To quote extensively from a very pertinent piece by a man with a rare combination of combat experience in South East Asia, a novelists' psychological acuity and an experienced practitioner of the inner workings of the US legislative process:

(Brownie points for reading the author's full piece, pondering, then correcting me as I pontificate freely and otherwise unchecked in past, future (and present. can't resist.) posts.)

"But there is room for engagement. Many Asian countries — China among them — do not even allow opposition parties. The National League for Democracy might consider the advantages of participation as part of a longer-term political strategy. And the United States could invigorate the debate with an offer to help assist the electoral process. The Myanmar government’s answer to such an offer would be revealing.

"[T]he United States needs to develop clearly articulated standards for its relations with the nondemocratic world. Our distinct policies toward different countries amount to a form of situational ethics that does not translate well into clear-headed diplomacy. We must talk to Myanmar’s leaders. This does not mean that we should abandon our aspirations for a free and open Burmese society, but that our goal will be achieved only through a different course of action.

...Finally, with respect to reducing sanctions, we should proceed carefully but immediately. If there is reciprocation from the government of Myanmar in terms of removing the obstacles that now confront us, there would be several ways for our two governments to move forward. We could begin with humanitarian projects. We might also seek cooperation on our long-held desire to recover the remains of World War II airmen at crash sites in the country’s north."

It seems tautologous to credit a fait accompli with kicking US foreign policy from inertial stagnancy to movement. But action breeds action and Webb's visit to Burma seems to have cracked open an opportunity for the West and the rest. His was no pony show insofar as it doubled as a chance for a US politician to hear, on Burmese soil, from major players whose relative ratio of heroism to villainy would plot nicely along an exponential growth curve. In other words, no exiles whispering into a Westerner's ear with ideas poisoned by long absence from -and scerlotic visions of - life inside. Webb's audience offered him a fresh, insider vision on a regime otherwise frozen into oblivion, at an obvious loss to US intelligence.

US intelligence on Burma? Who cares? By way of answer -- International Relations, 101, the Billiard Ball theory (skewed): One presumes it would be outside the interests of a vast Western power to wake up near the black hole in corner-left of the Asian billiard table, knocked out of place by a strategically positioned resource rich country that offers a vital political, economic and military outhouse for the Middle Kingdom and a nuclear tech. trading partner for out-of-work Muscovites nostalgic for a bit of Sputnik-era scientific bravado.

Cast your mind back to the fine-tuned pre-diplomacy required to open relations between the US and China in 1973. It took a mightily creative exchange of Ping Pong players, alongside a careful intervention of Pakistani emissaries (and we know not what expense in snail mail postage). Given the ritual subtletly of Beijing political messaging, and the signal lack thereof from big, brash, earnest America, it doubtless also took a Zhang and a Kissinger to gently discover the right dance steps to start the much celebrated Sino-US thaw. Naturally that historical analogy falls flat on at least ten"p" counts (power, population, political indeterminacy, party count, proximity to major US nemesis, potential to counterbalance proximal nemisis -- well okay that's six) . But the lesson endures: transnational communication shutdowns make starting points for negotiation a mite difficult.

The current against which Webb swims accepts with little question the conventional wisdom that dialogue with the junta would offer it symbolic legitimization, and thereby vindicate its annullment of the election results of 1990 in which Suu Kyi's party, the NLD, surged to victory. In Webb's defence, I would respectfully submit that we rest an ear on Burmese rice paddy and listen hard for the quiet seismic trembles of the opposition and everyone between. Accept that it is possible that in the intervening years (ie. nearly 20 years), they might have changed their thinking. Accept that they recognize the impossibility of watching their country slide ever deeper into poverty and pain. The most hardline of the junta's in-country critics, Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy, are clamoring for dialogue. A dialogue long forbidden to them, until an opening appeared like a wormhole in the form of next year's elections. A dialogue that begins admittedly with the unlikely premise of releasing the 2100 poltical prisoners and Aung San Suu Kyi. But there is a starting point, and we leave it to the mysterious alchemy of diplomat-negotiators to find the particular formula for turning cold-faced silence into a process. For transforming stangant internia into kinetic interia.

On Wit (cont.)

A photograph dating to 21 February 1948 caught Klement Gottwald, head of the Czech communist party, handing a fur hat to Vladimir Clementis, who helped orchestrate the coup that elevated Gottwald to Czech premier and eventually president. In the photo, the pair stand on a Baroque castle balcony, with Gottwald haranguing a Prague crowd just as the snows start to fall. And so he thinks to hand his hat to Clementis.

Shortly after his arrest and eventual execution in 1952 as a victim of inner party purges, Clementis would vanish without trace from the photo. Considering the photo and its vanishing parts in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera arrived at the following conclusion: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Which reminds me. Never let it be said that there is no historical power in the endless repetition of a joke.

//

If you know you're dead meat, to borrow the phrase of the comedien, what loss in shooting from the hip?

The Moustache Brothers of Mandalay run a tight business making sport of insulting the junta, firing off one-liners from an open wooden storefront that doubles as stageset, family dining room, green ogre's stamping pad, costume closet and alaphabet soup of Burmese concerns stenciled onto wooden signposts.

(ICC. Stop. Opium. Stop. China. Stop. Pause for a traditional dance, in a whirl of pink silk by Moustache Brother Spokesman's prized possession -- his "cover girl," he says in a lascivious refrain, holding up an ancient Italian version of Lonely Planet Guide to Burma with his wife, a few decades younger, gracing the cover in full traditional make-up.)

If a tree falls and no-one is there to hear it...
If only a tourist hears your political satire, wherefore its purpose?

Oh clever junta. They say Sen. Gen. Than Shwe plays his cards so close one forgets that he is a master of pyschological warfare. Isolate and conquer? Daw Suu rots alone in house arrest, far removed from the people she claims to represent. In past years, only her doctor and a food delivery man were permitted regular contact. The Moustache Brothers pose and strut in the shadows to a shadow of their audience. The decree against them comes in the wake of a string of arrests and staggered prison sentences following their provocative all-night performance in Suu Kyi's villa garden when last she was released.

