Despite the crackdown and the arrest, the government went ahead and in May 1990 did what no one expected and what no once since has really been able to explain: it held reasonably free and fair multiparty elections. There were problems, of course: The campaigning itself had been very restricted, and many parts of the country, the hill areas in particular, were in no position to take part because of the ongoing insurgency. But the balloting itself was fine, with less irregularity than any of the elections in the late 1940s or 1950s. The outcome, though, was a shock for the men in uniform, returning a clear victory for the NLD. With around two-thirds of eligible voters casting their ballots, the NLD won just under 60 percent of the vote and 392 out of 492 seats in the new Assembly. The military’s proxy was the National Unity Party, the rebranded Burma Socialist Program Party of the ostensibly retired strongman General Ne Win. But the National Unity Party trailed far behind with only 21 percent of the vote and 10 seats, the rest going to a medley of mainly ethnic-based parties. The military had seriously miscalculated the mood of the people.
What next? The army was schizophrenic. On the one hand, it appeared to have in mind its glory year of 1959–60, when it ran a highly competent, if ruthless, government and then handed power back to an elected government, pleased with itself for having done so and congratulated by admirers both at home and abroad. It had tried to do the same now, with 1959 as the template, right down to the slum clearings and the newly paved roads. On the other hand, it knew that 1960 brought problems and then a new army coup in 1962; it thought this time needed to be different, not just a handover to elected officials but something that would more clearly preserve its legacy and its authority. And in Aung San Suu Kyi, the passion and anger of the uprising behind her, it sensed a danger, to its institution and to itself personally that had had no equivalent in 1960. On 28 July the NLD met at Gandhi Hall in Rangoon and adopted a resolution calling on the SLORC to stand down and hand over power to a government based on the results of the elections—in other words, to the NLD. There was talk of trials for “crimes against humanity.” The whole world called on the Burmese officers to give up. They dithered and then rolled back on their promises, making things up as they went along.
Aung San Suu Kyi was freed six years later in July 1995, though she was able to travel outside Rangoon only with permission. Every Saturday afternoon at four she stood up on a little box and spoke from behind the gates of her house, and hundreds of people came to listen and ask questions. But few democratic reforms were in sight. There were some talks with the government, but the two sides were far apart, and no agreement was reached. Resorting to nonviolence tactics, she tried to provoke the government and test its limits through her speeches and through her attempts to ignore its restrictions on her movement. But she wasn’t facing the Raj of the 1930s or the Johnson administration of the 1960s. These were tough men who played a very different game. In 2000, Aung San Suu Kyi was again placed under house arrest, this time for a little more than two years.
She was disliked by many in the military, partly because of her perceived foreignness. For all her time abroad, however, she was first and foremost her father’s daughter. For Aung San, a no-nonsense, straight-talking approach coupled with courage and an iron will seemed a winning combination. And it was these same qualities that did much to win her popular adoration. But to believe that it was this single-mindedness that won independence is to misread the lessons of the 1940s. Britain’s withdrawal from Burma was part of its withdrawal from India; the question was one of the nature and timing of the postcolonial transition. Unlike the British, Burma’s generals were never ready to quit Burma. It wasn’t a matter of forcing the pace. They were considering going in a different direction altogether.
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By the late 1990s, beneath the talk of democracy and dictatorship, Burmese society was changing fast. The population was surging ahead and by 2006 had reached roughly fifty-three million people, a very young population, the majority having been born after the 1988 uprising. Towns and cities became more crowded, with fewer and fewer qualified teachers and doctors or any sort of infrastructure (including electricity) to meet expanding needs; and in the countryside, where most of the people still lived, an ever-increasing number of farmers squeezed out a livelihood on the same little plots of land. Many moved north in search of new opportunities, or simply to survive, to the jade mines and the bustling Chinese border towns, or across the Tenasserim Range into Thailand, where hundreds of thousands of Burmese today toil away, illegally and for little money, in construction jobs, performing menial labor, and in the sex industry. HIV/AIDS spread rapidly, in a society with increased narcotics use and where family planning had been virtually nonexistent during the Ne Win years. Some began to warn of an impending (or present) humanitarian crisis, in which millions of the country’s poorest, their savings finally gone, were finding it impossible to meet their most basic needs, to feed themselves and their children or obtain even the most essential health care.
