Category Archives: Southeast Asia

by | 19 October 2006 · 8:25 am

The Saudi Global Counterrevolution

The cross-fertilization of ideas between Wahhabism and other brands of Islamic fundamentalism began in the 1960s as part of Saudi Arabia’s strategy of strengthening Islamic identity as a bulwark against secular Arab nationalism.

Thus bonds that had been forged to stop Nasser and the other Arab nationalists could be mobilized to thwart Khomeini. Far from lacking religious legitimacy, Saudi Arabia in fact had impressive ideational and organizational resources at its disposal. To counter Shia fundamentalism, the House of Saud could mobilize Sunni fundamentalism. In fact, the Saudi regime saw an opportunity in containing Shia resurgence to turn the sharp edge of the rising religious extremism inside the kingdom—which manifested itself not only in the seizure of the Grand Mosque but in the growing number of Saudi youth trekking to Afghanistan to join the jihad against the Soviets—away from the ruling regime and toward defending Sunni power.

The implications of the Saudi-Iranian—or Sunni-Shia—divide for Muslim-world politics became clear in 1982, when the Alawi regime of Hafez al-Asad in Syria crushed a Muslim Brotherhood uprising in the city of Hama, killings tens of thousands. Iran had built an alliance with Syria around the two countries’ opposition to Saddam’s regime in Iraq. Sunnis such as the Muslim Brothers often reviled Alawis as beyond the pale of Islam and therefore not fit to rule Muslims. This belief only gave greater intensity to their rebellion against the Asad regime. Khomeini’s refusal to support the Muslim Brotherhood during the Hama uprising earned him the Brotherhood’s lasting contempt and showed that despite his eagerness to pose as a pan-Islamic leader, relations between Shia and Sunni fundamentalists were breaking down along familiar sectarian lines. When it came to choosing between a nominal Shia ally such as Asad and the militantly Sunni Brotherhood, Khomeini had not hesitated to stick with the former.

As rising oil prices poured untold billions into Saudi coffers from 1974 on, the kingdom began to subsidize various Islamic causes through charities and funds such as the Islamic World League (Rabita al-Alam al-Islami). This was a facet of the Saudis’ growing confidence and claim to leadership of the Islamic world. A portion of the money went to propagating Wahhabism. Once upon a time, Wahhabi tribesmen had invaded Arabian cities to spread their faith. Now that work became the task of financial institutions funded by the Saudi state and Wahhabi ulama. Thousands of aspiring preachers, Islamic scholars, and activists from Nigeria to Indonesia went to Saudi Arabia to study, and many more joined Saudi-funded think tanks and research institutions.

Muslim Brotherhood activists were joined by Jamaat-e Islami thinkers and leaders from South Asia as well as many more Islamic activists from Africa and Southeast Asia. Saudi Arabia did not just sponsor Islamic activism but facilitated its ideological growth. Many of those who studied and worked in Saudi Arabia then spread throughout the Muslim world to teach and work at Saudi-funded universities, schools, mosques, and research institutions. Today ambitious ventures such as the International Islamic Universities in Islamabad, Pakistan, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, are staffed by men who were trained in the kingdom. These de facto ambassadors for the Saudi viewpoint, influenced by the harsh simplicities of Wahhabi theology and fmancially dependent on Saudi patronage, work not only to entrench conservative attitudes in communities from Kano, Nigeria, to Jakarta, Indonesia, but also to defend Saudi Arabia’s interests and legitimacy….

Governments from Nigeria to Bahrain, Indonesia, and Malaysia sought to drive wedges between Sunnism and Shiism, casting the former as “true” Islam—and the incumbent government as its defender—while branding the latter as obscurantist extremism. In 1998 the Nigerian government of General Sani Abacha accused the Muslim Brotherhood leader Sheikh Ibrahim al-Zak Zaki of being a Shia just before he went on trial for antigovernment activism. In the 1990s the government of Bahrain repeatedly dismissed calls for political reform by labeling them as Shia plots. In Malaysia in the 1980s, the government routinely arrested Islamic activists on the pretext that they were Shias, thus avoiding the appearance of clamping down on Islamic activism while projecting an image as Sunnism’s champion against subversive activities.

