| "I |
USED TO LIKE WALKING in the
jungle, even when I was young. I
would go mostly with my friends.
We would climb trees. We had this
game, you may know it, you cut the
bamboo and you fill it with water
and seal it, and throw it on the fire—it would explode. I was about 10 or
11 years old.” Ashin Panna Siri was giggling, revelling in his
memories. Then he went
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silent, and withdrew into himself.
“What kind of questions do you want to ask me?” he said,
after a long pause. I told the 30-year-old Burmese Buddhist
monk that I wanted to know about his life, about his future,
and the future of his country.
“My life and my future, they are not important,” he replied.
“The future of my country is.”
The nightmares still pierce through Ashin Panna Siri’s
dreams and stain his sleep. They drag him back to the dark
cells where he was beaten and sexually humiliated by men
from Burma’s Military Affairs Security.
“Sometimes I am in prison again. I meet the police and
soldiers in the dream. Sometimes I am running and they
are following me,” he said. “Sometimes I get the nightmares
back, especially when I feel depressed and disappointed.”
“On my right side, one man, and my left side one man,
holding my arms, the questioner was in front of me,” Panna
recalled. “One of the men behind me would kick me. One
of the men in front of me would kick me. They would crush
my toes with their boots. They handcuffed me with my
hands behind my back. It was really terrible, really shameful…what to say? Cruel, very cruel. They speak to each other,
‘What kind of person is a monk?’ Whether I have male or
female organs. They would say to each other, ‘I will test.’”
He stopped talking, taking care to avoid eye contact. Silence
filled the room. This torture is probably still happening—
right at this moment, as I’m writing these words—to
some of the 2,200 men and women currently imprisoned in
Burma for speaking out against the country’s ruling junta.
In the hard labour camps located right across the Indian
border—just as in North Korean internment centres or Iranian
prisons—detainees are stripped of their rights and
their hope. Guards and interrogators can do pretty much
as they like: beat, torture and interrogate you, work you to death, starve you, sexually abuse you. And that’s what they
did to Panna—until he escaped.
Panna’s crime, in the eyes of the Burmese junta, was
to have helped lead the sea of more than 20,000 monks,
chanting Buddhist prayers, who poured into the monsoon-drenched
streets of Burma’s cities to protest against the
regime in September 2007. He was among those who organised
the mass pro-democracy demonstrations that took
place in Mandalay, the former royal capital and Burma’s
second-largest city. The monks called on the junta to address
the country’s crippling poverty and end its political
repression, and their demands were clear: the regime
should publicly apologise for beating and arresting protesting
monks; reduce fuel prices; release all political prisoners
including detained National League for Democracy (NLD)
leader Aung San Suu Kyi, and negotiate with the NLD and
other ethnic opposition parties.
Images of the peaceful protests—dubbed the Saffron Revolution—appeared around the world, and soon the uprising
swelled as tens of thousands of laypeople joined the demonstrations.
The monks had clearly tapped into the seething
resentment of 57 million Burmese toward their ruling
military dictatorship. The protests intensified as the more
radical members of the Sangha, or monkhood, refused to
accept alms from the government and the military. This
seemingly insignificant gesture spoke volumes. By refusing
donations from the regime, some elements of the Sangha—
Burma’s most revered institution—cut ties with the ruling
State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), effectively
denying the junta any moral legitimacy to rule.
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Khim Maung Si, a leader of the All Burma Federation of
Student Unions, holds a portrait of General Aung San, father of
the jailed leader Aung San Suu Kyi. |
The regime did not expect the monks to stand their
ground. But they did, and in late September, the government
exacted its revenge: martial law was imposed and
tanks, trucks and helicopters were deployed to frighten the
monks back into their monasteries. As military helicopters
hovered overhead, soldiers, armed with teargas, water
cannons and live ammunition, were given orders to shoot.
On 26 September, around lunchtime, troops in Mandalay
opened fire on protestors marching near the junction of
84th street and 35th street.
“They were aiming their guns at us. Later my voice started
shaking because they said, ‘We are ready to shoot,’” Panna
recalled. “They were becoming angry. The soldiers were
shouting, ‘Go back to your monasteries and to your houses.’
The people were clapping and making jokes because we did
not want to hear their voice. The atmosphere then was not
so serious. We did not realise what was going to happen.”
The bullets met the monks and nuns head on. Official figures
vary, but it is estimated that more than 31 people were
killed. Thousands more were dragged off into waiting army
vans. In the weeks that followed, the army began to systematically
arrest those suspected of being involved in the protests.
Panna had no choice but to flee. He and fellow monk
U Gambira, another leader of the pro-democracy group that
spearheaded the uprisings—the All Burma Monks’ Alliance
(ABMA)—spent almost three weeks on the run in central
Burma, sleeping rough and in safehouses. But one evening
in October 2007, Panna’s luck ran out and he was captured.
