Oops, they did it again...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8176296.stm
Friday, July 31, 2009
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Unwitting anonymity of a headless monk buried in a monsoon umbrella. Somewhere in Rangoon, surrounded by the usual crowd of people squatting round things spread out for sale in the middle of the street. Very possibly he's fiddling with the contraptions to tune in to the forbidden crackle of BBC, Norway-based Democratic Voice of Burma or Radio Free Asia -- about the only three reliable sources of outside info in Burma, beyond an array of fabulously named and less fabulously successful Internet proxies that pave the way to a world beyond in which gmail, yahoo and any site with the words Burma and Free are not thought tools of 'nebulous 'destructive elements' or 'skyful liars' of a kind regularly denounced on the back pages of the government mouthpiece.A neat segue that to introduce the New Light of Myanmar: Glorious Tribute to Make Excellent the Genius of King General Than Shwe, Senior Leader and Most Royal Jade Buddha. The paper, with characteristic Bolshevik subtlely -- and English as refined -- warned yesterday against any predictions of guilt in Aung San Suu Kyi's trial. (In also incidentally has a friendly message of felicitations to the King of Morrocco and a blow- by- blow of paddy transplantation celebrations. Never let it be said that newspapers always lead with bleed.) "Biased writings about the trial in progress, writings about which side will win or lose in that trial, predicted writings about the possibility fo the defendant's conviction and writings about tendency to give instructions to the judgment of the judge" amount to contempt of court, which some see as a none too delicate threat against vocal leaders of the opposition, include the venerated U Win Tin, journalist and NLD strategist extraordinaire. Whose English, I have it on good phone evidence, is incredibly refined.
Right, back to that serious piece I owe a publication. Apologies for lightweight content today. Stay tuned...and not to me, but to Burma. Sad things to come in the morrow. We predict.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Two days and counting 'till a verdict on the show trial of the moment and the world readies again for another series of condemnations, doubtless futile unless they were to come from the regime's Chinese patrons. Still, there hasn't been much empirical evidence to suggest a corking of the flow of contracts, migrants and/or tiny pieces of jade between China's southern Yunnan Province and Upper Burma.
But a wise friend in Rangoon, a scholar with high-level contacts in the junta, agrees that a small-noticed trip in mid-June to Beijing by No. 2, Vice Snr. Gen. Maung Aye had as much to do with appeasing the dragon as talking shop. ASEAN states, a mite less mighty, have continued to dither. We'll get to them another day.
Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton aired a new carrot-and-stick strategy at a July 22 meeting in Phuket, Thailand:. "If she [Suu Kyi] were released, that would open up opportunities, at least for my country, to expand our relationship with Burma, including investments in Burma. But it is up to the Burmese leadership," Clinton said.
Strong condemnation from the foreign or exiled media. Clinton's approach would sell out for a symbol the more than 2000 other political detainees, or even the 10,000 waifs wandering the streets after years in Burmese prisons. So responded Ko Bo Kyi, co-founder of the Thai-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, with the focused zeal of a former detainee -turned-lifelong crusader for Burma's gulag hoppers.
But that's hardly enough for Enzo Reale, in the Burmese exile paper Mizzima: "What about internally displaced people? What about forced and child labour? What about recruitment of children in the Army? What about refugees? What about the climate of intimidation and fear? What about Burma?"
Which takes us back to the point at hand. Does Clinton's gamble resonate deep into the bunkers and tunnels of sprawling Naypyidaw?
(Which incidentally isn't to say that retreat into a worm's fantasyland underground precludes bursts of urban Spring cleaning that vaguely recall the slum largesse of Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe. Brig. Gen. Aung Thein Linn, mayor of Rangoon, has apparently restricted the decades-old practice of street-side hawking. (We're assuming they're restricted to presumably licensed areas, by which we mean licenses bought off the general or others in his retinue)
What!? Rangoon minus its spectacular moving feast? That said, easier by far to brave vehicular traffic than tread over, round or through the tropical growth of makeshift shops choking the sidewalks with everything from fried locust to, well, anything Made-In-China.
