Everything Is Broken (15 page)

There is an innate arrogance in these reenactments and reconstructions. It is as if Than Shwe and his generals are trying to channel the unrivaled powers of Burma’s monarchs by creating their likenesses, refurbishing their pagodas, and building replicas of their palaces.

 

 

 

IN THE FIRST FEW YEARS
of Naypyidaw’s existence, foreigners were prohibited from entering the Abode of Kings, and it would be some years before I was able to get there. In the meantime, I kept an eye out for anything that might offer some insight on Burma’s elusive ruler. One such event was the marriage of Than Shwe’s daughter to an army major in 2006.

Though the wedding was supposed to have been a private affair, a video was leaked a few months after the ceremony. For the first time, the general public was able to witness the extravagant private lives of Than Shwe and the country’s elite. The images caused quite a stir and attracted worldwide attention as outtakes were broadcast on international news programs and the full-length version was made available on YouTube.

The bride was, without doubt, the star of the show. Before the ceremony began, the film captured her as she underwent final adjustments to her face and outfit. She closed her eyes so that the makeup artist could sweep a generous layer of green shadow across her lids and pouted patiently as a fine brush painted her lips the color of a maraschino cherry. Friends and older women fussed over the bride, fixing her diamond tiara and tweaking the diamond pins in her bouffant. A collar made of diamonds was fastened around the bride’s neck, and additional strands of diamonds were draped across her chest. Around each wrist she wore three diamond-studded cuffs, and the rings on her fingers were set with gems the size of jawbreakers.

The venue for the wedding party was similarly opulent. Guests walked in on a red carpet lined with fresh flowers. In the entrance hall, a series of life-sized portraits in gilded frames portrayed the bride in her wedding gown. Inside the reception room, a colonnaded palace façade had been erected to showcase the bride and groom. As the guests filtered into the room, waiters and waitresses bustled around the hall making last-minute adjustments to the table settings.

The guest list could have been ripped straight out of the pages of a Who’s Who of Burma’s ruling hierarchy. The generals and their wives appeared in lavish attire. The women wore lace blouses, richly embroidered
tamein
(as the sarong worn by women is called in Burmese), and sequined chiffon scarves. Between them they displayed a riot of color in ensembles of candy-floss pink, electric lime green, and volcanic orange. The men who accompanied them, many of them high-ranking officers or business cronies of the regime, were dressed more soberly in silk
longyi
with traditional white or cream jackets. Once ushered to their tables, most of the guests sat stiffly, waiting for the ceremony to begin. A few women leaned toward each other and whispered, perhaps complimenting one another’s outfits or comparing notes on who had and had not been invited to the wedding of the senior general’s daughter.

Than Shwe, who is seldom seen in public out of uniform, was dressed for the event in a golden silk
longyi
. The cameraman seemed to delight in filming him as he polished off a plate of delicate layer cakes and then reached for an extra helping of what looked like trifle, tucking in with steely relish. Than Shwe’s wife, Kyaing Kyaing, sat silently by his side. Despite the richness of her attire, she gave off an air of weariness; her spectacles were gold-rimmed but grandmotherly, and her earlobes sagged slightly under the weight of heavy diamond earrings.

These images of unabashed wealth highlighted the stark dichotomy between the life of the ruling classes and that of the average Burmese citizen. While most of Burma is mired in poverty, the regime’s coffers—and the generals’ private piggy banks—are illicitly filled through a variety of exports. Burma is rich in natural resources, and the generals profit from the sale of gems, jade, and teakwood. Most of the regime’s gains, however, are now made by auctioning off concessions to Burma’s plentiful reserves of oil and natural gas.

