Kerry Howley

I spent some amount of time at my desk in Rangoon daydreaming about UN tanks rolling down Sule Pagoda Road. (It was a weekly paper; we had lots of time.) In one very narrow sense, the conditions seemed ripe for a clean transfer of power. Burma has an elected leader, we were surrounded by Burmans who accepted her legitimacy, the junta was broke and seemed ripe for toppling. More important, and to my great surprise, there was an expectation of humanitarian intervention. The state-controlled New Light of Myanmar covered its pages in bloody images of Iraq as a kind of statement about American brutality, but that’s not always the message that got across. As my editor-in-chief once got in huge trouble for admitting publicly, the Burmese reaction we saw was: “When is our turn?” A common topic of conversation among all of the expats in 2004–the diplomats, the English teachers, the aid workers–was Burmese adoration for George Bush. You can laugh at that, or condescend to it, or talk about the probability that Bush can locate Burma on a map. But in the midst of attempts to “help” through strongly worded letters and economic sanctions, it seemed meaningful to me that plenty of Burmese just wanted someone to step in.

That was my impression, but my sample set is non-representative, and quiet, peaceful Rangoon is a misleading place. The Burma we knew was a relatively cosmopolitan Burma, full of educated Burman English speakers. As Robert Kaplan rightly points out in the New York Times op-ed, Rangoon is not Burma.

About a third of Myanmar’s 47 million people are ethnic minorities, who have a troubled historical relationship with the dominant group, the Burmans. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the heroine of the democracy movement, is an ethnic Burman just like the generals, and her supporters are largely focused on the Burman homeland. Meanwhile, the Chins, Kachins, Karennis, Karens, Shans and other hill tribes have been fighting against the government. The real issue in Myanmar, should the regime fall, would be less about forging democracy than a compromise between the Burmans and the other ethnic groups.

Of course, Myanmar is not the Balkans or Iraq, where ethnic and sectarian rivalries were smothered under a carapace of authoritarianism, only to erupt later on. Myanmar has suffered insurgencies for 60 years now, and may be ripe for a compromise under a civilian government. But neither can we be naïve. Just because Myanmar is not Yugoslavia doesn’t mean it isn’t like Russia; it is a mini-empire ruled by the ethnic-Burman military that could crumble into its constituent mountainous parts, especially as the democracy advocates have demonstrated little ability to run a country. Here in Mae Sot, a center for non-Burman ethnic dissident groups, complaints over the disorganization of Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi’s movement are rife.

Conversations about Burma typically involve only two players: Than Shwe, Burma’s current leader, and Suu Kyi, Burma’s elected leader. It seems a rather simple thing to saunter in and switch the two. But there are mayors of Burmese towns who don’t speak Burmese, and something like 30 percent of the population speaks neither Burmese nor English. There are people in Burma who have never heard of Suu Kyi, and there are Burmese who very much resent the junta’s “Burmanization” of the country’–”a troubled historical relationship” is an understatement. It wasn’t so long ago that the Burman majority would refer to the Chins and Mons as barbarians unfit for self-rule. If those tanks rolled down Sule Pagoda Road, they’d be welcomed. I don’t know what to do with that information, but I wouldn’t call it a justification.