Which doesn't mean they pack no punch.

Does futility measure as a utilitarian numbers game, or is there a qualitative significance in the mere act of playing to a wall? Is there symbolic importance in the smallest gestures of dissent? To borrow an idea I once heard expressed by composer Daniel Barenboim-- invest in a symbol because in the end a symbol matters. Like a dunce relegated with tall cap to a corner, Burma's most famous band of satiricists are forbidden from talking to Burmese. And so they play nightly to a sporadic trickle of tourists. Until the wife grows matronly and the face turns to a prune, and the husband wizens and grays, and the jokes grow stale and automatic.


But short of cutting off his tongue, you'd be hard put to silence the court fool. Asavvy friend in Rangoon had me know that my new Moustache friends dared to talk back to Burma through the forbidden channels of Radio Free Asia in a new regular Wednesday broadcast.

I made my way to Moustache land, a sui generis island of local slapstick theatrics and a regular on the Burmese tourist circuit, the night I arrived in Mandalay. I stumbled through backroads, picking my way in the dark and thickly hot air to a part of town the Lonely Planet Guide called Burma's West End.

I had about given myself up for dead, lost in a self-pitying wallow of foreigner's post-colonial nostalgia, about ready to curse the natives who were swearing me off in giggles and cackles iwith knowing and incomprehensible mockery, when my rescue appeared in the form of a howl of cheers.

There it was, under my nose, far more richly adorned than the paper Victorian theaters I'd long ago learned to love from a childhood steeped in the mysticm of the stage. There they sat, this subversive troupe, legs splays on the wooden floorboards, fingers scooping rice into their mouths with ravenous energy , waiting for the tourists who that night amounted to the grand total of -- me.

"We wait ten minutes. If four more come, we perform," said the family troupe spokesman. "If not, we talk."
And so we talked, or he talked, and I listened to a self-aware clutter of Wodehousian English mingled with a touch of Teuton by way of spaghetti Western. Two nights later I attempted another visit. Two Germans and to Brits sat waiting for the show. Judging from the glazed expressions, the jokes rang hollow.

//

With compliments:
Strategies of Dissent Evolving in Burma

Prologue to an Essay on Wit, Through a Glass Darkly

Forgive me this small digression (though by way of disclaimer, forthwith revealed the bare mechanics of this digression: an anecdote that takes the form of a haunting dialogue with a long lost relative, ostensibly disruptive to our theme and placed erratically on an entirely separate point along the space-time continuum, instead intends first to take us on a nostalgic trip triggered by a photo to a mystery steeped in WWII, then pauses a moment to remind us about the amorphous nature of evil -- though readers shall be spared any and all earthshatteringly profound philosophical insights -- by which point we will, we hope, be fully prepared to return full circle to the theme of the day in our well beloved lizard cage):

This evening I picked up a black-and-white photo, barely faded but for some sepia leakage in its righthand corner, that featured a band of young men who might've been the brawny, well-groomed members of a 1940s football team. Some smile, some rest on each others shoulders, some stand defiant. Behind them, a brick wall. Nothing more.

Turning it over, I noted that it was marked in the elegant inked script of a long lost family prankster. Above the date --10 Nov., 1939 -- he wrote "This is not a football team!"En francais, with typical wit, a message that echoes Magritte, crossed with Roberto Benigni.

Indeed not. The prankster's writing belongs to my grandfather, the member of the group perched bottom right in the photo, splaying his legs as he leans in with a brash elegance and a mustache that combine to suggest a dose of panache no nazi could ever quell. The scene was pictured a good month into the group's detention at an internship camp, where prisoners identified as Jewish stewed, awaiting deportation to the extermination camps of Germany and the east.

But it was early days yet. No one knew what evil might come. No one could imagine.

A letter a month later sent to his newlywed brother-in-law who languished in another prison -- the paper shared for space with a friend-- tells in coded messages of mingled hope and despair. Short phrases. Words lingering alone without clauses and context.

"When next we meet we can't wait to congtratulate you," the friend writes. "When next we meet. It will take time. Everything takes time."

The words, speaking aloud across the ages into minds attuned to more mundane things, come acompanied with a shudder. Of the photographed group, only my grandfather and another man escaped deportation. The rest, as far as we know, never returned.

Some say now that they dared to see evil when evil declared itself. Except they called it luck. A distant cousin who just celebrated his 85th told me last night, over a second glass of rose taken in a blur of twinkling candles, how his survival turned on fortune. He had read Mein Kampf at age 16, he said, so when the warnings of arrests began to come a year later -- a trickle of news from a baker, a tidbit from the wife of a local policeman -- he knew to take his mother and head for refuge to the locked, empty apartment in which he'd minutes earlier performed a spot of electrical work. Days later mother and son headed south toward the free zone. Just shy of the border, a delay of minutes kept them from their rendez-vous -- the momentary glitch that spared them from a Gestapo ambush that swept up who knows how many other hunted souls.

And so, back to our gulag among the pagodas, the better to introduce Burma's particular genius for gallows humor, where the line is fine between cynicism and free for all rotten tomato-throwing -- either they cry into their beer that all the country is a jail, or they cackle aloud that Rangoon is a city of house arrests. Perhaps it was the other way round.

Gallows humor, methinks, shines a mirror at reality and reveals it absurd. And if absurdity be the stuff of reality, then Burmese, or my grandfather, long ago learned to watch with a certain detachment the freak show unfurling all around them. Now if only they could get to the other side of the cage...

I commend this to you: a clear thinking piece in Foreign Policy by David Rothkopf that analyzes the potential downsides of Sen. Jim Webb's star turn in a country that otherwise doesn't have a US Ambassador. Thoughtless, Rothkopf argues. Barely a quid pro quo, a release of a US prisoner, and Suu Kyi still thrown to the dogs for her new 18 month sentence of house arrest. Unwittingly, Rothkopf's is the argument of Burmese watcher-critics who saw in Webb's visit a possible legitimizing device for a regime of imposters, who annulled the victory of Suu Kyi's party in 1990 and more or less left her to rot ever since beside the mildewed stench of Rangoon's Inye Lake. They didn't even have the class to let her share a cell with her fellow beloved Burmese in one of their 70-odd prisons and labor camps.

