Focusing on Aung San Suu Kyi may not be the best way to bring democracy to Burma, argues Maung Zarni. Real change, he says, will require the co-operation of those now in power.
Starting as one of the progressive political actors that drove out the fascist Japanese occupiers, the tatmadaw (combined armed forces) now stands accused of similar abuse. But we need to discard demonisation. It cannot be part of our solution. It has ill served our nation. Like it or not, the army has succeeded in inscribing its future role on our body politic. It is so deeply entrenched in our politics, economy and bureaucracy that engagement with the military regime is necessary if there is to be any chance for Burma's misery and isolation to end.
The tatmadaw is the same force that was founded by Bogyoke Aung San, the slain independence hero, army general and father of Aung San Suu Kyi. The generals are mainly drawn from the urban elite, but hundreds of thousands of Burmese families, of all ethnicities, have members of the army in their midst. However unpalatable the thought, both the leaders and the rank and file are unmistakably cut from the same existential fabric as the rest of us. They all embrace a xenophobic nationalism. They are family men who worship the same Buddha and believe in miracles and astrology. They all suffer from the anxieties and sense of insecurity that come with being at the centre of the vicious cycle of post-independence conflicts, both with their own citizens and now with the outside world.
For years, the west had no interest in Burma. During the cold war, there was no outcry when Karen insurgents blew up Rangoon-Mandalay passenger trains or when the tatmadaw burned down suspected guerrilla villages. Living behind the teak curtain of isolation imposed by the army, we heard about General Ne Win - who ended our parliamentary democracy in 1962 and gave us 26 years of one-party socialist rule - having tea with Her Majesty the Queen at Buckingham Palace while the CIA trained his deputies in counter-intelligence. Times have changed.
The post-cold war west has rediscovered human rights and no longer welcomes Ne Win's successors, nor tolerates their style of authoritarian governance. Yet the almost exclusive focus on Aung San Suu Kyi and her epic story has been unhelpful. Though well-intentioned, her endorsement of the tourist boycott, economic sanctions and political isolation has failed, and holds back the possibility of reform.
The army approaches politics as if it were a war, seeking unity at gunpoint. It suffers from a sense of being under siege by the west. It is the public that bears the enormous cost of the country's conflict. The record of the military governments since 1962 in public health, education, economy, human resource development, natural resource management, rural development and ethnic integration is abysmal. No improvement can be expected as long as the generals' priorities remain security, security and security.
But the military is capable of change from within, for better or worse. After all, despite decades of careful screening and intense propaganda aimed at ensuring ideological coherence, it still suffers chronic internal power struggles.
Change within the army, however, is slow and costly to those who initiate it. In 1976 Captain Ohn Kyaw Myint, an aide-de-camp to the then vice chief of staff, led an abortive coup to install a reformist government. The young ringleader was hanged and his co-conspirators, including the chief of staff, were all sacked. In 1983 Brigadier Tin Oo, then national security adviser, was ousted by the senior military leaders and his entire national intelligence network dissolved. The senior army leadership felt the spymaster was becoming too powerful. In 2004 General Khin Nyunt, who held executive posts as prime minister and chief of military intelligence, reached out to the Burmese opposition as well as the west. This overture by the third most powerful general was thwarted by inward-looking hardliners, who ousted him and dismantled his power base. Since then, these men have withdrawn from the international community and slammed shut the door to the opposition.
The army, controlled by hardliners, is absolutely unprepared to accept anyone as the country's leader who is not a battle-seasoned general, and least of all a civilian politician. So where is Burma heading? Oppressed under military rule and suffering quietly, the masses will continue to struggle to put food on the table while the country's heroine languishes under house arrest. Meanwhile, the junta trades with China, Thailand, India, Russia, Singapore and South Korea in the face of a Cuban-style economic blockade by the Americans.
Unfortunate as this is, the army is the only in stitution through which reform is possible. We have no choice but to talk to the generals. If the west and the opposition fail to invest in creating a capitalist class or supporting soldier-reformers, Burma's future will be bleak. As it is, finding reformers is like finding needles in a haystack.