But a wise friend in Rangoon, a scholar with high-level contacts in the junta, agrees that a small-noticed trip in mid-June to Beijing by No. 2, Vice Snr. Gen. Maung Aye had as much to do with appeasing the dragon as talking shop. ASEAN states, a mite less mighty, have continued to dither. We'll get to them another day.
Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton aired a new carrot-and-stick strategy at a July 22 meeting in Phuket, Thailand:. "If she [Suu Kyi] were released, that would open up opportunities, at least for my country, to expand our relationship with Burma, including investments in Burma. But it is up to the Burmese leadership," Clinton said.
Strong condemnation from the foreign or exiled media. Clinton's approach would sell out for a symbol the more than 2000 other political detainees, or even the 10,000 waifs wandering the streets after years in Burmese prisons. So responded Ko Bo Kyi, co-founder of the Thai-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, with the focused zeal of a former detainee -turned-lifelong crusader for Burma's gulag hoppers.
But that's hardly enough for Enzo Reale, in the Burmese exile paper Mizzima: "What about internally displaced people? What about forced and child labour? What about recruitment of children in the Army? What about refugees? What about the climate of intimidation and fear? What about Burma?"
Which takes us back to the point at hand. Does Clinton's gamble resonate deep into the bunkers and tunnels of sprawling Naypyidaw?
(Which incidentally isn't to say that retreat into a worm's fantasyland underground precludes bursts of urban Spring cleaning that vaguely recall the slum largesse of Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe. Brig. Gen. Aung Thein Linn, mayor of Rangoon, has apparently restricted the decades-old practice of street-side hawking. (We're assuming they're restricted to presumably licensed areas, by which we mean licenses bought off the general or others in his retinue)
What!? Rangoon minus its spectacular moving feast? That said, easier by far to brave vehicular traffic than tread over, round or through the tropical growth of makeshift shops choking the sidewalks with everything from fried locust to, well, anything Made-In-China.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Plus ca change...
Why no street protests? Why no marching? Has the fire gone out of their souls?
"You sound as if you are a foreigner," said a Mandalay acquaintance to me with an arched eyebrow, when I posed the question to him.
I asked the same of everyone I met, on a recent trip to Burma, even if the answer was palpably obvious. In Rangoon, you only had to glance toward the Shwedagon Pagoda, that "winking wonder," as Rudyard Kipling put it, whose golden peak rises from the city's urban cacophany as a beacon of constancy amid the shifting caprices of successive military autocrats. It was from here, in Sept. 2007, that a sea of monks swaddled in maroon togas poured down into the streets to protest a rise in fuel prices, only to be mowed down by security forces. The trauma lingers.
Besides, Burmese told me, a beloved leader's protracted fate holds less urgency then coping with day to day material concerns.
"Love is love, love is not a food price," said the rocker fugitive head of the subversive underground opposition network, Generation Wave, as we chatted one rainy afternoon in a Rangoon coffee parlor "The trial does’t affect them."
To cite one cheap example of Burmese poverty, and this in a country that once ranked as Asia's wealthiest, inflation in 2008 hovered at 27%, which puts it at 216th out of 222 states in the CIA's global inflation rankings.
Still, it's been a long couple of months. In the interim, protests erupted in Tehran, turned bloody, then fell out of the headlines as fast.
Burmese, of course, watched with typical comparative thoughtfulness from afar. Here's what I gathered at the time. And as it happens, of course it's still relevant. Stagnation, after all, is a ready ingredient of autocracies...
Rangoon, Burma -- With their eyes fixed on the bloody tumult in Tehran, inhabitants of these silent, monsoon-darkened streets ponder revolution of a different sort.
For weeks, the stillness in Burma’s former capital, Rangoon, has masked deep anguish about the trial of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi who languishes for the second consecutive month in the city’s Insein Prison in a protracted trial that most see as a twisted legal pretext to keep her behind bars ahead of parliamentary elections next year whom Burmese refer to simply and in whispers as “the Lady.” Aung San Suu Kyi has spent the last 13 of 19 years under house arrest.
“This is very painful for us,” said a social activist who works in HIV/AIDs, at a Rangoon tea shop. He paused a moment and gazed toward the golden peak of Shwedagon Pagoda that pierced through a shifting vapor of monsoon clouds, as if he were gathering solace from the sight. A frog lumbered past his feet. The trial, he said, was “a kind of insult to the people. Someone said we deserve this government because we don’t have the courage. There is a feeling that they will totally crack down.”
