If ever farce were rooted in tragedy, here's proof.

Rangoon, June 2009: Erratic downpours of monsoon silence a city that long ago gave itself up to a slow, spectacular creep of mold. Green, blue, yellow, black—the baroque formations bleed down colonial edifices, telling a mute tale of a four-decade-old neglect by successive military rulers whose world runs parallel and entirely without connection from the average inhabitant, unless of course they stand up and riot with mouths a-foam. In 2005, Sen. Gen. Than Shwe et al. uprooted the capital and removed to the searing flatlands in the center of the country. In its wake, former government buildings are a study in abandonment. Window panes are shattered. Lone security guards roam the streets like the mangy strays that slink by bracing for a beating. Barriers pin back sidewalks crammed with vendors, a haunting legacy of the failed demonstrations that punctuate Burma's fraught recent history when thousands choked the streets calling for democracy. The low-slung buildings everywhere appear not so much choked with tropical vegetation as forcing their way, like Rodin’s stone beings, half-formed, out of the jungle’s midst.

Ah, but the roof-scape! If one could measure humanity's thirst for at least some minimal barebones freedom, find it in the primordial sprout of satellite dishes tumbling across Rangoon. Far removed from the rough and tumble of the streets and their omnipresent stench of fried samosas, a black, tangled forest of dishes radiates to the Hlaung River, to golden Shwedagon's peak, to the hills north and east, each dish a bold, round embrace that warmly welcomes into living rooms already cluttered with laundry, dusty shortwave radios and dishes of steaming rice, unceasing floods of global expression, from soap operas to daylong C-span Congressional hearings. Alain Finkelkraut -- French philospher -- once dismissed the internet as "the sewers of the world." But Finkelkraut wrote in France, thus granted the luxury of choice, absolute and unhindered. When you have no choice, when free expression is subject to prison sentences or secreted into oblique analogies that grind their way through dull-eyed censorship boards, then electing to spend one's entire day beaming in the dregs of entertainment amounts to a vote for freedom.

So seek no further than a clamber up to the roof for a register of dissatisfaction and total disrespect for authority. The proliferation of satellite dishes are, in sum, a collective, wired poke in the eye.

Am prompted to this by stumbling on this snippet, about the 167-fold increase in price in a satellite dish, from January last year.

Reporters Without Borders and the Burma Media Association condemn the 167-fold increase in the price of a satellite dish licence - from 6,000 to 1 million kyats (5 to 800 dollars) - that has just been introduced by the military government. Reuters quoted a Myanmar Post and Telecom official as saying: "We were just ordered by the higher authorities. Even I was shocked when I heard about it."

Khin Maung Win, the deputy director of Democratic Voice of Burma TV (DVB TV), an Oslo-based station run by Burmese exiles, said: "We are about to launch a new formula with updated programmes every day and now the government has targeted us with this increase in the price of licences. Who can afford 700 euros just to install a dish?"

He added: "The military government is aware of the power of the image and they are not going to allow DVB TV and the international TV channels to become the main sources of news in Burma. Even if 90 per cent of dish owners do not have licences, this decision may be the first step in a crackdown."

International TV stations, especially Al-Jazeera International and DVB TV (the only independent Burmese-run TV station), have become very popular in Burma since September's protests. Some journalists estimate that Burma has at least a million satellite dishes, used mainly for watching football matches and films, although only 60,000 are officially licenced.

Dear reader,
I have a funny gadget attached to my site, called Google Analytics, which maps the bits of the globe where you ostensibly sit reading this blog. I've been amazed to discover fans of irreverent takes on Burma everywhere from remote Philippine villages to the Arctic upper reaches of Alaska. And believe me I understand the pleasures in audience anonymity, of ensconcing oneself in a silent conversation between written things and the responsive chatter of the mind. I am, however, schooled in the ancient art of brash, player-centric commedia theater, where masked stock characters once strutted cobbled courtyards and shouted their soliloquies, uninvited, direct from street to stars. Thus do I now feel like holding out my hat and soliciting your thoughts. Any at all. Criticism, insults, suggestions with doctoral theses to back them up that I fall unconscionably far from the center of clear thinking things.
You may even, if you like, request that I send you the bottled scent of an over-ripe Mandalay mango. I can't promise, but I could, if you're really nice, dispatch a hand-painted card, purchased in a Rangoon bazaar off a cunningly clingy street urchin, with a bucolic scene of oxen ploughing the paddy fields under fire-streaked skies, offset with a monk standing on stage left, in a swirl of red toga, gracefully fending off the sun with paper parasol...
Not that I'm attempting a bribe of any sorts.
Consider this merely a cordial invitation to hear your thoughts, your questions, your frustrations, even a mere hullo. I'd like that. The beauty of this medium, they tell us, is interactivity. Either that or I'm guilty of egregious self-indulgence.
Best Regards,
You loyal blogger

On the very day I offer you pure maroon-swaddled fluff, an oped that I judge critical reading. U Win Tin, whom I promised you we'd return to. And we will...

