The trouble isn’t so much a lack of measures as their total ineffectiveness (except maybe the celebrities’, which could at least put the country on the map of global consciousness). For example: Malaria had long vexed the residents of border camps like the one the first lady visited, of course. But in the ’90s, researchers dispatched hundreds of Karen refugees, including Htoo Moo, on epidemiological surveys. From sunset to sunrise the men worked in four-hour shifts, sitting around, talking, catching mosquitoes that landed on them before they bit with a small vacuum for 100 baht a night, bringing the insects back to the Western doctors alive in time-labeled cups. Thus did the researchers determine that malaria transmission occurs in the camps via the mosquito vector that flies in the early evening—not overnight, when people are in bed. Thus were malaria workers desperately disappointed with Mrs. Bush’s present. It was a nice gesture, and the publicity was pretty good, but the money spent on those nets, they said sadly, should’ve gone to drugs that there are never enough of and that have actually been proved to interrupt malaria transmission in camp.
Similarly, sanction proponents say that it’s not the idea of sanctions but our execution of them that’s flawed: Though US investors have had to pull their money out of, say, Burma’s garment industry, they can still deal in its oil and gas, which is where a lot of the junta’s big export money comes from. Unocal/Chevron lobbyists (including one Alan Hoffman) have kept Congress from making the company sell its stake in Burma gas fields. No provision mandating that Chevron divest was included in the Block Burmese Jade Act, which was meant to deprive the government of big income and was spearheaded by Joe Biden (whose former chief of staff was one Alan Hoffman). Efforts to strip Chevron of a sweet tax concession on its business in the country got downgraded to a suggestion that the company “consider voluntary divestment over time.”
Following the junta’s gross abuses in the ’88 uprisings, world governments had to show some kind of action. So foreign aid, some $500 million a year, mostly stopped flowing. Soon, the regime was drowning in debt. It could have been the end of an evil era, maybe, had capitalism not swept in and saved the day. To solve its cash crisis, the long-closed Burma opened itself to private businesses and foreign trade. International hotels were built; tourists arrived; nightclubs opened; the Thais bought logging rights. Foreign investments kept the economy running, as they largely keep it running now. So if we’d only fashion better and better-targeted sanctions, advocates say, Burma’s economy would collapse and the government might just give up and get packing. But whether or not you believe that sanctions were what finally broke South Africa, you cannot believe that they would have worked in that country if half the world’s governments had said “We’re not going to give you money for your stuff anymore” while the other half had said, “Awesome. More for us.”
China is building a pipeline that will carry energy directly through Burma from one of Burma’s western ports, easily accessible from the Indian Ocean and Gulf states—which would avoid the long trip around the Strait of Malacca, through which an estimated 80 percent of China’s imported crude passes. Thailand has the rights to 1.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in one concession alone. One Indian firm has signed up for 5 trillion cubic feet of gas; Russia’s got several firms drilling; a single pipeline operated by France, Thailand, and, yes, Chevron earned the junta more than $1 billion in 2008; South Korean Daewoo plans to make more than $10 billion over twenty-five years from its drilling project in the immense Shwe gas reserves; handling Daewoo’s exploratory Burma drilling was US firm Transocean. As a member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Burma is included in the free-trade agreement that eliminates tariffs on thousands of products exchanged with India, which has signed an understanding that it will invest billions of US dollars in two Burmese hydroelectric dams. The EU is discussing a free-trade agreement with ASEAN, as well, though England swears that it will ensure that the deal won’t benefit Burma—though it’s got oil and gas dealings there, too. In 2008 Burma experienced a 165 percent increase from the year before in the number of Chinese multinational companies involved in mining, oil and gas, and hydropower development. Trade between the two countries was up to $2.6 billion in 2008, from $630 million in 2001. Burma is estimated to be running a $2.5 billion trade surplus, with $5 billion in currency reserves.46 Indeed, our pulling our cash out after Burma opened its economy up to foreigners in the ’90s just concentrated more money and power in the government/army when its businesses could have begun being controlled by nonevil investors and legitimate concerns.