Regardless, Webb would have been hard put to secure her release from a junta impossibly terrified of her street cred months before the 2010 elections. "The generals' wives are jealous of her," a friend in Rangoon told me. This apparently matters more than fears from brawny men in starched khaki. As he told me this, I had visions of Livia Drusilla, arch villainness (at least according to Robert Graves, to whom I will happily endow my trust of all things ancient Roman), wife of Augustus, fertile fount of a long line of unhinged emperors including Caligula (great-grandson) and Nero (great-great grandson).

Should there have been more coordination from Washington? (Could there have been more coordination?) Was Webb consciously a maverick, the Vietnam vet parachuting in for the rescue to play to his own constituents? He was no emissary of Obama's, but one doubts they would notice the difference in Naypyidaw. A US Congressman is a US politician and a US man is a thing of US soil and therefore officially party to US policy which may or may not one day involve taking steps to invade Burma in multiple massive gunships from the sea. Ye gods! -- but that's not me saying that, rather the nightmare that long ago licked and flickered like giant shadow puppets against the walls of a golden pagoda while a hypnotized Burmese general watched, listened to the Livian poison of a royal astrologer and promptly decided to uproot his capital and install a fresh new one in the middle of malarial jungle...

U Win Tin, NLD's venerated and aging chief strategist and for a while, Burma's longest serving political detainee, undergoes heart surgery, according to the Democratic Voice of Burma.
(We will return to this later and explain why this is seismic).

John Yettaw stumbles to hospital in Bangkok days before he was due to begin his seven-year sentence of hard labor after a deux ex machina in the form of US Sen. Webb swooped in to release him, singlehandedly unleashing a global tempest here, here, here, here, here, or here vs. here about the relative merits of Western sanctions and whether Webb's lone dog mission should or could signal a change in US policy toward Burma. All of which more or less bring us full circle back to that thoughtful Foreign Affairs piece from Nov/Dec 2007 in post below.

Also much ink now pouring forth from Webb's statements, based on his short meeting with Aung San Suu Kyi, on how sanctions might have allowed the blossoming of love between Burma and China.
[For a worm's eye vision of such, start out at Mandalay University, cycle or moped through surrounding grid of streets, be careful not to topple over in stampede of mopeds headed at you from directions as part of unhinged local traffic rules that involve telepathy and serious lack of red lights, or -- this being my main illustrative point -- because you inadvertently keep catching your gloriously sunburned reflection in the mirrored windows of Chinese-designed McMansions, complete with their blue lego-land rooftops. At this point, if you're alive, you have in fact stumbled on the square lot of vast empty villas belonging to a handful of generals (in a section of town that aptly translates to the "Generals' Village"). Actually, you probably shouldn't be cycling here. Hire a cabbie, and drive at sluggishly calm pace through backstreets that appears to be empty because all its inhabitants have been forced to relocate to the soulless weird-scape of Naypyidaw several hours drive away. The villas have changed hands repeatedly between wealthy Chinese merchants and wealthy Burmese high brass. Small secret to many a city resident.

As a friend put it to me there, it's not that the Burmese nurture widespread xenophobia to the ethnic Chinese in their midst, many of whom have been in the country for generations and have happily assimilated in a society that (sometimes, depending on which bit of society) prides itself on its rich ethnic diversity. But there's precious little room for nascent Burmese entrepreuneurship if the junta keeps cutting deals with savvier Chinese construction companies. And thus many a Mandalay businessman express bitterness about the flood of Chinese purveyors, monopolizing everything from, say, the gem trade in the city's Dickensian jade market to constructinon of colossal malls with names that smack of Sino-homesickness.
Although, in fairness, you can't fault the "Great Wall" supermart for its fabulous air conditioning.

Intervention

Oh gosh, worthy readers! So many new chapters in our tale of Burma to relate -- in case you, like me, had lost your head in a cardboard box these past few days* and were as taken as I was with the suspense of an 11th hour visit to Burma by the first US Congressman in more than a decade, a trip that began amid hot criticism from exiles that he'd be made a tool of the junta and ended with the stunning promised release of our hapless court fool, John Yettaw by way of a shocker of a 40-minute visit with our heroine, Aung San Suu Kyi and meetings with the arch-villains in Naypyitaw along with a retinue of Suu Kyi's normally sidelined courtiers from her party, the National League for Democracy.

Enough for an entire Act III, in short, complete with (one imagines) a piercing aria from the embattled Nobel Laureate, a chanted chorus (true this) of disapproval from exiles and activists afraid that Webb would, by visiting, confer legitimacy on the junta (or perhaps they'd be more thriller, akin to the ravens coming in for the kill in Hitchcocks Birds), and, from Webb himself, a series of long existential soliloquies on the state of things in SE Asia and whether the US should or should not.
Alack the day. To engage or not to engage.
To suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and by opposing, end them?
(Larry Jagan's nicely argued pre-visit oped here.)

Which brings me full circle to two nights ago, while boxing up my old pad (which I say again in passing as excuse for egregious absence from humbled offering your daily dose of Burma), when I stumbled on an old piece by Michael Green and Derek Mitchell in a yellowing edition of Foreign Affairs (Vol. 86, No. 6, p147...). If lex parsimoniae be a thing of beauty, then I commend it to you. It argues for an untested new approach to Burma, so elegant in its simplicity that it obviously took a professor and a senior think tank fellow many many years, several doctorates and we know not how many trips to the conundrum in question to think up a solution brave, vital and utterly unlikely to happen any time soon. It argues, in short, for global coordination. On the one hand is ASEAN -- which accepted Burma as full member in 1997 as part of a regional policy of direct economic and diplomatic engagement (and not a few gifts of gas to fuel an enire SE Asian developing nation with mucho skyscrapers to nourish)-- and on the other the West, which as you know. long ago adopted the reverse tactic, to change by isolating. Throw in Japan, India and China, and they could all sit down en masse and nudge Burma to change, according to Mitchell and Green.

