Post by Imorta Thaw on May 13, 2008 11:50:20 GMT -8
Burma Special: The Forgotten War
Burma has other woes besides a cruel dictatorship. The country is a patchwork of ethnic groups which at best are ill at ease with one another and at worst--as in the case of the Karen people--are in open rebellion.
By Jacob Rigg
12-Year-Old Karen Fighter, Burma
Tragic twilight: a 12-year-old Karen fighter stands guard in rebel-held territory near the border with Thailand. CREDIT: REUTERS/JASON REED
On 24 July 1988, journalists racing towards Rangoon leafed through their dossiers to revisit the main players of Burma's history. They read of how the "Thirty Comrades", led by Aung San, father of modern Burma as well as of Aung San Suu Kyi, had allied first with the Japanese and then with the British during the Second World War in order to gain independence; of how Aung San's life was cut off in its prime by political rivals; and of how General Ne Win, one of the Thirty Comrades, had seized power in 1962.
The bellicose demonstrations that sprang up after Ne Win resigned in the summer of 1988 showed the world the violence of a junta that has been at war with its minority groups for four decades. But getting rid of the junta and achieving democracy will not be enough to bring prosperity to Burma. The question of ethnic identity and conflict has vexed leaders of the country for centuries. With the Karen, Burman, Chin, Kachin, Pao-O, Karenni, Kayan, Shan, Salone, Rakhine, Mon and Naga all living side by side, the picture is complex and often drenched in tears.
The first main group to settle in what became Burma were the Mon, moving into the area as early as 1500BC. Theravada Buddhists, the Mon are thought to have converted the Thais and Cambodians from Hinduism and Mahayana tendencies to this strict form of the Buddha's teachings. Many westerners know of them because of the temple at Angkor Wat, which is of Mon/Khmer construction. This group's last kingdom, Hongsavatoi, was captured by the Burman leader U Aungzeya in 1757, and they have been harshly repressed ever since. In the past few decades the Mon have risen in revolt against the central Burmese government on a number of occasions. Resistance continued until 1995, when the Mon and the military agreed a ceasefire. However, government troops continue to operate in defiance of the agreement.
By 1287 a new group, the Shan, had gained control over Upper Burma. The Shan ruled until 1604 when the Burman king Anaukpetlun invaded, and they remained important players in Burmese power politics: centuries later, Burman rulers still felt it expedient to take a Shan queen. When Thibaw, the last Burmese king, took a Burman queen instead, the Shan gentry, known as the Saophas, called their villages to arms and rebelled, precipitating the British invasion in 1885. Under colonial rule the Shan states were administered under a separate system as protectorates, and the British recognised the authority of the Saophas, who enjoyed a high status. But the rule of Ne Win and the dreaded State Law and Order Restoration Council (Slorc) brought ethnic cleansing and economic collapse to the Shan, who number approximately six million. Many of them now live across the border in Thailand.
But it is those groups that have never featured as rulers of Burma that have played the most active part in insurgency against the tatmadaw, or armed forces. The largest of these is the Karen. Many British servicemen who fought during the Burma campaign remember the Karen as effective and loyal fighters against the Japanese. When the Karen revolted in 1948, following what they saw as a British betrayal of their loyalty, they used these fighting skills to great effect. Under the leadership of the Karen National Union (KNU), they soon became the largest of 20 minority groups participating in an insurgency against the military dictatorship in Rangoon. During the 1980s the KNU fighting force numbered approximately 20,000; by this year that number had shrunk to fewer than 4,000, opposing a Burmese army more than a hundred times that strength.
Living mostly in the hilly areas on the eastern border of Burma, the Karen may number up to seven million, although no accurate census has ever been produced. (The junta regularly uses population data to underestimate the importance of ethnic groups and promote the significance of the Burmans.) There are many divisions within the Karen, but the Kayan, or Padaung, have drawn particular attention for their women's custom of wearing long brass coils around their necks. In the 1990s widespread oppression by the military regime forced many Padaung to flee into neighbouring Thailand, where they live with uncertain legal status in the border area.
Group Mentalities
Bogyoke Aung San, Father of Modern Burma
Happy dawn: Clement Attlee with Bogyoke Aung San and other nationalist leaders outside 10 Downing Street, January 1947. CREDIT: HULTON/GETTY IMAGES
Similar, smaller groups such as the Kachin and the Karenni have all fought wars of attrition with the junta. The Kachin people are an ethnic affinity of several hill-dwelling groups, known for their fierce independence, disciplined fighting skills, complex clan interrelations, Christianity, craftsmanship, herbal healing and jungle survival skills. The name Kachin is a Burman term for these groups, the vernacular term being Jinghpaw. Many 19th-century British sources describe them as being descendants of Kublai Khan who moved from the Tibetan plateau between the 10th and 13th centuries. In the early part of their history they fought the Shan among the hills around the upper waters of the Irrawaddy, Burma's main river, which starts in the Himalayas and drains eventually into the Andaman Sea. As the sprawling Shan kingdom broke up, the Kachin established themselves further south and south-east. Like the Chin, another of Burma's big ethnic groups, and the Karenni, the Kachin have fought against tatmadaw oppression since independence.
Ethnic strife is common across the former colonies of south and south-east Asia, but geopolitics and national postwar negotiations have made the fighting particularly savage in Burma. Initially many of these groups, particularly the Karen, thought that guarantees by the British government would be enough to deliver strong positions in any post-independence settlement. The Karen harboured hopes for a "back-door" road, running from the "frontier areas" through a separate Karen state and onwards to the sea, which would reduce the economic dependence of all the ethnic minorities on the Burman-controlled Irrawaddy Delta.
While the group of nationalists led by Aung San had regular contact with British officials, the minority position slipped away. The preoccupations of the incoming Attlee government were elsewhere, and the Labour government wanted to get Burma off its hands quickly. Despite promising protection to the Karen soldiers who had remained loyal during the Second World War, the British now abandoned Burma's minorities. By the time Aung San was assassinated in 1947, hope of any detente had passed. The Karen took up their guns and went to war--a war that would last half a century.
By the time of the coup in 1962, most of the ethnic groups which had suffered at the hands of the Burmese army, and by now wanted autonomy, were in open rebellion. To some degree, despite a widespread push by the tatmadaw, that situation continues today.
However, the simple picture that pitches the evil Burman army against the good folk of the hills is singularly unhelpful. The politics of ethnicity in Burma is complicated. Although the tatmadaw is largely Burman, it is not exclusively so, and neither is its brutality. In 1974 the junta ordered Chin and Kachin soldiers to quell street protests in Rangoon. Directly copying the British tactic of using soldiers from one part of the country to crush protest in another, these soldiers foreshadowed the iron fist of 1988. The ethnic insurgencies likewise suffer from factionalism, both ethnic and political. External political influence has also had an influence, with the Chinese funding the Communist Party of Burma's war from the 1940s to the late 1980s, and CIA and Kuomintang involvement further complicating the picture.
The political economy of the rebellion has fuelled both the rebel armies and the counter-insurgency tactics of the Burmese generals. In the limited economy of the 1950s, corruption became rife. The rebels controlled the land borders where smuggling could take place. Jade supplied funds for the Kachin army; teak, cattle and luxury goods from Thailand provided tax revenue for the KNU; medicine and rice helped the Rohingyas, Muslims from Arakan; opium helped the Shan groups. This provoked the savage-sounding "four cuts" policy or Pya Ley Pya. Designed (as with the US "strategic hamlets" policy in Vietnam) to cut the main links of the ethnic armies to food, funds, intelligence and recruits, it involved horrendous suffering for local people that persists.
In this forgotten war families have been torn apart, children butchered, mothers raped and fathers tortured. The ghosts of the conflict are the living as well as the dead. Villagers, occasionally disturbed by western photojournalists, look up with sunken eyes--whole generations knowing nothing but war; refugees who do not know whether their relations are still alive. Tatmadaw soldiers remain trapped in this seemingly endless cycle of violence where drug barons jostle with ethnic insurgents to cultivate the poppy that funds every side.
Many of the groups, worn down by the tactics of the tatmadaw, have drawn up ceasefire agreements. But in the light of the constant transgression of the most basic human rights, hopes of peace seem slim. No indigenous institutions reflecting the aspirations of the people themselves have ever been permitted to develop. Instead, as far back as Anawrahta, the first Burmese king, who was famously killed by a buffalo, rulers have seen the ethnic minorities in Burma as an inconvenience or a threat to national security.
Suu Kyi has said: "Unity in diversity has to be the principle of those who genuinely wish to build our country into a strong nation that allows a variety of races, languages, beliefs and cultures to flourish in peaceful and happy coexistence. Only a government that tolerates opinions and attitudes different from its own will be able to create an environment where peoples of diverse traditions and aspirations can breathe freely in an atmosphere of mutual understanding and trust." All those who desire a peaceful Burma must hope such a government can be formed. At present, however, it is a distant goal.
History Notes
1887: Third Anglo-Burmese War ends. The monarchy is deposed and Burma fully incorporated into the British empire.
1947: Aung San signs agreement with Attlee allowing for self-rule within a year. His party wins elections, but in July he is assassinated.
1962: Ne Win takes power and begins his disastrous "Burmese Way to Socialism".
8/8/88: Auspicious date when it was hoped Burma would become free. Pro-democracy marches meet with violence: 3,000 people are killed over the next six weeks.
2005: The former Czech president Vaclav Havel and Desmond Tutu call on the Security Council to demand change.
Title: Burma Special: The Forgotten War
Source: New Statesman (London, England) Vol. 135, No. 4805
Author: Jacob Rigg
Publication Date: Aug. 14, 2006
Page Number: 26-28
Database: SIRS Researcher
Service: SIRS Knowledge Source <http://www.sirs.com>
Myanmar's Anguish
The struggle of the people of Myanmar for justice in the face of an ironfisted military junta (which changed the country's name from Burma to Myanmar in 1989) that tolerates no dissent continues unabated. At the center of the struggle is the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the National League for Democracy party that won an overwhelming victory in the 1990 election. Spurning those election results, however, the junta, formally known as the State Peace and Development Council, placed her under house arrest, where she has remained on and off for a dozen of the last 18 years.
The violent attacks on peaceful protesters last September shocked the international community, as photos circulated around the world over the Internet. Soldiers fired into a crowd of monks and peaceful protesters in Yangon, killing some and arresting many hundreds more. The junta has acknowledged that 15 people were killed, but its opponents believe the number may be much higher. The participation of monks in the protest, in a country where Buddhism is the dominant religion, made domestic reaction and international condemnation all the stronger.
The army claims to be an all-volunteer force, but so pressing is its need for more soldiers that recruitment efforts extend even to children. Recent reports by Human Rights Watch describe in detail how army recruiters, desperate to meet their quotas, virtually buy children. High desertion rates make the recruiters' desperation all the more intense. In an effort to allay growing international criticism, the junta established what it calls the Committee for the Prevention of Military Recruitment of Underage Children. In fact, Jo Becker of Human Rights Watch, the organization's children's rights advocate, told America that the committee and other activities are basically cosmetic and "have done nothing to change the practice on the ground."
Recruiters continue to watch bus and train stations and markets for boys, who are promised money, free education and other benefits. Resistance can lead to beatings. Theoretically, recruits must prove that they are at least 18 years old, but according to interviews with recruits, there is little insistence on real proof. According to Human Rights Watch, one boy failed his medical exam because he weighed only 70 pounds. His recruiter, though, bribed the medical officer to allow the child to enlist. Some boys have been involved in the army's ethnic cleansing attacks on minority villages in the eastern part of the country, where fighting has displaced half a million ethnic Burmese, many of whom remain internally displaced persons.