After a week of relentless interrogations in a police station
in Monywa, military intelligence officers transferred him
to the city’s prison and he was charged with illegally holding
foreign currency. In January 2008, he was convicted
and sentenced to three years in a hard labour camp.
Panna paused as he recalled the memory of being sent to
Lin Dan labour camp in remote northwest Burma, around
50 kilometres from the Indian border. Every day was the
same; prisoners were chained together and forced to work
on repairing a mountainous highway. Armed officers with
guard dogs made sure the chain gangs did not slack off.
“The police followed the prisoners everywhere,” he said. “If
you went outside for work, they will guard the prisoners.
They had guns. The food was really horrible. Even breakfast,
one glass of rice, no more. We had to be satisfied with
that. The rice was a red colour, mixed with rat faeces and
mostly stones. We had no time to remove the stones. Some
prisoners wanted to run away. If they [runaways] were arrested,
they were terribly beaten and kicked. Some prisoners
were beaten to death.”
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A woman points to the map of Burma. |
Realising he would not survive the camp, Panna decided
to escape. Two years ago, at around 1 am one freezing September
night, while armed prison guards were asleep in a
sentry hut, he scaled two barbed wire fences. The journey westward to India and freedom took two days and nights
across mountains and dense jungle. Alone and on foot, Panna
stayed away from main roads and highways for fear the
Burmese authorities would hunt him down. He is the only
detained member of the ABMA to have escaped.
“I just ran and ran and when I feel exhausted, I climb
trees and take a rest for ten to 15 minutes,” he said. On
the ground, he explained, “there were a lot of leeches.” “I
was a little afraid,” Panna continued, “but I felt wonderful,
amazing.”
It was a journey that led him to the Indian capital. Two
years on, he has official refugee status from the United Nations
refugee agency, one of 3,700 Burmese officially seeking
refuge in India, though the number of unofficial Burmese
refugees is likely to be far higher.
It seems strange that Panna’s story rests here, in the
unremarkable suburbia of Vikaspuri in west Delhi, where
most of the 5,000-strong exiled Burmese community in the
capital live. A white sign with the swirls of the Burmese
script above the door to Panna’s new home reads ‘Shwe Wa
Yaung’ (Golden Saffron) Monastery. In one of the rooms at
the back, he pointed to a photo on a desktop computer of
some monks gathered in Mandalay when the ABMA was
created in 2007: “He is missing; he is missing,” Panna motioned, pointing to two monks in the image. Around 4,000
people disappeared or were jailed after the junta smothered
the demonstrations three years ago. Today, around
255 monks are political prisoners in Burma. Many more
remain in hiding or have been forced to leave.
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Burmese refugee families share a tiny apartment in
Vikaspuri. These men and women escaped from Burma to avoid
reprisal for their involvement in the freedom movement. |
Burma’s recent history reads like a glossary of state-sponsored
brutality. Human rights groups have catalogued the
regime’s merciless retaliatory campaigns against ethnic insurgent
movements in the country, as well as its systematic
use of forced labour, child soldiers, rape, torture and murder.
In September, the US and the EU backed calls for the
UN to set up an international commission of inquiry to investigate
whether the SPDC has committed crimes against
humanity.
When Burma gained its freedom from the British in
1948 with the revolutionary leader Bogyoke Aung San at
the helm of the new Democratic Republic of the Union of
Burma, its people had high hopes. But the country was torn
apart when a group of generals seized power in a coup in
1962. The military government forced through a disastrous
mix of political and economic policies known as the ‘Burmese
Way to Socialism.’ Fast forward almost half a century,
and largely thanks to their greed and mismanagement, resource-rich Burma is now the poorest country in Southeast
Asia and among the most corrupt in the world.
This is where the monks come in. Parts of the country’s
400,000-strong Sangha have a long history of standing up
to repression, a radicalism that stems back to the 1920s, when dissident monks were vocal opponents of British colonial
rule. More recently, monks who spoke out against the
country’s military rulers were detained and tortured by the
regime from the 1970s to the 1990s. Buddhist doctrine dictates
that monks should remain apolitical, so they normally
shy away from politics and have no direct influence over
the junta. But what they say and do matters in a country
in which around 80 percent of people are Theravada Buddhists.
Theological tradition also demands that the Sangha
must intervene if it fears that the wellbeing of the people or
the faith are in danger.
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Ashin Panna Siri at Saffron Vihar in Vikaspuri, Delhi. |
Today, renewed surveillance of radical monks, the razing
of some monasteries and the junta’s refusal to atone for the
brutality of 2007 means the generals have not been forgiven.