(*one of far too many cardboard boxes of a kind to make you want to find a match and set a light to all your stuff and such is my pointless excuse for abandoning my worthy readers)

The barricades are back

And not the revolutionary kind. A pretty picture or three from Indian-based exile magazine Mizzima, which shows you a return to the status quo pre-May. But at least -- sigh of relief -- Aung San Suu Kyi returns to house arrest with a security council resolution in the works. Straw poll -- how many think a forceful condemnation through the Security Council will have any effect on the junta? Who wonders if China will budge and join the world in scolding its southern charge?

Incidentally, lovely piece in the Democratic Voice of Burma about the junta commuting Suu Kyi's sentence out of sympathy. Did I hear someone make a snarky remark earlier about magnanimity?

Well, kids, the verdict's in. Aung San Suu Kyi gets 18 months of house arrest, but in a gesture of royal magnanimity, we learn that it was commuted down from a 3-year prison sentence with hard labor. As for the hapless John Yettaw who braved a lake to trespass on her property unleashing one of the best show trials since the Great Purge, he received 7 years hard labor. (Friends in Rangoon long ago joked that they'd rename in his honor University Ave., on which Suu Kyi's lakeside villa sits.)

Surely it didn't have to be this way...?
Predictable outpourings of international condemnations here or here. The usual crowd-- Britain, France, Philippines (Philippines?), Australia, US (with Sec. of State Hilary Clinton weighing in from Goma, Congo).

Oh stop whingeing. By every account inside Burma, there was no possible other outcome. If pretext they needed to keep Aung San Suu Kyi off the streets ahead of elections next year, pretext they found. I am inclined -- because this is a blog -- to turn juvenile and say I told you so. But don't listen to me, listen to my Burmese friends:

"At present, I'm a little lost," said a wise elder whom I'll call a concerned ethnic Karen activist. "Before this incident with the Lady , there was a crack, an opportunity. I saw it as an avenue, a certain step toward gradual change. But now that they behave that way, I don't see how to advocate."

My friend was speaking about the 2010 parliamentary elections, the first since 1990 and nominally intended to implement the terms of a new constitution that gives a civilian face to the junta by guaranteeing 25% of seats go to the military. For an emerging subset of urban intellectuals in Burma, it promised a glimmer of an opening. But the trial of Aung San Suu Kyi, for all its predictability, once more reminded them that opportunities in the face of authoritarianism are slippery. Those who were pondering a run in the elections now hesitate.
Another wise friend of mine in Rangoon was warned weeks ago by a friend in a letter not to campaign. The junta, he was reminded, cannot be trusted.

Trust. It's a word that's virtually synonymous with Aung San Suu Kyi.

But back she goes to her lakeside villa on University Avenue, which is curiously a stone's throw from the Thai and US embassies. So much for speculation in Rangoon that tearing down the barricades around it meant she'd be stowed away in prison. Those who were most irked couldn't understand how security, three layers of such, could have allowed a trespasser through. Yettaw, they told me, had already attempted the swim months before, authorities had been told, and still he was given another visa to enter the country -- an unlikely scenario given that any foreign friend of Suu Kyi's quickly finds themselves on the blacklist of immigration authorities, never more to be permitted into the Golden Land (journalists, alongside US military types and members of the International Labor Organization, are enemy number 1). Thus a thousand conspiracy theories took fire in the back roads of Rangoon -- surely he must've been a plant by the junta, they said, neatly timed to get her in trouble a few weeks before the expiration on May 27 of her most recent stint of house arrest.



Of the condemnations abroad, most pertinent are calls by Europeans and various nonprofits (between a growing surge of demands that Sen. Gen. Than Shwe be hauled before the ICC for crimes against humanity) for a tough stance by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Despite the absence of Burma's main patron China, ASEAN maintains a certain edge over imperial Westerners for succoring their neighbor with cash in return for precious Burmese resources. Bangkok is all atwinkle with Burmese gas. (It's a running joke in Rangoon, but their evening laughter is more often heard than seen when their generators cut out. )
Not in ASEAN's interests to have mass bloodletting over the border, or else face massive refugee spills. And so... BREAKING NEWS! Thailand, it seems, is pondering just that. Ponder away.

"First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up, because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me."
-- Attributed to Pastor Martin Niemöller


Washington's a one-topic town. At some undefined moment in the past few months -- anyone know the date? -- the rhetoric of the foreign affairs circuit shifted irrevocably from Iraq to Afghanistan. Buhbye Shiites, hullo Pashto...Which would make sense if it didn't also smack of myopia spiced with short-term amnesia. (And incidentally, why are we there, exactly? The good war, yes? Or was? Is? Will be? Anyone?)

What about Burma? Should the West really care? I mean beyond the pathos of a sadly predictable struggle starring an evil oligarchy and their fat Lamborghini-driving cronies, an iconic opposition leader rotting away into martyrdom and an amorphous mass of faceless folk holding fast to dwindling dreams of freedom.
I'd like to think we should maintain an iota of curiosity not because of the pure exoticized tragedy of a Soviet-style gulag system wrapped in the scent of green papaya. Rather because -- conceding for a moment that we all inhabit a small spherical thing -- untold possibilities for humanity vanish into the ether with each new generation trapped under the military jackboot. And that's aside from the possibility that China gets a gateway to the Andaman Sea and a pipeline full of gas, North Korea gets a sibling with a burgeoning nuclear program, and the semi-democratic rulers in the neighborhood get a powerful foil that makes them look like latter-day Mary Poppins.
We invest in cures for the issues of the past, deal with crises only when they explode into disaster, and leave for tomorrow the seeds of problems to come.
But Burma was once the future. At independence from Britain, it promised to be the leading light of Asia. It's universities were the envy of the East, it's rice paddies fed the world, it's natural riches beckoned years of steady growth.
And now? Now, nearly 50 years into military rule, it squats among the world's charity cases, closer in rankings on development, healthcare and corruption to Sierra Leone and other shambolic post-conflict zones in sub-Saharan Africa. And the bright youth of Burma are instead forced to stagnate, scratching a living from small odd jobs, forced into black market two-timing or Dickensian drudgery when they might have, given the chance, invented a bold new world. I've met so many Burmese twenty-somethings, hungry for ideas or for a taste of forbidden entrepreneurism. Already the older generation dismiss them as bad fruit staring blankly into sluggish monitors at Internet cafes.
A fig leaf of focus on a country ostensibly on the margins, however pivotal to the geopolitics of Asia, isn't in the end so much about us versus them. It is instead about choosing the world in which we live. All of us. Glad I wasn't born there, but I'd be proud as hell if I were. And I'd want you to know that. I might even have a thing or two to teach you. Given the chance.

