Cracks in the Junta

The Burmese junta is probably the second most repugnant regime in Asia after the slave state of North Korea. Burma is ruled by a band of aloof generals who recently moved the capital from the biggest city, Yangon, to an artificial one as if to emphasize their estrangement from the people. I had the privilege of visiting this beautiful country five years ago. I call it Burma and not Myanmar because the latter name was introduced by the junta in a campaign of cultural homogenization. “Burma” is a relic of British colonialism, so pick your poison.

Back to the dawn of 2005: My family had tried unsuccessfully to book a trip to Phuket for New Year’s. Fate spared us when a giant wave ripped up the coastline and left a thousand tourists dead there. We were instead airborne on our way to Burma when the tsunami hit. At our hotel in Yangon came rumors that several Burmese had died in the wave. No one knew how many or where exactly because the country has no press. The junta has you, in life and in death.

While the rest of Southeast Asia held its breath for the tsunami postmortem, Burma slept in the junta’s steel embrace. It was a kingdom of muted monks, frail farmers, and hushed hawkers. The regime seemed to have the order it sought. I am not sure I saw a policeman, soldier, or any other authority in my ten days in Burma. Billboards were the thought police. One read:

“People’s Desire:
OPPOSE THOSE RELYING ON EXTERNAL ELEMENTS, ACTING AS STOOGES, HOLDING NEGATIVE VIEWS
OPPOSE THOSE TRYING TO JEOPARDIZE THE STABILITY OF THE STATE AND THE PROGRESS OF THE NATION
CRUSH ALL INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL ELEMENTS AS THE COMMON ENEMY.”

Burma’s is a drowsy, stifled hinterland. The economic malpractice of the junta keeps poverty at a suffocating level. Little in the way of commerce flows through those dirt roads. And while the hinterland lies motionless, civil war flares on Burma’s frayed edges. The Shan states have been unruly subjects of the junta for decades. Most of the rebel encampments are across the border with Thailand as the Burmese military brutalizes its own landscape.

It is a whole lot of misery against a breathtaking backdrop. A bleeding sun scales the pagodas to kiss the bald heads of monks on their way to work. Lithe old fishermen bow to the current as they comb the depths of Inle Lake for their next catch. Clouds of ash drift above treetops as supper is prepared and the sun scars the sky in descent.


Aung Aan Suu Kyi is Burma personified. She has been imprisoned in her own house since winning election twenty years ago. She is worth much more than a bumper sticker for Westerners who read about her in the paper. Rather than flee the country, she suffered alongside her people as the junta’s squeeze tightened. The legitimacy gap between the kleptocrats who rule the country and the dissident who holds its soul is screaming for international attention. China, the Burmese regime’s principal benefactor, has been largely silent in the face of this suffering. The junta’s heavy-handedness is all too familiar to Beijing. The United States, meanwhile, has been principled but ineffective in not engaging the Burmese generals. Sanctions have failed to bring the country out of isolation.

We have to start exploiting the cracks in the junta, especially those opened up by the regime itself. The New York Times reports of “guarded hope among business people and diplomats” that Burma “may be moving away from years of paranoid authoritarianism and Soviet-style economic management that has left the majority of the country’s 55 million people in dire poverty.” A new constitution may come alive at the end of the year, perhaps followed by the first elections since the one stolen by the junta in 1990.

Other reasons for optimism include some privatization of state-owned factories, the lifting of ownership restrictions on cars, and the way in which Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz was eagerly received by the junta in December. The generals are now interested in reviving a rice industry that they watched drown in a cyclone two years ago.

Any election held while 2,000 potential candidates sit in jail is a sham. But it will mark a diffusion of power that could be a watershed for Burma. This Gorbachev-esque move is why I give the Burmese regime second place to Pyongyang on the list of the most draconian in Asia (some of the “-stans” in Central Asia are a close third). Sadly, despite Kim Jong-Il’s poor health, North Korea isn’t much closer to cracking the way Burma apparently has.

Are We Getting Any Better at Combating Genocide?

It is the time of year on Capitol Hill when lawmakers consider calling the first genocide of the 20th century what it was. This should be straightforward. The Ottoman Empire’s mass deportation of Armenians in 1915 led to over one million dead, eviscerating large traces of a people. The American ambassador to Constantinople provides a damning account in a caption to a photo showing scores of Armenian corpses:

"Scenes like this were common all over the Armenian provinces in the spring and summer months of 1915. Death in its several forms - massacre, starvation, exhaustion - destroyed the refugees. The Turkish policy was that of extermination under the guise of deportation."