There was political change as well. The military government convened a National Convention to discuss and draw up a new constitution, one of its committees chaired for a while by the mischievously named U James Bond. The convention was the government’s response to the elections in 1991 and its refusal to hand over power to the National League for Democracy. It initially included the NLD and other parties that had won seats in the polls, but it also included representatives of the ethnic insurgent armies and handpicked hundreds of others. It was clear from the start that this wouldn’t be a freewheeling debate on the future of the country, and the aim was fairly plain: find some constitutional formula that would include a paramount role for the army. The military may have been thinking about constitutions in nearby Thailand or Indonesia, both of which, in the recent past, ensured army autonomy as well as a certain number of seats in Parliament for the armed forces. Or it may have looked to its own colonial past (without admitting it), to the constitutions of the 1920s and 1930s that allowed British mandarins only very slowly to hand over government responsibility to elected politicians, while retaining for themselves a range of emergency powers, undiminished authority over the highlands, and an unambiguous sense of who was ultimately in charge.
For most in the National League for Democracy this was an unacceptable process. They pleaded for an amendment in the convention’s working procedures and in particular asked for a repeal of the rule that made a felony any criticism of the military during the convention debates. This was refused. For two rainy days in November 1995 the NLD’s eighty-six delegates boycotted the convention, and on the third day they were formally expelled. The convention soon went into a long recess.
For a while things simply plodded on. But then, in 2000, there was again a new energy, a new momentum. The National Convention was reconvened, and the adoption of a new constitution was to be followed by fresh elections and a civilian government. A somewhat more hurried round of talks began between the Burmese military and the insurgents, maps were examined, and options for local self-government were weighed. In 2003 a new government was formed and placed under the prime ministership of intelligence chief General Khin Nyunt. A seven-step Road Map to Democracy was unveiled. There were also signs of greater openness. The International Committee of the Red Cross was allowed for the very first time to visit prisons on a regular basis. The government admitted to a serious HIV/AIDS problem after years of denials and asked for international assistance. More than a hundred political prisoners were released. And talks were held between Aung San Suu Kyi and government representatives, at first secretly and then openly. International negotiators scurried between the two sides, hopeful for a long-awaited breakthrough.
Was there now a way forward? And whatever happened to General Ne Win?
THE LONG ROAD FROM HAINAN
For many years those who wanted reform in Burma waited, very patiently, for General Ne Win to leave the scene. He had been born in 1911 and by the 1988 uprising was already an old man. In that
year he had officially retired and then rarely appeared in public, but few suspected he had relinquished any real power. He lived, as always, in a heavily guarded compound on Ady Road, on the opposite side of the big swampy Inya Lake (on the outskirts of Rangoon) from Aung San Suu Kyi. He must still be calling all the shots, people said. All the while there was still the sense, a quarter-century-old optimism, that things would change when he died.
Then he died, quietly, peacefully, in bed, in December 2002, aged ninety-one. And nothing happened. It seems that he had in fact left political life a while ago, not immediately after the uprising in 1988 but a few years later, intervening now and then to settle disputes within the senior brass, but then fading away entirely to his own private world. When dictators die while still in power, regimes tend to crumble at the same time, but Ne Win had stepped back while still very much alive and allowed a transition to consolidate itself while he was still around. And then he apparently lost interest. Singapore’s former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew saw him a couple of times in the nineties. In 1994 Ne Win, looking haggard and unwell, told him that after the uprising had been crushed, he had been in torment, “fretting and worrying” about what to do. But then he had discovered meditation, and meditation began to calm him. When Lee met him again in 1997, he said the old soldier looked much better. Ne Win wanted only to talk about meditation, giving Lee advice and saying that he himself spent many hours, mornings and afternoons, in silent concentration. He no longer worried about anything, friends, family, or the country. When his generals came for advice, he said, he sent them away.13
When he died, the man who had led his country to isolation and poverty was virtually unmourned. In his final few months his protégés in the army had moved against his family, locking up his son-in-law and grandsons and placing his daughter under house arrest, more to shut down their crooked business dealings than anything else. The Ne Win era was over, but a whole new Burmese army had already come to the fore.
