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?

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.

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.

With all the controversy surrounding the announcement of this year's Nobel Peace Prize laureate, I found myself drawn to searching the catalogue of past recipients and to parsing the reasons and motivations that might have led the Nobel Committee in Norway to this year's conclusion. Here's one:

He will receive the Nobel Peace Prize today because he, too, has become a witness for truth and justice. From the abyss of the death camps he has come as a messenger to mankind - not with a message of hate and revenge, but with one of brotherhood and atonement. He has become a powerful spokesman for the view of mankind and the unlimited humanity which is, at all times, the basis of a lasting peace. Elie Wiesel is not only the man who survived - he is also the spirit which has conquered. In him we see a man who has climbed from utter humiliation to become one of our most important spiritual leaders and guides. The Nobel Committee believes it is vital that we have such guides in an age when terror, repression, and racial discrimination still exist in the world.
-- Presentation Speech in 1986 to Elie Wiesel, by Egil Aarvik, Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee

A guide, ergo a light and an example. A voice whose particular concerns translate into a universal doctrine of humanitarianism.

That was 1986. Five years later, different words for another laureate. Not only would a young rising star join the firmament of Nobel-graced greats, this one would also add to a select club of laureates forbidden to recieve the prize in person -- after Carl von Ossietzky (ill in a Nazi concentration camp), Andrei Sakharov and Lech Walesa.
It had been only two years since Aung San Suu Kyi burst into Burmese consciousness. Her first political act was born in fire; in the heated summer of 1988, amid the mass and already bloody demonstrations in Rangoon, she wrote an open letter to the government calling for a consultative committee of respected independent persons to lead the country into multi-party elections. Two day later, she stood before the golden peak of Shwedagon Pagoda and addressed thousands. Hers was a political program based on human rights, democracy and non-violence. Within a year, in July 1989, she was placed under house arrest. But by then her party, the National League for Democracy, had congealed into a force, the better to contend with a military junta that had transformed itself on Set. 18, 1988 into a 'State Law and Order Restoration Council' (SLORC -- often confused with drones, robot councils or any of various oxymoronic state ministries in Orwell's 1984).

Of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Chairman Francis Sejersted said this:

For a doctrine of peace and reconciliation to be translated into practice, one absolute condition is fearlessness. Aung San Suu Kyi knows this. One of her essays opens with the statement that it is not power that corrupts, but fear. The comment was aimed at the totalitarian regime in her own country. They have allowed themselves to be corrupted because they fear the people they are supposed to lead. This has led them into a vicious circle. In her thinking, however, the demand for fearlessness is first and foremost a general demand, a demand on all of us. She has herself shown fearlessness in practice. She opposed herself alone to the rifle barrels. Can anything withstand such courage? What was in that Major's mind when at the last moment he gave the order not to fire? Perhaps he was impressed by her bravery, perhaps he realised that nothing can be achieved by brute force.

Violence is its own worst enemy, and fearlessness is the sharpest weapon against it. It is not least Aung San Suu Kyi's impressive courage which makes her such a potent symbol, like Gandhi and her father Aung San. Aung San was shot in the midst of his struggle. But if those who arranged the assassination thought it would remove him from Burmese politics, they were wrong. He became the unifying symbol of a free Burma and an inspiration to those who are now fighting for a free society. In addition to his example and inspiration, his position among his people, over forty years after his death, gave Aung San Suu Kyi the political point of departure she needed. She has indeed taken up her inheritance, and is now in her own right the symbol of the revolt against violence and the struggle for a free society, not only in Burma, but also in the rest of Asia and in many other parts of the world.

We ordinary people, I believe, feel that with her courage and her high ideals, Aung San Suu Kyi brings out something of the best in us. We feel we need precisely her sort of person in order to retain our faith in the future. That is what gives her such power as a symbol, and that is why any illtreatment of her feels like a violation of what we have most at heart. The little woman under house arrest stands for a positive hope. Knowing she is there gives us confidence and faith in the power of good.

Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader rather than the woman, was born of promise. Her vision had yet to stand intact with time. Her flame endures, even as her supporters develop new strategies and thinking, exploring other paths to freedom, turning away, with pragmatism, from the headiness of toppling their goverment from the streets and working instead for the slower, patient incremental evolution of society.

The prize to Suu Kyi mattered not only for turning attention to Burma but also to vindicate the legitimacy of her struggle. It mattered because onto her it passed a torch that fuels itself on the power of human agency to alter history. On the wings of that belief, societies the world round were choking their streets with calls of change --1986 in Philippines saw People's Power, in 1987 mass demonstrations in South Korea led to political liberalization, Burma in 1988, and Tiananmen and Berlin in 1989.

And the likes of Ghandi, Mandela, Lech Walesa, Suu Kyi set ablaze with a spark the simmering of popular discontent.

