Living Silence in Burma (36 page)

There have been serious setbacks as well, however. In late 2003, the regime banned Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights, from visiting Burma after he found a listening device in the room where he was interviewing political prisoners and spoke out angrily about it. He was not allowed back into the country until 2007. In 2005, the regime insisted that ICRC staff be accompanied by USDA members when making prison visits. Such accompaniment violates ICRC principles, so as of December 2005, the ICRC stopped making prison
visits. Since then, prisoners have continued to suffer from a lack of access to proper medical examinations and treatment. Beatings and other forms of torture are still used in prisons, and conditions in the labour camps remain particularly harsh. Criminal prisoners whose families can provide money can use bribes to ease their conditions, but those who are poor suffer terribly.

Release

Once political prisoners are released, their lives are never the same. They and their family members are followed, treated with suspicion and hassled. In some cases, former political prisoners’ families even turn against them. Although they have been freed from physical confinement, they often find themselves socially isolated.

Moe Aye talked about how lonely he felt after his release. As the only person from his village to have served a long prison sentence, he was the subject of intense gossip. He had to report to the MI regularly, and he couldn’t meet his old friends because he was under surveillance. Although his family said to him in private that they were proud of him, in public they told everyone that he was bad and they couldn’t control him.

Moe Aye recalled how difficult it was to reintegrate into his family. His first night home, his mother was so happy about his return that she had made many kinds of curry to celebrate. But he said he couldn’t eat. ‘I at once remembered my friends in prison, and I wanted to pack up the food and send it to them. For over one month I couldn’t eat very well.’

The local military intelligence agents warned Moe Aye to stay away from all political groups, and especially from the township NLD. He agreed to comply, but the agents had their informers checking on him constantly. This worried his mother. When he went to a hospital in another town for medical treatment, an intelligence agent there approached him and demanded to know why he had come without reporting to the MI officer in his township first. Moe Aye told him that he had been ordered only to stay away from the NLD and going to the hospital had nothing to do with politics. The intelligence officer let him go, but Moe Aye found the experience upsetting. The tension increased during the December 1996 student demonstrations in Rangoon. Three policemen were posted outside his house and kept a constant watch on him. Although the policemen were friends of his, Moe Aye realized he could be rearrested at any time, and the stress was taking a toll on his mother.

Min Thein, another student who spent four years in prison in the early 1990s, faced similar problems. After his release, his friends were
reluctant to sit and talk to him in a tea shop, and some even tried to persuade him to give up politics. When he visited his friends’ houses, their parents treated him coldly. They were worried that Min Thein might try to recruit their children for anti-government activities.

Some former political prisoners wash their hands of politics and look for jobs in the private sector. Others try to contribute to society through teaching or writing. To avoid rearrest or relieve pressure on their families, a number of former political prisoners go into exile. Moe Aye, for instance, ended up in Norway, working for the Democratic Voice of Burma. Some other former political prisoners, such as several of the leaders of the 88 Students Generation Group, return to activism. Although they know the risks involved, and many indeed end up back in prison, they are unwilling to live their lives in any other way.

In conclusion, then, prison in Burma remains a grim place, where people are broken down physically and mentally. Yet some political prisoners manage to keep their spirits free and, once released, refuse to live in silence.

10 | Education: floating books and bathroom tracts

    Education gives you confidence in yourself and strength to make decisions. The more people are uneducated, the more you can keep them down. (A Burmese educator)

In the late 1940s and 1950s, Burma boasted one of the highest literacy rates in Asia and an expanding educational system. It has been devastating for educated parents to see their children growing up far less knowledgeable than they. The military regime has placed a low priority on education for several reasons. First, they fear that the more people are educated, the more likely they are to mount serious challenges to military rule. Second, the top generals are not highly educated themselves, and often resent better-educated people. And third, with limited funds at hand, they have funnelled resources into expanding and equipping the army rather than the schools. Since the 1990s, government spending on education has declined as a percentage of GDP, despite the fact that it was already extremely low compared to other countries.
¹

While the number of schools and primary teachers has increased, schools are generally run down and lacking even the most basic equipment. There are a few showcase schools in the cities with computers and other technology, but these are by far the exception. In most areas, so little money is provided that many schools levy an annual tax on students, along with various other fees throughout the year (such as table, water pot and maintenance fees), to keep the school running.
²
There are rarely enough textbooks available, so students who do not receive books in the classroom must buy photocopied versions, at a much higher price, on the black market. On top of this, parents must purchase uniforms for their children. Many families cannot afford all these expenses, and their children end up spending little or no time in school.

Starting in the 1990s, monks began trying to address this problem by opening up free primary schools at their monasteries. They hire teachers to teach the government curriculum as well as Buddhism, and the schools are supported by donations to the temple. In 2007, as many as 180,000 children were attending monastery schools, but the authorities have been very reluctant to allow the monasteries to expand beyond the primary level.
³

According to UNICEF, in 2008, of the 80 per cent of children who enrol in primary school, less than 55 per cent actually finish.
⁴
Particularly in rural areas, parents often need their children to help them with farm work and household chores, including taking care of younger siblings. Many parents feel that a few years of education will not help their children get a job anyway. Indeed, the primary education curriculum focuses on memorizing facts and preparing for secondary school rather than giving children life skills and the ability to think.
⁵

For those who do attend school, poverty and malnutrition also affect their performance. A primary school teacher in Karen State in the 1970s and 1980s talked about how the parents of one of his students told him to punish their son if he did not behave in class. In fact, the child had a hard time concentrating, because, as the teacher found out, his parents were unable to feed him before he came to school in the morning. The child was too hungry to pay attention. This remains a problem today, as indicated by UNICEF figures, which state that one-third of children under five are moderately or severely stunted and underweight because of malnutrition.
⁶

The curriculum

Every government uses its education system to try to inculcate certain attitudes in the minds of the country’s youth. In Burma, successive military regimes have asserted central control over the development of the curriculum to promote loyalty to the regime. Government textbooks, reinforcing the regime’s propaganda in the state-controlled media, stress the honour of the military and the necessity of continued military rule to maintain the country’s political stability.

