Living Silence in Burma (47 page)

Two years later, in June 1998, strange occurrences were reported at Myenigone junction, not far from the former cemetery. Myenigone was also where, on 21 June 1988, dozens of people were killed during an anti-government demonstration. Suddenly, on the tenth anniversary, a poltergeist was reported at the location. Plates and cups were said to have risen off tables in a tea shop, and televisions were levitating and smashing into each other in a nearby appliance store. One person even reported turning on a TV and seeing an image of blood. It was believed that the spirits of those killed in 1988 were coming back to haunt the regime.

Dismayed by this attack from an unexpected quarter, the Rangoon divisional commander hurried to the scene, where he read out an announcement telling the spirits that they had been released from their duties on earth and could move on. Such announcements are customarily read at funerals in Burma. People in the area held their own ceremonies, inviting monks to come and recite chants to drive away the spirits. While one such ceremony was taking place, it was said that donated juice bottles started moving and smashed into each other. Police and soldiers were sent to block off the area and disperse the huge crowd. In the state-sponsored
Kyemon
newspaper, an editorial accused political groups of spreading false rumours about poltergeists to stir up trouble.
²²

After a few days the situation calmed down, and the regime was able to breathe more easily again. It is exactly this kind of incident, however, which reminds the military that their hold on power is always tenuous and challenges will continue to appear, if not in the form of direct confrontations then through unexpected and even bizarre occurrences. For, ultimately, the battle to shift the balance of power in Burma is a psychological one. When the supporters of democracy feel that powerful forces are aligned with them, they may shake off their fear and act, but because psychic aspects play such a key role, nobody can predict when.

13 | The internationalization of Burma’s politics

The international community’s various dealings with Burma have been as politicized and complex as Burma’s internal dynamics. After 1988, both the regime and the pro-democracy movement looked abroad for support and legitimacy. The regime sought military aid, foreign investment and membership in regional groupings, while Aung San Suu Kyi and other democracy activists urged the international community to do more to bring about a resolution of Burma’s political crisis. Several kinds of international actors have interacted with Burmese political forces, including foreign governments and international political bodies, foreign companies, international NGOs and Burmese exiles and Burma support groups. This chapter considers the policies of various governments and other actors towards Burma and some of the debates that have arisen about foreign involvement in Burma.

Neighbouring countries’ relations with Burma

While the military regime, the pro-democracy groups and the ethnic nationalist organizations looked to other governments for support, foreign governments adopted policies towards Burma which reflected a mix of self-interest, pragmatism and moral imperatives. In the case of Burma’s neighbouring countries, policies changed dramatically as new opportunities emerged in Burma.

Thus, in the mid-1960s and 1970s, China strongly supported the Communist Party of Burma, but in the 1990s the Beijing government became the regime’s strongest ally. After the 1988 coup, Burma’s military junta was ostracized by most governments, with many initially refusing to recognize the SLORC. The generals in Rangoon were, however, able to turn to China for critical military support. Between 1990 and 1997, China furnished as much as 3 billion dollars’ worth of military equipment to the
tatmadaw
.
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Besides fighter aircraft, tanks and artillery, China sold Burma radar, signals intelligence equipment and electronic warfare equipment.
²
The Chinese armed forces also provided training for Burma’s armed forces. Although some of the Chinese equipment was of poor quality and malfunctioned, the
tatmadaw
was able to boost its capacity significantly.