In India and Pakistan, Sunni ulama confronted the Khomeini challenge head-on, branding his vitriol against the House of Saud as a species of fitna (sedition) wielded against the Muslim community. The Saudi rulers, conversely, were routinely painted as Sunnism’s greatest defenders and the symbols of its resistance to Shia attempts at “usurpation” in a historical context stretching all the way back to the early Shia rebellions against the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates. The Shia-Sunni struggles for the soul of Islam that had punctuated Islamic history were thus reenacted in the late twentieth century, with the Saudi princes in the caliphs’ role.

SOURCE: The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future, by Vali Nasr (W. W. Norton, 2006), pp. 154-157

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by | 2 October 2006 · 8:21 pm

The Cultural Revolution Hits Seinan Seminary in Japan

In the fall of 1970 [the year right-wing novelist Mishima Yukio committed ritual suicide] the [cultural] battlefield shifted to the seminary campus in Fukuoka, where most [Japan Baptist] Convention ministers were trained. The seminary was–and is–a part of Seinan Gakuin University, which was plagued by student rebellions in 1969…. The rebellions were nationwide in scope, affecting private and public universities alike, though carried out by a militant minority and not by the majority of students. At Aoyama Gakuin University (Methodist) in Tokyo and Kanto Gakuin University (American Baptist) in Yokohama, the theology departments became so involved as to self-destruct over a period of time. Neither has been reopened. Belatedly, though no less ominously, a group of dissident students at the Fukuoka seminary called a strike in September 1970.

The seminary had 34 students: 23 in the theology department of the university and 11 in an unaccredited Bible school. The striking students numbered only 10 at first and never exceeded 11, but they forced the cancellation of all classes until January 1971. With the backing of a few area pastors, they assailed the faculty for not speaking out jointly against the Vietnam War, the Security Treaty, the Baptist congress, Expo ’70, and government efforts to nationalize Yasukuni Shrine, where the war dead are enshrined. A theology that does not address such issues is invalid, the students declared; any evangelism that does not attack the evil structures of society is incomplete.

These social activists declared that the seminary was bankrupt and not salvageable, that the faculty should resign en bloc to clear the way for a new beginning. George Hays had the misfortune of being seminary dean at the time. On October 7, citing “two instances of misunderstanding related to the language,” he resigned the position, no longer confident that he could negotiate with the students. Hays was succeeded by Professor Sekiya….

Numerous meetings were held, some of them loud and boisterous, in quest of reconciliation. Position papers were demanded of each faculty member, and each was interrogated as though an accused heretic at an inquisition. No exceptions were made of the three missionary teachers: Hays, Bob Culpepper, Vera Campbell. Culpepper returned from an emergency furlough in November 1970, in the midst of the turmoil, and went on trial as the others had done. All three handled themselves well and helped the seminary to survive. When the new school year opened in Apri1 1971, however, total enrollment was down to 22. Not until the next decade did it reach 34 again.

Ozaki Shuichi has said that the most tragic result of the strike was the loss of some very promising students to the gospel ministry. If so, a close second was the loss of Ozaki himself to the seminary faculty. This New Testament scholar, second-generation preacher, and sometime interpreter to Billy Graham resigned during the struggle. Consequently, he was scathingly denounced as irresponsible and harassed by late-night phone calls. Dean Sekiya also got calls at night. The harassments came to an end when Ozaki’s daughter Yoko, the seminary librarian, was struck and killed by a train–an apparent suicide. So great was the shock that 16 years were to pass before Ozaki accepted an invitation to speak at the seminary, though he lived in Fukuoka all this time.