I think you deserve a pretty photo. Besides, I have to write more serious things so I can pay my rent and I'm being distracted by wanting to play on my blog all day. Which, frankly, you also deserve, but I'll make it up to you.

Aren't they sweet? At school, in Mandalay. Forgive the intrusion of a temperamental bicycle.

If It Smells of Gas, It Bleeds

Is it possible that recent fighting between the military government and the ethnic Kokang Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army was actually a clever and/or randomly naked instance of a long-held strategy to callously remove thousands of people living in the vicinity of a multimillion-dollar pipeline route? Oh, perhaps.
In a venal police state, conspiracy theories often turn on more than the proverbial mere grain of truth. The junta --let's not kid ourselves -- is evil. It is hellbent on its own enrichment and has proven none too fond of any obstacles to such, human or otherwise. Throw "ethnic" into the mix, and gone with the jasmine-infused wind is any semblance of kid-gloved guile dressed up in the trappings of civilian or legal technicalities. *

The route would begin in the newly discovered natural gas deposits in the Bay of Bengal, off Burma's Arakan State, cross the searingly hot central flatlands of Mandalay division and pour into China's Yunnan, intermediary efforts supplied by a consortium that includes -- of course -- the 100%-state-owned Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise and Korea's Daewoo. The pipeline's on-again-off-again construction has long been the subject of intense scrutiny and speculation.

Not nearly so wishy washy was the Chinese businessman I met checking out of a swanky all-marble bungalow extravanganza of a hotel in the hotel zone of Naypyidaw (no pool, alas). "And what are you doing here, Sir?" "I work on the pipeline. You know?" Oh fascinating. There my Mandarin proved incomplete and his interest in speaking to an overly curious foreigner less alluring than the feast of fried noodles and rice porridge awaiting at the breakfast buffet.

Assuming for an instant that this blog is a bit like a card table in a casino on which to chuck half-baked plans of hope and wishful thinking and watch as they fail to materialize or deflate like briefly baked souffles -- Ooh too many metaphors there -- let's use the pipeline to ask and speculate on a variety of blatantly obvious questions. Whether it is or is not in the offing is critical for many reasons, chief of which it promises to funnel millions into the junta's already gas-fat pockets. But they're already rich, so what difference does that make (I hear you cry)? Excellent point, fair reader. But even King Midos wanted more gold until he turned to the stuff himself. And no we are are not suggesting a vaguely pagan karmic twist with an end of rich poetic justice (Junta Sen. Gen Vanishes Into the Ether in a Toxic Vapor of Methane; Skinny-Lunged Cows Waste No Energy to Flinch. Or: Greenhouse Gases Congeal Over Naypyidaw; City of bones, at last!). Richness and corruption procreate. And thicker ties to China breeds less pressure for change inside Burma, which means fewer chances still for revolutionaries to both bake their souffles and eat them too. And -- a rather more crucial point -- the pipeline's construction will inevitably precipitate mass displacements, complete with violence to individuals, loss of lands and revenue, fraying of societies and more ethnic tensions generated by untimely mixing of groups that have lived happily segregated since well before King Thibaw disappeared with his evil queen and bottle of gin in a lick of British cannon fodder. (And no, the sacred royal White Elephant was not invited along.)
According to a report released by the Shwe Gas Movement, a pressure group based in Thailand, the pipeline promises $29 billion over the next 30 years to the junta. Which brings us back to fighting with the Kokang in late August, 50 km from the proposed route, 200 dead, mass exodus of another 30,000 civilians.
Note that your humble author is freely borrowing for these thoughts from this excellent anaysis in The Irrawaddy.
Alternatively, for real aficionados, check out the original report here.

