Will they won't they and if they do, what then?
Enough with the cryptic. There's talk, rumor really, that Aung San Suu Kyi may be released from house arrest in time to organize her party's campaign ahead of Burma's first elections in twenty years, scheduled for some time in 2010. The fact that her last release in 2003 coincided with a botched, if heavily choreographed, attempt to assassinate her as she traveled around the country, and that the new constitution carefully bars her in all but name from running suggests another question to the junta entirely: so what? Could this all be a clever ploy to seem magnanimous but instead defang an icon?
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Monday, November 9, 2009
What role the hairpin turns of fate in a mass movement? What power human agency? And what if revolt becomes revolution off an accident of history?
Two decades ago, separated by a year and a continent, two scintillating surges of people's power sought freedom from their respective repressive systems. Both ignited off the microscopic and tipped into the monumental. Both saw fear turn into mass defiance. Both froze their governments into paralysis.Vast collective euphoria seemed in each a portent of victory.
But there fate bifurcated. One regime turned and bit back, mowing down the crowds with impunity and with a force that froze its people into permanent pain and nostalgia for that one brief shining moment in Burma when change almost, just about, nearly, then never, came to pass.
The second fell and along with it crashed an empire. The Berlin Wall tumbled, defeated by a storm of East Germans on the wings of an accident. A bureaucrat misspoke, suggesting an immediate liberalization of travel across the East-West divide. And the people, their energy coiled back like a spring across years of oppression, made a run for it en masse. Down tumbled the bricks, picked apart, hammered, smashed to bits in a fury, their graffitied chunks scattered to the winds as relics of a vanquished era.
What if a single Stasi agent or GDR soldier had panicked and opened fire? Would the Berlin Wall have turned instead into a mass gravestone for swarms of protesters? What if the soldiers in Burma had refused to follow orders?
Fast forward twenty years. Rangoon, to visitors, appears frozen as if by a magic spell. Another mass protest in Aug-Sept. 2007 tried anew the recipe that worked so well for Eastern Europe in 1989 but failed so conclusively for Burma in 1988. Again it ended in a bloodletting.
And so today, on the 20-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, 21 years after Burma's own botched pro-democracy uprising and two years after the monk-steered protests that we all prematurely dubbed the Saffron Revolution, the question bears asking: what role luck in a mass protest? Do you unfurl again a banner, confident that the whole country will rise behind you? Do you risk another life lost in a vain show of martyrdom? Or do you cut your losses and pour your creative energies into long-term strategies of subversion, less dramatic, more incremental, a legacy for future generations ?
Not so much philosophical abstractions in a country where dreams of change land you in jail.
Two decades ago, separated by a year and a continent, two scintillating surges of people's power sought freedom from their respective repressive systems. Both ignited off the microscopic and tipped into the monumental. Both saw fear turn into mass defiance. Both froze their governments into paralysis.Vast collective euphoria seemed in each a portent of victory.
But there fate bifurcated. One regime turned and bit back, mowing down the crowds with impunity and with a force that froze its people into permanent pain and nostalgia for that one brief shining moment in Burma when change almost, just about, nearly, then never, came to pass.
The second fell and along with it crashed an empire. The Berlin Wall tumbled, defeated by a storm of East Germans on the wings of an accident. A bureaucrat misspoke, suggesting an immediate liberalization of travel across the East-West divide. And the people, their energy coiled back like a spring across years of oppression, made a run for it en masse. Down tumbled the bricks, picked apart, hammered, smashed to bits in a fury, their graffitied chunks scattered to the winds as relics of a vanquished era.
What if a single Stasi agent or GDR soldier had panicked and opened fire? Would the Berlin Wall have turned instead into a mass gravestone for swarms of protesters? What if the soldiers in Burma had refused to follow orders?
Fast forward twenty years. Rangoon, to visitors, appears frozen as if by a magic spell. Another mass protest in Aug-Sept. 2007 tried anew the recipe that worked so well for Eastern Europe in 1989 but failed so conclusively for Burma in 1988. Again it ended in a bloodletting.
And so today, on the 20-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, 21 years after Burma's own botched pro-democracy uprising and two years after the monk-steered protests that we all prematurely dubbed the Saffron Revolution, the question bears asking: what role luck in a mass protest? Do you unfurl again a banner, confident that the whole country will rise behind you? Do you risk another life lost in a vain show of martyrdom? Or do you cut your losses and pour your creative energies into long-term strategies of subversion, less dramatic, more incremental, a legacy for future generations ?
