Category Archives: Burma

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

Our first contact with the ‘wild’ Kayah came when we were received into a house on a hilltop owned by a shaman. He squatted by the fireplace smoking a pipe as if he were a guardian ghost of the place. He made me think of an unwrapped mummy, and he neither smiled nor spoke to us. We felt like intruders who had wandered into an ancient tomb, and soon set off to the village spring for a shower.

At the spring we waited for the villagers to finish their own shower. They included some stark-naked young women, who were unembarrassed and unashamed. As we watched them they talked to us with the familiarity of old friends. We felt ashamed at our curiousity about this (for us) novelty. When dressed, these women wore a black tunic which revealed one of their breasts. We were told later that they would not cover the naked breast until they were betrothed.

A traditional ‘wild’ Kayah woman is like an uninhibitedly colourful work of art. Her clothes are made of home-woven material in which red and black predominate. She wears black-lacquered cotton-thread rings beneath her knees in large lumps that look like twin beehives. Bunches of silver coins dangle from her neck along with a few strings of semi-precious stones. The younger women wear cone-shaped silver earrings that look like bunches of miniature carrots, while the married ones stuff their big earholes with silver cylinders. A married woman also wears a red turban on her head and a white sash around her waist. She walks like an elephant, slow and with jingling sounds at every step, reminiscent of the tinkling bells on a Burmese pagoda top. These gorgeously caparisoned females scratched their bodies liberally and spat copiously. And all the Kayah, children included, continually smoked pipes.

SOURCE: From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey, by Pascal Khoo Thwe (HarperCollins, 2002), pp. 203-204

To me [now starting college], Mandalay (a place which, as I later learned, foreign visitors enjoyed as a sleepy backwater that time forgot) was an amazing metropolis, a town of astounding variety and sophistication, a city that never slept. In Mandalay I learned how to use the telephone and the electric kettle….

My first introduction to foreign gadgetry went with the first stories I began to hear about the wonders of the West. I was told that people in the West could cook their meals without pots and pans and stoves. I was puzzled how this could be possible. The few Burmese magazines that were not government-controlled regaled their readers with these strange stories which they gleaned — in embellished form — from the British tabloid the Sun, from Newsweek, and from the novels of Jeffrey Archer, one of the few living English writers allowed to be published in Burma.

The beliefs we absorbed about the West strangely resembled the fantastic stories early Western travellers sent back about the Mysterious East. One teacher at school had told us that in the West things were so advanced that pigs could be grown on trees, and that a type of furniture had been developed that could be eaten if ever food supplies ran low. He also explained to us that the West got so cold in winter that if you peed outdoors the urine would instantly freeze so that you had to snap it like a stick. We had a pretty good sense that these were tall tales — but they made better listening than the equally tall tales of the regime. When we learned that the Americans got to the moon, for instance, we had solemnly been informed by a fanatical socialist-nationalist teacher: ‘Our ancestors got there centuries ago on the astounding flying machines that the genius of the Burmese had perfected — secrets alas now lost.’ We learned something important from all this: that the Burmese, after nearly thirty years of isolation from the rest of the world, constantly subject to official propaganda urging them to detest and despise the West, were in fact fascinated by the Western way of life and ignorantly credulous about it.

SOURCE: From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey, by Pascal Khoo Thwe (HarperCollins, 2002), pp. 120-121

This reminds me of a conversation I had with an older man in Papua New Guinea in 1976 who had heard something about a conflict in Berlin a decade and a half earlier, and wanted to know how things had finally turned out and who our current Kennedy was. I can’t remember if the conversation took place before or after Carter was elected to be our next Kennedy.

With the coming of socialism to our town, farmers were compelled to sell quotas of grain to the government buyers at a very low price. All the good-quality rice produced in Burma was reserved for export or (just as often) sold to the black market merchants. What was left — rice of the poorest quality — was then sold to the people. If farmers wanted to eat their own good-quality rice, they had to buy it from merchants at roughly ten times the price that they had been paid for it. As a result, farmers were reluctant to grow surplus rice for sale, preferring to grow only enough for their own families. When there was a bad harvest, they didn’t even have enough to feed themselves. Burma, which was the world’s biggest exporter of rice before the Second World War, became a net importer. Even leaving aside the flaws in the regime’s agricultural policy, sheer mismanagement and rampant corruption began to undermine the economy as early as the mid-seventies. The price of food and domestic goods rose steadily, until inflation ran out of control. Even basic food needs were no longer met. Rice was unavailable at the official rate, and sky-high on the black market.

