Living Within the Lie, Again?

- By Warazein

They say that, “the unexamined life is not worth living”. We seem to have
been living in a state of ‘free fall’, especially in terms of principles and morality. We
were made to’ live in the lie’ whether we wanted or not. General Ne Win and the
military took over power staging a coup and declaring that they saved the country and
the Union from breaking up. The Constitution of the Union was scrapped. Out of
nowhere we were told that Bogyoke Aung San, our founding father of Burma’s
independence, wanted our country to be a Socialist State. All those lies ended in 1988
and we all woke up starry eyed, broken and battered and suddenly the Burmese Way
to Socialism disappeared without a trace.

Apart from hardship in every aspect of our lives, scarcity of everything to endless
hours of queues and months of ‘brain washing’, Ne Win’s biggest lie of the land -‘a
just and equitable socialist society’ was snuffed out of its life without a whimper. It’s
like Leonard Cohen’s song, “Everybody knows that the fight is fixed; the poor stays
poor the rich get rich.” All we will have to do is to substitute the words, “the people
stay poor and the military gets rich”.

Former political dissident, Nobel Laureate, playwright and President of

Czechoslovakia (before Czech and Slovak separated peacefully into two republics on
1 January 1993) Vaclav Havel said that, “In order to enjoy a reasonably ‘normal life’
each person agrees to do everything that is expected of the loyal obedient citizen: they
will turn up to workplace meetings; they will take part in elections, and not grumble
too much when there is nothing to buy in the shops. In other words, they will agree to
perform the rituals.”

The people in Burma are also expected by the military regime that in order to enjoy a
reasonably ‘normal life’ they will have to go to the elections, vote for whoever
candidates they nominated. On the other hand if one choose ‘to live within the truth’
like Daw Suu and her colleagues within the National League for Democracy (NLD)
and the student leaders of the 1988 era, it means not only just giving up their career
prospects, privileges or advantages that a person might have enjoyed if they complied
but instead gave up their physical if not their mental freedom.

Each one of us has to ask ourselves, “Are we worthy of democracy?” If we said ‘yes’
then we will have to remember the words of Professor John Keane that, “Democracy
requires citizens to stay alert, to open their eyes and their mouths – to understand that
societies of sheep typically beget governments of wolves.” We have been acting like
sheep since the military coup of 2 March 1962. We went pink, not able to take
decisive actions and form a government even when we won the 1990 elections with a
landslide. Leopards don’t change their spots and neither do military officers their
uniforms and their mindless obedience.

Studies on obedience to authority by a distinguished Professor of Social Psychology

Stanley Milgram clearly shows that through ‘mindless obedience’ ordinary men and
women could be inflict pain on their fellow human just because they have been
instructed to do so by the authority. Inquiries found that ordinary Americans soldiers
(despite their training, the Geneva Convention and US Army regulations), on orders
from their officers were routinely brutalising jailed Iraqi prisoners ‘to soften them up’
for later interrogations – however ambiguous those ‘orders’ were.

If such abuse can be found in the US military, can we expect less from the military in
Burma? Even in the early days of a Parliamentary democratic Government of U Nu
the military intelligence unit in my home town in Shan State was used as ‘death
squads’ for political assassinations. An ethnic Pao parliamentarian and his colleagues
were gunned down in broad daylight and just beyond the outskirts of the town.

Former military intelligence officer now living in the US, Major Aung Lin Htut, has
admitted to this kind of ‘mindless obedience’ by the Burmese military in one of his
interviews with the Voice of America program in Burmese on 25 May this year. In the
same interview he stated that the Colonel who headed the tactical unit into the
Christie Island had followed orders from Senior General Than Shwe (whom they
referred to as Aba Gyi meaning Big Daddy) to shoot the innocent 59 villagers and
their families on the beach and buried there. Though the major has often mentioned of
‘crimes’ committed by others such as rape and killings of civilians in the border areas,
he has not once mentioned his role throughout his service in the intelligence
establishment. Unless and until he can convinced the present Obama Administration
of his role in the past he could be excluded from settling in America..

