When Will and I received our visas at the Myanmar embassy in Bangkok, I was taken aside and instructed to “avoid confusion,” and “take care to understand our Myanmar culture,” along with other various other euphemisms for not trying to contact any political prisoners or conduct any journalistic activities. I had assumed there to be a 50 percent possibility that we would not get any visas at all; perhaps an official had seen one of my Myanmar-related pieces in the LA Times or Reason, or perhaps something I had done during my last months living in Burma had led to my blacklisting. But we got our visas, and our warning, and booked our flight to Yangon.
Why we had to fly to Myanmar to find out that I was blacklisted is still something of a mystery. As we were being processed in Yangon, an immigration official typed my passport number into a very, very old computer. Something popped up on her screen. Without a word to me, she called someone over, who summoned someone else, and I watched my passport bounce from hand to hand to hand. There was much furious flipping of the passport pages, much high-pitched Burmese chatter. We were waiting for some still-higher official to call the airport. Will was granted admission and an entry stamp without a problem. When the call came, someone stamped “void” over the still-wet ink on his passport. And we were flown straight back to Bangkok.
I had known that in writing about Myanmar from time to time I was risking being banned from the place–my favorite place–for the rest of my life. But in truth I’d always considered myself too unimportant to garner notice. Does the dictatorship really read the Saturday LA Times? It’s not hard to Google potential visitors, but given the backwardness and incompetence I’d witnessed during my years in Burma, I had doubted that the immigration authorities were familiar with the concept of a search engine. The people I know who are banned are generally quite high up in some organization the junta considers threatening. Lowly freelance journalists slip through all the time, so long as they’re bright enough not to write “freelance journalist” on their visa applications.
Academics and journalists dealing with restrictive governments are used to dealing with this sort of thing. The Far Eastern Economic Review (I think) had a piece a while back about the timidity of Western academics in writing about China; your typical professor of Chinese studies doesn’t want to risk being denied entry to her country of expertise.
There is a tendency among those of us who value freedom of speech to believe that the virtuous thing to do is to speak out, access be damned. I don’t know that that is always the right impulse. I don’t know that I did the right thing in trading access to people trapped in Burma for a few opinion pieces critiquing vapid Western media coverage of the country. The world does not need another American reporter declaring the junta barbaric and incompetent, a position for which there is almost no opposition in the United States. Indeed, those intent on raising awareness have done harm by encouraging both economic sanctions and hardliners within the junta. I have never understood how American “awareness” of the Myanmar situation was supposed to help the Burmese trishaw driver surviving on two meals a day.
There is one young woman in Myanmar who continues to write me from time to time, thanking me for the time I spent coaching her toward competent journalism. I spent months teaching her how to structure a piece, a skill that does not come at all naturally to people raised in countries without an independent journalistic tradition. Surely helping her shape a single article was more important than any Burma-related op-ed I’ve written. And yet I’ve traded the right to go back–to have influence over individual lives–for the right to spill some ink. I am a journalist by nature, and it’s possible that I would do it all over again. But there is at least an argument to be made for playing by the rules of a paranoid military dictatorship to maintain access to the lives inside.
I hope anyone reading this, and considering a trip to Southeast Asia in the future, will drop in on Myanmar for a week or so. Most people will have no problem getting a visa in DC, New York, or Bangkok. Stay at a small, privately owned hotel, drop some cash on restaurants and lacquerware, spend a couple of days marveling over Bagan. The country is more than its government.
It’s a long shot. But, if you convince westerners why sanctions and inaction are not working, perhaps one day, there will be a better government in Yangon. Then, you can return for a real vacation.
Or, perhaps you can go to Umphang, Thailand, according to (http://www.economist.com/world/asia/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=12941078), and commiserate with Karens about not being allowed in Myanmar, together.
