The Land Peace Forgot

8220;In a way Burma is a place where the Second World War never really stopped. Ever since the first Japanese bombers hummed overhead and dropped their payloads over downtown Rangoon, the country has never known peace. For a brief period, between August 1945 and independence in January 1948, there were no open hostilities. And since then, there have been times, like today, when fighting is sporadic, small encounters here and there, affecting only isolated areas. But the gun has never been taken away from Burmese politics. And no government has governed the entirety of Burma since 1941. Elections have never been held across the entire country, and no government has been able to conduct a proper census. Few border regions are even today free of rebel control. There has not been a succession of wars; rather the same war, the same rhetoric, and sometimes even the same old rifles have staggered on and on, with only minor changes to the cast and plot and a few new special effects. Some of the very same groups that first took up arms in the 1940s, when Mahatma Gandhi was languishing in a British jail and Joe Louis was the heavyweight champion of the world, are still duking it out today. Perhaps a million dead, millions more displaced, an economy in ruins, and a robust military machine designed to fight the enemy within have been the main stuff of Burma8217;s post-independence history.8221;

This paragraph is the pivot on which Thant Myint-U8217;s book revolves. He gathers various strands of Burma8217;s history to understand how it arrived at such a juncture 8212; or such a long juncture, in fact, with the country almost frozen in the same tussle for so many decades. He then uses the rich and complex texture of the explanation to hazard new ways for the world to engage with Burma.

Some of the 8220;histories8221; alluded to in the subtitle are: the prominent place of military might in the Burmese psyche on account of the imperial successes five hundred years ago of conquerors like Bayinnaung; the civil wars bequeathed by the British; the loss of continuity with an old elite, with the exile of King Thibaw in 1885; the vacuum created in the 1940s with the driving out of middle-class Indians; the rise of a little group of 1930s Rangoon University students who8217;d in different ways impact Burma8217;s history, including U Nu, the first post-independence premier, U Thant, third UN secretary general and the author8217;s grandfather, Ne Win, the general who entrenched Burma in dictatorship, and Aung San, the hero assassinated so young and father of Suu Kyi.

In most of this, there is a strong attempt to make linkages between Burma and the rest of the world. These linkages rescue Burmese history from orientalist stereotype, and they also put in sharp relief the post-1988 isolation from the rest of the world, especially the West. This really is the crux of Thant Myint-U8217;s thesis, one that8217;s proven to be immensely controversial. Is it advisable, he asks, to see Burma as just one story, 8220;the story of Aung San Suu Kyi and her struggle against the ruling generals8221;? One, he says, this emphasis on predicating engagement with Burma on only her case could be based on a misreading of Burmese history: 8220;The Burmese military dictatorship is the longest-lasting military dictatorship in the world, and it is also its purest. It is not an army regime sitting on top of an otherwise civilian state. In Burma by the 1990s the military was the state. Army officers did everything. Normal government had withered away.8221; Two, isolation in fact could be the very thing that sustains the generals.

Regime change, he argues, by a sudden transition to democracy is fraught with danger. One must take into account Burma8217;s 8220;long history of failed state building8221; and the absence of 8220;a history of pragmatic and rigorous policy debate, on economics, finance, health care, or education as well as a more imaginative and empathetic discussion of minority rights and shared identities in modern Burmese societies8221;. In any case, he poses, would China have been better off it had been isolated after 1989? Would Thailand and Indonesia have created the conditions for democracy if they8217;d been isolated for decades?

These questions, as stated, have drawn much controversy. But they have nonetheless brought the Burma debate out of deep freeze.