China, Myanmar's giant neighbor to the north, and to some extent India and Russia, bear much of the responsibility for the junta's violent suppression of dissent and its attacks on ethnic minority groups. All three countries supply the army with weapons. Both China and Russia, moreover, have tried to block U.N. efforts to impose sanctions on the military government. For its purchase of arms, Myanmar depends largely on revenue from the sale of gemstones, for which the country is famous, especially rubies and jade. Over 90 percent of all rubies sold worldwide originate in Myanmar. In addition to serving as the main source of financing for arms purchases, the gems have also been one of the ways by which corrupt military officials have personally enriched themselves in a country where deep poverty is endemic. Attempting to block sales of the gems, the European Union in October placed sanctions on importing them, and legislation is pending in Congress that would ban their purchase in the United States. Some companies, like Tiffany & Co., have already refused to buy them, and after the September attack on protesters, Bulgari, Cartier and other jewelry companies followed suit.
For almost half a century, the Burmese people have suffered under the weight of oppressive military governance. The greatest need now is for a return to democratic civilian rule. The courageous monks, some of whom have been beaten and jailed, and other peaceful protesters have made their voices heard throughout the world. They, together with the longstanding support shown for Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy party, make it clear that the people long for a civilian-ruled government that will respect their long-abused human rights. In the meantime, international pressure, including pressure by the United Nations, should focus on some of the more egregious abuses--ending the attacks on ethnic groups, the release of prisoners held primarily for the exercise of their right to free speech and prohibiting the recruitment of children into the army.
Title: Myanmar's Anguish
Source: America (Vol. 197, No. 20)
Author:
Publication Date: Dec. 17, 2007
Page Number: 5
Database: SIRS Researcher
Service: SIRS Knowledge Source www.sirs.com
BURMA: SCENES FROM ANOTHER WORLD
by Peter Sidler
Many visitors to Burma feel, when their brief sojourn is over, much like someone taking leave of his beloved: He departs sadly, and promises to return soon. Many have succumbed to the charms of this land, and have recorded their thoughts and feelings for posterity. Among them was Rudyard Kipling, who a century ago traveled from the Andaman Sea up the Rangoon River to the capital of the same name, and Somerset Maugham, who spent time in Burma in the late 1920s. The country has often been described as a living fossil, a place where time not only has stood still but does not even exist, has never existed.
Traveling through Burma, you constantly encounter scenes and images that seem to be of another world. The modern era has affected Burma only to a very limited degree. Instead of skyscrapers, Rangoon's hallmark is a golden pagoda more than two and a half thousand years old, and the city has not (yet) been deformed by neon signs. There is hardly any garbage--where there is little to buy, and barely any surplus, very little ends up in the dust bin. Where, in other countries, superhighways cleave the landscape, in Burma the countryside is accented by thousands of temples and pagodas, and the land follows a rhythm all its own.
Burmese women radiate a charm unparalleled even by Asian standards. You feel here that your eyes cannot take in enough; the exotic is virtually palpable. Men wear skirts--the longyi, a long cloth which they repeatedly re-knot as they walk. Women smoke thick cigars--especially the market women, as they crouch behind their displays of farm produce waiting for customers. Women and children smear patches or stripes of a yellowish-white paste on their forehead, cheeks and nose--thanaka, made from an aromatic wood (the scientific name of which is murea exotica) by rubbing a twig on a stone and mixing the result with water; thanaka is supposed to tighten the skin and protect it against the harsh tropical sun.
Traffic in Rangoon is very sparse, and on country roads it is virtually nonexistent. The vehicles one sees are rickety old models which would have been scrapped in the West decades ago, too decrepit to be considered "classic cars." And on Lake Inle in eastern Burma, an area which would seem even more idyllic if the people there had not totally denuded the surrounding mountain slopes of their forests, something quite unique is to be found. A few sleepy villages line the lake shore, their inhabitants raise vegetables on floating islands, and the fishermen on this lake steer their boats with their feet. They stand in the stern on one leg like storks, their other leg slung over the rudder, and in this way, with the aid of one arm, they keep their craft in motion. They explain this unusual method by maintaining that it enables them better to steer their craft through the large clumps of vegetation that float in the clear waters.
In Mandalay, on the banks of the Irrawaddy River, people still go about their daily affairs as their ancestors have done for centuries. Their simple houses are built on stilts, and come right down to the water. The women draw their water from the river, in which they do their laundry, wash their dishes, and bathe themselves, while their children splash in shallow pools nearby. And just out of arm's reach, thick tree trunks float by, waiting to be hauled ashore by yoked teams of oxen and pulled by the snorting beasts to nearby storage areas and from there eventually onto trucks which, as a rule, have rusted into little more than skeletons equipped with only the most essential components.
At another spot, bamboo staves are being unloaded; men and women skillfully weave house walls of stripped leaves, and in front of some of the huts women cook rice over open fires. Burmese spend a good deal of their time at tasks that we Westerners are used to dealing with quickly. In areas far from a river, for example, they often have to walk long distances and then wait at a public watering place with hundreds of others in order to fill their ox-drawn tank wagons or the tin buckets which they carry suspended from a pole yoked over their shoulders.
Situated in the center of the country, the Plain of Pagan, about a day's train ride from the capital, offers a breathtaking sight. In an area of perhaps 50 square kilometers, bounded on the west by the Irrawaddy and on the east by a mountain chain, the remains of more than two thousand sacral buildings are crowded together. A traveler once aptly remarked that the only fit comparison would be to imagine all Europe's medieval cathedrals-- without any other buildings to moderate them--jammed together in a space of similar size. Marco Polo, who passed through the area in the year 1298, wrote of Pagan as one of the loveliest sights in the world, and a 19th-century British colonial official observed that one cannot move hand or foot there without brushing up against something holy. Along with the temple complexes of Angkor in Cambodia and Borobudur on Java, Pagan ranks as one of Asia's greatest archeological sites. From about the start of the Christian era, the area saw the rise and fall of a series of small kingdoms, but its golden age began with King Anawrahta, who ascended the throne in A.D. 1044 and conquered the Mon kingdom to the south in 1057. That was the first time in history that a single monarch ruled over the area approximately equivalent to today's Burma. Returning from his conquest of the Mon, Anawrahta brought back to Pagan not only the wealth of his defeated opponents but also Buddhist monks, architects, sculptors, and the entire royal family.
Under Anawrahta and his two successors, thousands of pagodas, temples, and Buddhist monasteries were erected in the course of a feverish building campaign triggerred by profound religiosity. During the reign of King Kyanzitta (1084-1112), Pagan became known as the "city of four million pagodas." Indeed, in its heyday it housed as many as 13,000 religious structures, of which exactly 2,217 have been catalogued today. But no one knows exactly what the city looked like back then, because all buildings--including monasteries and royal palaces, but excluding the pagodas and temples--were built of wood. In July 1975 Pagan was hit by a severe earthquake, and it was initially feared that many of its remaining structures had been irreparably shattered. Fortunately, that was not the case, and in the intervening years all serious damage to Pagan's most important monuments has been repaired. On Unesco's initiative, financial assistance was offered by the international community, but the Burmese government, which has kept the country largely sealed off from the rest of the world since the 1960s, insisted that the restoration be accomplished without the help of foreign advisers. The results are impressive. The Burmese took great pains to restore the Pagan structures carefully and with simple means, so they still shine with an ancient splendor undisturbed by blatant patchwork.
Though Burma is a pervasively Buddhist country, with more than 80% of its people holding to that faith, there are still sacral relics from earlier animist times. About 50 kilometers east of Pagan, Mount Popa rises from the flat plain like a huge mound of sugar, its summit home to pre-Buddhist nats (spirits), for which reason the mountain is sometimes referred to as "the Burmese Olympus." Seen through the heat haze as you approach it from Pagan, the view of this 1,500-meter volcanic cone is as unforgettable as the panoramic view from its peak when you finally climb the steep, covered staircase leading to the very top. The summit is a fairytale maze of shrines, pagodas, temples, and monasteries, to which the faithful make pilgrimage the year 'round in order to invoke the aid of the spirits and gods in their personal affairs. Thagyamin is honored as king of the spirits, and after him Nga Tin Ded and his sister Shwemyethna, who are known as the "mahagiri nats." To a certain extent the nats may be compared to the saints of the Catholic church, whose assistance is sought in times of need. Today 37 nats are acknowledged in Burma, some of them rooted in ancient times, others of more recent origin, all of them possessing a demonic or evil character whose powerful influence can be escaped only by showing honor and respect to these spirits. This the Burmese do by placing money, flowers or food on special altars. The same purpose is served by the wreaths which many Burmese motorists tie to the hoods of their cars, or the flowers women wear in their long black hair.
One can see in Rangoon's Shwedagon Pagoda how much spirits and demons are part of the everyday religious life of the Burmese. Situated north of the capital's center, and purported by legend to be more than 2,500 years old, this complex of more than 380 individual temples and prayer halls, with its colorfully painted, fabulous animals and other statues from the realm of myth and fairytale, also includes shrines to the nats. Lording it over the fantastical assemblage of structures is a nearly 100- meter-tall stupa that allegedly houses eight of Buddha's hairs.
The Shwedagon Pagoda is at its most beautiful at sunrise or sunset, when the first or last rays of the sun bathe the golden stupa in the most magnificent light. There is always activity on its main platform, yet somehow the predominant atmosphere is one of peace and calm. In one corner a family enjoys a picnic; at a nearby shrine, a woman pleads for divine aid in conceiving a child, while in an open temple hall a group of devout believers sit meditatively on straw mats listening to words of wisdom from a monk. Many people come here merely for a stroll, or a chat, or simply to sit a while and watch the colorful crowd on the white marble main platform, where hordes of the faithful walk clockwise around the stupa at all hours of the day.
Seeing the Shwedagon Pagoda for the first time, when monkeys still cavorted in its temples, Kipling wrote: "This is Burma, and it will be quite unlike any land you know about." One of the most important events in the life of a Burmese male, an occasion for colorful celebration in this profoundly pious country, is his entry into a monastery. This generally occurs between the ages of nine and twelve, and the boys serve as monks for only a few weeks, after which they return to their normal lives. The ceremony is known as shinbyu and for the people of Rangoon the preferred venue is the Shwedagon. Elegantly dressed and crowned-- the crowns serving as a reminder that Buddha was the scion of a royal family--the novices are accompanied to the pagoda by parents, relatives and friends, where their heads are shaved and they don the monk's robe.
While the beginnings of the Shwedagon Pagoda go back millennia, Rangoon itself is a relatively young city. It became Burma's administrative center only after the British had brought the last northern sections of the country under their control in 1885. With its broad, tree-lined streets, its elegant colonial buildings (now sadly neglected) and beautiful parks, Rangoon seems all of a piece, and has remained more or less as the British left it in 1948.
On one of the loveliest spots along the Rangoon River stands the old Strand Hotel, once known as "the finest house east of Suez." It was built around the turn of the century by the Armenian Sarkies brothers, like the Raffles Hotel in Singapore and the Eastern and Oriental in Penang. Like the city as a whole, the hotel has obviously seen better days, yet the charm of its high-ceilinged rooms, its dilapidated lobby and old bar remains undimmed. The main lobby is dominated by a two-story-high mural by the Burmese artist U Ba Kyi, which bears the title "Kipling's Road to Mandalay." On one side it shows London, with a path of silvery moonlight on the sea leading from the British capital directly to Burma's tropical landscape, complete with elephants, palm trees, and the city walls of Mandalay; a Burmese woman, smoking a cigar, gazes at a pagoda, and a British soldier is visible through the rising tobacco smoke. The images are drawn directly from these lines in Kipling's poem MANDALAY: "By the old Moulmein pagoda,/Lookin' lazily at the sea,/There's a Burma girl a-sittin'/And I know she thinks of me./For the wind is in the palm trees,/an' the temple-bells they say:/Come you back, you British soldier;/Come you back to Mandalay!"
Kipling was never in Mandalay. He spent only a few days on Burmese soil, in Moulmein in the south, and in Rangoon. The journey from the capital to Mandalay by day train is a memorable experience: comfortable cars, ceiling fans helping to cool the passengers even with the windows open, trundling for twelve hours through the absolutely flat landscape. Peddlers with trays on their stomachs pass down the aisles ceaselessly. Some of them offer rice-filled banana leaves packed in newspaper, which they sprinkle with roasted peanuts and chopped chili peppers, top with a spoonful of oil, and garnish with a roasted chicken drumstick. Others go through the train with cool drinks, fruit, hardboiled eggs, baked goods, cigarettes, hot tea, and coffee, or handicrafts and simple toys. There is even a man with a pile of dog-eared books and comics; those with a yen to read can take something, returning it after a while to the "librarian" with a small fee. The traveling peddlers generally board the train at one station with full baskets, then debark at the next station or as soon as they have sold all their goods. At each stop, they face competition from hordes of local merchants offering their wares on every platform.
