Open Society Foundations » Maureen Aung-Thwin

New Messages of Hope for Burma

Maureen Aung-Thwin — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 15:26:46 +0000

The following originally appeared in the South China Morning Post.

Today, the anniversary of Burma’s independence from British colonial rule in 1948, reminds Burmese—wherever they live—of what might have been. In post–World War II Southeast Asia, Burma was the “It” country and the top contender for the region’s first “tiger” economy. Rich in natural and people resources, Burma had one of the highest literacy rates in the world and a prestigious university system. Burma also enjoyed one of the freest presses in Asia, with more than 30 daily newspapers in many languages. Can it ever be so again?

Yes, there is hope for Burma: in the age of Twitter it is impossible to run an efficient police state; even after almost half a century of military rule, too many Burmese still carry the torch for freedom. There is also hope because the world is watching the struggle in Burma with renewed interest.

Aung San Suu Kyi may be the famously stubborn icon of freedom, but she is the best known of many other stubborn Burmese prisoners of conscience, more than 2,000 of whom are languishing in jails, serving draconian sentences, some for the second or third time. In a recent show of defiance, even insurgent ethnic forces who had signed ceasefires with the regime refused to be manipulated during November’s stage-managed elections.

The Burmese generals are discovering the futility of trying to micromanage what 50 million citizens see, hear or read, and to rein in information that can come in—and out—in less than a blink. There is little evidence that the Burmese authorities even bother to play Big Brother 24-7, partly due to the lack of capacity to staunch the enormous bytes of data that today besiege even purportedly “isolated” nations. The authorities filter specific buzzwords and watch certain e-mail addresses, but apparently do not block other obvious sites that provide users with secure email communications.

The penetration of the Internet in Burma is a mere 0.2 percent of the population, but user growth between 2000 and 2009 was around 10,000 percent, one of the fastest in Asia. The regime controls all three official Internet service providers, but cannot block access to electronic information as efficiently as other repressive countries in the region. Monitoring the Internet is very labor-intensive and most users know how to get around site blocks.

Blogging has taken off in a big way inside Burma and among Burmese living abroad, who rely on inside informants to provide items for sites based outside Burma, such as the promising new www.myanmarwikileaks.org.

Since her recent release from house arrest, Suu Kyi has wasted no time learning about and exploiting the new (to her) methods of instant communication with the outside world. She has conducted many telephone conferences with students abroad and sent countless video addresses to conferences and meetings. She is finally able to “speak” in Burmese to her main constituents inside the country via interviews with exile Burmese language radio and television stations. She may be, as some observers think, overexposing herself in a fickle world of 24-hour news cycles, but she is also increasing her already formidable army of supporters around the globe, who will notice if she is locked up again any time soon.

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen is the latest of prominent personalities to champion the cause of freedom for Burma. He has been highly critical of Burma’s closest neighbors—India, China and Thailand—which are “making a lot of money out of the Burmese people by keeping it under dictatorial hands.”

Hopefully in 2011, some of the more enlightened generals will come to the same conclusion.

Elections in Burma: Sometimes, It’s What You Don’t Know That Matters

Maureen Aung-Thwin — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 16:45:04 +0000

The following originally appeared in the South China Morning Post.

Former U.S. secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld could have been describing Burma when he famously said: “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know.” In Burma, it’s a bit of both.

Despite the Burmese regime’s secrecy and paranoia, one known known is how the people feel about decades of oppression under a dictatorship. However many votes the Burmese regime decides it “won” in Sunday’s fraudulent elections, the Burmese electorate long ago rejected military rule. Burma’s last election two decades ago was won overwhelmingly by the National League for Democracy (NLD), the opposition party led by Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. The results were ignored and the NLD eventually forced to disband. This year, perhaps because the process was so crudely manipulated, hundreds, possibly thousands, of soldiers braved punishment to defy strict orders to vote for the regime’s proxy, the Union Solidarity and Development Party.

