A deafening silence descends on Myanmar
By Dinah Gardner
YANGON - Myanmar is no longer a CNN moment.
It has been more than a month since the brutal crackdown of the country's
pro-democracy protests and it is back to business in the old capital of Yangon.
The tea houses are full; fritters sizzle in oil-filled woks on street corners;
buses bulge with commuters - those last on hang perilously off the back; and
couples, hand-in-hand, queue up to buy Bollywood cinema tickets.
But then there are the missing monks. The eastern entrance into Shwedagon
Pagoda, the country's holiest Buddhist shrine, has
more than a dozen monasteries. Several lie desolate, padlocked shut; the others
home only to a handful of clergy. Yangon's streets used to swim with burgundy
robes but after the crackdown, young monks were ordered out of the city's
monasteries and back to their home towns and villages.
The curfew - installed the day of the crackdown so that security forces could
sweep in under cover of darkness and grab suspects - was lifted a couple of
weeks ago, a month ahead of schedule. The end of the midnight ban is ominous in
itself, say observers. It means the authorities are confident they have seized
all "troublemakers".
Two days before the curfew was lifted, this correspondent watched as police
rounded up five men. It was 1am, two hours past curfew. The detainees were
cowering at the side of the road, hands cuffed behind their backs; in the
shadow of Shwedagon - sensitive because it was a focal point for the monk-led
protests.
And after the crackdown, the situation has only grown worse. The fuel hike,
which originally sparked the protests, is still in place, and a junta now even
more fearful, has jacked up the repression. State media run stories insulting
everyone's intelligence - "abbots" go on air to criticize protesting monks,
labeling them at best "foolish", at worse "bogus" and "bad" and report
pro-regime rallies condemning the pro-democracy demonstrations and attended by
a public well known either to have been paid or coerced into attending.
Rewind to September. The protests were in full swing and the West - heads of
state and the press - were championing the demonstrators. "Every civilized
nation also has a responsibility to stand up for the people suffering under
dictatorship," US President George W Bush told the United Nations, while he
announced stiffer sanctions on Myanmar. That was September 25, two days before
army started gunning down protesters.
Immediately after the crackdown, embassies and United Nations offices in Yangon
were flooded with pleas for asylum. But diplomatic protocol meant overseas
offices could not help. Those hunted by the regime had to find their own
refuge. And after several United Nations Development Program staff were
arrested, the organization set up an information hotline for UN and
non-governmental organization (NGO) staff. It was inundated with desperate
calls from the public once news of the service was leaked to the Voice of
America - a hugely popular source of news for ordinary people in Myanmar. But
this was also a dead end for those hunted by the regime.
"It was a hotline not a helpline. There was nothing we could do," said one UN
source. "It's hard to be a Schindler in [Myanmar]," referring to Oskar
Schindler, the Sudeten German industrialist credited with saving almost 1,200
Jews during the Holocaust in World War II.
Officially, 10 people, including a foreign journalist, lost their lives in the
government's bloody crackdown, but witnesses and diplomats say that many more
were killed. And as the streets of Yangon fell quiet, this Southeast Asian
nation, defined by the dignity of its downtrodden people, is once again fading
from international consciousness.
The police arrested about 3,000 people for their involvement with the protests
- just days before and after they were loudly championed by columnists in
Washington and London. Now hundreds are still unaccounted for and well over a
thousand are still being held without charge. There were statements of
condemnation and more sanctions - smart ones this time to pincer the junta's
money banked in Singapore.
Solitary confinement
But those who had stood up for democracy - urged on by the West - were left
alone to dodge the junta's secret police. And now Myanmar is once again near
the bottom of the Western news agenda, only in the headlines while UN envoy
Ibrahim Gambari dawdles in the capital Naypyidaw.
Life in a Myanmar prison is cruel, where detainees are often treated as less
than human. One young rickshaw driver told me he had just spent 22 days in jail
for throwing stones at police in demonstrations in Mandalay, Myanmar's
second-biggest city. "They beat me every day," he said. "For the first day we
didn't get any food. The second day we had inedible rice. By the fourth day I
was so hungry I started to eat it."
There have been several other reports of detainees being tortured in government
custody. If history is any guide, that's par for the course for Myanmar's
political prisoners. A writer who had served five years for taking part in 1988
student demonstrations said jail was literally hell on earth. "We had nothing
to eat so we used to catch rats and eat them," he laughed. "Since I got out I
don't touch meat. I'm vegetarian."
But the real tragedy was the politicization of the protests. The monks first
marched only to plead with the government to do something about the crippling
poverty - fuel prices had been jacked up overnight making bus fares
unaffordable for a population that earns an average of a US$1 a day. Matters
started to go awry, say observers, when the main opposition, the National
League for Democracy (NLD), jumped on board and added their call for democracy.
The order to start shooting would never have been given if "the demonstrations
had not been sabotaged".
"The monks would be marching and the NLD would run ahead, parting the crowds
and directing the monks like traffic," remembers one Yangon-based expatriate.
"At one point they came to a junction and waved the monks towards the
right-side route, but the lead monks choose the left path. That was telling."
The protests could have gone on for much longer if the monks had been in
charge, says another NGO worker. "I think it's really a pity that the protests
didn't just stick with the monks because what would the government have done if
the monks peacefully walked on and on and on? It would be very difficult for
them to start shooting. They would have had to tolerate it for a longer time
and then you would have started this culture of demonstrations."
Even activists agree that the bulk of Myanmar's citizens just want a better
life. "Most people don't know much about democracy," said a Yangon-based former
political prisoner. "They just want enough money to feed their family."
Myanmar no longer publishes statistics about its annual budget, but in the
recent past it earmarked as much as 40% for military-related spending and less
than 3% on public health. Some 32% of children are malnourished, and malaria,
tuberculosis and HIV/Aids kill tens of thousands of people every year. The
education system is in a shambles - universities were closed and fragmented
after the 1988 protests; the generals' children receive their schooling in
Singapore or elsewhere overseas.
But it's not just the junta who is ignoring Myanmar's downtrodden. The
international aid community, uncomfortable about working with the military
regime, has been giving the country the cold shoulder for years. And even some
of those that did take the plunge have been pulling out. The Global Fund and Medecins
Sans Frontieres-France quit in the past two years, both citing
excessive government interference in their humanitarian programs.
According to World Bank figures from 2005, overseas development aid (ODA) in
Myanmar was about US$2.90 per capita. That's abysmally low compared that to
other developing countries in the region, including Cambodia, where ODA per
person in 2005 was about $38.50.
"So now you have a people with a government that doesn't do anything for them,
and an international community that also doesn't do anything for them," says
one long-term expatriate NGO worker in Yangon. "What little ODA you do have
goes mostly on UN salaries anyway. So the people get nothing."
Dinah Gardner is a freelance journalist based in Beijing.
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