Like Rangoon, Mandalay is not a very old city, but according to legend its beginnings go back thousands of years. It is said that Gautama Buddha and his favorite disciple Ananda once stayed for a while on a sacred hill near what is now Mandalay, on which there had been pagodas and temples since ancient times. There, Buddha prophesied that a city would be founded on the site in the year 2,400. A deeply religious ruler, King Mindon, made sure the prophecy would be fulfilled by launching construction of a new palace at the foot of that hill in A.D. 1857 (or 2,400 by the Buddhist calendar). Today only its retaining walls remain; the palace itself, built entirely of wood, burned down completely toward the end of World War II in a fire ignited during clashes between advancing British troops and the retreating Japanese. Under King Mindon, Mandalay experienced a brief heyday as the religious and intellectual center of what remained of a former Burmese empire, and today it still houses hundreds of monasteries and tens of thousands of Buddhist monks. Mindon's son Thibaw was the last Burmese king. In 1885 the British colonial rulers annexed the last independent region of the country. Thibaw was not only the last Burmese monarch, he also was known for his extraordinary cruelty. It was common practice for Burmese rulers to do away with their relatives upon ascending the throne; Thibaw, however, had potential rivals buried alive and then had elephants trample on their graves.
In 1962, when the army took power in Burma in a bloody coup, they hermetically sealed the country against the rest of the world. Even today, tourist visas are valid for only one week. The "Burmese path to socialism" proclaimed by the military, compounded of narrow-minded militarism and untenable economic formulas, brought the country to ruin. Once the richest land in Southeast Asia, Burma today is among the poorest nations in the world. The people do not suffer dire material want, but pitifully little is available to them--thanks only to the woeful government of the reigning junta. Those politicians who are unwilling to be ruthless (or unthinking) are in jail, under house arrest, in foreign exile, or else try their best to remain unobtrusive. University students and other young people who have turned their backs on the oppressive political climate of the capital, often die of malaria in the jungles of the border regions.
One of the results of Burma's quarantine is that the country, its culture and traditions, have remained largely free of foreign, modern influences. The charms of this isolation, of the dreamily lovely Burmese landscape and the fairytale scenes which repeatedly greet the traveler, inevitably cast their spell over every visitor. Having cut itself off from the blessings of the twentieth century, the country has also been spared the necessity of dealing with the dark side of progress.
But Burma's clocks have stood still only because it was so decreed by remarkably stupid and brutal military despots, whose activities today do not extend much beyond clinging to power with all their might. In elections held last year, more than 80% of Burma's voters cast their ballots unequivocally against the military junta, which has no intention of relinquishing power to those chosen by the electorate. Political night has lain over this beautiful country for a good many years now, and there is no telling when day may dawn again.
Title: Burma: Scenes from Another World
Source: Swiss Review of World Affairs (Zurich, Switzerland)
Author: Peter Sidler
Publication Date: March 1992
Page Number: 17-21
Database: SIRS Researcher
Service: SIRS Knowledge Source www.sirs.com
Burma's Censors Monitor Internet, Newspapers--and Poets
By Danna Harman.
The Christian Science Monitor
• The regime has watched the media more closely since last September's uprising by monks.
RANGOON, Burma--Saw Wai is a Burmese poet known for his love songs. His eight-line Valentine's Day ode, about a brokenhearted man in love with a fashion model, was a particularly tender one. But there was one problem.
If read vertically, the first word of each line formed the phrase: "Power Crazy Senior General Than Shwe."
The senior general himself, head of Burma's (Myanmar's) military junta, could not have been amused. The head of the censorship board was urgently called to the capital; the weekly "Love Journal" has been shut down and copies of the offending edition were yanked from newsstands.
Saw Wai is now in jail, where apparently he will spend Feb. 14 in isolation, behind bars.
Extreme government censorship is as much a part of life in today's Burma as rice and pagodas. Everything from TV programs to newspaper ads goes through a rigorous vetting board. But the junta is fighting a losing battle against a population hungry for information, armed with tools ranging from transistor radios to sneaky editors and myriad ways to bypass blocks on Internet sites.
Since last September's monk uprising, the censorship has increased. And criticism of the ruling junta is not all that is wiped out--so is most bad news, including reports on natural disasters and defeats of the national soccer team. Even good news can be cut if it's about countries out of favor with the government.
Reporters Without Borders' (RSF) Press Freedom Index placed Burma 164th out of 168 countries last year, just ahead of Cuba, Eritrea, Turkmenistan, and North Korea. This year, the country might do even worse.
"The police and army continue to hunt for journalists and activists who photographed and filmed the [September 2007] crackdown on the pro-democracy demonstrations," RSF says in its January report.
All TV and radio stations in Burma are government owned. The same is true for the country's three daily papers, which routinely run front-page stories along the lines of "Maj-Gen Khin Zaw of Ministry of Defense inspected bridges on the railroad yesterday," or "Maj-Gen Tha Aye of the Ministry of Defense attended a ceremony to broadcast fertilizers for summer paddy."
Far more popular than the dailies are the 80-odd privately owned weekly and monthly magazines here--which are read, according to the British Broadcasting Corporation's (BBC) World Service Trust, by some 40 percent of the urban and 20 percent of the rural population. Yet these have to submit everything from their editorials to cartoons to a government censorship board before publication. Falling afoul of the board results in immediate punishment ranging from having the paper closed, to years of imprisonment.
Very slow Internet access--which, in any case, is found only in the biggest cities--while cheap, is still a luxury for many. It, too, is under government control. Officially, all e-mails go through the authorized government-run Internet service providers, where detailed data on users is collected, and the mail itself is scoured, sometimes causing days of delays. Popular e-mail sites such as hotmail.com and gmail.com, along with foreign newspapers and a long list of other supposedly undesirable sites, are blocked.
Following last year's riots, all Internet access was cut off for three weeks. And, according to several Internet cafe owners, since then, they have been pressured to register the personal details of all customers and save screen images every five minutes on each computer--all of which could be demanded at any time by authorities.
So how does news actually get in, out, and about? The commercial papers are locked in a never-ending game of cat and mouse with the censors, explains an editor of one popular weekly here, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of security concerns. For example, newspapers typically re-send the same stories to the censor board a few weeks later, rewritten, with a new headline. "If we fail the first time, we restick the main point about three quarters of the way down in the story and surround it with very technical language to get the censors bored. We can still say a lot," he explains.
"Journalism is a vehicle for doing what we care about--which is actively advocating for social and economic change," admits the publisher of another weekly, who also asked his name not be used.
Meanwhile, foreign shortwave radio services are enormously popular here, with an estimated 40 percent of Burmese tuning in to the BBC, Voice of America Burmese broadcasts, Radio Free Asia, and the Democratic Voice of Burma. Small Chinese-made radios cost as little as $5.
Watching satellite television is harder because of frequent electric outages, and the expense. Nonetheless, it is popular with Burmese gathering in tea shops to watch sports and catch news.
"My constituency is a small town in upper Burma, but even there we have small satellite dishes and radios, and everyone is listening to the radio or watching the tennis," says U Han Tha Even, spokesman of the opposition NLD. "Even the military is listening to the BBC. Where else would they get information?"
In addition, in Rangoon and Mandalay, months-old copies of The Economist or Time magazine pass like gold from hand to hand. At night, under generator-run lights, locals crowd into makeshift outdoor secondhand book markets, browsing.
The Internet cafes in these main cities are packed with youngsters overriding the blocks with endless formulas to reach proxy servers--and freely surfing the web, in open defiance of the law. They chat with friends across the border in Thailand, check gmail accounts, read news, search for scholarship opportunities overseas, and follow American celebrity antics.
"I think there as many ways to enter gmail through side portals as there are ways to block it," says Zaw Zaw, a young Internet cafe owner, who admits he does not follow rules about tracking customers, and, so far, nothing has happened.
"Media from the outside is so very important," stresses Burmese monk in exile Abbot U Uttara, who heads the Sasana Ramsi Vihara in London. "Not only to stay informed, but because it conveys to those within Burma that the world has not forgotten them."
The flow of information goes both ways. While Burma is notoriously strict about letting foreign journalists into the country and restricts travel within Burma, many do enter, and a lot of what the junta is trying to cover up is reported anyway. Meanwhile, courageous local journalists reporting for outside media are very active. Burmese news sites based outside the country--such as Irrawaddy.org~~a href="http://"/~~and Mizzima.com--put out daily reports using journalists within.
During September's demonstrations, despite a heavy crackdown on media, and the shooting to death of a Japanese journalist (which the government claims was accidental), images of the beatings and shootings of unarmed protesters crossed the world within minutes of the events--courtesy, mainly, of local activist journalists who rushed to nearby cafes or embassies with photos and reports. Mobile phones, while more expensive in Burma than almost anywhere else, are also becoming popular--allowing for immediate sending of both photos and text messages.
Valentine's Day poet Saw Wai remains in jail, says the weekly publisher, but there is no doubt others will continue fighting the boundaries here by cheekily sending out subversive messages, flooding the censors with reworded news stories, buying more radios, and bypassing blocked sites. "The times where you could isolate a whole country will never return. It's just not possible," he says. "Ours are small victories, but they are still victories."
Title: Burma's Censors Monitor Internet, Newspapers--and Poets
Source: Christian Science Monitor
Author: Danna Harman
Publication Date: Feb. 11, 2008
Page Number: n.p.
Database: SIRS Researcher
Service: SIRS Knowledge Source www.sirs.com
The Irrawaddy: All the News That Burma Deems Unfit to Print
By Tibor Krausz
Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
• A Burmese dissident magazine based in Thailand relies on thousands of Burmese contacts reporting from inside the sealed country
Chiang Mai, Thailand--Aung Zaw got his first taste of publishing two decades ago in the kitchen of his family's home in the old Burmese capital of Rangoon. A student of botany protesting his country's jackbooted military regime to the alarm of his mother, Aung Zaw began producing samizdat leaflets at night on an antiquated printing cylinder operated as if rolling dough.
Arrest, torture, and a stint in jail followed. As the Burmese pro-democracy uprising of 1988 was being crushed by the ruling junta and thousands were being killed, Aung Zaw, disguised as a monk, escaped through the land-mined jungles of Burma (Myanmar) to Thailand. Here, he made a discovery--the "magic of the fax machine," as he puts it. Presently, he was back in business, dispatching reports about his compatriots' plight to human rights groups.
Now, a mere fax seems ancient beside the top-notch office tools of Aung Zaw's current project: The Irrawaddy. Based in Thailand, the English-language print and online newsmagazine offers coverage of Burma and its iron-fisted military junta. The once penniless refugee now oversees a $500,000-a-year media operation, funded largely by European Union governments.
Aung Zaw crosses his arms and claps himself on both shoulders, saying, "A heavy responsibility weighs on these." Then gesturing around the newly furbished newsroom in this city in mountainous northern Thailand, he adds: "I never thought I'd come so far!"
Burma's secretive generals probably wish he hadn't.
The Irrawaddy's reporters draw on a clandestine network of sources several thousand strong across tightly policed Burma, from shop owners to disgruntled officials who communicate via phone, e-mail, courier, and meetings snatched at border crossings. The journalists also parse the regime's propaganda statements for insight.
Earlier this year, Aung Zaw obtained a secret video of the wedding of strongman General Than Shwe's daughter--an alleged $300,000 affair bankrolled by arms-dealing and drug-trafficking cronies. The leaked video enraged impoverished, long-suffering Burmese citizens, most of whom languish on less than $1 a day.
In September when Buddhist monks, riled by skyrocketing prices, took to Rangoon streets in silent protest, Aung Zaw began working the phones frantically. For days, he says, he was interviewing and being interviewed (by foreign media) often simultaneously. When the crackdown began, he recalls. "We were speaking to a stringer on his mobile. Just then the soldiers started shooting protesters."