Burmese view events in Iran with the hindsight of past failed protests, all brutally suppressed. But even for the most hard-bitten of the country’s clandestine opposition activists, dreams of toppling the junta from the streets have instead yielded a new pragmatism, and a powerful search for a new way.
In recent days, the military junta’s mouthpiece, the New Light of Myanmar, has drowned out news from Teheran with articles on bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“This is an old trick for us, for they did that kind of stuff back in the beginning weeks of Iraq Invasion,” said a Rangoon resident. “We called the New Light of Myanmar the New Light of Baghdad and the other paper, the Mirror of Iraq.”
But Burmese say they are acutely conscious of unfolding events in the Middle East, accustomed to tuning into banned foreign radio outlets and using proxy servers to bypass blocks in the hundreds of internet cafes that have sprung up in recent months across the country. Meanwhile, some of the nearly 200 private journals published in Rangoon and Mandalay have seized on Iran as a news story from which to subtly pass messages through the censors to their readers.
“What we, the private media, are trying to do was to put in as much stories and pixs of what's going on in Teheran in our papers. So far we were successful. The upcoming paper of mine… will carry, albeit if it's not censored, news stories of the events in Teheran and a feature on 'Elections and Democracy," trying to draw some parallels between the one in Iran the upcoming one here,” said an editor of a weekly publication, referring to elections in 2010 for a new constitution that critics widely dismiss as a sham. “I'm still waiting till Friday whether it will be censored or not...”
“About Iran, I can't say whether their current movement will change the political trend or not,” said Moe Thway, a rocker with red-streaked hair who co-founded of Generation Wave, one of Burma’s most shadowy and creative clandestine opposition networks. “But I can surely say that this movement will be carry on toward changes. It can be a start at least…But Iran and our Burma are still different.”
In recent weeks, Moe Thway has been among the ragged and diffuse groups of Burma’s semi-underground opposition activists trying to stir action by passing out subversive pamphlets or photographs of Aung San Suu Kyi.
But Iran’s citizens are not nearly as depressed and despairing as in Burma, said Generation Wave’s Moe Thway, echoing a sentiment widespread among residents. In Burma, nostalgia for the student-led pro-democracy uprising of 1988 was conclusively smashed nearly two years ago. In Sept. 2007, the military junta ordered forces to open fire on a sea of Buddhist monks and lay residents who had poured into the streets from the marble steps of Rangoon’s Shwedagon to protest an overnight doubling of fuel prices.
If hope of change exists, Burmese glimpse it in the burgeoning of civil society, or the slow creep of grassroots activism. Overtly political opposition groups and many more apolitical networks have in recent months emerged with a focus on a strategy of evolutionary change, carefully reaching out to educate the country’s rural masses and working to strengthen their sense of civic engagement ahead of the 2010 elections.
“We cannot go directly to our goal,” said a graphic designer who co-founded a group that teaches social management and governance in Rangoon and remote towns under the cover of English classes. “We must move forward because here we have a lack of democratic culture. So I started my organization to start informal education….”
But the groups tread a careful line between politics and social work to meet their goals without harassment from authorities.
At first light on a recent Sunday, a dozen physicians piled into two vans and headed out from central Rangoon to dispatch free medicine and consultations to villagers an hour away in a tiny squat of bamboo and straw-thatch huts down a dirt path among watery rice paddies.
The group first came together during the Sept. 2007 protests to care for the demonstrators who had been beaten by security forces. Then, in May 2008, Tropical Cyclone Nargis hit Burma with a trail of devastation, killing 140,000 people. While the junta dragged its feet and rebuffed foreign aid workers, the physicians were among countless Burmese who shuttered their shops or clinics, closed their textbooks or froze their printing presses for the space of a few days to throw together bags of rice, cooking oil or whatever supplies they could muster to bring to the ravaged villagers.
