Tom Hull: Thant Myint-U: The River of Lost Footsteps

I've had the Dec. 11, 2006 isssue of the New Yorker sitting on my desk since sometime around the issue date, originally thinking that I wanted to keep a quote from a book review. The book is about the history of Burma/Myanmar, The River of Lost Footsteps, by Thant Myint-U, the grandson of UN Secretary U Thant. The review is by John Lanchester. Unfortunately, I didn't mark the quote I wanted to keep, so I'm floundering through a fascinating piece on a subject I know very little about. Something to do with the pernicious follies of imperialism, as I recall. Maybe this one, on how the British took over:

By the summer of 1885, [Burmese King] Thibaw was a famous ogre, Burma was a famous potential market, and [Lord Randolph, father of Winston] Churchill, running as the self-proclaimed advocate of "progressive conservatism," was contesting a parliamentary seat in the radical hotbed of Birmingham, a city with a large industrial vote. All that he needed was a strategic reason for an invasion, and this was soon provided by a rumor of French involvement in Burma. A casus belli was cooked up, over a fine that Burmese officials -- probably corrupt ones -- had imposed on a Scottish company. War was declared. General Sir Harry North Dalrymple Prendergast and his troops made short work of deposing Thibaw, and very hard work of suppressing the guerrilla resistance that followed. British officials had assumed, Thant says, that "a swift and simple change at the top would lead to quick submission and the rapid return of normal government." It didn't. In the end, the suppression of the rebellion took three times as many troops as the initial invasion, and succeeded partly because of the enervating effects of a brutal famine.

More than a century later, it's clear that the aftermath of this particular imperial adventure has been catastrophic. There are regimes that attract more negative attention than the Burmese dictatorship of today, but there are few that are as universally condemned, or that have shown such a consistent talent for immiserating their own people. [ . . . ] There is no liberty and no democracy in Burma, where the winner of a 1990 election, Aung San Suu Kyi, is still living under house arrest. The dictatorship has an almost unrivalled record of economic incompetence, at one point managing to make Burma, which is rich in natural resources, one of the ten poorest countries in the world. The "Burmese Way to Socialism," as the junta's official ideology is called, is a mixture of isolationism, nationalism, self-proclaimed Buddhism, and outright fantasy. [ . . . ] One of the subtlest things in The River of Lost Footsteps is the connection Thant charts between Burma's current predicament and its colonial past. A deep sense of humiliation gave rise to a curdled nationalism that eventually made the military dictatorship possible. The great British experiment in regime change created a Burma that was, in Thant's words, "entirely different from anything before, a break with the ideas and institutions that had underpinned society in the Irrawaddy valley since before medieval times" -- a Burma "adrift, suddenly pushed into the modern world without an anchor to the past."

Also worth noting is Thant's critique of the world's efforts to pressure or punish Burma/Myanmar:

But Thant thinks that Aung San Suu Kyi -- "the Lady," as she is generally known in Burma -- relies too much on her father's example. Aung San Suu Kyi, who won the Nobel Peace PRize in 1991, has her father's intensity, courage, and charisma, and perhaps also his sense of destiny; but, for Thant, that is not all that needs to be said. To assume that the same single-mindedness that won Burma's independence in 1947 will gain its freedom now is to confuse the colonial past and the postcolonial present. "Britain's withdrawal from Burma was part of its withdrawal from India; the question was one of the nature and timing of the postcolonial transition," Thant observes. "Unlike the British, Burma's generals were never going to quit Burma." Aung San Suu Kyi's valiant opposition to the military regime has become much better known, he observes, than the reasons that the regime arose in the first place, and the result is policy that rests on an incurious, ahistorical simplicity. "The paradigm is one of regime change, and the assumption is that sanctions, boycotts, more isolation will somehow pressure those in charge ot mend their ways," he writes. "The assumption is that Burma's military government couldn't survive further isolation when precisely the opposite is true: Much more than any other part of Burmese society, the army will weather another forty years of isolation just fine. [ . . . ]

Instead of the current policy, Thant argues, what is needed is a policy of engagement with Burma, one of ethical trade and ethical tourism, coupled with a gradual process of economic reform, a rebuilding of institutions, "and a slow opening up of space for civil society." Given all these things, "perhaps the conditions for political change would emerge over the next decade or two." This is not a simple policy of regime change -- or not regime change as we have come to know it.

Of course, we've seen how grossly ineffective, and ultimately cruel, pressure by tough sanctions has repeatedly proven to be. Such strategies fall under the rubric of "war by other means," which means they wind up sharing the moral faults of war. In particular, they demonize the other, rendering the dispute ever more rigid and irresolvable. But they also tend to be significantly asymmetrical: US sanctions against relatively small nations like Cuba, North Korea, Myanmar, Iraq, or even Iran, cost us very little, while potentially doing much harm to the other. The fact that we see and feel so little pain makes it so easy to continue such strategies. It's only when they blow back that we notice them at all. (North Korea's nuclear weapons seem to have finally gotten attention by the Bush regime.)

It seems to me that even so vast a conflict as the Cold War might have been significantly ameliorated by appealing to the highest ideals of the Communists rather than attacking their worst practices, provoking their greatest fears. The same thing could be true for numerous other smaller scale conflicts.

posted 2007-03-09