Aung San Suu Kyi (25 page)

“Why did she decide to leave her children and her husband?” asked a professor and supporter of the junta at the Rangoon Institute of Technology. “I talked to her when she was first married to Mr. Aris and had only one baby and came back during Ne Win's time to lay a wreath at her father's grave. She told me then that she had no intention of ever moving back to Rangoon. Obviously, by the time she was placed under house confinement, there was already trouble in her marriage or she never would have suddenly decided to abandon her husband and two children.”

One of the ministers in the government followed the same bizarre line of reasoning: “Frankly, it is a perverse way of running one's emotional life when the alternative to divorce is house arrest. Why should our country be involved in the domestic troubles of one couple?”

The world at large did not allow itself to be convinced. On the contrary, international prizes and distinctions rained down on the prisoner at University Avenue. She was awarded the Norwegian Thorolf Rafto prize for human rights, the European Parliament's Sakharov Prize, UNESCO's Simón Bolívar prize, the Victor Jara distinction, the Jawaharlal Nehru prize, W. Averell Harriman's democracy prize, and some years later the Freedom of the City of Dublin award as well as the Swedish Olof Palme Prize. And these are only a few of the many distinctions.

One explanation for the enormous attention was of course Suu Kyi's personal character. She dared to stand up against one of the world's most brutal dictatorships. It was a classic David and Goliath situation.

Perhaps the Western world's strong reactions were also dependent on its bad conscience. Many countries had more or less consciously shown tolerance during Ne Win's military rule. Bertil Lintner writes in his book
Burma in Revolt
about how leading academics and politicians in the West turned a blind eye to the violations of the Burmese regime, how the British era and the brief period of democracy in the 1950s were regarded as a parenthesis in history, and how it was only natural after the colonial era that the country reverted to
its traditional forms of rule. The ethnic minorities were perceived as fanatical separatists—rather like the general picture of the southern states during the American Civil War. Modernization demanded quite simply that these small “tribal societies” conform to the formation of a greater state. That these groups of people had legitimate reasons for demanding more independence from Rangoon did not seem to be of any importance. This understanding was not least common among the left-wing groups of the 1960s and 1970s, which lay the whole of the blame for the civil war on the former British colonial power.

The Burmese had repeated over and over again to foreign visitors to Rangoon that the regime was hated by the people, but very few had listened to them. And on the few occasions he was put under pressure concerning this matter, Ne Win always asserted that the civil war and the unstable situation in the border regions made it impossible to revert to democracy. The time would soon be ripe, he avowed. The process of democratization would shortly begin.

Of course it did not.

Lintner gives a most amusing description of how foreign diplomats stationed in Rangoon were kept quite unaware of the real political development in the country. The regime did not contribute any information of its own, and the diplomats were quite content to hang around in hotel bars and play a few rounds on the golf courses of the capital while waiting to be transferred to a more interesting country.

Many countries also cooperated with the junta in order to combat the drugs in the golden triangle. Guomintang's time in the mountains had brought with it an enormous increase in the drug trade, and after Ne Win's agreement with local warlords Burma had become one of the world's foremost exporters of heroin. Ne Win had received hard international criticism for his KKY strategy at the beginning of the 1970s, and had then formally cut off all contact with warlords like Khun Sa and Lo Hsing-Han. But this change was only cosmetic. In practice, several of the largest drug cartels had the support of the junta, and many of the officers in Tatmadaw made great private profit by supporting the drug trade through protection and safe conduct for the opium transports over the border to Thailand.

Despite this, Ne Win succeeded in convincing the international community of his honest intentions. The United Nations organ for combating drugs, UN Drug Control Programme (UNDCP), cooperated with the Burmese
authorities, as did the Drug Enforcement Agency in the United States. In the mid-1980s, Washington supplied Burma with Bell 205 helicopters and the herbicide Agent 2,4-D. This substance is closely related to Agent Orange, which was used to defoliate large areas of jungle during the Vietnam War, and its use was forbidden in the United States since, according to several health investigations, it increased the risk for cancer. After that, helicopters and airplanes swept in low over the regions belonging to the ethnic minorities, spraying their fields with poisonous chemicals. Their harvests died, as did the population, sometimes. Those who drank water that had been sprayed or ate food that had been stored near the fields became ill with appalling stomach pains.

And this had no effect at all on the production of opium. First, the junta used the American equipment in the war against the ethnic groups. The opium traders who were in collusion with the junta avoided getting their crops destroyed, and those who challenged Ne Win got their farmlands mercilessly sprayed with Agent 2,4-D. It was the same for the guerrilla groups, for example among the Kachins and Karens, who were fighting for their right to independence without financing their activities via opium.

Second, many farmers were compelled to increase their production of opium as an effect of the spraying. The farmers in the Shan state at this time grew three main crops: coffee, tea, and opium. But it was only the opium that could be economically profitable in a single season. Those who kept their coffee and tea plantations risked getting their entire annual income destroyed if a government helicopter suddenly turned up on the horizon. Those who changed over to opium reduced the risks and increased their chances of quick profits.

However, the United States was far from being the only country to give support to Burma at that time. At the end of 1982, Ne Win wanted to purchase the Carl Gustaf recoilless antitank rifle from Bofors, for example. The political section at the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs had advised against the sale on account of the civil war, but when the matter landed on Prime Minister Olof Palme's desk, he dismissed their objections. In Björn Elmbrant's biography of Palme, his comment is quoted: “Oh, that.” Palme had said, “That guerrilla war has been going on since the Second World War. They are drug dealers more than guerrillas. The situation is stable. Just get on with it.”