Like many of those unofficial ad hoc groups, the Rangoon physicians have since developed a informal nonprofit, alternating weekends with work in an orphanage and seven villages on the outskirts of Rangoon. The group’s founder, a doctor with a busy private medical practice in a leafy residential maze of Rangoon streets, managed to secure funding from a foreign nonprofit and named the shifting team of twentysomethings to sixtysomethings the “Volunteers for the Vulnerable.”
“Not even all our members know the name of the group,” said the founder. Instead he negotiates with government authorities to have access to the village using the cover of a Buddhist monastery.
But it’s not just glorified welfare work.
The day change comes, the founder said, “the Lady will lead. But we will lead too. We will organize at the township level.”
"You sound as if you are a foreigner," said a Mandalay acquaintance to me with an arched eyebrow, when I posed the question to him.
I asked the same of everyone I met, on a recent trip to Burma, even if the answer was palpably obvious. In Rangoon, you only had to glance toward the Shwedagon Pagoda, that "winking wonder," as Rudyard Kipling put it, whose golden peak rises from the city's urban cacophany as a beacon of constancy amid the shifting caprices of successive military autocrats. It was from here, in Sept. 2007, that a sea of monks swaddled in maroon togas poured down into the streets to protest a rise in fuel prices, only to be mowed down by security forces. The trauma lingers.
Besides, Burmese told me, a beloved leader's protracted fate holds less urgency then coping with day to day material concerns.
"Love is love, love is not a food price," said the rocker fugitive head of the subversive underground opposition network, Generation Wave, as we chatted one rainy afternoon in a Rangoon coffee parlor "The trial does’t affect them."
To cite one cheap example of Burmese poverty, and this in a country that once ranked as Asia's wealthiest, inflation in 2008 hovered at 27%, which puts it at 216th out of 222 states in the CIA's global inflation rankings.
Still, it's been a long couple of months. In the interim, protests erupted in Tehran, turned bloody, then fell out of the headlines as fast.
Burmese, of course, watched with typical comparative thoughtfulness from afar. Here's what I gathered at the time. And as it happens, of course it's still relevant. Stagnation, after all, is a ready ingredient of autocracies...
Rangoon, Burma -- With their eyes fixed on the bloody tumult in Tehran, inhabitants of these silent, monsoon-darkened streets ponder revolution of a different sort.
For weeks, the stillness in Burma’s former capital, Rangoon, has masked deep anguish about the trial of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi who languishes for the second consecutive month in the city’s Insein Prison in a protracted trial that most see as a twisted legal pretext to keep her behind bars ahead of parliamentary elections next year whom Burmese refer to simply and in whispers as “the Lady.” Aung San Suu Kyi has spent the last 13 of 19 years under house arrest.
“This is very painful for us,” said a social activist who works in HIV/AIDs, at a Rangoon tea shop. He paused a moment and gazed toward the golden peak of Shwedagon Pagoda that pierced through a shifting vapor of monsoon clouds, as if he were gathering solace from the sight. A frog lumbered past his feet. The trial, he said, was “a kind of insult to the people. Someone said we deserve this government because we don’t have the courage. There is a feeling that they will totally crack down.”
Burmese view events in Iran with the hindsight of past failed protests, all brutally suppressed. But even for the most hard-bitten of the country’s clandestine opposition activists, dreams of toppling the junta from the streets have instead yielded a new pragmatism, and a powerful search for a new way.
In recent days, the military junta’s mouthpiece, the New Light of Myanmar, has drowned out news from Teheran with articles on bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“This is an old trick for us, for they did that kind of stuff back in the beginning weeks of Iraq Invasion,” said a Rangoon resident. “We called the New Light of Myanmar the New Light of Baghdad and the other paper, the Mirror of Iraq.”
But Burmese say they are acutely conscious of unfolding events in the Middle East, accustomed to tuning into banned foreign radio outlets and using proxy servers to bypass blocks in the hundreds of internet cafes that have sprung up in recent months across the country. Meanwhile, some of the nearly 200 private journals published in Rangoon and Mandalay have seized on Iran as a news story from which to subtly pass messages through the censors to their readers.