SOURCE: The Southern Baptist Mission in Japan, 1889-1989, by F. Calvin Parker (University Press of America, 1991), pp. 238-240

Nowadays Seinan [‘Southwestern’] Seminary is independent of the (U.S.) Southern Baptist Convention, which since the 1970s has imposed stricter doctrinal controls at all the major seminaries in the U.S. (Southern in Louisville, Southeastern in Wake Forest, Southwestern in Fort Worth, and New Orleans). Seinan Seminary pays the salaries of several former missionaries who would likely have trouble passing the current SBC creed tests.

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by | 27 September 2006 · 6:18 pm

The Thai Coup and the Jihadist Insurgency

The milblogger who authors The Adventures of Chester has compiled an interesting take on what the Thai military coup might portend for dealing with the jihadist insurgency in the south of Thailand.

News reports indicate that there were a number of reasons why Thailand’s military decided to overthrow Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra last week, but the most interesting among them was a disappointment with his strategy toward the Muslim insurgency in the south. From The Australian:

THE Royal Thai Army will adopt new tactics against a militant Islamic uprising, following the coup that sent Thaksin Shinawatra, the ousted prime minister, into exile in London last week.

According to sources briefed by the army high command, Mr Thaksin’s bungled response to the insurgency in southern Thailand, which has claimed 1700 lives in two years, was a critical factor in the generals’ decision to get rid of him.

Military intelligence officers intend to negotiate with separatists and to use psychological warfare to isolate the most violent extremists, in contrast to Mr Thaksin’s heavy-handed methods and harsh rhetoric….

When Mr Thaksin, a former policeman who made his fortune from telecommunications, came to power in 2001, he broke with the old order. He put police cronies in charge of the southern border and shut down two intelligence clearing centres.

Soon, reports in the media alleged that corruption, smuggling and racketeering were rife.

In January 2004, militants raided an armoury and started a killing spree. They have murdered Buddhist monks, teachers, hospital staff and civil servants – anyone seen as representing the Thai state. The army has seemed powerless to halt the chaos.

But at the same time Zachary Abuza, a political science professor at Simmons College in the US, and author of a forthcoming book about the Thai insurgency, offers a more nuanced take:

Will the CDR [Council for Democratic Reform] and interim administration be better equipped to deal with [it]? At the very least, there will be less political interference in counter-insurgent operations and fewer personnel reshuffles and policy initiatives from an impatient “CEO prime minister.” Second, the CDR is likely to implement many of the recommendations of the National Reconciliation Council that Thaksin had blatantly ignored. Though the NRC’s recommendations alone will not quell the insurgency, they will have an important impact in regaining the trust of the Muslim community. Third, [coup commander-in-chief Gen.] Sonthi [Boonyaratglin] has expressed a willingness to talk with insurgents, though to date only PULO has offered to talk and the aged leaders in Europe have no control over the insurgents. And many in the military establishment including Sonthi, himself a Muslim, have publicly refused to see the insurgency for what it is, denying it any religious overtones or secessionist goals. Nor is the political situation likely to alter the campaign of the insurgents. If anything they may step up attacks in an attempt to provoke a heavy-handed government response. The Muslim provinces have been under martial law for over two and a half years, with little to show for it but an alienated and angry populace.

UPDATE: The Head Heeb has a characteristically thorough and comparative analysis of what he headlines The Bertolt Brecht coup.

All this leads to some concern about what the new constitution might contain. Boonyaratglin has promised that it will make the government more accountable, which is a good thing on its face; the former constitutional framework allowed Thaksin to accrue far too much personal power and was often ineffective in providing institutional checks and balances. The trouble is that it isn’t clear who will hold future governments to account. If the early signs are any indication, the military may impose a paternalistic, royalist-praetorian constitution in which unelected oversight agencies and councils hold the balance of power and the army and the throne are the final arbiters of political acceptability. Thailand may come out looking, at least in the near term, like Turkey up to the 1980s or Fiji today.