China assisted Burma’s military in return for access to intelligence information. China was eager to keep an eye on India’s military activities as well as to monitor shipping in the Indian Ocean and through the Straits of Malacca.
³
China also looked to Burma as a market for Chinese goods and an important trade route to the Indian subcontinent and the Indian Ocean. As a result, the Chinese invested in the development of ports, roads, bridges and factories in Burma.
⁴
Chinese consumer goods flooded Burma’s markets, and as opportunities for making money expanded, the presence of Chinese in northern Burma grew rapidly, particularly in Mandalay and other towns.
⁵
Chinese companies from Yunnan Province have also been active in logging and mining in northern Burma. In the early 2000s, China’s interests in Burma expanded to include oil and gas exploration and the planned development of pipelines to bring Burmese and Middle Eastern oil and natural gas up through Burma to landlocked south-western China.
⁶

China has also been an important ally for Burma in international forums such as the United Nations, because it too opposes foreign demands to improve domestic human rights records. Nevertheless, China has its concerns with the regime as well. First, China wants to see stability along the China–Burma border and therefore would like to see the relations between the ethnic resistance groups in northern Burma and the regime improve. They are concerned that the ceasefires could break down and fighting could resume, which would have spillover effects for China. Second, the Chinese government is frustrated with the regime’s gross economic mismanagement, which adversely affects Chinese business interests in the country. China sees economic development in Burma as key to raising prosperity in south-western China. Third, the Chinese government has been very concerned about the amount of heroin coming from Burma. Not only have drug addiction rates increased, but because the heroin addicts frequently share needles, HIV/AIDS infections have also spread.
⁷
The United Wa State Army, one of the main trafficking groups, came under pressure from China as well as the regime and banned the production of opium by farmers in its territory in 2005. Nevertheless, heroin trafficking continues to a lesser degree, as does the trafficking of amphetamines.
⁸

Despite the Chinese government’s concerns with the Burmese regime, Chinese leaders have perceived continued military rule as better than having a pro-West democratic government in control. They see Aung San Suu Kyi, the NLD and other democracy activists as closely linked to the USA in particular, and worry that China would lose influence if these
groups came to power. In addition, China worries that a civilian government wouldn’t be able to maintain political stability in Burma.

As much as the generals in Rangoon relied on support from China, they also recognized that such dependence was dangerous and did not sit well with the domestic population. As a result, the regime sought to improve ties with other governments in the region which were eager to contain China’s spreading influence.

Fortuitously, from the regime’s perspective, India re-evaluated its policy towards Burma in the mid-1990s and decided that it needed to improve relations with the regime. Previously, the Indian government had hoped that the democracy movement would succeed and had welcomed democracy activists who fled from Burma in the 1988–90 period. Indian leaders decided, however, that the regime was firmly entrenched and that India had other important interests it needed to pursue in Burma. First, the Indian government was very eager to put an end to the insurgency in north-east India, where armed resistance groups, some of whom had received arms and training from China in the past, were demanding an end to Indian rule.
⁹
India tried to end the civil war both by improving the economies of the north-eastern states and by weakening the strength of the separatist armies, many of which had sanctuaries and training camps in Burma. The Indian government needed the cooperation of the Burmese military to drive them out. Second, India was worried about China’s growing influence in Burma and did not want Burma to become a client state of its arch-rival in the region. Third, as India began promoting the growth of private industry in India, the government adopted a new ‘Look East’ policy to expand trade with Burma and the rest of South-East Asia.

To improve relations with the Burmese regime, India began selling military equipment to the
tatmadaw
, including maritime surveillance aircraft, artillery guns and tanks. It also financed infrastructure projects that could facilitate trade and periodically shared intelligence and carried out joint operations with the Burma Army along its common border.

Since the discovery of natural gas and oil in western Burma and its territorial waters, India has been eager to purchase energy from Burma and signed a gas and oil exploration contract with the regime in 2007. In 2008, India signed two deals with the military regime to build hydropower dams along western Burma’s Chindwin river to supply electricity to north-eastern India.
¹⁰

While India has allowed the pro-democracy activists who had sought refuge in the north-east and in Delhi to remain, the government no longer
publicly criticizes the regime. Nevertheless, some Indian politicians and journalists have remained outspoken in their support for the Burmese democracy movement. This is because of their ideological commitment to democracy as well as the historical links that were forged with General Aung San and other Burmese leaders during their respective national struggles. Good relations continued throughout the period of parliamentary rule in Burma, and in the early 1960s Aung San Suu Kyi attended high school in New Delhi when her mother was the Burmese ambassador to India.

