The Irrawaddy Magazine (Dec. 2012, Vol.20 No.1)

Kayin State’s Fragile Peace

Asian Giants Revise Myanmar Policy

Chinese Methods Facing Pressure

Classic Delta Beach Retreat

TheIrrawaddy www.irrawaddy.org

December 2012

America

Embraces

Myanmar

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contents Vol.20 No.1

EDITOR and DIRECTOR: Aung Zaw manager: Win Thu

TheIrrawaddy

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In Person

The Glass Palace Revisited

The Irrawaddy magazine covers Myanmar, its neighbors and Southeast Asia. The magazine is published by Irrawaddy Publishing Group (IPG) which was established by Myanmar journalists living in exile in 1993. The IPG is an independent, non-profit organization providing in-depth news and information.

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Cartoons

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Quotes

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Intelligence

EDITOR (English Edition): Kyaw Zwa Moe

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In Brief

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In Focus

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Business Roundup

COPY DESK: Neil Lawrence; Charlie Campbell CONTRIBUTORS to this issue: Aung Zaw; Charlie Campbell; Francis Wade; Hnin Wathan; Jared Genser; Katja Nordgaard; Kyaw Phyo Tha; Kyaw Zwa Moe; Marwaan Macan-Markar; Phil Thornton; Simon Roughneen; Steve Tickner; William Boot photographers: JPaing; Steve Tickner LAYOUT DESIGNER: Banjong Banriankit MAILING ADDRESS: The Irrawaddy, P.O. Box 242, CMU Post Office, Chiang Mai 50200, Thailand.

Yangon office: No. 197, 2nd Floor, 32nd Street (Upper Block), Pabedan Tow nship, Yangon, TEL: 01 388251, 01 389762 Myanmar.

EMAIL: editors@irrawaddy.org SALES&ADVERTISING: adversiting@irrawaddy.org PRINTER: Chotana Printing (Chiang Mai, Thailand)

Kayin State’s Fragile Peace

Asian Giants Revise Myanmar Policy

Chinese Methods Facing Pressure

Classic Delta Beach Retreat

TheIrrawaddy www.irrawaddy.org

opinion 12 | Viewpoint

Making Friends with Foes?

29 |

UN Engagement Vital for Rights Reform

45 | Guest Column A Partner in Peace

Lifestyle 50 | Travel

▪▪ Classic Delta Beach Retreat ▪▪ Cabbies with a Conscience

December 2012

America

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Food

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Books

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Q&A

Embraces

Myanmar

cover photo: The Irrawaddy

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Commentary

▪▪ 50th Street Café ▪▪ The Full (Rakhine) Monti

▪▪ Myanmar Moving Forward?

▪▪ Political Prisoners Pen Prose ▪▪ Wives and Mothers of the Nation

A Different Kind of Lady

December 2012

Features

15 | Heritage: Palaces of Impermanence

The Buddha taught that nothing lasts forever, but the monasteries of Yangon deserve another lease on life as part of the city’s precious heritage

P-15

20 | COVER Time to Embrace the West US President Barack Obama’s visit should be treated as a new beginning rather than an end product

22 | COVER

Obama in Myanmar: Fanning the ‘Flickers of Progress’

US President Obama’s historic visit to Myanmar raises hopes, but will it really usher in a new era of change?

30 | Asia & Myanmar: Asian Giants Revise Myanmar Policy The return of the West to Myanmar creates challenges and opportunities for the country’s Asian partners

P-40

34 | Conflict: Disquiet on the Western Front Communal violence in Rakhine State could undo Myanmar’s efforts to rehabilitate its standing in the world

38 | Profile: The Kachin Cage Fighter Cage fighting sensation Aung La Nsang vows to keep battling for the Kachin cause

P-22

40 | Ethnic: Kayin State’s Fragile Peace Myanmar’s recent reforms have many Kayin people trying to navigate their way through rumors and a range of isues, from leadership divisions to citizenship and land rights

46 | Business: Chinese Methods Facing Pressure

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Regime-cozy ways will not work in a more democratic environment, say experts

49 | Interview: The Rocky Road to Recovery Economist Lex Rieffel talks about the challenges that lie ahead as Myanmar moves to reform its economy This issue of The Irrawaddy was produced with the support of the Prince Claus Fund in the Netherlands.

December 2012

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in person

The Glass Palace

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Revisited

mitav Ghosh, the internationally acclaimed author of Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke, first visited Burma in 1997 and set his awardwinning novel The Glass Palace there three years later. Earlier this month, the Bengali Indian writer revisited the country to see the changes taking place.

He met The Irrawaddy correspondent Kyaw Phyo Tha to discuss his recent experiences.

The last time you were in Myanmar was in 1997. What differences have you noticed after 15 years?

It is like going from one planet to another. It’s almost unbelievable. One of the things that make cities of Burma [Myanmar] so distinctive is that all the men wear longyi. Now the longyi seems to be fading. Everyone is in shirt and pants. That’s one thing. The traffic on the roads, the taxis, the buildings—all of that is starting to change. But most of all change is in the atmosphere.

That’s like writing a book. Let me say that for me she’s been a sort of beacon in the world. I feel that admiration for her, and I’m feeling incredibly happy she reached this point in time when she’s able to initiate changes in Burma. I was here on the eve of [the ex-military government] proposing a new Constitution.

Essentially the deal they were offering then was not really different from the deal the NLD [National League for Democracy] eventually accepted.

So, I felt then she and the NLD was making a mistake by turning down that deal [at that time]. I said so to her at that time because they withdrew from the 2010 elections. I said to her that one consistent thing in the history of Southeast Asia in the 20th

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Your uncle and father were your inspirations for writing The Glass Palace. Could you tell our readers more about them?

My uncle’s family was in Burma from the earliest 20th century. He created a big business in teak. He got the contract to provide the sleepers throughout India so he became very rich. On December 24, 1941, when the Japanese first bombed Rangoon [Yangon], one of the bombs fell on his timber yard which was right by the river. So all his timber was burnt up. That was a catastrophe for him.

So he would tell these stories of Burma all the time. I just grew up with these stories. My father’s stories of Burma too. My father came and stayed in Burma. He was in India when the

India was quite supportive of the Myanmar democracy movement in the early days so why was it later forgotten?

I don’t think this happened. In 1993, India gave Aung San Suu Kyi the Jawaharlal Nehru Award—the biggest award in India. I think what [India] did was they switched from a position of non-engagement with the junta to a position of engagement like that of Asean [the Association of Southeast Asian Nations]. You can criticize that move. People have criticized India on that move. But in reality, that’s the policy that worked.

Why does India have so many internationally renowned writers like yourself, Rabindranath Tagore, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Vikram Seth?

I can’t explain really. I think people in India love telling stories. That’s always been the case. You can consider India’s influence in Southeast Asia was never a military influence, or political influence even. But it was the influence of stories like Ramayayan and Mahabarata.

Throughout Asia, they became such important cultural forms.

It happened not through power, not through politics. It happened through stories. In a sense I think you could say we are doing what our ancestors did—telling stories.

Photo: Steve tickner / The Irrawaddy

What’s your impression of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi?

century is that any party that withdraws from the election loses something very profoundly.

Second World War broke out and joined the British Indian Army. When the British reinvaded Burma in 1944, he was with Lord Slim’s army.

What are the disadvantages of being a writer in a democratic society?

The idea that there are no constraints on writers [in democratic society] is a mistake.

There are constraints even in the US and I myself experienced those constraints around 9/11 and 2001. The real threat to freedom of expression in our times doesn’t really come from the government. In most parts of the world now it comes from non-state actors like extremist groups or other various kinds.

December 2012

cartoons December 2012

Is Myanmar ready for another Nobel Peace Prize laureate? (Cartoonist: Wa Lone)

The US comes out on top in Myanmar. (Cartoonist: Stephff)

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quotes

“No process of reform will succeed without national reconciliation.”

—US President Barack Obama during his historic speech at Yangon University

“It’s like the government is using political prisoners as political bargaining chips.”

—Ko Letyar Htun, a student activist who was given a death sentence in 1998 but released during an amnesty on November 19 to mark President Obama’s visit to Myanmar

“We will continue to move forward.”

—Myanmar President U Thein Sein during his meeting with President Obama in Yangon

“We believe that civil wars occur due to the country’s political system. Thus, we want to solve this war through political means.”

—Gen Gun Maw, vice-chief of staff of the ethnic rebel Kachin Independence Army, which resumed fighting government troops in June 2011 after a 17-year ceasefire broke down

“The most difficult time in any transition is when we think that success is in sight. Then we have to be very careful that we’re not lured by the mirage of success.”

—Opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi at her press conference with President Obama in Yangon

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December 2012

intelligence

Govt Appeals to Monks to Lift Boycott On a hot evening in early September, a dark blue Toyota Double Cab parked outside a temple in Mandalay. It was there to pick up a monk who five years earlier had played a major role in issuing an excommunication order on members of the military and their families. The order, which marked the beginning of the 2007 Saffron Revolution against Myanmar’s then ruling junta, was imposed after a crackdown on a small monk-led protest in Pakokku, Magway Region, in early September 2007. That incident led to much larger demonstrations around the country that were also suppressed by force, creating a lasting fissure between two of Myanmar’s most powerful institutions: the military and the monastic community. The monk in Mandalay was taken to a hotel on 80th Street, where in a room on the third floor he met four people who turned out to be senior government officials seeking an end to the monks’ patam nikkuijana kamma, or formal refusal to accept alms. This secret meeting led to subsequent talks, where the monks stated their demands, including a full apology and the reinstatement of monks removed from their monasteries for taking part in the protests. No deal has yet been reached, but if successful, the negotiations could bring closure to one of the most acrimonious episodes in recent Myanmar history. ________________________________________________________

MI Comeback: Mission Impossible?

For decades, Myanmar was ruled by fear of the MI—the dreaded Military Intelligence. The ouster in 2004 of former spy master Gen Khin Nyunt marked the end of the MI’s reign of terror, but not of MI-phobia. Even after his release from house arrest earlier this year, some of his subordinates remain behind bars—most notably, ex-Brig-Gen Than Tun, the head of the MI’s counter intelligence unit and political department. Sentenced to 160 years in prison, he is unlikely to see the light of day anytime soon. His crime: gathering information on high-ranking military officials, against the orders of ex-supremo Snr-Gen Than Shwe himself.

Evidently, ordinary citizens weren’t alone in feeling the MI’s baleful influence: senior members of the former junta, including the country’s top general and his deputies, also distrusted its constant scrutiny. According to former counterintelligence officer and Myanmar deputy chief of mission to Washington ex-Maj Aung Lynn Htut, suspicion of the MI still runs deep among senior leaders of the current government. Besides keeping MI officials under lock and key, the former regime and its successor have made sure that the Military Affairs Security, which was formed to replace the MI, never gets a chance to accumulate the same sort of power. _______________________________________________________

Tycoon Fights Protesters with Feng Shui When threatened with a public protest in front of his company’s headquarters, Yuzana chief U Htay Myint used an extraordinary defense—he paid a Thai feng shui master 4,000,000 kyat (US $5,000) per day to ward off looming ill-fortune.

U Htay Myint, who is also a Lower House MP for the ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party, has faced pressure for confiscating land in war-torn Kachin State. To fend off his client’s critics, the mystic for hire repositioned a red light bulb on the reception-area ceiling to face outwards—“to repel destructive elements coming from outside,” according to an Intelligence source. He also identified a jinx on the Yuzana logo and suggested an alternative. A pool at U Htay Myint’s Rangoon residence was deemed another source of peril. The 58-year-old tycoon, who hails from Myeik in Burma’s deep south but has Chinese ancestry, then reportedly made a day trip to Singapore for yadaya che—a ritual aimed at reversing bad luck or compensating for misdeeds. In 2006, Yuzana seized more than 200,000 acres (80 hectares) of farmland near the world’s largest tiger reserve in Kachin State’s remote Hukawng Valley, forcing nearly half a million people off the land they have lived on for generations. ________________________________________________________

December 2012

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in brief

Comedians Not Amused by Reform Photo: kyaw phyo tha / The Irrawaddy

The 64-yearold urged the authorities to mimic other political changes by removing the ban from his group, which has been prohibited from performing since 2001 after he was released from prison in Myitkyina Township, Kachin State, where he served The Moustache Brothers perform in Mandalay. seven years for making fun of the then ruling junta generals.

The Moustache Brothers and Thee Lay “I welcome the political changes and I Thee, two of Myanmar’s leading comedy am even glad about them,” he said. “But troupes, have complained that they conthese changes have not been for me. I tinue to have performances restricted dewant to ask why the authorities have not spite the raft of recent democratic changes given me permission to do my favorite undertaken by Naypyitaw. performances.”

Par Par Lay told The Irrawaddy from “I want to say there is still no freedom of The Moustache Brothers’ backstreet theart in our country even though they say that ater in Myanmar’s second largest city of things have opened up,” agreed Kye Thee, Mandalay that the government now allows a member of the Thee Lay Thee troupe. all cultural dancing groups to put on shows except political satire.

Educated Exiles ‘Have Duty to Return’ Photo: thei irrawaddy

U Min Ko Naing Myanmar‘s future prosperity is under threat from a severe skills shortage and so educated nationals living abroad should return to help develop the country, said 88 Generation Students leader U Min Ko Naing. The 50-year-old activist, who spent 24 years in prison for his role in peaceful democracy demonstrations, made the comments in a Facebook video. “Your motherland

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and your country is suffering and under threat from a lack of education,” he said. “It is the right time to come back to work for the country. We are constructing a road. We need people to help grow flowers on this road.”

Aung San Suu Kyi visited the memorials of Indian independence leaders Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru prior to her speech.

Opposition Leader Asks for Indian Support

The forced relocation of more than 30,000 villagers by southern Myanmar’s Dawei deep-sea port project will take place before June next year, says Dawei Special Economic Zone (SEZ) Support Team Chairman Tin Maung Swe. A total of 16 villages in Yaybyu and Longlon townships in Dawei District of Tanintharyi Region will be moved to three new locations, he told The Irrawaddy. “We will complete a total of 500 new homes in Bawar Village,

Myanmar’s main opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi used the Jawarharlal Nehru’s Memorial Lecture to urge India to strongly support her country’s nascent democratic transition. “I hope, at this most difficult phase, the people of India will stand by us and walk by us as we proceed on the path that they were able to proceed upon many years before us,” she said. Daw

30,000 Dawei Villagers Forced Out by June

which is the new place where five villages from the Nabulae area of Yaybyu Township will first be relocated this month,” he said. “So far we have completed building 343 houses.”

Govt Reports $70m Graft across 15 Ministries Nearly half of Myanmar’s ministries misused almost 60 billion kyat (US $70 million) in the last fiscal year, Auditor-General U Thein Htike told a session of the Union Parliament in November. One-third of the funds have since been returned, said the report, with many of the involved staff members already punished for their role. The total misuse across 15 ministries took place in the 2011-12 fiscal year under the budget allowance set by the former military government, according to the report.

Rohingya Refuse ‘Bengali’ Registration in Rakhine Thousands of Rohingya Muslims in Pauktaw Township, Rakhine State, have refused to sign governmentissued registration forms in order to push for recognition as an official minority. Chris Lewa, the director of the Arakan Project humanitarian group which works for Rohingya rights, told The Irrawaddy that local people were not happy that the authorities erased the term “Rohingya” from completed forms and instead replaced it with “Bengali.” Almost all members of the Muslim Rohingya minority in Pauktaw Township have since refused to cooperate with the registration process.

CSOs Slam $80m World Bank Grant to Myanmar Civil society organizations (CSOs) are taking the World Bank to task for its decision

December 2012

Hundreds of 1,000-yearold Buddhist statues have been returned by workmen

Photo: Warazein Moekyo

Ancient Buddhist Relics Returned by Workers

Vietnam May Evict Bears from National Park

after an ancient pagoda site in Pyay Township, Bago Region, dating from the Sri Ksetra era of the Pyu Kingdom, was ransacked.

