Wednesday, 05.14.08

Burma's Days

Photo by Marco Di Lauro / Getty Images News

Burma's junta continues to obstruct aid and divert it from cyclone victims.

There's no excuse for the behavior of Burma's leaders, but history offers an explanation that goes beyond sheer autocratic barbarism. As friendly as the Burmese can be to Western tourists, they have reason to be suspicious about their neighbors and outside powers -- they have been sandwiched between empires in India and China; subjugated and exploited by Great Britain; devastated by Japan (and the Allies) during World War II; and vulnerable in the second half of the 20th century to meddling by Thailand, rogue Chinese nationalists, and other factions and interests. Hand in hand with that xenophobia goes a fierce pride: For much of their history they've been not just survivors, but builders of a Burmese empire that, at its zenith in the mid-11th century, controlled a large chunk of mainland Southeast Asia.

Made in Burma, the junta reflects Burmese characteristics that won't necessarily go away once it's removed. Consider the junta's seemingly laughable reliance on omens and lucky numbers to set government policy, whether it involved moving the capital or changing the currency. In July 1947, a few months before independence, Burma's Cabinet resigned en masse because it discovered that the day when most of its members had taken the oath of office was "inauspicious." Just before 6 pm on August 1, the Cabinet members asked Sir Hubert Rance, the last British governor, to swear in the new Cabinet between 6:20 and 6:25, because that would be more favorable. ("It is incidents like these that make us love the country and the people so much," Rance telegraphed the next day to the Earl of Listowell, the last secretary of state for India and Burma.) Even the students who took to the streets in 1988 to overthrow the junta timed their demonstrations to start at 8:08 a.m. on August 8, 1988. The auspicious timing didn't make much of a difference, to put it mildly, but many Burmese of course remain influenced by such beliefs.

"The most striking aspect of the Burma debate today is its absence of nuance and its singularly ahistoric nature," writes Thant Myint-U, the grandson of former UN Secretary General U Thant. His elegant history of Burma, The River of Lost Footsteps, is an excellent corrective. At the risk of institutional puffery, let me also offer another recommendation: a 70-page supplement on Burma that The Atlantic published in 1958, written mostly by Burmese, covering everything from the national character ("an irrepressible elan and a charming insouciance, but also a slapdash confidence about things in general, a fatal lack of humility in approaching any task") and the state of the arts to the evolution of what one author called the "Buddhist welfare state." A view of the past and a window on the present, it also offers clues to a brighter future that may yet come to pass.

— James Gibney

Filed Under: Asia, Burma, crisis, disaster, foreign affairs, Myanmar

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