Behind the War of Words

Have Myanmar's generals learned to listen as well as lecture?

By DOMINIC FAULDER
Monday, June 18, 2001
Source : Asiaweek

Apart from the problem of finding a cheese-free dish for my distinguished Burmese guest, our lunch in Bangkok had been a delight. Twenty or 30 years ago, Thais, too, weren't happy about eating cheese or drinking cow's milk. Times change and enzymes adapt. Modern Thailand is now a frontline state in a global pizza war in which the super cheesy pizzas of one local chain are poised to win the day. Every conceivable type of ice cream is guzzled here, and café lattes abound.

My Burmese guest finished his cheese-free sandwich and handed over a recent copy of The Myanmar Times. Tin Maung Than, 47, was the editor of Your Life magazine and one of Myanmar's best-known journalists until he fled to Thailand with his family last November. It would be hard to find anybody less threatening or more sincere. His main fear was that his efforts to hot-wire a dialogue between the ruling State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) and the National League for Democracy would come to light. From there it could have been a short hop to indefinite incarceration for some trumped-up offense against the state. That's Myanmar. And people wonder why ASEAN's vaunted policy of constructive engagement has flopped.

The June 4 edition of the MT contained an interesting profile of Thakin Ba Thaung, "the revolutionary, and author of the national anthem." As I flicked through, an unexpected wave of nostalgia crashed down upon me. Clean white paper, crisp layout, generous use of color, a reasonable balance of news, business and features. In fact, all in all, completely unlike anything I had read from Myanmar before, especially when it was still known as Burma. This newspaper bore not the slightest resemblance to The Working People's Daily, which in 1989 was still a bargain at one kyat.

In those days, visiting correspondents would compete with each other over breakfast to find a single fact in endless reports of officers dispensing advice to mute officials at meetings with cryptic headlines such as "Refresher Course No. 8." It was all so mysterious -- a bit like guessing what freemasons get up to at their lodge meetings. The WPD was set in gloriously wobbly type and specialized in articles that began on the back page and meandered forward. More than half the weather forecast was devoted to what had already occurred in the previous 24 hours. I suppose it's always better to avoid undue speculation, like what might happen next. Information can be a dangerous thing.

Best of all were the fiery editorials and commentaries, not infrequently directed at the foreign correspondents themselves over alleged calumnies. Nothing like a public rap over the knuckles to get the day going. My worst offense was revealing on the BBC that one of the WPD's most fearsome columnists, Bo Thanmani, ("General Steel") was none other that Soe Nyunt, the newspaper's editor. I was hauled up in front of the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) Information Committee to hear him read a four-page denunciation itemizing my journalistic shortcomings with Stalinesque attention to detail, little of it factual. My punishment was to be an admission of all my transgressions published in the Far Eastern Economic Review. "But he writes for Asiaweek," hissed a military intelligence officer, rousing himself from near slumber. An unenforceable penalty. There was embarrassed silence. A condemned man reprieved, I was fed bananas, thick sweet tea and wane smiles before the video camera was switched off and Myanmar's information czars shuffled off.

The good old days. Nostalgia isn't what it was, and all that. Actually, it is. The Working People's Daily has been replaced by The New Light of Myanmar as the repository for some of the most cherished traditions of Burmese state journalism. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, this astonishing publication can be enjoyed in the comfort of your own home with free online delivery. (That's just so long as you don't actually live in Myanmar, where Internet access is restricted to about 3,500 mailboxes.) The wobbly fonts and reverse weather forecasts may be gone, but the vitriol and pious editorials about how everybody else in the world has everything completely wrong are still alive, well and remarkably venomous. So too, are reports on generals giving undisclosed advice to quaking officials -- no doubt about something really crucial, like onion exports.

Thailand has been on the receiving end of most of the venom lately, and has very curiously been referred to by its old name of Siam in some commentaries. The real Siam's skillful handling of predatory colonial powers in the 19th century was recently judged by one Burmese authority to be tantamount to enslavement -- a very contrary assessment of a kingdom that managed to avoid colonization, given that Burma was overrun by a small, well armed British force. A recent Burmese textbook described the Thais as -- in more politically correct parlance - "work averse." Ahem.

Last year, Myanmar's deputy minister of national planning and economic development was sacked for his pointed revelations during a business seminar about the terrible state of the Burmese economy. At one point, he said: "There is no way Myanmar, with a GDP of only $1 billion dollars, can compete with Thailand which has a GDP of $55 billion. There is a lot we have to do to catch up with them." Indeed, perhaps we can all learn a thing or two from the Thais if they can be so productive with so little alleged effort.

The Thai media have responded with broadsides of their own, and a war of words has raged. Mostly it trades on simplistic stereotypes and reopens historical hurts that have little bearing on the present day. The vicious snarling of the junta's media is anyway meant to divert attention from the rotten state of the Burmese economy. In May, chronic hard currency shortages sent the kyat's free market rate to over 950 to the dollar, an all time low. The preposterous official rate is 6.7 to the dollar .

Flaying Thailand may be a perverse short-term psychological palliative, but it won't change anything in the real world. Unpegging the kyat might. Be that as it may, the benefit of the economic meltdown is that the generals may finally have been compelled to enter a dialogue of sorts with Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy. Could even the SPDC be learning that nothing can be achieved when people refuse to talk to each other reasonably?