*(To translate -- I'm referring here to niceties that involve drafting a brand new constitution meant to offer at least a semblance of civilian rule, its attendant show of elections, referendums and such like, and random trials of beleaguered Nobel Peace Prize winners on bizarrely capsized charges, et cetera -- and for that I'll send you back reflexively to pretty talk of the law, junta-style . I believe you get the drift. We will incidentally return to constitutional matters on a day of sufficient weightiness).

UPDATE:
Earthrights International has some tough accusations against Total and Chevron.

The Scholar (by way of Pit Stop along the River Styx)

Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It requires passion as well as perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms–that man would not have achieved the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible.

-- Max Weber, Politik als Beruf (1919)

I have a friend in Rangoon, whom I'll call the scholar, whose intelligence is sufficiently notorious, and whose political views run so staunchly and unapologetically against the grain of accepted opposition tactics that an acquaintance of his, currently basking in the merry freedoms of have-me-another-pint-'cheers London, recently emailed him (scholar) to ask if he (scholar again) wasn't in fact the anonymous man identified as a (scholar) buried deep down -- as in, paragraphs 22-25 -- of a 25-graf Washington Post story about Burma's evolving strategies of dissent.

Not having read the WP story, the scholar had no idea. So he demurred.
But it was him. Of course it was.

I can't pretend to have met more than an iota of the cream of Burma's intellectual crop, but channels of influence are narrow in the netherworld where urban professionals meet government officials.
Scene: The netherworld. Cut to a lone pit stop along the sleek new highway under construction between Rangoon and Naypyidaw. "Under construction," in a country with erratic electricity and even fewer Caterpillers, translates to a rotating army of fine-boned women in conical straw hats squatting in the middle of this vast pathway to fortified power, painstakingly applying white paint at precise mathetical intervals to mark the separations between the lanes, ostensibly indifferent to the 180kmph winds unleashed by the tinted-glass SUVs that periodically fly by.
As I sat in the backseat of a 1980s Japanese model that managed at most a healthy putter, it occurred to me to wonder: a. whether the laborers were there by choice, b. (morbidly) about the chances of a squashing and the impunity accorded to chauffeurs bearing minister or general if by chance they should be responsible for said squashing, c. whether there were any rivals to Burma's clear monopoly on handpainted highways disguised as modern roadways of the most bland homogeniety and d. whether, if I were a Junta Leader, I wouldn't repackage this monsoon-proof speed bump force of highway artists as further evidence that authoritarianism breeds unlikely stores of creativity. Suggested reworked headlines to the tomorrow's New Light of Myanmar: Vice-Senior Minister General Thein Maung Invites Wives of Paddy Workers in Search of Paddy to Forgo Rice Planting Season and Harness the People's Desire. Or: Minister-Generals Create Million-Man New Employment Sector Requiring Skill of Gold Leaf Workers and Scientific Subtlety of Astrologers to Make Beautiful the Pathway to the Royal Capital.

[To fully appreciate the intended joke, here's a sampling of the New Light, with its laughable mix of irrelevant foreign news roundups, pedantic opinion columns on the importance of harnessing water resources in an efficient way, front page typically awash in tributes to various vice-senior general ministers cutting ribbons at new pagodas and - best of all -- vintage Orwellian sidebars, apparently passed through a sausage-grinder instant-translator.
For instance, a typical space-filler that sits ideally placed atop page 2 for tearing out and using as a de facto chewing gum disposal wrapper:
'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 the progress of the nation
-- Oppose foreign nations interfering in internal affairs of the State
-- Crush all internal and external desturctive element as the common enemy]

At the exact two hour mark south of Naypyidaw, with another two hours to go to Rangoon, the SUVs park by a ditch and their passengers pour out, pick their way daintily over red mud and spread out for a stint in a genial cacophony reminiscent of a downtown teashop. It is a reminder of life, of spontaneous human-built chaos, an oasis of sudden vivacity, already sorely missed in a few hours of travel from the Ozymandian sterility of Naypyidaw via this barren axis to the former capital, a lightrod of empty power passing through an eerily barren landscape of flatland.
Here they sip tea, stretch the legs or grab a bowl of rice drenched in one of several possible curries, in which islands of meat float and fizz in oceans of gravy that run the gamut of colors from muddy to murky.
I selected rice with a condiment of neon yellow cabbage from a clatter of trays covered in cloth to ward off the flies. My driver opted for something more masculine. He was a genial fellow who would punctuate his expressions of disdain for Naypyidaw with loud betel-nut-filled globs of expectoration that shot out the drivers' window in the direction of the hapless roadway laborers. He was also something of my Rosetta Stone, crucial for deciphering the subtle social signs surrounding us. We pondered, for instance, a table of distinguished women in fuschia and deep purple sarongs, chatting or taking calls on their cell phones over heaped plates of noodles. Tables away, a man in army uniform gazed absently through the smoke curling from his cheroot. He seemed to me a ranking officer. When the women rose, he snapped to his feet and headed for the drivers' seat of a vast, shining SUV.
"Ministers' wives," whispered my driver. "The chauffeur is an army grunt."