In primary and secondary education, teachers and even headmasters have no input in curriculum development and cannot deviate from the textbooks in their teaching. As one former headmaster explained, designing the curriculum was a top-down process, with teachers not allowed to make criticisms or give suggestions. The instructors merely had to follow it.

In the mid-1960s, General Ne Win ordered that English no longer be used as a medium of instruction. English was linked to colonial rule, and true nationalists were supposed to speak in Burmese only. Many educated parents, who spoke beautiful English from their days in school, were anguished by this policy. They realized that fluency in English was essential to integrating with the global economy and keeping up with outside ideological currents. Nevertheless, some high-school and
university students absorbed the government’s propaganda and mocked friends who used English words in conversation. It was not until 1979, when General Ne Win’s daughter failed her entrance exam into a British medical school because of her poor English, that teaching in English was reinstated.
⁷
Still, English teaching in Burma today tends to be inferior to what it was in the past, because so few fluent teachers remain.

Rewriting history has been a key project for the regime. Since Aung San Suu Kyi’s rise in political importance in 1988, for instance, the military people in charge of textbook production have downplayed the role of General Aung San and focused instead on the need for military leadership to hold the country together. General Aung San was a military leader, but he later resigned in order to enter democratic politics as a civilian. In the past, the regime emphasized General Aung San’s role as founder of the army, but Aung San Suu Kyi has argued that General Aung San never intended for the army to oppress the Burmese people. In the past, schools hung pictures of General Aung San as an inspiration to students, but with Than Shwe’s rise to power, schools have been required to hang his picture instead (or in addition to Aung San’s). In 2008, a speech by General Aung San was removed from the high-school history curriculum, as were writings by Thakin Kodaw Hmaing, a revered literary figure and a strong advocate of peace and national reconciliation.
⁸
The regime is more interested in promoting the history of Burmese warrior kings, as evidenced by the construction in Naypyidaw of towering statues of the three great imperializing kings from the past.

Kyaw Moe, a former high-school teacher, worries about the implications of the government’s educational policies on students. He realizes that they will grow up thinking that their teachers have taught them ‘the facts’, when in fact they are being given large doses of propaganda. He found teaching history and economics the most difficult, because the gap between the textbooks and reality was so wide.

Another teacher agreed but said he did not have any ideas about how to change the educational system. ‘We had only one system that we knew,’ he said. ‘If we had had a chance to see books about other systems, about which education system is good, we could have compared. But we had no books.’

Since the regime acceded to the UN’s Convention on Child Rights in 1991, the generals have been required to report periodically to the convention’s monitoring committee. The rights include the right to a free education, the right not to have to perform any type of labour that would be dangerous or disrupt children’s schooling, and the right to social
welfare assistance. Countries that agree to follow the convention are also supposed to make the rights in the convention known to their citizens. To show they are working to implement the rights in the convention, the authorities agreed to UNICEF’s suggestion that information about child rights be put in the national curriculum. While children now have a chance to learn something about child rights, the authorities have done little else to ensure that children’s rights are respected.

One thing the regime is willing to spend money on is government-run courses for teachers. Under the SLORC and SPDC regimes, as well as in the BSPP days, teachers attending teacher training and refresher courses have been taught military drills, techniques for monitoring students, and political ideology. Such courses are used to weed out or dampen the spirits of independent-minded teachers and to instruct them in how to inculcate the regime’s propaganda.
⁹

Kyaw Moe attended such a three-month course in the early 1970s before becoming a high-school teacher. He said the instructors taught them how to control and indoctrinate their students. His group was told: ‘Your students’ ideology only depends on you, the teachers. If your students get bad ideas, it is because of you, so you must think of the students as clean toys which you can form as you like.’

When I asked Kyaw Moe how he felt about this, he said, ‘There was a great storm in my heart and in my mind. But what could I do at that time? I had a family.’ But several years later, during the election period, he joined the NLD and offered an alternative education to certain students who were also NLD members. He says that in his private classes, he and his students spent far more time discussing politics than lessons. But in school he didn’t dare to deviate from the curriculum. If he were arrested, he feared his family would not be able to make ends meet.

Even primary-school teachers, it seems, must be on guard and engage in political indoctrination efforts. At the closing ceremony of a refresher course for primary-school teachers in 2006, then Secretary-1 and Chairman of the Myanmar Education Committee, Lieutenant General Thein Sein, asserted:

    The saboteurs who oppose national development are trying to destroy national unity and peace and stability. They are systematically hatching plots to revive racism, and ideological and sectarian differences. Teachers will have to organize the people to clearly see the perpetration of the saboteurs and to ward it off with Union Spirit.
¹⁰