The antique Buddhist relics were handed to the authorities after the culprits began to worry about being arrested for stealing the artifacts. Pyay residents had previously sent a letter to The Irrawaddy to complain about the theft, and after word got out those responsible eventually decided to give the treasures back.

Photo: Reuters

to grant Myanmar US $80 million in development assistance, saying that the Washington-based financial institution had ignored its own polices in making the move. At a press conference in Yangon, representatives from 23 CSOs said that the bank’s decision to provide funding to Myanmar for community-driven development (CDD) projects lacked transparency. It was also unclear, they said, whether the bank had taken into account issues such as ethnic conflict and endemic corruption.

Hundreds of bears, some of them blinded or maimed, may be evicted from a lush national park near Hanoi after a Vietnamese vicedefense minister ordered their sanctuary not to expand further and find another location. Chat Dau Valley is of strategic military importance, but environmentalists allege that vested interests have urged

More Earthquakes on the Cards

Photo: Reuters

1930, when a 7.3-magnitude earthquake In the wake of the powerful earthquake hit Bago (then Pegu), a city 50 miles (80 that rattled Upper Myanmar on November km) from Yangon. The disaster claimed 11, a seismologist has warned that regions more than 500 lives. south of the country’s second largest city “According to geological records, a Mandalay, including the capital Naypypowerful quake tends to strike every 100 itaw, remain vulnerable to potent future years or so. To our surprise, there’s been tremors. no single historic quake in the regions U Soe Thura Tun, the secretary of ranging from south of Mandalay to NayMyanmar’s Seismological Committee, pyitaw, even though the area is sitting on said central areas are prone to seismic the moving fault,” said U Soe Thura Tun. activity mainly because of the Sagaing “It can be interpreted that a quake is likely Fault—a 750-mile (1,200-km) major break to hit the region.” that transects the country from north to south, passing through major cities before dipping off into the Gulf of Martaban.

Despite their perilous positions, historical records show that no settlement along the line has experienced The Yadana Theinga bridge near Shwebo, Sagaing Region, collapsed after a any major tremor since major earthquake on November 12.

December 2012

an eviction. Conservation groups say the dispute in Tam Dao National Park is emblematic of conflicts brewing across Vietnam’s protected areas, with environmental safeguards disappearing when developers want the land.

Thai Lèse Majesté Reform Urged by Ex-prisoner A Thai-born American who spent more than a year in prison on charges of insulting Thailand’s king says the country’s harsh laws outlawing criticism of the monarchy are holding back democratic development. Joe Gordon, who was convicted last year for translating excerpts of an unauthorized biography of King Bhumibol Adulyadej from English into Thai and posting them online, said those jailed under Thai laws protecting the royal family often suffer abuse from prison guards and are treated “like animals.”

Bangladeshi Villages Get Internet by Bike Dozens of “Info Ladies” are biking into remote Bangladeshi villages with laptops and Internet connections to help tens of thousands of people, especially women, get everything from government services to chats with distant loved ones. The Info Ladies project, created in 2008 by local development group D.Net and other community organizations, is modeled after a program that helped make cellphones widespread in Bangladesh. It intends to enlist thousands more workers in the next few years with startup funds from the South Asian country’s central bank and expatriates working around the world.

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IN FOCUS

Kachin at War Kachin Independence Army (KIA) soldiers ride in the back of a jeep near frontline positions in the mountains outside Mai Ja Yang, Kachin State, on Januar y 23, 2012.

Conflict between government troops and the KIA resumed on June 9, 2011, after the collapse of a 17-year ceasefire. The conflict has left tens of thousands of Kachin civilians homeless, including many in rebel-controlled areas and even across the border in China. Despite repeated attempts to negotiate an end to the fighting, peace remains elusive in Myanmar’s northernmost state.

Photo: James Robert Fuller

viewpoint

Making Friend

While friends may be more useful than enemies, b

M

Photo: Reuters

aking friends with enemies always entails an element of risk that the reverse might occur.

In politics, that means losing allies and supporters and perhaps even being deemed a traitor to your cause. Although indeed risky, this is the current approach undertaken by both Myanmar’s opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and reformist President U Thein Sein.

Why should these two former foes—captive and captor—become friends?

Various reasons: to rebuild the nation; avoid reversing recent tentative reforms; reconcile the government, opposition and ethnic groups; lift international sanctions; and win the 2015 election.

The motives of each might differ, but the more important question concerns what the people of Myanmar will gain out of this new tactic.

The “making friends strategy” began curiously with the two publicly praising each other. After meeting U Thein Sein for the first time in August 2011, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi announced her belief in the president’s sincerity.

This was heart-felt praise for the exgeneral who has embarked on a series of bold liberalization measures since taking office in March 2011. His willingness to alter electoral regulations also persuaded the Nobel Laureate and other minority parties that boycotted the 2010 general election to rejoin the political process.

In September, while receiving the Congressional Gold Medal in the United States, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi insisted, “We must remember that the reform process was initiated by President U Thein Sein. I believe that he is keen on democratic reforms.”

The president, likewise, did not miss an opportunity to congratulate his former prisoner during an address to the UN General Assembly in New York. “As a Myanmar citizen, I would like to congratulate her for the honors she has received in this country in recognition of her

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By

efforts for democracy,” he said. These words would have been unthinkable only two years ago, and marked the first time that anyone from the military-dominated government has officially paid tribute to the democracy icon.

Then, with the blessing of U Thein Sein, two key ministers of the President’s Office, U Soe Thein and U Aung Min, attended a ceremony commemorating the 24th anniversary of the country’s pro-democracy uprising, known as 8-888, in which at least 3,000 peaceful demonstrators were gunned down by the then-junta.

The Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) MPs donated one million kyat (US $1,150) to the organizers, the 88 Generation Students group comprised of former political prisoners. Their gesture went some way towards appeasing the critics of the government.

Moreover, the president and his team also reached out to ethnic armed groups in order to agree ceasefires and invited exiled dissidents to return home and take part in their reform process.

All parties—including opposition and government—seem to be attempting to achieve the national reconciliation which many leaders believe is essential for future peace, prosperity and democracy.

Three main divisions of power—obvious offspring of the former junta—currently exist in Myanmar: the government comprised of exgenerals, generals-turned-parliamentarians in the legislature and the armed forces, known as the Tatmadaw.

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and other leading democracy advocates realize the need to tread carefully in order not to excessively antagonize this trio. The still-dominant Tatmadaw is not yet ready to return to the barracks. Moreover, the military continues to wield near-total power and is able to interfere in politics at any moment, according to the widely-condemned 2008 Constitution.

This new political order looks more challenging and complicated for the National League for Democracy (NLD) chairwoman and the wider dissident community.

For the past half-century, no one—including the NLD, other opposition groups or ethnic rebel armies—has been able to free Myanmar from the clutches of its current and former generals. Thus, having some “reformists” emerging out of the old political order offers the best opportunity to move forward. This is why we must welcome the

December 2012

nds with Foes?

emies, both are necessary to succeed in politics

By KYAW ZWA MOE forging of new friendships, even if this involves some risk.

December 2012

Photo: Reuters

Friends with Benefits?

Despite her noble intentions, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s image has become tainted both internationally and domestically.

Probably in an effort not to alienate the government, she has taken a “neutral” stand— seemingly at odds to her customary outspoken character—and choose to be silent on sensitive issues such as the ongoing conflict between government troops and the ethnic rebel Kachin Independence Army in northernmost Myanmar, where tens of thousands of civilians have been forced to refugee camps by the Chinese border.

Most Kachin feel betrayed, thus costing the opposition leader the support of many who enabled the NLD to win 73 percent of Kachin State parliamentary seats in the annulled 1990 general election.

But that is not all. Regarding the bloody conflict between Rohingya Muslims and Rakhine Buddhists in western Myanmar, the 67-year-old said, “We do not want to criticize the government just for the sake of making political capital.

We want to help the government in any way possible to bring about peace and harmony in the Rakhine State.” Again, her “neutral” stand disappointed everyone outside Naypyitaw’s corridors of power—the international community, the Rakhine people and the Rohingya.

The reason behind this conciliatory approach became apparent when she said during her trip to the US, “What has happened in the past has taught us that if we want to succeed we have to work together and the whole future of Burma is before us,” using the country’s former name. “If we are to ensure this future for the succeeding generations, we all have to learn to work together.”

Having huge influence over foreign leaders, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi advocated Western countries to lift sanctions against Myanmar— something that U Thein Sein’s administration desperately desired while also providing the opportunity to reintegrate into global affairs.

Understanding the important role of the powerful Tatmadaw in the reform process, she also informally tried to befriend high-ranking military officials in Parliament by inviting them for informal meetings over lunch. But the top brass reportedly refused her offers, signaling that there is still a way to go. This will be a monumental

task for the opposition leader, despite being the daughter of national hero Gen Aung San, the founder of the Tatmadaw.

Successful or not, this pacifying political trend is highly likely to continue until the 2015 election. As chairpersons of the NLD and the ruling USDP respectively, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and U Thein Sein must try to defeat each other at the upcoming ballot, despite the need to maintain a cordial atmosphere for national reconciliation.

But how long can this last? Considering the schoolyard taunting that characterizes the UK Parliament and the belligerent rhetoric that marred this year’s US presidential elections, it appears that “true democracy” requires a willingness to accept a certain amount of confrontation when debating key issues.

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi will try to win a landslide victory for her party as she did in 1990—if conducted freely and fairly, such an outcome seems almost certain.

On the other hand, U Thein Sein and his team will be determined to maintain the current political structure of having three important power holders—the government, Tatmadaw and Parliament dominated by the military—while also maintaining an NLD presence in the legislature for the sake of appearances.

Thus, we can assume that it is highly unlikely that the 2015 election will be strictly free and fair. Myanmar’s next five years look likely to be a continuation of the status quo but with the NLD and other parties gaining more seats in the legislature.

Even if the 2008 Constitution is amended to allow Daw Aung San Suu Kyi to take top office, the highest position she might be able to obtain is as one of the two vice-presidents. Seeing the growing support for U Thein Sein, both internationally and domestically, and the USDP’s determination to come out on top by hook or by crook, he looks likely to stay in power until the end of the decade.

However, if Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and the president shift away from the “making friends strategy,” Myanmar’s traditionally uncertain political landscape could become even more unpredictable.

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Palaces of Impermanence The Buddha taught that nothing lasts forever, but the monasteries of Yangon deserve another lease on life as part of the city’s precious heritage

By KYAW PHYO THA

heritage

Fine teak woodwork at the Shwe Kyin Monastery in Yangon.

Photo: Steve Tickner / The Irrawaddy

Photo: Steve Tickner / The Irrawaddy

Photo: Kyaw Phyo Tha / The Irrawaddy

heritage

A

t first glance, the Norman Monastery in Yangon’s Mingalar Taung Nyunt Township is a sight to behold. Supported by more than a hundred teak pillars and made almost entirely of the coveted, carefully oil-treated lumber, the 124-yearold structure sprawls along a plot of land nearly 200 feet (61 meters) long and 100 feet wide. Its facade is partly embellished with a traditional Myanmar motif of entwined tendrils, while its tiered roof is decorated with pinnacles and its gables are adorned with exquisite wooden carvings.

Step inside, however, and this first impression of dignified solidity quickly vanishes. When it rains, the roof leaks.

The floors creak under the slightest pressure, and through a louver window with a missing hinge, you can see a pinnacle dangling like a fractured lance.

The early evening light penetrates broken panes of stained glass, painting abstract patterns on the rust-colored robes of the monks who move through the gloom inside.

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Called the Norman Monastery after a school that originally occupied the land where it now stands, this stilted building became a pongyi kyaung, or place of learning for Buddhist monks, in 1888, two years after Britain established colonial rule over the whole of Myanmar. Although it remains a proud reminder of the enduring devotion of the people of this overwhelmingly Buddhist nation to their native faith, it also attests to the Buddha’s teaching of anicca, or impermanence.

While there has been a growing movement in Yangon to preserve the unique architectural legacy of the colonial era, so far precious little has been done to protect the monasteries that for centuries have served as repositories of traditional craftsmanship. All over the former capital, age-old monasteries housing hundreds of monks are left to face the elements and the depredations of time, defended only by the efforts of their inhabitants and the generosity of donors.

Step inside, however, and this first impression of dignified solidity quickly vanishes.

December 2012

Photo: Kyaw Phyo Tha / The Irrawaddy

Left: A novice monk looks out of a monastery window.

Center: A corner of the Norman Monastery Right: Two monks chat at the Maha Mingalar Bon Kyaw, or “Hundred Pillar Monastery,” in Yangon.

This is not to say, however, that the need to do something for these noble structures has gone entirely unnoticed.

“Old monasteries are also on our protection list, and we are currently making an inventory of them,” said Daw Moe Moe Lwin, an acting director from Yangon Heritage Trust, a newly founded NGO trying to preserve the best architectural remnants of Myanmar’s past.

But monasteries are not a top priority for the group—ironically, because they are already entrusted to the care of the communities that have long supported them.

“Generally, religious buildings have trustees to take care of their maintenance, so they are somewhat safe from serious deterioration or demolition, unlike some other ancient buildings,” said Daw Moe Moe Lwin.

Those who must manage the upkeep of monasteries know, however, that there are limits to what can be done with the resources their supporters provide.

“We’ve been struggling on our

December 2012

own to maintain the monastery little by little,” said U Tezita, the caretaker monk of the Norman Monastery.

“Given to the huge size of the building, we don’t dare to think about an overall restoration. It would be a Herculean task!”

For years, the 60-year-old monk and U Vicittasara, the abbot of the monastery, have managed to preserve their building with tiny cash donations from well-wishers.

“We can only do it once a year because we don’t have many donors to pay for repairs,” said the 84-year-old abbot. Every year, they have to make a list of priorities. “We have to decide what to repair and what to neglect, depending on the amount of money we receive,” he said.

“If our budget is only enough to replace a sheet of corrugated tin, that’s what we do,” the monk explained.

Yangon’s exceptionally wet climate makes the the job of maintenance much more difficult. The city receives on average of 103 inches (261.6 cm) of rain a year—far more than the roughly

40 inches (101.6 cm) that fall on more arid parts of the country.

“Rain is a big problem for this building as the roof is now very ramshackle,” said U Tezita. “The water streams down from the ridge pole, causing rafters and other parts of the building to fall into decay over time.”

Maha Mingalar Bon Kyaw Monastery, located near the famous reclining Buddha of the Chauk Htet Gyi Pagoda in Bahan Township, is another fine example of traditional monastery architecture, but sadly, it is also much diminished compared to its former glory. Still popularly known as the “Hundred Pillar Monastery,” the 124-year-old structure no longer lives up to that name.

“I had no choice. I had to get government permission to have some of the pillars removed. The only alternative was to pull down the whole building,” said U Ottara, the abbot of the monastery, explaining why its southern wing and dozens of supporting pillars were removed for safety reasons. Last year, the annex, which had begun to

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heritage

lean dangerously, was declared unfit for human habitation.

In 1998, Myanmar’s then ruling junta issued the Protection and Preservation of Cultural Heritage Regions Law, which makes it a serious crime—punishable by up to five years in prison—to structurally alter ancient monuments and other historically and culturally important edifices. So far, however, the government has done little in the way of actively preserving old monasteries.

“We have been entirely donorreliant for ages,” said the 76-year-old U Ottara, echoing a refrain heard at monasteries around the city.

Technically, at least, monasteries that are 100 or more years old are entitled to the same status and protection as other heritage sites. In practice, however, they are not usually given the recognition they deserve.

“Yes, they should be listed, and as a matter of fact, we are collecting data on old monasteries. But even if we do recognize them, we’re not sure if we will be able to support the preservation of all of them, because we just don’t have the funds,” said a senior official from the Archeology Department in Yangon.