An opposition party, the National Democratic Force, has called for all parties not to recognize the ballot counts “without a clear explanation about the suspicious advanced votes and other irregular activities in the vote counting.”

A known unknown is why junta leader Senior General Than Shwe felt the need to go through the charade of elections in the first place. Was it to keep a promise to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) to complete his seven-point road map towards “a discipline-flourishing democracy”? Perhaps to put in place a trusted successor who wouldn’t treat him as shabbily as he did his predecessor, General Ne Win? Maybe it was to make the incessant international critics back off. Or, did the fortune-teller make him do it? Regardless of the reason, managing and manipulating a huge, nationwide operation is apparently a lot more complex than the generals bargained for. Two years ago, in the immediate aftermath of Cyclone Nargis, it was relatively easy for the regime to stage-manage a desperate electorate and claim a 93 percent vote in favor of a constitutional referendum.

Though fraudulent, this year’s elections have already had some unintended consequences. Than Shwe and his lieutenants are suddenly faced with appeasing newly assertive ethnic forces, sullen soldiers, demoralized bureaucrats and a growing battalion of restive youth representing 30 percent of the population. This new generation of potential rebels who weren’t yet born or were too young to have experienced the 1988 nationwide uprising against military rule, includes writers, singers, comedians and hip hop artists—most of them virtual global citizens, savvy about information and communication technologies that give them a huge advantage over what one rapper called “clueless censors.”

Still, the biggest known known of Burma is the challenge for any government, military or civilian, to peacefully and finally resolve the ethnic “problem” in Burma. Ever since the pre-independence era of colonial British rule, ethnic nationalities have unsuccessfully tried to establish a genuine federal union with the majority Burmans.

Over the last two decades, the Burman-led military regimes have divided and ruled, cutting separate ceasefire agreements with ethnic “insurgents.” An attempt earlier this year to force ethnic armies to become border guards under central Burman control quickly backfired. Violent clashes between Burmese and ethnic forces near the sensitive Chinese order sent 30,000 refugees streaming across from Kachin State to Yunnan , spooking Beijing, Burma’s protector and patron. Soon after the skirmishes, the regime-controlled Election Commission refused to allow certain Kachin candidates to contest the vote. The prospects for renewed fighting in the northern border are real; ominously, on election day, fighting broke out at the Thai-Burma border town of Myawaddy between regime troops and a breakaway Karen brigade that did not want to be border guards.

A major known unknown is what the international community will say or do now that the Burmese generals have blatantly ignored calls by the UN secretary general, the UN General Assembly, Asean and individual governments around the world, for free, fair and inclusive elections. Asean used to justify Burma’s membership as a means of elevating the Burmese to the higher standards of the community. Asean refused to contemplate that being pulled down in the opposite direction was also possible. So far, the “Burma issue” has dominated every Asean summit agenda since the country became a member. The generals, however, know that talk is cheap. Burma is resource rich and relatively undeveloped, so the regime is betting that its neighbors’ thirst for energy, raw materials, and a docile consumer market will help suppress known knowns about the country, and help keep everyone in a state of denial.

To those who still want to “wait and see,” a brief reminder that Rumsfeld’s ruminations conclude with: “There are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.” Or, in other words, be careful what you wish for.

What an Oscar Might Mean for Human Rights in Burma

Maureen Aung-Thwin — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:55:45 +0000

Aye Chan Naing, head of the news agency depicted in the award-winning documentary Burma VJ, comments on what an Oscar win could mean for human rights activists working inside Burma’s closed society.

FILM

The Independent (London, England) September 23, 1994 | ADAM MARS-JONES No film with a PG certificate can be about the realities of war, and Ronald F Maxwell's four-hour-plus labour of love, Gettysburg, hardly even tries. It's a film about the making and unmaking of heroes with a relatively scrupulous background - subtitles telling us names of places, or the distance of forces from the action - and a relatively unscrupulous sanitising of horror. When a general is shot by a sniper, he dies without apparently realising it, and a tableau of grieving comrades instantly forms around him, a military version of a religious painting, and an awkward touch of poetry in an outstandingly prosaic film. Randy Edelman's music goes into pathos overdrive.

