One-and-a-half years after Thein Sein assumed the presidency, and amidst
the most profound wave of reforms since Gen Ne Win seized power in 1962, that
Burma is undergoing a transition to democracy seems more undeniable by the day.
And there are changes indeed, as
I could see during a one-month trip to the country in July and August. But if
the current condition of Burma is to be termed “in transition,” it belongs to
the most uneven and contested of kinds.
Rangoon is where the shift of
political atmosphere is most conspicuous. There are also changes in the urban
landscape—the once virtually traffic jam-free roads are now routinely clogged
almost like Bangkok by hundreds of new cars, and the image of democracy icon Aung
San Suu Kyi has turned from contraband to commodity and sold all over the city.
Now dozens of Western businessmen
with suitcases arrange deals in venues like the smart 365 Coffee, and many more
tourists roam around, visiting famous spots such as the decrepit NLD
headquarters near the Shwedagon Pagoda which has turned into a new attraction
since the April 1 by-election. Japanese tourists take pictures as if the
crumbling party office was the Louvre Museum of Paris.
And there is a newfound freedom
of expression that many Burmese are enthusiastic to exploit. Now it is possible
to maintain open conversations in teashops that just one year ago were only
held in private, in hushed tones or not at all. This includes ordinary Burmese
as well as activists or those involved in politics.
Once, while dinning in a cheap
restaurant, the waiter looked with curiosity at the Kindle I was reading and we
ended up viewing pictures featured within the latest biography of Suu Kyi—The
Lady and the Peacock by Peter Popham.
Soon other people congregated
around to see the spectacle. The cashier of the restaurant, a girl in her 20s
who did not speak English, was able to correctly identify all the images with
one telling mistake—when shown a picture of a monk fleeing the mayhem of the
brutal crackdown on the “Saffron Revolution” anti-government protests of 2007,
she instead said “Rakhine [Arakan] State.”
Despite the airs of change, not
everybody agrees on the meaning of this “transition.” A Burmese political
analyst based in Rangoon who did not want to be identified expressed skepticism
about the changes and argued that the “hardliners versus softliners” narrative
often fostered by the regime is mere “theater.” “We could have expected the
appearance of more softliners if the international community would have shown
more caution with the new government,” he said.
He was no less incensed about the
ceremony held by the 88 Generation Students in Mandalay to celebrate the 24th
anniversary of the 1988 popular uprising. Government ministers Aung Min and Soe
Thein gave a donation of one million kyat to group leaders Min Ko Naing and Ko
Ko Gyi for their commemorative event. “Now you can buy a revolution in this
country for one million kyat,” said the analyst, to which Ko Ko Gyi replied,
“even countries at war have diplomatic relationships, so why not?”
It seems that even within the
National League for Democracy (NLD) there are different perceptions of the
political situation. Senior party member Win Tin stated that “there are changes
in the mechanism of the state, of course, but here is not political change at
all.”
Other people in the NLD showed
more enthusiasm. One member who was elected as an MP in the annulled 1990
general election told me in their headquarters that “we trust our President U
Thein Sein,” and explained that the president had done two good things to defend
the nation—the suspension of the Myitsone Dam project and measures to tackle
the conflict in Arakan State.
In any case, possible signs of
change fade away gradually as one moves out from the center of the big urban
areas. A trip by train is enough to see the crippling poverty in which most
Burmese live. In the outskirts of Mandalay, entering the city after an
exhausting journey from the Kachin State capital Myitkyina, one witnesses
dozens of children as young as four or five begging along the railway line—waiting
for passengers to throw them anything to eat or drink.
Every trace of a political
opening disappears completely outside of what the British colonialists called
“Burma proper”—the Burman-majority divisions at the geographical heart of the
country. There are not the winds, not even a breeze, of change in Kachin State,
a region mired in civil war since a 17-year ceasefire between the Kachin
Independence Organization (KIO) and central government broke down last June.
Speaking with Ze Nyoi, a 39-year-old
Kachin refugee at the Janmai Internally Displaced Persons camp on the outskirts
of Myitkyina, it is extremely difficult to believe that the country is heading
towards democracy. Her husband, Brang Shawng, was detained in the camp in June
by Burma’s fearsome Military Intelligence (MI) under suspicion of collaborating
with the KIO.
