Category Archives: Burma

Hla Htut sat reading a collection of Tolstoy’s short stories in a faded deckchair. I gave him my letter of introduction, from a mutual friend in Rangoon. He read it carefully, folded it up, and handed it back to me. With great solemnity he pulled a plastic stool from behind some boxes and offered me a seat. Then he leaned back in his chair, lit a slender cheroot, and confessed that he hates books.

Hla Htut is in his early thirties. He has placid, sculpted features and an easy, slow manner. Since his schooling was disrupted by the government’s frequent and haphazard closure of Burma’s universities, he never finished the bachelor’s degree he started in English literature. Instead, he began dealing in books. It isn’t that he hates all books, he clarified: he just hates Burmese books. In fact, Hla Htut has no time for any contemporary Burmese writing, be it novels, newspapers or magazines. ‘I don’t trust them. They always lie,’ he said….

Burma has always had a high literacy rate, thanks to a strong tradition of education instilled by the country’s Buddhist monasteries, and reading for pleasure became a widespread pastime under the British. After a few generations under the colonial education system and with the introduction of printing presses, Burmese writers began to write more for the masses rather than for the palace elite. An adventure story inspired by The Count of Monte Cristo was published in 1904 and is considered the first example of the novel in Burma. It was an instant hit, and a few years later novels and short stories written by Burmese writers were everywhere.

The Burmese, explained Hla Htut, had always been primed to love stories. All Burmese children were weaned on the Jataka stories, a collection of some 550 moral tales which described the many reincarnations of Prince Siddhartha before he achieved enlightenment as the Buddha. Prince Siddhartha appears in human and animal form wandering through the Buddhist cosmological landscape – a wonderland of celestial beings and forests filled with mythical beasts. Among other early favorites were H. Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle (the translator of the latter transformed Sherlock Holmes into the longyi-clad Sone Dauk Maung San Sha, or Detective Maung San Sha, and the sleuth’s famous Baker Street address became Bogalay Zay Street in Rangoon). A hundred years later, both Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle are still big sellers. Hla Htut puts it down to the oppressive political environment in which people live. ‘We Burmese, we need to escape. We don’t want to read non-fiction. We want only fiction and fantasy. We want to read about heroes – strong men, clever men.’

SOURCE: Secret Histories: Finding George Orwell in a Burmese Teashop, by Emma Larkin (John Murray, 2005), pp. 26-28 (reviewed here and here)

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Burmese had built a reputation as one of the most militaristic of the peoples of southern Asia. They had sacked the Thai capital, caused grief to the Indian Mughals and had seen off the Chinese. In 1824, their great commander, Mahabandula, had sworn to bring the governor general of India back to Mandalay in silver fetters. Lord Amherst had not made that journey, however, and the Burmese had been sharply defeated in three major wars. The final one, in 1886, had seen the end of Burma’s independence and its last monarch packed off into exile near Bombay. After 1886, the British did not recruit ethnic Burmese into their forces, as they had the Sikhs of the Punjab when they were conquered fiercely to resist British occupation for much longer than the Sikhs. Later, all sorts of pseudo-anthropological arguments were used about their unfitness. Burmese Buddhists, the British said, regarded soldiers as beings ‘not very high on the human scale’ because they took life. They, like the Bengalis, were supposedly ‘effeminate’ and could not take extremes of heat and cold.

This was all nonsense, as some British officials realized. A small company of Burmese sappers had done exceptionally well in the Mesopotamian campaign during the First World War where it had been 125 degrees in the shade. They also took the cold of the North West Frontier uncomplainingly. The basic reason that the British did not maintain the slightly increased percentage of Burmese recruits after 1918 was that Indians and recruits from the Burmese minorities were cheaper. All this meant that the vast majority of ‘Burmese’ in outfits such as the Burma Rifles and the Burma Frontier Force were Kachins, Shans, Karens like Smith Dun, or else locally resident Indians and Gurkhas. There were hardly a thousand ethnic Burmese officers or NCOs under arms in 1940. This stored up huge problems for the British in the Second World War. When the Japanese offered young Burmese military training, they leapt at the opportunity. It was a matter of pride as well as politics. How could the Burmese be a people if they did not have an army?