Dr Maung Zarni is a visiting research fellow at Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford, and founder of the Free Burma Coalition
Easy praise, empty words
Archbishop Desmond Tutu
By this October, my courageous sister and fellow Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi will have spent 11 years of her life in detention in Burma. Eleven years that she has sacrificed and dedicated to the freedom of her people. Like Gandhi before her, she has steadfastly rejected the use of violence in the struggle to free Burma from the clutches of its hardmen. And yet, even without tanks, guns or an army behind her - and from the solitude of house arrest - she continues to pose a threat to the scared military men of Burma.
But where are the statesmen and women, the visionaries of our time, with regard to Aung San Suu Kyi's non-violent struggle for freedom? Governments the world over have given my sister so much praise for standing courageously against the generals and the military machine they command. But praise is easy and words empty when they fail consistently to translate into action.
Protracted hand-wringing, the counter economic interests of some countries, and an absence of courage and vision over the years, have meant that there has been no coherent international governmental strategy on how to tackle Burma's intransigent rulers. The repetitive words of 15 years of UN reports, resolutions and statements, and the laudable efforts of a sequence of UN special envoys and rapporteurs, have failed to effect any positive change. The regime continues to reject any assertion of human-rights abuses, has shown no commitment to years of UN mediation efforts and has refused to co-operate with current non-enforceable UN efforts. In fact, at each turn, Burma's generals have opted to ignore, snub and embarrass the entire UN system.
The time for words is done. Last year, together with President Václav Havel, I commissioned the global law firm DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary to prepare a definitive report on the threat that the Burmese government poses both to its own people and to regional peace and security. The evidence and facts contained in the report made it abundantly clear that a coherent multilateral approach must now be deployed through the auspices of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) as soon as possible. Burma's generals have shown that they will respond to nothing less.
I make a direct call here to our friends on the UNSC, many of whom fought hard against apartheid in South Africa, to help us now to support the people of Burma. As happened with the apartheid regime in South Africa, the people of Burma have unequivocally rejected their illegitimate rulers; and the legitimate representatives of Burma's people have urged the world to support them. I call upon my brothers and sisters on the UNSC to pass a resolution that binds Burma's regime into an irreversible contract - one that commits it to a transition to democratic government and ensures the release, not only of Aung San Suu Kyi, but of all those who have endured the darkness of a Burmese prison for the sake of freedom.
If we commit ourselves wholeheartedly to this end, Burma will one day have a leader whose commitment to her people is unwavering, and whose integrity and vision have already been proven by her courage, sacrifice and vision. Just as Nelson Mandela no longer belongs only to South Africans, I believe that in the future Aung San Suu Kyi will be a shining light for Asia and the world.
History has shown us that neither systems, nor governments, nor dictators are eternal, but the spirit of freedom is. Freedom then is our dangerous message, our potent weapon. We must ensure that it rings loud in the dark hallways of the dictators in Rangoon.
Aung San Suu Kyi, a hero of our time
Glenys Kinnock
When the New Statesman asked me to submit a nomination for a poll of "heroes of our time" a few months ago, Aung San Suu Kyi was my instant choice. I visited her at her home in Rangoon a few years ago and she is one of the most inspirational people I have ever had the privilege to meet. She has enormous grace, serenity and humanity, and her determination never to leave her country until democracy is restored has earned her the admiration and respect of all those who believe the human spirit can overcome evil.
Her personal suffering includes being refused the right to see her children and callously denied the chance to see her beloved husband, Michael, before he died of cancer. Yet she puts such personal agony second to the needs of her country, rejecting the regime's pressure for her to join her family in exile abroad. Suu Kyi simply says: "My life is the cause for democracy and I am linked to everybody else in that cause. I cannot just think of me."
But the international community has let Aung San Suu Kyi and her people down badly. As I write, the EU is engaging outrageously with the regime for the first time. Led by the Finnish EU presidency, the Council of Ministers has agreed to grant a visa for one of the generals to attend an EU-Asia summit. Meanwhile, the Association of South-East Asian Nations (Asean) has issued a pathetically watered-down statement merely calling for "tangible progress" on democratic reforms.