“The best we can do is educate people living nearby about the cultural value of these sites, and ask them to cooperate with conservation efforts,” he added.

While the situation in Yangon is particularly severe, it is far from unique.

Most of the country’s monasteries built in the late 19th or early 20th century are falling into disrepair, often resulting in a decision to tear down old buildings and replace them with cheaper, easier to maintain structures.

“The abbots and donors say it’s just too expensive to pay for the upkeep of older monasteries. That’s why they feel it’s better to just build new ones,” says Hsu Nget, a well-known writer who has called on Myanmar’s media to highlight the need to reverse this growing trend.

As a native of Mandalay, Myanmar’s second-largest city and home to some of the handful of old monasteries that have been carefully preserved for posterity, Hsu Nget believes that much more can be done to ensure that these unique examples of traditional

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“Even if we do recognize them, we’re not sure if we will be able to support the preservation of all of them, because we just don’t have the funds.”

–A senior official from the Archeology Department

The interior of the Maha Mingalar Bon Kyaw Monastery

Myanmar architecture aren’t lost forever.

“We need to let people know that these monasteries are in urgent need of conservation. We could learn a lot from countries like Cambodia about how to preserve our national heritage.”

In the end, Myanmar Buddhists’ reverence for their religion and traditions will not be enough to save their places of worship. Indeed, in some ways, Buddhist customs could even hasten the decline of monasteries from a bygone era.

December 2012

Photo: Steve Tickner / The Irrawaddy

According to U Silacara, a 33-yearold monk from the Norman Monastery, many donors are reluctant to give money to maintain monasteries built by an earlier generation of merit-makers.

“Most would rather build a new one that they can put their names on. It’s

December 2012

no wonder that our monastery is in a sorry state.”

But even monks who feel dutybound to do everything possible to spare their monasteries from preventable deterioration feel that it’s best not to cling too much to vestiges of the past.

“I would feel bad if something happened to the monastery,” said U Vicittasara, the Norman Monastery abbot. “But at the same, if it deteriorates beyond repair, I know I will have to let it go, because all things are impermanent.”

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Photo: jpaing / the irrawaddy

Time to Embrace the West

US President Barack Obama’s visit should be treated as a new beginning rather than an end product

By AUNG ZAW

W

ill Barack Obama’s historic visit herald a new chapter in the US-Myanmar relationship?

Without doubt, the first sitting US president to visit Myanmar was the undisputed highlight of a raft of international dignitaries to arrive since President U Thein Sein initiated political reforms last year.

Many see Myanmar as continuing to live in the 20th century, still unable to emerge from China’s shadow. Mr Obama’s arrival in the once-isolated country signals that the time has arrived to reshape and redefine foreign policy as we engage more with the West.

Before he touched down in Yangon’s once-sleepy international airport, many critics and campaign groups argued that Mr Obama’s visit was too soon, while others thought his trip was to simply a bid to offset China’s influence.

Other analysts thought that the purpose of his trip was to embolden the Myanmar population and encourage further reform. For me, there is no black and white answer to these assessments and they all play a part.

Certainly, the visit fits into the US administration’s policy of maintaining a pivot towards the Asia-Pacific. Myanmar lies between China and India, with direct access to the strategically important Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean. Moreover, a country bordering China, and gener-

December 2012

ally known to be in Beijing’s pocket, which suddenly forges closer ties with Washington is a rare foreign policy coup for the White House.

Myanmar’s move from authoritarian rule to democracy has therefore been welcomed in the US, even if it still has far to go, and was also seen as a political achievement for Mr Obama prior to his re-election in November. After all, Myanmar suddenly became a darling of the West.

The rise of anti-China sentiment and ongoing protests against Chinesefunded megaprojects are ringing alarm bells in Beijing and Naypyitaw. Moreover, I doubt China is happy to see its neighbor suddenly becoming more open and courting the West.

Washington recently announced that it will allow Myanmar to be an observer at next year’s annual Cobra Gold military exercise. Nevertheless, enhanced cooperation between the US and Myanmar armed forces will draw remonstrations from campaign groups at home and abroad.

Indeed, these concerns are not without precedent. From the 1950s to 1980s, Myanmar sent military officers to receive training in the US, yet these same individuals helped engineer Gen Ne Win’s 1962 coup, install half-adecade of brutal military dictatorship and run one of the most feared internal spy agencies in Asia.

Did the US president’s visit embolden the people of Myanmar? His administration planned the trip carefully and

cover story selected the perfect venue to deliver his historic speech. Mr Obama did not go to Naypyitaw—many Myanmar people did not want him to recognize what is still seen as the generals’ capital—and chose to speak at long-derelict Yangon University, a hotbed for anti-regime activism for generations.

Knowing his enormous leverage, Mr Obama broached almost every contentious subject in Myanmar—sectarian violence, racism, discrimination, national reconciliation, long-running insurgencies and cementing peace.

He was extremely well received despite stirring some controversy among both Bamar and ethnic Rakhine politicians by championing the cause of Rohingya Muslims.

However, his meeting with U Thein Sein went well although several government sources subsequently admitted that some ministers were unhappy with his speech. This is not surprising as Mr Obama obviously did not come to offer blanket praise of the government. The military remains in absolute control, and former dictators—who siphoned state funds and committed countless crimes including heinous human rights violations—continue to enjoy impunity.

His visit to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s residence was significant, as the 44th US president’s kiss and general overaffection did not invoke any ill-feeling amongst the traditionally conservative Myanmar people. In fact, most rather welcomed his enthusiasm. I wonder what would happen if the new Chinese premier behaved similarly towards the Nobel laureate? Perhaps there would be a public outcry.

But the National League for Democracy chairwoman, who initially opposed Mr Obama’s visit, warned, “We have to be very careful that we›re not lured by a mirage of success.” She is correct. Cautious optimism remains the correct position as there remains a long way to go.

Nevertheless, having Air Force One land in Yangon demonstrates that Myanmar is no longer a pariah state.

“When I took office as president,” said Mr Obama. “I sent a message to those governments who ruled by fear: We will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your first … So today, I have come to keep my promise, and extend the hand of friendship.”

Myanmar has been waiting a long time for such an offer and the chance to step out of China’s shadow. We must not miss this opportunity.

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Obama in M

Fanning the of Progr

US President Obama’s historic visi but will it really usher in a

By MARWAAN MAC

in Myanmar:

he ‘Flickers ogress’

cover story

oric visit to Myanmar raises hopes, her in a new era of change?

AAN MACAN-MARKAR

US President Obama pours water over a statue at a shrine as US Secretary of State Clinton smiles during their visit to the Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon.

Photo: Reuters

I

t was in Bali, on November 18, 2011, that Myanmar really moved onto the stage of international respectability after decades of condemnation as a rogue state. Offering a helping hand shortly after noon on that day in the Indonesian resort was US President Barack Obama.

He did so through his much commented upon “flickers of progress” statement, which acknowledged the reforms ushered in after Myanmar came under the leadership of President U Thein Sein. “After years of darkness, we’ve seen flickers of progress,” he said.

“President Thein Sein and the Burmese Parliament have taken important steps toward reform. A dialogue between the government and Aung San Suu Kyi has begun.”

And now, exactly a year later, with the winds of a presidential re-election victory behind him, Mr Obama has flown into Myanmar to what foreign policy analysts in Washington have described as one of the fastest stories of engagement ever between the leader of the world’s superpower and a onetime international pariah. Until this visit, the conventional wisdom was that such a historic trip by a sitting US president would occur in 2014, when Myanmar takes over as the head of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean). By then, there would be a bigger canvas (time-wise) to measure the progress of the quasicivilian government that U Thein Sein heads, and reward it with an unprecedented visit to Myanmar by the current resident of the White House.

The rapid shift in Washington’s policy towards Myanmar has been mirrored in other corners of the West.

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Yet this rush by Washington to embrace the U Thein Sein reforms is not out of step with what unfolded earlier this year. In April, days after a groundbreaking by-election that saw the hounded opposition heroine Daw Aung San Suu Kyi lead her National League for Democracy (NLD) party to an emphatic victory, the Obama administration announced plans to ease some of the punitive sanctions that had been imposed on Myanmar for decades. “That was a risky move since it was before Daw Suu and her NLD colleagues took their seats in Parliament to confirm the spirit of reform,” said a Washington-based foreign policy source regarding the economic carrots announced on April 4. The latter included an easing of the ban on US financial services and paving the way for US-supported international development assistance to flow in.

Then, in July, the Obama administration gave the green light for US oil companies to explore deals with the Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise (MOGE), the notorious state-owned petroleum company whose earnings (including US $500 million annually from the Yadana natural gas pipeline) had helped to prop up the repressive military regime that had preceded the U Thein Sein administration. The relevance of this move for America’s new Myanmar policy was brought to relief given who it was up against—Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. “She opposed lifting the embargo on investments in Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise because it was the source for the nontransparent flow of cash that built Naypyitaw,” said Michael Green, senior vice president for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington, DCbased think tank, at a press conference on the eve of Mr Obama’s visit. “But [when] the administration did it, she said, well, it’s not that big a deal. She kind of adjusted.”

According to Mr Green, the Obama administration brought Daw Aung San Suu Kyi around to its way of thinking after some careful consultation. “The administration has been leaning forward or has been taking steps and then talking to [Daw Aung San Suu Kyi] and talking through it, and she’s realized that in a close call, she’s better to say, let’s go with the administration’s stance.”

The rapid shift in Washington’s

Myanmar President U Thein Sein waves as he poses for a photo with US President Barack Obama in Yangon on November 19, 2012.

policy towards Myanmar has been mirrored in other corners of the West, where indignation at the human rights violations of the country’s former military leaders had also given rise to similar sanction regimes. The end of April saw the European Union reward Myanmar’s reformists by announcing it would suspend its punitive economic restrictions for a year. This nod paved the way for prospective European investors to join their American counterparts to explore a landscape that has all the attributes of a frontier economy.

“I think the business sector, notably in the case of the United States (which had the strongest restriction on private-sector engagement) is one important driving force behind

December 2012

cover story Photo: Reuters

this emerging trend,” says Jared Bissinger, an economist specializing in Myanmar affairs at Australia’s Macquarie University. “Many Western companies are eager to do business in Myanmar and have pushed their respective governments to help make this possible.”

And foreign business consultants and advisers are already leaving their mark in the rush to fill up hotel rooms and rent office space in Yangon.

What was on display at the “Global Investment Forum” in Naypyitaw in mid-September offered a pointer to a direction the rapprochement between the West and Myanmar is taking.

Scores of foreigners sporting black and gray business suits filled an ornate hall in the administrative capital to get a

December 2012

primer about what is on offer since U Thein Sein eased the iron grip of the previous military junta to herald a raft of political and economic reforms.

Little wonder why young Myanmars who took a gamble to return home and taste the air of change have no regrets.

Among such risk takers is Ko Thuta Aung. The then 26-year-old, armed with a British education, made the journey back from the comfort and order of Switzerland in November last year. Six months later, he had set up shop to tap the economic opportunities that have bubbled to the surface in Yangon.

“We help foreign businesses by organizing delegations, business matching, event matching and business research,” says the co-founder of the

HamsaHub Company of Business Developers. “Our latest projects have been contributing to data gathering and arranging meetings with senior government officials.”

But are the reforms that have attracted those such as Ko Thuta Aung to build a future in the new Myanmar the result of tough Western government-led sanctions precipitating change? Not so, argue the likes of Derek Tonkin. “Sanctions were seriously counterproductive and entrenched the military in power, causing only symbolic and psychological irritation, but inducing no deviation at all from the Seven-Point Roadmap [toward a military-dominated ‘disciplined democracy’] declared in 2003,” says Mr Tonkin, a former British ambassador

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Photo: Reuters

who had four postings in Southeast Asia. “There is as yet no general acceptance of this reality, as both the US and European hawks as well as Daw Aung San Suu Kyi herself continue to argue against all the evidence that sanctions, which could not be targeted at the regime, were of major importance in inducing political reform.”

But did Washington have an alternative following the military’s brutal crackdown on the 1988 prodemocracy uprising? No, says Robert Fitts, a former US diplomat who served in three Southeast Asian capitals, arguing that the tough measures imposed during the Bill Clinton presidency were justified under the circumstances. “In Burma, in the 1990s, with the repression, you could prove that the US was standing for

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something,” he explained. “This moral component—doing something good against oppression—is a must to get domestic support for a president’s foreign policy.”

Consequently, Washington banned new investments in Myanmar, blocked imports, restricted banking and financial transactions, denied visas and blacklisted military officers and their business cronies. For its part, the EU targeted over 1,000 Myanmar firms with visa bans and asset freezes, banned the sale and transfer of weapons, and targeted the country’s key exports such as rubies and timber. International development assistance, even through the United Nations, became scarce. By 2010, according to the World Bank, Myanmar’s roughly 60 million people— many of whom live below the poverty

line—were receiving just $7 per capita of Overseas Development Assistance, compared with $67 per capita for the nearly 6.5 million people of Laos, and $34 per capita for Vietnam’s population of nearly 90 million.

By the time of U Thein Sein’s inauguration, the combined impact of sanctions and gross economic mismanagement by the former junta had reduced Myanmar—a nation endowed with abundant natural resources, and once regarded as Southeast Asia’s most promising economy—to dire poverty.

Long after the indignity of being given Least Developed Country status by the UN in the 1980s, Myanmar’s current per capita GDP of $857 still lags behind that of Cambodia ($900) and Vietnam ($1,411), according to Asian Development Bank figures.

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cover story Crowds line a street outside the home of Myanmar’s opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi as US President Barack Obama arrives to meet her in Yangon.

There are hopes that the West’s return to Myanmar will help restore the country’s battered economy to its former glory. But it would be wrong to assume that the new US policy, though promising an influx of investment, is primarily about getting Myanmar back on its feet. After all, it comes in the context of a much broader effort by the Obama administration to deepen America’s ties in the AsiaPacific sphere. This shift towards Asian regional issues marks a departure from the previous George W. Bush administration’s military forays in Iraq and Afghanistan. China’s hawkish policies in 2010 and 2011 in the seas it shares with its smaller neighbors even prompted US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to spell out some of Washington’s strategic interests in the

December 2012

region at a meeting in Hanoi. And by the end of 2011, as Myanmar’s year of reform was drawing to a close, the Obama administration began to talk of a “pivot” in Washington’s foreign policy towards Asia.

“The context of [Mr Obama’s] trip [to Thailand, Cambodia and Myanmar in November] is the pivot to Asia,” said Mr Green of the CSIS at the press conference in the US capital, calling the Myanmar visit “the most fascinating trip by far.” He added that while the issue of China’s growing influence in Myanmar was downplayed as a reason for the country’s sudden departure from its former refusal to make democratic concessions, it couldn’t be discounted completely as a cause for the former ruling generals’ apparent change of heart. “Burma was leaning heavily towards China in part because of Western sanctions. We heard repeatedly in Naypyitaw and Rangoon that this is not about China.

But to some extent it really, beneath the surface, has to be.”

Still, he said, Myanmar officials and opposition leaders alike have stressed that they don’t want their country to get caught up in a power struggle between the world’s superpower and its most potent rival for influence in the region.

“There has been no real power shift in Burma, no power restructuring, since the army still retains power.”

– M aung Z arni , a prominent Myanmar political activist in exile

“[They] don’t want to be in a game between the US and China. What they want is help developing their economy after decades of ruining the economy and struggling with ethnic conflict,” said Mr Green.

Besides the economic incentives the US is dishing out to keep the reforms on track, Washington has also begun engaging with Myanmar’s armed forces. “One of the most challenging aspects of reform is enlisting the country’s military, which governed the country through authoritarian rule for five decades,” wrote Samantha Power, the special assistant to the president and senior director for multilateral affairs and human rights at the National Security Council, in a White House blog about Mr Obama’s Myanmar visit. “US Army Lt-Gen Francis Wiercinski [has drawn] on his experiences to make a powerful case to senior officials from the Burmese Defense Ministry that national security is helped rather than hindered by transparency and independent monitoring, and by compliance with international humanitarian law and human rights law.”

