IF WE FEAR THEM, WE ARE USELESSIF WE FEAR THEM, WE ARE USELESS
by Maggie Lemere and Zoë West
As we write this, Burma finds itself in a defining moment.
A country of more than 55 million people, marked by oppressive military rule and civil war, Burma has been ruled by successive military regimes for the past five decades. The current regime, the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC)—led by Commander-in-Chief of the Tatmadaw (Burma’s military), Than Shwe—is among the most notorious human rights violators in the world.
The military regime held the first national elections in twenty years on November 7, 2010, in what was widely viewed as an attempt to consolidate and legitimize its rule under the veil of “disciplined democracy.” Citing deeply flawed election rules, the main democratic opposition party, the National League for Democracy, boycotted the election, refusing to enter a candidate. As many analysts predicted, the junta-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP)—headed by the SPDC prime minister and other SPDC ministers—won approximately 75 percent of parliamentary seats.
One week after the election, NLD leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi—Burma’s widely respected and beloved democratic voice—was released from house arrest after being confined for fifteen of the past twenty-one years. Meanwhile, new rounds of fighting erupted between armed opposition groups and the Tatmadaw along Burma’s eastern border with Thailand.
Nineteen armed opposition groups have signed tenuous ceasefire agreements with the ruling SPDC regime, while others have refused, and still actively oppose the regime. In its campaign to crush armed resistance to their rule, the Tatmadaw has committed widespread human rights abuses, eliciting grave concern from the international community. The Tatmadaw has tortured and imprisoned thousands of nonviolent democratic opposition members; at press time, there were 2,203 political prisoners,11 including activists, journalists, politicians, artists, and Buddhist monks. With brutal and calculated tactics, Burma’s military regime has successfully imposed a deeply embedded fear of dissent across the country.
No matter how you interpret recent events, Burma remains in the same protracted crisis it has been in since colonialism began in the late 1800s and since a military coup d’état thwarted the progress of the newly independent state in 1962. The people of Burma continue to suffer the far-ranging and severe impacts of oppressive military rule and ongoing violent conflict; the civil war between the Karen National Liberation Army and the Burmese government is considered the longest-running civil war in the post–World War II era.
Across the country, the military junta’s abuses have included forced labor; arbitrary arrest and detention; physical and sexual violence; torture; severe restriction of speech, assembly, and movement; the destruction of homes, property, and villages; forced military conscription, including the conscription of child soldiers; and severe persecution against religious and ethnic minorities. As a result, between 2 and 4 million Burmese are displaced both internally and across Burma’s borders. Since just 1996, more than 3,500 villages have been destroyed in eastern Burma alone.22
Nowhere to Be Home delves into the diverse lives of twenty-two people from Burma, who describe life under the military regime in their own words. The narratives in this book are based on interviews conducted with people inside Burma, as well as people who fled and are now living in Thailand, Malaysia, Bangladesh, and the United States. The narrators encompass a wide range of intersecting and constantly evolving identities. Stories of persecuted ethnic minorities stand beside the story of a child soldier forced to become persecutor; the words of political prisoners stand beside that of a fisherman with HIV.
Though the narratives in this collection were gathered in the year leading up to Burma’s November 2010 election, the stories depict full spans of life experience, and the persistence of the human rights crisis over decades.
Though slightly smaller than Texas, Burma is a diverse, multiethnic country. While two-thirds of the country are ethnic Burmans, there are more than 135 other ethnic nationalities, and more than 100 distinct languages.
Many of Burma’s current challenges stem from divisions—both of land and of people—fostered under the British colonial regime, which gained complete control in 1884 over territories that were previously independently ruled.
Toward the end of World War II, Burmese nationalists led by General Aung San fought the British for independence. In 1947, the British ceded to the demands of the independence movement, and Aung San became the leader of an interim government. Aung San and representatives of a few of Burma’s ethnic nationalities signed the Panglong Agreement in 1947, in which they agreed to form a Federal Union of Burma and grant ethnic minorities some autonomy. Independence was officially granted in January 1948, but General Aung San was assassinated with most of his cabinet before the constitution went into effect. It is believed that a group of paramilitaries connected to a political rival carried out the assassinations.
The assassination of Aung San and his cabinet members became a major obstacle to the formation of the new union. The years between 1947 and 1962 were marked by instability as ethnic nationalities felt increasingly threatened by the directions the new leadership was taking. New armed groups were formed along ethnic lines, and the union of Burma collapsed.
