Recent developments in Burma – including the government’s relocation to a remote jungle compound, the extended detention of Nobel Peace Prize recipient Aung San Suu Kyi and ongoing reports of forced labor, ethnic purging and widescale rapes – have drawn more stringent international condemnation from world leaders. In light of these events, ThaiDay speaks to three campaigners about their different opinions and approaches to restoring democracy to the military-ruled state.
The journalist
In 1997, a team of Burmese exiles based in Chiang Mai began The Irrawaddy, a magazine covering Burma and Southeast Asia. Featuring a maelstrom of news, commentary, cartoons and interviews, The Irrawaddy is recognized as one of the foremost voices of dissent against Myanmar’s regime. And though the magazine is still in its infancy with a monthly circulation of only 3,000 copies, the publication’s website (www.irrawaddy.org) is huge. Seven million people visit the site each month, according to web-hosting company Visual Horizons.
The Irrawaddy’s 23-member team of reporters and support staff is headed by Aung Zaw, 37, a former student activist who was once imprisoned and tortured inside Rangoon’s notorious Insein prison. Aung fled to Thailand on foot along with thousands of Burmese after mass demonstrations for regime change in 1988 led to a military coup and the permanent imposition of martial law. More than 4,000 protestors were killed, while thousands more were arrested and imprisoned in lieu of due process.
“I was in prison for only a week but was severely tortured,” Aung recalls. “There were all forms of inhumane treatment – techniques and methods to make you lose your dignity and integrity.”
Aung began battling the regime from Thailand in the early 1990s. After teaching himself to write “journalese” by deconstructing press releases from rights-based NGOs Amnesty International and Asiawatch, he began working on a freelance basis for the Bangkok Post and The Nation. In 1992 he set up his own media organization, the Burma Information Group, from which The Irrawaddy sprung.
“I was an activist but I now see my role as a journalist,” Aung says. He explains how The Irrawaddy is an independent publication not affiliated with any political group or organization.
“We do receive funding from groups like the Open Society Institute [a private grantmaking foundation chaired by US financial tycoon George Soros] and some other European and American organizations,” he says, adding that while the publication still runs at a loss, they have begun to invest more time and effort in the marketing side of the operation to boost circulation.
Content for The Irrawaddy is fed by a network of covert sources — diplomats, students, activists and NGO workers — who report from Myanmar, sometimes under grave risk. Aung says that one of his sources was sentenced to seven years of imprisonment in 1996 after the junta busted him for sending correspondence to Aung’s mailing address in Bangkok. Despite the ongoing danger, Aung asserts that it is actually getting easier to procure information from inside Burma because people there are becoming more resourceful and outspoken. “It’s amazing. We have so many sources,” he says, “and our contact list is expanding...so by default we are encouraging freedom of speech.”
Aung says he is confident that it is only a matter of time until the regime collapses.
“Last year, if someone was to tell me that the government [in Myanmar] was about to fall, I wouldn’t have believed it. But this year, with all the incidents taking place — bomb attacks, power struggles, economic problems, international pressure and the move to Pyinmana — I see there is hope. The regime is getting old and so is its leadership. They are reaching a breaking point.
“When this happens we are hoping to go back to Burma and relaunch our publication there,” he continues. “That’s our mission.”
UN special rapporteur for Myanmar Paulo Sergio Pinheiro approaches the junta as “an interested friend with experience to help solve their problems.”
The diplomat
UN special rapporteur for Burma Paulo Sergio Pinheiro has the unenviable privilege of being one of a number of emissaries whom Burma’s military junta refuses to allow into the country. Since November 2003, he has been forced to report from the Thai-Myanmar border region and his offices in Bangkok, New York and Geneva. Nevertheless, he has carried out his duties with an unflinching and diplomatic eye.
“I did not come to Myanmar to teach lessons,” he says regarding his earlier visits to the country at a packed press conference at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand last Friday. “I try not to tell authorities I know more than they do, but approach them as an interested friend with experience to help solve some of their problems.”
And experienced he is. A professor of political science who has lectured in universities in France, the United States and his native Brazil, the 61-year-old has committed his professional life to the fight for worldwide democracy and justice. Since 1988 alone, he has published 12 authoritative essays on issues as diverse as urban violence, law and children’s rights. He has also held human rights monitoring missions in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Paraguay, Haiti, Burundi and Togo, and worked as the UN special rapporteur for human rights in Burundi between 1995 and 1999.