Edelman's score is astonishing both for its sheer quantity and its banality. A virtually continuous bombardment of heroic Muzak. It endlessly paraphrases folk tunes in orchestrations of tragic grandeur, and every time you think he is out of ammunition he brings up a banjo or a plangent Spanish guitar from the rear. For a textbook example of the perversely anaesthetising effects of music on a soundtrack you could hardly do better than the sequence of the cannonade before Pickett's Charge on the third day of the battle. The guns at Gettysburg could be heard in Baltimore, 60 miles away, and before the music intervenes you get a sense of what that must have been like, the numbing endlessness of it. Then the orchestra starts in with its poignant treacle, and conveys the audience into a different state of numbness, an eerie distance from the events that have been so carefully reconstructed. go to website facial hair styles

Gettysburg boasts the grandest staging of history in American cinema since The Birth of a Nation, and made use of 5,000 Civil War re-enactors, or living "historians" as some of them prefer to be known. These extras were apparently meticulous in their attention to details of dress and kit, but they bring an inauthenticity of a different sort to the film. The people for whom war is a hobby, and who have the means to invest in uniforms and paraphernalia, are necessarily older than those who did the original fighting. Both armies in the film are seasoned, even grizzled, and there is a striking absence of the young who have always fed the cannons. The director's standard special-effects shot to show the impact of cannon fire or cannister-shot (that is, shrapnel) on human bodies is of people flying forward through the air. The reasons for this are perfectly understandable - extras are not in fact cannon-fodder and stunt people don't wish to land on their backs - but the effect is nevertheless so stylised as to make nonsense of the film's claims to historical accuracy. go to site facial hair styles

Gettysburg is based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Michael Shaara called The Killer Angels, and could profitably be shorn of its set- piece discussions of philosophies of war, starting with the idea that gave the book its title: each man as both angel and killer. The film sets out to show that everyone has his reasons. There is a remarkable shortage of bitterness in this Civil War, and a total absence of blood lust. Understatement is the rule, even in combat: "Can you hold, John?", "Reckon I can." Robert E Lee gives a maverick general a dressing down of grotesque gentleness: "Things tend to get out of hand. That's why we have orders." Opposing soldiers greet each other almost fondly: "See you in hell, Billy Yank", "See you in hell, Johnny Reb." Generals Armistead and Hancock, fighting on opposite sides, have a passionate past attachment to each other, which the film takes at face value, though the male friendships of the last century look schmaltzy or euphemistic nowadays.

This conscious refusal of hindsight and muting of irony is typical of the film. The contradictions of the Civil War, its combination of high rhetoric and mechanised carnage, are thoroughly damped down. Admittedly we learn that this was a war where a Confederate Scout learned that there was a new commander-in-chief of the Union forces by the sly ruse of reading the Yankee newspapers. But the futility of war is too modern an idea to get any purchase on Gettysburg. The most nearly cynical of the characters in the film, who declines to see a divine spark in any of the combatants, still concludes: "What matters is justice. That's why I'm here." Gettysburg has so much the trudging feel of a mini-series that it's easy to miss the bits of architecture that Maxwell, screenwriter as well as director, has put into it. The first half shows the making of a hero of the Union, how Colonel Lawrence Chamberlain, a college professor who applied for a sabbatical so as to enlist, held the day at Little Round Top. Everything has been set up to make Chamberlain a sort of New Man in uniform: his humane treatment of mutineers leads directly to the saving, by a reformed renegade, of his brother's life in the thick of the battle. Jeff Daniels as Chamberlain sports one of the loveliest facial hair styles in a film that is full of them. His moustache looks like the tail of a bird of blonde fur that has just flown up his nose. The effect is to allow this actor to escape from the fresh-faced weak sincerity that has been his trademark.