Suu Kyi's parting words to me were a plea for us to use our liberty to ensure that the Burmese people can secure theirs. So far, her pleas go unheeded by international leaders. But even as world attention focuses on other global crises, we cannot let the terrible suffering of Burma be forgotten. That is why recognition of the heroic qualities of Suu Kyi matter so much.
Glenys Kinnock MEP is a patron of the Burma Campaign UK
A nation in waiting
Peter Popham
It is a society infested with spies, where people live in terror of a hardline military regime, yet the pro-democracy movement can still make its voice heard. Will the UN Security Council at last help Burma unseat its brutal junta?
When I first visited Burma for the Independent in 1991, months after Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) had won a landslide election victory, the country was known as a quaint relic of empire. Western visitors were obliged to take an expensive, one-week guided tour of the country by bus and shaky old Fokker plane. But if the idea was to deflect our gaze from contemporary misery to glorious heritage, it did not succeed. As the tour bus took us through Rangoon's outskirts, our guide scoffed at the patriotic exhortations on the billboards, and pointed out the new roads that had been constructed by forced labour. In Bagan, that amazing plain, full of temples, another guide told me that the entire population of a village had been uprooted and forced to move en masse several kilometres to the south to make way for new hotels and restaurants. When I told him that I wanted to see where the villagers had been dumped, a bicycle was procured and late that evening I was taken to meet them.
It took great courage for these men and women to point out to me the regime's crimes. That they were still willing to do so bore witness to the depth of their estrangement from Burma's generals. In the election of 1990, the official party of the regime received a tiny fraction of the vote, whereas the NLD won the backing of 82 per cent. Every Burmese knew that the government, headed by the chairman of the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) junta, Senior General Than Shwe, had no right to rule.
When I returned 11 years later, I found that, superficially at least, Rangoon had been transformed. In the mid-Nineties, around the time of Suu Kyi's first release from house arrest (she has endured years of enforced solitude in her decaying villa on Rangoon's Inya Lake), the regime had opened Burma up to foreign investors. Rangoon was rudely refashioned, new multi-storey hotels giving the city a modern profile, coats of paint (in lieu of gold leaf) making its ancient shrines - the stupa - shine again.
But that brief boom hit the buffers in 1997. Since then, the country has been getting ever poorer, while its corrupt rulers get richer. Once, Burma was known as the rice basket of south-east Asia. Today its GDP is estimated to be $74.3bn (£38.9bn), with a GDP per capita of $1,700 (£889), the lowest in a region that includes Bangladesh, Laos and Vietnam. Burma ranks 190th out of 191 countries in healthcare delivery; 36 per cent of children under five are moderately to severely underweight; one in ten babies dies before its fifth birthday. The country's education system is in ruins: Burma spends 0.3 per cent of its GDP on education, while its far wealthier neighbours spend roughly 3 per cent. One-third of its children complete less than five years of schooling. Universities are forced to remain closed for years on end. Provision of basic services is as bad as in the most corrupt and impoverished parts of India: neighbouring Thailand, for example, has 20 times as many roads per square kilometre. At the same time, 50 per cent of the regime's budget is spent on the military.
Revenue from foreign firms contracted to exploit Burma's gas and other resources, and kickbacks from drug producers and dealers, explain why the generals grow richer while the Burmese standard of living continues to slide. CountryWatch places Burma 191st out of 192 countries both in total trade and in the ratio of total trade to GDP, but firms such as Total continue to bail the generals out. The French oil giant signed its first Burmese contract in 1992. In 2002-2003 it obtained gross revenue of $921m (£482m) from the natural gas fields in the south of the country, contributing nearly 30 per cent of Bur ma's earnings. A newly opened gas reserve in the west of the country, now under bidding by Korean, Chinese and Indian companies, is set to bring the regime billions of dollars in revenue. More than 90 per cent of the world's rubies come from here. The involvement of the Chinese, Thais and others in the timber trade is also believed to be huge, but is off the books.