The elections date is announced to be on 7 November 2010. But the prospects for
change to the lives of people in Burma living under the military dictatorship are like
the situation in a Jewish joke. The joke told by Ben Eliezer in his book on “The
World’s Best Jewish Jokes”, an Israeli soldier guarding a number of Egyptian
prisoners in the Sinai desert just after the Six Day War, told them that, “There’s good
news and bad news, which do you want to hear first?” An Egyptian corporal replied,
“Let’s hear the bad news first.” The Israeli soldier replied that, “Well, all we’ve got to
eat is camel shit.” Then the Egyptian prisoner replied, “Let’s have the bad news.” The
answer he got was, “There’s plenty of it.”

We too will have plenty of ‘camel shit’ after the elections. We have the military in
uniforms as rulers before and we are going to have more military in both uniforms
and civilian clothes after the elections. Throughout my life in service back in Burma, I
had never come across a former military officer who would not like to be addressed
by their former military rank even though he was working in civil service. Shedding
their military uniforms, getting elected, and donning themselves in civilian clothes
will neither make them more civil nor will they be serving the people. They will be
like camel shit decorated with sand which makes them look a bit better (for those who
lost their sense of smell and has mindless sense of obedience).

Some so-called experts who know very little about Burma expressed their
disappointment when Daw Suu and the NLD chose not to contest the elections. Some
are naïve to expect that things might change or improved after the elections. Those in
ASEAN countries are ‘licking their lips’ and ‘wringing their hands in glee’ so that
they would not have to feel ‘guilty’ of their ‘constructive engagement’. At the rate the
Chinese are exploiting there will not be much left. Morality does not fill greedy
stomachs.
As they say, “If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, it must be
a duck.” Some experts on Burma and some in the international community who
predicted that changes could be abound will end up be like kids watching and hoping
that a tadpole might turn into a fish. The military is not even thinking of relinquishing
power any time soon. They act like a dictator, they have little or no regard to the
welfare of the people or the country, how can they change? All they care about is their
lives and their ‘ill-gotten wealth’. At the moment they are like cormorants which
catch fish for their Chinese masters. The birds, because of the rings around their neck,
cannot swallow the big fish they caught. Economic sanctions imposed by the US and
the West do not allow them to enjoy their loot to the full. The Chinese are the only
people who are enjoying the full benefit of ‘economic growth’ with the help of the
military regime and at the expense of the people of Burma.

One thing they do not get it is that, things are not as they were when their stepfather
General Ne Win took over power. In a Memo from the then President’s Special
Assistance for National Security to President Johnson to grant military aid to Burma it
was mentioned that “.while Burmese neutrality under Ne Win leaves a great deal to be
desired, it is angelic when compared to some other people we have to put up with.”
There is no Cold War, no proxy wars to fight, no Monroe Doctrine, no Domino
theory, and no Vietnam War. The international climate is totally different. The
paralysis and incompetency of international organizations such as the United Nations
might not change but the twenty-first century is the ‘era of responsibility’. Sooner or
later these generals could end up in The Hague, it is only a matter of time.

No one can expect the military in Burma to be a monolithic and united force any
more. Not after it handed down death sentence to their own for leaking of state secrets
(knowing too much about the assassination of his boss, General Tin Oo). Then a
military engineer walked out of the country landing in Bangkok with enough evidence
to blow open the regime’s secret nuclear program.The intelligence officers purged
when General Khin Nyunt was deposed will not be so forgiving. Senior General Than
Shwe, who was a fanatic for ‘Hsin-phyu-daw’ going at length to paint the aeroplane
white and name it the white elephant, was absent from the welcoming ceremony at
Naypyidaw. In addition, it must be an exception rather than a rule, for him to be
treated at a private hospital in Burma and not in Singapore.

The announcement of the election date may be just a diversion for the people since
things at Naypyidaw are said to be in confusion. It reminded me of the time when
China’s Chairman Moa was at his death bed and his ‘kitchen cabinet’ headed by his
wife Jiang Qing and members of the ‘Gang of Four’ were plotting their own coup.
The propaganda machine was also telling people not to read too much into ‘shooting
stars’ as omen of death.

Unlike the former spy Major Aung Lin Htut I do neither have ‘insider knowledge’ nor
an intelligence background to predict or speculate anything remotely possible. I was
not trained as an analyst but if a CIA trained former spy can come up with the bizarre
claim that Than Shwe will free Daw Suu before the elections date was announced
(which is by now way off the mark), my reading of tea leaves and putting my finger
up in the air to see which way the wind is blowing; I can speculate that the elections
will turn out to be what no one expected. Bob Dylan said, “You don’t need a
weatherman to tell you which way the wind is blowing.” END