These are the sorts of unhappy, backfirey results US Burma policy has long tended to achieve. Remember all those Burma-invading KMT troops we secretly supported, in our efforts to thwart Red China, who went on to build drug cartels? Well, then, the Reagan administration’s solution to Burma’s out-of-control opium production was to give the junta millions of dollars for an opium-eradication program involving US aircraft and 2,4-D—the chemical that makes up half the composition of Agent Orange. The Burmese government sprayed it all over Shan villages. The Shan complained that it killed cattle and people.47 Also, it wasn’t much of a deterrent for those who were opium farmers, who weren’t superinclined to plant food instead of drugs on that land, now that it’d been covered in poison. Burma went on to be named World’s No. 1 Opium Producer by the US government in 1991, a distinction it held until it was briefly surpassed by Afghanistan in 1999 and then fully usurped by the country in 2003, after the US had ousted the Taliban.
The United States can better target its sanctions all it wants, but those policies will continue to produce undesirable side effects. Already, they’ve put tens of thousands of Burmese textile workers out of factory jobs—and, as even the State Department has admitted, into sex work. And they will continue to be useless. Burmese timber still comes into the United States through China, and Burmese gems via the $8 billion of jewelry imports from Thailand. In 2008, more foreign companies had invested in Burma’s energy sector than ever. According to the Ministry of National Planning and Development, foreign investment dollars in the country nearly doubled in the first nine months of that year compared with the same period of the previous year, and in 2007, foreign investment in oil and gas was more than triple that of the year before. So, as Chevron has pointed out, if we pull out our remaining investments, someone else—and perhaps someone less conscientious48—will just gladly put their money in. The international community can’t even agree to stop giving the regime weapons. Norway has gone so far as to ban investment in one of China’s manufacturers because said manufacturer sells military vehicles to Burma. But even Germany, along with Singapore and Pakistan and Russia and Ukraine and Serbia, has supplied the junta with military equipment, which workers at a Rangoon port say is offloaded from cargo ships in the middle of the night as in an Indiana Jones movie. North Korea, too, which has missiles and will sell them to anyone with the money to buy, and with whom the Burmese foreign minister recently agreed to resume ties after twenty-five years of a diplomatic kibosh. And China, of course, which is the sole buyer of Daewoo’s Shwe gas output and has showered Burma’s military with weapons. Burma’s resources were those that allowed the founding and thriving of Burmah Oil, which became Burmah Castrol, which was bought by BP in 2000 for some $5 billion. They built Herbert Hoover’s silver-mining fortune. We know well enough to know that as long as there’s money—and energy—to be made in Burma, there’s unlikely to be a cohesive or constructive policy of international financial disengagement.
But even if everyone did collectively agree to simultaneously disinvest, including two of Burma’s neighbors—the world’s two most populous, energy-desperate countries—which is never going to happen—who says regime change would necessarily follow? There’s no guarantee that a government that’s worked so hard to isolate itself from prying, hostile foreign eyes—that’s had its suspicion that the West isn’t good for it repeatedly confirmed with incursions and, later, sanctions—will be sad if the wh
ole world decides to just stay out of its business, considering that it puts up all over the country giant white-on-red billboards that say this:PEOPLE’S DESIRE
★ Oppose those relying on external elements, acting as stooges, holding negative views.
★ Oppose those trying to jeopardize stability of the State and progress of the nation.
★ Oppose foreign nations interfering in internal affairs of the State.
★ Crush all internal and external destructive elements as the common enemy.
