In response to:
The Road from Mandalay from the October 23, 1986 issue
To the Editors:
I enjoyed reading Ian Buruma’s comprehensive and perceptive analysis of the state of things in Burma [NYR, October 23, 1986]. Such coverage of Burma is all too rare, as the dictatorship there has successfully hidden itself behind “the lacquer screen” of isolation and careful neutrality for a quarter century. Burma’s government is guilty of a severe pattern of human rights abuse, which continues uninvestigated, unprotested, and largely unreported.
The frontier areas, as Mr. Buruma noted, are a war zone. The war is, in a sense, an extension of World War II, when ethnic groups became polarized into oppressors and resistance. Thousands die in this war each year, and tens of thousands are made refugees. The government of Burma, in its Albanian xenophobia, does not allow even such international relief groups as the Red Cross or UNICEF to operate in the war zone. This allows the torture, imprisonment, and abduction of civilians in the war zone by the Burmese Army to continue.
Burma has tried to establish a “strategic hamlet” program in the frontier areas, and villages suspected of insurgent support are routinely burned, with their inhabitants forced into walled camps or used as laborers (porters, mine-detectors) for the Army. In the north of Burma, war against the villagers is “justified” by the fact that the hill tribes there grow opium and the opium is traded in by the insurgent groups. There is no market economy or transport system in the northern mountains, except for the opium trade. Opium, which has been grown in northern Burma for over one hundred years, is the only cash crop. Since 1985, the US government has involved itself in this war by supplying Burma with 2,4-D herbicide (a major ingredient of Agent Orange) for narcotics eradication. Burma appears to be using the herbicide as a counterinsurgency weapon, in hill tribe areas suspected of insurgent support. The hill tribes displaced by 2,4-D spraying (which drifts over food crops as well as opium) may seek protection of armed insurgent groups (which can shoot down spraying aircraft), or flee across the borders of Laos, China, or Thailand.
2,4-D is under review in the US, and there is strong evidence that it may cause severe health effects such as cancer and birth defects. Its effects on the already endangered hill tribe cultures, and the environment, as well as the political fallout, may be disastrous. To the hill tribes of northern Burma, US-supplied 2,4-D spraying might as well be a B-52 bombing raid.
There is only one way to end Burma’s Golden Triangle opium trade, and that is a settlement to the long and tragic war. Only if some international aegis can bring Burma and the rebels to a negotiated peace, can development take place. Only with peace and development can the tribal people survive without growing opium. A federal system like that of Burma’s original Constitution is still viable, as are other forms of state alliances. Each year that war and oppression are allowed to continue sets back the time when Burma can develop itself out of its present wretched condition.
Edith T. Mirante
Cranford, New Jersey
To the Editors:
The NYRB‘s periodic reports on lesser-known parts of the world are among its most attractive features. Readers are rightly impressed by the wide learning, linguistic competence and serious engagement of “reporters” like Hobsbawm, Ascherson, or Garton Ash. In the case of Ian Buruma’s article on Burma, however, they may not realize how they are being conned.
It is typical of Buruma’s unscrupulous methods that the only two books on Burma he cites are footnoted after many paragraphs purloined from them almost word for word. It is typical of Buruma’s ignorance of the scholarship on Burma that the two books, Sarkisyanz’s Buddhist Backgrounds of the Burmese Revolution (1965), and Lucian Pye’s Politics, Personality, and Nation Building: Burma’s Search for Identity (1976), described as “fascinating” and “classic,” are actually two longstanding jokes in the field; in plundering them he thus unwittingly recycles their glaring errors of fact, interpretation, and even spelling. One might excuse Buruma his (unacknowledged) ignorance of the Burmese language (would the Review print articles on Latin America by writers who knew no Spanish?), but not his lazy neglect of the major works of Harvey, Hall, Donnison, Lieberman, Aung-Thwin, Taylor, Silverstein, and others.
To give one among many examples, Buruma gloatingly relates that one Burmese, Buddhist monarch tried “to increase his power by drinking an elixir made of six thousand human hearts” (p. 32). This fancy is swiped (unacknowledged) from Pye, who averred (p. 67) that the king (whose name he got wrong) “sought to increase his power through an elixir made of 6,000 human hearts.” The idle Pye took the story from Maurice Collis, the Michener of British Burma, who embellished freely on the travel-report of Fra Manrique, a seventeenth-century Portuguese divine. Alas for Pye and Buruma, the report itself, long since published by the Hakluyt Society, shows that: the king concerned was Arakanese, not Burmese; that he was seduced into the atrocity by an “Alcoranic (i.e., Quranic) and devilish adviser” (for seventeenth-century Catholic missionaries in the East Islam was the contemporary “evil empire”); and that Manrique recorded not what he had seen himself, but tales he heard from local anti-Muslim “friendlies.”