In such a circumstance I think you have to count yourself as one of the distinguished and enlightened few who are held in contempt for their ability (and position) to articulate the Truth and for their willingness to widen the horizon of human emancipation in a country where most westerns simply indulge and sniff at ‘culture’. But that probably goes without saying …
yours,
Adrian Leverkuhn
It’s hard to think of many other bloggers who can create posts that are as simultaneously emotionally resonant and intellectually provocative as this one. That’s a pretty powerful argument you got there.
Back here in the decadent West–I say that without sarcasm–many people ask, either honestly or maliciously, what teaching and writing and teaching writing are worth.
The next time someone wonders aloud, I’m sending them to this post.
[...] Kerry Howley manages both to offer a snapshot of Burmese life and criticize ineffective western poli…, as she both condemns the SPDC and evaluates her own humble part to play against it. There is a tendency among those of us who value freedom of speech to believe that the virtuous thing to do is to speak out, access be damned. I don’t know that that is always the right impulse. I don’t know that I did the right thing in trading access to people trapped in Burma for a few opinion pieces critiquing vapid Western media coverage of the country. The world does not need another American reporter declaring the junta barbaric and incompetent, a position for which there is almost no opposition in the United States. Indeed, those intent on raising awareness have done harm by encouraging both economic sanctions and hardliners within the junta. I have never understood how American «awareness» of the Myanmar situation was supposed to help the Burmese trishaw driver surviving on two meals a day. [...]
Well, I’m very sorry that you got banned from Burma. I know from reading your work over the years how deeply you care about the place.
On the other hand, I read that you and Will got engaged recently, so my congratulations on that.
Unrelated to this, but
http://mattsteinglass.wordpress.com/2009/01/19/the-skin-trade/
I won’t flatter myself by comparing my weak midnight ramblings with an audience that occasionally reached double figures to a freelance peace in the LA Times, but I did remove all traces of criticism of the regime in Belarus from the web for similar reasons.
Screaming into the wind to folks who agree with my position without exception clearly was not worth risking access to friends and family.
I can only imagine the frustration and sense of injustice.
My father had to constantly walk a tightrope concerning this sort of thing given his academic interests in Suharto’s Indonesia. (Sadly, he didn’t live to see the end of that regime.) He was always open with the fact that his fear of being denied entry into the country had as much to do with his love of the island and his adopted family as it had to do with being unable to research. What’s to be done, though? If he spoke out, he might do some good, but not a lot, and if he was barred entry, he lost the ability to work and write and spend money within that country and that culture.
This, though– “I have never understood how American “awareness” of the Myanmar situation was supposed to help the Burmese trishaw driver surviving on two meals a day.”– is the alternative any better? It’s true that being aware does little for the people of any given country. Does being unaware, somehow, feed their hungry bellies? It’s easy to criticize the notion that caring matters. It’s difficult to come up with any kind of justification for believing that not caring has some sort of utility. And, believe it or not, there’s more of you, at this point, than there are of us.
Freddie,
I don’t understand your comment. No one is claiming that “not caring has some sort of utility.” (?) And who are “you” and “us”?
So the question becomes, why should people not be aware? If the statement is just that awareness makes nothing happen, I generally agree. But there’s no reason to privilege not being aware, and my fear is that criticism of the idea of awareness is just yet another right-of-center bludgeon against squishy liberalism and political correctness.
Kerry,
Not that this counterbalances the loss you’ve experienced no longer having access to Burma or the loss Burma has from no longer having access to you, but your writings have mattered here. Most Americans don’t have any firsthand experience with dictatorship or what it’s like to live in one, and have no way of understanding how American policies affect the people living in dictatorships. When the United States invaded Iraq, the country was Saddam Hussein and his victims to most Americans, myself included. People like you mean that we can see and understand the real people who aren’t dictators, and who, while suffering mightily under dictators still have lives worth living and freedoms that can be won in small ways. People like you help people like me see the harm in bombing the shit out of a place until the thugs in charge are replaced by someone palatable.