The second half of the film concentrates on a tragic figure of the Confederacy, General James Longstreet (Tom Berenger), whose solid advice on tactics was ignored by Robert E Lee (Martin Sheen), a man with a genius for raising morale who could not see that morale was not enough. Longstreet is the man who must pass on orders that he knows will produce disaster.

The symmetry of the two stories is shown by the use of names: Chamberlain's brother learns to call him Sir and not Lawrence, while Lee in defeat finally breaks down and calls Longstreet Pete. War can raise men up or bring them down.

It would take more than this piece of literary patterning to save the film from being simultaneously pat and lumbering. Gettysburg is less a war film than a colossal club sandwich, made up of alternating layers of lavishly staged combat, gruff male bonding and campfire discussions of personal philosophies, all held together by the toothpicks of Edelman's music and served with a child's portion of ketchup.

(Photograph omitted) Battle with a glossy sheen ADAM MARS-JONES

Where Journalists Are Criminals

Maureen Aung-Thwin — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 21:24:51 +0000

Aye Chan Naing is the Chief Editor of Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), a news agency and Open Society Institute grantee that is the focus of the Academy Award–nominated documentary Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country. While in the US to promote the film, Aye Chan Naing spoke with OSI about the current situation of DVB’s underground work in Burma.

What is the Democratic Voice of Burma?

Democratic Voice of Burma is an independent multimedia organization committed to responsible journalism. We provide uncensored and unbiased news and information to the people of Burma both in the diaspora and inside Burma via daily shortwave radio, satellite television programs, and our website, www.dvb.no. DVB is also the main provider of Burma-related television news to international and local television stations, journalists and filmmakers.

Although DVB was established in Oslo, Norway, in 1992, the majority of our journalists are working inside Burma as undercover reporters.

What is life like for DVB reporters working undercover?

They risk getting arrested every day. For example, they could even be questioned for covering a story on the spread of swine flu in Burma. They sleep in different places to be safe and always have to be alert, not only to pursue breaking news but also to go into hiding immediately if one of their co-workers gets arrested.

In public, our journalists have to carefully hide any equipment such as mobile phones, tape recorders, laptop computers and cameras. This kind of equipment attracts the attention of the authorities who are easily suspicious.

The most difficult decision our reporters face every day is whether to spontaneously take out their camera or microphone and start recording events and incidents, or someone speaking out in despair. This is the most painful decision they have to make, whether to report the story or leave it completely untold.

Why can't you report legally from inside Burma?

There are several laws, some dating back to 1878, which the Burmese regime uses in order to suppress free expression inside Burma. Two examples of such laws are the Vernacular Press Act which was created by the British colonial power in Burma to submit articles before publication, and the Electronic Act, a newer law which prohibits sending information "detrimental to the security of the state" across the internet. Most of our jailed journalists were charged under the Electronic Act.

But – and this is a very big but – these are not the only laws the regime uses to suppress free expression. Hla Hla Win, a DVB journalist who was recently sentenced to 20 years imprisonment had her sentence extended by seven more years (for a total of 27 years imprisonment) because she was riding a bicycle without a license.

Can you tell us more about your campaign for the detained DVB journalists who were recently imprisoned?

We refuse to be silent while the Burmese regime continues to treat our journalists as criminals. More than a dozen DVB journalists have been imprisoned since 2007. In Dec 2009, Hla Hla Win, a DVB journalist was sentenced to 27 years imprisonment and in Jan 2010, another journalist, Ngwe Soe Lin was sentenced to 13 years imprisonment. Both of them were arrested while pursuing news stories for DVB.

We have set up a “Free Burma’s VJs” campaign committee. We are also working with international associations such as Reporters Without Borders and Committee to Protect Journalists. We are also asking governments and UN agencies to demand the Burmese military release our journalists from prison. Finally, we are planning to launch a public awareness campaign to mobilize support from the international community.