Which brings us back to President Obama. If I might add my two cents, I had the initial surge of disbelief for a barely tested president who won the prize over nominees who daily risk their lives for peace and the advancement of human rights. But upon reflection...
That nominations must be in by Feb. 1 -- barely a month after the interregnum between Pres. Bush and the taking of the oath of his successor -- suggests the initial trigger was both rejection of Bush and vindication of Obama for winning on a campaign that rose above racial divides. But in the intervening eight months the nominations sit, the committee reflects, and the nominees evolve. There's more to test him on.

Barack Obama accepted his award as "a call to action," acknowledging that it probably didn't reflect too many of his own none too sweeping accomplishments. He grapples with the same issues that would have met with others in his place. He has yet to prove, eight months into his presidency, that he can vanquish any.
His approach, however, is all. It offers a clear break with his predecessor, but more than that it stands on a different conception of America, in which might is the mantle of benign global leadership. It as as valid as the Jacksonian populism of a previous president, if, from the world's point of view, somewhat more appealing for its lack of unilateralism and visible self-interest. There might after all be truth in the idea that this 2009 award to Obama is less a rejection of Bush then a tribute to the possibility and dream of American leadership in a world.
And so I wouldn't reject Norway's decision as a brand of European arrogance dictating a path to pacificism. In my travels to distant villages in the vast tumbledown slums of Africa or villages in our well loved Burmese rice paddies, I've learned that people live with similiar dreams. America isn't their nirvana but in its broader, benign manifestations, it offers them hope. It is, like Wiesel, like Suu Kyi, a guide and a beacon. We all need that.

(A preemptive disclaimer about the weird shifts in size in this post -- You are not in fact viewing this through a magnifying glass, but if you were to, and the glass were to rove around like a rabid mouse, this is roughly how it might look. Actually, not really. But you never know.)

-A divisional court in Rangoon rejects Oct. 2 Aung San Suu Kyi's appeal.

-The US announces its long-awaited policy shift on Sept 29, including an increase in humanitarian assistance and its first detailed talks with Burmese authorities. This takes effect immediately -- a day later, in New York, Kurt Campbell, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs meets with U Thaung, Minister of techonology, science and labour. Then he goes to Washington on the 30th to report on the State Department's new thinking in a Senate hearing, held by Jim Webb. He specifies that engagement with the junta would "supplement" rather than "replace sanctions."*

-Suu Kyi is reported to accept the US shift.

-Chinese authorities seek damages from the junta but block Myanmar from appearing on this month's UN Security Council agenda. Larry Jagan writes of a major flurry of Sino-Burmese diplomatic nattering, and something of a bust-up.

-Talks between the junta and the Kachin Independence Organization are in a stand-off.

-And another American finds his way into Insein prison.

It's been a heady few weeks, eh?

Pardon the long pause, fair readers. No undue respect intended. Still, all the better to accumulate in a single package a series of fits and starts on Planet Burma-- geostrategic, microscopic -- propelling us centimeters forward in a country that some have thought frozen by a magic spell of military whimsy.

About that assumption, I'd beg to differ. True the scene in Rangoon presents itself to the naked eye as little different, doubtless, to months, years previous (dishes and cell phones aside). But as my favorite poet once put it,

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears ;
Men reckon what it did, and meant ;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Admittedly, the subject, as was John Donne's wont, was love, deep and profound and omnipresent between two parting paramours.

In Burma, deep forces of change -- geostrategic, microscopic -- are rooted in two recent events: the killing of monks in the protests of Aug-Sept. 2007, and, less than a year later, the empowerment of the people when their government hopelessly bungled the delivery of relief to victims of Tropical Cyclone Nargis.

*This was a colorful affair. Camera crews, mainly Japanese, buzzing outside the wooden doors. Inside, standing room only. The seated crowd were one-third red -- monks, and another third neon-yellow -- unidentified white folk, all stoney faced and wearing phosphorescent T-shirts that read "Burma is NOT Vietnam."

Lucky someone thought to hang a map of Asia behind Webb in case any of us were confused.

The yellow-wearers, it turns out, were conscripts of the US Campaign for Burma. At the end of the hearing, I asked a blonde why we should run the risk of comparing.

"Webb thinks they're the same," she answered. "He wanted to lift sanctions on Vietnam." And now Burma.

Ah. Didn't the hearing sway her a little, I ventured? Wasn't there a suggestion, I asked, of a rethink in policy grounded in historical and socio-economic circumstances rather than a mere cut and paste from Vietnam? To boot, at three hours long, the hearing consisted of complex, nuanced presentations from Campbell and three seasoned academics on Burma -- David Steinberg, Thant Myint U and David Williams. Webb's lengthy questioning to the panelists implied that he was, well, listening.

Less so the blonde. "No," she answered. And out she stomped.

But then perhaps the conscripts to the cause, to the cause of Burma viewed from far far far away where it looks all contrasty in black and white, well perhaps they're a bit like Rangoon at first glance: stagnant, frozen in routine. Stuck.

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.

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.