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.

Valparaiso

There was just one blemish on my time in Valparaiso, one a bit more personal than stepping in one of the many mounds of dog excrement that litter the city. I left a futbol café with a place in mind for live music. It was closed. Remembering the guidebook’s description of the bars east of Plaza Sotomayor as popular with the sailors come to port, I went looking for a seafarer’s haunt. I found nothing but eerie buildings and buses on their way home. I came to a dimly lit square. As I passed through, someone from a group of teens said god knows what to me in Spanish. For discretion’s sake, I consulted my map behind a statue. I had just laid my bag at the foot of the statue when a hoodlum from that group swooped it up and sprinted off the square. Still holding my photocopied sheets of Neruda poems, I sprang my step and hauled ass after him. My adrenaline was whipping me into a frenzy as I lengthened my stride. We were making our way up the mazy streets of Valpo and it was high time for me to retain my camera and dignity. Now only a few yards behind him, I began clawing the air to try to collar him at full speed. He heard my crazed breathing and must have known he had it coming; just then he flipped the bag over his head to me and ran off into the Chilean night. I had scarcely noticed an accomplice running alongside him, ready to play a game of catch with my satchel. I fumed and shouted after them and took several seconds to remember I was in a back alley in Chile. A couple of abuelitas gawked at me as they shuffled home.

My newfound insecurity rattled me all the way up the hill, where I sought refuge in the night-time panorama of the city. I didn’t want a fluke incident to blight my conception of Concepcion, one of the wondrous thoroughfares that led me up to my hostel. I put my feet up on a banister overlooking the harbor and, after a smoke and a coffee, the city’s luster seeped back into me as my sweat began to dry. I gaped for awhile at the port that had once been the western hemisphere’s busiest. Sometimes it’s necessary to jostle with the mayhem down below to appreciate such a vista.

I scoffed aloud at the amateurism of the thief – as petty as they come, ill-prepared for a tourist willing to tussle. Neruda’s moonlight cut through billowing clouds casting out to sea. I reached into my bag for the poems I had saved for my last night in Chile, but then realized that the thief really had succeeded in robbing me. In switching to survival mode to chase him down, my hand had involuntarily let slip the Neruda poems. So goes the loss of innocence in a city cloaked in serenity. I closed my eyes to inhale the crisp air and forgive all that was below me. The moon was watchful, the ships docked for the night, and somewhere up the hill in La Sebastiana, Neruda’s ghost promised me a second reading.

The Wine Cradle of the Andes

Mendoza was sepia for the winter but the mountains were still there, as was the wine. There’s something disarming about the flatlands below a mountain range, as if nothing can fall on you....We arrived on a Thursday morning, as did El Gripe in the newspapers: 300,000 exposed, 40% of schools shuttered. Added to this premonition of malaise was the detectable filth on the city’s streets – storefronts looked blanketed by a dust storm and cadaverous dogs hobbled up after you as you passed. While the winter may sully the city, the outlying vineyards retain their unspoiled beauty and the Andes are eternal. We hired a guide and toured three vineyards in addition to the five-course tasting menu we enjoyed at another estate. This cost $150 a head.

Our area of focus was Lujan de Cuyo, a lush valley minutes south of Mendoza. Our tour guide painted a not-so-rosy picture of how El Gripe was squeezing his ski business. This jeremiad influenced our tip at the end of the day.

Since we hadn’t had a fluid conversation with a stranger in several days, we got on well with the guide. In my own head, I couldn’t conjure the circumstances that had plucked this laid back outdoorsman from the pines of Washington state and placed him in Argentina. He mentioned a girlfriend and a job as a ski photographer, but I was unable to connect the dots because it all seemed a whimsical, if enviable, undertaking.

To our virgin nostrils, the wine was ambrosial. Naturally, we concentrated on the Malbec grape, a cast-off from France that was born again on the Argentine hillsides. Its vibrant violet color took on a fantastic glitter as I held it up to the sun. I think being onsite boosted the taste, as a satisfactory sampling is the only acceptable follow-up to all of the swirling and sniffing and smacking of the lips.

Our first bodega was Alta Vista, a rustic compound built by Spanish immigrants at the turn of the century. The charming hostess led us through cavernous basements where the wine mingles with flavored oak in enormous barrels until its ready for drinking. We glimpsed estate workers busy calibrating the wine to its proper temperature for fermentation. For red wine, Alta Vista uses century-old concrete vats that require a delicate finessing of the temperature. A fire is lit under the concrete and the heat disperses throughout. White wine isn’t as sensitive to temperature variations and can be fermented in larger steel vats.

