On Underground Activists

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

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

On Law, part 1, cont.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Law, part 1 (prologue*)

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

On nukes and spooked soldiers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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