The Lady Lives

Twenty years after she was first put under house arrest, Aung San Suu Kyi is still the inspiration of Burma's would-be opposition.

"It's like taking a sledgehammer to a nut," a Rangoon friend said of the military junta's attempt to sideline Aung San Suu Kyi. Few Burmese doubt that the nearly three month-old trial of the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate represents anything more than a clumsy attempt to keep her off the streets in parliamentary elections provisionally scheduled for next year.
Suu Kyi had been a fixture of Burma's political scene for little over a year when her new party, the National League for Democracy, surged to victory in the country's last parliamentary elections in 1990. Fourteen years of house arrest followed. Each time she was released, the crowds converged upon her with a cultishness that has raised anxieties among some Burmese. She remains untested, they say. But even they agree that her star endures as a worthy opponent to one of the world's most repressive regimes. For more...

And thus the ruling military junta fear her, jealous of her legitimacy in a country where theirs is dead, conclusively destroyed with the order to beat up Buddhist monks who took to the streets in Aug.-Sept. 2007, and buried a few months later with their bungled response to Tropical Cyclone Nargis, the country's most devastating natural disaster in modern times.

On Underground Activists

In Burma, Carefully Sowing the Seeds Of Resistance; Fragile Opposition Wary of Confrontation

P.S. For some context on Burma's diffuse and threadbare networks of opposition, here's one from August 2008:
A New Generation of Activists Rises in Burma

On Law, part 1, cont.

So to the defense advocate (see last post), with a delay of a day and apologies to worthy readers who deserve better. But if this is a meta-blog, consider that I am in fact being all clever and cleverly attempting to immerse you in the erratic delaying tactics of the junta with their attendant peaks and valleys of hope and dashed hope.

So to our lawyer. (to remind you, last post)
From his Rangoon basement office, a clutter of wooden desks and dusty British-era legal tomes, he had for nearly three decades shuttled daily to a special court at Insein prison the other side of the city, the better to defend detainees before a judge who would inevitably hand down a sentence, often on a technicality.
It had struck me, the first time I'd met him, an endlessly futile gesture. Camus, Sartre, Ionesco redux -- a little stick figure caught in a fractal.
Asked if he'd ever secured the release of a political prisoner, he'd paused a moment to reflect, set down his cup of tea, then told me of the lone instance in his 27 year career. It was a case involving "an MP," one of that curious and embattled sub-species of Burmese with the rare honor of legitimate democratic backing. Most were among the members of Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy party that won 392 out of 485 seats in the elections of 1990, the country's first since a military coup in 1962. But the assembly never met, the junta annulled the results and the NLD MPs were henceforth forever harassed along with their families and subject to constant fears of arrest. MPs, in short, are the emu of Burma. A daft comparison? Got a better rare, strange and hunted creature for me?
Anyway, so the case's not even that fascinating, merely that the MP of our lawyer's memory was slapped with a charge that landed him 10 years behind bars. But the lawyer, in a typical instance of lawyerly activity, pointed out to the judge that there was the minor question of the "facts and findings and data," all of which were found to directly "contradict the accusations by the authorities," he recalled. I'm still pondering why in that particular instance this should have had any effect whatsoever on the judge.

A point which reminds me of a question put to me by a young Burmese tourist guide, brilliantly articulate and perfectly intelligent, who once asked me with perfect incredulity, "You mean you don't pay off your judges in America?" This followed a long conversation about justice as we bumped and thumped in an SUV on an endless road through seamless rice paddies (All incidentally very bucolic and romantic from afar, with wispy women bending in broad-brimmed straw hats over serene pools filled with lolling water buffalo, until you rudely peered from up close and noticed the wrinkles or limbs so thin they could be confused for a child's.)

But I digress.
The lawyer, when I last saw him, had a fine crop of new white hair that suggested an early spring lawn after a barren winter. He was thinner than I'd remembered. But he smiled still with that all knowing Albus Dumbledore half-smile. Beside me now is the tale of his imprisonment that he'd had a friend pen for me in green ballpoint, in numbered bullet points. Point being he was desperate to tell me what had happened to him, but his English was awful, my Burmese far worse and so he had a friend write it all down in English to avoid the usual trotting around the meaning of his or my broken language.

Perhaps I'll let the paper speak [taking exception to intrude at will in square brackets and skipping some of the numbered bullets to get to the juicy bits ]:

"1. I've ben participating as an advocate for political activist in special court in Insein Central Jail since March 2008.
2. It contains Min Ko Naing [legendary student leader of the 1988 street revolt] and 37 members. [all similarly defiant 1988 protesters and dissidents celebrated far beyond prison walls]...
5. Some of the political prisoners [whom the laywer defends, including Min Ko Naing] address the court that they don't believe judicial system in Myanmar Court and so they'll withdraw...
6. Being so, I have to withdraw my power describing their desire.
7. When I did this, I was suited [sic] as an opponent and contempt of court section 3, with my colleague..., advocate.
8. Then we were sentenced about 4 months in prison on 7/11/2008 [11/7/2008] and sent to Basein prison in Delta Region with my legs were crowtied. [sic]"
There's more, but to translate: Special supreme court advocate -- our lawyer friend -- in his mid-sixties, and already a well known rabble rouser who defends political detainees in the deathly isolated silence of the very court in which Aung San Suu Kyi is currently on trial gets slapped with four months in jail for doing his usual job, which is to defend the cases of political detainees before a judge who will send them to prison regardless. No outside observers. All because he feels a need to stab a needle for history's sake into the giant's hide.
In this instance, the detainees in question -- damn their nerve, judge must've thought-- were legend, and legends dare to do something different. Instead of sitting by like Solzenhitzyn's sheep (see next post, in quote), they dared to tell the judge like it was. They refused to recognize the proceedings. And so their attorney, our now-gaunt, crew-cutted friend, was slapped with four months in jail on charges of contempt of court for following his clients' orders and withdrawing their not-guilty pleas. He told me this three months after his release.