And this army that had come to the fore was a generation or more removed from its founding, in the rain-drenched Japanese training camps on Hainan Island, where the importance of unquestioning obedience and unwavering loyalty, not to any higher authority but to the army itself, had first been programmed into the minds of eager young nationalists. Since then the army had gone through a lot and had battled incessantly for six decades against dozens of enemies, from the marshlands along the Bengal border to the foothills of the Himalayas. Along the way it had changed, from a few lightly armed (and nearly overwhelmed) infantry battalions to one of the biggest armed forces in the world and one that was involved in every aspect of the country’s economy and administration. The Burmese military dictatorship is the longest-lasting military dictatorship in the world, and it is also its purest. It is not an army regime sitting on top of an otherwise civilian state. In Burma by the 1990s the military was the state. Army officers did everything. Normal government had withered away.
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When the men in uniform looked to the past, they saw a country that tended to fall apart into little pieces and that had always needed to be melded together by force. They saw themselves in a long line of national unifiers and saw their task as unfinished. The Communists—always their biggest enemies—had collapsed, and nearly all their other battlefield foes were at most shadows of their former selves. The soldiers were on top for the first time. And in their imagination there remained the challenge of nation building, of creating and promoting a new Myanmar identity, based on Buddhism and what was perceived as correct and traditional Burmese culture, unmuddied by the humiliating days of colonial rule, something plain and simple and straightforward, like the army itself. These were men, for the most part, who knew no other life, had joined the armed forces as teenagers and never left, had fought in the mountains and forests for years, killing and seeing their fellow soldiers killed, living entirely apart from the rest of Burmese society. They had created a sort of military fantasy world, where everything was about making enemies and making war and everyone else had a supporting role, like camp followers in a Mongol horde. Perhaps to some, democracy sounded like a good thing, a worthy goal, but for many, imagining democracy was as hard as imagining a more democratic barracks. It just didn’t fit in with the rest of the picture.
There were certainly those in the regime who wanted less isolation, who believed that some contact and some communication with the wider world were for the better, that Burma had fallen too far behind its old neighbors—the Chinese and the Indians and the Thais—and needed to catch up. The Asian economic miracle was all around. General Ne Win’s Burmese socialism had been an economic catastrophe, and in these new times a new economic approach was needed. But how to do this? No one knew. And there were even those in the armed forces who thought that some sort of accommodation was possible with Aung San Suu Kyi as well as with the insurgent groups in the hills. In 2000 serious reforms had started. In 2003, Aung San Suu Kyi and a convoy of her supporters had been attacked on a dirt road by government-backed thugs. But even then talks continued, and there was an air of urgency. A new understanding seemed close at hand. But then things turned around yet again. A much expected release of Aung San Suu Kyi in the spring of 2004 never happened. And in October of that year, the prime minister, General Khin Nyunt, the man behind the talks, was himself sacked and detained, together with dozens of his aides.
The top general, Than Shwe, and many other combat-hardened army chiefs had felt there were too many risks involved in any compromise. The memory of 1988, when the country had come so close to revolution, the fear of retribution, was still fresh on their minds. There was also an impression that the outside world was out to get them no matter what. When the talks with the NLD and the ethnic insurgents were still progressing, Washington had imposed new, debilitating sanctions. Many felt that turning inward again was safer, more secure. There were venal motives as well, but the deeper source of today’s conservatism is the contentment of too many in the officer corps with what they see, who admire the military state and military-led society, or at least who could not easily dream up anything much better.