Such immediate access made The Irrawaddy's website, constantly updated daily in both English and Burmese, a must for people seeking news from the hermetically sealed country. Hits on the site, says office manager Win Thu, jumped threefold to 39 million a week...until a cyber-attack brought it down for days.
"Censorship in Burma is tighter than ever," says Zin Linn, a former political prisoner who works as media director for a shadow government of Burmese exiles in Bangkok. "But The Irrawaddy is on the side of truth and dedicated to finding out facts on the ground. Often, people from Burma ask me what The Irrawaddy says is happening in their country.
* * *
In 1994, Kyaw Zwa Moe was serving a 10-year sentence in Rangoon's notorious Insein Prison. His crime: posting antigovernment notices in his high school's lavatories as a 16-year-old student. Political prisoners were forbidden to read anything except propaganda sheets. "They wanted to imprison our minds," notes Kyaw Zwa Moe, now The Irrawaddy's managing editor. Yet he kept returning with relish to a screed denouncing a Burmese emigre in Thailand for publishing "lies." The "traitor" was his older brother, Aung Zaw. "I knew immediately," he recalls, chuckling, "if the government was denouncing him, Aung Zaw was on the right track."
A year before, with an old PC and $100 in savings, Aung Zaw had launched The Irrawaddy from his cramped, windowless room in a rundown Bangkok hotel. Named after Burma's largest river, it debuted as a four-page news bulletin. He made several hundred photocopies and distributed them to advocacy groups and embassies.
"In my simple English, I wrote a project proposal [to an aid agency] asking for $2,000 a year," recalls Aung Zaw, who frequently punctuates his sentences with exclamations. "For several months, nothing! Then they called me and said, 'Can you ask for more?'" He laughs.
But Aung Zaw turns somber in his reminiscences.
His mother, a teashop owner, never got to read the magazine, he laments. She was crushed to death by an Army truck in Rangoon not long after The Irrawaddy launch. "In a letter she wrote me before her death she said, 'We will reunite soon!' " Aung Zaw says. "But I couldn't even attend her funeral."
A slender man with feline features, Aung Zaw sports the kind of ponytail you see on portrait painters in the artistic enclaves of Chiang Mai. His bookshelves groan under works by Turgenev, Chekov, and Camus--testaments to his membership in a literary circle back in Rangoon.
Yet his bohemian exterior masks an imperious resolve: "The day I started The Irrawaddy I declared my independence from party politics."
That didn't please all in the factious Burmese emigre community. Nor has the independent-minded editor made friends by investigating controversies about exile groups, like their alleged extrajudicial murder of suspected government spies along the Thai-Burmese border.
"I'm not very diplomatic when I write," Aung Zaw explains. "But our job as journalists is not to bring down the government but to seek the truth objectively."
Still, objectivity can be a challenge. After his release in 1999, Kyaw Zwa Moe joined his brother in Thailand, working his way up from office boy to managing editor at The Irrawaddy. In 2005 he studied journalism on a scholarship at the University of California, Berkeley.
"I hate those...generals," he concedes. "But I've learned that you do a disservice to people by [countering propaganda with propaganda]."
* * *
The New Light of Myanmar, meticulously catalogued in The Irrawaddy's library, is a Rangoon-based government daily. It's propagandists periodically congratulates "newly trained" journalists for answering the call of duty.
Kaung Set isn't a journalist the junta has in mind. The journalist writes for government publications by day and, using that pen name, secretly works for The Irrawaddy on the side.
"Journalism is an unknown concept in Burma," says Kaung Set during a visit to the magazine's offices here before slipping back into Burma. "Whenever I write I'm thinking constantly how I can get past the censors--even if it's only about fashion."
While soldiers beat, shot, and arrested monks and peaceful protesters in September at the Shwedagon Pagoda, the country's holiest site, The Irrawaddy correspondent surreptitiously took photos and e-mailed them to The Irrawaddy--facing 20 to 30 years in prison on charges of sedition, if caught.
"If we don't do it, no one will know what's happening to us," the reporter stresses. "For us, truth is more precious than gold."
Last year, an Irrawaddy contact was sentenced to seven years in prison. Yet messages and photos keep pouring in.
A new e-mail pops up on Aung Zaw's computer. Its attachment is a handwritten letter penned in squiggly Burmese script. Desperate to tell his story, a Burmese man had it scanned and sent to the editor from a secure Internet connection.
"The flow of information is unstoppable," Aung Zaw says. "It's very hard to remove the mountain, but we've started shoveling."
Title: The Irrawaddy: All the News that Burma Deems Unfit to Print
Source: Christian Science Monitor
Author: Tibor Krausz
Publication Date: Dec. 7, 2007
Page Number: n.p.
Database: SIRS Researcher
Service: SIRS Knowledge Source www.sirs.com
13 Nations Denounced for Web Censorship
By Verena Dobnik
Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP)--The Internet enemies list numbers 13: Belarus, China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.
These are the countries singled out by the press freedom group Reporters Without Borders as the worst culprits for systematic online censorship, and they were targeted in the group's 24-hour online protest ending at 5 a.m. Wednesday.
"No one should ever be prevented from posting news online or writing a blog," said the Paris-based group, Reporters Sans Frontieres in French, which taps more than 100 journalists who are "keeping us informed."
Worldwide, 61 people, 52 in China, are in prison for posting what the countries claimed was "subversive" content, the reporters' group said in its annual report.
The cyberspace demonstration was advertised in Manhattan--in Times Square and in Bryant Park--on truck-transported billboards. As of Tuesday afternoon, 10,000 people had registered their protest, with black holes on the group's Web site gradually disappearing with each click, said Lucie Morillon, the group's spokeswoman in Washington.
The 13 countries "censor and block online content that criticizes them," the organization said in defining its protest. "Multinationals such as Yahoo! cooperate with the Chinese government in filtering the Internet and tracking down cyber-dissidents."
Reporters Without Borders said it obtained a copy of the verdict in the case of Jiang Lijun, sentenced to four years in prison in November 2003 for his online pro-democracy articles in China. Reporters Without Borders said that the search engine company Yahoo! Inc. had helped Chinese police identify him.
"It's one thing to turn a blind eye to censorship--it's another thing to collaborate," Morillon said.
In a statement, Yahoo! said: "We continue to employ rigorous procedural protections under applicable laws in response to government requests for information, maintaining our commitment to user privacy and compliance with the law."
In Cuba, Reporters Without Borders said, the government "ensures that there is no Internet access for its political opponents and independent journalists, for whom reaching news media abroad is an ordeal."
The punishment for writing "a few counterrevolutionary articles" for foreign Web sites can be years in prison, it said.
Reporters Without Borders said it tracks cases of online repression in various ways, including through court cases and reports of arrests by family and friends.
The nonprofit group, founded in 1985 by French journalist Robert Menard, is 70 percent funded by sales of its magazine, Reporters Without Borders For Press Freedom, which includes photos of journalists in jail. About 200,000 copies are printed three times a year.
Nepal, Maldives and Libya have been removed from Reporters Without Borders' annual list of Internet enemies. But there's an addition to the list, Egypt, where it said "many bloggers were harassed and imprisoned this year."
Title: 13 Nations Denounced for Web Censorship
Source: Buffalo News (Buffalo, NY)
Author: Verena Dobnik
Publication Date: Nov. 8, 2006
Page Number: n.p.
Database: SIRS Researcher
Service: SIRS Knowledge Source www.sirs.com
NO LONGER BURMA, STILL A TYRANNY
by Scott Kraft
Times Staff Writer
- Seven Years After Its Military Rulers Re-Christened It Myanmar, the Southeast Asian Nation Is Busily Seeking Foreign Money. But Most of Its People Remain Impoverished, and Dissent Is Uneasily Tolerated at Best.
YANGON, Myanmar--The lesson in democracy begins promptly at 4 each weekend afternoon. Several thousand people gather behind barricades, eyes trained on the fence surrounding a two-story lakeside home on University Avenue. Traffic cops, dressed smartly in pressed white coats, keep two lanes open for passing cars.
When Aung San Suu Kyi, pink orchids in her brushed-back hair and microphone in hand, appears from behind the fence, the crowd breaks into cheers and applause. For the next hour, the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner gamely conducts a forum on democracy in a country run by generals.
She often answers questions, submitted in advance, about new quotas for rice farmers or the burden of inflation on pensioners, the use of forced labor to build a dam or involuntary "donations" for computers in schools.
"If we had democracy tomorrow, we would still have problems. It's just that we could talk about them openly," Suu Kyi told her listeners the other day. "Security for our children will not come overnight with democracy. But we certainly won't have to worry about the knock on the door in the middle of the night."
Suu Kyi's remarks do not appear on television or radio or even in the next day's newspapers. But a transcript lands on the generals' desks. And a few days later, newspaper articles, written under pseudonyms, criticize the folly of "that girl," as they refer to Suu Kyi, 50.
Such is the uneasy standoff between the generals and the democrats in the steamy Southeast Asian nation of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. Eight months have passed since Suu Kyi was freed from six years of house arrest, and yet there still is no sign of national reconciliation or real progress toward democracy.
Instead, the military rulers here are engaged in a broad effort to win the hearts and minds of Myanmar's 46 million people with a stage-managed constitutional conference, replete with pep rallies, and an economic boom fed by foreigners dreaming of quick profits.
The linchpin of that strategy is an ardent courtship of foreign tourists and investors. While this remains one of the world's poorest countries, building cranes fill the skyline of Yangon, the capital; traffic jams the streets around the dome of the 2,500-year-old Shwedagon Pagoda; billboards advertise Toshiba computers and Kirin beer. An emerging elite of millionaires can be found at the yacht club, the glitzy new nightclubs or the three new driving ranges for golfers.
Suu Kyi is biding her time. "When do we want democracy? Well, we want it now, of course," she said in an interview. "But we are not that impatient. We have other work to do, and we carry on."
Indeed, she is quietly rebuilding her political party, the National League for Democracy, of which she is general secretary. Though still facing restrictions and government harassment, the party appears to have retained the support that gave it 80% of the vote in 1990 elections, a vote that the military rulers annulled.
Although Suu Kyi calls for dialogue with the ruling junta, it sees no need to talk to her. The rulers, a committee of 21 generals known as the State Law and Order Restoration Council, or SLORC, operate in what one diplomat here describes as "their own Kafkaesque reality."
And they are carefully pursuing a course designed to maintain their hold on power.
"So far, the generals haven't had to deal with Aung San Suu Kyi," said Khin Maung Thwin, a local journalist. "They're selling their hopes on making things economically stable. If they do that, they figure they won't have to worry about her."
MYANMAR'S STORIED HISTORY
Myanmar's history is long and rich, dating to the 11th century Bagan Dynasty. It covers a kite-shaped area roughly 1-1/2 times the size of California, the largest of any country in mainland Southeast Asia, with vast teak forests, deposits of jade and rubies, and oil fields. Buddhism is the predominant religion. More than 100 distinct languages are spoken in the 40,000 mostly remote villages.
The country, long a favorite subject for English novelists and travel writers, won its independence from a century of British colonial rule in 1948. A year earlier, independence leader Aung San, the head of a provisional government and Aung San Suu Kyi's father, was assassinated along with members of his Cabinet.
Gen. Ne Win took power in a military coup in 1962, instituting three decades of socialist policies that devastated the country's economy. Massive unrest forced him to step down in 1988, but the new military rulers cracked down brutally on dissent, killing an estimated 3,000 protesters and changing the nation's name from Burma to Myanmar in 1989.
Suu Kyi returned in 1988, after 28 years abroad, to lead the pro-democracy struggle. She was placed under house arrest in 1989, and, although her party won election in a landslide a year later, the junta refused to surrender power.
These days, the junta, under Gen. Than Shwe, remains in firm control. Though most martial law decrees have been lifted, military intelligence agents continue to watch citizens and to harass and detain dissidents. Thousands have been forced to move, without compensation, for government development projects; tens of thousands have been forced to leave their jobs and work on those projects, where they have to provide their own meals and tools.