But it is not an easy mindset to change, warn trenchant critics of the Myanmar military. They are dismissing parallels being made between Myanmar and other countries that witnessed dramatic change of political systems, with an old oppressive order giving way to newer liberal institutions, such as Poland, South Africa and the former Soviet Union. “There has been no real power shift in Burma, no power restructuring, since the army still retains power,” notes Maung Zarni, a prominent Myanmar political activist in exile.

“The military wants to land on its feet under the current reforms, and not give up its power,” adds the author of an upcoming book, “Life under the Boot: 50 Years of Military Dictatorship.”

“The military has always believed it is the modernizing force in Burma and even now it has begun to believe its own propaganda that it is a democratizing force in the country.”

The conflict raging in the north, between government troops and Kachin militants, mirrors such a warning—that the old order, while having retreated to the shadows in Yangon, is still as much a presence with muscle and firepower as it always was.

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Yangon

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Among our readership we count policy-makers and government officials throughout the world. Diplomats, UN officials, NGO workers, journalists, students and activists both abroad and inside Myanmar regularly read our magaine and website.

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commentary

UN Engagement Vital for Rights Reform The United Nations has a crucial role to play in Myanmar’s ongoing efforts to restore human rights

By JARED GENSER

I

n a dramatic break from the past, Myanmar is undergoing significant political reform. On November 7, 2010, the country held its first election in 20 years.

Though the election was neither free nor fair and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was only released from house arrest six days after the polls, reforms instituted following President U Thein Sein’s inauguration in March 2011 have given the outside world substantial reason for hope.

As Myanmar goes down this path, the international community in general, and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in particular, should acknowledge genuine progress where it exists, but also remain actively engaged to ensure that respect for human rights is a real priority of all parts of U Thein Sein’s government.

Until 2010, the human rights situation in Myanmar was one of the worst in the world. Sexual violence, torture and extrajudicial killings were commonplace; children were pressed into military service by the thousands; the country’s prisons were full of arbitrarily detained dissidents; and more than a million people were displaced by conflicts that often directly targeted civilians.

Since 2010, the situation has only marginally improved. While hundreds of political prisoners have been released and some limited changes have been made to restrictive laws that historically were used against civil society, many violations continue. Of particular concern are the military attacks in Kachin and northern Shan states, and the arrests, killing and displacement of parts of the Rohingya Muslim population by the military in June 2012.

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During much of the last 20 years, the direct personal role of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Myanmar was limited, focused mainly on issuing public statements of concern.

More meaningful engagement from the OHCHR, however, came via staff support for the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Myanmar.

During this time, four Special Rapporteurs issued 36 reports documenting human rights challenges and violations in Myanmar.

Consequently, these reports helped influence the UN General Assembly to adopt 20 annual resolutions on Myanmar, and to place Myanmar on the Security Council agenda in 2006.

However, in 2007 China and Russia vetoed a proposed Chapter VI Security Council resolution intended to address the human rights abuses in Myanmar.

From 2010 to the present, the opportunity for engagement by OHCHR has increased dramatically. Included among the new OHCHR activities are: assisting with a Universal Periodic Review workshop in 2010, training of government officials in 2011 and a new capacity-building project on human rights that targets the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission and related stakeholders.

Similarly, the current Special Rapporteur has gone beyond describing human rights abuses and highlighted the need for law reform and the rule of law. In addition, there are indicators of progress by the Myanmar government in engaging with the UN, including its signing of a plan to end the recruitment of child soldiers, and the adoption of a new law allowing labor unions.

These signs of progress are encouraging. At the same time, challenges for deeper engagement persist. First, historically the Myanmar

government has been unwilling to take seriously the concerns of the UN, particularly when it highlighted the culture of impunity of the Myanmar judiciary that benefits the perpetrators of human rights violations. In order to end abuses and the impunity, the government must begin to acknowledge that there are abuses, something it has been slow to do.

Second, in-country access must be enhanced. Previously, the Special Rapporteurs had difficulty getting into Myanmar; presently, the main obstacle is accessing conflict zones such as Kachin and Arakan states.

Lastly, additional UN financial and administrative resources must be allocated. While OHCHR has to cope with resource constraints, the High Commissioner should urge member states to give more, ideally so that OHCHR can open an office in Yangon, as the government has now said it would be willing to accept.

There are additional areas that are vital to helping Myanmar’s reform efforts. First, the High Commissioner should take a more public and active personal role in promoting human rights in Myanmar. Second, OHCHR should expand its efforts focused on advancing the rule of law, law reform, and ensuring foreign investment respects human rights. Finally, OHCHR should support the establishment of a truth and reconciliation commission. Together, these initiatives would go a long way in advancing Myanmar’s progress.

Myanmar still has a long way to go in its transition process to democracy.

During this process the international community has both a moral and legal obligation to ensure the Myanmar government respects the human rights of its people. We owe the Myanmar people nothing less.

Jared Genser is managing director of Perseus Strategies, a boutique law and consulting firm focusing on international human rights, humanitarian law and corporate social responsibility.

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Asian Giants Revise

Myanmar Policy The return of the West to Myanmar creates challenges and opportunities for the country’s Asian partners

By SIMON ROUGHNEEN

A

s reforms are slowly worked through Myanmar’s Parliament, a shift is taking place in the country’s foreign relations. Better dealings with the West aside, the longtime military-ruled nation’s international rebirth has prompted other palpable changes.

Under the former junta, trade sanctions left businesses from China, India, South Korea and Southeast Asia with an open goal in Myanmar—a land rich in natural resources coveted by Asia’s bustling economies.

During the sanctions era, China and Thailand have been arguably the two most prominent investor-nations, with China first among equals given its additional role as Myanmar’s minder on the United Nations Security Council—deflecting criticism and blocking damning resolutions in the wake of the former junta’s heinous human rights abuses.

But a year ago, China was handed a surprising snub by the nominally civilian Myanmar government. In one of the first signals that Naypyitaw was about to undertake a series of reforms, President U Thein Sein suspended the controversial Myitsone Dam in Kachin State.

The project was set to flood an area the size of Singapore yet have 90 percent of power generated exported to China, despite only a quarter of the domestic population having access to electricity, according to the Asian Development Bank.

With Western investors likely to stream in soon, and with Japan offering the Myanmar government a helping hand with debt relief and major investment pledges in much-needed infrastructure, does this mean Beijing has suddenly been pushed onto the back foot?

“Yes and no,” say those keeping an eye on regional affairs. Jan Zalewski, an analyst covering Myanmar for the IHS Global Insight

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asia & myanmar

research firm, told The Irrawaddy that “Myanmar’s re-balancing of foreign relations means that China will increasingly have to compete with other foreign players when dealing with the country.”

As challenges arise, there are signs that China is recalibrating its approach to Myanmar. A recent editorial in the Global Times warned Chinese businesses to take local sensitivities into account when doing business in Myanmar.

The article cited the Myitsone debacle and recent mass protests

against a copper mining project in the Letpadaung Mountains of Sagaing Region—the latter jointly owned by the military-controlled Union of Myanmar Economic Holdings Ltd and Wan Bao Company, a subsidiary of state-owned Chinese arms manufacturer North China Industries Corp.

“Myanmar’s increasing gearing-up to attract Western investments not least means that the modus operandi of doing business with Myanmar is changing, which will alter the position of many Chinese businesses that hitherto had to rely on only a handful of key contacts

within the previous military regime for entering the country,” said Mr Zalewski.

This does not mean, however, that China has completely lost out in Myanmar. In 2011, bilateral trade between the two countries came to US $6.5 billion, up 46 percent year-onyear, according to Beijing, while China’s investment in Myanmar hit a total of $20.26 billion by the end of last year, going by Naypyitaw figures.

According to Chinese reports of Wu Bangguo’s visit to Myanmar ahead of the Chinese Communist Party

Photo: Reuters

Myanmar’s President U Thein Sein inspects a guard of honor during a ceremony at Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi.

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leadership changes in November, U Thein Sein said Myanmar welcomes Chinese investment, especially in laborintensive industries.

“Myanmar knows that it won’t be beneficial for it to completely sideline its powerful northern neighbor, so China’s role in the country will still remain dominant,” added Mr Zalewski.

That should hold even if Myanmar’s opposition wins the 2015 general election, as democracy icon and former political prisoner Daw Aung San Suu Kyi has welcomed continued good relations with Beijing, telling Chinese state-run Xinhua News Agency in June that, “We are very good friends with China. I really don’t see why we cannot continue to be good friends.”

Indeed, with Western economies struggling with debt and stagnation, even a China that is now running into slowdown seems set to be the single biggest investor in Myanmar for the foreseeable future.

But as China’s prominence recedes in relative terms, Japan is moving fast to bolster commercial ties after generally going along with Western sanctions in recent years. Now, however, Japan is stealing a march on potential competitors by plowing money into Myanmar as Westerners cautiously await new laws, such as the longoverdue Foreign Direct Investment law passed in early November.

According to Toshihiro Kudo, a Japan External Trade Organization researcher speaking in Bangkok, Japanese interest in Myanmar is “feverish,” with up to 200 businesspeople a month passing through its Yangon office compared with perhaps only 200 per year in the past.

Recent estimates indicate that Japan has or will put at least $18 billion into Myanmar, based on a round-up of loan write-offs, public and private investment pledges and bilateral aid promises. Myanmar wants Japan to develop the Thilawa Port, a half-hour drive from downtown Yangon, and possibly inject much needed cash into the stillborn multibillion dollar port planned for Dawei in the southwestern Tanintharyi Region.

Japan’s NTT—one of the world’s apex telecommunications infrastructure providers—has established an office in Yangon in advance of a planned

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Some of Asia’s biggest brand names are making their mark in Yangon and other cities in Myanmar.

liberalization of Myanmar’s minuscule telecoms sector, which will likely allow foreign companies to operate as network providers. The Myanmar office came on the back of U Thein Sein meeting company executives of NTT in Japan in April—one of several investment-related trips in Asia that the pacemaker-wearing president has made in recent months.

Japanese foundations have promised money for Myanmar’s impoverished ethnic borderlands— lending the country’s interests a selfless air. However, Yuki Akimoto, a director of BurmaInfo Japan who researches and documents human rights and environmental issues in Myanmar, says Japan’s interest is much more business-driven than altruistic.

With tensions between Tokyo and Beijing increasing over disputed islands and long-simmering nationalistic mutual hostility, Japanese business sees an opportunity to cut-and-run with a cheaper labor market now on the scene

in Myanmar. “Japanese manufacturers already had been looking for alternative production bases because producing in China was getting too expensive,” Ms Akimoto told The Irrawaddy.

But what of Asia’s third biggest economy, India, which shares a 1,463km border with Myanmar as well as a history of British colonial rule?

India has typically been seen as floundering somewhat in its Myanmar policy, the oft-touted “world’s largest democracy” reversing support for Myanmar’s democratically-elected winners of the 1990 election in favor of “pragmatic engagement” with the coupinstalled former military dictatorship— the rationale being that India would otherwise lose economic and strategic ground in Myanmar to an ascendant China.

That happened anyway, and although bilateral trade between India and Myanmar is expected to more than double by 2015, according to a speech given in Kolkata by the Myanmar

December 2012

asia & myanmar

Photo: Steve Tickner / The Irrawaddy

consul general there, the projected leap from $1.28 billion in 2010-11 to $3 billion 2014-15 would still amount to less than half of Myanmar-China trade today.

In November, opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi visited India— the country where she lived as a young woman while her mother was Myanmar ambassador there during the 1960s.

Her trip came on the heels of yet another international suitor arriving in Myanmar earlier this year, when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh—himself under fire at home for dithering over India’s now-backfiring economy—paid a visit.

But after a decade-and-a-half of playing catch-up with China, will increased investment and engagement from Japan and the West crowd out New Delhi once more? Again, it is a “yes and no” answer, according to some who keep tabs on India’s regional policies.

Dr K Yhome, a Myanmar researcher at the Observer Research Foundation,

December 2012

an Indian think-tank, believes that increasing Western engagement means that the window of opportunity for New Delhi will narrow.

It might not be a complete loss for India in Myanmar, however, he says, telling The Irrawaddy that “New Delhi also would see the West’s engagement as adding to its efforts to counterbalance China in Myanmar,” and in turn, facilitate India deploying geographical and cultural advantages in its eastern neighbor.

“Despite the West’s presence in Myanmar, New Delhi has the advantage of proximity, both land and maritime, to Myanmar and also cultural linkages,” said Dr K Yhome. “The question is how effectively India will leverage these strengths in Myanmar.”

Last year, in what was one of the first tangible international rewards for

“Myanmar knows that it won’t be beneficial for it to completely sideline its powerful northern neighbor, so China’s role in the country will still remain dominant.”

–Analyst Jan Zalewski

what were then just promises of reform, Myanmar’s nearest neighbors in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) agreed to let Myanmar lead the group in 2014—eight years after it was stopped from chairing Asean as Western countries objected on human rights grounds.

For the most part, though, Asean’s “non-interference” mantra put the bloc at odds with the West over Myanmar, leaving both sides now claiming credit for pushing the country toward reforms. Asean is often considered the sole source of regional political pressure on Naypyitaw—urging the former junta to hold free and fair elections and attempting to codify human rights— compared to China and India, which both happily look the other way on humanitarian issues as long as investments pay off.

And while the West says sanctions backed the junta into a corner—an assertion backed up by some leaked diplomatic cables from the US Embassy in Yangon—Asean claims the opposite: that sanctions did not work and that years of “engagement” nudged the generals into seeing the folly of military rule.

Asean countries such as Thailand and Malaysia benefited, like China, from Western sanctions on Myanmar, capitalizing on absent business competitors to milk Myanmar’s natural resources. Myanmar’s economic stagnation and civil wars meant that both countries were favored destinations for migrant workers— something that could change in future if Myanmar’s political glasnost is followed by an Asian Tiger take-off.

A big if, perhaps, but a revived Myanmar economy could drive a “reverse brain drain” back to the former pariah nation and cause problems for those neighboring economies dependent on cheap, and sadly oftenabused, migrant labor.

There is change in other ways too—with Asean countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia touting a blunter line on anti-Muslim, antiRohingya sentiment in Myanmar than Westerners giddy at the thought of making quick money in what is deemed world’s biggest remaining “virgin market.” Non-interference comes full circle, it seems.

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analysis | conflict

Disquiet on the Western Front Communal violence in Rakhine State could undo Myanmar’s efforts to rehabilitate its standing in the world

By AUNG ZAW

T

he communal violence in Rakhine State has drawn the attention of the international community, including the countries of the Middle East, as media outside of Myanmar has exposed the plight of Rohingya Muslims in the north of the state near Bangladesh. The violence subsequently became an anti-Muslim campaign that received condemnation from governments around the world.

The Myanmar government, which has been widely applauded for its ongoing reform efforts, is once again on the defensive, as foreign observers warn that its handling of the Rakhine crisis could deal a serious blow to those efforts. In response, government officials have vowed to arrest and punish the culprits behind the unrest—although some still suspect that pro-government elements were among those directly involved.

Indeed, the violence in Rakhine has wider implications. Surin Pitsuwan, the former secretary-general of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, has rightly pointed out that there is a risk that the Rohingya will be radicalized by this latest effort to force them out of the country. “This would not be good for anyone,” he told The Bangkok Post.

He also warned that any intensification of the communal strife in Rakhine State would have wider strategic and security implications for the region. This is true, as the unrest would force refugees to flee across the border, and so entail serious humanitarian and security concerns.

The Brussels-based think tank the International Crisis Group has also said in a new report that the sectarian violence in Rakhine State threatens national stability and could spread into a wider religious conflict unless tackled through decisive moral leadership.