SOURCE: Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire & the War with Japan, by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper (Penguin, 2004), pp. 82-83

I discover censorship defines life at the Myanmar Times and depletes the buzz and excitement that’s generally a feature of good newspaper offices where ground-breaking stories are regularly broken. Censorship at the Times is absolute and total, but the system itself is quite simple. All articles selected for possible publication are faxed to Military Intelligence and are either accepted in their totality, completely rejected, or partly censored, with words, paragraphs and sections removed. Such information is relayed to the editor, Goddard, usually by an officer named Wai Lin. Sometimes the Brigadier General himself rolls up his sleeves and pitches in, and if big issues, especially political issues, are discussed in an article, Wai Lin will pass the material to him for ‘instruction and guidance’.

Inside page layouts and story placements are mostly left to the staff to determine, but the front-page layout is carefully scrutinised and stories approved for publication might not be approved for front-page publication, or the emphasis of such stories might be downplayed.

At times, there can be dialogue about decisions. I am told a story about breakdancing becoming a fad among trendy Yangon youth was axed by MI because they only want to promote traditional dancing. A query, asking if there was any way the story could be saved, resulted in a new ruling that it could be used if breakdancing were not defined as a dance but instead as an American fitness regime.

I discover that Myanmar has a mind-numbing myriad of rules regarding publications. New laws, new variations to new laws, and new amendments to old laws relentlessly emerge.

I don’t even try to grapple with this complexity because I am told that ultimately only one law applies–the law of the day as detennined by the Brigadier General and his boys at Military Intelligence. If they say no it means no, and there is no burrowing through laws and statutes to find precedents or technicalities to present to lawyers. If the Brigadier General rules it out, it’s out and anyone who publishes against his will could well be on the road to Insein prison–which, incidentally, is appropriately pronounced ‘Insane’ prison.

But the most stultifying aspect of the insidious, all-pervading censorship is that the paper is denied an entity or a voice. All aspects giving a Western paper its character, personality and identity–editorials, letters to the editor, causes and crusades, opinion and analysis–are no-go zones. The term ‘political analysis’ does not exist in the Myanmar Times lexicon.

SOURCE: Land of a Thousand Eyes: The subtle pleasures of everyday life in Myanmar, by Peter Olszewski (Allen & Unwin, 2005), pp. 28-29

Asiapundit has a few more uncensored news reports on Myanmar/Burma.

The July 2004 IIAS Newsletter includes a review of the book In Search of Chin Identity: A Study in Religion, Politics and Ethnic Identity in Burma by Lian H. Sakhong (NIAS Press, 2003).

Traditional tribal society was exclusivist and tightly knit, with a hierarchy of nobles, commoners and slaves. At its apex, chiefs (ram-uk) were not only owners and distributors of land, heads of their communities and commanders in war, but also high priests, responsible for offering sacrifices to the Khuahrum, locally rooted guardian deities whose good will was believed necessary for prosperity. When Baptist missionaries challenged the power of the Khuahrum and Khua-chia (evil spirits, causing accidents and disease), conversion to the new faith was eased by the old belief in Khua-zing, a Supreme God to whom the chiefs did not sacrifice, because He, viewed as the source of all life (zing), is ‘good, never cruel and never harms people’ (p. 46).

Detribalisation

The British ‘pacification’ of Chinram between the first invasion of the country in 1871 and the Anglo-Chin War of 1917-19 cleared the way for ‘detribalisation’, the breakdown of the old ‘chief-land-god’ nexus. Sakhong, however, argues that detribalisation did not result in dehumanisation, as the Christianity preached by American Baptist missionaries provided the Chin with the basis for a new way of life. The latter overcame the traditional isolationism of the tribes, creating a new Chin identity based on a community of worshippers in a wider world where they could relate as equals to ‘civilized’ lowlanders….