In 1962, a Burman general named Ne Win led a military coup d’état, which would set in motion nearly five decades of military rule and armed conflict in Burma. Economic reforms were enacted that largely isolated the country and created a precipitous downward spiral. By 1987, the economy was in ruins and protests had erupted all over the country. The largest demonstrations in Burma’s history occurred on August 8, 1988, and saw the emergence of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi as an important proponent of democracy. The current ruling junta, the State Peace and Development Council, or SPDC (formerly known as the State Law and Order Restoration Council), seized power in 1988 after the protests. When Daw Aung Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy, won national elections in 1990, the SPDC refused to hand over power. They imprisoned Suu Kyi and other opposition leaders. Suu Kyi remained under house arrest for the majority of the subsequent two decades, but she continued to call for a tripartite dialogue between ethnic minorities, the military, and the democracy movement.
Despite ongoing resistance to its rule—including the monk-led “Saffron Revolution” in 2007, which was brutally suppressed—the SPDC military junta maintains its oppresive power. The regime profits greatly and reinforces its strength with the sale of natural resources, earning around $3 billion annually through trade with countries such as Thailand, Singapore, China, and India.33 While the regime and its business cronies are extremely wealthy, they only invest 1.4 percent of Burma’s GDP in health care and education, leaving most Burmese citizens with substandard options on both fronts.
In 2005, the SPDC moved Burma’s capital to a gleaming new city, Naypyidaw, built to the tune of around $2 billion. Naypyidaw, built in secrecy, is effectively an isolated city largely reserved for military officials and civil servants. As the only city in Burma with twenty-four hour electricity, the disparities between Naypyidaw and the rest of the country are stark—and revealing.
“Imagining what it is like to be someone other than oneself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.”
—Ian McEwan
With a country like Burma, where news reports emphasize millions of displaced and affected peoples and a conflict stretching over decades, it can be hard to connect to the people who face this reality every day. The individual lives of the Burmese people become buried under a pile of issues, abuses, and statistics.
Oral history creates a space for those “faraway stories”—the experiences of people whose realities seem starkly different from our own—to enter the realm of our awareness through their own voices. It offers the chance for those stories to be heard in delicate nuance, rather than sweeping generalizations.
Just as any person does not fit into neat categories, the people who shared their stories in this book are multidimensional and not easily categorized. The narrators highlight not only the incredible challenges of life under the military regime, but also what they love—what they are fighting for. Every person we interviewed took pleasure in describing his or her best memories, in highlighting a side of life in Burma that reveals hope and dignity. Nge Nge, a teacher, recounted how blessed she felt every time she walked into school and was greeted by a flock of students hoping for the privilege of carrying a book for her or holding her hand. Khine Su transported us to the lush rice fields where she worked as a girl, singing with her friends as the rain fell around them. In honoring the fullness and fluidity of their lives, the narrators demonstrate the humanity that is missing in simple labels like “migrant worker” or “refugee.”
Each narrator reveals complex truths and realities, cast upon the backdrop of perpetual instability in Burma—a son or a daughter, a migrant worker one day, an underground activist the next, or both at the same time.
Understanding the complexity and richness of people’s life experiences in Burma is paramount to understanding the current political and social landscape in the country itself. As you read these stories, the interconnections between different narrators’ experiences will begin to surface. Each narrative builds another layer in the larger picture, with intersecting experiences that reveal a loose web of causes and effects, actions and reactions.
You’ll read the story of Knoo Know, whose father was a general in the Kachin Independence Army (the KIA, an ethnic opposition army), alongside the story of Saw Moe, who fought in Burma’s military against the KIA. You’ll hear from U Agga, a monk who recounts his experience escaping the SPDC’s crackdown on the Saffron Revolution, as well as from Philip, a monk who became a soldier in the Shan State Army-South. Though this book is by no means exhaustive or representative of every Burmese person’s experiences, these stories, viewed collectively, form a multifaceted portrait of the crisis in Burma.
As editors, we strove to create a unique collection of narratives, balancing an array of important issues and demographic factors. Choosing which narratives to include was a difficult task, and is inevitably an imperfect process. Those more familiar with Burma will immediately realize what wasn’t included.
We’d also like to note that this book does not represent a comprehensive view of Burma’s border regions; because of various constraints, interviews were not collected on the China–Burma or India–Burma borders. Border areas inside Burma were also mostly inaccessible to us. We point you to the work of Human Rights Watch, EarthRights International, and the Network for Human Rights Documentation – Burma, for a more quantitative overview of the human rights situation inside Burma and in its border regions.
