BOOK REVIEW Myanmar's ageless ethnic question The Shan of Burma: Memoirs of a Shan Exile by Chao Tzang Yawnghwe
Reviewed by Bertil Lintner
In March 1981, I made my first contact with the Shan resistance movement in
Myanmar. Hunched under a canvas awning in the rear of a pick-up truck, I was
taken along some back lanes into a rundown part of the northern Thai city of
Chiang Mai to meet an unofficial representative of the insurgent Shan State
Army (SSA). The vehicle was driven by an intellectual - one of my first Shan
acquaintances - who cut an unlikely figure as a rebel veteran: he was short and
frail, wore glasses with thick lenses and spoke fluent English with an
aristocratic accent.
A week later, I was there, among the SSA guerrillas across the border, having
traveled a whole day by bus from Chiang Mai to Mae Hong Son, a small town in
Thailand's northwestern-most
corner, and then trekked for two days over the border mountains. I carried in
my backpack the only two works I then had found worth reading among all the
sensational gibberish that had been published about the Shans, a people in
northeastern Myanmar whose language resembles Thai rather than Myanmar, and
whose culture also resemble that of their Thai cousins: Scott-Hardimann's Gazetteer
of Upper Burma and the Shan States, a colonial publication printed in
Yangon in 1900, and US Myanmar scholar Josef Silverstein's Politics in Shan
State, an article which had appeared in the September 1959 issue of The
Journal of Asian Studies, a quarterly published by The Association for Asian
Studies, a US society.
Since then, many other works about the Shans have been published, the most
noteworthy being Sai Aung Tun's voluminous 2009 study History of the Shan State
From Its Origins to 1962, and Inge Sargent's 1994 book Twilight Over
Burma: My Life as a Shan Princess. Chao Tzang's The Shan of Burma,
however, became the first comprehensive, informative and non-sensational
account of the Shans and the interrelated question of opium and insurgency in
their homeland - which includes most of the Golden Triangle, one of the world's
most important sources of illicit narcotics. This book was first published by
Singapore's Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in 1987, and Chao Tzang,
incidentally, was the driver of the pick-up truck in Chiang Mai I rode in back
in March 1981.
Chao Tzang passed away in July 2004, only 65 years old, and his memoirs have
now been published in a new and much improved edition. Since it was reprinted
six years after author's death, the text has not been updated because that
would have required an epilogue written by somebody else added to the original
manuscript. Since the book was written more than two decades ago, it contains,
regrettably but quite understandably, nothing about the 1988 nationwide
uprising for democracy, which altered Myanmar's political landscape perhaps
forever.
But even so, the re-publication of Chao Tzang's work could not be more timely.
An election was held in Myanmar on November 7 and the country's pro-democracy
leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, was released six days later. Although Myanmar's
ruling military had hoped that the election would mark the final stage of the
consolidation of its absolute power over the country - and that few would
gather around Suu Kyi, who they thought would have been forgotten after all her
years under house arrest - those events had some severe consequences.
Karen rebels on the Thai border launched some spectacular attacks to show their
dissatisfaction with recent developments - and huge crowds came to see Suu Kyi,
who immediately began talking about convening a nationwide conference with
Myanmar's national minorities to solve the ethnic conflicts that has been
tearing this country apart for decades. Suddenly, and unexpectedly for the
military, the ethnic issue was attracting the attention it deserves amid their
stage-managed elections.
The Shan rebellion is one of Myanmar's oldest and fiercest, and little has
changed in that part of the country since the first edition of Chao Tzang's
book was published. Reading an almost 30-year-old manuscript, and comparing the
situation in Myanmar today, shows that there is only a new cast of characters
and players; the reasons why the Shans, and others, took up arms in the first
place still have not been addressed by the country's central authorities.
Chao Tzang died in exile in Canada, where he spent the last 19 years of his
life. In 1985, he and his family left Chiang Mai in haste after the then most
notorious druglord of the Golden Triangle, Khun Sa, had tried to recruit him.
Khun Sa wanted Chao Tzang to become a spokesman for his organization, to shore
up its supposedly political credentials. And when Khun Sa gave someone "an
offer he could not refuse", the only way to survive was to escape and go into
hiding.
As luck would have it, Chao Tzang's mother, Sao Nang Hearn Kham, was already
settled in Edmonton, Alberta, and a Canadian citizen. Chao Tzang chose to live
in Vancouver, where he joined the University of British Columbia to continue
his studies, which had been interrupted when the military seized power in
Myanmar in the early 1960s. In Vancouver, he earned a PhD in political science
and his thesis was titled The Politics of Authoritarianism: The State and
Political Soldiers of Burma, Indonesia, and Thailand.