Yet the regime's failure to make political or economic reforms - "It seems to lack both the capacity and the will to tackle the country's severe macroeconomic imbalances," one report concluded - has led many foreign investors to disengage, and in 2003 Burma experienced a severe banking crisis.
Frozen in time
Politically the country remained stalled, frozen in the brutal, outrageous aftermath of the elections of 1990. Suu Kyi was released again in 2002, with the regime making the mistake of thinking that years of demonisation through the state- controlled media had worked. They had denounced her "feminine nature", her "womanly wiles"; she was no more than "an ordinary housewife". Suu Kyi felt unable to leave her country when her husband, the Oxford academic Michael Aris, was dying of cancer in Britain in 1999; still, her marriage to a foreign national and her years of residence abroad made her an "alien" who "had never tasted pickled bamboo shoot curry". But when crowds braved the military presence to greet her at her home or her party headquarters, the regime's error became apparent; so they locked her up again.
The forward march of time had ceased. "Not only are events dated from their proximity to the uprising," wrote the anthro pologist Monique Skidmore in her book Karaoke Fascism: Burma and the politics of fear, "but time is also conceived to move differently. Time no longer 'flows', it now 'pools'. There is no sense of progression. The nation comprises a nation in waiting."
Skidmore, who lived among ordinary Burmese in Rangoon for several months in the mid-1990s, found a population infested by regime spies at every level, where a show of eager support for the junta is the price to be paid for promotion at work or any other favour, while bribes, known as "line money", are extorted by the regime at every turn. The ubiquitous presence of the military, and its propensity for jailing even the mildest of dissidents (Amnesty International says there are more than 1,000 political prisoners in the country, including many elected MPs), have the effect of terrorising the mass of Burmese. Skidmore recalled one woman finally summoning the courage to whisper to her that she knew "Aung San Suu Kyi's phone number". The mere possession of such knowledge becomes a terrifying act of defiance.
With a population of more than 50 million, Burma is a big regional player - too big, and too strategically placed in the armpit of China and India, to be either ignored or readily brought to heel. Although the UN's General Assembly and Human Rights Commission have repeatedly condemned the regime, the UN Security Council has refused to get involved. The get-out clause for France and China - both up to their necks in trade with the junta - is that, however unappetising the SPDC, however gross its human-rights violations, it presents no threat to the peace, security and stability of the region. But last year Václav Havel and Archbishop Desmond Tutu took the glaring fact of "Myanmar's" illegitimacy and sponsored a study into its consequences. This may at last be a step in the right direction.
The Burmese junta has shown dogged persistence in keeping its country's legitimate rulers under lock and key or in exile abroad. Today, the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma (NCGUB), formed in 1990 in the rebel town- ship of Manerplaw near the Thai-Bur m ese border (where I visited the organisation a year later) is still hanging on at its base in Washington, DC. It has a prime minister, Dr Sein Win, and its strength is, as Suu Kyi's ecstatic welcome around the country in 2002 and 2003 proved, that it still has a network of support across Burma.
But the junta does not give an inch. In May this year, Kofi Annan's special envoy Ibrahim Gambari was allowed to meet Than Shwe and Aung San Suu Kyi, and came away with the impression that her liberty was imminent. The claim made headlines around the world in the run-up to Suu Kyi's 61st birthday. Once he was safely out of the country, however, the junta extended her house arrest for another year. When Annan tried to speak to Than Shwe to find out what was going on, Burma's reclusive strongman refused to take the call.
If anything, the junta's position has hardened over the past three years. When the former military intelligence chief General Khin Nyunt became prime minister in 2003, he announced a "road map to democracy" that would include parliamentary elections leading to the formation of a new government. A little over a year later he was shunted aside, placed under house arrest and accused of corruption. He was replaced by Lieutenant General Soe Win, who directed the murderous attack on Suu Kyi and her convoy on 30 May 2003. Than Shwe is said to have banned the mention of Suu Kyi's name in his presence. Gambari reported that she is no longer allowed regular access to her doctor.