The first provocative wine we sampled at Alta Vista was Torrontes, a signature white wine of Argentina. To avoid the taint of charlatanism, I won’t broach the oenologist’s phrasebook. Words like “oaky” and “earthy” mean nothing to me. One of my few criteria for wine is that it startle rather than bore me. White wines rarely do the former to my stubborn palate. Torrontes, with its robust, lingering flavor, was a welcome exception.

We next visited Club Tapiz to take in a larger scale bodega. The American label Kendall-Jackson had owned the estate a few years back but an Argentine family proudly returned it to local hands and whitewashed the Jackson name from all of its branding. Why? “We didn’t want the stigma.” So much of the appeal of these vineyards is in them being a generational labor of love.

On arriving at Tapiz, we were ushered into a horse-drawn carriage for a drive through the vineyards themselves. Dust flew up and settled to reveal the supernatural silhouette of the Andes. The driver pulled up next to some idling llamas that looked a bit like men in llama costumes. We were bemused to see each other. I wondered aloud if the clumsy creatures trampled the vines, but no one seemed too concerned.

The wine flowed from this picturesque welcome and against such a backdrop, how could any aroma cause offense? Tapiz showcased its impressive arsenal of vintages beneath a stately chandelier in a barn house. A 2006 Malbec classic struck me with vim so I bought a bottle. We also had the luxury of tasting the wine directly from the vat and attempting to discern these inchoate flavors from their fully matured and bottled cousins.


We needed some nourishment to sponge up the wine and it came in the form of a five-course tasting menu at the lovely Bodega Ruca Malen. The seating chart was such: my four companions to my left and right, and myself opposite the Andes. The young servers blushed before announcing each course in lilting accents that heightened my expectations for an epic repast. The meal was such:

1) Yauquen Sauvignon Blanc 2008 – “refreshing, light and citric”
Goat Cheese Bruschetta

Objective of pairing: “To highlight the citric flavors and fresh fruit of the Sauvignon Blanc”

2) Ruca Malen Malbec 2006 – “Deep, elegant nose”
Slices of Filet Mignon cured with olive oil from Lunlunta

Objective of pairing: “To highlight the fresh red fruit and sweetness of the Malbec”

3) Ruca Malen Merlot 2006 – “Brilliant and intense red…Hints of both
vanilla and chocolate”
Wheat Croquets with Wild Mushroom Ragout
and caramelized onions

Objective of the pairing: “To highlight the black pepper as the aromatic descriptor”

4) Ruca Malen Carbernet Sauvignon 2006 – “An intense ruby red with
hints of toasted oak”

Kinien Malbec 2007 – “On the nose red fruits and some floral violet
notes"

Roasted Beef Tenderloin with squash, sweet corn and mashed potatoes

Objective of pairing: “To show the structure of these two varietals, highlighting the spicy side of Cabernet Sauvignon and flower notes and sweet tannins of Malbec”

5) Granite made of Chardonnay, yerba mate, and honey

White chocolate and season fruit


The menu had every reason to boast. The flavors were all there, even the indescribable ones that the menu so enticingly described. We stayed two hours and were content to stay two more. It was a meal that you impulsively label your best ever because it is so vivid and anything but fleeting.

We wrapped the day at the homey Bodega Sottano, which produces just a few thousands bottles a year. By this stage the wine was evoking some heady conversation. Our affable hostess may have another job as a grade school teacher as she often interjected with a palate quiz: “Where on your tongue do you taste this wine?” “What varietals are striking you?” “What colors do you see in this Cabernet Sauvignon?” As in grade school, I tried to guess the answer by the tone of the teacher’s voice. By the fourth red wine I was running out of colors and labeled one fuchsia. She saw that I was using words that she might not recognize in order to improve my quiz score. I apologized for my inept Spanish and fell silent.

Next she bestowed famous look-alikes on our group of four. One was told he resembled Roger Federer (not the first time), another the singular Waldo, as in “Donde esta Waldo?”, and my third friend an elusive Latin pop star (probably the first time). The hostess decided my beard reminded her of Joseph Fiennes and for the rest of our tour I was known as Shakespeare. We thought it only polite to offer her a celebrity of her own. Despite our assurances that her twin is “an attractive American comedienne”, she was dissatisfied with what Google Images returned for Sarah Silverman. We had evidently exhausted all conversation on wine. It was time to hand in our connoisseur badges and step out of the surreal.

The sun ducked behind the Andes as we parted ways with the vineyards and returned to Mendoza city. We muttered impressions to each other through teeth stained purple from a day’s work. “A good place for a honeymoon.” “How good an investment is a vineyard?” Our guide was grinning at our ravings about the day, his Van Gogh beard holding a couple of droplets of Malbec. This was the bliss I had come for and all the trifles of travel – delays, flu, foreign tongues, and general disarray – wilted in the dying embers of the day.