The rest of the crowd might have included tradesmen, headmasters, ministers -- anyone requiring a license or a shortcut through bureaucracy sweetened with an extra dose of unsolicited salary, which would entitle them to a stint kowtowing before a Naypyidaw ministry, (giant structures of concrete all born, it seemed, from the same Ministry-Building-Cookie Cutter of Chinese concrete contractor, complete with blue-lego rooves and mirrored windows).

Dissidents have sometimes learned to travel that axis. On the long winding road to change, shades of conciliation beckon subtle possibility.
The scholar is among a band of influential thinkers treading lightly on that path, which means concretely that they will rub shoulders with the holders of power rather than declaiming their opposition in a litany of demands that have proved mute in two decades of military rule.

Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.

His even-handedness reflects in a genteel English that one rarely hears spoken in England. For writings deemed subversive and close ties with the United Nations, he spent a year in Rangoon's Insein and fourteen in the far Kachin north of Mytikina, which for an urbane gentleman of Rangoon amounts to Burmese Siberia. Fifteen years in the gulag left no detectable trace of bitterness. He steeled his mind against insanity, he told me, with the discipline of Buddhist meditation. It endowed him also perhaps with the perspective to see his society anew and from afar, the better to analyze its failings when he returned to its midst.
If he emerged avowedly independent, he wears the label lightly alongside the badge of credibility that comes of being a former political detainee. No one could accuse him of treachery to the cause of change.

I'll give over the rest of this to some of his clear-eyed analysis of recent and forthcoming events in Burma's restive ethnic areas, including information sourced from high up the chain of command.

After the [Communist Party of Burma] CPB broke up in 1989, the Kokang and Wa set up their own nationalist organizations and proceeded to make the most of their newfound status. Basking under Khin Nyunt’s protection [Burmese General, much-feared Chief of Intelligence and wily Prime Minister who served a short yearlong stint before a one-sentence dismissal in 2004 that effectively purged him and his entire highly effective Military Intelligence network] and they turned in a big way to making money, with no holds barred. And they tended to throw their weight about. The Burmese public, especially in Upper Burma, referred to the Wa and Kokang derisively in the same breath (which isn’t fair, what they really meant were the paramilitaries). In the eyes of the ordinary Burmese, these two ethnic groups do not have the same standing as that of the Shan and Kachin for instance. They were at the fringe, they were former Communist rebels, they were uncivilized, and above all, they were getting out of hand. There is little sympathy for people like Peng Jiasheng, and the gruesome pictures of police corpses is aimed at public sentiment and support for the government’s actions. Let’s face it – the ethnic forces are going to hang on to their weapons no matter what. The SPDC’s preferred solution to this seems to be a military offensive. If that offensive comes up with a quick outcome, well and good. But chances are that in the Wa and Kachin areas it is going to get bogged down and drawn out. The Kokang operation gave a quick outcome, despite Peng being still at large. The worry is that this might tempt the military high command to venture into further pig-headed forays. To go back to the balance of military power – perhaps it can be said to have an equilibrium of its own. The feat that’s called for now is to make the SPDC realize this without first resorting to bloodshed. There could be a couple of thousand people dead before it dawns upon the junta that the ethnic forces cannot be wiped out. To put it another way – to find a face-saving formula that will let things move on while tacitly recognizing that the weapons are still there in the hills and jungles.

In a recent email, I suggested to him that the outside world might be more attune to the plight of Aung San Suu Kyi than the hundreds of anonymous "ethnic" types scattered in the hills shared with China.
His reply:

"Your remark about the iconic aura of ASSK overriding the plight of millions affected by fighting has the ring of tragedy in it – that millions of ordinary citizens and slaves have to continue to suffer for the greater glory of Caesar (? Caesaress). If would be in everyone’s interests if the U.S. comes to realize that the best and perhaps the only future for ASSK is to take on a Sonia Gandhi role. A good analogy is that of Winston Churchill – a brilliant wartime leader who became out of sync with the postwar, post-Empire world. In the early 1950s he had to be gently eased out, and HMQ herself played a part in this."