But the Security Council is one of the few things the junta may genuinely fear. France and Japan, another friend of Burma, have agreed to come on board; China and Russia are finding it increasingly hard to resist the pressure. Maybe this is what it will take to get Burmese time flowing forward again. It is one potent weapon that has yet to be tried.
Burma by numbers
500,000 number of soldiers out of a population of 50 million
19 the annual sum, in pence, spent per person on health
30,900 hectares of opium poppies cultivated in 2003
15 years in jail: penalty for unlicensed possession of a fax machine or modem
4,445,633 number of pagodas built, according to legend, at Bagan
540,000 estimated number of internally displaced people
68 percentage of the population that is Burman. The largest other groups are the Shan (9 percent) and Karen (7 per cent)
25 length in feet of a fully grown Burmese python, which can also live for more than 25 years
17 percentage of schools with safe drinking water
Rangoon rappers who have to be careful how they hip-hop
Mark McCrum
It was the sight of saffron-robed monks whipping overexcited fans back into their seats at an outdoor gig in Bagan that first turned me on to one of the oddest hybrids in world contemporary music: the Burmese rap scene. The shaven-headed holy men had sticks and were in earnest. An unusual sight at a rap concert, perhaps, but as the gig was on the fringes of the Ananda Pagoda Festival, such crowd-control tactics were less out of place than they would have been in downtown Rangoon, where Burmese rap began.
The pioneer of this intriguing musical movement, Myo Kyawt Myaing, introduced rap to Burmese listeners in the early 1990s. A sound engineer who had spent time in Singapore, Myo brought mixing-board know-how back with him to Rangoon. Dismissed at first as a passing craze, rap gradually took a firm hold and is now, along with Burmese hip-hop, a major trend in the country. Take one of the overcrowded buses from Rangoon to Mandalay and, by the end of the ride, you will be very well acquainted with the genre, as the overhead video screens play little else.
Thirty-five-year-old Myo has since been joined by artists such as the former male model Sai Sai and the boy band Examplez. The rappers do not recite their lyrics to original tunes, but to remakes of such celebrated American rappers as Dr Dre, Eminem, Snoop Dogg, and even those feared creators of gangsta rap, NWA (Niggaz With Attitude). The Myanmar crew sport copycat gear, too: oversized shorts, loose-fitting hooded sweatshirts, bandannas, baseball caps flipped backwards - all kit conveniently made in nearby China and now just as cheap in Rangoon as the quainter traditional longhi.
Their duplication of the US house style does not extend to lyrics, however:
My name is Myo Kyawt Myaing
I'm from Seven-Mile
My father is U Kyawt Myaing and he is a pilot
I have a lot of temporary girlfriends that I used to hang out with
As everybody knows . . .
Myo is playfully referential (Eminem famously came from Eight Mile) but hardly controversial. Nor is Sai Sai, who told the Irrawaddy, Burma's independent magazine-in-exile: "I don't write political lyrics. I prefer to write about love and life." Other lyrics encourage listeners to avoid playing the lottery, or to confront the challenges of growing up.
None of this is surprising in a country where all songs have to be submitted to the fierce censorship of the Press Scrutiny Board. "We cannot sing words like 'human rights' or 'democracy' in our songs," complains one anonymous Rangoon tunesmith. "We cannot even sing 'dark' or 'tiny room'." Attempts to bury covert political messages in lyrics have also failed. Some Burmese pop singers have even been forced to include a minimum of four "constructive" songs on their albums, written for them by military propagandists.
In such a climate, the only answer for Burmese rappers who want to get political is to get out and use the internet. A virtual rap group called Myanmar Future Generations creates its work abroad in secrecy and releases it through its website ( [http://www.mm-fg.net]). "We are not politicians," they say, "but we want our country's next generation to know that our motherland is suffering." Tunes such as "Inequality" or "Reunion Song" would never have made it past the censors at home. Their latest offering, "Angel of Peace", featuring video clips of the opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, was released in May.