For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question (20 page)

IT WASN’T
like the Karen were the only people suffering severely in Burma. After Ne Win got back from golfing with US diplomats in Hawaii, he subjected the whole population to increasingly crushing oppression. His junta was like a rightfully insecure boyfriend; it knew it wasn’t good enough, and so knew only how to be paranoid and controlling. The policies of isolationism enacted within months of the coup prevailed for decades. The government was (not surprisingly) intensely nationalist protectionist, Western- and ethnic-insurgent-hating, with a capability for militarism that matched its vast legacy of it. The only sanctioned literature included such classics as
Cruel and Vicious Repression of Myanmar Peoples by Imperialists and Fascists and the True Story about the Plunder of the Royal Jewels
, published by the media group of the Committee for Propaganda and Agitation to Intensify Patriotism. There was no TV until 1980. Under the Burmese Way to Socialism, farmers were forced to sell grain on the cheap to the government, which in turn sold it to export or the black market. Unless they wanted to buy their rice back off the black market for ten times what they’d sold it for, the farmers got to eat whatever crap was left over. A disincentivized agrarian class turned what had been, before World War II, the world’s largest exporter of rice
into a net importer.
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Meanwhile, Ne Win had gotten those plundered royal jewels he’d been so concerned about back from England’s Victoria and Albert Museum. Though they were supposedly held in Rangoon’s National Museum, the rumor was that the ones on display were fake, the real ones taken by Ne Win, so he could prance around his house in them, I guess.

In the mid-’80s, the economic policies of Ne Win, who was no economist, became even more crippling. One day, the government suddenly demonetized bills of ten, fifty, and one hundred kyat, the Burmese currency, rendering most of people’s cash savings—even the cash in their pockets—instantly worthless. The seventy-five-year-old Ne Win replaced them with seventy-five-kyat and thirty-five-kyat notes. Within just a couple of years, both those just-introduced bills were demonetized and replaced with denominations of forty-five and ninety: numbers whose digits added up to and were divisible by superstitious Ne Win’s lucky number nine.
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Up to 80 percent of the country’s currency was completely useless. Those who’d managed to wring any more savings out of the dismal economy since the previous demonetization lost them again. This alone would seem to be enough to put an end to the population’s civility. Then, a few months later, some students got into a tea-shop brawl with locals—including a high-ranking official’s son. When the
locals were not held accountable for beating the shit out of the kids, students were ready to demonstrate. When several students were killed during those demonstrations, people rioted.

The British, remember, had dealt with their protesters fifty years earlier by opening fire.
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Ah, precedent. In March 1988, a few days after the tea-shop incident, unarmed protesters in Rangoon took to the streets. They were shot at. Boys and girls alike were clubbed to death. Students were chased into a nearby lake, where many drowned. Several dozen student activists died of suffocation in a police van. The government shut down all the universities. As the weeks passed, the hot, broke, and restive Burmese became increasingly angry. The price of food went up prohibitively. In June, thousands of people poured into the streets around the country. The radio reported that students were being killed, but the demands for a revolution continued.

In late July 1988, Ne Win did something astounding. In a televised speech, he lamented the lack of trust in the government and said that, clearly, elections would have to be held. Burma hadn’t had elections in three decades, and last time they’d led to Ne Win’s coup. He called for a multiparty government, which was surprising, since at the time Burma had a one-party system made up of only his Burma Socialist Programme Party, and he was the one who’d made all the other political parties illegal. Though it seemed like good news at first, it wasn’t, exactly.

But wait. There was more. He later appointed as his successor Sein Lwin, the one who’d ordered the attacks on the protesters in the first place—the guy people called The Butcher. It was like a really extreme version of George W. Bush resigning at some point in his presidency and telling rioting American liberals to calm down, everything’s cool, because Dick Cheney would be in charge now.

This was not what the people were gunning for, which was the resignation of the whole horrible government. At the astrologically auspicious moment of eight past eight in the morning on August 8, 1988, Rangoon dockworkers went on strike. Tens of thousands of Burmese throughout the country marched, hollering for democracy, crowding the streets of every major city, without interference from the regime. All day, people cheered and gave speeches. Then, around midnight, the military/government, which had no interest in giving up power as the people demanded, cut the electricity, drove in tanks and trucks, and opened fire, shooting, as promised, to hit.

For five days, the death toll climbed as neither soldiers nor increasingly incensed civilians stood down. When a group of doctors and nurses at Rangoon General Hospital called for the army to stop shooting people, it shot at them. Rumors circulated that the army was tossing bodies of the wounded into the incinerators along with the dead. On August 13, in an apparent bid to restore order, the army withdrew and Sein Lwin resigned. But the people were fired up.

“It is hard to describe the thrill people felt in finding their voices for the first time, in being able to speak out,” Pascal Khoo Thwe wrote in his memoir. And it’s hard to understand for anyone raised with free speech and institutional encouragement to think and argue for herself. Infrastructure was at a standstill as workers walked out of their jobs punch-drunk and giddy with their new
liberties: the freedom to get together and talk about whatever they wanted. In late August, a massive crowd that had gathered on a slope of the Shwedagon Pagoda was addressed by a slight but steady woman. She was Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of Aung San, and many thousands—tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, they say!—of people listened to her call for a democratic government, though she’d never been involved in politics. “I could not, as my father’s daughter, remain indifferent to all that was going on. This national crisis could, in fact, be called the second struggle for independence.”

