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Stillness Of Change

After prolonged isolation, Yangon wants to face the world on its own terms. Will it be allowed to?

By Swapan Dasgupta in Yangon

Adjoining the main entrance to the Mandalay Fort, King Mindon's stunning Golden City that was the seat of royal power from 1861 to 1885, is a large hoarding that is striking in its incongruity. "The Tatmadaw shall never betray the national cause," it proclaims. The Tatmadaw, for the uninitiated, is the armed forces, the guiding light of Myanmar since General Ne Win seized power in 1962.

On the face of it, the Tatmadaw is an invisible force, more prominent in western media reports than on the streets of Mandalay and capital city Yangon. There are no uniformed intruders to either distract the awfully courteous shopkeepers selling rubies, jade and handicrafts for dollars in Yangon's Bogyoke Market (formerly the Scott Market) or intimidate the rows of second-hand booksellers on 37th Street. A teeming metropolis that is part Mumbai, part Kolkata and part Colombo, Yangon blends the glitzy market economy with the oriental bazaar. The roadside food stalls are enveloped in a familiar smell of pickled fish but the five-star hotels are a picture of sanitised orderliness. There is no fixed price for goods and hard bargaining is part of a time-honoured ritual, particularly for tourists who can breeze through the country without negotiating the uncertainties of wildly negotiable multiple exchange rates.

The legendary bamboo curtain and a prolonged spell of isolation notwithstanding, Myanmar just isn't another North Korea. There is laughter in the streets, pesky child monks needling tourists for alms and a very un-subcontinental orderliness of traffic. There are no portraits of Senior-General Than Shwe watching over people and there is no ban on cable television. English is back as a language of instruction, cricket is making a cautious comeback among the Indians and, for the enterprising, there are megabucks to be made.

"Business is good," gloats
U Maung Shwe, a Yangon businessman who works closely with the Ministry of Commerce. His real name is B.L. Goenka, a third generation Marwari settled in Myanmar. He is reported to be close to Lt-General Tin Oo, the Secretary-2 of the ruling State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) who was reportedly killed in a helicopter crash last week. Goenka may be the archetypal man for all occasions but even those who lack his formidable connections aren't exactly unhappy. Yangon's Indian community no longer makes up 58 per cent of the population it did in 1948 but 25 Durga pujas are still held each year in the city. The anti-Indian feeling that formed a subtext of early

Burmese nationalism has virtually evaporated.

Myanmar isn't perfect but it isn't quite the "fascist Disneyland" that concerned human-rights bodies have made it out to be. There is an overdose of olive green military uniforms in the SPDC hierarchy, the non-official media wage a guerrilla war with the censors, people are wary of speaking out and the generals have decreed the country isn't ready to face the subversion of the Internet. However, compared to the socialist disaster zone Ne Win bequeathed to his successors in 1988, Myanmar has come a very long way.

That is not good enough for the US and the EU which have imposed economic sanctions against Myanmar, accusing it of heinous crimes ranging from the suppression of democracy to drug peddling and slave labour. Last year, US human-rights campaigners successfully pressured oil-services provider Baker Hughes to sell out its stake in the Mann oil fields project in northern Myanmar. Last April, the oil company Premier was advised by the British Foreign Office to end all commercial ties with the "disgraceful regime" in Myanmar. Spurring the activist groups is the open encouragement to international sanctions by the opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, now under house arrest in Yangon.

In public discourse, Suu Kyi is a non-person in Myanmar. At best, she is referred to tangentially as "the lady" and her National League for Democracy is nowhere in sight. Despite her credentials as the daughter of Aung San, the father of Burmese nationalism, Suu Kyi's claim to lead Myanmar to a democratic paradise on the strength of the 1990 elections, is fiercely resisted by the present ruling establishment.

As a Christian who was married to a Briton, the 55-year-old Suu Kyi is not above the majority Burman community's traditional fear of the foreign hand. This fear is partly grounded in Myanmar's humiliating experience of colonialism-British soldiers repeatedly entered the Shwedagon pagoda with their boots on and transformed the Mandalay Palace into an officers' club. But equally, it is centred on the Buddhist fear of a Christian-led cultural transformation of the country. Myanmar nationalism sees the hand of missionaries behind the alienation and separatism of minority ethnic groups like the Karens, Kachins and Shans. Suu Kyi has tried to allay misgivings by also speaking of a "traditional Burmese nationalism arising from Burma's cultural homogeneity" but the fear of democratisation being followed by an assault on Buddhism and the country's territorial integrity persists. Her faith in international pressure on the military regime merely reinforce existing prejudices.

Along with this heightened cultural wariness, there is the fear of the marginalisation of the military. Unlike India, Myanmar didn't have a mass nationalist movement. Aung San and his 30 Comrades effected the liberation of the country in 1942 by riding piggyback on the invading Japanese. Thereafter, it was a hastily cobbled army that functioned as both a political party and a militia. The opposition too developed in the guise of armed, ethnic separatists. A democratic culture never struck roots.

	PEACENIK: Suu Kyi is ready to play ball

After a long spell in isolation, Suu Kyi appears to have recognised this. For the first time since 1996, she has begun talking with Lt-General Khin Nyunt, Secretary-1 of the SPDC, through the good offices of UN Special Envoy Razali Ismail. Both sides have maintained a media silence but as a gesture of goodwill the Government has dropped its public denunciation of Suu Kyi. The idea is to lessen the animosity. With ASEAN pressing for a solution, there are whispers of a rift within the military over the future course (see box). According to senior officials in Yangon, there is a blueprint of a quasi-federal constitution that confers autonomy to the non-Burman states but institutionalises the role of the Tatmadaw. The ball, they say, is in Suu Kyi's court.

There is a deceptive calm in Myanmar today that could well vindicate Paul Theroux' naughty aside that "Nothing happens in Burma but then nothing is expected to happen". Underneath the surface, however, the winds of change are unmistakable. Pro-government notables, with strong links to the Buddhist clergy, talk of "consolidation", the oppositionists speak of "reconciliation". The difference isn't purely semantic but the gap is no longer unbridgeable. Exiled Thintbawa editor Tin Maung Than's observation in the Bangkok-based Irrawaddy reflects the new mood: "The military is part of our body, whether it is good or bad. The opposition is also part of our body, whether good or bad. We should be kind to ourselves as a country."

That's a sentiment the conflict-weary Myanmarese would readily endorse. If only they are allowed to, without becoming a part of a new great game involving the US and China.

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