Some farmers illegally grew poppies in the jungle to support their families in bad years. When they discovered that opium made them much more money, with less effort, than normal crops, they grew more and more — and eventually poppies outstripped rice and other grains. At first the government tried to eradicate the poppy fields, making use of helicopters, machine-guns, flame-throwers and other technical assistance provided by Western governments. But government officials soon realised that they could enrich themselves by becoming unofficial agents for opium warlords, and so would destroy only a few token fields. The weapons supplied by the West were turned instead on internal enemies of the regime. The alleged fight against drugs became an excuse to attack ethnic rebels and even villagers who showed any opposition towards the government. As a result, the opium trade boomed as never before.

SOURCE: From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey, by Pascal Khoo Thwe (HarperCollins, 2002), pp. 56-57

This pattern has been repeated so many times in so many countries that it has become a sad cliché. In order to reduce supplies of opium, the Burmese government should have encouraged farmers to grow it while forcing them to sell it to the government at artificially low prices. This always works so well with food crops. In order to increase food supplies, they just needed to stand aside and skim off (i.e., tax) the profits of growers and distributors. Results-driven policies are always superior to ones driven by ideology (pure intentions), as Deng Xiaoping recognized in the aphorism for which he will always remain famous, “It doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”

Unfortunately, Deng’s other lasting legacy is his decision in 1989 to violently suppress the demonstrations in Tiananmen square, and the Burmese generals will leave the same mixed legacy, even if they decide to “free opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and invite the National League for Democracy to a May 17 constitutional convention” (as noted by Robert Tagorda).

Above the fireplace in Grandma’s kitchen, beneath the sooty shelf (our houses lacked chimneys, and the smoke had to find its own way out through holes cut in the gables) hung a huge amount of dried meat — beef, wild boar, rats, fish, game birds, moles, snakes — and above that were herbs of all kinds. In the corners of the store-room were huge bags of pounded rice, while big pots of rice-wine were being brewed, swamped with clouds of rice-wine gnats. We had no trouble from mosquitos there, for they hate the yeast that rises from the rice-wine as it brews. Beneath the roof, sheaves of maize and millet hung from the beams on bamboo poles. Grandma’s cat always roamed above the beams protecting the grains from rodents. Geckos and wall-lizards were constant visitors to the walls — propitious and sacred creatures that preyed on small insects. The floor of the house had to be swept every day with elephant-grass brushes. [p. 59]

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On summer nights we watched the burning of the mountain slopes by the slash-and-burn farmers on the other side of the lake. The red trails of the fires seemed to devour the water of the lake and the stars of the sky like some mythical monster. The fires were reflected in the lake, so that the whole scene had a special quality of terror and mystery. It seemed to me as though half the world was burning. The fires burned for many nights in succession, and I often woke during the night to watch the changing pattern of the flames. The fragrance of blossoms from the orange tree often swept past the house on the evening breeze as we slept in the open on the balcony or in the tree-house. We also washed and ate in the open — there were not many mosquitos in our town. Wild grouse, cuckoos and summer birds called their mates from bushes and treetops, while the sounds of the cicadas and bees were unbearably loud.

Why do I have such vivid memories of a burning world? As usual, these were not just my personal response, but were shot through with the beliefs I had inherited. The Padaung are haunted both by the Christian idea that the world might come to an end, and by their own ancient beliefs about fire: ‘When the forest burns, the wild cats rejoice.’ This is a vision of civil disorder and of those who would exploit it. Fire is one of the ‘five enemies of man’ in Buddhist tradition — but it is also a power we revere, a power to cleanse and renew. [pp. 53-54]

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The jungles to the west of the town and the lake to the east were our playgrounds. We used to pick seasonal wild fruits and play hide-and-seek. But our special pleasure was war games. Inspired by all the government warnings about the rebels lurking in the jungles around the town, we enacted guerrilla raids and attacks, abductions and killings.

The war games became reality later, when we witnessed real fights between government troops and rebels very near our town. We were intensely excited, because each fight seemed ridiculously like a game, except that real people got wounded and killed. Perched on tree branches on the tops of hills, we watched the clashes as if they were football matches. We cheered and shouted while people were slaughtering each other in earnest in the valley.

We organised dangerous games for ourselves. We built small carts with wooden wheels for downhill racing. The carts were like modern go-karts, but with no steering wheel or cover. Of course we wore no protective clothing. To make the carts run faster, we greased the axles with a slimy liquid chewed from the bark of a gum tree. The steeply descending track was strewn with tree-stumps, barbed wire, cacti and bamboo. Worst of all, the track skirted an electricity pylon mushroomed with landmines at its base. No one managed to finish the track without getting hurt. Two boys were killed. Another of our games was to use long poles to prod and explode the landmines around pylons. [pp. 48-49]

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