The protests didn’t end until six weeks had passed. Survivors and state radio reported hundreds killed. Doctors in Rangoon claimed wildly that three thousand unarmed civilians had been murdered on August 8 alone. The government was “overthrown” in a coup, which was generally believed to have been staged by a behind-the-scenes Ne Win. It got a new, heartwarming name: the State Law and Order Restoration Council. (It adopted its current name, the much friendlier-sounding State Peace and Development Council, in 1997.
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) The new government announced that it would hold elections, but nothing changed. Though 234 parties registered, their campaigning was rigorously restricted. They could choose their insignia only from a preapproved list, which included tennis rackets and beach balls. Hundreds of political activists were in jail. Aung San Suu Kyi was locked under house arrest. Still, when the elections finally took place, in May 1990, two-thirds of those eligible to vote did. The National
League for Democracy, Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, won 60 percent of that vote, and the majority of the seats in parliament. The people had called the government’s election bluff by voting against it.

“Don’t gamble with the Burmans,” warned the
Handbook of Burma and Northeastern India
put out by the US Army Air Forces Tactical Center in 1944—“they’re poor losers.” Indeed, like a rebuffed petulant child, the regime simply refused to give up its property, declared the elections invalid, and locked itself in power, which it retains to this day. In the meantime, it has cracked down harder than ever on its citizenry. There’s the Printers and Publishers Registration Law, which requires that all printed material—magazine, hand-lettered flyer, whatever—pass the inspection of the Press Scrutiny and Registration Division of the Ministry of Information before publication. Verboten is the distribution, in any medium, of any information that is unfriendly to the state, the state ideology, members of state government, the state of state government, the state socialism program, the state of the economy, or the state of the union (plus Internet porn). BBC and Voice of America radio broadcasts have been jammed. CNN has been blacked out. Universities have been shut down regularly, for long periods of time; when open, students might be forced to do their classes at satellite locations to keep them from congregating on main campuses. Aung San Suu Kyi has largely been kept under house arrest, despite having won the Nobel Peace Prize the year after the elections; one of the two times she was let out, a mob of government-backed goons attacked a convoy carrying her through the street and beat some of her supporters and colleagues to death—up to a hundred, they say!—though she escaped; though only to be arrested again; she was still incarcerated when I arrived in Mae Sot. And there has been, of course, an expansion of the military, requisite to keeping the mean peace. There were 200,000 Burma armed forces soldiers before the 1988 uprisings. By 1996, there were twice as many.

The Burma army did need all the troops it could get in the days following the ’88 protests; the countrywide rebellion wasn’t the only
fight in town. The ethnic groups in the eastern hills were still at work on their armed revolution. Thousands of the student demonstrators joined the Karen, fleeing for days, weeks through the jungle to their territory, arriving at encampments with signs saying things like “Welcome to the Karenni Liberated Zone: you will possess our land only over our corpses.” The primarily Burman protesters formed the All Burma Students Democratic Front at mighty Manerplaw and became an armed resistance, the Karen rebels teaching the students jungle warfare and fighting alongside them as the army came in hot pursuit, battling face-to-face, old school, the government using unarmed captured civilians as human shields. Between firefights, the authorities spoke to the protesters via state radio, urging them to come home. Like diabolical stepparents in a fairy tale, they baited the students with sweet entreaties over the airwaves: “Come back, children, we still welcome you with open arms. ...” Those who turned themselves in disappeared. Government aircraft dropped leaflets on the bases, some claiming the exiles would be safe if they just went home, some saying they would be bombed in their hiding spots if they didn’t.

The rumor and lifeline of hope among the Burmese hiding in the jungle with the battle-hardened Karen was that Americans were coming with arms and Special Forces soldiers and battleships. When they didn’t, the KNU tried nevertheless to seize the day, calling a conference with the sudden, unexpected, and welcome allies, but the seventy student representatives were incapable of constructive dialogue. Pascal Khoo Thwe, who was present, blamed their lack of any model but the regime, which had taught them only to be defensive and uncompromising. The students went back home, or to another country to live in exile, having grown tired of waiting at the border for Western reinforcements to help take Rangoon, leaving the Karen back to fending for and waiting by themselves.

It was just as well that the Burman students gave up: The enormous demonstrations and ensuing murders and unfair fights were barely covered in the United States. Amnesty International released some
literature that nobody really read (and that the Burmese state media dismissed as “fabrications” that “emanated from jealousy against establishment of a peaceful and prosperous socialist state”). The United States wasn’t going to take any significant action against the regime, and then only some pretty questionable action, for years.

ABBY AND
I agreed that the next person to remind us not to consort with Burmese spies got punched in the face.

I was, like all Americans without a visa, authorized to stay in Thailand for only thirty days. But since Burma was such a short jaunt away, I could do a border run and reenter Thailand with a fresh, thirty-extra-day-allowing stamp. I prevailed on Abby, who didn’t need to leave the country, who had responsibly paid for and received her extended tourism visa before she left the States, to go with me anyway. The night before we left, Saturday night, the night after we got drunk on Friday night, we got drunk again, to the sounds of our coworkers badgering us to keep quiet about their whereabouts and ethnicity.

“Do not give any information,” The Blay said for the eleventh time while we drank Chang, again, out of coffee cups, again. His had a drawing of a teddy bear and some German words on it. Mine featured a cartoon middle-aged white man in a cape and said SUPER DAD. This time, I asked someone where they’d gotten all these mugs. No one knew. This time, we were sitting on the floor of The Blay’s room instead of at the picnic table. He stored a few proper glasses on a shelf in here, he showed us, but there wasn’t enough company worth taking them out for. Ta Mla was drinking, but just for the
moment; by ten, he was back at work at his computer. Htan Dah’s kid had joined us and was already totally blotto, but shared a cup with his dad. Eh Soe had disappeared—not that he’d have been much of a conversationalist anyway. That morning, in response to a simple question, my hungover roommate had answered me with entirely nonsensical English and, when I asked him to repeat himself, tried again, and then again, before quitting and saying, “I have a very terrible headache.”