With his current four-year mandate coming to end in early 2006, Pinheiro is preparing a final report on progress of the regime’s self-defined seven-step road map to democracy, as well as a special report for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
While Pinheiro cites the continued detainment of political prisoners like Aung San Suu Kyi and leaders of the Shan ethnic minority to highlight the appalling state of human rights in Myanmar, he is guardedly optimistic about the regime’s stated commitment to change.
“It is with this spirit that I continue to appeal to the authorities,” he says, noting that “there are no black-and-white solutions” for any countrywide political transition, that the world should not treat Burma as an especially difficult case.
“Every political transition is complicated [and] no country in the world has the right to instrumentalize another. That’s not the way things work in the international community,” he continues, in a veiled reference to comments like those of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who regularly chides Burma’s neighbors for not doing more to press for democratic reform there. “Sometimes I get the impression that [western nations] are writing a play and [expect] Asian countries must play along.”
Pinheiro is also highly critical of sanctions as a means to keep the junta in check, such as those taken in August by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria to stop funding projects in Myanmar. “The decision to withdraw aid was wrong,” he says. “Humanitarian aid cannot be held hostage to political agendas.”
Asked to comment on the effectiveness of his mandate, and whether he has become frustrated with the lack of improvement and reform in Burma, Pinheiro replies with an equanimous sense of modesty that speaks volumes.
“It is a special thing to be a rapporteur. We have to operate in fields of contradictions,” he says. “Others could have been more competent or efficient...[But] if [Myanmar’s] victims think I have been useful, then I’m happy.”
The soldier
Seventeen years have passed since Myint Wai discarded his military uniform. Yet he still considers himself a loyal soldier of Burma, as he prefers to call it.
“Of the people, by the people, for the people,” he says, citing Suu Kyi’s father, General Aung San, the pro-independence hero who led the resistance movement that fought the Japanese during World War II, or recalling the words of Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg address. “This should be the main objective of the army and I request [Myanmar’s unelected ruler] General Than Shwe to practice the real responsibility of a professional soldier.”
Interviewed outside the Bangkok office of the Thai Action Committee for Democracy in Burma (TACDB), an NGO for which the 47-year-old former Air Force lance corporal now works as a Burmese affairs officer, Myint recalls the events that led up to his exile following the August 1988 military coup in Rangoon.
“I was providing shelter for dissidents,” he says. “This was very important because after the coup they were searching everywhere for them. But some of my friends found out that military intelligence [was on to me], so I decided to leave.”
In mid-October of the same year, Myint chartered a small boat to take nine fellow deserters and himself across the Bay of Bengal, to Ranong in southern Thailand, where they immediately began planning for their return journey. “Our aim when we came was not to seek asylum but to prepare arms to return to Burma. That was our mission,” he says.
Pragmatism, however, eventually got the better of the proud soldier, and by 1990 Myint had applied for and received permission to reside legally at a UNHCR refugee camp on the Thai-Burmese border area. But the inactivity that exiles are often forced to endure in camps became too much for Myint. In 1993 he canceled his refugee status and moved to Bangkok, where he was arrested the following year for being an illegal alien. Myint currently enjoys restricted refugee status under the auspices of the UNHCR – so long as he stays in Bangkok.
“I never considered myself an illegal,” Myint says, with accelerating momentum. “I am a human being. I should be able to choose where I stay, where I visit, whenever I want. I am not a criminal. I left my country because of injustice and persecution.”
Myint says he is extremely grateful to his Thai hosts, particularly his Thai wife, though he accuses certain high-ranking members of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s administration of prioritizing commercial dealings with Burma’s junta before its pledge to help restore democracy there.
“This policy is not in the long-term interests of Thailand because Burma’s problems are being exported to Thailand,” he insists, citing the continued influx of social and economic ills such as refugees, illegal laborers, sex workers, methamphetamines and spread of diseases like AIDS and malaria.
Myint and the three other permanent staff members of the TACDB are thus focusing their efforts on persuading Thailand to nullify its commercial contracts with the junta and offer more support to the country’s exiled democracy movement. The most effective way to accomplish this, Myint says, is to make Thais more aware of their country’s “unofficial” foreign policy.
“Unlike Burma, the Thai government gets its power from the people. If the Thai people knew what was happening they would force change,” he states with the confidence of a whistle-blower.
“This is a civilized Buddhist society and I know the Thai people sympathize with us. They should not allow their government to pursue a policy that exploits the people of Burma.”