, the army had closed down the Rangoon airport, sealing off the country from the rest of the world. I felt I missed entirely my chance to be a part of things and to help.
The next year was my induction into Burmese politics. When the uprising was crushed, thousands of young men and women had made their way to rebel-held areas along the Thai border, not to flee the Burmese authorities but in a desperate and ill-placed hope that the West would arm them and help them overthrow the Rangoon government. I went to see them and spent many months in their muddy makeshift camps, never thinking that an armed revolution was the answer to Burma’s problems, but in every other way sharing the anger and frustration that had sent them into the malarial jungles. I could go back more or less whenever I wanted to an air-conditioned apartment in Bangkok and had a generous postgraduate scholarship waiting for me, but they, of exactly the same generation as I was and often from similar family backgrounds, were in much deeper and had risked much more.
The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma Page 5