But then again, some feel it more important not to embarrass an ally. Turkey is about as secular as they come in the Middle East and can help Iraq stagger to its feet. I am not sure how bad the diplomatic fall-out would be should Washington find its balls here. Perhaps the same spastic fits we see from China vis-à-vis the Dalai Lama and then back to business; maybe deeper consequences. But none of these possibilities scare me when silence on genocide is the alternative.

At the very least there have been six cases of genocide since the Holocaust. Chronologically, the chief perpetrators and victims are:

1) The Khmer Rouge on their own people

2) Saddam Hussein on the Kurds

3) Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic on the Bosniaks

4) The Hutus on the Tutsis

5) Slobodan Milosevic on the Kosovars

6) Omar Bashir and the Janjaweed on the Fur people

In all of these instances, thousands were slaughtered before the “international community” considered intervening, if it did at all. So benighted was Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge that it was several months into the bloodbath before eyewitness accounts emerged. The evidence was much swifter in implicating the Bosnian Serbs, but this did not prevent General Mladic’s men from digging mass graves that showed up on the satellite images of U.S. intelligence. Our ability to combat genocide has not improved with our means of documenting the crime.

During the Bush years, many liberals pined for the foreign policy of Bill Clinton. At least Clinton didn’t get us stuck in two wars, they said. But two genocides went unchecked on Clinton’s watch. He waited three years while civilians in Sarajevo were pounded with artillery before ordering a tepid bombing of Serbian military positions. And after the nightmare of Black Hawk Down, President Clinton did not fancy involving the American military in Rwanda’s inferno, where an average of 5,000 were butchered every day for three months.

Bosnia shocked the Western media more so than Rwanda or Darfur because it happened in Europe. Genocide had returned to the continent fifty years after the Third Reich. Banja Lunka was the new Auschwitz, Mladic the new Himmler. Here was mass murder in the backyard of a Europe reconciled. Franco-German relations were better than ever; dictatorships in Spain and Greece had given way to agreeable democracies; the European Union was on the march. But the Balkans were an inconvenient outlier for European mandarins punch-drunk with peace. For some, the words never again meant never again thinking that genocide was possible in Europe after the Holocaust.

Also clouding the Western conscience was the idea that the Balkans were hopelessly resigned to conflict. On President Clinton's nightstand was Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts, a book that paints ethnic strife in the region as routine and eternal. The Slavs and Muslims had been going at it for centuries, wasn't this all natural and beyond our control?

Politics pulled the strings for Clinton's Bosnia policy. In his 1992 campaign for president, Mr. Clinton blasted President George H.W. Bush for not deterring the Bosnian Serbs. One was led to believe that a President Clinton would be willing to use force to stop the killing. But the new administration did not move outside a policy of denial of the facts on the ground until the war was in its fourth year. Until then, it often laid blame on all sides (Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks) while using the charade of consultation with European allies.

The Clinton Administration went to great lengths to avoid the word "genocide" because using it might have suggested a responsibility to intervene. When Secretary of State Warren Christopher tiptoed up to Congress to testify on Bosnia, he went as far as to say that the atrocities committed by Bosnian Serbs were "tantamount to genocide". Apparently that word, "tantamount", was just enough of a face-saver for Christopher and the Administration. But what useless rhetoric for the hundreds of thousands terrorized by the Yugoslav Army, for the UN personnel taken captive by the marauding Mladic.

The tragedy in Bosnia reminds us of the limits of relying on a deeply flawed United Nations or a self-interested United States to prevent genocide. Mladic and Karadzic dared the West to stop them and the mass-murderers prevailed. There are many explanations for America's inaction. The simplest is a reluctance to call it genocide, a powerful word that changes the debate. A crime against humanity is one that cannot be countenanced by human beings. But it is a crime that won't leave us unless we are clear about its manifestation. Srebrenica was genocide. Al-Anfal was genocide. And yes, the Armenian Genocide was genocide.

*Samantha Power's A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of the Genocide was a source for this post. I strongly recommend it and so does the Pulitzer Prize committee.

**Update: The Swedish parliament voted to recognize the Armenian genocide, while the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs said as much in a non-binding measure. Turkey recalled its ambassadors to both countries and warned of "serious damage" to ties in the case of Sweden.

Jan Baalsrud

The story of Jan Baalsrud makes me proud to have a double A in my last name. To hell with Quisling and Knut Hamsun, this is the stuff the Norge are made of.