REINVENTING BURMA; SAVE AUNG SAN SUU KYI AND TIN OO

national | miscellaneous | news report Wednesday June 04, 2003 02:28 by KYAW SWA - BURMESE WRITER SPOTLIT at HOTMAIL dot COM WWW.HOTMAIL.COM 66-9-1583091

I am Kyaw, a Burmese writer and activist. It is time to help Aung San Suu Kyi and U Tin Oo who were injured and 70 freedom fighters were shot at by the Burmese government. Burmese leaders and freedom fighters are in great danger. Please do your best to liberate Burma and send in UN peacekeeping troops to this troubled Asian nation. In fact, Aung San Suu Kyi has lived in Europe, Bhutan, India, Japan and England, and has worked for strong Burma-West cultural ties. Thank you for your courage and love for Burmese people. Burma needs you now.

REINVENTING BURMA

BURMESE WOMEN
Let me tell you we Burmese have no rights to challenge the courage and wit of our mothers’ financial and spirtitual plight. Though a matriarchal society, women are treated badly: Daw Aung San Suu Kyi does not receive the respect she deserved from brutal Burmese men, generals in the military. Again she is harassed, endangered and detained while all universities are shut down. She represents the new Burma, feminine, ideal, intelligent and beautiful. Her wisdom is our future, our inspiration. Her motherly instruction to the ruling men are our lessons. Her blood is redder than the bloody flag of Burma. Her fight is ours!

In history, our First Lady Sao Hearn Kham (wife of President Shan Prince Shwe Thaik) was a star revolutionary of the Shan diaspora due to Ne Win. Ne Win is in Burmese hell now, as you might guess. I asked my mother already, once she was done with vipassana meditation. My own aunt once stood up for her rights to wear pants as a female army commander 2nd class, trained with elite soldiers in Alabama. My aunt served as an aide to a few Burmese generals. From 1962 to 1988, Burma did not have any female minister in Ne Win’s cabinet, and women MPs were less than 10% of all. If the free world powers are seeking a moral model to democratize, it is not Iraq Mr. church-going saviour Bush, but Burma. Saving Burma can improve the image of the UN, EU and the US definitely. Remember the Khmer Rouge? We must then allow modern Burmese women to lead the renaissance, institute democratic support structures and let universities offer Women Studies programs.

SPIRITUAL RENAISSANCE
With the blemished soul in the collective identity due to Victorian Colonization of King Thibaw’s Konbaung Dynasty to later Japanese Facism, a colourful but short democracy of U Nu leading to dangerous dictatorship of Ne Win and military rules—the only continuity in Burma is the culture of oppression and hardship faced by all communities of Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam and Chinese Paganism along with folk Animism in villages. In our family, I am often exposed to the Eid, the Mass and things all blend in well with the Buddhist discussions on the wooden floors.

Thinngyan

Waiting…like being rained on. I feel uncertain, untouchable. Anita asked me to help name a ristorante in the Big Mango on Sukhumvit, the city. I am a villager in Hua Hin, Thailand now. I miss what is now old affairs of the superstar Gurus. Colonial cool Burma, Manadalay…Temasak then Minneapple and Brooklyn where some Chinaman mistreated me the waiter at his Asean Café, what a grand name from a little man wearing leather pants. Needlework of homegrown quilts, pathos of collective karma—is Burma doomed forever as Phra Jew, a Thai Buddhist monk justified on the Golden Land citing collective karma.

People are made, and mad, I think. Poetry, the inner labyrinth of the Burmese soul, was thrown out of my bosom. Shakespeare came in the mail orders, the version was that of Harold Bloom. I know Burma will change, but how and when? Can we organize the Communities of Change, of course we can—General Aung San founded the communities of liberators, Burma Independence Army first with 30 comrades, then to a size that is now self-destructing the nation. Virgins were crying in poor Burma. My Phay Phay, dad, never calls us here in Thailand because he does not have the dollars to pay the phone bill. He told me little saving banks Dana Thiri or Maha Danan have now closed. In 6 months now, he lost a big chunk of his retirement savings due to unethical banking in Rangoon, the land of loons. I expect nothing more from his country, his, now that Ne Win is dead. My high school buddies now pay homage to Rangoon without inviting me except Zaw. The rest flew in from Australia, Singapore and sneaked into Burma of new Satellite towns, forgetting me the poor English teacher making less than 500 pounds a month in Thailand, a bastard with western ideology like Edgar in Lear. No Macbeth, nor Buddha is to be found.

THE ECONOMISTS’ VIEW
My boss at the university, Acharn Narongchai, a former Commerce Minister of Thailand personally told me that he was impressed by Burma on his first visit in 2003 to the Land of Pagodas. I gathered what impressed him in this nation with no Financial Transparency and Laissez Faire economy__ he a Thai gentleman educated at Johns Hopkins and a researcher at the TDRI and ISEAS__ was the monumental Shwe Dagon Zedi, the ancient pagoda of Burmese and Mon Queen and Kings whose economic policies centered around Buddhist ethics and Dhana (generosity in Pali). If Professor Amartya Sen’s idea of development as freedom were to be realized in Burma, Burma cannot piggy-back-ride on the clever and hungry Goat, China in early 21st century of retro-civilisation whose industrial manufacture outshines Burma and dooms the success of Myanmar. Chinese, Malaysians, Singaporeans, Taiwanese, now Thais have all benefited from the sell-out of Burma’s natural resources, from oil and gas, forestry to oceans and drugs.