A report by EarthRights International states that between 2000 and 2009 the junta earned US$4.83 billion from a controversial gas pipeline operated by Total, a French company, and the U.S.-owned Chevron—hardly any of these earnings were declared in the national budget, and were instead stashed away in offshore bank accounts. With explorations still being conducted, and Burma situated next to energy-hungry countries such as Thailand and China, there will be no shortage of investments. Though the generals get rich off these megadeals, the wealth does not trickle downward, and the rest of Burma has become ever more impoverished by the regime’s financial misappropriations. For most of the population, unaccustomed to such displays of wealth, the wedding of the senior general’s daughter must have looked like a party fit for a real-life princess.

When the ceremony began, the lights in the reception hall were dimmed. A spotlight was trained on the bride and groom as they walked down the aisle. A row of bridesmaids preceded them, scattering jasmine flowers beneath their feet. Three female attendants crouched behind the bride, carefully maneuvering the long lace train of her dress. The bride gripped the groom’s arm tightly, and her expression was serious. Only very occasionally did her glossy red lips stretch into a tense smile. Close-ups of the couple were beamed onto wide-screen televisions positioned around the room. Reflected in the spotlight, the treasure trove of diamonds worn by the bride seemed to shoot sparks of lightning out across the audience.

O
ne Tuesday in the middle of August 2007, an order from Naypyidaw was put into effect that triggered a calamitous chain of events. Released by the Ministry of Energy, the order resulted in the price of gas rising by 60 percent, diesel by 100 percent, and compressed natural gas by 500 percent. Overnight, the cost of bus and train tickets doubled. By the end of the week, necessities such as rice, cooking oil, and salt had become more expensive due to increased transport charges. At some tea shops, a cup of tea that previously cost K200 (around US$.20) suddenly cost K300.

In a country where much of the population survives day-to-day on meager wages, the order was economic torture. A United Nations household survey conducted in Burma a couple of years earlier had found that more than 30 percent of the population eked out a living below the poverty line and did not always have enough money to cover their daily requirements. The unexpected escalation in the cost of living threatened to make life untenable.

On August 19, four days after the announcement, an estimated five hundred people demonstrated in Rangoon to demand that the government lower fuel costs. It was an incredibly rare act of mass protest and the largest demonstration the country had seen in years. The event was organized and led by the 88 Generation Students, a group of student leaders who had been prominent in the 1988 uprising. Though most of them had been arrested for their roles in organizing the 1988 demonstrations and had spent the past decade or more in prison, they had served their sentences and been released some years earlier. Since their release, they had established informal networks for social work and low-key political projects. In response to the August price hikes, they instigated a series of protests.

I was at home in Bangkok at the time and followed news of the protests on Web sites run by exiled Burmese media groups. It was always with a faint sense of dread that I clicked onto the sites. I felt certain that the regime’s response would be harsh; the demonstrations were destined to be short-lived, quickly quashed, and just as soon forgotten. Or so I mistakenly thought. There is a Burmese saying that cautions that predicting the outcome of political events is like trying to guess the color of a chick’s feathers by looking at the egg, or like proclaiming what shape a cloud will take. As had happened to me many times before in my attempts to foresee the future of Burma, I was proven wrong. Though a government crackdown against the 88 Generation-led protests did take place, something much larger and even more explosive was taking shape.

Within just a few days, the government had arrested scores of people. Protest leaders who were able to escape went underground and continued to organize demonstrations, but the number of protesters diminished rapidly and the groups that gathered in different areas of Rangoon grew smaller each day. On August 23, a group of thirty protesters walking to the office of the National League for Democracy was arrested, as was a lone protester holding up a handwritten placard outside the U.S. embassy. The next day, twenty people demonstrating outside city hall were detained. Four days later, some fifty people led by female NLD members with black-and-white photographs of General Aung San pinned to their chests marched through the busy Hledan intersection in the northern part of the city shouting, “Lower fuel prices!” They quickly dispersed after another twenty people were arrested. With key organizers either in prison or on the run, the voices of dissent were temporarily silenced.