I listened, I probed, and all the while, behind his desk, defiant, hung an old watercolor of Aung San Suu Kyi, her hair blowing into a maroon backdrop. I'd always been struck that the lawyer hung it with such prominence behind his desk, visible from the cramped, informer-ridden street. Entering his office, it was the first image to which the eye was drawn. And then you'd look away as fast, half burnt, afraid of being caught looking in case you'd be thought "political," and therefore a "destructive element," insufferably opposed to the military junta's status quo.

Fear, the Lady used to say, is a habit.
But then, rather like Min Ko Naing, the lawyer never acquired the habit.
What sheep, Sir Aleksandr S?

On Law, part 1 (prologue*)

"For several decades political arrests were distinguished in our country precisely by the fact the people who were arrested were guilty of nothing and were therefore unprepared to put up any resistance whatsoever. There was a general feeling of being destined for destruction, a sense of having nowhere to escape from the GPU-NKVD (which, incidentally, given our internal passport system, was quite accurate). And even in the fever of epidemic arrests, when people leaving for work said farewell to their families every day, because they could not be certain they would return at night, even then almost no one tried to run away and only in rare cases did people commit suicide. And that was exactly what was required. A submissive sheep is a find for a wolf."
-- Aleksandr Solzhenityn, The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation
(in my copy, p 11, chapter called 'Arrests')

Funny that. I could've sworn someone in Burma had taken a page out of the Soviet book.
No one of course could accuse Aung San Suu Kyi of sheepishness. Nor could they of half the former political detainees who stumble back through the streets in a post-prison daze wondering where on earth someone in the intervening years thought to move the shack they once called home. But subsequent readjustment, I've found, often comes with a steelier defiance. Onto to that point tomorrow when I'm lucid enough to take you to tea in the cluttered basement office of one of Aung San Suu Kyi's personal lawyers, shorn of all his hair, shortly after his release from the aptly named Insein prison. Which makes perfect sense (his stint in prison, that is) once you decide to discard logic and/or the general laws of physics and let the mind dissolve into a perfectly hypnotic state of Escheresque strange loopiness.

Meanwhile, and on that very point, ponder Daw Suu's challenge. I wonder if she intended the irony.
Till tomorrow then. G'night!


(* on law in Burma be warned. Rather like that elusive verdict, we may never get to a conclusive conclusion)

(P.S. Feel free to say hello, chuck a rotten tomato and/or offer a mean bit of criticism. I'd hate to think I was insulting anyone's intelligence)

While we're on the subject of nukes and the continuing escalation of speculation thereabouts, (if you're brilliant and have nothing better to do you'll have read deep into yesterday's post and know all about this), the indefatigable Aung Zaw writes in his exile magazine, the Irrawaddy, of the long history preceding the current talk of nuclear ambitions. It's a strong corrective to that trait symptomatic of intel-deficient countries who are quick to black out their diplomatic channels and then wonder at the impertinence of the xenophobic pariah regime when it suddenly seems armed to the teeth. To that, one is inclined to impertinently reply -- no, duh.
Recipe for nuclear ambition: enthrone an almighty but mightily paranoid general with an added penchant for astrology and psychological warfare atop a fat mountain of oil, gas, jade and teak; attach a strategic mouth to the Andaman Sea; squeeze between resource-greedy, overpopulating developing states and a vast empire with an enormous military, a disinterest in human rights and an increasing capacity to call on its millennial sense of global self-importance; add a craving for scattering the windfalls of said natural resources on futile projects that vaguely recall the "lifeless things" of Ozymandias' colossal wreck; compound with a bloated military that swallows an estimated 40% of the government budget; then isolate isolate isolate and watch the arms souffle as it grows before your very eyes. Which is not to blame the US for Burma's "sudden" nuclear program, only to suggest that better intelligence might've removed the element of surprise.

Then a question arises about the timeliness of all this. Nuke revelations and a show trial, simultaneously? One presumes even Stalin had enough showmanship to stagger his acts. Perhaps some high-ranking astrologer, perching up a coconut tree somewhere near Naypyidaw (probably growing sideways then upside down from inside a North-Korean-made tunnel), stared at a pattern in the stars and took the tail of a comet for a sign of manifest destiny best implemented through a missile launch coupled with a fresh dose of bullying the local scapegoat. It would at least offer a distraction for Sen. Gen. Than Shwe as the world abroad writhes in the stink of its own impotent rhetoric. Unlikely, but the world seems suitably discombobulated by the weirdness of one (trial) and the wickedness of the other (nukes). And so it stands by, paralyzed, scrambling for strongly worded non-binding UN resolutions or trading condemnation.

But I tell you the penguins are still swimming with perfect nonchalance in their little air-conditioned playpen in Naypyidaw's Royal Zoo. Perhaps they know something the rest of us don't.

On nukes and spooked soldiers

(with apologies to a fabulous blog whose name I've shamelessly ripped off)

In a country with sketchy infrastructure and even sketchier channels of reliable information, speculation abounds about the existence of a nuclear reactor. There might have been more than one, but if so, no one said anything. Some said it lay deep among the malarial ruby mines of Mogok in the wild hinterlands about 200 km north of Mandalay. Others said it was hidden near a storied gorge an hour to the north of Pyin Oo Lwin, one hours drive from Mandalay in the softly breezy hills of Upper Burma. Others begged to differ. It lay south-southwest, security barriers and checkpoints radiating for miles. Or so they said.