Burma has other woes besides a cruel dictatorship. The country is a patchwork of ethnic groups which at best are ill at ease with one another and at worst--as in the case of the Karen people--are in open rebellion.
By Jacob Rigg
12-Year-Old Karen Fighter, Burma
Tragic twilight: a 12-year-old Karen fighter stands guard in rebel-held territory near the border with Thailand. CREDIT: REUTERS/JASON REED
On 24 July 1988, journalists racing towards Rangoon leafed through their dossiers to revisit the main players of Burma's history. They read of how the "Thirty Comrades", led by Aung San, father of modern Burma as well as of Aung San Suu Kyi, had allied first with the Japanese and then with the British during the Second World War in order to gain independence; of how Aung San's life was cut off in its prime by political rivals; and of how General Ne Win, one of the Thirty Comrades, had seized power in 1962.
The bellicose demonstrations that sprang up after Ne Win resigned in the summer of 1988 showed the world the violence of a junta that has been at war with its minority groups for four decades. But getting rid of the junta and achieving democracy will not be enough to bring prosperity to Burma. The question of ethnic identity and conflict has vexed leaders of the country for centuries. With the Karen, Burman, Chin, Kachin, Pao-O, Karenni, Kayan, Shan, Salone, Rakhine, Mon and Naga all living side by side, the picture is complex and often drenched in tears.
The first main group to settle in what became Burma were the Mon, moving into the area as early as 1500BC. Theravada Buddhists, the Mon are thought to have converted the Thais and Cambodians from Hinduism and Mahayana tendencies to this strict form of the Buddha's teachings. Many westerners know of them because of the temple at Angkor Wat, which is of Mon/Khmer construction. This group's last kingdom, Hongsavatoi, was captured by the Burman leader U Aungzeya in 1757, and they have been harshly repressed ever since. In the past few decades the Mon have risen in revolt against the central Burmese government on a number of occasions. Resistance continued until 1995, when the Mon and the military agreed a ceasefire. However, government troops continue to operate in defiance of the agreement.
By 1287 a new group, the Shan, had gained control over Upper Burma. The Shan ruled until 1604 when the Burman king Anaukpetlun invaded, and they remained important players in Burmese power politics: centuries later, Burman rulers still felt it expedient to take a Shan queen. When Thibaw, the last Burmese king, took a Burman queen instead, the Shan gentry, known as the Saophas, called their villages to arms and rebelled, precipitating the British invasion in 1885. Under colonial rule the Shan states were administered under a separate system as protectorates, and the British recognised the authority of the Saophas, who enjoyed a high status. But the rule of Ne Win and the dreaded State Law and Order Restoration Council (Slorc) brought ethnic cleansing and economic collapse to the Shan, who number approximately six million. Many of them now live across the border in Thailand.
But it is those groups that have never featured as rulers of Burma that have played the most active part in insurgency against the tatmadaw, or armed forces. The largest of these is the Karen. Many British servicemen who fought during the Burma campaign remember the Karen as effective and loyal fighters against the Japanese. When the Karen revolted in 1948, following what they saw as a British betrayal of their loyalty, they used these fighting skills to great effect. Under the leadership of the Karen National Union (KNU), they soon became the largest of 20 minority groups participating in an insurgency against the military dictatorship in Rangoon. During the 1980s the KNU fighting force numbered approximately 20,000; by this year that number had shrunk to fewer than 4,000, opposing a Burmese army more than a hundred times that strength.
Living mostly in the hilly areas on the eastern border of Burma, the Karen may number up to seven million, although no accurate census has ever been produced. (The junta regularly uses population data to underestimate the importance of ethnic groups and promote the significance of the Burmans.) There are many divisions within the Karen, but the Kayan, or Padaung, have drawn particular attention for their women's custom of wearing long brass coils around their necks. In the 1990s widespread oppression by the military regime forced many Padaung to flee into neighbouring Thailand, where they live with uncertain legal status in the border area.
Group Mentalities
Bogyoke Aung San, Father of Modern Burma
Happy dawn: Clement Attlee with Bogyoke Aung San and other nationalist leaders outside 10 Downing Street, January 1947. CREDIT: HULTON/GETTY IMAGES
Similar, smaller groups such as the Kachin and the Karenni have all fought wars of attrition with the junta. The Kachin people are an ethnic affinity of several hill-dwelling groups, known for their fierce independence, disciplined fighting skills, complex clan interrelations, Christianity, craftsmanship, herbal healing and jungle survival skills. The name Kachin is a Burman term for these groups, the vernacular term being Jinghpaw. Many 19th-century British sources describe them as being descendants of Kublai Khan who moved from the Tibetan plateau between the 10th and 13th centuries. In the early part of their history they fought the Shan among the hills around the upper waters of the Irrawaddy, Burma's main river, which starts in the Himalayas and drains eventually into the Andaman Sea. As the sprawling Shan kingdom broke up, the Kachin established themselves further south and south-east. Like the Chin, another of Burma's big ethnic groups, and the Karenni, the Kachin have fought against tatmadaw oppression since independence.
Ethnic strife is common across the former colonies of south and south-east Asia, but geopolitics and national postwar negotiations have made the fighting particularly savage in Burma. Initially many of these groups, particularly the Karen, thought that guarantees by the British government would be enough to deliver strong positions in any post-independence settlement. The Karen harboured hopes for a "back-door" road, running from the "frontier areas" through a separate Karen state and onwards to the sea, which would reduce the economic dependence of all the ethnic minorities on the Burman-controlled Irrawaddy Delta.
While the group of nationalists led by Aung San had regular contact with British officials, the minority position slipped away. The preoccupations of the incoming Attlee government were elsewhere, and the Labour government wanted to get Burma off its hands quickly. Despite promising protection to the Karen soldiers who had remained loyal during the Second World War, the British now abandoned Burma's minorities. By the time Aung San was assassinated in 1947, hope of any detente had passed. The Karen took up their guns and went to war--a war that would last half a century.
By the time of the coup in 1962, most of the ethnic groups which had suffered at the hands of the Burmese army, and by now wanted autonomy, were in open rebellion. To some degree, despite a widespread push by the tatmadaw, that situation continues today.
However, the simple picture that pitches the evil Burman army against the good folk of the hills is singularly unhelpful. The politics of ethnicity in Burma is complicated. Although the tatmadaw is largely Burman, it is not exclusively so, and neither is its brutality. In 1974 the junta ordered Chin and Kachin soldiers to quell street protests in Rangoon. Directly copying the British tactic of using soldiers from one part of the country to crush protest in another, these soldiers foreshadowed the iron fist of 1988. The ethnic insurgencies likewise suffer from factionalism, both ethnic and political. External political influence has also had an influence, with the Chinese funding the Communist Party of Burma's war from the 1940s to the late 1980s, and CIA and Kuomintang involvement further complicating the picture.
The political economy of the rebellion has fuelled both the rebel armies and the counter-insurgency tactics of the Burmese generals. In the limited economy of the 1950s, corruption became rife. The rebels controlled the land borders where smuggling could take place. Jade supplied funds for the Kachin army; teak, cattle and luxury goods from Thailand provided tax revenue for the KNU; medicine and rice helped the Rohingyas, Muslims from Arakan; opium helped the Shan groups. This provoked the savage-sounding "four cuts" policy or Pya Ley Pya. Designed (as with the US "strategic hamlets" policy in Vietnam) to cut the main links of the ethnic armies to food, funds, intelligence and recruits, it involved horrendous suffering for local people that persists.
In this forgotten war families have been torn apart, children butchered, mothers raped and fathers tortured. The ghosts of the conflict are the living as well as the dead. Villagers, occasionally disturbed by western photojournalists, look up with sunken eyes--whole generations knowing nothing but war; refugees who do not know whether their relations are still alive. Tatmadaw soldiers remain trapped in this seemingly endless cycle of violence where drug barons jostle with ethnic insurgents to cultivate the poppy that funds every side.
Many of the groups, worn down by the tactics of the tatmadaw, have drawn up ceasefire agreements. But in the light of the constant transgression of the most basic human rights, hopes of peace seem slim. No indigenous institutions reflecting the aspirations of the people themselves have ever been permitted to develop. Instead, as far back as Anawrahta, the first Burmese king, who was famously killed by a buffalo, rulers have seen the ethnic minorities in Burma as an inconvenience or a threat to national security.
Suu Kyi has said: "Unity in diversity has to be the principle of those who genuinely wish to build our country into a strong nation that allows a variety of races, languages, beliefs and cultures to flourish in peaceful and happy coexistence. Only a government that tolerates opinions and attitudes different from its own will be able to create an environment where peoples of diverse traditions and aspirations can breathe freely in an atmosphere of mutual understanding and trust." All those who desire a peaceful Burma must hope such a government can be formed. At present, however, it is a distant goal.
History Notes
1887: Third Anglo-Burmese War ends. The monarchy is deposed and Burma fully incorporated into the British empire.
1947: Aung San signs agreement with Attlee allowing for self-rule within a year. His party wins elections, but in July he is assassinated.
1962: Ne Win takes power and begins his disastrous "Burmese Way to Socialism".
8/8/88: Auspicious date when it was hoped Burma would become free. Pro-democracy marches meet with violence: 3,000 people are killed over the next six weeks.
2005: The former Czech president Vaclav Havel and Desmond Tutu call on the Security Council to demand change.
Title: Burma Special: The Forgotten War
Source: New Statesman (London, England) Vol. 135, No. 4805
Author: Jacob Rigg
Publication Date: Aug. 14, 2006
Page Number: 26-28
Database: SIRS Researcher
Service: SIRS Knowledge Source <http://www.sirs.com>
Myanmar's Anguish
The struggle of the people of Myanmar for justice in the face of an ironfisted military junta (which changed the country's name from Burma to Myanmar in 1989) that tolerates no dissent continues unabated. At the center of the struggle is the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the National League for Democracy party that won an overwhelming victory in the 1990 election. Spurning those election results, however, the junta, formally known as the State Peace and Development Council, placed her under house arrest, where she has remained on and off for a dozen of the last 18 years.
The violent attacks on peaceful protesters last September shocked the international community, as photos circulated around the world over the Internet. Soldiers fired into a crowd of monks and peaceful protesters in Yangon, killing some and arresting many hundreds more. The junta has acknowledged that 15 people were killed, but its opponents believe the number may be much higher. The participation of monks in the protest, in a country where Buddhism is the dominant religion, made domestic reaction and international condemnation all the stronger.
The army claims to be an all-volunteer force, but so pressing is its need for more soldiers that recruitment efforts extend even to children. Recent reports by Human Rights Watch describe in detail how army recruiters, desperate to meet their quotas, virtually buy children. High desertion rates make the recruiters' desperation all the more intense. In an effort to allay growing international criticism, the junta established what it calls the Committee for the Prevention of Military Recruitment of Underage Children. In fact, Jo Becker of Human Rights Watch, the organization's children's rights advocate, told America that the committee and other activities are basically cosmetic and "have done nothing to change the practice on the ground."
Recruiters continue to watch bus and train stations and markets for boys, who are promised money, free education and other benefits. Resistance can lead to beatings. Theoretically, recruits must prove that they are at least 18 years old, but according to interviews with recruits, there is little insistence on real proof. According to Human Rights Watch, one boy failed his medical exam because he weighed only 70 pounds. His recruiter, though, bribed the medical officer to allow the child to enlist. Some boys have been involved in the army's ethnic cleansing attacks on minority villages in the eastern part of the country, where fighting has displaced half a million ethnic Burmese, many of whom remain internally displaced persons.
China, Myanmar's giant neighbor to the north, and to some extent India and Russia, bear much of the responsibility for the junta's violent suppression of dissent and its attacks on ethnic minority groups. All three countries supply the army with weapons. Both China and Russia, moreover, have tried to block U.N. efforts to impose sanctions on the military government. For its purchase of arms, Myanmar depends largely on revenue from the sale of gemstones, for which the country is famous, especially rubies and jade. Over 90 percent of all rubies sold worldwide originate in Myanmar. In addition to serving as the main source of financing for arms purchases, the gems have also been one of the ways by which corrupt military officials have personally enriched themselves in a country where deep poverty is endemic. Attempting to block sales of the gems, the European Union in October placed sanctions on importing them, and legislation is pending in Congress that would ban their purchase in the United States. Some companies, like Tiffany & Co., have already refused to buy them, and after the September attack on protesters, Bulgari, Cartier and other jewelry companies followed suit.
