For a half century nobody has paid much attention to Burma. Even geographers yawned when the thugs running the place renamed it Mayanmar.
It’s not that Burma couldn’t be important. In pre-World War II days, as a thriving British colony, it was a breadbasket for Asia and Africa, the world’s largest rice exporter, an important oil producer.
Even with hindsight, it‘s hard to reconstruct how things could have gone so bad. There was colonial bitterness – intensified by the role Overseas Chinese and Indians played in the system. [If you haven’t read George Orwell’s “Burmese Days”, do so immediately!] Incredibly bitter fighting between the British and the Japanese [aided by Subhas Chandra Bose’ anti-British Indian National Army and Burmese nationalist guerrillas] was followed by postwar anarchy.
It has been downhill ever since. Slowly, as bushes grew out of the facades of old colonial bank buildings, Rangoon slid backwards But just as the late 18th century mad kings opened the gates for British Indian domination, a military dictator, Ne Win, “Brilliant as the Sun”, of doubtful sanity held sway. [He beat an underling to death with a golf club on a Rangoon course in a fit of rage.] When his psychiatrist died in Vienna, only half jokingly we predicted, with his annual visit no longer possible, the end was near. Ditto when his lovely, sometinmes mollifying, Euraisian wife, Kitty, preceded him to the grave.
How to explain a whole society mesmerized by a madman? Ask the Russians or the Germans.
Ne Win continued with absurd strategies, one more idiotic than the next on “the Burmese Road to Socialism”. Burma may not be more cursed than a dozen other places around the globe, but Ne Win’s unusual long life and his mysterious hold on the minds of the benighted military is one of the great psychomysteries.
So Burma’s 50 million people just slipped from the world’s ken. Nothing so dramatic as an iron curtain but officials incredible performance if one wangled a 24-hour tourist visa was something for a post-colonial British novel [The Tribe which Lost its Head, perhaps?]
Oh! There have been moments for its neighbors: the rape of teak forests for Thai furniture makers, smuggling of fantastic jewels [jade] as far as Hong Kong, countertrade of arms for rebel Naga tribesmen in northeast India, and opium – once the province of renegade Chinese Nationalist remnants in the Golden Triangle of Burma’s Shan states, northern Thailand, and Laos. In an attempt at modern “technology”, the military dope peddlers flooded Thailand with cheap amphetamines. A freebooting American oil company put together the thugs and corrupt Thai police for a gas pipeline deal.
But in 2002 Ne Win’s offspring mangled a plot for dynastic succession, followed by the old vulture’s death after 44 years of virtually absolute rule. He was cremated just hours later; no senior military, no official announcement; a simple obituary did not mention Win's rule.
But his ghost has not been exorcised. Despite reform announcements, continual UN missions and luminaries’ visits, the madness continues. A few months ago, apparently resulting from soothsayers’ warnings, the government hided itself off to a new jungle redoubt without preparation. A “reformist” general suddenly was dumped with little more than complicated speculation among the thriving Burmese expatriate colony in booming Bangkok.
Why then bring up the whole subject?
Because there is a moral. One of those arcane Washington Inside-the-Beltway debates is raging among the realists [those who opposed the Iraq war], the Wilsonians [those who believe democracy must solve the Mideast problems], and those in between, all across the chessboard.
The case of Burma proves, alas!, the choices are not all that neat.
Washington has, from time to time, taken up the cudgels; enforced sanctions after the thugs murdered opposition leaders and put their leader Aung San Su Kyi, daughter of the notorious founding father, in virtual total confinement. Idealism? Rangoon’s neighbors, Association of South East Asian Nations, have admitted Myanmar, sent mission after mission to Rangoon to plead for reform. Result: zilch. If it’s good cop, bad cop, it ain’t working.
But does it matter to the rest of the world? It turns out it just might. Word now comes Rangoon incompetence is totally incapable of controlling an epidemic of avian flu. Some international medical experts are saying Burma, with a large migratory bird traffic, could become the black hole of the disease. Either through a cover-up or a lack of monitoring in remote or rebel-run areas the disease will remain undetected for long enough to mutate, "go human" and unleash a killer flu pandemic on the world.
Meanwhile, in early April comes word Myanmar troops, trying to stamp out the decades-long rebellion by the Karen, have beheaded civilians, raped women, and torched villages in an offensive which has forced 1,000 refugees to flee into Thailand and thousands of others to hide in the jungles.
Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net),
is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent
for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International.
He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.