But on the elusive nuclear question, I trusted a young Burmese army captain the most, for reasons that had everything to do with 1. his appurtenance to the dark side (ie. he was a fresh army engineer trained in the elite defense academies); 2. his recent two-year training trip to Moscow along with X other officers to hone his "skills in engineering," and 3. and most crucially, the fact that he smiled hard with that ubiquitous frozen smile that translates roughly as "I've been told to smile and say nothing if anyone asks" then giggled a bit then looked away for a split second. Every bit like that blushing, blanching lover in Racine's incest-ridden tragedy Phedre. But I swear this wasn't love. I'd simply asked him point blank if his time in Moscow wasn't in fact intended to develop the black art of nuclear engineering or, more to the point, could he point me in the direction of that pesky local nuclear reactor?

I had met him in Pyin Oo Lwin, a hilly outpost much favored by the British in colonial times for its soggy, European-style clime whose chiefest claim to proximity with Little-Surrey-On-The-Miln is strawberry cultivation. In the past couple of years, the town formerly known as Maymyo has become something of a satellite to the new capital, Naypyidaw, whose tiny population of generals' wives and ministers apparently far prefer said sogginess instead of that vacuum of dry heat with eight lane highways and scarcely a teashop in sight. Even if it does manage to ward off the urban riffraff of Mandalay and Rangoon (mainly by forbidding their passage except in coaches that zoom through in the dead of night), Naypyidaw has a coldly soulless quality that sends a modicum of chills up the spine. Three sets of street lights in the style of American McMansionmania? Who on earth is arch Senior Gen. Than Shwe kidding? L'Etat c'est moi, maybe, but the taste of the court of Louis XIV, his is not, despite a royal complex well known to all. Naypyidaw, which in Burmese means "Abode of the Kings," is by all accounts his none too subtle attempt to revive the era of the Bagan kings of the 13 th c. As it turns out, he's also breathed new life into George Orwell. "Animal Farm" plays out to perfection in Pyin Oo Lwin, a town crawling with soldiers who come there to train in one of four elite defense academies.

"We're surrounded," seethed a town restauranteur.

Rather like the pigs who kick out Farmer Jones et al before moving into the farmhouse, Burmese generals now inhabit the vast red-brick Tudor manors left in Pyin Oo Lwin by the British. As for the plebians, sorry civilians, they squat in the usual tumbledown shacks, stacked atop one another in the town center, which is otherwise a pretty touristic draw with painted pony carriages. In the Lonely Planet guide to Burma, Pyin Oo Lwin amounts to something of homesick reststop before heading back into the thick of jasmine-and-sticky-rice-infused exoticism.

But it's also rife reporting ground for uncovering secrets. Several people there let slip that anywhere from 200 to 300 Russian instructors converge on the town every autumn. The point was confirmed by my captain, an alumnus of the Russian exchange program.
I'd been caught by a sudden downpour as I cycled miserably through the backstreets, ever more soaked and cursing my luck, when a car passed, slowed down, and a young man in a starched deep green uniform leaned out the window, grinned lasciviously and asked if I was lost. No, actually. But I said yes. I thought, hell, why not, I might actually get a conversation with a member of the miltary. He led me back to my hotel then plopped down on the front porch as if he owned the place and demanded a coffee, either blissfully unaware or similarly disinterested by the sudden unease of the hotel staff. Turns out, he said, he wanted to practice his English on me. And, he said bashfully, he'd mistaken me for a Russian instructor. (Hmm. Wish I could say it was my cheekbones..)
It was a nice piece of luck. I'd deliberately headed for Pyin Oo Lwin to witness up close the parallel lives of the military. It was after all small secret that Burma had in the past 50 years become two countries -- one military, the other, everything else. But trying to pry beyond the state of indoctrination far behind the mask of smiles and giggles to the place where the secrets were locked in his mind was a bit like trying to pick apart a Swiss bank account with a needle.

In retrospect, a far better strategy would've turned on asking whether he thought Eugene Onegin was in fact a little harsh with Tanya. And either the captain would've on the spot replied with a brilliant lie suggesting he knew something, anything, about Russian literature or he'd have been so discombobulated and irked at my insolence that he'd have sworn aloud then stated frankly that Pushkin paled in comparison to Nabokov and, while endearing, wasn't actually the central subject of discussion in the Russian-Burmese annual exchange of high level genuis military engineers all of whom deserved to be part of a top secret program that promised to make Burma rule the world. Oops. Didn't mean to say that.
Ha! Caught red-handed.

But a journalist can always dream. And what of any talk of North Korea? 'Fact, he might've been the clever one, drowning out any such thoughts by deflecting to an old stalwart whose menace diminished some time around 1989.

As it turns out, the North Korean-cum-nuclear question is the most explosive development yet in an increasingly disturbing tale that began with Bertil Lintner's revelation that Pyongyang might have traded tunnel engineering for Burmese basics (ie food), escalated with a US Navy destroyer shadowing the N. Korean Kang Nam 1 as it headed for Burma bound with a suspected cargo of missile equipment and turned truly frightening with statements by US Secretary Hilary Clinton suggesting that the world had actually read the news clips and/or that kooky astrologically insignificant but brutal regime was in fact less a pariah than a dangerous potential rogue state with ambitions that would outdo even the most megalomaniac of Bond villains.

To return to that first link outa here, the revelations by Prof. Desmond Bell, an Australian specialist in strategic defense, and Phil Thornton, journalist, were based on the converging reports of two defectors whom they interviewed in painstaking detail over two years near the Thai-Burma border. Forgive the long quote (from their article first reported in the Sydney Morning Herald and replicated first person in the Bangkok Post), but this is fascinating stuff:

"What the defectors told us, and access to transcripts of Burmese Army communications, helped us straighten out much of the confusion and speculation on the public record. It has been widely reported that a nuclear reactor has been built at eight or nine different sites in Burma.