The boycott of donations from the military continues
and the Sangha still fears that the regime is out to destroy
the faith and Burma’s future prosperity. In this sense, the
protests that Panna helped lead marked a radical change,
because the regime’s attacks on the demonstrating monks
led many Burmese to fear that the future of Buddhism was
at stake. This perception of a threat to the faith, coupled
with further deterioration in the country’s economy, has
convinced many analysts that more monk-led mass demonstrations
may take place.
“The monks are seen as the last refuge of truth,” says Professor
Ingrid Jordt, a professor of anthropology at the University
of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, “so when the regime
goes after them, no longer even making a show of respect
to the monks or religion, the monks feel that this is a sign of
the destruction of their religion. What is at stake now is not
just that a monk be able to practice the religion, but the religion
itself. Once that dynamic has shifted, I think we may
see the possibility for a spontaneous uprising but probably
connected to some kind of economic pressure.”
When soldiers started killing monks three years ago, India’s
petroleum and natural gas minister, Murli Deora, was
in Burma signing deals worth 150 million dollars with the junta-led Myanma Oil and Gas Enterprise. The deals meant
that the Indian state-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corporation
could carry out deep-sea gas exploration off Burma’s
Rakhine coast.
Despite sharing a huge border and close historical, cultural
and religious ties, the two countries have had a rocky
relationship. From 1962 until the early 1990s, New Delhi’s
view of state repression in Burma was rooted in Nehruvian
principles of morality. India gave sanctuary to Burmese
dissidents and was a vocal critic of the slaughter of more
than 3,000 men and women in Burma in 1988, gunned
down when millions peacefully protested for economic and
political change. But that all began to change with India’s
financial reforms of 1991, when the Indian government decided
the country’s economic growth was tied to bilateral
trade with nations like Burma. The advent of India’s ‘Look
East’ policy also coincided with Burma’s decision to legalise
cross-border trade. The U-turn in policy that followed
has led to a shift in Indo-Burmese relations characterised
by India turning a blind eye to the SPDC’s brutality. Flashes
of despotism in Burma are regarded as ‘internal’ matters.
Now, when ministers in the world’s largest democracy look
across the border at their neighbour, a few factors dominate
the skyline; they want to build on India’s economic growth
by securing stable access to energy via Burma’s massive
supplies of hydro-electricity, oil, minerals and natural gas;
they want to deal with the insurgents on India’s northeastern
border and they want to check China’s expanding influence
in Southeast Asia.
In a clear sign of the radical shift in New Delhi’s stance
towards Burma, Senior General Than Shwe, the 77-yearold
SPDC chairman, was in India this July for his second
state visit. After a visit to Bodhgaya, presumably intended
to atone for his sins against the monks, the main item on
Than Shwe’s agenda was the pursuit of new gas, oil and
mining deals with India. Annual bilateral trade between
the two countries is currently only worth around 1 billion
dollars—a tiny amount that both governments appear eager
to increase. While India needs energy, Burma wants foreign
currency: supplying its military costs money—around
330 million dollars a year, according to the estimates of
economists. Billions of dollars in gas revenues are also siphoned
off by the Burmese regime, which means money
earned from its lucrative international energy deals that
should pay for schools, hospitals and roads ends up in bank
accounts in Singapore. These are huge stashes of cash that
avoid scrutiny from international sanctions. Never mind
that the average father or husband in Burma struggles to
feed his family, earning barely more than a dollar a day,
with GDP per capita now at 400 dollars.
India isn’t the only country doing business with Burma:
China is Burma’s biggest political, military and financial
ally, and Sino-Burmese trade is almost three times the size
of Burma’s commerce with India. Burma is also a convenient
shortcut for China to the Indian Ocean, the vast expanse
of water that New Delhi regards as its own and that
Beijing wants to muscle in on to improve its trade routes.
When two Chinese warships were for the first time given access to Burmese waters this September, the foray was a
clear sign of Beijing’s growing strategic and military designs
in India’s backyard and strengthening ties between
Naypyidaw and Beijing. So the reasons for India to turn a
blind eye to Burma’s excesses keep stacking up. It’s a stance
that doesn’t look likely to change any time soon.
While India and China jostle to do business with the
Burmese regime, the junta is savvy enough to play its two
burgeoning neighbours off each other, though the regime
realises that for reasons both economic and political, it
can’t afford to antagonise Beijing, whose permanent seat
on the UN Security Council has been used to protect Naypyidaw.
Meanwhile, Russia and the Ukraine also sell arms
to Burma’s regime. The Burmese Air Force recently bought
50 Mi-24 combat helicopters from Moscow. It’s not clear
how much the SPDC paid for them, but there’s little doubt
that the money came from its gas and oil profits. The gunships—
Naypyidaw’s first combat-equipped helicopters—are
reported to be for counter-insurgency operations, but they
are almost certain to be deployed against unarmed demonstrators
when the regime next deems it necessary.
