| |
Life in limbo for a Myanmar
exile
By A Lin Neumann
CHIANG
MAI, Thailand - When Min Zin was 14, he and his friends
were making newspapers by hand, literally. They etched
characters into inked wax paper and rolled
fluorescent-light tubes over the impressions in a crude
homemade duplicating process. The results, distributed
free of charge on the streets of Rangoon (now Yangon),
were the only independent publications in the country.
 This was not a school
handicraft project. The year was 1988 and Min Zin was
involved in the deadly serious business of
revolution
against a dictatorship in
Burma. As one of the youngest and most prominent leaders
of the pro-democracy rebellion, Min Zin was making
speeches, organizing students, printing underground
political broadsheets and risking his life for
democratic change.
"Of course, we were naive,"
Min Zin says now of his days as a street-corner
propagandist. "All we knew was that these were bad guys
and we wanted new leaders."
During those heady
months of the 1988 uprising, the country was shaken to
its foundations by students, some even younger than Min
Zin, who took to the streets daily bringing dictator Ne
Win's tottering regime to the point of collapse. But the
broadly popular movement was brutally suppressed in
September of that year when a military junta took power
and thousands of people were killed.
Fast-forward to 2003 and Min Zin is still at it,
only he is anything but naive.
Now a veteran
journalist, the lanky, good-humored Min Zin is one of a
handful of exiled Myanmar (Burma was officially renamed
in 1989) journalists pointing the way toward an eventual
future in which the press might one day thrive again in
his home country.
He is a regular correspondent
for Radio Free Asia and a staff editor for The
Irrawaddy, a respected exile publication and website
(www.Irrawaddy.org) covering Myanmar issues from Chiang
Mai, Thailand. He has been a visiting fellow at the
journalism school at the University of California at
Berkeley and his essays on topics ranging from political
strategy to popular culture in his homeland are
thoughtful, independent and influential.
His
work as a writer, scholar and journalist is an
inspiration to many. Christina Fink, an American expert
on Myanmar affairs, credits Min Zin with being a key
strategist of the student movement during his years in
exile and says that his commentaries and articles are
followed closely inside Myanmar through Radio Free Asia
and through smuggled copies of his writing. "Min Zin
focuses on the role of youth in society and seeks to
inspire young people to develop themselves outside the
regime's tightly controlled, top-down education," Fink
wrote recently.
The path that Min Zin took to
become a journalist has been arduous and threatening,
sad and inspiring. After the suppression of 1988, Min
Zin left school and went underground for nine years,
dodging the efforts of the military regime to track him
down and toss him into prison, along with thousands of
others.
Throughout his years of hiding and exile
- he narrowly escaped from Myanmar to seek refuge in
neighboring Thailand in 1997 - he was never sure what
would happen to him. "I saw friends, girls and boys 12
years old and even younger, killed by soldiers in front
of my eyes," he said. His immediate family members were
all arrested at one time or another, usually on
suspicion that they were aiding Min Zin.
During
his odyssey, he taught himself to speak and read English
fluently and even contributed essays on political issues
to underground samizdat journals that circulated among
students and dissidents.
"I had a lot of time to
read, in those days," he said with a laugh. While hiding
in Myanmar, friends brought him books from the libraries
of the US and British embassies in Yangon, and he began
expanding the horizons of his political thinking. "At
first, we had no idea what was democracy, he said. "In
our schools we were only taught about Marxist thinking"
during the regime of Ne Win, whose peculiar brand of
"Burmese socialism" brought the country isolation and
ruin.
It was life on the run, oddly enough, that
gave Min Zin the time to deepen his thinking and begin
writing seriously about change, even contributing
scholarly non-political articles under a pen name to the
few legal magazines published in Yangon.
His
exposure to fresh ideas has not diminished his outrage
at the junta that rules his country, but he jealously
guards his independence and his credibility as a
journalist. Neither Min Zin nor any of the staff of The
Irrawaddy are members of any political organization.
"We are independent and free to think and
criticize anyone," said the magazine's founder and
editor, Aung Zaw, himself a political dissident in
exile. "It is important for our future that we develop
independent journalism for Burma."
When asked if
he is an activist or a journalist, Min Zin bristles and
insists that it is not an either/or proposition. "We
need to define, first, the word 'activist'," he told
Asia Times Online at The Irrawaddy office on a quiet
street in Chiang Mai. "In the West you can take for
granted that your rights are established. But here, the
immediate goal is to remove the repression. So in terms
of our values you can say we are activists. But in terms
of affiliation, I am not an activist. I have never
joined any political party."
Min Zin and his
Irrawaddy colleagues constantly work the phones and
networks of sources and friends inside Myanmar,
searching for information on one of the most closed
regimes in the world. When pro-government thugs, for
example, attacked opposition icon Aung San Suu Kyi and
her supporters in a remote part of the country on May
30, The Irrawaddy was among the first to get the news.
Using sources inside Myanmar, they pieced
together the events that most observers say were staged
by the ruling State Peace and Development Council to
tarnish Suu Kyi's image and justify her arrest and
continuing detention.
Min Zin, however, does not
confine himself to writing about the intricate twists
and turns of Myanmar's long struggle for change. He is
equally at home writing about popular singers in his
homeland or discussing the country's literature. He has
interviewed by phone one of Myanmar's few hip-hop stars
for the magazine and recently wrote about a popular film
actress who is also a devout Buddhist. "It is not all
about politics," he explained. "The society is changing
and I want to see how our culture can adapt to new
realities."
His work is noticed in seemingly odd
places. This year, Min Zin appeared on an MTV-produced
documentary celebrating the life of Nelson Mandela. The
music channel sent him to South Africa for a taped
dialogue with Mandela, an experience of a lifetime, he
said, even though he admits that friends kidded him
about appearing on MTV. Pop idol Beyonce Knowles hosted
the special.
He was deeply impressed by Mandela
and compared his effectiveness with that of Suu Kyi, a
fellow Nobel laureate and Myanmar's roughly comparable
leader. "Suu Kyi is a moral figure, she is a saint, a
moral person in an immoral society," he said. "But she
appeals too much to the conscience, on telling people to
do the right thing. Unlike Mandela and Vaclav Havel
[whom Min Zin also met and interviewed on a trip to the
Czech Republic] - these guys knew how to maneuver. She
is not pragmatic," he said. "Suu Kyi doesn't believe in
maneuvering."
He is realistic about what it may
take to change Myanmar's dictatorship, which has been in
power in one form or another since 1962. He praises US
efforts to boycott the regime and bring sanctions
against Myanmar. "The United States is the hegemonic
power in the world," he said. "They can make things
happen if they will be serious about change." Min Zin
wants to see the US twist the arms of China, Japan and
Thailand - regional powers that have all done business
with the dictatorship for decades - to force change on
the generals in Yangon.
Eventually, he believes,
change will come and his long sojourn will end. "Being
in exile builds a rift between reality and your own
life," he said. "Literally my dreams are still confined
to my neighborhood in Rangoon." His father, a political
activist and teacher from an earlier generation who also
suffered and was jailed for his beliefs, died a few
years ago, he said, but he cannot accept the reality
because he cannot go home.
His dream is to
return home and help establish The Irrawaddy as an
independent newsmagazine in a free country. "We are not
immigrants - we are refugees, forced to resettle
somewhere foreign. I think about my life in Burma
because I lost it all when I was 14. My mind is always
back home."
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online
Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
