Impressions of Burma (Myanmar)

Myanmar, or Burma as some still prefer to call it, has been in the news fairly often lately, and unlike in the past, it has been for mostly positive reasons. While it is still perhaps to early to tell if the changes taking place will stick (here is an interesting in-depth look at what has been taking place and the differing viewpoints about what it all means, and here is a briefer article about the negative effect of the current sanctions on one Burmese rock band), it has brought to mind the trip we made there back in early 2003 and the impressions I got of the country at the time. In the ten days or so we were in Burma, after arriving in Yangon (Rangoon) and spending a couple of days there, we took a bus up to Mandalay in the north and then to the ruins of Bagan before heading back to Yangon. I kept a journal of sorts at first, but I ended up falling behind and eventually abandoning it (I think the last entry was from our last day in Bagan). Someday I’ll dig it out and use it to write up a chronological account of the whole trip (relying on my fading memory for the last part), but for now I’ll just record a few general impressions.

[Note: As far as the name of the country goes, my opinions are rather mixed. The most serious objection to the name “Myanmar” is that the change was imposed by a particularly awful government. If the source of the name is ignored, it actually has some advantages over the name Burma, which derives from the dominant ethnic group (called Burman or Bamar). The country is home to a wide variety of ethnic groups, many of which resent and in some cases violent resist domination by the Burmans. Of course the government which imposed the name Myanmar also was guilty of some terrible atrocities against those minority ethnic groups, but that doesn’t change the fact that the name itself is more ethnically neutral. As a result, I don’t really favor either name strongly, and I tend to use them interchangeably. On the other hand, we spent all our time in the Burman parts of the country – in most cases it wasn’t even possible to go to the minority regions – so I’ll probably use Burma more often.]

Myanmar was clearly a poor country, and like several other former British colonies I have visited (such as Nepal, India and Sri Lanka), it seemed to have a rather large number of large colonial era buildings that looked as if they might have been fairly grand when new but were now falling apart. The people for the most part seemed very friendly. In Bagan we met a young woman who was one of the many locals selling souvenirs to tourists. We chatted with her and when we ran into her again later at another site talked with her some more. Eventually she introduced us to her father (who was also selling souvenirs) and gave us a set of postcards for free. They weren’t a new set, but I was still quite surprised that she would give us something on such a short acquaintance, just to be friendly (we hadn’t bought anything else from either her or her father, so it was clear that she had no other motivation). While we didn’t strike up any other friendships like that, most other people struck as genuinely amicable.

As for the government, its presence was obvious in some places and less so in others. There was a billboard in both Burmese and English in Yangon containing propaganda slogans along the lines of “the people firmly reject foreign imperialism” or something like that; for a precise quote I’d have to dig out the one copy of their English newspaper I picked up, as it also contained the slogans (in any case, they were a definite example of common phenomenon – the more a government or leader claims to be speaking for the people, the less likely they are to be speaking the truth). One day in Bagan we saw a long convoy of military vehicles (perhaps some top general was taking a tour of the ancient city, maybe out of the delusion that he was an heir to its former greatness). Also in Bagan we saw an office of Aung San Suu Kyi’s political party, the National League for Democracy. It was a small building with a sign in Burmese and English. Outside there were a couple of men sitting on motorbikes (or maybe just standing – I don’t remember for sure). As we stood looking at the office, one of them told us to go ahead in and take a look. We did so, but there was no one inside, just a few pictures on the wall. We suspected that the men outside were most likely government agents who were keeping an eye on the place, though we had no way to tell for sure.

On the other hand, we saw a few things that showed that the government was a little lax in its suppression of criticism, either because they simply didn’t care about some things or they were inefficient. While we were in Mandalay, we went to see a performance by a comedy troupe led by Par Par Lay. He had previously spent several years in prison for making jokes about government corruption, but the performance we saw still included a number of obvious references to government censorship. Perhaps the main reason he could get away with that was because the show was in English and the audience was made up of foreign travelers. I have no idea if he was doing shows for locals at the time, but I would guess he would have been more circumspect if he did. Regardless, his bravery was impressive, and in fact I recently read that he did get arrested again in 2007, though he was released a few weeks later.

Another example that sticks in my mind was a T-shirt I saw for sale in Yangon. This T-shirt featured the image from the cover of a solo album (The Story of [the] Dispossessed) by the leader of the Thai rock band Carabao, Yuenyong Opakul, better known as Ad Carabao, showing him behind bars. This may not seem like much, but the theme of this particular album was the repression of the ethnic Shan (a Tai ethnic group, speaking a language closely related to Thai) by the Myanmar government. It’s possible that even the T-shirt seller didn’t know the significance of the image (we didn’t ask), but it was still a bit surprising to see. On the other hand, even the most efficient dictatorship is bound to let a few things through the cracks, and Burma’s government wasn’t terribly efficient (though it was probably more efficient at repression than anything else).

Of course there were many other interesting things we saw during our trip, such as the impressive ruins at Bagan, the Shwedagon Pagoda, and various places in Mandalay and Yangon, but an account of those will have to wait. As for the current situation in Myanmar, while things are definitely looking a lot better than a few years ago, it’s worth keeping in mind that there’s still a long ways to go. An unfortunate reminder of this came recently when the Burmese monk U Gambira, who was a leader of the 2007 protests and was released from prison just last month as part of the large-scale amnesty of political prisoners, was arrested again. Though he was released after questioning, the most recent reports indicate that he will be charged for illegally breaking into and squatting in monasteries that were padlocked following the 2007 protests. So it appears the government, or at least elements of it, is still not prepared to completely tolerate dissent (as it happens, U Gambira himself expressed some skepticism about the government’s sincerity in reforming after his release from prison last month). The outside world must still be prepared to put pressure on the government not to backslide in its relaxation of control.