For almost half a century, the Burmese people have suffered under the weight of oppressive military governance. The greatest need now is for a return to democratic civilian rule. The courageous monks, some of whom have been beaten and jailed, and other peaceful protesters have made their voices heard throughout the world. They, together with the longstanding support shown for Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy party, make it clear that the people long for a civilian-ruled government that will respect their long-abused human rights. In the meantime, international pressure, including pressure by the United Nations, should focus on some of the more egregious abuses--ending the attacks on ethnic groups, the release of prisoners held primarily for the exercise of their right to free speech and prohibiting the recruitment of children into the army.
Title: Myanmar's Anguish
Source: America (Vol. 197, No. 20)
Author:
Publication Date: Dec. 17, 2007
Page Number: 5
Database: SIRS Researcher
Service: SIRS Knowledge Source www.sirs.com
BURMA: SCENES FROM ANOTHER WORLD
by Peter Sidler
Many visitors to Burma feel, when their brief sojourn is over, much like someone taking leave of his beloved: He departs sadly, and promises to return soon. Many have succumbed to the charms of this land, and have recorded their thoughts and feelings for posterity. Among them was Rudyard Kipling, who a century ago traveled from the Andaman Sea up the Rangoon River to the capital of the same name, and Somerset Maugham, who spent time in Burma in the late 1920s. The country has often been described as a living fossil, a place where time not only has stood still but does not even exist, has never existed.
Traveling through Burma, you constantly encounter scenes and images that seem to be of another world. The modern era has affected Burma only to a very limited degree. Instead of skyscrapers, Rangoon's hallmark is a golden pagoda more than two and a half thousand years old, and the city has not (yet) been deformed by neon signs. There is hardly any garbage--where there is little to buy, and barely any surplus, very little ends up in the dust bin. Where, in other countries, superhighways cleave the landscape, in Burma the countryside is accented by thousands of temples and pagodas, and the land follows a rhythm all its own.
Burmese women radiate a charm unparalleled even by Asian standards. You feel here that your eyes cannot take in enough; the exotic is virtually palpable. Men wear skirts--the longyi, a long cloth which they repeatedly re-knot as they walk. Women smoke thick cigars--especially the market women, as they crouch behind their displays of farm produce waiting for customers. Women and children smear patches or stripes of a yellowish-white paste on their forehead, cheeks and nose--thanaka, made from an aromatic wood (the scientific name of which is murea exotica) by rubbing a twig on a stone and mixing the result with water; thanaka is supposed to tighten the skin and protect it against the harsh tropical sun.
Traffic in Rangoon is very sparse, and on country roads it is virtually nonexistent. The vehicles one sees are rickety old models which would have been scrapped in the West decades ago, too decrepit to be considered "classic cars." And on Lake Inle in eastern Burma, an area which would seem even more idyllic if the people there had not totally denuded the surrounding mountain slopes of their forests, something quite unique is to be found. A few sleepy villages line the lake shore, their inhabitants raise vegetables on floating islands, and the fishermen on this lake steer their boats with their feet. They stand in the stern on one leg like storks, their other leg slung over the rudder, and in this way, with the aid of one arm, they keep their craft in motion. They explain this unusual method by maintaining that it enables them better to steer their craft through the large clumps of vegetation that float in the clear waters.
In Mandalay, on the banks of the Irrawaddy River, people still go about their daily affairs as their ancestors have done for centuries. Their simple houses are built on stilts, and come right down to the water. The women draw their water from the river, in which they do their laundry, wash their dishes, and bathe themselves, while their children splash in shallow pools nearby. And just out of arm's reach, thick tree trunks float by, waiting to be hauled ashore by yoked teams of oxen and pulled by the snorting beasts to nearby storage areas and from there eventually onto trucks which, as a rule, have rusted into little more than skeletons equipped with only the most essential components.
At another spot, bamboo staves are being unloaded; men and women skillfully weave house walls of stripped leaves, and in front of some of the huts women cook rice over open fires. Burmese spend a good deal of their time at tasks that we Westerners are used to dealing with quickly. In areas far from a river, for example, they often have to walk long distances and then wait at a public watering place with hundreds of others in order to fill their ox-drawn tank wagons or the tin buckets which they carry suspended from a pole yoked over their shoulders.
Situated in the center of the country, the Plain of Pagan, about a day's train ride from the capital, offers a breathtaking sight. In an area of perhaps 50 square kilometers, bounded on the west by the Irrawaddy and on the east by a mountain chain, the remains of more than two thousand sacral buildings are crowded together. A traveler once aptly remarked that the only fit comparison would be to imagine all Europe's medieval cathedrals-- without any other buildings to moderate them--jammed together in a space of similar size. Marco Polo, who passed through the area in the year 1298, wrote of Pagan as one of the loveliest sights in the world, and a 19th-century British colonial official observed that one cannot move hand or foot there without brushing up against something holy. Along with the temple complexes of Angkor in Cambodia and Borobudur on Java, Pagan ranks as one of Asia's greatest archeological sites. From about the start of the Christian era, the area saw the rise and fall of a series of small kingdoms, but its golden age began with King Anawrahta, who ascended the throne in A.D. 1044 and conquered the Mon kingdom to the south in 1057. That was the first time in history that a single monarch ruled over the area approximately equivalent to today's Burma. Returning from his conquest of the Mon, Anawrahta brought back to Pagan not only the wealth of his defeated opponents but also Buddhist monks, architects, sculptors, and the entire royal family.
Under Anawrahta and his two successors, thousands of pagodas, temples, and Buddhist monasteries were erected in the course of a feverish building campaign triggerred by profound religiosity. During the reign of King Kyanzitta (1084-1112), Pagan became known as the "city of four million pagodas." Indeed, in its heyday it housed as many as 13,000 religious structures, of which exactly 2,217 have been catalogued today. But no one knows exactly what the city looked like back then, because all buildings--including monasteries and royal palaces, but excluding the pagodas and temples--were built of wood. In July 1975 Pagan was hit by a severe earthquake, and it was initially feared that many of its remaining structures had been irreparably shattered. Fortunately, that was not the case, and in the intervening years all serious damage to Pagan's most important monuments has been repaired. On Unesco's initiative, financial assistance was offered by the international community, but the Burmese government, which has kept the country largely sealed off from the rest of the world since the 1960s, insisted that the restoration be accomplished without the help of foreign advisers. The results are impressive. The Burmese took great pains to restore the Pagan structures carefully and with simple means, so they still shine with an ancient splendor undisturbed by blatant patchwork.
Though Burma is a pervasively Buddhist country, with more than 80% of its people holding to that faith, there are still sacral relics from earlier animist times. About 50 kilometers east of Pagan, Mount Popa rises from the flat plain like a huge mound of sugar, its summit home to pre-Buddhist nats (spirits), for which reason the mountain is sometimes referred to as "the Burmese Olympus." Seen through the heat haze as you approach it from Pagan, the view of this 1,500-meter volcanic cone is as unforgettable as the panoramic view from its peak when you finally climb the steep, covered staircase leading to the very top. The summit is a fairytale maze of shrines, pagodas, temples, and monasteries, to which the faithful make pilgrimage the year 'round in order to invoke the aid of the spirits and gods in their personal affairs. Thagyamin is honored as king of the spirits, and after him Nga Tin Ded and his sister Shwemyethna, who are known as the "mahagiri nats." To a certain extent the nats may be compared to the saints of the Catholic church, whose assistance is sought in times of need. Today 37 nats are acknowledged in Burma, some of them rooted in ancient times, others of more recent origin, all of them possessing a demonic or evil character whose powerful influence can be escaped only by showing honor and respect to these spirits. This the Burmese do by placing money, flowers or food on special altars. The same purpose is served by the wreaths which many Burmese motorists tie to the hoods of their cars, or the flowers women wear in their long black hair.
One can see in Rangoon's Shwedagon Pagoda how much spirits and demons are part of the everyday religious life of the Burmese. Situated north of the capital's center, and purported by legend to be more than 2,500 years old, this complex of more than 380 individual temples and prayer halls, with its colorfully painted, fabulous animals and other statues from the realm of myth and fairytale, also includes shrines to the nats. Lording it over the fantastical assemblage of structures is a nearly 100- meter-tall stupa that allegedly houses eight of Buddha's hairs.
The Shwedagon Pagoda is at its most beautiful at sunrise or sunset, when the first or last rays of the sun bathe the golden stupa in the most magnificent light. There is always activity on its main platform, yet somehow the predominant atmosphere is one of peace and calm. In one corner a family enjoys a picnic; at a nearby shrine, a woman pleads for divine aid in conceiving a child, while in an open temple hall a group of devout believers sit meditatively on straw mats listening to words of wisdom from a monk. Many people come here merely for a stroll, or a chat, or simply to sit a while and watch the colorful crowd on the white marble main platform, where hordes of the faithful walk clockwise around the stupa at all hours of the day.
Seeing the Shwedagon Pagoda for the first time, when monkeys still cavorted in its temples, Kipling wrote: "This is Burma, and it will be quite unlike any land you know about." One of the most important events in the life of a Burmese male, an occasion for colorful celebration in this profoundly pious country, is his entry into a monastery. This generally occurs between the ages of nine and twelve, and the boys serve as monks for only a few weeks, after which they return to their normal lives. The ceremony is known as shinbyu and for the people of Rangoon the preferred venue is the Shwedagon. Elegantly dressed and crowned-- the crowns serving as a reminder that Buddha was the scion of a royal family--the novices are accompanied to the pagoda by parents, relatives and friends, where their heads are shaved and they don the monk's robe.
While the beginnings of the Shwedagon Pagoda go back millennia, Rangoon itself is a relatively young city. It became Burma's administrative center only after the British had brought the last northern sections of the country under their control in 1885. With its broad, tree-lined streets, its elegant colonial buildings (now sadly neglected) and beautiful parks, Rangoon seems all of a piece, and has remained more or less as the British left it in 1948.
On one of the loveliest spots along the Rangoon River stands the old Strand Hotel, once known as "the finest house east of Suez." It was built around the turn of the century by the Armenian Sarkies brothers, like the Raffles Hotel in Singapore and the Eastern and Oriental in Penang. Like the city as a whole, the hotel has obviously seen better days, yet the charm of its high-ceilinged rooms, its dilapidated lobby and old bar remains undimmed. The main lobby is dominated by a two-story-high mural by the Burmese artist U Ba Kyi, which bears the title "Kipling's Road to Mandalay." On one side it shows London, with a path of silvery moonlight on the sea leading from the British capital directly to Burma's tropical landscape, complete with elephants, palm trees, and the city walls of Mandalay; a Burmese woman, smoking a cigar, gazes at a pagoda, and a British soldier is visible through the rising tobacco smoke. The images are drawn directly from these lines in Kipling's poem MANDALAY: "By the old Moulmein pagoda,/Lookin' lazily at the sea,/There's a Burma girl a-sittin'/And I know she thinks of me./For the wind is in the palm trees,/an' the temple-bells they say:/Come you back, you British soldier;/Come you back to Mandalay!"
Kipling was never in Mandalay. He spent only a few days on Burmese soil, in Moulmein in the south, and in Rangoon. The journey from the capital to Mandalay by day train is a memorable experience: comfortable cars, ceiling fans helping to cool the passengers even with the windows open, trundling for twelve hours through the absolutely flat landscape. Peddlers with trays on their stomachs pass down the aisles ceaselessly. Some of them offer rice-filled banana leaves packed in newspaper, which they sprinkle with roasted peanuts and chopped chili peppers, top with a spoonful of oil, and garnish with a roasted chicken drumstick. Others go through the train with cool drinks, fruit, hardboiled eggs, baked goods, cigarettes, hot tea, and coffee, or handicrafts and simple toys. There is even a man with a pile of dog-eared books and comics; those with a yen to read can take something, returning it after a while to the "librarian" with a small fee. The traveling peddlers generally board the train at one station with full baskets, then debark at the next station or as soon as they have sold all their goods. At each stop, they face competition from hordes of local merchants offering their wares on every platform.