This was the result of long years of isolation since 1962. It was not an ideology but a mentality that had grown up and become dominant. Isolation had placed anyone with a more progressive mind-set at a a disadvantage, and had fueled the attitudes that entrenched the status quo. And yet the response of the West was to isolate the country further.
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In the years since the uprising, interest in Burma’s plight has mushroomed. Many have now heard of Aung San Suu Kyi and are vaguely aware of the reluctance of the ruling generals to give up power. Almost no one, though, is aware of the civil war or the reasons why Burma’s military machine developed and the country became so isolated in the first place. The paradigm is one of regime change, and the assumption is that sanctions, boycotts, more isolation will somehow pressure those in charge to mend their ways. The assumption is that Burma’s military government couldn’t survive further isolation when precisely the opposite is true: Much more than any other part of Burmese society, the army will weather another forty years of isolation just fine.
The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Aung San Suu Kyi in 1991 raised her profile enormously around the world and has been a great boost to a growing confederacy of Burma activists in London, Washington, and elsewhere. A few of these Burma activists were older Burmese exiles, people who had stolen away during the ironfisted days of General Ne Win, including many from the ranks of the U Nu government, and their children. But many more were from the much younger generation of the 1988 uprising, university students and others who had taken to the streets that summer and then decided to leave the country illegally, winding up in Thailand and India and then eventually emigrating to other countries, like Australia and the United States.
Little communities grew up. In America, the biggest concentrations of Burmese expatriates were to be found in New York, Washington, and Southern California, but many hard-
core activists wound up in places like Fort Wayne, Indiana, today an unlikely hotbed of Burmese exile action. Boasting Glenbrook Square (“the largest shopping center in Indiana”) and Jefferson Point (with “trendy eateries and Mediterranean atmosphere”), this midwestern town of two hundred thousand is also now home to over three thousand refugees—Burmese, Mons, and Karens. There are no less than four Buddhist temples as well as services in Burmese at both the Lutheran and Baptist churches. Little Burma on South Lafayette Street sells a range of familiar groceries, from pickled tea leaves to sticky rice.
Like activists everywhere, by the late 1990s they were aggressively using the Internet, which soon sprouted hundreds of specialized Burmese political sites, chat rooms, newspapers, and message boards. They were joined by many non-Burmese, Americans, Australians, British, Scandinavians, and others who have often worked selflessly and with great dedication; together with the exiles, a formidable Burma lobby has slowly taken shape. As in any activist group, there are differences of opinion, on strategy and tactics, but the Burma lobby, with growing celebrity and high-level political support, has managed to largely stay on message: the military government is bad, Aung San Suu Kyi is good, and the international community needs to apply pressure on Rangoon and pressure means no aid, trade sanctions, and more isolation.
Most aid had been suspended since 1988, but by the late 1990s many private companies, who had rushed into Burma earlier in the decade, began to pull out, at least in part because of activist pressure. From the United States, Wal-Mart, Kenneth Cole, Tommy Hilfiger, Jones New York, and Federated Department Stores (owners of Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s), Pepsi Cola, Amoco, Levi Strauss & Co., Liz Claiborne, and Eddie Bauer ended their Burma operations. And in 1998 the U.S. government imposed a ban on new American investment in Burma. Campaigns to boycott tourism to Burma were also ratcheted up, and government attempts to attract more visitors have been only marginally successful. Tour companies began to shy away from business in the country, and many of the hotels, inns, and little guesthouses that had been built expectantly in the early 1990s remained largely empty. Other contacts were shunned. Visa bans were imposed so that officials of the government would not be able to visit the West, and scholarships and academic exchanges have remained virtually nonexistent. More damaging for the already poverty-stricken economy, assistance by the World Bank and other international financial institutions and aid agencies was largely prohibited, with even attempts to provide emergency humanitarian aid sometimes drawing censure.
The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma Page 44