Critics, including human rights groups, have accused the government of mishandling the crisis, noting that some government officials made extensive use of social media to foment anti-Rohingya sentiment. This resurgence of racism at a time when Myanmar is supposed to be restoring democracy and human rights is sad, indeed.

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Many native Rakhine regard the Rohingya as foreign interlopers who have taken advantage of Myanmar’s porous border with Bangladesh to illegally enter the country. President U Thein Sein, who has been hailed as a reformist leader, seems to agree with this assessment. At a meeting with officials from the UN refugee agency UNHCR in June, he pointedly said that Myanmar would take responsibility for its ethnic nationalities, “but it is not at all possible to recognize the illegal border-crossing Rohingyas.”

In this regard, the president’s attitude is not far removed from that of his predecessor, former dictator SnrGen Than Shwe. According to noted Myanmar scholar Prof David Steinberg, the military junta leader who handed over power to U Thein Sein in 2011 strongly believed that Myanmar’s most dangerous frontier region is that shared with Bangladesh.

But this preoccupation with the perceived threat of a “Bengali invasion” is not limited to military men. Many native Rakhines, who considered themselves to be devout Buddhists, are convinced that the only defense against a twin tide of illegal immigrants and Islamists is to push back hard, with violence if necessary. Such a mindset creates the ideal conditions for an even more ominous threat—hardliners within the military seeking to roll back reforms under the cover of restoring security.

Locally, some Rakhine politicians also appear to be trying to take advantage of the current turmoil to advance their own interests. But this is not just an issue for the Rakhine alone: It is also affecting the political climate of the rest of the country, with many siding with the president, and more moderate voices sidelined or silenced by intimidation. Even Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, admired around the world for her courage in standing up to Myanmar’s military, has been reluctant to speak out on this issue, earning her some rare criticism from her international admirers.

Communal violence in Rakhine State has devastated whole communities and forced tens of thousands of people, both Rohingya and Rakhine, into refugee camps.

(ALL PHOTOS: JPAING / THE IRRAWADDY)

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analysis | conflict When pressed, the Nobel Peace Prize of 135 recognized ethnic groups. From laureate told the BBC World Service that time on, the Rohingya have been in November: “I am urging tolerance officially regarded as migrants from but I do not think one should use one’s Bangladesh with no status in Myanmar. moral leadership, if you want As is generally the to call it that, to promote case when two countries a particular cause without or cultures meet—and really looking at the sources sometimes collide—the of the problems.” Neither reality is far more complex she nor her National League than the official stance for Democracy (NLD) have acknowledges. The Rohingya Myanmar visited Rakhine State since people settled in the Mayu Rakhine the violence began in June.

Frontier Area—the area now State During her trip to India in known as Buthidaung and November, she appeared to Maungdaw townships in Yangon move closer to the president’s northern Rakhine State, close position. Calling the Rohingya thailand to Bangladesh—generations issue a “huge international ago. tragedy,” she implied that The seeds of the current Bangladesh should also bear conflict were sown during some responsibility. “Is there the Second World War, when a lot of illegal crossing of the the British allowed many border [with Bangladesh] still migrants from what was then going on? We have got to put a stop to it part of India to come settle in Myanmar. otherwise there will never be an end to At the time, these Bengali-speaking the problem,” she said. migrants were called “Chittagonians.”

U Ko Ko Gyi, a prominent student “Tensions between Muslim and leader and former political prisoner, has Buddhist communities were high during said that the 88 Generation Students the British rule and communal riots broke group, of which he is a leading member, out under the Japanese occupation,” does not recognize the Rohingya as one wrote Moshe Yegar, an Israeli diplomat of the ethnic nationalities of Myanmar. posted in Myanmar in the 1960s, in a If necessary, he said, speaking to local thesis titled “The Muslims of Burma.” media soon after the deadly riots between Long before the war began, the Rakhine and Rohingya communities resentment was growing among ethnic began, he would join the armed forces to Rakhines over the Zamindari system, drive out the “Bengalis.” under which Bengali migrants were Coming from someone regarded as a permitted to hold 90-year leases on the champion of human rights, these words land, effectively making them landowners came as a real shock to many domestic who came to dominate agriculture in the and international colleagues, as well as region. diplomats and campaign groups. To put it Adding to their sense of dispossession, simply, he was advocating human rights the devoutly Buddhist Rakhine were for all in Myanmar—except the Rohingya. also appalled to see the new settlers Since making these remarks, Ko eagerly establishing mosques and Islamic Ko Gyi has been named a member of schools in their homeland and marrying a government-appointed commission local women, who were converted to to investigate the unrest in Rakhine Islam.

State. After visiting the state, he said In 1942, when Japanese troops were his impression was that the government advancing on Myanmar, the Rakhines’ had handled the crisis poorly, and that pent-up hostility toward the settlers the country’s citizenship law must be came to a head. “Gangs of Arakanese properly settled before peace can return.

[Rakhine] Buddhists in southern Arakan However, the commission itself has where the Buddhists were in the majority recently come under criticism for lacking attacked Muslims villages and massacred credibility, after two Muslim members inhabitants. Whole villages were sacked were sacked. and their inhabitants all murdered,” Many of the problems facing the writes Yegar in his thesis.

Rohingya in Myanmar today date back Later, it was the turn of the Muslims to the 1982 citizenship law introduced by to take revenge and mete out similar then dictator Ne Win, whose xenophobic punishment to Buddhists living in the socialist regime decided to exclude this north, forcing the Buddhist Rakhine to Muslim minority from the country’s list flee south. Serious communal violence

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and massacres took place in 1942 and 1943, leaving a legacy of bitterness that still lingers.

“It was in this manner that Arakan became divided into two separate areas, one Buddhist and the other Muslim,” according to Yegar.

The British, who planned to reenter Burma from India, armed the Chittagonians in the Mayu Frontier Area to counter the Japanese forces. This newly armed group was called simply the “Volunteer Force” or “V Force.” Its members were to collect information about the movements of the Japanese and to launch guerrilla attacks against them.

Instability, lawlessness and terror were the order of the day in Rakhine State at that time. Ethnic Rakhines alleged that members of the V Force committed attacks against Rakhine villages and destroyed Buddhist temples.

Then, after the war, and after Myanmar regained its independence from Britain, Rakhine faced a new threat—the Mujahid rebellion. Although this was an Islamist movement, some communists and Rakhine rebels joined forces with the Mujahids, after reaching an agreement with them to split Rakhine once the government of Prime Minister U Nu had been defeated.

U n d er U Nu, s e ve ral m ilitary campaigns (most famously, “Operation Monsoon”) were launched to push out the Mujahids. The final assault, led by then Brig-Gen Aung Gyi, who recently passed away in Yangon, came in 1961.

According to Rakhine academics, the goal of the rebellion had been to create a separate Muslim state to be known as “Arakistan.”

Throughout the 1950s, there was also a campaign by the Rohingya to have the northern part of Rakhine State declared an autonomous region, directly administered by the central government in Yangon and without any involvement with Rakhine officials or any Rakhine influence whatsoever.

There was also a corresponding campaign to deny Rakhine statehood.

According to Yegar: “In July 1961,

Clashes between ethnic Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims left a trail of destruction and destitution on both sides; many Rohingya attempted to flee the violence by going to neighboring Bangladesh.

the Rohinga [sic] Youth Association held a meeting in Rangoon [to call on] the government of U Nu not to grant the status of state to Arakan because community tensions still existed between Muslims and Buddhists since the 1942 riots.”

The government subsequently set up the Mayu Frontier Association (MFA), which was administered by army officers, but not granted autonomy. Since it was not placed under Rakhine jurisdiction, however, the arrangement was accepted

by Rohingya leaders.

However, the issue of the status of the Rohingya and demands for Muslim autonomy did not die down. This did not go down well with the Rakhine, who suspected that the Bengalis—as they continue to call the Rohingya—wanted to annex the MFA to then East Pakistan, now Bangladesh.

Rakhine scholars have long argued that the term “Rohingya” only entered mainstream Myanmar political discourse in the 1950s. However, Western scholars and early foreign travelers to Myanmar have said that the name has existed at least since the 19th century.

In any case, by the 1960s, it was, in one form or another, generally accepted as the designation for the Muslims of northern Rakhine State. Yegar cites this passage from the May 1960 issue of the Yangon-based Guardian Monthly as evidence of its entry into common parlance: “Today, the Arakanese Muslims call themselves Rohinga or Roewengyah.”

The Rohingya issue and conflict in Rakhine State will not go away easily.

It is a well-known fact that Myanmar’s Muslim suffers discrimination, and that the Rohingya are particularly persecuted.

Since there has been no real effort to integrate the Muslim population, including the Rohingya or Bengalis, into mainstream Myanmar society, it seems almost certain that sectarian violence will continue to plague the country’s western gate.

Critics of the government say that it needs to revisit Myanmar’s citizenship laws and immigration policies to deter an influx of migrants from neighboring countries. It could begin by studying the refugee and asylum policies of other nations. But above all, it must rely on rule of law, rather than force, to restore order along Myanmar’s western frontier.

Failure to address this issue properly could deal a devastating blow to this country’s hard-won progress in opening to the outside world.

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profile

The Kachin

Cage Fighter

Cage fighting sensation Aung La Nsang vows to keep battling for the Kachin cause

By CHARLIE CAMPBELL

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and he almost broke my arm. I was super impressed with the effectiveness of jujitsu.”

Aung La Nsang now teaches for Crazy 88 Martial Arts Academy in between preparing himself for competitions. His impressive 14-8 winloss career record is the result of five hours training every day—a grueling mixture of strength and conditioning work, sparing and technical drilling.

Photo: Crazy 88

M

yanmar might not be blessed with a wealth of sporting heroes, but when cage fighter Aung La Nsang defeated Jason Louch just two minutes and 30 seconds into his latest bout, a star was born.

The 27-year-old fights out of Elkridge, Maryland, but has never forgotten his roots—holding up a ethnic Kachin flag after his latest stunning victory and pledging a portion of his winnings to help displaced civilians in northernmost Myanmar.

Nicknamed the “Burmese Python,” the 6’1” (185 cm) athlete remembers his upbringing in the Kachin State capital Myitkyina despite moving to the United States at the tender age of 18. Well-spoken and charming, he betrays a sharp sense of humor not necessarily anticipated in a professional pugilist.

“I started training Brazilian jujitsu in 2004 and then after four months I entered a mixed martial arts [MMA] contest,” he told The Irrawaddy. “I had a friend who did it before I started and in my first class he taught me with an arm bar—it’s a submission hold which is an arm lock

“I try to set a goal and I try real hard towards that goal,” he said. “If you don’t have a goal then you won’t have any direction—that’s the motto I try to live by right now. Put your heart into it, give 100 percent and you will achieve your goals.”

The fourth child out of three boys and two girls, Aung La Nsang did not receive any fighting instruction before arriving in the US but admits to long having a taste for combat.

“I always fought with my brothers and people but I never trained formally in Burma. But kicking and punching is in our blood. I didn’t formally train in Lethwei or Burmese martial arts though,” he said. “I did have an older brother who used to always beat me up, but not anymore!”

Now his goal is to work up to the highest level of MMA competition— the global Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), which broadcasts to a multimillion viewer audience in 22 languages across 150 countries.

“It’s a bigger promotion,” said Aung La Nsang. “I’ve got some friends in the UFC and I do well against them—I’m not going to say that I beat them up, but skill-wise I’m there. But I’m under contract with the CCFC [Cage Fury Fighting Championship] and it’s a big promotion in the US east coast.”

In order to reach his target, the Burmese Python must first take a bite out of current welterweight champion George Sullivan. “In August, George Sullivan fought and they offered me that fight, but I wasn’t in training camp yet so I didn’t take it,” said

“Kicking and punching is in our blood” –Aung La Nsang

December 2012

December 2012

Photo: Crazy 88

Aung la Nsang. “But I guarantee in another fight or so they will let me have a crack at him.”

Yet it could have been so different for the former International School Yangon student who majored in agriculture at Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Michigan, and subsequently worked on a dairy farm.

“At college I studied agricultural science and it was my intention to do agriculture back home,” he said. “That would be my dream—to open a gym and do some farming in Kachin State.

“It’s not going to be in the near future, that’s for sure, as I’ve still got my dream here to follow and a lot of fighting—this is just the beginning, I feel like I’ve just started to get the hang of fighting.”

And if there is any adversary that concerns Aung La Nsang, it certainly is not the muscle-bound modern gladiators he encounters in the steellined octagon.

“I worked for a migratory bee company out of college,” he said. “I did beekeeping for a year-and-a-half all over the United States. I loved it but I was having trouble achieving my goal of becoming a MMA fighter so I had to stop that.

“I would get stung every day pretty much, and let me tell you that you never get used to it—it hurts every time. I don’t know if it’s worse than getting hit. Getting punched in the ring doesn’t hurt that much—I mean you feel it, but you just can’t prepare yourself for that sting.”

Despite Aung La Nsang’s intention to one day adopt a pastoral lifestyle in his homeland, a key change must materialize before this could occur— peace between the Naypyitaw government and the ethnic rebel Kachin Independence Army (KIA).

The two sides have been engaged in an escalating conflict since June last year with around 90,000 civilians displaced by fighting near their homes and forced live in temporary camps by the Chinese border.

“Right before my last fight I was in tears because I wanted to win for Kachin people so bad,” said Aung La Nsang, who admits to having distant family in the KIA. “I’m going to keep fighting for them to raise awareness, but I’m a fighter first and not a politician so there’s only so much that I can do. But I shall try to help as much as I can.”

Aung La Nsang poses with an ethnic Kachin flag.

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ethnic

Kayin State’s Fragile Peace Myanmar’s recent reforms have many Kayin people trying to navigate their way through rumors and a range of isues, from leadership divisions to citizenship and land rights

By PHIL THORNTON

P

’da Myah raises a sun-bronzed arm and points across a never-ending blanket of green rice fields that disappear into the distant horizon and Myanmar beyond. The faint smudge that makes up the Dawna Range mountains stands flat against a sky sliding into night. P’da Myah is at times excited, nervous and sad as he speaks about being resettled to Australia from the Thailand-Myanmar border.

“I’ve spent seven years in displaced hiding sites and then 10 years at Mae La Refugee Camp with my family,” he said. “My mum died in the camp—in 2007 she passed away. Mum never knew peace in her lifetime—17 years without a real home for us is enough. I will leave for Melbourne in four days.”

P’da Myah has mixed feelings about resettling in a third country. The 30-year-old is caught between wanting to stay and help build peace in his beloved Kayin homeland and leaving to build a stable and secure future for his young family.

“I’ve always wanted to live in peace in my country—that’s always been my dream—but I have never known freedom. I don’t want to lose any more time; I want to learn, get new skills and hopefully come back here one day.”

P’da Myah can be forgiven for losing patience. The Karen National Union (KNU), one of Myanmar’s biggest ethnic armed groups, has been fighting the central government for greater autonomy in Kayin State for 63 years.

The group first signed a peace

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agreement with President Thein Sein’s reformist administration on January 12, although the ceasefire remains precarious and the consequences of more than half-a-century of bloody insurgency plain to see.

The Thai Burma Border Consortium (TBBC), a humanitarian group which works with both internally displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees, estimates that militarization in southeast Myanmar has displaced as many as 450,000 local villagers, with around 145,000 people living in nine refugee camps just over the border in Thailand.

The TBBC and partner agencies have “documented the destruction, forced relocation or abandonment of more than 3,700 civilian settlements in Southeast Myanmar since 1996, including 105 villages and hiding sites between August 2010 and July 2011,” according to a statement on the group’s website.

Like P’da Myah, Kayin journalist Saw Wei Thoo fled his home in the late 1990s after attacks on his village by government troops and has spent more than 10 of his 27 years in Umpiem Mai Refugee Camp located 95 miles (152 km) south of Mae La. “I have never known peace, and my father has never known peace,” he said. “My country has never had the benefits of the stability that peace brings. My village of 5,000 people has no electricity—that means we have no refrigeration for medicine or food.