The sociopolitical landscape in Burma is constantly changing, and will no doubt have evolved in the time it takes for this book to reach your hands. Right now, the SPDC claims to be ceding power to democratic rule through the recent elections, yet the ruling generals have carefully enacted measures to ensure their continued authority.
The elections were widely condemned as a sham by the international community. Political prisoners were barred from participating, and substantial voter fraud and voter intimidation was reported. The new political landscape overtly privileges the military, as the new constitution drafted in 2008 reserves one-quarter of the seats in the lower-house and one-third in the upper-house of Parliament for military officials. Further, many military officials resigned from their posts earlier in the year in anticipation of taking power in the civilian government.
Most argue that the election was a definitive setback, allowing the regime to cast itself as “reforming” and therefore gain more lucrative business deals, while consolidating its power. However, some contend that small steps in the right direction will potentially open the door for more civil participation. But no matter how you look at it, profound change is imperative, because Burma is crumbling. Long-neglected infrastructure is reflected in the dilapidated streets of Rangoon, Burma’s former capital city. The din of generators is a constant soundtrack where electricity is fickle and sometimes limited to six hours per day. The internet is heavily censored, and short-wave radios are the primary means for secretly accessing news from outside the country.
Around 70 percent of the population lives in rural areas, relying on farming for their livelihood.44 One-third of the population lives below the poverty line, and the GDP per capita is reported to be the thirteenth lowest in the world.55 Many of the people we interviewed, such as Khine Su and Ko Mg Mg, described forced labor as a normal part of life in their villages. For a family that lives from hand to mouth, months, weeks, or even days of unpaid forced labor can be crippling. Such abuses are embedded in the everyday lives of much of Burma’s population, creating an unforgiving set of circumstances where daily survival is a challenge. This system leaves people to face tough choices, as many of our narrators describe—decisions like leaving your family and your country for years on end in an attempt to find a better livelihood.
The day Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was released, thousands of well-wishers gathered in front of the gates of her home in anticipation of hearing her speak publicly for the first time in seven years. One of Aung San Suu Kyi’s first statements reported after her release was simple and powerful: “I want to listen to the people of Burma’s voices.” We hope that in reading this collection, you’ll listen to the voices of people from Burma, and feel an enduring connection that motivates continued interest, reflection, and, when appropriate, action.
The severity of the abuses in Burma is undeniable, but as many narrators revealed in their stories, there is also hope for transformation. While living and working on the Thailand–Burma border, we were consistently impressed and inspired by the impact of education and training programs through which the people of Burma are devoting enormous effort to working with their communities.
Beyond providing skills and knowledge, these educational initiatives open new spaces for people from Burma to move beyond the deep divisions enacted by geography, ethnic nationalism, and class, among other factors. This dynamic environment seems especially crucial for the youth living in border areas, many of whom are dedicated to bettering themselves through education despite the challenges they face daily. These organizations and efforts deserve the continued support of the international community. For a poignant reflection on the importance of education—particularly for youth from Burma, where the education system is in shambles—we hope you will read the epilogue written by the associate editor of this book, K’pru Taw. K’pru is a young Karen man from rural Mon State, Burma, who persevered through a long bout of tuberculosis and his family’s entrenched poverty (compounded by forced labor) to continually seek education. When he was sixteen, he left his home and went to a refugee camp on the Thailand–Burma border so he could study. In the past six years, he’s made remarkable strides in his education and work—as part of Voice of Witness, as well as with other organizations and projects. His tireless commitment to this book was vital to its completion.
It is our intent that these stories demonstrate the humanity we all share, through our histories and in our present moment. What may seem beyond our comprehension is worth listening to with the hope of gaining small but important insights into the human condition, and thus, ourselves—such reflection is vital to our ability to promote the progressive and lasting change we wish to see. As they shed light on the crisis in Burma, the narrators in this book are also testifying to the value inherent in telling and remembering.
—Maggie Lemere and Zoë West
1 The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma); as of November 3rd, 2010.
2 From “Protracted Displacement and Militarization in eastern Burma,” a report by the Thai–Burma Border Consortium, 2009.
3 Earthrights International, Revenue Transparency in Burma Campaign.
4 CIA World Factbook: Burma.
5 Refugees International, Burma: “Current Humanitarian Situation.”