“The Burmese,” wrote colonialist James George Scott in 1886, “were little inclined to yield to threats.” He would know. Not thirty years prior to the first British invasion, in 1824, with thousands of refugees fleeing into British territory from Burma’s expansionist rampage, and with concerns about the worst possible future for Burma—that it would become a part or ally of France—the British sent a series of envoys to the country. The first one was stood up by the king, then made to wait, rudely, for two and a half months for an appointment; the second went home in a huff; and the third mission won exactly zero concessions from the Burmese court, leading the diplomat to conclude that the British might just have to go to war. Ultimately, that time, the British didn’t do shit, which was part of the reason the Burmese later pushed their borders right up against them in the first place. Another reason was that by then, the Burmese fancied themselves the all-conquering warlords of the universe. They’d subjugated the Thais, the Chinese, and the Mon, among others, sacking kingdoms abroad even while fighting rival ones at home. In 1768, of the more than ten thousand troops that had invaded Burma from Manchu, one of the largest empires the world has ever seen, just a few made it home alive. The Portuguese had tried their hand at conquering Burma, and lost in 1613. When Kublai Khan himself had demanded tribute in 1271, the Burmese started a war with the Mongols that lasted more than a decade, so King Bagyidaw, Emperor of Emperors, Against Whose Imperial Majesty if Any Shall Be So Foolish as to Imagine Anything, It Shall Be Happy for Them to Die and Be Consumed; the Lord of Great Charity and Help of All Nations; the Lord Esteemed for Happiness; the Lord of All Riches, of Elephants and Horses, and All Good Blessings; the Lord of High-Built Palaces of Gold; the Great and Most Powerful Emperor in This Life, the Soles of Whose Feet Are Gilt and Set upon the Heads of All People, would be damned if he was going to just roll over for England, whether it had an arsenal of native scouts and spies and rocket fire or not. Even King Thibaw, even after his country had been licked by the British twice, refused to accept their terms for avoiding the third war. Rather, in response, he went ahead and made his own declaration of war, and furthermore stipulated that if the British didn’t step off, he was going to sail over to England with an army of elephants and annex them.49
This time, though, with no relationship or leverage to speak of, we’re sure that we’re going to give a country—that country—a stern and united “Knock it off,” and with nary a significant “or else,” and it’s just going to come out with its hands up. Like even if the nations of the world abandoned all that trade—which they won’t; even we haven’t—and pushed Burma into total economic collapse; like even if desperation nudged tensions among paranoid generals and a giant underpaid army to run uncontrollably high, the leaders of Burma would just stop fighting their own people, rather than fight them as well as each other to the last bloodied man standing, the welfare of the populace, always, be damned. As it is, Burma’s leaders have let the country devolve into chaos. As it is, for anyone outside the upper echelons of the military/opium/industrial complex, the country is already in total economic collapse; the regime works not so much for as in spite of its people, selling off all its resources as if its civilians weren’t starving and in the dark and right there, while the generals stow billions in Singaporean shelter accounts.
Some say we can’t lift the sanctions because that’s the same as admitting that the regime has won, but it’s kind of hard to argue, really, that it hasn’t. Already, the military’s the last institution standing. No other forms of national government even exist in the country. Master creator of the military machine Ne Win stepped down in 1988, but you wouldn’t have noticed it; other tyrants just took his place, and he was rumored to have been running the show regardless. He died in 2002, but his dynasty has lived, his same dictatorial song and dance, for decades, the world’s longest-standing military dictatorship. Western powers have only helped entrench the regime and its violence against our former ethnic-minority allies there with covert and overt post-independence war efforts and the same sanctioning that didn’t work in Iraq and didn’t work in Cuba and certainly isn’t working in Burma now.
The solution, instead, lies in the United Nations. The Security Council has plenty of critics, sure, who charge and joke that the body is impotent, unable to play a meaningful role in international crises. Sadly, the Security Council has agreed. The UN itself admitted that its policy during the massacres in Rwanda and Bosnia and Herzegovina was devastatingly fatal. So at the 2005 UN World Summit, it was resolved that if a nation is host to any of four “atrocity crimes”—war crimes, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, genocide—that nation comes under a responsibility to protect, or R2P, and the Security Council has committed to take “timely and decisive” action to protect the nation’s people. The principle even overrides national sovereignty.