The roads in and out of my village are unusable in the wet season.”

The KNU was Burma’s first ethnic

December 2012

Photo: Reuters

insurgency group and began fighting central government in 1948, shortly after the end of colonial rule. The Kayin people believe Myanmar’s ethnic nationalities were granted autonomy in the Panglong Agreement signed by Gen Aung San on February 12, 1947, which the government later abandoned.

Saw Wei Thoo stresses that most refugees and displaced Karen want to return to their homeland if there is genuine peace.

“Given the right circumstances, all [people] want to return to their homes and land,” he said. “The problem is guaranteeing their security and safety.

Our country has a massive landmine problem and most ethnic people don’t have legal documents to claim or prove ownership of their land.”

Homeless on Our Own Soil The mighty Salween River runs from China through Myanmar and separates Thailand’s Mae Hong Son Province from Kayin State. After an hour-and-a-half of river travel from the bustling Thai hamlet of Mae Sam Lab, a large sandy beach with a homemade sign declares you have reached Ei Tu Hta Camp. Nestled behind a 30-meterhigh sand dune, 700 small bamboo huts are home to nearly 4,000 IDPs. Saw Nya Ter is the camp leader at Ei Tu Hta and was a rice farmer before being driven from his home in 2006.

He says the offensive of the Myanmar armed forces, or Tatmadaw, at the time was relentless.

“All the people [in Ei Tu Hta] had rice farms, fruit and nut plantations,” he said. “The Burmese [Myanmar] Army destroyed many farms, thousands of acres of rice and plantations all gone— what a waste.”

Although a TBBC report, Displacement and Poverty published in October 2011, confirms the wanton devastation that Saw Nya Ter and Saw Wei Thoo experienced firsthand, the latest reports indicate that the picture may be changing.

TBBC figures released on October 31, 2012, show that the numbers of people displaced between August 2011 and July 2012 dropped to an estimated 10,000.

A KNU soldier watches a ceremony commemorating the 63rd anniversary of Karen Revolution Day in Oo Kray Kee Township, Kayin State.

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special rapporteur on human rights Attempting to build on the recent in Myanmar, also warned of the re f o rm p ro c e ss , t h e N o rweg i a n consequences of a continued lack of government has pledged US $5 million legal proof of land ownership. towards an initial round of pilot projects “Land confiscations and known as the Myanmar Peace Support the consequent forced eviction of Initiative (MPSI) that aims to prepare individuals and communities often the ground for the eventual return of lead to poverty, displacement and IDPs. ruined livelihoods,” he said. “Given The MPSI is set to last for six the expected wave of privatizations months, after which a Peace Donor and increase in foreign investment, Support Group—made up of Norway, along with accelerated economic the United Nations, Australia, Britain, development, there is likely to be the World Bank and the European an increase in land confiscations, Union—will take over and potentially development-induced displacement work with refugees, providing the and other violations of economic, social political situation is conducive. and cultural rights.”

But the MPSI recently drew flak Saw Nya Ter agrees that lacking from community and civil society proof of ownership for their land is groups. In an open letter to Norwegian a major concern for many camps Ambassador to Thailand, Cambodia residents. “We hear rumors that our and Myanmar Katja Nordgaard, a land and farms have been sold and in collection of ethnic Shan organizations some cases even sold again,” he said, said, “MPSI’s flawed, rushed and adding that most people in the camp [opaque] peace fund consultations have do not have government-issued identity not been and will never be acceptable cards. to ethnic communities and community“Some may have had [identity based organizations.” cards] in the past but nobody here now In response to its critics, Norway has papers. People here can’t go back attempted to clarify its position by until they are guaranteed security and stating that the initiative was just the access to their farms. We don’t trust start of a much longer peace process ceasefires, we have to have guarantees that must take place internally in before we can go home.”

Myanmar.

Saw Nya Ter says the government Nevertheless, the barrage of has two weapons to get people off their criticism and counter-arguments land—the widely condemned 2008 from all sides has left displaced Constitution, which decrees that all communities—including ethnic Karen, land is actually owned by the state, and Shan and Kachin among others—in the Tatmadaw. a state of confusion about the MPSI. “They beat us in law Grassroots organizations and if that doesn’t work warn that unless there they burn us off our land,” is more inclusion, he said. “Villagers look transparency, honesty around and say ‘how can and proper consultation, we have a ceasefire when the scheme is heading for there are now many more failure.

Myanmar soldiers in our land?’ If And the situation for they want a ceasefire [then ethnic people on the ground they should] leave our land remains undeniably dire.

Kayin and return to the army “Findings suggest that State Yangon camps.”

59 percent of households In addition, a recent in rural communities of thailand public spat between Southeast Myanmar are KNU leaders added impoverished, with the fuel to rumors that the indicators particularly organizations was in severe in northern [Kayin] danger of splintering areas where there have been into factions—adding allegations of widespread yet another level of uncertainty for and systematic human rights abuse,” displaced communities. said the October TBBC report.

Tensions among the rebel Speaking to the United Nations leadership reached critical levels after General Assembly in September a go-it-alone delegation negotiated with 2012, Tomás Ojea Quintana, the

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Photo: Reuters

ethnic

“They beat us in law and if that doesn’t work they burn us off our land.”

–Saw Nya Ter, camp leader at the Ei Tu Hta refugee camp

December 2012

Photo: : Saw Yan Naing / The Irrawaddy Photo: Reuters

Left: KNU soldiers parade at a ceremony to mark Karen Revolution Day. Top right: A Kayin shopkeeper in Thailand’s Mae Hong Son Province holds a poster of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and her father Gen Aung San. Bottom right: An ethnic Kayin woman carries her child through the Mae La refugee camp outside Mae Sot, near the Thai-Myanmar border.

government officials on September 29 to open a liaison office in Hpa-an, capital of Kayin State.

Three KNU leaders—Gen Mu Tu Say Poe, the head of the KNU’s Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) military wing; Saw Roger Khin, the head of the Health and Welfare Department; and the recently deceased Padoh David Taw, secretary

December 2012

of its peace committee—were relieved of their positions.

The KNU then held an emergency meeting on October 25 and 26 to resolve their differences over the dismissal of the three leaders. Kayin community organizations, religious leaders and others from inside Myanmar, along the border and from overseas, urged the KNU to resolve its internal conflict,

unite and continue its ongoing peace talks with Naypyitaw.

In response, the group issued a statement that reinstated the two remaining outcasts and said it had “resolved the problem of ‘weaknesses’ that had arisen within the organization, through consultation and under the guidance and the leadership of the KNU, all the participants at the meeting agreed

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Photo: Reuters

ethnic

KNU General Secretary Naw Zipporah Sein, left, and U Aung Min, leader of the Myanmar government’s peace negoatiating team, exchange documents of agreement during talks at the Sedona Hotel in Yangon on April 6, 2012.

“It is naïve to think [businesses] are there for our interests.

They are not, they’re driven by their own needs and interests.”

–A Kayin district leader

to march on, in accordance with the basic principles and policies of the KNU.” Despite the tensions and differences of opinion, there appears to be a renewed determination within various KNU factions to build unity. Both Gen

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Mu Tu and Saw David Tharckabaw, the KNU vice-president, stressed the farreaching consequences that a division within the KNU could have on peace talks with the government.

Only Business Internal conflict is not the only issue that worries those involved in or affected by the ongoing negotiations.

Kayin civil society organizations, as well as the KNU, have recently voiced concern that the peace talks could give business groups an unfair advantage.

KNU General-Secretary Naw Zipporah Sein brought up the involvement of the Dawei Princess Company and Yangon-based nonprofit organization Myanmar Egress in ceasefire negotiations, and asked the government to clarify the situation.

President’s Office Minister U Aung Min, Naypyitaw’s chief peace negotiator with ethnic armed groups, added to these concerns in a taped video interview with the Karen Information Centre.

“Mostly, I work with U Hla Maung Shwe, the businessman. When there is a trip, we estimate the cost and pay for it half-by-half,” said U Aung Min. “Until now, we haven’t used any money

from the government. Until now, the government doesn’t have a budget line for this. The Parliament hasn’t allocated any money for this.”

A Kayin district leader, who asked to remain anonymous, said his area is already earmarked for massive development and it is vital that all business deals are scrutinized for a conflict of interest.

“It is naïve to think [businesses] are there for our interests,” he said. “They are not, they’re driven by their own needs and interests.”

Law Eh is a senior officer in the KNLA, and battled-hardened after spending 27 of his 55 years fighting a guerrilla war against the Tatmadaw.

Smart and with a university degree to prove it, Law Eh is matter-of-fact in his assessment of the current situation.

“We are in the initial phase of the ceasefire now—getting to the next stage is hard and slow,” he said. “This time it is different. The lower ranks of the Burmese Army don’t want to fight, the people don’t want any more fighting— they are the same as the Karen.

“If the ceasefire does not work out, then we can expect more of the same.

If that happens, no one benefits.”

December 2012

guest column

A Partner in Peace Norway’s ambassador to Myanmar, Thailand and Cambodia explains her country’s role in helping Myanmar to end decades of internal conflict

By KATJA NORDGAARD

December 2012

Photo: Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs

A

s a long-time backer of Myanmar’s efforts to restore democracy, Norway was recently asked to coordinate international support for the country’s ceasefires by chairing the Peace Donor Support Group. To provide concrete support, the Myanmar Peace Support Initiative (MPSI) was established.

Unlike the situation when previous ceasefires were established in Myanmar, the current efforts are taking place in a context of nationwide political reforms and democratization.

For the international community not to support this opportunity to achieve peace after decades of conflict would be irresponsible.

Of course, we are fully aware of the need for the fighting to stop across the country and for a genuine dialogue on political issues to begin. But, to be clear, Norway is not mediating in or facilitating the ceasefire talks.

Our role has been to support the agreements already reached between the government and the non-state armed groups (NSAGs), and to help build trust and confidence in the fragile period between when the ceasefires are signed and the political process of addressing the underlying causes of the conflicts begins. A precondition for Norway’s engagement to support the ceasefires has all along been that these agreements are followed by a genuine political process.

At a meeting between Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and Myanmar President Thein Sein in Naypyitaw on November 3, the president confirmed that the government will now begin a political dialogue process by meeting all the armed groups to ask them to identify issues that they feel will be most important in future talks.

The MPSI is not a development

Norway’s Ambassador to Myanmar Katja Nordgaard, left, at the opening of the country’s new embassy in Yangon.

program; nor is it about the repatriation or relocation of refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs). It was created earlier this year as a short-term effort to support the ceasefires as the first stage of the peace process. Under this initiative, members of the international community are supporting the peace endeavors in Myanmar in a concrete way.

Just half a year after the decision was made to form the MPSI, it has begun a number of very small but significant and politically important pilot projects in a number of ceasefire areas where there was previously no access to IDPs and the most vulnerable populations.

The MPSI responds to concrete requests by the parties to the ceasefires.

These vary from ceasefire to ceasefire, and reflect the different levels of confidence between the parties to the ceasefires. Before the MPSI decides to respond to the requests, and before any activity is undertaken, intensive

consultations are undertaken with affected communities and civil society.

The MPSI aims to facilitate consultations with and interactions between the NSAGs, central and local governments, local communities, civil society organizations including women’s group’s, and other stakeholders. Claims that the MPSI is only engaging Yangonbased NGOs are not correct. In our pilot project in Kayin State, for instance, our implementing partner is the exile-based Committee for Internally Displaced Karen People, which has never before been able to operate openly in Myanmar.

The MPSI also hopes to support the establishment of community-based ceasefire monitoring mechanisms in Chin and Kayah states. Most of these projects will not be financed by Norway, but by other donor countries identified

by MPSI. This is another important feature of the MPSI: that it has provided a platform for a coordinated approach from the donor community and given the possibility to share information and to plan and discuss how best to support peace in the longer term.

When the parties to the ceasefires agree to liaison offices, the MPSI will look at how to support these offices and their role as platforms for local dialogue amongst stakeholders. What this demonstrates is that the MPSI is as much about testing the political will of all parties as it is about the activities themselves.

The MPSI is breaking new ground and striving to ensure that the experiences from the initiatives are captured and fed into longerterm strategies. In addition, support for consultation processes will help start the dialogue on key issues in the peace process. Once more sustainable support mechanisms start to operate, the MPSI will no longer be needed.

The full responsibility for the initiation of a genuine political process to establish lasting peace lies only with the parties to the conflicts. It is extremely difficult to build peace after a long and bitter conflict. It will take years, and there will be setbacks and difficulties, and everybody will have to make sacrifices. Courageous and visionary leadership will be required on all sides. But if the political will exists, then peace and a democratic transition are possible. Norway and the rest of the international community stand ready to support this.

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business | investment

Chinese Methods

Facing Pressure Regime-cozy ways will not work in a more democratic environment, say experts

By WILLIAM BOOT

T

hey are Myanmar’s biggest investors, but wherever their money goes, controversy and protests follow. Now the Chinese are facing growing competition for big contracts from the Japanese and South Koreans and, perhaps, soon the United States as well.

Chinese state or state-linked firms have focused on tapping into Myanmar’s natural resources—gas, hydroenergy, copper and timber—and hauling it off to China. But none of it has happened without allegations of land theft, displacement or environmental damage.

Observers say that China’s growing commercial influence in Myanmar was one of the factors which pushed the former junta generals to finally reform and open the country up to other investors.

It is certainly true that one of the first major acts of the Thein Sein presidency was to stop Chinese construction of the controversial hydroelectric dam at Myitsone on the Ayeyarwady River.

Not only would most of the electricity generated by the project be pumped to China’s neighboring Yunnan Province, there would be massive relocation

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of communities and damage to fisheries and the downstream environment, numerous NGOs have said.

“Over the past two decades Burma’s leaders have become increasingly uncomfortable with their dependence on China for trade, aid and arms transfers,” said Ian Storey, a senior fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.

“While their desire to reduce that dependence may not be one of the central drivers of the current reform process, it’s clear that their move to broaden the country’s foreign relations will ultimately erode China’s political influence and economic interests,” said Mr Storey in a commentary for the Singapore-based think-tank.

Myanmar anger at the cavalier attitude of many Chinese firms operating inside the country has even led to criticism from within China regarding their business practices.

“The reason why Chinese enterprises often become a target of criticism in [Myanmar] is that they lack a clear understanding of the national situation, especially the complicated interest pattern in the country,” com-

mented Bi Shihong, a professor of the Institute of International Studies at Yunnan University.

“Chinese enterprises haven’t give n e nough atte ntion to other interest groups besides the [Myanmar] government and its local partners. And they haven’t communicated well with the local NGOs and communities. [They] should pay more attention to these challenges when investing in Myanmar.

“They should take into consideration the interests of the central [Myanmar] government, local governments and local communities, so as to benefit all sides,” said Prof Bi in the Beijing Global Times, which is owned by the official Chinese news agency Xinhua.

This is a severe scolding for Chinese firms in Myanmar, but it may be too late for Beijing to redeem itself.

Japanese and South Korean invest-

December 2012

Photo: JPaing / The Irrawaddy

The Monywa copper mine in Sagaing Region. ment is pouring into Myanmar for vital projects to improve infrastructure— something China has never shown any interest in.

A consortium of major Japanese industrial conglomerates, led by Mitsubishi Corporation, is spending billions of dollars to develop Myanmar’s first special economic zone (SEZ) at Thilawa, adjoining the port just south of Yangon. And Korean companies are to build Myanmar’s first major new electricity generating station of which none of the power will be exported.

“It is interesting that Chinese business has shown no interest in investing in a [SEZ] at Dawei. I think that is a reflection of the fact that they see no benefit to China from it,” regional energy infrastructure analyst Vincent Lomax told The Irrawaddy from Hong Kong. “China has built its exclusive port on the central coast at Ramree Island

December 2012

to serve its purpose of transshipping crude oil through Burma.”