"The defectors' detailed and adamant testimonies, coupled with the radio transcripts, contradict this - they say Burma has no more than two reactors, one located at Myaing and the other at Naung Laing.

"But not everyone in the region agrees about the extent or the purpose of the Naung Laing operation. A senior regional security officer with extensive up-to-date inside information about the area disagrees.

"Before it was a heavily guarded 'no-go zone'. Now you can drive right up to the buildings. Villagers are allowed to grow crops again. Even though the signs say; 'Military Science and Technology Ministry' and there are soldiers, the level of security has been drastically reduced. I think it's now a decoy site, to distract people away from the Myaing area."

"The Myaing reactor is located in Magwe division and is known as the "Nyaungone Project". It is part of the MOU signed with Russia's atomic energy agency Rosatom (the Russian Federal Atomic Energy Agency) in May 2007 to build a 10-megawatt light-water reactor using 20 % enriched Uranium-235, nuclear waste treatment and burial facilities, an activation analysis laboratory, medical isotope production laboratory and to train 300 specialists for the nuclear centre.

"At the time, a US State Department deputy spokesman, Tom Casey, was reported as saying that the US 'wouldn't like to see a project like this move forward' until Burma has an adequate nuclear regulatory and security infrastructure in place.

"The second 'secret' or military reactor site that the defectors provided a large amount of detailed information about is built inside the smallest of three mountains by North Koreans at Naung Laing. Both the defectors agreed the underground mountain facilities house another 10-megawatt light-water research reactor."

Stay tuned. More serious nuclear discussion to come...

Sun Ray!
With thanks to Burma VJ, and its ragged handful of Burmese video journalists, I'm provoked tonight to miss terribly a friend whose code name inadvertently mirrors his spirit as much as it serves to deflect from his true identity. The last time I saw him he had transformed from dynamic rising political star into that classic of Burmese opposition activists - a fugitive in his own country.
We met late, near the Strand Hotel, colossal Rangoon monument to British colonial excess, with 24-hour butler service for the lucky few willing to dole out $450 a night. He had declined my invitation for a drink at the empty bar where I waited for him, poring through a leather-bound tome of the 1910 Rangoon Times: The Christmas Edition (Freeman's Cholordyne! The original preparation! For colic afflictions anywhere in the Empire!)
I found him outside lurking in the shadows. He was barely recognizable in a pair of spectacles, a vast anorak and a hairnet that masked his dark mane.
"How are you?" I asked as we plunged away from the hovering doormen into the total dark of a side street.
"Actually, I am not fine," he said, each syllable inflected with urgency.
And so he began. His tale framed our meanderings to a deserted jetty, to a kareoke bar, and finally to a beer parlor where we chatted until closing time -- time at last for him to slip unnoticed into his refuge for the night...
Why? Who? What? Where? When?

Rare are the moments that scratch at a certain truth of human nature. Rarer still do such moments emerge simultaneous with a vital historical reconstruction, told with brutal honesty through the unflinching lenses of a ragged handful of clandestine Burmese video journalists.
Thus the aptly named documentary, Burma VJ. To the martyred protesters of mass monk-led demonstrations, triggered in August 2007 by an overnight doubling of fuel prices, Burma VJ offers a searing tribute.

In searingly intimate detail, Burma VJ follows the arc of a mass movement, the sudden tipping point that turned fear and its attendant passivity into mass defiance. And then, launching into the elegaic, it turns as tragic as the sudden brutal end of the monk-steered street protests that a diplomat dubbed the Saffron Revolution. As it turned out, the name, like Iran's shortlived Green Revolution, was premature. Unless, that is, one accepts the first definition of revolution, that it returns a movement to its origin.. Wasn't it Edmund Burke who wrote that revolutions, well, revolve?

See it and wonder for a moment at the euphoria flashing across faces of the thousands who crowded balconies and rooftops, or flooded the sidewalks of Rangoon to cheer on the barefoot, red-robed monks pouring every bit like the country's spiritual lifeblood through Rangoon's streets. Ponder for a moment the clenched fists flying, or the courage required to unleash a people's movement in the streets in a society utterly mechanized by fear. Still they dared to march again, after nights of beatings and mass sweeps through the monasteries that augured the blood still to come. And when they were finally dispersed, the students -- always look to the students in Burma -- the students took up the mantle of revolution.

Most poignant of all, the documentary binds together the disparate footage of a network of reporters for the Democratic Voice of Burma. Count their numbers on your left hand. Coordinating their movements is "Joshua," whose narration guides our understanding of events with nuance and sophistication (as a camera pans in on soldiers training their guns at the crowd, he tells us, for instance, that the rank-and-file know the brutality and cruelty of the generals far more than "us". In that moment, we're brought to understand what Burmese mean when they call for reconciliation. They mean, inter alia, the folding into society of the boys who were in this instance ordered to fire on their mothers and sisters. It's small secret in Burma that that the lower ranks of a 400,000-strong army are deserting en masse. Or, if that has proved impossible to verify, rumors are also strong that the boys in uniform feel the deepening poverty of the country as badly as the rest of the population).
With Joshua as backbone, the cameras shake and jump, disappear into a quickly zipped bag, reappear behind a tree to peep at soldiers smashing at the crowds, or rest for a moment in silent witness and solemn salute on the bruised and bloated body of a monk floating naked in a creek, his red toga swirling round him like a pool of blood.


Point being, you don't have to care much about Burma to glean a sense of the courage and might that motivates the eponymous video journalists who braved arrest or worse to smuggle out the word to the Democratic Voice of Burma, and from there, to the world beyond. It worked. The world, for a brief instant, listened. Inside the country, the crackdown left a trail of psychological scars, still so resonant as they weigh the worth of protesting the ridiculous trial of Aung San Suu Kyi. But outside, and beyond, the moment will forevermore be archived among the icons of defiance, the Tiananmens or the smashing of the Berlin Wall. It was perhaps only a spasm, but it was also a mass gasp for democracy and a nonviolent end to nearly five decades of military rule. The legitimacy of the junta, if any there was, was henceforth smashed.