The Thai coup, in other words, carries more than a hint of Bertolt Brecht’s “Solution – that, the people having forfeited the military’s confidence, Boonyaratglin decided to dissolve it and elect another. Granted, he is unlikely to do so as literally as Stalin did, but he has evidently concluded that the people – who, after all, elected Thaksin – can’t entirely be trusted with democracy for the time being. Therefore, politics will be banned until the people – or, more specifically, institutions like the legislature and media through which the people expresses its will – are reordered to the military’s satisfaction and the balance between representative and non-representative organs is adjusted. As in Turkey or Fiji, the military doesn’t intend to dissolve the people very often, but it will ensure that their institutions are established in such a way that they don’t risk losing their guardians’ confidence.

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Filed under religion, Thailand

by | 20 September 2006 · 9:55 pm

Bhumibol vs. Thaksin in Thailand

Shawn W. Crispin at Asia Times Online sees the coup in Thailand as an effort by the royalists to take power back from Thaksin, who had waged a long battle to wrest power away from the constitutional monarchy and concentrate it in the executive branch.

The mainstream media have widely misinterpreted the potent but peaceful protests as being galvanized by the Thaksin family’s controversial US$1.9 billion tax-free sale of its 49% holdings in the Shin Corporation to Singapore’s Temasek Holdings. To the contrary, the protests, which were later co-opted by various special-interest groups aligned against the government, were first galvanized and primarily sustained by the explosive claims first made by firebrand media mogul Sondhi Limthongkul that Thaksin was on particular occasions disloyal to the throne….

According to sources familiar with the matter, Thaksin had attempted to elevate Major-General Prin Suwanthat to commander of the 1st Army Division, which crucially is charged with overseeing security in Bangkok. Thaksin also reportedly pushed to promote Prin’s ally, Major-General Daopong Ratanasuwan, to take over the 1st Infantry. With assistant army commander Pornchai Kranlert in place, the reshuffle, if accomplished, would have given Thaksin an unbroken chain of command over crack troops responsible for Bangkok’s security.

Notably, without his allies in the top posts, Thaksin’s order from New York to impose a “severe state of emergency” and remove Sonthi from his position as army commander went unheeded.

Meanwhile, the military has promised to return power to the people as soon as possible, and judging by past royally orchestrated extra-constitutional interventions, it will honor that vow.

Thaksin’s ouster will pave the way for important democratic reforms, which under the military’s and monarchy’s watch will broadly aim to dilute the power of the executive branch, limit the power of large political parties, and strengthen the independent checking and balancing institutions that Thaksin stands accused of undermining.

via LaurenceJarvikOnline

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by | 5 September 2006 · 6:02 pm

Marketing Humanitarianism by Condemnation

Virtually all reports by NGOs [with human rights agendas] are catalogues of cruelties and abuses by governments, and their central campaigning method has been to publish reports that generate press coverage and place international attention on stigmatised governments. The NGOs campaigning against non-Western [and Western] governments see their work as non-political, they just describe abuses and ask the international community to act. In this way, they present human rights as independent of the social, economic or political situation. Many NGOs are concerned that explaining why abuses occur may justify them or give credence to the claims of repressive regimes. If mitigating factors were to be brought into the account this would undermine the mission of seeking immediate compliance with human rights standards. Pressure is brought about by utilising key events or symbols such as a highly publicised massacre, like Srebrenica, or a ‘poster child’ to simplify complex issues for mass audiences.