Dawei is a stalled project proposed

by Thailand for an oil transshipment port with a refinery and petrochemicals plants.

“The Burmese are probably right to question China’s motives in their country because everything they have invested in concerns extraction of raw materials or the use of Burma as a conduit. They do this wherever they go in the world,” added Mr Lomax.

The contest for Myanmar’s resources has yet to begin in earnest, however.

“Small Chinese companies as well as big state enterprises are casting their eyes on neighboring [Myanmar] as it opens its economy to foreign investment,” said an assessment by the Financial Times.

One in particular, China Polymetallic Mining, is keen on exploiting

Myanmar’s lead, zinc, silver and copper resources.

China Polymetallic is privately owned and listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange but it is being backed by the Yunnan provincial government to venture across the border, said the London-based newspaper.

“Yunnan is close to [Myanmar] which has similar mining formations to Yunnan. Also our employees share their culture and living style with people in [Myanmar] so we think it’s relatively easy for us to take our operational model [there],” the firm’s chief financial officer Li Tao was quoted by the Financial Times as saying.

Myanmar workers and farmers have so far had little but a grim experience of Chinese mining business practices at a copper mine near Monywa, in northwest Myanmar’s Sagaing Division. The mine operator, state-owned Wan Bao Company, is accused of complicity in the theft of thousands of hectares of land to promote its commercial interests as well as devastating environmental pollution.

Wan Bao is partnered by the Union of Myanmar Economic Holding Limited, which is owned by the Myanmar mili-

tary.

“It’s time for Chinese enterprises to alter their old habit of only catering to the government in [Myanmar]. Instead, they should pay more attention to the demands of local communities and their cultures and customs,” said Prof Bi in the Global Times.

Myanmar, however, will have to accept that their country’s geographical location will increasingly make it attractive as a conduit for business— China seeking a route to the sea, India seeking markets in Southeast Asia and Myanmar’s fellow members in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations pushing for land links to South Asia and the Bay of Bengal.

The challenge for Myanmar, say economists, will be to manage its new place in the 21st century regional economy without being exploited.

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business | roundup Photo: JPaing / The Irrawaddy

ocean-going vessels port in Kyaukphyu, which is also the starting point for the pipelines. China plans to acquire crude oil from the Middle East via the pipeline.

The multibillion dollar railway project is scheduled to take five years to complete. Tin Thit said proper compensation and respect for human rights must be guaranteed before any further work.

Tourists visit a temple in Yangon.

Myanmar Gears Up for Tourism Myanmar is likely to emerge as a major tourist destination within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) by the end of this decade, says an industry publication.

Yangon will host the country’s first tourism conference, organized by the Myanmar Tourism Federation and Sphere Conferences of Singapore, over three days in February as part of the Naypyidaw’s “Tourism Master Plan.”

“The objective is to provide background and perspective for potential hotel investors while positioning the country as a player with a big future in Asean tourism,” said the Bangkok-based TTR Weekly.

“Most of the big inbound tour operators based in Bangkok maintained offices and joint ventures during the decades of military junta rule, giving them a substantial lead over tour operators in Singapore or Hong Kong who opted to wait for sanctions to lift,” said TTR. “However, it remains to be seen if they will now expand their influence after years of absorbing losses as sanctions held at bay lucrative travel contracts.”

China Urged to Halt Railway

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Tiny Singapore is amongst the biggest sources of foreign investment interest in Myanmar, with teams from the Singapore Business Federation (SBF) making three exploratory visits in 2012.

In November a delegation made a five-day tour, examining business opportunities in financial services, oil and gas, agriculture, tourism and telecommunications.

The SBF said Myanmar’s new Foreign Direct Investment law would encourage more Singaporean firms to seek business opportunities.

Singapore is already a leading investor in Myanmar’s tourism industry, financing hotels and seaside resorts. It is also one of the nation’s biggest trading partners, providing a cargo sea link during Western trade sanctions.

Photo: JPaing / The Irrawaddy

The state-owned China Railway Engineering Corporation is performing route assessment studies for a planned freight railway linking China’s southwest Yunnan Province to Myanmar’s west coast.

The 1,200 km railway will run between Kunming, capital of Yunnan, and Kyaukphyu on Ramree Island in Myanmar’s Rakhine State—alongside the controversial twin oil and gas pipelines currently being built.

Myanmar NGOs have recently called for pipeline construction to be suspended and persistent human rights abuses investigated. The military is accused of helping the builder, China National Petroleum Corporation, secure land and labor.

Now there is concern that more land could be seized and villagers forcibly relocated away from the railway route, said Tin Thit, of NGO Green Land Mandalay.

China has built an

Singapore Sizes up Trade Expansion

Meanwhile, a Myanmar cargo shipping company which operates container vessels to Singapore is moving into port wharf development in Yangon.

KMA Shipping Company won a contract from the

Myanmar Investment Commission to build a $70 million wharf storage infrastructure at Thein Phyu in the Port of Yangon in anticipation of a big rise in container traffic.

In 2011, goods valued at US $1.2 billion were imported into the former capital from Singapore.

Myanmar Debts to be Settled by Early 2013 The World Bank has set the first quarter of 2013 as the deadline to help Myanmar clear its international debts and gain wider access to global aid and grants.

The institution is working with the Asian Development Bank (ADB) to resolve the debt issue. Previous military regimes stopped making repayments on loans up to two decades ago.

The ADB has opened an office in Yangon and is currently working with the Naypyitaw government, but still insists on full repayment of a US $500 million debt before providing any more funding.

Earlier this year, the Japanese government canceled Myanmar’s debts in a gesture to aid development.

Japan has since become one of Myanmar’s biggest investors.

The World Bank is providing expert advice on restructuring Myanmar’s antiquated financial system and providing aid of up to $345 million to help reduce poverty and improve rural infrastructure over the next 18 months.

Denmark has also announced an increase in direct poverty alleviation aid to $23 m illion per year in 2013, regardless of EU financial assistance.

Copenhagen already doubled annual aid to $18 million in 2012.

By WILLIAM BOOT

December 2012

business | interview

The Rocky Road to

Recovery

The Irrawaddy correspondendent William Boot speaks to economist Lex Rieffel about the challenges that lie ahead as Myanmar moves to reform its economy

S

ince joining the Brookings Institution in 2002, R i e f f e l , a fo r m er US Treasury Department staff economist, has made Myanmar’s economic transition a focus of his policy research work. He was in the country in October and November to assess foreign aid to Myanmar.

In terms of economic revival, what are Myanmar’s most pressing needs?

An economy, even a rudimentary one like Myanmar’s, is a complex system. This means that to perform at a high level, a large number of elements need to be functioning properly at the same time.

Right now, it is hard to identify a single element that is functioning properly.

Substantial progress has been made since March 2011 in removing obstacles to proper functioning, like ending some monopolies and abandoning the official exchange rate, but much more needs to be done to have a properly functioning electrical system, telecommunications system, banking system, land tenure system, trade regime, foreign exchange regime, etc.

Furthermore, in complex

December 2012

systems, it is necessary for the number of properly functioning elements to grow until a “tipping point” is reached before the benefits of improvements can be easily seen.

What is needed to ensure that the whole country benefits from Myanmar’s sizable natural gas reserves?

There are three distinct challenges for the government of Myanmar in this area. The first is to ensure that the country is getting the full market value for the natural gas that is currently being extracted and to improve transparency for the revenues associated with this extraction.

The second is to adjust the division of the gas produced so that a larger share is consumed inside Myanmar and a smaller share is exported to other countries.

The third is to choose a rate of extraction in the future that does not unfairly favor today’s population and disfavor the generations to come. At some rate of extraction, Myanmar’s natural gas is more valuable kept in the ground than extracted and used.

M y a n m a r h a s aspirations to become

a leading rice exporter again, but farming technology is virtually 19th century. What n eed s t o be d o n e t o change this?

Farming technology across most of East Asia has changed dramatically over the past four to five decades, but this progress has had an important downside: widespread destruction of soils through inappropriate use of chemicals (fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides) and harmful cultivation practices. Hopefully, Myanmar can avoid the fate of other countries and emerge as the leading producer of healthy food in East Asia.

There is much talk about Myanmar again become a leading exporter of rice, but setting this as an objective is not a smart way to improve the livelihoods of farming and non- farm ing rural households, representing more than 60 percent of the nation’s population. A better approach is to allow farmers to choose their crops freely and then work to lower their costs by improving infrastructure (roads and ports), making available high-yielding varieties of seed, providing credit on reasonable terms, etc.

What is important for Myanmar’s economic

success is raising rural household incomes, not achieving some arbitrary export target.

What are your concerns about foreign aid to Myanmar?

In brief, we have seen other countries suffer from an excess of foreign aid.

Today, Myanmar is the top priority country for almost every aid agency in the world: multilateral agencies like the World Bank, bilateral agencies like USAID and international NGOs like Mercy Corps.

Visitors from all of these agencies are swarming into Myanmar and seeking meetings with government officials to initiate or expand programs. These visits divert the time of senior officials away from essential work on policy analysis and implementation.

At the same time, the government of Myanmar is struggling to organize itself and adopt procedures to manage the immense array of donor agencies.

It will take exceptional discipline on the part of the donors and unprecedented coordination on the part of the government to avoid the adverse impacts seen in other countries in similar circumstances.

TheIrrawaddy

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lifestyle | travel

Chaung Tha–Classic

Delta Beach Retreat It may not rival Ngapali’s golden sand, but Chaung Tha remains a popular choice for Myanmar’s burgeoning new middle classes

By FRANCIS WADE

J

projects underway in udging by the number of building the village has bold that ion ress Chaung Tha, one gets the imp coast has in recent tern wes r’s nma Mya on spot ambitions. This n for Yangonites have e hsid years become an alternative beac its better known hing reac of e ienc nven inco put off by the cost and rival to north, Ngapali. excess, Chaung Tha responds But where Ngapali leads the way in g beach is devoid of the epin swe in kind with its simplicity. The tors and instead offers a peti com ht blig that hundreds of parasols or rent bicycles and lone chin sea of space for youngsters to play set. sun at k ride the low tidemar the past five years. The main The village has changed much over ll cluster of vendors selling dried strip was once quiet, and the sma a taste of what has taken place fish at the southern end offers up here for generations. s over Myanmar in the wake But as the scent of opportunity drift n appears the order of the day. of its recent political thaw, expansio -to-be new Hotel Ace which sits Skeletal structures, like the soon the beach, and on which work of tip hern atop rocks at the nort or with increasing frequency. began three years ago, greet the visit

lifestyle | travel

They testify to this newfound expectation of demand—accompanying the throngs of local holidaymakers are a trickle of foreigners here to escape the hot cities and plains of central Myanmar, and aware that the seven-hour bus ride from Yangon is small fry in a country notorious for its pot-holed, arterial roadways.

While Chaung Tha may not be the exquisitely manicured beach that many Southeast Asian coastlines are famed for, there’s a freshness in the atmosphere, born of its recent emergence from a solitary past, that others do not have.

At the southern end, few habitations exist and the vegetation pushes further out onto the beach, meaning anyone comfortable with the lengthy trek out of civilization can find some tranquil isolation. It still retains its identity as the small fishing village it once was—women and children walk the beach carrying buckets of crabs and sticks of barbequed prawns, and residents are still brazenly curious about outsiders, smiling or staring inquisitively as they meander past.

Development is happening, however, and resorts now line the northern end of the beach. How long it will keep its quaint appeal is hard to tell—only 20 years ago, the immaculate coastlines of southern Thailand were home to little more than a smattering of bars run off generators, yet now there is a multi-million dollar industry where a generation of Thais have grown weary of the hedonistic, playground mentality exhibited by swarms of arriving tourists. Chaung Tha still has a long way to go, but the hunger for business is evidently there.

There are dangers to this here. The main village hub is at a distance from the resorts and guesthouses, meaning locals do not generally blend with the tourists. For the outsider it therefore lacks that epicenter of life, and instead visitors largely confine themselves to one of the many resorts that line the beach.

These structures, often generic, risk becoming the focus of Chaung Tha—at the northern end of the beach they sit side-by-side uninterrupted for hundreds of meters, meaning public thoroughfares linking the road to the sand are few and far between.

For those who like to spend their

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Myanmar Chaung Tha Yangon Pathein

thailand

Regular bus services to Chaung Tha leave Yangon’s Hlaing Tharyar Bus Terminal at 6:30 am and cost 9,000 kyat ($11) for the seven-hour journey. They return at around the same time from the main street in Chaung Tha. Alternatively, Asia Dragon has overnight buses leaving their office on Pansodan Street or Dagon Centre II (second stop) for 15,000 kyat ($18).

(All photos: the irrawaddy)

December 2012

Photo: Steve Tickner / The Irrawaddy

time moving back and forth along beaches and sampling what each establishment has to offer, Chaung Tha could frustrate, particularly given there is only one beachside bar, Shwe Hin Tha, which is surely a requisite for any coastal hangout.

“I did expect there to be more bars on the beach,” says Ebst, a middle-aged German here for a week of rest and recuperation before heading home. “It’s not what I had hoped for—there are too many resorts, and not enough places to relax except for on the beach. But it still has positives, like the food.”

As we speak he is tucking into a giant grilled snapper, served for around US $6 at the Shwe Ya Min restaurant.

Attached to a guesthouse that offers basic but satisfactory rooms for as low as $8—perhaps one of the cheapest places anywhere on Myanmar’s resurgent tourist trail—Shwe Ya Min already has the coveted thumbs up from the Lonely Planet. It sits back from the beach, and offers up whopping portions of fresh seafood at bargain prices. In keeping with the rest of Chaung Tha, its staff are charming and speak broken English.

Elsewhere individual rooms can go for as much as $100. High-end resorts, like Golden Beach Hotel and the existing government-owned Hotel Ace, offer customers bungalows and swimming pools that sit just above beach level, looking out onto the sea.

They cater more for Myanmar families who descend here on public holidays—Golden Beach has multiroom suites for 150,000 kyat ($170), and largely attracts the Yangon middle classes keen to escape the city for a few days.

Chaung Tha may never become a beachside paradise that will draw flocks of international tourists. Ebst says he thinks it is designed with locals in mind, “and is unlikely to attract many Westerners” if its development model continues along the same lines.

But it does offer up a taste of Myanmar, which is what people cross the world to see—on national holidays families arrive by the coach load and revel in a lifestyle rarely seen elsewhere in a country still brittle after decades under military rule.

And for similar reasons, Chaung Tha also boasts something appealing for open-minded foreigners who leave their usual expectations behind.

December 2012

Ex-political prisoners U Shell, left, and U Bo Bo outside the old High Court of Yangon.

Cabbies with a Conscience A pioneering taxi service provides former detainees with a vital income

A

fter spending much of their lives behind bars, now they are spending their days behind the wheel. Founded by three former political prisoners, Golden Harp Taxi Network was created to provide job opportunities for released dissidents who were involved in Myanmar’s long democracy struggle.

With a logo of a traditional Myanmar harp on their windshields, the cabs have been plying the roads of Yangon since April, offering their services to both locals and foreigners.

“I couldn’t land a job since my release in 1999,” said U Bo Bo, one of the founders. The 42-year-old submitted nearly a dozen job applications but was turned down as soon as potential employers learned of his eight-year prison sentence.

Every month, members save a portion of their income to support comrades still in prison. “If they cannot find jobs upon their release, we can loan them money [from the fund] to pay a deposit for a taxi to join us,” explained U Shell, 43, another member of the network. Only in October did Golden Harp recruit its fourth sedan and driver.

From the outset, their services have been in demand, mostly from foreign visitors thanks to friends living abroad who pass on their contact details.

“We can make a living out of this job,” said U Bo Bo. “Hiring one of our

By KYAW PHYO THA taxis not only means that you are supporting an ex-political prisoner and his family, but also our comrades still in prison.”

