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.

A Pitch for Peace

I came to believe in the cathartic power of the world’s game after taking in an impromptu soccer match between monks in a Burmese backwater. There, in an unheralded village between Yangon and Mandalay, lay a gem of earthly spontaneity. The pitch was a humble tract of sun-baked mud, but its unlikely surroundings brought a sense of eminence to the proceedings – a shallow lake became one sideline and two adjacent embankments provided elevated viewing for spectators. After a week of listening to my guide boast of how every landscape we observed was uniquely Burmese, I was attentive to a scene that proved him both right and wrong. Under the “uniquely Burmese” category might fall the holy men who checkered the pitch with their luminous maroon robes and jocular soundtrack to the match. In so much as my a priori ignorance of Burmese culture would allow, I also designated the rhythmic cheers emanating from the village crowd as “uniquely Burmese”. But if you were to zoom the viewing lens on the tattered ball that bounced from one spry foot to another, you could easily emerge in another part of the world, amongst another set of bare feet. Here, Kurdish children clad in European jerseys clamor for a shot on goal.

This is where my story dissolves and Ian Klaus’ fades into view. Where the touchline had been a lake in Myanmar, here it is a foreboding border with a hostile country. But these footballers are heedless of international fault lines and perhaps even of the wars endured by their forefathers: a boy casually hops the stone wall marking the Iraq-Iran border to retrieve an errant attempt at goal. For these young Kurds, their own touchlines trump those drawn by statesmen. The dusty pitch provides a stage for self-expression, much the way a dinner table provides a poor family confirmation of its self-sustenance. There is something primordial and natural in the rivalry between the Kurdish towns of Tawela and Biara and the molting of inhibitions on the pitch. There is nothing natural in the border post that stands within earshot of the match. Just as in Myanmar, where Orwellian edicts hover over the citizenry from billboards, Iranian theocracy is a ludicrous sideshow to the freedom provided by the pitch.

Some grassroots organizations are trying to expand the pitch’s touchlines, to claim more fertile land for the artistic minds of young footballers. The younger they start, the better. As Franklin Foer chronicles in How Soccer Explains the World, it does not take long for soccer to mirror sectarianism. Rival hooligans pivot effortlessly from stadium brawls in peacetime to shelling each other’s neighborhoods in guerilla war. The “beautiful game” carries the seeds of a beautiful but tragic life. The liberating bliss with which young players take to the pitch is menaced by the “realities” of war and staid conflict. It is all too often a cruel choice between staying at home and joining the thugs who practice ethnic sport. Either way, the primordial innocence of ball, feet, and dust is lost.

A few years after my trip to Myanmar, the world got wind of a tragedy unfolding in Yangon, the former capital. Thousands of monks were descending on the city in spartan defiance of the ruling junta. Soaring fuel prices had sparked the protests, but there was also a palpable purge of grievances held for decades against the government. The junta responded with the Tiananmen playbook, mowing down the revered monks and jailing thousands of sympathizers. Macabre, awful, and sorrowful though the 2007 crackdown was, it cannot disrupt the tranquil image in my head of monks as the sentries of Burmese society. They had found refuge in the village soccer pitch that day, a rare haven unfettered by tyranny. When it came time to leave the pitch, whether hours, days, or years later, the monks left in resolute columns and carried the dignity of a supportive people with them.