Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (39 page)

In 1886 the British toppled the Burmese monarchy and annexed this whole area to their Indian empire. Though colonial rule lasted only sixty-two years, as Martin Smith writes in his comprehensive
Burma: Insurgency and the Politics of Ethnicity
, by moving the center of power from the royal courts at Ava and Mandalay in the heart of Burma to Rangoon and the Irrawaddy delta hundreds of miles south on the Bay of Bengal,
the British robbed the country of whatever geographic logic it had ever possessed. What’s more, the British incorporated into their territory “thousands of square miles of rugged hill tracts and loosely independent mini-states” that were home to diverse minorities.
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The destruction of the monarchy stripped the country of centuries of tradition that had fortified society in the Irrawaddy valley since before the Middle Ages. “The new Burma, British Burma, would be adrift,” writes Thant Myint-U, “suddenly pushed into the modern world without an anchor to the past,” prone to bitter nationalism and extremism.
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It was as if the British in 1886 threw Burma off a cliff from which it is still falling, 124 years later.
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The British approach was classic divide and rule. They favored the hill tribes with local autonomy, and recruited Karens, Shans, Kachins, and other ethnics into the local army and police, even as they exerted direct and repressive control over the numerically dominant Burmans of the valley.
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Had the Tory leader Winston Churchill won the 1945 election in Great Britain, the hill peoples might have become independent principalities of their own, as a reward for defending the British Empire against the Burmans, who, having chafed under British rule, became Japanese sympathizers. But the Labour Party candidate, Clement Attlee, won the election and decided to give all of Burma independence as a single unit, without a clear-cut road map to ethnic reconciliation.

During World War II the Burmese leader General Aung San and thirty comrades had gone to Japan and raised a nationalist army that would welcome the Japanese into Burma. But when Aung San returned to Burma in the midst of the war, he soon realized that the Japanese were even worse occupiers than the British had been and fortuitously switched sides. After the war he entered into negotiations with Attlee, but the ethnics claimed that Aung San, as an ethnic Burman, could not represent them. In their eyes, he could negotiate only on behalf of
Burma proper—
that is, historic Mon, Arakan, and Myanmar—not the Chin, Shan, Karen, and other hill tracts. So Aung San backtracked and, in a very wise and open-minded gesture, agreed to conduct separate negotiations with the
ethnics. Aung San looked next door at India and would see how inter-communal carnage following independence had led to a million refugees and tens of thousands dead in Bengal and the Punjab. As India moved toward bloody partition, he was determined that Burma avoid India’s strife.

The result was an agreement he made in February 1947 in the little Shan town of Panglong with the local
sabwas
(feudal leaders), which helped produce the Union of Burma. It was based on three principles: a state with a decentralized federal structure, recognition of the ethnic chieftaincies in the hills, and their right of secession after a number of years.

But that July, Aung San was assassinated, and attempts at ethnic reconciliation came to a halt just as the British departed in January 1948. A new constitution was promulgated, featuring more central control, and the Karens and others consequently revolted. As the Indian writer Pankaj Mishra explains:

Indeed, Burma’s ethnic morass was made worse by having become a maelstrom of jungle warfare between the British and Japanese. Burma was the theater of battle for the famed irregular warfare campaigns of 1943 and 1944 that the British launched from the northeastern Indian border town of Imphal, their rear base. These campaigns featured the legendary unconventional warrior Major General Orde Wingate, the son of Christian missionaries, who led long-range penetration units known as Chindits (an anglicized corruption of a mythical Burmese lion) deep behind Japanese lines in the Burmese jungles, supported by gliders. Before Wingate’s daring missions, the Japanese were at the gates of British India, about to invade. Wingate helped turn the tables on them. He operated in the same area that the Chinese would now have to pacify for the sake of their pipelines, were the junta to collapse. (The Father of the White Monkey, a sort of Wingate figure in his own right, had given me a
1946 first edition of the wartime memoirs of one of Wingate’s officers in Burma, with an inscription from the prophet Isaiah.)
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The Cold War introduced new actors into the Burmese chaos, even as the warmhearted and charismatic civilian prime minister U Nu tried, ultimately in vain, to unite the country in the wake of Aung San’s death. In 1950 more than ten thousand retreating troops of Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalist Army (Kuomintang), run out of China by Mao Zedong’s victorious communist soldiers, ensconced themselves in the Shan States. And in the next decade, Mao’s China armed a communist guerrilla insurgency against the Burmese government that operated from the hill tracts. In response to these challenges, civilian power in Rangoon floundered as the Burmese military, now dominated by ethnic Burmans (in which minorities could rise only to the rank of major), grew to 100,000. In 1961 this army under General Ne Win managed to expel the Kuomintang out of Burma and into neighboring Laos and Thailand.