This association of ethical human rights policies with the denunciation of the crimes or abuses of governments has led to a particularly one-sided perspective focusing on condemnation and punishment. It is assumed that the more ‘ethical’ the government or NGO group is the more forceful will be their calls for sanctions or other forms of punishment. In this respect the human rights campaigners distinguish themselves from the international agencies involved in democracy promotion and democratisation, which tend to see a long process of constructive assistance for reforms as necessary. There is little evidence that condemnation and coercion is a more effective policy option than co-operation. Jeffrey Garten in Foreign Policy asks if human rights activists would deny that US trade links and commercial investment in states like China, India, Indonesia and Brazil have contributed to improved economic opportunities, communication freedoms and better education, health and working conditions. He makes a strong case that ‘the criteria for promoting human rights ought to be not what salves our consciences, but rather what works’. However, the pragmatic ‘what works’ approach seems to be noticeable by its absence in the human rights NGOs’ concern to denounce foreign governments and promote ethical coercion…. Most high-profile human rights actions have involved selective condemnations, sanctions and military intervention; the policies of economic integration and aid have, in fact, suffered and are often seen as inimical to human rights promotion.

Unfortunately, the NGO approach of seeking ‘worst cases’ to highlight their work, through mounting a populist campaign of condemnation, has been willingly followed by Western [and non-Western] governments.

SOURCE: From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond: Human Rights and International Intervention, new ed., by David Chandler (Pluto Press, 2006), pp. 66-67 [reference citations removed]

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Filed under China, Indonesia, NGOs

by | 28 July 2006 · 8:11 pm

Alex Golub on Unfulfilled Consumers in PNG

Another Pacific-area article that caught my fancy is Alex Golub‘s Who Is the “Original Affluent Society”? Ipili “Predatory Expansion” and the Porgera Gold Mine, Papua New Guinea in the latest issue of The Contemporary Pacific at Project Muse (subscription required). Here are a few paragraphs from the introduction and conclusion (some references removed).

In the 1970s, first-world fantasies of “ecologically noble savages” were key to the creation of alliances between indigenous groups, environmentalists, and affluent first-world publics. More recently, however, anthropologists have grown increasingly critical of such stereotypes of indigenous people. In areas as diverse as Amazonia, Australia, North America, and Indonesia, indigenous peoples find their political leverage derives from filling first-world fantasies that are often essentialized and stifling.

This dynamic has taken another interesting twist in Papua New Guinea. Unlike many Commonwealth countries, Papua New Guinea has no settler population, and, unlike many African states, it has no majority ethnic group. Furthermore, Australia’s administration of Papua New Guinea was both well meaning and under-resourced. As a result there has been little alienation of land and it is difficult to recognize Papua New Guineans as “indigenous people” separate from “settler” populations, as is typically done in Australia, Africa, and the New World. At the same time, however, Papua New Guinea is highly reliant on resource rents, and the activities of international logging, mining, and hydrocarbon companies present a picture of a David-and-Goliath struggle between local people and transnational capital that is comfortably familiar to many first-world activists.

Like scholars elsewhere, Melanesianists are increasingly dissatisfied with stereotypes of grassroots Papua New Guineans as ecologically noble savages. A growing literature has, for instance, emphasized the ways in which compensation claims for damage to the environment are part of a complex local politics. Glenn Banks has argued that compensation claims are often a way of expressing a sense of disenfranchisement by people outside of mining lease areas (2002), while Martha Macintyre and Simon Foale have argued convincingly that even for people within mining lease areas, claims of environmental damage are often expressions of dissatisfaction with social concerns couched in environmental idioms (2002).

But there is a danger that these responsible works could be misread by policy elites in Port Moresby, the national capital, who often see landowners as savages more nasty than noble. Papua New Guineans have one of the best track records in the world for extracting concessions from foreign developers and the national government, and the demands of landowners have become so strident that the overall perception nationwide is that they are corrupted opportunists who have given up their traditional culture in order to “go for money” (Filer and others 2000). Thus, at one industry conference in 2000, the president of the Papua New Guinea Chamber of Mining and Petroleum claimed that “people issues are at the forefront of the mining and petroleum industries” in Papua New Guinea. The industry’s biggest challenge, he claimed, were “community problems that could have been avoided” and that were caused by “so-called ‘landowners'” who ripped off the government. “The rip-off is so blatant,” he said, “[that] it penetrates into the fabric of the government” (Golub fieldnotes 2000). Other speakers were more blunt. “Community affairs issues will shut down this country,” said one mining executive, himself from the highlands region (Golub fieldnotes 2000)….