Like Rangoon, Mandalay is not a very old city, but according to legend its beginnings go back thousands of years. It is said that Gautama Buddha and his favorite disciple Ananda once stayed for a while on a sacred hill near what is now Mandalay, on which there had been pagodas and temples since ancient times. There, Buddha prophesied that a city would be founded on the site in the year 2,400. A deeply religious ruler, King Mindon, made sure the prophecy would be fulfilled by launching construction of a new palace at the foot of that hill in A.D. 1857 (or 2,400 by the Buddhist calendar). Today only its retaining walls remain; the palace itself, built entirely of wood, burned down completely toward the end of World War II in a fire ignited during clashes between advancing British troops and the retreating Japanese. Under King Mindon, Mandalay experienced a brief heyday as the religious and intellectual center of what remained of a former Burmese empire, and today it still houses hundreds of monasteries and tens of thousands of Buddhist monks. Mindon's son Thibaw was the last Burmese king. In 1885 the British colonial rulers annexed the last independent region of the country. Thibaw was not only the last Burmese monarch, he also was known for his extraordinary cruelty. It was common practice for Burmese rulers to do away with their relatives upon ascending the throne; Thibaw, however, had potential rivals buried alive and then had elephants trample on their graves.
In 1962, when the army took power in Burma in a bloody coup, they hermetically sealed the country against the rest of the world. Even today, tourist visas are valid for only one week. The "Burmese path to socialism" proclaimed by the military, compounded of narrow-minded militarism and untenable economic formulas, brought the country to ruin. Once the richest land in Southeast Asia, Burma today is among the poorest nations in the world. The people do not suffer dire material want, but pitifully little is available to them--thanks only to the woeful government of the reigning junta. Those politicians who are unwilling to be ruthless (or unthinking) are in jail, under house arrest, in foreign exile, or else try their best to remain unobtrusive. University students and other young people who have turned their backs on the oppressive political climate of the capital, often die of malaria in the jungles of the border regions.
One of the results of Burma's quarantine is that the country, its culture and traditions, have remained largely free of foreign, modern influences. The charms of this isolation, of the dreamily lovely Burmese landscape and the fairytale scenes which repeatedly greet the traveler, inevitably cast their spell over every visitor. Having cut itself off from the blessings of the twentieth century, the country has also been spared the necessity of dealing with the dark side of progress.
But Burma's clocks have stood still only because it was so decreed by remarkably stupid and brutal military despots, whose activities today do not extend much beyond clinging to power with all their might. In elections held last year, more than 80% of Burma's voters cast their ballots unequivocally against the military junta, which has no intention of relinquishing power to those chosen by the electorate. Political night has lain over this beautiful country for a good many years now, and there is no telling when day may dawn again.
Title: Burma: Scenes from Another World
Source: Swiss Review of World Affairs (Zurich, Switzerland)
Author: Peter Sidler
Publication Date: March 1992
Page Number: 17-21
Database: SIRS Researcher
Service: SIRS Knowledge Source www.sirs.com
Burma's Censors Monitor Internet, Newspapers--and Poets
By Danna Harman.
The Christian Science Monitor
• The regime has watched the media more closely since last September's uprising by monks.
RANGOON, Burma--Saw Wai is a Burmese poet known for his love songs. His eight-line Valentine's Day ode, about a brokenhearted man in love with a fashion model, was a particularly tender one. But there was one problem.
If read vertically, the first word of each line formed the phrase: "Power Crazy Senior General Than Shwe."
The senior general himself, head of Burma's (Myanmar's) military junta, could not have been amused. The head of the censorship board was urgently called to the capital; the weekly "Love Journal" has been shut down and copies of the offending edition were yanked from newsstands.
Saw Wai is now in jail, where apparently he will spend Feb. 14 in isolation, behind bars.
Extreme government censorship is as much a part of life in today's Burma as rice and pagodas. Everything from TV programs to newspaper ads goes through a rigorous vetting board. But the junta is fighting a losing battle against a population hungry for information, armed with tools ranging from transistor radios to sneaky editors and myriad ways to bypass blocks on Internet sites.
Since last September's monk uprising, the censorship has increased. And criticism of the ruling junta is not all that is wiped out--so is most bad news, including reports on natural disasters and defeats of the national soccer team. Even good news can be cut if it's about countries out of favor with the government.
Reporters Without Borders' (RSF) Press Freedom Index placed Burma 164th out of 168 countries last year, just ahead of Cuba, Eritrea, Turkmenistan, and North Korea. This year, the country might do even worse.
"The police and army continue to hunt for journalists and activists who photographed and filmed the [September 2007] crackdown on the pro-democracy demonstrations," RSF says in its January report.
All TV and radio stations in Burma are government owned. The same is true for the country's three daily papers, which routinely run front-page stories along the lines of "Maj-Gen Khin Zaw of Ministry of Defense inspected bridges on the railroad yesterday," or "Maj-Gen Tha Aye of the Ministry of Defense attended a ceremony to broadcast fertilizers for summer paddy."
Far more popular than the dailies are the 80-odd privately owned weekly and monthly magazines here--which are read, according to the British Broadcasting Corporation's (BBC) World Service Trust, by some 40 percent of the urban and 20 percent of the rural population. Yet these have to submit everything from their editorials to cartoons to a government censorship board before publication. Falling afoul of the board results in immediate punishment ranging from having the paper closed, to years of imprisonment.
Very slow Internet access--which, in any case, is found only in the biggest cities--while cheap, is still a luxury for many. It, too, is under government control. Officially, all e-mails go through the authorized government-run Internet service providers, where detailed data on users is collected, and the mail itself is scoured, sometimes causing days of delays. Popular e-mail sites such as hotmail.com and gmail.com, along with foreign newspapers and a long list of other supposedly undesirable sites, are blocked.
Following last year's riots, all Internet access was cut off for three weeks. And, according to several Internet cafe owners, since then, they have been pressured to register the personal details of all customers and save screen images every five minutes on each computer--all of which could be demanded at any time by authorities.
So how does news actually get in, out, and about? The commercial papers are locked in a never-ending game of cat and mouse with the censors, explains an editor of one popular weekly here, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of security concerns. For example, newspapers typically re-send the same stories to the censor board a few weeks later, rewritten, with a new headline. "If we fail the first time, we restick the main point about three quarters of the way down in the story and surround it with very technical language to get the censors bored. We can still say a lot," he explains.
"Journalism is a vehicle for doing what we care about--which is actively advocating for social and economic change," admits the publisher of another weekly, who also asked his name not be used.
Meanwhile, foreign shortwave radio services are enormously popular here, with an estimated 40 percent of Burmese tuning in to the BBC, Voice of America Burmese broadcasts, Radio Free Asia, and the Democratic Voice of Burma. Small Chinese-made radios cost as little as $5.
Watching satellite television is harder because of frequent electric outages, and the expense. Nonetheless, it is popular with Burmese gathering in tea shops to watch sports and catch news.
"My constituency is a small town in upper Burma, but even there we have small satellite dishes and radios, and everyone is listening to the radio or watching the tennis," says U Han Tha Even, spokesman of the opposition NLD. "Even the military is listening to the BBC. Where else would they get information?"
In addition, in Rangoon and Mandalay, months-old copies of The Economist or Time magazine pass like gold from hand to hand. At night, under generator-run lights, locals crowd into makeshift outdoor secondhand book markets, browsing.
The Internet cafes in these main cities are packed with youngsters overriding the blocks with endless formulas to reach proxy servers--and freely surfing the web, in open defiance of the law. They chat with friends across the border in Thailand, check gmail accounts, read news, search for scholarship opportunities overseas, and follow American celebrity antics.
"I think there as many ways to enter gmail through side portals as there are ways to block it," says Zaw Zaw, a young Internet cafe owner, who admits he does not follow rules about tracking customers, and, so far, nothing has happened.
"Media from the outside is so very important," stresses Burmese monk in exile Abbot U Uttara, who heads the Sasana Ramsi Vihara in London. "Not only to stay informed, but because it conveys to those within Burma that the world has not forgotten them."
The flow of information goes both ways. While Burma is notoriously strict about letting foreign journalists into the country and restricts travel within Burma, many do enter, and a lot of what the junta is trying to cover up is reported anyway. Meanwhile, courageous local journalists reporting for outside media are very active. Burmese news sites based outside the country--such as Irrawaddy.org~~a href="http://"/~~and Mizzima.com--put out daily reports using journalists within.
During September's demonstrations, despite a heavy crackdown on media, and the shooting to death of a Japanese journalist (which the government claims was accidental), images of the beatings and shootings of unarmed protesters crossed the world within minutes of the events--courtesy, mainly, of local activist journalists who rushed to nearby cafes or embassies with photos and reports. Mobile phones, while more expensive in Burma than almost anywhere else, are also becoming popular--allowing for immediate sending of both photos and text messages.
Valentine's Day poet Saw Wai remains in jail, says the weekly publisher, but there is no doubt others will continue fighting the boundaries here by cheekily sending out subversive messages, flooding the censors with reworded news stories, buying more radios, and bypassing blocked sites. "The times where you could isolate a whole country will never return. It's just not possible," he says. "Ours are small victories, but they are still victories."
Title: Burma's Censors Monitor Internet, Newspapers--and Poets
Source: Christian Science Monitor
Author: Danna Harman
Publication Date: Feb. 11, 2008
Page Number: n.p.
Database: SIRS Researcher
Service: SIRS Knowledge Source www.sirs.com
The Irrawaddy: All the News That Burma Deems Unfit to Print
By Tibor Krausz
Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
• A Burmese dissident magazine based in Thailand relies on thousands of Burmese contacts reporting from inside the sealed country
Chiang Mai, Thailand--Aung Zaw got his first taste of publishing two decades ago in the kitchen of his family's home in the old Burmese capital of Rangoon. A student of botany protesting his country's jackbooted military regime to the alarm of his mother, Aung Zaw began producing samizdat leaflets at night on an antiquated printing cylinder operated as if rolling dough.
Arrest, torture, and a stint in jail followed. As the Burmese pro-democracy uprising of 1988 was being crushed by the ruling junta and thousands were being killed, Aung Zaw, disguised as a monk, escaped through the land-mined jungles of Burma (Myanmar) to Thailand. Here, he made a discovery--the "magic of the fax machine," as he puts it. Presently, he was back in business, dispatching reports about his compatriots' plight to human rights groups.
Now, a mere fax seems ancient beside the top-notch office tools of Aung Zaw's current project: The Irrawaddy. Based in Thailand, the English-language print and online newsmagazine offers coverage of Burma and its iron-fisted military junta. The once penniless refugee now oversees a $500,000-a-year media operation, funded largely by European Union governments.
Aung Zaw crosses his arms and claps himself on both shoulders, saying, "A heavy responsibility weighs on these." Then gesturing around the newly furbished newsroom in this city in mountainous northern Thailand, he adds: "I never thought I'd come so far!"
Burma's secretive generals probably wish he hadn't.
The Irrawaddy's reporters draw on a clandestine network of sources several thousand strong across tightly policed Burma, from shop owners to disgruntled officials who communicate via phone, e-mail, courier, and meetings snatched at border crossings. The journalists also parse the regime's propaganda statements for insight.
Earlier this year, Aung Zaw obtained a secret video of the wedding of strongman General Than Shwe's daughter--an alleged $300,000 affair bankrolled by arms-dealing and drug-trafficking cronies. The leaked video enraged impoverished, long-suffering Burmese citizens, most of whom languish on less than $1 a day.
In September when Buddhist monks, riled by skyrocketing prices, took to Rangoon streets in silent protest, Aung Zaw began working the phones frantically. For days, he says, he was interviewing and being interviewed (by foreign media) often simultaneously. When the crackdown began, he recalls. "We were speaking to a stringer on his mobile. Just then the soldiers started shooting protesters."