While it’s clear India isn’t doing much to try to push the
SPDC to reform, even if it did, would the generals listen?
Probably not. Burma really doesn’t need India that much—
China, Singapore and Russia are more valuable allies. And
thanks to its treasure trove of natural resources, Naypyidaw
won’t retreat into self-enforced economic isolation,
as it did in the past, and won’t take kindly to be being bullied
by anyone. Dr Marie Lall, a South Asia specialist at
Chatham House in London, says: “Burma needs both countries
[India and China] economically, especially China. I
don’t think economic isolation is on the cards. Given the
natural resources that they have, I don’t think they will
ever let either country, China or India, dictate what they
do.” Burma’s dictators, in other words, will not wall themselves
off from the world—as they have sometimes done in
the past—when they know they can do business with China,
India and Thailand.
Burma’s generals have spent decades ignoring both the
carrot of Asian governments and the stick wielded by Western
countries demanding reforms. The SPDC has preferred
to spend its time fine-tuning a way to institutionalise its political
power. This month, Burmese citizens will head to the
polls for the first time in two decades to vote in legislative
elections, which could have been an occasion for a return
to some semblance of democracy and for the devolution of
power to the country’s diverse array of ethnic groups. But
it seems pretty clear this isn’t what the junta has in mind.
Rewind the tape not so far back, around two decades, and
you’ll see why.
Once upon a time there was a young woman, the daughter
of a national hero. Her name was Aung San Suu Kyi and as
leader of the NLD, she won an election in 1990 to rightfully
lead her country. But that didn’t fit in with generals’ endgame.
So they ignored the results and locked her up. More
than 20 years on, she’s still there, waiting. So this month’s
polls were never going to be ‘free and fair’ as the international
community—including India—pointlessly insisted they should be. The regime decided beforehand that the playing
field wouldn’t be level by barring anyone currently in jail
from standing in the elections, annulling the 1990 elections
results and forcing through a constitution that guaranteed
the military 25 percent of all seats at national and local
levels. It was a thinly veiled attempt to stop Aung San Suu
Kyi and scores of other detained opposition political leaders
from contesting any seats. But the question of whether
this month’s elections could usher in any positive change,
no matter how small, is a debate that has divided analysts.
There are no easy answers. But influential NGOs like the International
Crisis Group have argued the elections may be
a way to implement slow change. The real debate, they and
other experts—including Lall—say, should focus on whether
the polls have put in place an electoral structure that in time
could lead to gradual reform; Burma’s constitution means
opposition candidates could for the first time have some in-
fluence in Burma’s 14 regional legislatures.
To be fair, it’s clear that change in Burma, if it does happen,
will be a painstaking transition rather than spontaneous
regime-change. Burma isn’t Iraq or Afghanistan. Suicide
bombs don’t go off and foreign armies don’t come trundling
through rushing to save the day. Every couple of years,
Aung San Suu Kyi’s plight flashes onto the international radar
screen and makes a small blip. Western officials make
their statements, while behind the scenes, governments like
the Chinese apply a little pressure on the SPDC, and then
it’s back to business as usual. The rest of the world looks
the other way while people who rock the boat in Burma are
followed by the military intelligence, threatened, and then
disappear.
Panna managed to escape this fate, but his comrade U
Gambira was not so lucky: in November 2007, he was sentenced
to a 68-year prison term (later commuted to a mere
63 years) for his part in helping to organise the 2007 protests.
Now Panna is piecing together a new life in Delhi,
working to improve his English and his computer skills.
He is a child of this regime, born into a country ruled by
one of the world’s longest dictatorships. He remains, despite
all that he has suffered, a sharp young man: bright, funny,
vulnerable, thoughtful and, despite his regular refrain—“my
English is not so good”—articulate. The boy who hadn’t seen
a car until he was 14 years old, who entered the Sangha as
a teenager to fulfil the wishes of his grandmother, grew up
to lead a revolution in his land, one that briefly stirred the
conscience of the world before it was crushed by the regime
that tortured him and drove him into exile.
But his home is a beautiful country, and one that he
hopes he can return to. As I trespass into the minefield of
his memories, there is no visible trace of the scars all those
beatings left behind. But the imprint is there; carved into
him so that it is as much a part of Panna as his commitment
to his faith. “Sometimes, it’s incredible. If I think [about]
my experience again…it’s too [much] for me but now I
can overcome. I have no choice. I don’t regret, I do for the
benefit of my people and my country,” he said. “I do the
things as best as I can. That’s why, even if they kill me, it’s
worth dying.”
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