To an audience familiar with stereotypes of noble savages, the reaction of the Ipili to the mine can be startling. Elites in Port Moresby who romanticize a traditional “Melanesian Way” feel betrayed by landowners who fail to conform to their expectations. At the same time, first-world activists interested in finding “guardians of the forest” in Porgera will be disappointed indeed at the alacrity with which the Ipili, as they say, “traded their mountain for development.”

But it may be that the unease the Ipili instill in others is due to the fact that they are driven by concerns remarkably like “our own.” Their desire for new commodities, time-saving devices, and prepared food is in many ways not so different from what one would find in any major city in the United States. Thus it could be said that “they” are not as bad as “we” are, or, to put it another way, that “we” are as good as “they.”

So which is the original affluent society? Just as we see our own weak points in Ipili prodigality, so do Ipili imagine whites, as a version of their present or possible selves. This examination of Ipili culture reveals them to be a bit more like ourselves than we have been led to believe. Sahlins looked to hunters and gatherers to explode the Western, Hobbesian conception of infinite need. Studying the Ipili suggests that the West is not the only place plagued by need and want. Ipili do not denounce consumer society in the name of a pristine, authentic primitivism. They denounce it for failing to make good on its promises. The problem, as they see it, is not enough affluence.

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Filed under Indonesia, Papua New Guinea

by | 19 July 2006 · 10:14 pm

Indonesia Received Tsunami Warnings

Officials in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, failed to issue a tsunami warning despite receiving data about Monday’s earthquake 20 minutes before the first wave struck the island of Java.

One official told the Guardian they were too busy monitoring the aftershocks of the 7.7-magnitude quake that triggered the tsunami to raise the alarm. The government’s science and technology minister, Kusmayanto Kadiman, confirmed last night that Indonesia had received bulletins from the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre in Hawaii and Japan’s meteorological agency after the quake, but “we did not announce them”….

Aerial television footage showed that virtually all the wooden buildings hit by the tsunami were swept away, along with about half the brick structures. Buildings up to half a mile inland were damaged. Some 30,000 people are thought to have fled their homes.

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by | 19 July 2006 · 8:03 pm

Who’s Indigenous in Indonesia?

On 17 July, the Jakarta Post ran an interesting opinion piece by Endy M. Bayumi on what it means to be indigenous in Indonesia. The question arose because Miss Indonesia, Nadine Chandrawinata, doesn’t look sufficiently “indigenous.”

It was a coincidence that around the time she gave this interview, the House of Representatives last week unanimously endorsed the new citizenship bill that cleared up the legal definition of “indigenous”.

The bill defines citizens of this republic as Indonesia asli, or indigenous Indonesians, and it goes on to define “indigenous” not by one’s race or ethnicity, but rather by one’s being born on Indonesian soil, and never having taken up any foreign citizenship….

Prior to this law, Indonesians of Chinese descent — and to a lesser extent those of Arab, European and Indian blood — have had to put up with discriminatory treatment because they were not considered indigenous, although they may have been born here or their families may have been here for many generations….

The term “indigenous” itself is a misnomer.

The Malays in Indonesia may lay claim to being the indigenous people in the western part of the country, but the Melanesians (with a darker complexion) dominate the eastern part of the archipelago. So we have two indigenous groups in this country.

But can the Malays in Sumatra, Java, Kalimantan and Sulawesi truly claim to be Indonesia asli? Shouldn’t that claim belong more to the aborigines, like the Suku Anak Dalam in Jambi and others whose existence is on the verge of extinction?