“What we, the private media, are trying to do was to put in as much stories and pixs of what's going on in Teheran in our papers. So far we were successful. The upcoming paper of mine… will carry, albeit if it's not censored, news stories of the events in Teheran and a feature on 'Elections and Democracy," trying to draw some parallels between the one in Iran the upcoming one here,” said an editor of a weekly publication, referring to elections in 2010 for a new constitution that critics widely dismiss as a sham. “I'm still waiting till Friday whether it will be censored or not...”
“About Iran, I can't say whether their current movement will change the political trend or not,” said Moe Thway, a rocker with red-streaked hair who co-founded of Generation Wave, one of Burma’s most shadowy and creative clandestine opposition networks. “But I can surely say that this movement will be carry on toward changes. It can be a start at least…But Iran and our Burma are still different.”
In recent weeks, Moe Thway has been among the ragged and diffuse groups of Burma’s semi-underground opposition activists trying to stir action by passing out subversive pamphlets or photographs of Aung San Suu Kyi.
But Iran’s citizens are not nearly as depressed and despairing as in Burma, said Generation Wave’s Moe Thway, echoing a sentiment widespread among residents. In Burma, nostalgia for the student-led pro-democracy uprising of 1988 was conclusively smashed nearly two years ago. In Sept. 2007, the military junta ordered forces to open fire on a sea of Buddhist monks and lay residents who had poured into the streets from the marble steps of Rangoon’s Shwedagon to protest an overnight doubling of fuel prices.
If hope of change exists, Burmese glimpse it in the burgeoning of civil society, or the slow creep of grassroots activism. Overtly political opposition groups and many more apolitical networks have in recent months emerged with a focus on a strategy of evolutionary change, carefully reaching out to educate the country’s rural masses and working to strengthen their sense of civic engagement ahead of the 2010 elections.
“We cannot go directly to our goal,” said a graphic designer who co-founded a group that teaches social management and governance in Rangoon and remote towns under the cover of English classes. “We must move forward because here we have a lack of democratic culture. So I started my organization to start informal education….”
But the groups tread a careful line between politics and social work to meet their goals without harassment from authorities.
At first light on a recent Sunday, a dozen physicians piled into two vans and headed out from central Rangoon to dispatch free medicine and consultations to villagers an hour away in a tiny squat of bamboo and straw-thatch huts down a dirt path among watery rice paddies.
The group first came together during the Sept. 2007 protests to care for the demonstrators who had been beaten by security forces. Then, in May 2008, Tropical Cyclone Nargis hit Burma with a trail of devastation, killing 140,000 people. While the junta dragged its feet and rebuffed foreign aid workers, the physicians were among countless Burmese who shuttered their shops or clinics, closed their textbooks or froze their printing presses for the space of a few days to throw together bags of rice, cooking oil or whatever supplies they could muster to bring to the ravaged villagers.
Like many of those unofficial ad hoc groups, the Rangoon physicians have since developed a informal nonprofit, alternating weekends with work in an orphanage and seven villages on the outskirts of Rangoon. The group’s founder, a doctor with a busy private medical practice in a leafy residential maze of Rangoon streets, managed to secure funding from a foreign nonprofit and named the shifting team of twentysomethings to sixtysomethings the “Volunteers for the Vulnerable.”
“Not even all our members know the name of the group,” said the founder. Instead he negotiates with government authorities to have access to the village using the cover of a Buddhist monastery.
But it’s not just glorified welfare work.
The day change comes, the founder said, “the Lady will lead. But we will lead too. We will organize at the township level.”
Monday, July 27, 2009
Welcome to the musings -- we hope seamless and pithy, we predict sporadic, longwinded and ridden with asides -- of a semi-eponymous witness to a forbidden land.
To Burma, then, With Love.
Today seems fitting for this small birth. Today the Lady faces a new delay in the delayed debacle of a monumental delaying tactic -- a trial that has sputtered as fitfully as the generators of Rangoon and Mandalay. Today, in short, we're immersed in the daily sport of the junta's cat-and-mousing with a population that long ago learned to avert its gaze in anguished disgust. We weren't holding our breath.
The case against Aung San Suu Kyi has dragged on inside the blackening walls of Insein Prison since May 18, triggered by a kooky American who swam across the vast algae-ridden greenery of Inye lake (with a remarkable resilience to microscopic bacterial infestation, though no one appears to have found much to analyze there as such) and trespassed on the University Ave compound where Burma's Mandela has languished for 13 of the past 19 years.