The author does not carry his narrative through to the Ne Win (1962-88) and State Law and Order Restoration Council/State Peace and Development Council (1988-) periods. This is unfortunate, since there is limited information in Western languages on how the Chins maintain their identity in the face of military-enforced ‘Burmanisation’, including the post-1988 junta’s aggressive promotion of the Buddhist religion. While the SPDC builds new pagodas nationwide, it discourages the construction of new churches and mosques and the renovation of old ones.

This same pattern broadly describes so many parts of the boondocks of Southeast Asia, where the hill people only began to “join civilization” and adopt one of the major evangelical religions during the 19th and 20th centuries, often converting to some variety of Protestant Christianity, no matter whether the long-converted lowlanders were Buddhist, as in Burma, Thailand, or Cambodia; Muslim, as in the Malay Peninsula and Indonesian archipelago; or Catholic, as in the Philippines.

In the evening we would go shooting wood pigeon among wild marijuana fields. The birds were high on the marijuana seeds and barely able to fly but fluttered helplessly in the bushes. Their spasmodic, interrupted flights, together with their strange little cries made me think of drunken people trying to waltz. We stuffed the barrels of our home-made guns with pebbles and shot the pigeons down. Just the sound of gunshots seemed to stun them and they dropped from the trees at our feet. We killed them by seizing them by the legs and bashing their heads against trees. They made an excellent dish. We cooked them with marijuana sauce according to the local recipe. Here it is — Smoked Pigeons with Marijuana Sauce: ‘Smoke the birds with the twigs of marijuana for a day. Stuff them with lemon grass, kaffir lime leaves, garlic, ginger with a pinch of salt and wrap them in banana leaves. Boil or bake according to taste.’

Although we used marijuana for cooking, smoking it was strictly forbidden by the rebels. You could end up condemned to the stocks, plagued by mosquitoes, for three nights if you did that.

When the rainy season began we caught frogs. There was some danger in this, for we were not the only party who preyed on them. We usually made sure of first killing the frog-eating snakes, and then caught the frogs afterwards. Pythons, like frogs, are quite delicious to eat. They taste like smoked salmon. We also hunted moles, guinea-pigs and rats. We hung and smoked the rodents for three days before cooking them. Rat soup, minced moles and roast guinea pigs were our common recipes. The local people liked to hang the meat of porcupines until it stank like that of a corpse before they cooked it with herbs. It tasted delicious, but we had to eat it holding our noses.

At the end of 1988 we were invited by the Karen villagers to share a Christmas meal with them. The main dish had a strange flavour — the meat in it tasted like dog meat with a strong whiff of garlic and lemon grass. After the meal, our hosts didn’t wash their fingers, but sniffed at them for some time. Before we went home they told us that we had been eating monkey. Suddenly, I wanted to throw up. For the Karen, the meat of monkey was a typical Christmas dish, like turkey or goose in the West. They believed it was a gift from God, and that even the smell should not be wasted.

Tender wild banana trunks were available throughout the year, and we used them in soups along with lentils and vegetables. Truffles and wild mushrooms were in season at the beginning of the monsoon. During the cold season, when the bamboo shoots had matured, bamboo mushrooms became available.

We had more than one way of cooking rice without pots and pans, depending on the situation we were in. It could be cooked in bamboo stems: you soak the rice in green bamboo stalks for half an hour, and stuff the open end of the bamboo with grass. Roast the bamboo slowly over the fire until the rice is cooked, then peel off the bamboo skin. In this method, the rice comes in cartridges. Another method we called ‘rebel style’. The rice is soaked in a towel, linen or sarong for more than an hour. Dig a hole in the ground, one foot deep, bury the rice bag, then make a fire on top. Steamed rice will be ready within fifteen minutes. We used this method often when the rebels were on the run.

SOURCE: From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey, by Pascal Khoo Thwe (HarperCollins, 2002), pp. 215-217