As I had thought, the regime’s response was fast and cruelly efficient. In almost all of these instances, the authorities made use of the
Swan Ah Shin
(literally, the Masters of Force). A sinister addition to the regime’s manpower in recent years, the
Swan Ah Shin
is an informal and un-uniformed army of hired thugs. Given basic military training, they are used to patrol neighborhoods and contain public disturbances. They are often large and physically strong men who have a prior police record or were recruited from prisons, and they are much feared by the civilian population.

Burmese journalists were able to secretly film some of the arrests made by the
Swan Ah Shin
in August. The footage, which sometimes lasts no more than a few minutes, depicts men who could be ordinary passersby grabbing protesters and bundling them into unmarked vans or waiting cars. The unobtrusive, lightning-quick maneuvers certainly don’t look like arrests conducted in the name of the state; they look more like anonymous abductions.

Though sporadic demonstrations continued to break out across the country in the early days of September, it might all have fizzled out had several hundred monks not decided to march through the streets of Pakokku, a town in central Burma renowned for its teaching monasteries and scholar monks. Soldiers were quickly sent to the scene and fired warning shots into the air. When the monks carried on marching, the soldiers started to beat them. Two monks were tied to a lamppost and publicly flayed with bamboo sticks and rifle butts. It was believed that one monk was killed.

Monks are so revered in Burma that many laypeople are reluctant even to step in the shadows they cast for fear of giving offense. To physically attack a member of the Buddhist clergy was a horrifying act in predominately Buddhist Burma. The following day, when a government delegation visited one of the major monasteries in Pakokku to order an end to the protests, the complex was surrounded by monks and town residents. A riot broke out, and cars that had carried the delegation to the monastery were torched. Trapped inside the compound, the government officials had to wait six hours before they were able to escape through a back entrance.

To punish the soldiers, members of the monastic community threatened to invoke an ancient rite known in Pali as
patam nikkujjana kamma
and colloquially referred to as
thabeik hmauk
, or the overturning of the alms bowl. The act is a monk’s most hard-hitting spiritual weapon. Buddhist monks and laypeople live in mutual dependence; laypeople donate food, robes, and other necessities to monks, and monks provide them with a conduit for making merit through this act of giving. The overturning of the alms bowl severs the cycle of practical and spiritual inter-dependency. For monks to hold
thabeik hmauk
against the military would mean that soldiers and their families could no longer make merit. It also would mean that military families could not participate in religious ceremonies performed by monks and would be denied any religious rites of passage from birth through death. In spiritual terms the
thabeik hmauk
is a long-lasting condemnation, as it robs those who have been excommunicated of the ability to accumulate merit for future lifetimes.

The decision to overturn the alms bowl is not taken lightly. According to Buddhist scriptures, the rite can be enacted only against those who harm the
Sangha
, or monastic community, in eight distinct ways (these include denying a monk robes, food, or medicine; endangering the lives of monks or reducing their numbers; and using ten kinds of abusive language against them). Once enacted, the boycott can be lifted only if the person or organization targeted apologizes with sincerity. After the incident at Pakokku, a hitherto underground group of monks called the All Burma Monks’ Alliance released a public statement announcing that the
thabeik hmauk
would be instigated if the regime did not make amends by September 17, 2007.

The regime issued no official comment. The minister of religious affairs, a brigadier general, allegedly organized a meeting with senior monks in Pakokku to offer them compensation of K30,000 (just under US$30) for each injured monk; the offer was not accepted. In the state newspapers and on television, the usual images of high-ranking generals kneeling before abbots to make donations seemed especially disingenuous.

Presumably in the interests of discouraging any would-be demonstrators, the
New Light of Myanmar
ran a convoluted article informing readers that “protests are no longer fashionable.” The article reasoned that even the United States and Britain—countries “said to be democracy pioneers”—do not give in to demands no matter how many thousands of people are on the streets, and cited the antiwar demonstrations against the Vietnam War and the invasion of Iraq as examples.