What followed would all seem pretty farce, if it weren't also an excuse to twist at will through a twisted legal system and keep a symbol locked away. The trial, of course, has become a convenient opiate designed to drug local viewers of the more firebrand revolutionary stripe into a stupor of disinterest and cynicism. Either the Lady gets five years or another year, Burmese residents told me, often with a shrug, either she gets a prison sentence or more house arrest (Location to be determined). And so what? Onwards the prospects of elections next March. Onwards the slow forbidding march to freedom and democracy...
Or perhaps not. Today, for the third days in two months, diplomats and a handful of luckless local journalists sat in as silent witnesses, a grand audience for Grand Guignol. Delusions of magnanimity from on high in Naypyidaw, or a sop to the world beyond?
No matter. Few beyond much care any longer. The suspense is as palpable as watching the slow creep of mold on Rangoon's colonial edifices.
Incidentally, a moment on me. I think I'll resort to the royal "we." Less hubristic, or the more so, perhaps, but also more attuned to the schizophrenia of this blogger -- a reporter masked with a pseudonym wrapped in a caricature. I've got to ensure that I can go back to visit.
Disclaimer: I won't pretend to be neutral here. I'll opt for fairness. My opinions, where salient, derive from regular dialogue with friends across the country and a couple of deeply invested undercover trips to for a US newspaper. Hoping in future postings and other published things to piece together the disparate states of mind of a thousand anonymous Burmese.
But let's be clear. I'm in love with Burma and I'm going to tell it like it is, as I understand it, spiced with the myopia of a romantic who misses like hell the faint smell of jasmine and the sudden appearance of a crumbling golden pagoda from the midst of an alley of mango sellers.
To Burma, then, With Love.
Today seems fitting for this small birth. Today the Lady faces a new delay in the delayed debacle of a monumental delaying tactic -- a trial that has sputtered as fitfully as the generators of Rangoon and Mandalay. Today, in short, we're immersed in the daily sport of the junta's cat-and-mousing with a population that long ago learned to avert its gaze in anguished disgust. We weren't holding our breath.
The case against Aung San Suu Kyi has dragged on inside the blackening walls of Insein Prison since May 18, triggered by a kooky American who swam across the vast algae-ridden greenery of Inye lake (with a remarkable resilience to microscopic bacterial infestation, though no one appears to have found much to analyze there as such) and trespassed on the University Ave compound where Burma's Mandela has languished for 13 of the past 19 years.
What followed would all seem pretty farce, if it weren't also an excuse to twist at will through a twisted legal system and keep a symbol locked away. The trial, of course, has become a convenient opiate designed to drug local viewers of the more firebrand revolutionary stripe into a stupor of disinterest and cynicism. Either the Lady gets five years or another year, Burmese residents told me, often with a shrug, either she gets a prison sentence or more house arrest (Location to be determined). And so what? Onwards the prospects of elections next March. Onwards the slow forbidding march to freedom and democracy...
Or perhaps not. Today, for the third days in two months, diplomats and a handful of luckless local journalists sat in as silent witnesses, a grand audience for Grand Guignol. Delusions of magnanimity from on high in Naypyidaw, or a sop to the world beyond?
No matter. Few beyond much care any longer. The suspense is as palpable as watching the slow creep of mold on Rangoon's colonial edifices.
Incidentally, a moment on me. I think I'll resort to the royal "we." Less hubristic, or the more so, perhaps, but also more attuned to the schizophrenia of this blogger -- a reporter masked with a pseudonym wrapped in a caricature. I've got to ensure that I can go back to visit.
Disclaimer: I won't pretend to be neutral here. I'll opt for fairness. My opinions, where salient, derive from regular dialogue with friends across the country and a couple of deeply invested undercover trips to for a US newspaper. Hoping in future postings and other published things to piece together the disparate states of mind of a thousand anonymous Burmese.
But let's be clear. I'm in love with Burma and I'm going to tell it like it is, as I understand it, spiced with the myopia of a romantic who misses like hell the faint smell of jasmine and the sudden appearance of a crumbling golden pagoda from the midst of an alley of mango sellers.
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