Letter from Rangoon
source : Burmadaily / UPI, Fri 12 Jan 2001
To read the political tea leaves, Burma-watchers feast on propaganda rags like the New Light of Myanmar. Its Orwellian slogans shout the ``People's Desires'' -- ``crush all internal and external destructive elements as the common enemy'' -- but read between the lines and public enemy number one, Aung San Suu Kyi, had come off lightly over the past month.
The rumors exciting Rangoon's diplomats were finally confirmed this week. The generals who run Burma are holding secret talks with the embattled torchbearer for democracy, confined to her house or city limits since her landslide election victory in 1990.
The dialogue spells breakthrough, or another cynical public relations exercise by her captors. For the casual reader of Burma's press, little else had changed.
On a late December visit, I spotted the usual diatribes against the ``democracy witchcraft masters of the international colonialist bloc'' and annoying puppets like ``screwball'' James Mawdsley, the British human rights activist released in October after 415 days in solitary confinement.
Poor boy, sympathized the paper, it was not his fault he was ``infected by others with the democracy gastric.''
This unfortunate ailment seems to plague many of Burma's 50 million people. Despite the military's best efforts to silence opposition politicians, and hound their supporters into renouncing ties, "The Lady" and her National League for Democracy enjoy the whispered support of almost everyone I encountered, from Rangoon to Mandalay.
But "government spies are everywhere," warn my confidantes, steering conversation back to safer ground like the English soccer ruling Saturday night television screens.
"Did you see our Oscars?" inquires a taxi driver, his tongue loosened by Mandalay rum. The Burmese film world had just gathered for its annual back-slap.
"Every winner thanked the military," he spits with disgust. "But they don't thank from their hearts." The lies perfected by Burma's acting profession are repeated countrywide.
Most families harbor bitter grievances, but the choice is clear: Bear your heart and go to jail, or learn to live with the junta.
"We were the luckiest students in the world," enthuses a tour guide in Rangoon. Let's call him Than. "We had a three-year holiday!". Than was reading philosophy when the government shut all universities in 1996 to teach the students a lesson for their democratic yearnings.
Like his classmates, Than had voted for Suu Kyi's coalition party, and watched in despair as the regime ignored her triumph. 'It has been an illusion since then," he says.
"Now we can't trust anything the government says."
The universities eventually reopened, after relocation to the distant suburbs to dampen thoughts of protest, and Than got his degree.
"We don't forget, but we have to live," he says.
"People have basic needs, and no time to worry about politics. Now they think only about the lottery!" Tourism is slack so Than helps out at a friend's lottery stall. The $100,000 jackpot offers instant nirvana to players with an average wage of just $300 per year.
Like many Burmese in the service sector, Than resents Suu Kyi's high-minded call on foreigners to boycott her nation until the election results are respected.
"We need evolution not revolution," he argues, "and the more people who come, the better. We need foreign investment and foreign technology. We want to swim in the ocean again."
After decades of self-imposed isolation, the government says it is ready to take the plunge. "I hope the international community will not force us into a corner," said Foreign Minister U Win last month. "We can stay in the corner, but we don't want to." Burma's Asian neighbors are prepared to embrace their awkward cousin, while the west demands improvements to its atrocious human rights record.
"The only way to change the situation in this country is by engaging it," believes Bernard Pe-Win, a British businessman who was born in Burma.
At his Forum club in Rangoon, a talking shop for the city's small expatriate community, Pe-Win argues the west has little leverage to bring down the military government. Resource-rich Burma can feed itself, and most other essentials slip across the 1,362 mile border with China. "Burma is a handy whipping boy," Pe-Win suggests. "The west engages China, with its large population and market, and even North Korea, with its nuclear weapons, but feels it can ignore Burma. The military government is not as good as we would want them to be," he admits, "but they are a far cry from how they have been painted. Idi Amin would have wiped out the opposition."
Instead, Suu Kyi endures internal exile in her Rangoon home. Like Tibet's Dalai Lama, a fellow Nobel Peace Laureate, she remains a potent symbol of an oppressed people, yet ``The Lady'' is hardly the regime's only concern. Some observers believe the international focus on Suu Kyi serves the government's aims, by denying support and negotiating space to Burma's restless minority groups, victims of the worst human rights abuses.
"This place could be like the Balkans!" warns a western oil executive in Rangoon. Burma's borderlands are home to rebel insurgents, drug traffickers, and a confusion of ethnic and religious agendas. "I take trouble to hire Buddhists, Christians, Muslims and animists, and they work well together. But left to themselves, they would just hire their own kind. The 'do-gooders' call for democracy, but where will they be when the trouble starts?" The military raises the specter of national disintegration to justify its firm grip on power, with the promise of democratic reform when circumstances allow.
"The repression continues day by day," a former political prisoner tells me in Rangoon. He was jailed under a law protecting the state from ``destructive elements'' like ``The Lady.'' "You can feel it, everybody is tight-lipped, everybody is frightened. If there are no sanctions from abroad," he cautions, "then foreign donors should see that their money doesn't go into the pockets of the military, to enhance their power."