When in 2007 a draft resolution on Burma was brought before the Security Council, some activists and legal advisers felt that there was a strong case for it to include charges of genocide. The UN 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as an attempt “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group” with at least one of five methods. One of them the SPDC isn’t guilty of: “Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” But “Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group”? If you count gang-raping and murdering pregnant women, yes. “Killing members of the group”? Check. “Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group”? Check. “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”? Clearly. Since the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, systematic rape has also been recognized as a defining feature of genocide, and in Burma, it’s systematic, institutionalized, indoctrinated into soldiers. It is, according to defectors, explicitly ordered, and in the name of diluting ethnic blood: “Your blood must be left in the village.” Burmese soldiers also force minority women into marriage with them as a means of enslavement. Australian National University’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre corroborates that there was a special Karen-killing terror squad of the Tatmadaw. They went around beheading and detesticling people. Once, they took a kid who was playing volleyball, cut his head off, and displayed it in the jungle, sticking a cheroot in its mouth, which they probably thought was pretty funny. Villagers knew these guys when they arrived because they started stabbing people instead of just shooting them.
But not everyone agrees that these crimes a genocide make; not one government has officially leveled the charge at Burma, and no tribunals have been called. Some academics, journalists, and even activists argue that these genocidal actions aren’t sufficiently genocide-like to count. We can’t just be throwing the word around to describe any old horror, since then it loses its potency in describing the very specific horror of atrocities we’ve all agreed are genocides. Or as my father put it when I tried to impress upon him the seriousness of the situation in Burma, “But how does it compare to Sudan?”
If Sudan is the bar against which we’re measuring genocide, okay: The SPDC has destroyed more than three thousand ethnic villages in eastern Burma, comparable to the number that have been destroyed in Darfur. In Darfur, nearly three million people have been displaced. In the jungle of eastern Burma alone, an absolute minimum of half a million live displaced, and millions have fled the country. The mortality rate of children under fi
ve, a common measure of conflict epidemiology, in Sudan is 109 per 1,000 live births. In eastern Burma, it’s 221. In the Darfur genocide, four hundred thousand civilians have been killed. Unfortunately, no one’s come up with a comprehensive, widely agreed-upon tally of Burma’s casualties. Some experts estimate that a few thousand minorities have been slain a year, every year, since independence, sixty years ago. So, three hundred thousand? One expert put the number at four hundred thousand—as of 1990. A junta chairman once estimated that the body count of Burma’s civil war “would reach as high as millions.”
According to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, genocidaires don’t have to act hard and fast; slow and even indirect genocide is genocide nonetheless. Also decided in that tribunal was that prosecutors don’t have to provide actual official, written proof of genocidal intent to successfully charge genocide; the intent can be inferred. Like from the ashes of thousands of burned villages. Like from the disallowing of Karen language instruction. Like from the UN special rapporteur for human rights in Burma having admitted in 1998 that the systematic violence and destruction were clearly “the result of policy at the highest level, entailing political and legal responsibility.” Like from a group of kids in a refugee camp who were given some art supplies and paper and told to make whatever they wanted and drew pictures of people running from a burning village, a woman with some of her clothes torn off by soldiers who are about to rape her, and civilians being murdered while an infant gets tossed into a rice mortar. Like from any Karen IDPs who’ve been violently chased from their villages by soldiers who’ve destroyed all their food and livestock in their wake: If they manage not to die, it’s really not for their government’s lack of trying, since it even attempts to, and sometimes does, stop and kill aid workers trying to bring in relief. Like from the messages SPDC soldiers write on walls or post on trees of villages they attack: “Soon the Karen will no longer exist. Waiting for the day when you will die.”
For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question Page 19