'Tis time to talk of ethnic things.

To the Western liberal post-modernist (a la Tony Judt), Ethnic man has much akin to Hydrocarbon man, which is to say ideally entering the winter of his life, discredited after a century spent strutting across states large and small, ancient or emergent, spawning demagogues, Wagnerian theories of Supermen and mystical glorifications of foggy past massacres.

To the ensconced but ever-paranoid ruler of an authoritarian anthropologist's paradise, Ethnic man is a poke in the eye, which is to say the rabbling refuse of a rival minority group, beholden only to his collectivity, and rather like the wandering cosmopolitan, forever scheming violent takeover. Ideally, since the days of serving gin to British colonials as Native Favorite #1, he has reverted to a bucolic life in the wilds of the frontier, picking through brambles, oiling up the leather from a fresh kill and smashing together rocks in a neanderthal approximation of music (ruler hopes). In the event of an escape from the hills, however, best to flatten him. This would conveniently serve the double purpose of sending shockwaves of fear to neighboring rival groups.

Not exactly a theory of crystalline intelligence, but let's assume that as foundation on which to build a flimsy scaffold of educated hypothesis about the current blur of bloodiness between the junta, bands of armed ethnic groups in the northeastern highlands of Burma and the tent cities for their refugees that have newly sprung up and been torn down as fast over the border, in China.


Remember, fair readers, that Burma is a smorgasbord of peoples, as richly endowed as the French claim cheeses. Start at A (Anu) and work your way via 135 groups to Z (Zotung). Though roughly psuedonymous with the ethnic Burman (roughly two thirds of the total 50 million), the country is also home to the Karen and Shan groups, each about 10% of the total population, while Akha, Chin, Chinese, Danu, Indian, Kachin, Karenni, Kayan, Kokang, Lahu, Mon, Naga, Palaung, Pao, Rakhine, Rohingya, Tavoyan, and Wa peoples each constitute 5% or less of the population. Predictably, the British cultivated their favorites among the people of the hills, whom they managed to covert to Christianity and forevermore helping to cement a distinction with the decidedly Buddhist Burmans of the plains. The groups agreed to a Union of Burma at Panglong in 1947, which in spirit set out a plan for enshrining minority rights, varying levels of autonomy and the option of secession for two groups in particular, but the terms were never fully implemented.
Cue six decades of insurgent activity, precipitated by a series of military rulers who have made small secret of favoring the majority ethnicity.
And so we return to recent events, reminder of the fragility of cease-fires signed after 1988 with a variety of armed ethnic groups.

Fascinating too, relations with China have been thrown into sharp relief.

Myanmar's military incursion into northeastern Shan State shattered a 20-year ceasefire with rebel armies on its border with China and could trigger the protracted instability that Beijing, the junta's strongest friend, has long feared.

A prolonged conflict that forces more refugees to flee to China would show that the junta is intent on controlling the rebellious region, despite any fallout with China, analysts said.

"Seizing control is more important, because they will not accept private armies with their own local administration," said Bertil Lintner, an author and specialist on Myanmar.

"They're not as subservient to the Chinese as many people think. They're certainly not their puppets. The generals are megalomaniacs and they know China won't cut the trade ties."

Ah. Indeed. According to a friend in Rangoon, the attack on the Kokang was a propaganda victory inside. Images of dead security forces have galvanized support for a military again seen to be defending the people from nefarious destructive elements.

International NGOs reported that more than 30,000 refugees fled to China in the past week to escape the fighting. Since then, with the fighting apparently subsiding, refugees have begun to trickle back to the Kokang capital of Lougai, which is on the border and which is firmly under the control of the Burmese army.
Writes Larry Jagan in the Bangkok Post: "Once a bustling border town full of bars, discos, karaoke clubs, massage parlours and gambling dens, the town centre is still virtually deserted and many buildings have been damaged."

Meanwhile, the Irrawaddy reports, "Wa sources... confirmed that hundreds of villagers from the townships of Hopang, Konlong and Panlong had fled to other towns in Shan State or to China to avoid being caught in the crossfire of a potentially bloody armed conflict."

And so the platitude once more reveals its grain of truth. Seems as though Beijing was thrown to the dogs for a bout of terrorizing the ethnic groups into submission ahead of 2010. In the end, all politics is local.