Three days after his arrest,
Brang Shawng was taken back to the camp by his captors, ostensibly to do a
staging of his criminal activities which was recorded on video camera by the
intelligence agents. According to his wife and one of the camp managers, his
body bore the scars of the torture suffered under detention and the episode
terrified the rest of the camp-dwellers.
According to his lawyer, some
days later, Brang Shawng signed a confession and was presented before a judge
who discovered a tape recorder hidden in his shirt by the MI to make sure that
he said what he had been told to say.
The judge dismissed his
confession and admonished the agents, only to be replaced the next day by
another judge who was more compliant. Now Brang Shawng is waiting for the
verdict and, according to the manager of his camp and his wife, is completely
demoralized while the torture has taken a heavy toll on his mental health.
An overwhelming majority of
Kachin people I spoke with in Myitkyina, and in the KIO’s headquarters of Laiza
during a previous trip, do not believe in the reformist credentials of Thein
Sein in the slightest, and many consider him a mere puppet of former junta
chief Snr-Gen Than Shwe.
For instance, it was reported
last December that Thein Sein ordered the army not to shoot first in Kachin
State and that his orders were not being obeyed on the ground. However, Sumlut
Gam, the chief of the KIO’s negotiation team that deals with the government,
says he is convinced that Thein Sein never actually issued that order.
Suu Kyi herself does not seem to
have garnered too much trust among many Kachin people either. Both in Myitkyina
or Laiza, is virtually impossible to find the iconic portraits of her that are
ubiquitous in Rangoon or Mandalay. One Catholic priest even told me that it was
impossible for him, as a Kachin, to trust any Burman, not even “the Lady.”
There are not many portraits of
Suu Kyi to be seen in Sittwe, the capital of Arakan State, either. One of the
few states in which the Nobel Laureate’s party did not win a majority in the
1990 ballot, Arakan State is a bastion of Rakhine nationalists with the NLD
only recently opening its first office there.
By contrast, Thein Sein seems to
be far more popular and people wearing t-shirts with his face and “We support
our President U Thein Sein” are not difficult to spot. This support comes from
the government’s handling of the crisis provoked by sectarian violence between
the Buddhist Arakanese and Muslim Rohingya communities and the president’s
proposal in July to expel the Rohingya population to third countries.
If Kachin State is mired in war,
Arakan State is mired in hatred and fear. Both sentiments are very much
palpable in the streets of Sittwe. The distrust between each community runs
deep and the government has segregated them to avoid new clashes. The Rohingya
people, however, are in a clear position of inferiority, unable to move freely
and confined in their own camps and ghetto-like slums.
The Rakhine are clearly much
happier with this segregation than their Muslim neighbors, as demonstrated by
conversations with many of them, including my fixer and translator in the
Rakhine refugee camps.
The NLD member would openly
display his prejudices against the Rohingya and Muslims in general by saying
things like, “there are many more rapists among them than in other religions,”
and his support for the current government that “is acting as a good referee.”
In one sign of the eagerness of
the government to show its new face to the world, I could visit the camps of
the Rohingya—closed and heavily guarded by the security forces—but only while
escorted by the police, supposedly for my own security.
“You can go wherever you want, we
are in a transition period and we wish to show everything to journalists,” said
Police Lt-Col Myo Min Aung in the lobby of a hotel in Sittwe. A stout man in
his 30s who counts Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls about the
Spanish Civil War as one of his favorite books, he was sent to Arakan from
Rangoon three months ago to assume control of the situation.
Progress is undeniable as it
would have been unthinkable to have such a conversation only one year ago.
Nevertheless, access to many places—the Muslim quarters or specific camps I
asked to visit—turned out to be absolutely restricted, sometimes due to
“security concerns,” sometimes with the excuse that “hardliner people in the
army” were there at that moment and should not see me. Or perhaps due to fact
that, despite its “openness,” the Burmese authorities still have too many
things to hide.
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