One theory has it that the Malays currently inhabiting much of mainland Southeast Asia and the archipelago are descendants of people who migrated south down the Mekong River many thousand years ago. [Or ancestral Austronesian speakers came off the south coast of China, or out of Taiwan, down through the Philippines. So what? Malay dialects spread throughout the Indonesian archipelago much more recently—hundreds, not thousands, of years ago—probably spreading with Muslim traders along the coasts and up the major rivers of island Southeast Asia.–J.]

The Malays therefore are not Indonesia asli. But they can claim to be “more indigenous” by being here first, long before the Indians, Arabs, Chinese and Europeans came to this part of the world.

Malaysia, being a federation of sultanates, claims that all land belongs to the rulers, and thus to the indigenous Malay and Muslims. Non-Malays (the Chinese and Indians) are guests of the land and treated as second-class citizens with fewer rights.

Thankfully, Indonesia was a republic from its inception, and the land (and the water between the islands) belongs to the republic and its people, and not to any exclusive race or religious group.

The new citizenship law thus essentially recognizes that we are all indigenous, irrespective of the color of our skin, the language we speak, or the religion we follow.

This land is our land. If some of us want to claim to be more indigenous than others, let them be, but don’t expect the law to treat them differently.

And as for Nadine, she has as much right to represent Indonesia at Miss Universe 2006 as anyone else who is an Indonesian by blood and by law.

I don’t care at all about Miss Indonesia, but the new citizenship law sounds like a good thing.

via Colby Cosh

My favorite restaurant in Indonesia’s Ambon City during my academic junket in 1991 was named Pondok Asli, a place fancy enough to be translated Maison d’Indigènes rather than Native Hut. It was destroyed, like most of urban Ambon, after the Laskar Jihad invaded in 2000. Our Fulbright group tour was housed with host families in Poka and Rumah Tiga, near Pattimura University, which was also utterly destroyed by foreign jihadis. I’m not sure how many of our host families were slaughtered in the process. I have fond memories of eastern Indonesia, whether Muslim or Christian, but I scorn anyone who tries to make excuses for the jihadis.

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by | 27 May 2006 · 9:26 pm

Burma: Once Wealthy, Now Wasteland. Why?

While I was in Katha I went to visit a woman who is the guardian of one of Burma’s many secret histories…. ‘We historians must keep our mouths tightly shut,’ she said as she bolted the door and motioned me to a seat…. Tin Tin Lay used to work as a history professor in Rangoon University,… She now sat down opposite me and asked, ‘What is it you want to know?’

Before the Second World War, Burma was one of the richest countries in the region. Any economist comparing it with other countries in Asia would have thought it safe to wager that it would develop one of the region’s most successful economies. Since then, civil wars have raged across Burma’s border areas, taking an infinite toll on lives and natural resources, and the military regime has outlasted almost all other dictatorships around the world. How, I wanted to know, had the fertile ground of Burmese Days evolved so quickly into the wasteland of Nineteen Eighty-Four?

Tin Tin Lay blames all Burma’s woes on a streak of authoritarianism that she believes runs through Burmese society. Before the British arrived in Burma the country was ruled by an absolute monarchy. ‘We Burmese spent eight centuries living under these all-powerful monarchs,’ she said. ‘A Burmese king could kill you or destroy you or arrest you whenever he wanted.’ As a result, she argued, the Burmese have become conditioned to authoritarian rule. ‘We are trained to listen to our elders, she said. ‘We are trained to obey.’ In other words, the Burmese have a psychological receptiveness to authoritarian government.