After many paragraphs of bogus learning on Burma’s earlier history, political-tourist Buruma turns to the recent past. Following Pye and Sarkisyanz, he depicts General Ne Win’s March 1962 coup as an atavistic return to medieval conceptions of Buddhist, Burmese monarchy. Innocent readers would scarcely suspect that Ne Win was Army Chief of Staff throughout the first decade of parliamentary government (1948–58); that he took power peacefully in 1958 when U Nu’s ruling AFPFL party split into two hostile factions; that in 1960 he arranged the cleanest elections in Burma history (in which the faction he was thought to prefer was decisively beaten by U Nu); and that he took power a second time only when the Nu regime’s divisive policies and venal practices had driven the country to the verge of anarchy.
Nor does Buruma even mention the international context in which Ne Win decided to isolate Burma from the world. Yet in 1958 a CIA-supported regional rebellion had broken out in Indonesia; external manipulations and internal conflicts had destroyed Laos’ fragile unity; and a divided Vietnam was lurching toward catastrophe. Burma itself was threatened by PRC border pressures and a PRC-supported communist insurgency; by large Kuomintang armies within its territory, supported by the CIA, Taiwan, and opium; and by several longstanding ethnic-minority insurrections. To Ne Win, it seemed clear that only exclusion of foreigners and a rigidly neutralist foreign policy would safeguard Burma from suffering its neighbors’ fate. The policy has not solved all of Burma’s security problems (far from it) but it has certainly insured that the scale of political killing in Burma over the last twenty-five years has been dwarfed by those in Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia, East Timor, and even the Philippines. One might add that the “medieval” Ne Win regime has executed no more than a handful of its enemies (military officers attempting a coup), and has provided pensions and national honors, after periods of untortured imprisonment, for its best-known civilian opponents, such as U Nu, Kyaw Nyein, and Thakin Soe, even when they had been in armed rebellion. How many First, Second, or Third World regimes would do the same?
Buruma’s account of contemporary Burma is no less deceptive. He notes that foreign tourists are allowed only seven days in Burma, but claims that “most” Rangoon intellectuals reject the regime’s ideology (forgetting that he opened his article with the statement that the regime has “systematically erased” the “City,” i.e., Learning). Our non–Burmese-speaking tourist must have had a busy intellectual week. He jeers that before the British arrived “Rangoon was little more than a fishing village.” This claim is purloined from Pye (p. 92), who was too lazy to read any standard British history of Burma. In fact, Rangoon was the new name given by the dynast Alaungpaya in 1755 to the old trading port of Dagon (from which the Shwedagon shrine gets its title); and in the century prior to the British conquest of Lower Burma (1852), it became one of the Burmese empire’s largest revenue-earning seaports. Then, from across the Bay of Bengal, Lord Dalhousie decreed a massive “urban renewal” on imperial Victorian lines, sweeping the old city off into Buruma’s squalid margins.
Buruma goes on to claim that “until a few years ago the English language was banned in Burmese education.” The reader would not guess that today the teaching of English begins in kindergarten, and English is the language of instruction in many subjects at the university level; nor that the Burmanization of education after 1962 was intended, quite reasonably, to let Burmese children be taught in their own language—like the children of Indonesia, France, Vietnam, or the UK. A final glaring falsehood is Buruma’s claim that “the military has taken over from the universities as the breeding ground of the new elite.” In fact, a sizeable portion of the officer corps is recruited from the university student body, creating a factional line within the military between “academy” and “university” types.
Really, the Burmese, and the Review‘s readers, deserve better than Buruma.
Benedict R. Anderson
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York
To the Editors:
Ian Buruma’s facile “The Road from Mandalay” is woefully ill-informed, narrowly arrogant and a disservice to your readers. Buruma would be well advised to check his sources before writing about things he does not understand. Errors abound. In his parody of Burma’s history, Buruma does not only have his facts wrong, but has followed interpretations which bear little relationship to the findings of serious scholars of Burma’s past. To then link the alleged “irrationality” of “the traditional Burmese system” of monarchical times, pace the unfounded claims of Lucien Pye, with the behaviour of Burma Socialist Programme Party Chairman Ne Win is neither enlightening nor, useful. Without evidence, Buruma says that Ne Win practices “merciless punishment of the slightest hint of disloyalty.” How does he justify such a view against the fact that in 1980 Ne Win issued amnesties to all his political opponents and gave them state pensions and awards? Was this the act of a ruthless and irrational man or of an adept politician seeking to establish social unity?
Buruma’s understanding of ethnicity and the historical and economic bases of the secessionist and smuggling movements which persist along Burma’s borders with China, Laos and Thailand is equally deficient. It is a highly complicated subject, but the fundamental issue stems not from the alleged fact that the majority of the population are “Burman” and wish to suppress minority cultures. Rather, it stems from a variety of factors including (1) the lucrativeness of opium and other illegal smuggling; (2) a desire on the part of some minority political leaders to retain personal authority of a semi-“feudal” or personal kind over their former subjects; and (3) of the nature of the modern state with its imperatives to control the national economy and ecology as well as to maintain national security and prevent foreign intervention. In any case, the insurgents, including the Burma Communist Party, control far less than “half the country” however calculated.