The same year in Taungya, the capital of the Shan States, non-Burman ethnic groups came together and demanded that the constitution be amended according to the spirit of the 1947 Panglong Agreement. The issue was debated in parliament and U Nu was sympathetic to the plight of the Shans in particular. Yet the response to this, and to the generally deteriorating security situation in the country, was a military coup that brought General Ne Win to power in 1962. The coup was a mercy killing for a well-meaning though increasingly ineffectual civilian administration, but it ushered in more than four and a half decades of catastrophic rule, with thus far no sign of abatement. The economy was both mismanaged and nationalized, the entire state apparatus both militarized and Burmanized, while ethnic conflict raged.

Civil conflict boiled over in the streets of Rangoon in 1988 just as Ne Win stepped down. Coincidentally, the late general Aung San’s daughter, Aung San Suu Kyi, had come from England to Rangoon at this time to care for her ailing mother. Aung San Suu Kyi ended up leading a spontaneous rising of hundreds of thousands of Burmese, mainly ethnic Burman students, in a freedom movement. But a new military junta, the SLORC (State Law and Order Restoration Council), quickly replaced Ne Win and in 1989 renamed the country Myanmar, after the Burman term for the central valley—a name that the ethnic hill tribes, as well as many liberal Burmans, never accepted. When the freedom movement was crushed, many of the Burman students fled to the ethnic areas. Though
they had difficulty adapting to the rough physical conditions there, they established a precedent for cooperation between Burmans and the minorities.

In 1990 the military allowed elections that Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy won in a landslide, even though she was now under house arrest. The military then abrogated the results. Worse, the end of the Cold War brought an end to covert Thai military support for the hill tribes who were fighting the vaguely socialist SLORC. This led to Thai business interests signing deals with the junta for logging and hydropower concessions in the ethnic borderlands. At the same time, China began to funnel billions of dollars of aid to the junta, which was further helped by the opium business in the Golden Triangle. Soon Singapore, Indonesia, and India began to embrace the regime, lured by the country’s natural resources. Thus, while military regimes were falling the world over, Burma continued to suffocate under military tyranny. In 1992, Than Shwe, the current dictator, came to power.

Tellingly, the 2007 Saffron Revolution, which saw large demonstrations and consequent brutal repression of thousands of monks in Rangoon, Mandalay, and nearby Pakokku, went unsupported in the hill tracts. Although the uprising caught the West’s imagination, Burma’s own ethnics remained unmoved. Burma remains not only one of the most tyrannized countries in the world, along with North Korea and Zimbabwe, but also one of the most divided. Everyone substantially involved in the Saffron Revolution is now in prison, exiled, or in hiding.