Such immediate access made The Irrawaddy's website, constantly updated daily in both English and Burmese, a must for people seeking news from the hermetically sealed country. Hits on the site, says office manager Win Thu, jumped threefold to 39 million a week...until a cyber-attack brought it down for days.
"Censorship in Burma is tighter than ever," says Zin Linn, a former political prisoner who works as media director for a shadow government of Burmese exiles in Bangkok. "But The Irrawaddy is on the side of truth and dedicated to finding out facts on the ground. Often, people from Burma ask me what The Irrawaddy says is happening in their country.
* * *
In 1994, Kyaw Zwa Moe was serving a 10-year sentence in Rangoon's notorious Insein Prison. His crime: posting antigovernment notices in his high school's lavatories as a 16-year-old student. Political prisoners were forbidden to read anything except propaganda sheets. "They wanted to imprison our minds," notes Kyaw Zwa Moe, now The Irrawaddy's managing editor. Yet he kept returning with relish to a screed denouncing a Burmese emigre in Thailand for publishing "lies." The "traitor" was his older brother, Aung Zaw. "I knew immediately," he recalls, chuckling, "if the government was denouncing him, Aung Zaw was on the right track."
A year before, with an old PC and $100 in savings, Aung Zaw had launched The Irrawaddy from his cramped, windowless room in a rundown Bangkok hotel. Named after Burma's largest river, it debuted as a four-page news bulletin. He made several hundred photocopies and distributed them to advocacy groups and embassies.
"In my simple English, I wrote a project proposal [to an aid agency] asking for $2,000 a year," recalls Aung Zaw, who frequently punctuates his sentences with exclamations. "For several months, nothing! Then they called me and said, 'Can you ask for more?'" He laughs.
But Aung Zaw turns somber in his reminiscences.
His mother, a teashop owner, never got to read the magazine, he laments. She was crushed to death by an Army truck in Rangoon not long after The Irrawaddy launch. "In a letter she wrote me before her death she said, 'We will reunite soon!' " Aung Zaw says. "But I couldn't even attend her funeral."
A slender man with feline features, Aung Zaw sports the kind of ponytail you see on portrait painters in the artistic enclaves of Chiang Mai. His bookshelves groan under works by Turgenev, Chekov, and Camus--testaments to his membership in a literary circle back in Rangoon.
Yet his bohemian exterior masks an imperious resolve: "The day I started The Irrawaddy I declared my independence from party politics."
That didn't please all in the factious Burmese emigre community. Nor has the independent-minded editor made friends by investigating controversies about exile groups, like their alleged extrajudicial murder of suspected government spies along the Thai-Burmese border.
"I'm not very diplomatic when I write," Aung Zaw explains. "But our job as journalists is not to bring down the government but to seek the truth objectively."
Still, objectivity can be a challenge. After his release in 1999, Kyaw Zwa Moe joined his brother in Thailand, working his way up from office boy to managing editor at The Irrawaddy. In 2005 he studied journalism on a scholarship at the University of California, Berkeley.
"I hate those...generals," he concedes. "But I've learned that you do a disservice to people by [countering propaganda with propaganda]."
* * *
The New Light of Myanmar, meticulously catalogued in The Irrawaddy's library, is a Rangoon-based government daily. It's propagandists periodically congratulates "newly trained" journalists for answering the call of duty.
Kaung Set isn't a journalist the junta has in mind. The journalist writes for government publications by day and, using that pen name, secretly works for The Irrawaddy on the side.
"Journalism is an unknown concept in Burma," says Kaung Set during a visit to the magazine's offices here before slipping back into Burma. "Whenever I write I'm thinking constantly how I can get past the censors--even if it's only about fashion."
While soldiers beat, shot, and arrested monks and peaceful protesters in September at the Shwedagon Pagoda, the country's holiest site, The Irrawaddy correspondent surreptitiously took photos and e-mailed them to The Irrawaddy--facing 20 to 30 years in prison on charges of sedition, if caught.
"If we don't do it, no one will know what's happening to us," the reporter stresses. "For us, truth is more precious than gold."
Last year, an Irrawaddy contact was sentenced to seven years in prison. Yet messages and photos keep pouring in.
A new e-mail pops up on Aung Zaw's computer. Its attachment is a handwritten letter penned in squiggly Burmese script. Desperate to tell his story, a Burmese man had it scanned and sent to the editor from a secure Internet connection.
"The flow of information is unstoppable," Aung Zaw says. "It's very hard to remove the mountain, but we've started shoveling."
Title: The Irrawaddy: All the News that Burma Deems Unfit to Print
Source: Christian Science Monitor
Author: Tibor Krausz
Publication Date: Dec. 7, 2007
Page Number: n.p.
Database: SIRS Researcher
Service: SIRS Knowledge Source www.sirs.com
13 Nations Denounced for Web Censorship
By Verena Dobnik
Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP)--The Internet enemies list numbers 13: Belarus, China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.
These are the countries singled out by the press freedom group Reporters Without Borders as the worst culprits for systematic online censorship, and they were targeted in the group's 24-hour online protest ending at 5 a.m. Wednesday.
"No one should ever be prevented from posting news online or writing a blog," said the Paris-based group, Reporters Sans Frontieres in French, which taps more than 100 journalists who are "keeping us informed."
Worldwide, 61 people, 52 in China, are in prison for posting what the countries claimed was "subversive" content, the reporters' group said in its annual report.
The cyberspace demonstration was advertised in Manhattan--in Times Square and in Bryant Park--on truck-transported billboards. As of Tuesday afternoon, 10,000 people had registered their protest, with black holes on the group's Web site gradually disappearing with each click, said Lucie Morillon, the group's spokeswoman in Washington.
The 13 countries "censor and block online content that criticizes them," the organization said in defining its protest. "Multinationals such as Yahoo! cooperate with the Chinese government in filtering the Internet and tracking down cyber-dissidents."
Reporters Without Borders said it obtained a copy of the verdict in the case of Jiang Lijun, sentenced to four years in prison in November 2003 for his online pro-democracy articles in China. Reporters Without Borders said that the search engine company Yahoo! Inc. had helped Chinese police identify him.
"It's one thing to turn a blind eye to censorship--it's another thing to collaborate," Morillon said.
In a statement, Yahoo! said: "We continue to employ rigorous procedural protections under applicable laws in response to government requests for information, maintaining our commitment to user privacy and compliance with the law."
In Cuba, Reporters Without Borders said, the government "ensures that there is no Internet access for its political opponents and independent journalists, for whom reaching news media abroad is an ordeal."
The punishment for writing "a few counterrevolutionary articles" for foreign Web sites can be years in prison, it said.
Reporters Without Borders said it tracks cases of online repression in various ways, including through court cases and reports of arrests by family and friends.
The nonprofit group, founded in 1985 by French journalist Robert Menard, is 70 percent funded by sales of its magazine, Reporters Without Borders For Press Freedom, which includes photos of journalists in jail. About 200,000 copies are printed three times a year.
Nepal, Maldives and Libya have been removed from Reporters Without Borders' annual list of Internet enemies. But there's an addition to the list, Egypt, where it said "many bloggers were harassed and imprisoned this year."
Title: 13 Nations Denounced for Web Censorship
Source: Buffalo News (Buffalo, NY)
Author: Verena Dobnik
Publication Date: Nov. 8, 2006
Page Number: n.p.
Database: SIRS Researcher
Service: SIRS Knowledge Source www.sirs.com
NO LONGER BURMA, STILL A TYRANNY
by Scott Kraft
Times Staff Writer
- Seven Years After Its Military Rulers Re-Christened It Myanmar, the Southeast Asian Nation Is Busily Seeking Foreign Money. But Most of Its People Remain Impoverished, and Dissent Is Uneasily Tolerated at Best.
YANGON, Myanmar--The lesson in democracy begins promptly at 4 each weekend afternoon. Several thousand people gather behind barricades, eyes trained on the fence surrounding a two-story lakeside home on University Avenue. Traffic cops, dressed smartly in pressed white coats, keep two lanes open for passing cars.
When Aung San Suu Kyi, pink orchids in her brushed-back hair and microphone in hand, appears from behind the fence, the crowd breaks into cheers and applause. For the next hour, the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner gamely conducts a forum on democracy in a country run by generals.
She often answers questions, submitted in advance, about new quotas for rice farmers or the burden of inflation on pensioners, the use of forced labor to build a dam or involuntary "donations" for computers in schools.
"If we had democracy tomorrow, we would still have problems. It's just that we could talk about them openly," Suu Kyi told her listeners the other day. "Security for our children will not come overnight with democracy. But we certainly won't have to worry about the knock on the door in the middle of the night."
Suu Kyi's remarks do not appear on television or radio or even in the next day's newspapers. But a transcript lands on the generals' desks. And a few days later, newspaper articles, written under pseudonyms, criticize the folly of "that girl," as they refer to Suu Kyi, 50.
Such is the uneasy standoff between the generals and the democrats in the steamy Southeast Asian nation of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. Eight months have passed since Suu Kyi was freed from six years of house arrest, and yet there still is no sign of national reconciliation or real progress toward democracy.
Instead, the military rulers here are engaged in a broad effort to win the hearts and minds of Myanmar's 46 million people with a stage-managed constitutional conference, replete with pep rallies, and an economic boom fed by foreigners dreaming of quick profits.
The linchpin of that strategy is an ardent courtship of foreign tourists and investors. While this remains one of the world's poorest countries, building cranes fill the skyline of Yangon, the capital; traffic jams the streets around the dome of the 2,500-year-old Shwedagon Pagoda; billboards advertise Toshiba computers and Kirin beer. An emerging elite of millionaires can be found at the yacht club, the glitzy new nightclubs or the three new driving ranges for golfers.
Suu Kyi is biding her time. "When do we want democracy? Well, we want it now, of course," she said in an interview. "But we are not that impatient. We have other work to do, and we carry on."
Indeed, she is quietly rebuilding her political party, the National League for Democracy, of which she is general secretary. Though still facing restrictions and government harassment, the party appears to have retained the support that gave it 80% of the vote in 1990 elections, a vote that the military rulers annulled.
Although Suu Kyi calls for dialogue with the ruling junta, it sees no need to talk to her. The rulers, a committee of 21 generals known as the State Law and Order Restoration Council, or SLORC, operate in what one diplomat here describes as "their own Kafkaesque reality."
And they are carefully pursuing a course designed to maintain their hold on power.
"So far, the generals haven't had to deal with Aung San Suu Kyi," said Khin Maung Thwin, a local journalist. "They're selling their hopes on making things economically stable. If they do that, they figure they won't have to worry about her."
MYANMAR'S STORIED HISTORY
Myanmar's history is long and rich, dating to the 11th century Bagan Dynasty. It covers a kite-shaped area roughly 1-1/2 times the size of California, the largest of any country in mainland Southeast Asia, with vast teak forests, deposits of jade and rubies, and oil fields. Buddhism is the predominant religion. More than 100 distinct languages are spoken in the 40,000 mostly remote villages.
The country, long a favorite subject for English novelists and travel writers, won its independence from a century of British colonial rule in 1948. A year earlier, independence leader Aung San, the head of a provisional government and Aung San Suu Kyi's father, was assassinated along with members of his Cabinet.
Gen. Ne Win took power in a military coup in 1962, instituting three decades of socialist policies that devastated the country's economy. Massive unrest forced him to step down in 1988, but the new military rulers cracked down brutally on dissent, killing an estimated 3,000 protesters and changing the nation's name from Burma to Myanmar in 1989.
Suu Kyi returned in 1988, after 28 years abroad, to lead the pro-democracy struggle. She was placed under house arrest in 1989, and, although her party won election in a landslide a year later, the junta refused to surrender power.
These days, the junta, under Gen. Than Shwe, remains in firm control. Though most martial law decrees have been lifted, military intelligence agents continue to watch citizens and to harass and detain dissidents. Thousands have been forced to move, without compensation, for government development projects; tens of thousands have been forced to leave their jobs and work on those projects, where they have to provide their own meals and tools.