U Shell said the job helps them reintegrate into society. There was a time when people were afraid of even talking to political prisoners because of their involvement in “subversive” activities.

“Now if my passengers learn who I am, they treat me with respect,” said U Shell. “When they learn about our network, they give us the thumbs up.

Some give their numbers and say ‘Let me know if there’s something I can do for you guys!’”

Golden Harp Taxi Network charges US $50 per day within Yangon. The cars are well maintained and interpreters are available upon request. Thanks to their background, drivers can update passengers on Myanmar’s ongoing political situation and help with further contacts.

For more information and reservations, Golden Harp Taxi Network can be reached at shwehinthar2012@gmail.com or via drivers’ mobiles: U Bo Bo: (0)9 428117348 U Shell: (0)9 449004810 U Talky: (0)9 450019186 U Tun Myint: (0)9 73217789

TheIrrawaddy

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50th Street Café

Escape the Madding Crowd

By STEVE TICKNER

T

he heat, odor and noise of downtown Yangon can get on anyone’s nerves. But thankfully there’s a bastion of tranquility where one can escape the mêlée for a while and regain composure in air-conditioned luxury.

The 50th Street Café, Restaurant and Bar is one of a pitifully small number of entertainment venues in the former capital which would not look out of place anywhere in the world. Not surprisingly found on 50th Street, a stone’s throw east of the bustling city center, the two-floor sports bar offers friendly and attentive staff, plush leather couches and an eclectic international menu.

The haunt of Yangon’s growing throng of affluent locals and foreign expats—businessmen as well as various embassy and NGO workers— 50th Street is practically unrivaled as

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the most popular bar in the city.

The restaurant can happily cater to the needs of the homesick backpacker—perhaps one craving comfort food such as a Western-style burger, meat-filled pie or authentic thin-crust pizza—or equally a wealthy industrialist.

The building itself has an interesting history. A two-story building made entirely of bricks imported from Britain and top quality local teak timber, it was constructed in 1906 originally as a trader’s house by the waterfront. And to this day, various businesses associated with the rich shipping history of the port occupy the surrounding lanes.

The spacious venue opened in its current form in March 1997 and was then extensively renovated in 2009. The ground floor features a bar, private alcoves, pool table and

multiple TV screens for sports fans— the bare masonry finish gives the restaurant an earthy and welcoming natural ambience.

Most importantly of all, the menu is nicely varied, catering to Western tastes but also providing examples of classic Myanmar cuisine. There are light meals such as salads, sandwiches and tapas as well as more substantial options including juicy burgers, imported Australian steaks, pasta, pizza, full-bodied curries and some imaginative vegetarian choices.

A central feature is a broad, polished teak staircase which spirals up to the second floor bar and dining area. A suitably wide range of cocktails are on offer, including a local Wingaba Bloody Mary boasting organic credentials and concocted using homemade tomato juice.

On the wine list you will find

December 2012

Photo: Steve Tickner / the irrawaddy

lifestyle | food

Photo: Kyaw Phyo Tha

The Full (Rakhine) Monti

By KYAW PHYO THA

I

imported Australian, New Zealand and French labels—enough variety to complement the diverse menu.

There is also a Myanmar offering, Red Mountain Estate from Shan State, along with real champagne for those celebrating special occasions.

In addition, a large number of the most famous domestic and international beer brands are represented along with fresh smoothies and real coffee. And after dark, the dance floor fills with Yangon’s bright young things who gather to shake a tailfeather.

50th Street is undoubtedly a much-needed sanctuary in a city that has a great deal to learn about top class hospitality. Bills can be paid in dollars or the local kyat, there is free WiFi Internet and daily specials including happy hour all day Sunday.

December 2012

Photo: Steve Tickner / the irrawaddy

9/13, 50th Street, Botahtaung Township, Yangon.

Tel: 01-397 060 Email: GM@50thstreetyangon.com Website: 50thstreetyangon.com Mains: 6,000 – 20,000 kyat.

Star rating: 

Photo: Steve Tickner

Details:

f you want to explore new culinary frontiers, look no further than the Minn Lan Rakhine Traditional Hand-Pressed Monti & Fresh Seafood Restaurant in Yangon. This fine establishment, with five locations around the city, is not just a mouthful to say—it’s also sure to fill your mouth with flavors that will keep you coming back for more.

As the name indicates, the cuisine on offer here hails from Rakhine State, and the specialty of the house is a noodle dish known as monti—a fiery Rakhine rendition of that old Myanmar standard, mohinga. Rakhine monti can be an intense eating experience, and not just because of the sheer heat that it generates.

The noodles, made with first-grade rice and pressed to perfection, provide a tender texture, while flakes of golden hued pike conger, both dry and raw, add the authentic salty flavor of Myanmar’s west coast cuisine.

Garnished with chopped coriander and sliced boiled egg, and with a combined aroma of garlic and pepper, monti is an enticing treat. If you’re worried that you can’t take the heat, rest assured—it won’t be any hotter than you want it, because every bowl is made to order (if you like, you can always add a little extra chilli sauce later for the full monti experience). A few splashes of preserved marian plum juice brings a nice tang to the medley. Bean fritters and fried fish cakes are also available on request.

If a burning bowlful of noodles is not really what you want, the restaurant also has an assortment of fish, lobsters and crabs from the Bay of Bengal. But be warned: even though business hours are from 11 am to 9:30 pm, it can be difficult to get a table, especially at dinner time. Star rating: 

Yangon Locations : Sanpya Bahan Outlet – 1 Min Lann, South Sayar San Ward

Tel: 01-551259 | Kamayut Outlet – Inya Lake Tel: 09-73118696 | Mayangone Outlet – Corner of Parami Road and West May Kha Road Tel: 09-5502459 | Tamwe Outlet – 116 Kyauk Myaung Street, opposite Kyauk Myaung Store Tel: 09-73056320 | San Chaung Outlet – Corner of Baho Rd and Khittar St, near Asia Royal Specialist Centre Tel: 01-510285 | All five restaurants are closed on the 23rd of every month.

TheIrrawaddy

55

lifestyle | books

Myanmar Moving Forward?

T

here have been a couple of major crossroads in the history of Myanmar—first, when national hero Gen Aung San was assassinated in 1947, soon after negotiating independence from the British; and second, when countrywide pro-democracy demonstrations took place in 1988, followed by a landslide election victory for the National League of Democracy (NLD), led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. And now, after the rise of a quasi-civilian government embarking on a process of political reform, Myanmar is again at a crossroads. For the new administration, recognizing the critical challenges and how to overcome them will very much determine the nation’s future.

And so the latest book on the subject, aptly titled “Burma: A Nation at the Crossroads,” by Benedict Rogers, a human rights activist and journalist, attempts to tell a “comprehensive, holistic and accessible” story of Myanmar.

There are three sections written in an episodic style.

Firstly, the decline of Myanmar from independence to Dictator Gen Ne Win assuming power through a military coup; secondly, significant events such as 1988 uprising, Saffron Revolution and Cyclone Nargis; thirdly, the persecution of groups by the former military regime—ethnic minorities, military deserters, child soldiers and the Rohingya; and lastly, analyzing the current situation and what the future holds.

Each chapter is mostly a summary of events or issues—with the exception of those on ethnic minorities— thus providing a good quick overview for readers new to Myanmar, but lacking any fresh material for aficionados who have been Burma: a Nation at the closely following recent Crossroads, by Benedict developments.

Rogers, was published by Given the author’s longRider in June 2012. standing work as a human rights activist, it is of little surprise that the chapters on ethnic minorities stand out with great detail, including numerous firsthand accounts and interviews, yet much of the attempted analysis is feeble and devoid of any innovative insight—certainly not living up to the attention-grabbing title of the book.

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TheIrrawaddy

Political Prison

Penning Pro F

or almost six weeks in a row, two debut novels in the Myanmar language were featured in the top-ten list of the nation’s biggest and most prestigious bookstore, Sar Pay Law Ka. The pair share many similarities— the authors, Min Ko Naing and Mya Aye, are prominent leaders of the 88 Generation Students civil society group who were recently released after many years as political prisoners. Indeed, until early 2012, their novels would not have passed the former regime’s strict censorship criteria.

Considering the authors’ backgrounds, many readers would anticipate comparable plots involving political intrigue or prison experiences; but this is not so.

“Rear Mirror” by Min Ko Naing revolves around the life of a student activist and a girl with whom he meets while hiding at a monastery in her village. In the foreword, the author says he considered rewriting the whole novel as it was first penned towards the end of 1988 before he was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment. The last page was completed in 2004 upon his release, but he finally decided against a thorough revision as he wished to maintain his 26-year-old style and ideas.

“Rear Mirror” reflects on the tribulations a student activist goes through during 1988—fear felt by the families of student activists for their safety; being constantly on the lookout while hiding in a faraway place; warm support from villagers; and being somewhat frustrated at not being amidst the action.

Clouds in the Sky, The metaphor behind the novel’s

by Mya Aye, was title is especially telling—how a student published by Inya in activist needs a rear mirror to see what August 2012. he leaves behind, especially those closest to him, in his arduous struggle to fight a greater cause for the people.

By contrast, Mya Aye’s novel “Clouds in the Sky” took around one year to complete—from late 2009 to the end of 2010. The main characters are a mysterious young man, who lives alone in a poor suburban neighborhood and helps

December 2012

By HNIN WATHAN

oners

Prose Rear Mirror, by Min Ko Naing, was published by Eastern Star in July 2012.

Refiguring Women, Colonialism, & Modernity in Burma, by Chie Ikeya, was published by Silkworm in 2012. the lives of surrounding people, and a beautiful doctor.

Apart from these main protagonists, other characters are chosen to representing the poor and downtrodden in Myanmar—a trishaw driver who resorts to robbery to pay for his sick child’s operation, a lost and alcoholic old man, and a young girl who becomes a prostitute to support her brother and gambling-addicted mother.

Unlike Min Ko Naing’s straightforward style of focusing on just two characters, Mya Aye’s novel has intertwining narratives. Whether readers prefer a storyline reflective of a particular tumultuous era, or one with a twist and more fictional style, readers will not be disappointed with the literary merit of either.

In November 2009, Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) based in Mae Sot, Thailand, published “Rear Mirror” to commemorate Min Ko Naing’s birthday. He was in prison at the time and his novel was not allowed to be printed or distributed inside Myanmar.

Almost three years later, after President U Thein Sein’s reformist administration came to power, Min Ko Naing and Mya Aye, along with many other prisoners, have been released and their bestselling books can be bought legally inside the country.

Thus, the success of these two debut novels should be considered not only for their pure literary worth, of which there is plenty, but also for a subtle indicator of wider change in Myanmar.

December 2012

Wives and Mothers of the Nation

W

hat did it mean to be a “modern woman” in Myanmar during the colonial period from 1920 to 1940?

How were they perceived by a society with strong nationalistic sentiments? “Refiguring Women, Colonialism, & Modernity in Burma” provides an interesting insight to these issues.

The book covers the relationship between colonialism, modernity and gender in Myanmar.

Divided into six chapters, Chie Ikeya analyses modern Myanmar women from political, social and cultural perspectives using both English and Myanmar-language literary and newspaper primary sources.

The first chapter introduces the contextual setting of the time, especially in the areas of education and media. The second chapter describes the rise of educated Myanmar women in the 1920s and how the press played a role in encouraging them to take on various professions previously dominated by men.

The third chapter looks at how women were politicized as a “wife-and-mother of the nation”—with the duty to take care not only of her family but also her country. The fourth examines how women were consumers of

foreign commodities, fashion and culture in two distinct ways— self-indulgence or in a “wise and dutiful” manner for her family.

The last two chapters show how Myanmar women who had an intimate relationship with non-Buddhist foreigners and embraced self-indulgent modernity were perceived by a society that was consumed by the nationalist movement.

In 2002, the debutant author, currently an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore, chanced upon lively discussions while inside Myanmar regarding the modern Myanmar woman in local and Englishlanguage publications during the colonial period, and then decided to research the topic.

Although very much based on her PhD research at that time, the fascinating findings and analysis are documented in a very readable manner. The book gives great insight into how Myanmar women were viewed by other Asian nationalities and Westerners during the colonial period.

Despite its rather academicsounding and ungainly title, “Refiguring Women, Colonialism, & Modernity in Burma” is a worthwhile and absorbing read.

TheIrrawaddy

57

Q&A

Lady

A Different Kind of

time. We just have to adapt them to today’s fashions. But I always dress in a culturally appropriate way, without being too revealing.

D

What do you say to critics of your live performances?

I think that by international standards, they’re not so extraordinary. But Myanmar was a closed country for a long time, and some people still have closed minds. You have to accept that you will face criticism if you try to be creative. But really, it’s just a few people. Even after being cut off from the outside world for decades, most Myanmars can still appreciate the value of art.

ubbed “Myanmar’s Lady Gaga” for her outlandish costumes and onstage antics, Phyu Phyu Kyaw Thein is not your average pop star. The 31-yearold vocalist, who has been in the music business for nearly a decade, is also a fully qualified medical doctor. If that isn’t remarkable enough, she is also secretary of the Myanmar Music Association and an ambassador for a UK charity that fights human trafficking. Her latest album, “A Girl is Brokenhearted,” reached the top of the charts and remains in the top 10 three months after its release. The Irrawaddy correspondent Kyaw Phyo Tha recently asked her about her career and her exceptional success.

Which do you prefer—being a doctor or a pop star?

To be a doctor, you need intelligence and hard work. To be an artist, you have to have talent and sensitivity. Most people think they’re contradictory.

It’s a rare combination, and I’m proud to be one of the few who fit both descriptions. But for the moment, I think of myself mostly as a professional singer.

So you don’t think your years in medical school were a waste of time?

Of course not! It’s not like I spent six or seven years on drugs or going to parties. Anyone who thinks that being a doctor-turned-vocalist is a waste of human resources should go talk to the Ministry of Health.

What do you think about being called “Myanmar’s Lady Gaga”?

Well, it’s flattering to be compared to an internally famous pop star, but she and I are from completely different worlds. Besides, I’ve been known for my “unusual” performances since I first started my act in 2003, when Myanmar was still a closed country, and long before Lady Gaga made headlines.

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TheIrrawaddy

As the secretary of the Myanmar Music Association, what are your thoughts on the rampant music piracy in this country?

This is the biggest difference between Lady Gaga from the first world and Phyu Pyu Kyaw Thein from the third.

In Myanmar, piracy is seen as a just another way to make a living.

MMA tries to educate people that piracy is a crime, punishable by a short prison term or a fine of up to 500,000 kyat (US $625).

Our aim is to amend the law and make it effective. Lawenforcement officials need to be honest and transparent.

In short, what we need is the rule of law.

Photo: Ko Taik

Why do you dress in such elaborate costumes?

Because I like them. My sister is my designer. They’re full of color and fit with our Myanmar culture. They’re really nothing new, because traditional performers have dressed this way for a long

Will the end of censorship make a big difference?

I’ve had some bad experiences with censorship, so I think it’s good if we don’t have to face such restrictions.

But artists still need to have a sense of responsibility.

Tell us about your involvement in MTV EXIT, a UK charity campaigning to raise awareness of human trafficking.

I have been the campaign’s Celebrity Ambassador for Myanmar since 2008. I hosted a Myanmar-language documentary called “Traffic” and in 2008 I also took part in the MTV EXIT music concerts in Bangkok to raise awareness of trafficking. I will also join another concert this year.

December 2012

Informative, reliable and in-depth reporting via our magazine and website: www.irrawaddy.org

CONDOMINIUM

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A Trip to Arakan State

A Port Heading for a Storm?

Battleground

It’s Written in the Stars

Yangon office: No. 197, 2nd Floor, 32nd Street (Upper Block), Pabedan Township, Yangon, Myanmar. TEL: 01 388251, 01 389762 MAILING ADDRESS: The Irrawaddy, P.O. Box 242, CMU Post Office, Chiang Mai 50200, Thailand.