Burma's New Hope: A Repressive Regime Loosens Its Grip (for Now)
It's instinctive. I still avert my eyes. But the Lady stares at me all over town, in a laminated postcard pressed to my palm by a street child, on a poster at a Buddhist monastery where monks were once locked up for their political activism, at the entrance of a tea shop darkened by one of Burma's chronic power cuts. Just last year, displaying a portrait of Aung San Suu Kyi, the once jailed democracy icon known affectionately by her supporters as the Lady, could invite arrest by agents of the ruling military junta. Back then, Burmese would furtively show me her image, then look around to see if anyone was watching. Too often, someone was. But now her picture is openly cherished, a 66-year-old Nobel Peace Prize laureate as fresh as the blossoms she wears in her hair. "It's like a dream to see her pictures everywhere," says Su Su Nway, a political prisoner who was released in October after four years in jail, mostly in solitary confinement. "I still cannot believe it. I wonder if I will wake up and she will be gone."
For now, she is around — and so was another lady. Hillary Clinton's visit to Burma, which continues through Dec. 2, is the first by a U.S. Secretary of State in more than half a century. For decades, relations between the two nations have moldered, as Burma hid behind a haze of tropical terror and the U.S. slapped economic sanctions on the country's oppressive rulers. Burma is the second poorest country in Asia, after Afghanistan, and the world's second most corrupt, after Somalia. Most Burmese live in the countryside, surviving with barely one foot out of the Iron Age. Virtually everyone not part of the elite suffers the relentless fear of an authoritarian state that can jail practically anyone for any reason. For instance, in 2008, after a cyclone killed some 140,000 people, some Burmese who distributed food were imprisoned simply for inadvertently exposing the government's failure to help citizens. Clinton was, thus, in one of the world's most backward, repressed countries — an Orwellian realm where George Orwell himself once served as a colonial policeman. (See Aung San Suu Kyi in the 2011 TIME 100.)
Yet the country that calls itself Myanmar is also a changed place. It's not just Suu Kyi's omnipresence that signals a remarkable transformation. In March, a nominally civilian government replaced the ruling junta. Despite vote rigging for the military-linked party in last year's elections and a leadership stacked with retired generals, the new government is starting to do something the previous regime failed to do: consider the needs of some 50 million Burmese. Economic reforms — from privatization to the creation of labor unions — are beginning to mend a tattered economy in which one-quarter of the country's budget is spent on the army. Some of the hundreds of political prisoners crowding Burma's notorious jails have been released. Once muzzled newspapers are loosening up, and the country's censorship czar has said that his bureau should be abolished. Even the country's flag and anthem were abruptly changed late last year (brighter colors, catchier tune), as if the regime wanted a visual and aural break from its disgraceful past. "It's a brave new Burma," a friend in Rangoon, the commercial capital, tells me. I laugh, but she's not joking.
Suu Kyi, having just celebrated her first anniversary of freedom from house arrest, is also looking forward. "I am cautiously optimistic," she tells me at the headquarters of her opposition National League for Democracy (NLD). "That's all I can say, that's all anyone can say." The NLD is doing more than talking. The same day in mid-November that U.S. President Barack Obama announced Clinton's visit to Burma, the NLD made a historic decision to re-enter politics — a space that didn't even exist until last year. Back in 1990, the NLD won elections that the military junta ignored. The woman who might have been Burma's Prime Minister spent most of the intervening two decades under house arrest. When the regime announced it would hold new elections in 2010, the NLD chose to boycott a surely sham contest. (SEe TIME's photoessay, "Freedom for Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi.")
But the surprisingly reformist leadership of President Thein Sein, a retired general and former junta member, has now persuaded the opposition force to reregister as a political party and contest the coming by-elections. Suu Kyi is running for a seat in parliament, something she could only do after the government changed electoral laws this year to allow former prisoners to run for office. "I am awed by the responsibility," she says. "We have a lot of work to do, and we are, as you might imagine, a bit rusty when it comes to all this."