The Burmese regime has shown itself to be quite adept at playing India and China off against each other, just as it plays off different groups within the country against each other. The generals have been able to take advantage of China and India’s competing interests to obtain economic benefits, as well as military and political support, from both.

Like India, Thailand began reconfiguring its policy towards Burma in the mid-1990s. In the past, the Thai military quietly supported the armed ethnic nationalist groups controlling virtually all of the Burmese side of the Thai–Burma border. This was part of a cold war strategy to maintain a buffer zone that would make it more difficult for communists from China, Burma and Thailand to link up. But in the early 1990s, the communist threat faded, and ethnic resistance groups began losing ground to the far larger and better-equipped
tatmadaw
. With more
tatmadaw
troops along the border, the Thai Army was worried about
tatmadaw
incursions into Thai territory. Very little of the Thai–Burma border had been jointly demarcated, and the actual location of the borderline was in dispute in several areas. Taking a pragmatic view, and also lured by logging, fishing and other investment opportunities in Burma, Thailand’s generals began to improve relations with the Burmese junta. They also cooperated in pressuring some of the ethnic nationalist armies to make ceasefire agreements with the Rangoon regime. As a result, the New Mon State Party, which depended on access to Thailand for supplies, finally agreed to a ceasefire in 1995.

Meanwhile, businessmen from Thailand were also eager to take advantage of trade and investment opportunities in resource-rich Burma and encouraged the Thai government to facilitate this. Thai governments found themselves having to balance a concern about the regime’s repressive behaviour, which often resulted in refugee flows into Thailand, and the Thai business community’s calls for better relations with the military regime. Such conflicts were apparent in the Thai government’s handling of the Burmese embassy takeover in Bangkok in October 1999 and its
reaction to the Burmese regime’s subsequent unilateral closure of the Thai–Burma border. The student activists who took over the embassy told the media that they had undertaken such a drastic action only to refocus the world’s attention on Burma and to demand a political dialogue between the military regime and the NLD. The Thai deputy foreign minister, M. R. Sukhumbhand Paribatra, offered himself in exchange for the hostages and was able to persuade the hostage-takers to get on a Thai military helicopter with him and to take them to a Karen-controlled area just inside Burma. Everything was quickly resolved, without any bloodshed. With regard to the hostage-takers, the Thai interior minister, Sanan Kachornprasart, told the press: ‘We don’t consider them to be terrorists. They are student activists who fight for democracy.’
¹¹

From the Thai government’s perspective, they had handled the situation well, but the generals in Rangoon were outraged that the hostage-takers had been viewed sympathetically and had escaped arrest. The regime promptly revoked all Thai fishing concessions in Burmese waters and shut the border to trade. Thai businessmen demanded that the Thai government do something. Soon after, the Thai government put pressure on Burmese political activists living in Thailand to register with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and to agree to be resettled in a third country as soon as possible. Then they began deporting hundreds of illegal Burmese migrant workers. On 23 November 1999, the Thai foreign minister flew to Rangoon to smooth relations with Burmese officials. The next day, the Burmese regime reopened the border to trade.

In the late 1990s, the Burmese regime stopped construction of the Mae Sot–Myawaddy ‘Friendship Bridge’ linking Thailand and Burma for almost two years until it exacted concessions from the Thai government.
¹²
It sought more pressure on the KNU and Burmese dissidents operating out of Thailand. Even though the full cost of the bridge construction was borne by the Thais, the regime assumed it could count on Thai businessmen to pressure the Thai government to do whatever was necessary to keep the construction on track. Of course, by delaying such projects, the regime sacrificed much-needed income too, but eliminating its political opposition, rather than improving the economy, was the regime’s top priority.