Chao Tzang's father, Sao Shwe Thaike, was the saohpa, or prince, of the
Shan State of Yawnghwe. When Myanmar achieved independence in 1948, Sao Shwe
Thaike became the first president of the Union, and, later, was twice appointed
speaker of the House of Nationalities, the then upper house of parliament.
Their family home in Yangon (Rangoon) was raided during the night of General Ne
Win's coup d'etat on March 2, 1962, and Chao Tzang's 16-year-old brother, Sai
Myee, was shot by the soldiers and the father, the ex-president, was led away
and died in the hands of Myanmar's dreaded military intelligence shortly
afterwards.
Chao Tzang, who had graduated from Yangon University in 1959 (not in 1969, as
the short biography on the back-flap of the book wrongly states), was a tutor
in English there until he joined the Shan rebel movement in 1963. The following
year, his mother and Sai Shwe Thaike's widow, Sao Nang Hearn Kham, escaped to
Thailand and became chairperson of the central military council of the newly
created SSA, which brought together three smaller Shan resistance armies.
In the hills of Shan State, Chao Tzang was instrumental in setting up the SSA's
political wing, the Shan State Progress Party (SSPP), in 1971. He served as its
secretary general until he retired to Thailand in 1976, following disagreements
over a pact the SSA had formed with the insurgent Communist Party of Burma.
Chao Tzang, and many other veterans, could not accept an alliance with the
communists, even as they offered the SSA's troops training and generous
military assistance.
Chao Tzang's book is a very personal account of his youth and life with the
Shan resistance. His version of Shan-Myanmar relations throughout history - and
his views of the controversial opium question - may not conform with what has
been written and said elsewhere by so-called scholars and United Nations
"experts". But for that very reason it should be compulsory reading for anyone
interested in Myanmar affairs.
Frustrated at failed internationally supported anti-drug policies in Myanmar,
Chao Tzang concludes:
I sometimes wonder whether the opium problem has
not become a goose that lays golden eggs - enriching, on one hand, the drug
syndicates and traffickers and on the other providing multi-national and
international bureaucracies with more jobs, funds and good living. (p 252)
The book consists of three parts: the first deals with Chao Tzang's life and
experiences, the second is an overview of Shan-Myanmar relations from
pre-colonial days up to the present, and the third is a highly informative list
of historical and political personalities who have played roles in Shan and
Myanmar politics.
This new, improved edition also contains a useful index, which the first
lacked, an “In Memoriam” by his younger brother, Harn Yawnghwe, who heads the
Euro-Burma Office in Brussels, an information center run by Myanmar exiles of
all nationalities, and a Foreword by Martin Smith, author of Burma: Insurgency
and the Politics of Ethnicity. As in the first edition, the name
"Burma" for the country is used, not "Myanmar", which became the country's
official designation in 1989, as changing it would have been tantamount to
altering the original manuscript.
Some readers may take exception to Chao Tzang's treading a bit softly on the
issue of his nemesis, the druglord Khun Sa. But that is understandable given
the circumstances under which Chao Tzang had to escape to Canada, and for many
years live at an undisclosed address. But I think most readers, including
neutral observers of the political drama in Myanmar, would find it hard to
disagree today with the overall conclusion of his excellent study:
The
time has come for Burma's leaders, both in Rangoon and in jungle headquarters
to rethink ... their ambitions and prejudices. For much too long, the people of
the Union of Burma have been entrapped in the politics of violence. All efforts
must be taken to break the vicious cycle which has made the Burman, Shan, Mon,
Karen, Karenni, Kachin, Chin and Arakanese [Rakhine], pitiable victims of war
and violence.
The Shan of Burma: Memoirs of a Shan Exile
by Chao Tzang Yawnghwe, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies Publishing,
Singapore (2010), ISBN-10: 9971988623. Price US$35.93, 276 pages.
Bertil Lintner is a former correspondent with the Far Eastern Economic
Review and the author of several books on Myanmar. He is currently a writer
with Asia Pacific Media Services.
(Copyright 2010 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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Since then, many other works about the Shans have been published, the most
noteworthy being Sai Aung Tun's voluminous 2009 study History of the Shan State
From Its Origins to 1962, and Inge Sargent's 1994 book Twilight Over
Burma: My Life as a Shan Princess. Chao Tzang's The Shan of Burma,
however, became the first comprehensive, informative and non-sensational
account of the Shans and the interrelated question of opium and insurgency in
their homeland - which includes most of the Golden Triangle, one of the world's
most important sources of illicit narcotics. This book was first published by
Singapore's Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in 1987, and Chao Tzang,
incidentally, was the driver of the pick-up truck in Chiang Mai I rode in back
in March 1981.