Burma today is a country where the government spends $1.10 per capita on health care and 40 cents on education, while maintaining one of the largest standing armies in the world. The Burmese army has cut through its own territory like the army of Alexander the Great through the Near East, plundering the populace while making short-lived peace deals with the Wa and splinter factions of the other tribes. Soldiers bayonet peasants’ pots in ethnic areas so that they cannot cook and will go hungry.
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Hundreds of thousands of Burmese troops are sprawled over the hilly borderlands, where thousands of villages have been destroyed and sown over with land mines, even as hundreds of thousands of people are displaced within the country, and more hundreds of thousands sit in refugee camps in Thailand. Risks of infection from HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis “are among the highest in the world.”
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Despite the energy pipeline and hydropower projects, electricity cuts and gasoline shortages
plague Burmese cities. Burma may be a more miserable place now than it was during the heaviest fighting of World War II. The regime, while lacking the chilling, bureaucratic evil of Stalin or Saddam Hussein, is, nevertheless, characterized by a benightedness and careless indifference to its people, which it treats as subjects rather than as citizens.
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Meanwhile, U.S. policy toward the Burmese regime has remained more or less unchanged over the course of several administrations. Barack Obama, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush have all embraced the principle of Burmese democracy, even as they have demonstrated little appetite for aggressively supporting the ethnic insurgencies, however covertly. This feeds the argument that American policy toward Burma is more moralistic than moral, and that former president George W. Bush in particular, despite the intense interest in Burma of former first lady Laura Bush, was prone to the same ineffectual preachiness of which former president Jimmy Carter has often been accused on other issues. According to this logic, the U.S. should either open talks with the junta (as Obama’s State Department has recently done) rather than risk being ejected from the whole Bay of Bengal region by India and China, and leaving Burma open to mass exploitation, or support the ethnics in the effective but quiet manner that my American acquaintances in the region recommend. “Right now, we get peanuts from the U.S.,” Lian Sakhong, general secretary of the Burmese Ethnic Nationalities Council, told me.

American officials responded that there is, indeed, teeth in their pronouncements. There has been a ban on investment in Burma since 1997 (though it is not retroactive, thereby leaving Chevron, which took over its concession from Unocal, free to engage in pipeline construction). New layers of sanctions were added in 2003 and in 2007, and humanitarian aid is provided through certain NGOs operating from Thailand. Moreover, the U.S., from the standpoint of realpolitik, would rather not get too deeply involved in Burma and is, therefore, happy to see its allies India and Singapore indirectly defend its interests against China. As for any form of cross-border operation in support of the Karen and Shan fighters, officials noted that the moment the word of such a policy got out, America’s embassy presence in Burma would be gutted.

Nevertheless, according to Jack Dunford of the Thailand Burma Border Consortium, the United States is the only major power that sends the junta a “tough, moral message, which usefully prevents the International
Monetary Fund and World Bank from dealing with Burma,” and thus allowing it to build even more dams and infrastructure to further rape the landscape. U.S. policy, Dunford went on, “also rallies Western and international pressure that has led to cracks in the Burmese military.” The regime will collapse one day, according to this line of thinking, maybe sooner than later, and that will put America in excellent stead with the Burmese people.

The regime could founder in a variety of ways. Though the specter of another mass uprising excites the Western imagination, perhaps more likely is another military coup, or something more nuanced—a simple change in leadership, with the septuagenarian Than Shwe, in poor health, allowed to step aside. Then, new generals would open up talks with Aung San Suu Kyi, while releasing her from house arrest. Of course, this, by itself, even with elections, would not solve Burma’s fundamental problems. Aung San Suu Kyi, as a Nobel Peace laureate and global media star, could provide a moral rallying point that even the hill tribes would accept. But the country would still be left with no infrastructure, no institutions, and a growing but still frail civil society and NGO community, and with various ethnic groups waiting in the wings that fundamentally distrust the dominant Burmans. The National League for Democracy lacks any managerial skills, according to foreign observers, while the ethnic groups are themselves weak and divided. In this regard, Burma bears comparison with Iraq and Romania after their Stalinist regimes collapsed. Iraq fell into chaos for years, whereas Romania experienced only two weeks of chaos because another branch of the Communist Party, more liberal, wrested power from the demonstrators and led the country through a half-decade transition before finally departing. The lesson, as one international negotiator told me, is: “There will be no choice but to keep the military in a leading role for a while, because without the military there is nothing in Burma.” In power for so long, however badly it has ruled, the military has made itself indispensable to any solution.