Norway also gave the junta its support. Via the United Nations, Norway financed a project to find replacement crops for the farmers in the Shan state, but the project was limited to the areas that “might become” sites for opium production. The areas where the drug trade was already the dominant enterprise were left alone.

Against this background, the demonstrations and massacres in 1988 acted as an eye-opener for the international community. When the junta employed the same methods inside Rangoon as they had earlier used against the ethnic minorities, the world at large was no longer able to shut its eyes to it.

However, the zeitgeist in the 1990s played a part in the sharp reactions against the violations and the support for the democratic movement. Autumn of 1989 saw the collapse of the Iron Curtain, only months after Aung San Suu Kyi had become a public figure. The Cold War was at an end, and the West seemed to have won. The economist Francis Fukuyama spoke of the end of history. The world would now open up. People and rulers would realize that the Western world's model with its mixture of political democracy and market economy was the only feasible one. Fukuyama was met by stony and justified criticism for being shortsighted and unhistorical, but most people held the view anyway that the fall of the Eastern Bloc had opened up a window of opportunity. Dictators and autocrats would no longer be able to conceal themselves behind the great powers. Human rights and humanitarian issues, not crass realpolitik, would be the center of attention for the international community.

Burma became a test for the possibilities of the international community. It was as though the military junta had only understood the first half of Francis Fukuyama's thesis. After the SLORC's seizure of power in September 1988, they got rid of the ideology of the socialist state and redirected the economic policy, and just as in the 1960s, they found their model in China. The generals wanted to privatize sections of the economy and admit foreign companies, but they were not planning for democracy. Crass market economy would be combined with continued political control.

In the autumn of 1990, Sweden took the initiative with a resolution in the United Nations General Assembly that criticized Burma for its violations against its own civil population. This was the first in a series of initiatives on the part of the United Nations General Assembly, but while it was an
indication of several countries' anxiety, it also demonstrated that the world community was deeply split. China, India, and several other Asian countries opposed the proposal. Sweden had to withdraw the resolution and came back later with a watered-down proposal that could be accepted unanimously by the assembly. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights also appointed an independent expert to examine the development in Burma, and in 1995 Álvaro de Soto was appointed as the special envoy from the secretary general of the United Nations. A long line of rapporteurs and envoys has followed after him, but each has failed in breaking the stalemate in Burma.

The United States chose to go further on its own. Immediately following the massacres in 1988, it introduced a weapons embargo against Burma and ended several of the antidrug programs that had been administrated by the regime in Rangoon. Later on during the 1990s it introduced even more directed sanctions, among others a prohibition against new investments in Burma and travel bans on members of the junta.

The involvement of the European Union has in principle mirrored the American involvement, with an arms embargo and gradually sharpened sanctions during the 1990s and the 2000s. The sanctions of the European Union have never been as comprehensive as those of the United States, mainly because the member states of the European Union have not been able to agree on a common objective. The Nordic countries along with Holland and Great Britain have been the “hawks,” while France has often blocked the issue. The French oil company Total has extensive interests in Burma, which have constituted a hindrance for the European community when it comes to introducing sanctions against the gas and oil trade.

In the mid-1990s, a broad grassroots movement emerged whose aim was to stop companies from investing in and trading with Burma. By means of consumer boycotts, mainly via activists in the United States, they succeeded in getting companies like Pepsi Cola, Levi's, Ericsson, and Motorola to pull out of Burma. At the end of the 1990s, four American states and twenty-three cities had decided not to carry out any public deals with companies that had enterprises in the country. The campaign became global in due course. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of organizations in the civil community became involved with human rights in Burma. These organizations
often cooperated with activists from inside Burma, who had fled from oppression and were now in the process of establishing a resistance movement in exile.

One central agent at work was the exile government that had been formed by six parliamentarians under the leadership of Sein Win. They had succeeded in fleeing to the regions bordering Thailand in 1990, and there they were received with open arms by the Karen guerrillas and other armed groups that had established a base in the little village of Manerplaw.

Sein Win, a cousin of Aung San Suu Kyi, had not had any prominent role within the NLD, but he was now one of those who had succeeded in escaping. On December 18 in Manerplaw, the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma (NCGUB) was founded with Sein Win as the prime minister. The NCGUB remained in the border regions for some years but nowadays has its main offices in Washington.

China chose a completely different road than the European Union and the United States. One might actually read the development in China and Burma as a pendulum movement. First, the economic policy, in which Burma tried to imitate China. Then the massacre at Tiananmen Square (the Square of Heavenly Peace), which was carried out barely a year after the generals in Rangoon had done the same against their people. Burma was the only country in the world that publicly defended the Chinese communist party's action.

Then came Aung San Suu Kyi's house arrest, implemented only a few weeks after tanks had rolled into the streets of Beijing. After that, China quickly became the ally of Burma, and Burma's main supplier of aid, consumer goods, and—not least—arms. The first arms delivery was shipped in at the same time as the protests of the monks were crushed in the autumn of 1990. After them followed fighter aircraft, patrol vessels, tanks, radar equipment, and hand firearms sufficient for seventy-four new battalions. As thanks for this assistance, Chinese companies were permitted more or less without impediment to exploit the natural resources of Burma.

The borders that have since characterized the way the world community deals with the Burma issue were drawn at this point. China and Russia assert that the United Nations should not interfere with the domestic affairs of member states, and they have consistently exploited their veto power in the United Nations Security Council to block all serious proposals concerning Burma.

The military junta has in turn exploited the situation to play the countries of the world against one another. If China has wavered in its support, then the junta turns to India or Russia. If either of these has increased its pressure on Burma, it draws up new agreements with neighboring countries in Southeast Asia.