Burma is an economy without transparency or market ethics. Worse still, there is no justice in the whole country where most British laws are still foundationed in theory. My own family’s meager Kyat 10,000,000 savings are in jeopardy currently due to the cheatings of private saving banks run by businessmen, like Maha Danan which promised a 5% monthly interest because of the real estate boom, carbon copying the Thai fanaticism for construction corruption where national funds are funneled into the greedy pockets of the corrupt. Bigger private banks also carry tarnished images due to money-laundering done by Wa businessmen who are splitted in ideology and practice rapidly. My mother remained optimistic that the 5% interest outweighs the possibility of being cheated, and I am sure she is not the only gullible in this land of helplessness.

SINICIZATION MEANS DOOM
I remember my train ride from Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore to Penang via Dr Mahathir’s Kuala lumpur in 1991. In Penang, I was not too impressed by the tacky financial center with skyscrapers but found solace and displacement in friendly shophouses serving Dim Sum so authentic and delicious to be Rafflesian, Singaporean.
It is odd to realize that later both Lee and Mahathir were drawn to the illusory markets of timber, fisheries, airlines and tourism in the same manner squid is to green light of fisherpeople. Markets in Singapore and Malaysia were never that free to be analysed according to Sen’s Cambridge ideals, but business-mindedness and liberal governance helped the Sino-Malay economic cultures. Both Lee and Mahathir, both British trained Asian leaders not unlike Aung San Suu Kyi, weilded considerable influence in Asia for decades. These two great Asian men systematically ostracised and discriminated Aung San Suu Kyi due to their plan to support negative conditions in the “Burma Looting” and, sure due to insecurity and bigotry towards a great woman of Burmese heritage. In fact, Mahathir has not done justification to his statesmanship by being earnest in negotiating or meeting with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the landslide winner of the free elections in Burma about ten years ago. We also know that the UN envoy Tan Sri Razali is engaged in a dirty dancing with the junta on making barcoded VIP passports, gasp.

Once I met a Chinese-Thai man who owns a home in China and one in Thailand. He speaks 5 or so languages, including several Chinese dialects, and is proud of his heritage and longed to practise his English with me. How funny here, Thailand had long been sinicized in its compassionate way as Lee Kuan Yew advocated for Taiwan’s politics, and we see most of the rural poor Thais are indigenous and black-skinned.

Nearby the Kabaaye Pagoda built at the zenith of U Nu’s democracy in Burma to celebrate the 6th Grand Sangha Assembly honouring the 2500 years Buddhism has led the East, I visited a restaurant and bar where a Burmese youth came in to have a glass of potent Chinese whisky and then hopped on the bus home. None of the Chinese immigrants working at this Rangoon eatery can speak Burmese. The exodus of rural Chinese refugees has occurred due to Chinese government’s ignorance of the southern and western China. Have a look at the Yangtze’s Three Gorges Dam in the path of the Harvard scholar Deirdre Chetham. It is a mess in China. The World Bank, the loyal tool of the US government, sometimes funds dam constructions which abuse the ecological harmony of rural Southeast Asia. Mekhong river is also blown away by China to improve trade. Even my father is pro-dams and he could care less about local villagers or the environment.

Like bees to fatal flourescent bulbs, either Cambodia, Laos, Taiwan or now China, um a Freudian slip, I mean Burma dances in the eclipse of China whose pseudo “communist capitalism” has become a laughing stock of Fidel Castro. Marx would have laughed audibly in the British Library if he knew the Chinese, Vietnamese, Burmese or Laotian leftists would one day be this gullible. The enlightened world should be aware of what the communist China did to Tibet for over 50 years; his Holiness the Dalai Lama and the displaced Tibetans are not that dissimilar from the Burmese lot. The East needs the West as much and as often as the West needs the East. Now Burma needs you, all of you.

Most importantly, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi must be freed and the UN must send in Special Peacekeeping Forces led by a competent negotiator in conscience to usher in a new era and democratic administration for Burma peacefully. Just like Laos, Cambodia, Timor or Afghanistan. The Englishman Dr. Michael Aris once responed, in 1996, my email mentioning that he is most worried about the safety of his beloved Burmese heroine Daw Suu. I forsee a Phoenix rising as in Harry Potter’s triumph, for the fearsome and poisonous dragon, you know who, in Burma is no longer beautiful but danger! Burma is ready for change and the return of a divine and moral intervention. And justice. Viva la Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and may she be safe. May all the Buddhas of Burmese Nirvana help her cause!