I had heard this controversial theory before. It was set out in a famous essay published in the early 1960s by the late Maung Maung Gyi, who had a doctorate from Yale University. He wrote about the despotic nature of Burmese kings, who were traditionally extolled as Thet-oo Hsanbaing Mintayagyi, which means ‘The Great Owner of Life, Head and Hair of His Subjects’, or a more succinct title could be used: Bawa-Shin Min-Taya, meaning ‘The Arbiter of Existence’. Because there was no consistent law of primogeniture, the history of Burmese kingdoms is drenched in bloodshed…. The large number of rivals and challenges to the throne led to brutal massacres not only of the challengers themselves, but also of their families. The people lived at the whim of these great Arbiters of Existence; whole villages could be turned into slave markets, or be burned to cinders for harbouring dissenters. The result, wrote Maung Maung Gyi, can be seen in a Burmese proverb that says there are four things in life which cannot be trusted: a thief, the bough of a tree, a woman and a ruler. The Burmese thought-pattern had become adapted to the idea of a government as something oppressive and evil. The Burmese came to believe that misrule was an inevitability of governance. This psychological legacy has taught them that it is futile to stand up against a bad ruler, no matter how bad things get.

It is a theory that Tin Tin Lay would never be able to discuss in public, unless she wanted to provoke the ire of the military junta (not to mention the many Burmese who would disagree with her). ‘The views are unpopular – I know they are,’ she told me. ‘But there is a truth to them. Look at us. Here we are, suffering. Suffering under our own people. Year after year we are made poorer. Year after year we become more downtrodden. The government runs free, robbing, looting and raping us. Why?’ She repeated her question, more sharply: ‘Why?’

I suggested a more accepted explanation of how authoritarianism was able to take root in Burma: it was the fault of the British. When the British took over Burma, they destroyed all the country’s traditional institutions of government – the monarchy, the monkhood, the central administration. They deported the king, who was the linchpin of the country’s administration and religious systems, keeping him until his death under careful guard in exile in India. And they practiced a system of divide and rule among the ethnic minorities. This system was unsustainable without the British, and, when it crumpled in on itself after they left, the Burmese army stepped in to quell the ensuing chaos.

Tin Tin Lay looked at me with absolute disdain…. ‘The British,’ she said, brought us democracy. It was the first time we had tasted it. We had never even heard of it before the British came, and we were not ready for it. I am ashamed of the Burmese people. I am ashamed of Burma and I am sad for the Burmese. We are very, very ignorant. We are always looking for someone to blame, so we blame the British.’

SOURCE: Secret Histories: Finding George Orwell in a Burmese Teashop, by Emma Larkin (John Murray, 2005), pp. 203-205

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by | 24 May 2006 · 4:32 pm

Animal Farm in Burma

Animal Farm was unpopular in Burma when it was first published there in the 1950s. Many of the leading intellectuals at the time had leftist leanings and read it as a criticism of the socialism they admired. When the US Embassy printed excerpts as anti-Communist propaganda, the book’s fate was sealed. The society which had sponsored the translation had to give away remaindered copies. But years later, when people began to reread it, they saw similarities to their own history. I met one university lecturer who told me she had tried to put Animal Farm on the syllabus for English-literature students, but the authorities had warned her off: the text was just too similar to what was going on in Burma. A few years ago Animal Farm was serialized on the BBC’s Burmese radio service. For weeks afterwards, Tun Lin told me, Mandalay tea shops were abuzz with attempts to match the animal characters to Burma’s own leaders. Could you compare ‘the Lady’, as democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi is known, to the exiled porcine revolutionary Snowball? And which pig was General Ne Win? Was he Major, the imperious old pig with a vision who died so suddenly? (Hopefully.) Or was he Napoleon, the grotesque ruler who grew stronger and more deranged each day? (Probably.)

Ne Win was perhaps a bit of both. He was a famously reclusive leader, known for his foul mouth, many marriages and obsessive superstition. It was his dabblings with numerology that had the most dramatic consequences for Burma. In 1987 Ne Win demonetized certain banknotes, replacing them with new notes with denominations of 45 kyat and 90 kyat – each value neatly divisible by nine (an astrologically auspicious number, and the general’s favourite). People’s already paltry savings were wiped out overnight and, with little to lose, a year later they took to the streets in the 1988 uprising.

SOURCE: Secret Histories: Finding George Orwell in a Burmese Teashop, by Emma Larkin (John Murray, 2005), pp. 89-90

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