In years past, Burma's military intelligence could arrest someone for possessing samizdat NLD pamphlets in their homes. Yet for a nation sheltered so long from open political debate, the hunger for civics knowledge in Burma is astonishing. Every time I visit, I have improbable discussions with young and old alike on things like federalism, constitutional amendments or Rousseau. The big political question now, of course, is whether these budding reforms will bring anything truly resembling democracy and a free market to Burma. Other countries in Asia, like Indonesia, have made the transition from military rule to democratic governance. Could Burma, one of the last remaining "outposts of tyranny," to use a U.S. designation, be next?
See what's next for Burma after Suu Kyi was freed.
I hear validation from the unlikeliest of sources. Myo Yan Naung Thein spent nine years in jail for his political activity, surviving torture so intense that he was partly paralyzed before his most recent release in 2009. "It's rapid, unbelievable change we are seeing in Burma," he says. "Before, we talked in whispers, but now we speak in loud voices." The 37-year-old former student leader is also running as an NLD candidate in the by-elections, although their date has not yet been announced. Dressed in the customary Burmese sarong, or longyi, paired with a blazer, he talks about democracy, Thomas Jefferson and the electoral-college maps from U.S. presidential elections he secretly studied. But as he pauses for a moment to catch his breath, he asks just what I am about to pose: "Of course, we are all wondering, Will this last? Is this just a trick by the military? Or is this road to democracy irreversible?"
When Burma's generals announced they would hold elections in 2010 as part of a grand plan to turn the country into a "discipline-flourishing democracy," the world scoffed. Since seizing power in 1962, the country's military had ravaged one of Asia's brightest economies and turned its weapons on ethnic minorities, pro-democracy protesters and ordinary citizens alike. In the months leading up to the polls, loads of state-owned enterprises were auctioned off to regime cronies, whose ostentation — Ferraris, mansions, jewel-encrusted weddings — has shocked an impoverished populace. The election results were hardly promising. Many of the opposition candidates who didn't adhere to the NLD boycott complained of rampant voter fraud. When the new legislature convened in March, the military's proxy party dominated. One-quarter of seats were also reserved for men in uniform. (See photos of decades of dissent in Burma.)
But a subdued Burmese spring blossomed into a surprising summer. Although previous military rulers had for years ignored the nation's beloved opposition leader, President Thein Sein met in August for a cordial chat with Suu Kyi. While much of the foreign investment flowing into Burma from Asian nations has landed in the pockets of military families or their cronies, an undeniable frisson of commerce exists in Rangoon. There are other quivers of activity. This fall, two small protests took place in Burma, one in Rangoon and the other in the city of Mandalay. Unlike in 2007, when the military massacred monks and jailed thousands of unarmed demonstrators, no one was arrested — or shot. In November, the parliament passed a bill allowing some Burmese the right to protest, a privilege they previously did not enjoy. Such reforms - modest in a global context but revolutionary for Burma — were the kind of "flickers of progress" that Obama said prompted Clinton's visit.
Whether these reforms are irreversible depends on what has motivated the changes. The 2007 monk-led protests may have been crushed, just as another democracy movement was in 1988. "But the government cannot rule by fear forever," says Myo Yan Naung Thein. "The 2007 protest proved that, with poverty, with repression, there always will be someone who will confront them." The aftershocks of the revolutions shaking the Arab world have reached Burma's leaders, even those bunkered away in the country's remote new capital, Naypyidaw. "The main driving force for change is political will," says Nay Zin Latt, the President's political adviser, who credits Thein Sein's personal leadership for Burma's reforms. "We do not want an Arab Spring here." (See a profile of Aung San Suu Kyi: Burma's first lady of freedom.)
Geopolitics — and a yearning for international legitimacy — are also at play. Burma is a backwater, but it is wedged between two of Asia's great powers: China and India. With Western sanctions in place, the Chinese (and Burma's other neighbors) have stepped into the breach, snapping up the country's rich natural resources, from timber and hydropower to gems and natural gas. But the Burmese have long eyed their northern neighbor with unease; many of the regime's generals earned their stripes fighting ethnic rebel armies once backed by Chinese communists. In September, Thein Sein announced that he was suspending a $3.6 billion Chinese-backed dam in northern Burma that would have sent most of the electricity over the border to China.
