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

of young people who looked only to the future.
    Most of my life since that year on the border has been spent away from Burma, except for a few months here and there, most recently in 2006. But none of the questions I (and many others) asked in the late eighties have gone away: Why has Burma’s military dictatorship proved so enduring, and what can possibly bring back greater political freedom and democracy? How should we think about the continuing war between Rangoon and ethnic minority–based insurgencies? Why has Burma, so rich in natural resources and seemingly once so well ahead of its Asian neighbors, fallen so far behind? More to the point, what is to be done?
    To some Burma presents no mystery. The military dictatorship wasthe creature of General Ne Win, had impoverished the country, and had to be ousted from power. Nothing else mattered. The insurgency, the interethnic conflict, the grinding poverty, all these things stemmed from a single problem; once the military dictatorship was replaced with a new democracy, there would be a fresh beginning.
    This approach has had the strength of clarity, both a moral clarity and a clarity of action. Burma was essentially a good place held hostage by a wicked government, and therefore all efforts had to be directed at the removal of the ruling establishment. But how to remove the government? For a minority, like the former university students who had camped out along the Thai border, only an armed insurrection would do the trick. For others the answer was the strongest dose possible of diplomatic and economic sanctions. People would again take to the streets. The army would buckle under.
    Over the past seventeen years, interest in the country’s plight has increased significantly. That the military government held, lost, and then refused to respect the results of its own elections in 1990 only highlighted its venal nature. Burma is now of celebrity and political interest as a well-entrenched second-order foreign policy matter, with a small cottage industry devoted to ensuring that Western governments hold the line against Rangoon’s military regime. Norway’s award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Aung San Suu Kyi in 1991 propelled the opposition leader to international acclaim. And now the cause of Burmese democracy flutters consistently on the margins of high-level attention, with dedicated albums by U2 and REM, Prime Minister Tony Blair personally lending his name to a boycott of tourism in Burma, and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice styling the country an “outpost of tyranny.”
    But over these same seventeen years prophecies of the regime’s imminent collapse in the wake of hardening international sanctions have proved, at least so far, fanciful. The country has changed considerably, and the government itself has transformed, only not in the way that the growing legions of Burma campaigners would wish. For a long time all Burmese assumed that the death of General Ne Win would lead suddenly to change, positive change, but then in 2002 the old man died quietly in his lakeside bungalow, and nothing happened; a fresh generation of captains and colonels had already taken charge, determined to act on their own dreams and nightmares. The mix of international policiesin place—limited (American and European) trade and investment sanctions, a cutoff of most development assistance, including from the World Bank, and a steady stream of righteous condemnation, whether right or wrong—has not so far worked. Instead there is every sign that while millions remain impoverished, the regime itself has moved from strength to strength. What has had the force of clarity has not had the value of effectiveness. And so we must ask ourselves again: How did the country reach such a state?
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    The most striking aspect of the Burma debate today is its absence of nuance and its singularly ahistorical nature. Dictatorship and the prospects for democracy are seen within the prism of the