Not so much philosophical abstractions in a country where dreams of change land you in jail.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
And so it begins...
A new US policy, opening salvos of dialogue with Burma's poker-faced band of generals and a meeting between Aung San Suu Kyi and a US assistant secretary of state. Hopeful signs of change to come or mere hot air?
Few would be so sanguine as to predict the forthcoming installation of a hot line between Suu Kyi in her lakeside prison and the junta in a bunker beneath Naypyidaw (not the best occasion, admittedly, for chatting about the absence of decent fiberoptic cable connectivity anywhere in the vicinity of Rangoon). Much less is there a chance of Suu Kyi's release ahead of Burma's greatest unfurling enigma in 20 years -- the looming elections of 2010. This is the first set of multiparty elections, we remind you, since 1990, when Suu Kyi's newly formed party, the National League for Democracy swept to victory, shortly after the mass uprisings of 1988 in surprisingly free and fair conditions. But the junta, caught by surprise, annulled the results shortly thereafter. To be crude, all else follows...(well almost, but for that we'd have to bury deep into modern history with the military coup that took place in 1962.)
Anyway. With no date announced, no electoral law, no clear proof of the junta's thinking beyond the speculative and the educated guessing, no decision on whether Suu Kyi's party will run or boycott, trust no-one to predict for sure the widening of Burma's narrow political space. It is, in short, too soon to break out the champagne. And the junta have a wily ability, history suggests, to offer a sop of appeasement to their most vocal and powerful critics. Rewind to 1994, when Congressman Bill Richardson flew in for the first of two trips to set up dialogue between Suu Kyi and the junta, under the aptly wily intelligence chief Gen. Khin Nyunt (purged in 2004, and down with him came crashing his Soviet-style intelligence apparatus...). Same again in 2000, argues Bertil Lintner.
The underlying assumption here is that Suu Khi is the linchpin of the opposition, however fragmented, diffuse and ragged its organization. Some I know of in Rangoon would beg to differ. Ah, there's the rub. Suu Kyi's role bears further discussion, controversial by any stretch insofar as it would awaken the wrath of tides of outside activists and exiles .
But we digress.
The point here is the old US policy of isolating the regime -- in half-hearted concert with the West while Asia adopted a wholly different approach of commercial engagement -- has proved a conclusive failure. Dialogue is a start. To what? Stay tuned.
A new US policy, opening salvos of dialogue with Burma's poker-faced band of generals and a meeting between Aung San Suu Kyi and a US assistant secretary of state. Hopeful signs of change to come or mere hot air?
Few would be so sanguine as to predict the forthcoming installation of a hot line between Suu Kyi in her lakeside prison and the junta in a bunker beneath Naypyidaw (not the best occasion, admittedly, for chatting about the absence of decent fiberoptic cable connectivity anywhere in the vicinity of Rangoon). Much less is there a chance of Suu Kyi's release ahead of Burma's greatest unfurling enigma in 20 years -- the looming elections of 2010. This is the first set of multiparty elections, we remind you, since 1990, when Suu Kyi's newly formed party, the National League for Democracy swept to victory, shortly after the mass uprisings of 1988 in surprisingly free and fair conditions. But the junta, caught by surprise, annulled the results shortly thereafter. To be crude, all else follows...(well almost, but for that we'd have to bury deep into modern history with the military coup that took place in 1962.)
Anyway. With no date announced, no electoral law, no clear proof of the junta's thinking beyond the speculative and the educated guessing, no decision on whether Suu Kyi's party will run or boycott, trust no-one to predict for sure the widening of Burma's narrow political space. It is, in short, too soon to break out the champagne. And the junta have a wily ability, history suggests, to offer a sop of appeasement to their most vocal and powerful critics. Rewind to 1994, when Congressman Bill Richardson flew in for the first of two trips to set up dialogue between Suu Kyi and the junta, under the aptly wily intelligence chief Gen. Khin Nyunt (purged in 2004, and down with him came crashing his Soviet-style intelligence apparatus...). Same again in 2000, argues Bertil Lintner.
The underlying assumption here is that Suu Khi is the linchpin of the opposition, however fragmented, diffuse and ragged its organization. Some I know of in Rangoon would beg to differ. Ah, there's the rub. Suu Kyi's role bears further discussion, controversial by any stretch insofar as it would awaken the wrath of tides of outside activists and exiles .
But we digress.
The point here is the old US policy of isolating the regime -- in half-hearted concert with the West while Asia adopted a wholly different approach of commercial engagement -- has proved a conclusive failure. Dialogue is a start. To what? Stay tuned.
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