If Burma is to balance China's influence, it needs a counterweight. The U.S. will not fully engage with Burma unless its human rights are better protected. But as Obama reiterated during a recent summit in Asia, Washington is keen to raise its profile in the region and — though it was officially left unsaid — contain Beijing. Presidential political adviser Nay Zin Latt promises another batch of political prisoners will soon be released, presumably to placate the U.S. "Before, whether we liked it or not, we had to take what China had to offer," he says. "When sanctions are lifted, it will be better for everyone in Myanmar." Even the NLD, which has long supported a sanctions scheme that most Burmese who I know oppose, appears open to a shift. "The U.S. is the only superpower that can promote freedom and liberty globally," says Tin Oo, the NLD's vice chairman. "The U.S. needs to encourage Burma's reforms, and as they get brighter, we can consider an end to sanctions."
See photos of the hope of Burma.
For most Burmese, though, the sanctions debate is a distant exercise. In the country's borderlands, ethnic minorities backed by ragged militias document the Burmese military's institutionalized rape, torture and looting that have alienated people already suspicious of a leadership dominated by the country's majority Bamar ethnicity. Fighting has flared most fiercely in northern Kachin State, on the border with China. I try calling a Kachin rebel fighter I know, but his family tells me he is somewhere on the jungle front line. The government says it is pushing for a cease-fire. But getting all of Burma's 135 or so ethnic groups, who make up some 40% of the nation's population, to submit to a central authority after decades of abuse may be far more difficult than a dtente between the Lady and the generals.
Even in Rangoon, simple survival fills many people's days. In the dusty outskirts of the city, at the nation's only private AIDS clinic, I meet Khin Than Nwe, a 30-year-old dying of a disease that is quietly stalking an ignorant populace. Burmese spending on health and education is among the lowest in the world, and the government has tried to shut this clinic down before, lest it expose Burma's failings to the world. Khin Than Nwe bore three children, but each died within a few months. She thought it was malnutrition, a constant in a country where one-third of people live below the poverty line. It was only after she was diagnosed last year with AIDS, a disease she had never heard of despite living in a village just 55 km from Rangoon, that she figured out what had really killed her babies. As a clinic assistant brushes flies off her, I ask Khin Than Nwe if she knows the two people pictured on the caregiver's keychain. "That's our Lady," she answers, bringing her hands together in benediction. But she doesn't recognize the man standing next to Suu Kyi. It is President Thein Sein, who was photographed with her during their historic meeting this summer. (See photos of young adults in Burma.)
Burma's current constitution doesn't allow Suu Kyi to serve as President because of a bizarre rule that bars anyone ever married to a foreigner from leading the land. (Suu Kyi, who spent much of her early life living abroad after the assassination of her independence-hero father Aung San, was married to a British scholar who died while she was under house arrest.) Not everyone supports the NLD's re-entry into politics. Badanda Pamoutka, the abbot of a monastery that participated in the 2007 protests, is mystified by the opposition's course. Some monks who led the peaceful demonstrations four years ago are still in jail. "I don't understand why the NLD wants to cooperate with this regime," the abbot says. Others are convinced the current glints of openness are a ruse by strategic generals backed by former junta chief Than Shwe. "If they want, the authorities can still throw me into jail for whatever reason they want," says Zayar Thaw, a hip-hop artist who didn't consider himself political until the authorities banned his music and then imprisoned him for four years. "How can you say this is a democratic government?"
All that is true. But if Suu Kyi succeeds in her quest to join parliament — by which I mean the government does not rig the vote against her — then she may have a space to use her considerable charismatic skills. Surely there are parliamentarians associated with the regime who want development for their homeland too. The Lady could be a kingmaker in the 2015 elections. "I'm no hero worshipper, but I know she's indispensable," says Win Htein, an NLD stalwart who emerged from 14 years in jail in 2010. "Even if she is not the government leader, in the people's hearts, she is already our national leader." As he speaks, the lights in the NLD's dilapidated Rangoon headquarters flicker, then die, the curse of a resource-rich country with scant public services. Burmese often find themselves in the dark. But at least now a glimmer of hope burns anew.
- Find this article at:
- http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2100949,00.html
__._,_.___
