The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma by Thant Myint-U Read Free Book Online

be taking power “to prevent the disintegration of the Union.” Hundreds of people were believed to have been killed in Rangoon alone, with at least several dozen in other cities and towns. The protests collapsed. The country was at once outraged and exhausted. The revolutionary moment was over.
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    There was a muted international response. The United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, and Germany suspended bilateral aid. But there was no pronounced outcry, certainly not from the general public, in Europe or in North America. Nothing like the reaction to the massacre at Tiananmen Square a year later. There were no calls for United Nations action. No urgent transatlantic diplomacy. Part of the reason was simple: there were no television cameras present in the country at the time. There was no CNN and no nightly news stories showing the depth of popular feeling or the violence that followed. There were no pundits demanding retribution and little attention on Capitol Hill or at Westminster. Much of the uprising had been in late August and early September, just in time for the late-summer holidays.
    But the lack of response wasn’t just attributable to the absence of television or to the fact that important people were vacationing in Martha’sVineyard or Tuscany. It was also because Burma was almost entirely unknown. To the extent that it was thought about at all, it had the image of an exotic and dreamy backwater, a gentle Buddhist country, lost in time and quietly isolated, hardly the sort of location for a foreign policy crisis. It was an offbeat tourist destination, unspoiled compared with neighboring Thailand, perhaps even a model of an alternative approach to life, unhurried and without the extremes of modern capitalism and communism. Prodemocracy demonstrations in Burma? It was like hearing about a coup in Shangri-La. What was to be done with a place like that?
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    I was then twenty-two. I had been born on a snowy January morning very far away from Burma at the Columbia-Cornell Medical Center on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. At the time my maternal grandfather, U Thant, was serving as the secretary-general of the United Nations, a job he had held since 1961, since the death of his predecessor, Dag Hammarskjöld, and would continue to hold until his retirement a decade later. He was presiding over the UN during a decade of considerable change. Dozens of newly decolonized Asian and African countries had recently filled the ranks of the world body, and their concerns—mainly to reduce the inequalities between rich and poor nations—fueled much of the organization’s quickly evolving agenda. There were also political challenges during this height of the cold war, from the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Cuban missile crisis to Vietnam and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Then, as now, the UN was often marginalized and occasionally scapegoated. But perhaps more than now there was a recognized value in maintaining the secretary-general as an impartial arbitrator and neutral voice and as a backdoor channel when more public diplomacy proved impossible. Like today, there were calls for reform and many who would throw their hands up in despair at the inability of the organization to tackle this or that problem. But the 1960s were less than a generation away from the fifty million dead of the Second World War, and there remained, perhaps, in every quarter a more heartfelt desire to make the UN work.
    Of course I knew none of this growing up in Riverdale, a solidly middle-class neighborhood about forty-five minutes by car or subway from midtown. My parents, both Burmese, had met and married inNew York and were living with my grandfather and grandmother in what was then the secretary-general’s official residence, a rambling seven-bedroom red-brick house, partly covered in ivy and set on a grassy six-acre hillside along the Hudson River. On the map it was part of Riverdale, but in most other ways it was a small