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Last Updated: Sep 8, 2008 - 9:03:46 AM |
Monsoon clouds crushed the dark,
seaweed-green landscape of eastern Burma. Steep hillsides glistened
with teak trees, coconut palms, black and ocher mud from the heavy
rains, and tall, chaotic grasses. As night came, the buzz saw of
cicadas and the pestering croaks of geckos rose through the downpour.
Guided by an ethnic Karen rebel with a torchlight attached by bare
copper wires to an ancient six-volt battery slung around his neck, I
stumbled across three bamboo planks over a fast-moving stream from
Thailand into Burma. Any danger came less from Burmese government
troops than from those of its democratic neighbor, whose commercial
interests have made it a close friend of Burma’s military regime. Said
Thai Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej recently: the ruling Burmese
generals are “good Buddhists” who like to meditate, and Burma is a
country that “lives in peace.” The Thai military has been on the
lookout for Karen soldiers, who have been fighting the Burmese
government since 1948.
“It ended in Vietnam, in Cambodia. When will it end in Burma?” asked
Saw Roe Key, a Karen I met shortly after I crossed the border. He had
lost a leg to a Toe Popper anti¬personnel mine—the kind that the regime
has littered throughout the hills that are home to more than a half-
dozen ethnic groups in some stage of revolt. Of the two dozen or so
Karens I encountered at an outpost inside Burma, four were missing a
leg from a mine. Some wore green camouflage fatigues and were armed
with M-16s and AK-47s; most were in T-shirts and traditional skirts, or
longyis. Built into a hillside under the forest canopy, the camp was a
jumble of wooden-plank huts on stilts roofed with dried teak leaves,
with a solar panel and an ingenious water system. Beyond the camp
beckoned perfect guerrilla country.
Sawbawh Pah, 50, small and stocky with only a tuft of hair on his
scalp, runs a clinic here for wounded soldiers and people uprooted from
their homes, of whom there have been 1.5 million in Burma. The Burmese
junta, known as the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), has
razed more than 3,000 villages in Karen state alone—one reason
TheWashington Post has called Burma a “slow-motion Darfur.” With a
simple, resigned expression that some might mistake for a smile, he
told me, “My father was killed by the SPDC. My uncle was killed by the
SPDC. My cousin was killed by the SPDC. They shot my uncle in the head
and cut off his leg while he was looking for food after the village was
destroyed.” Over a meal of fried noodles and eggs, I was inundated with
life stories like Pah’s. Their power lay in their grueling repetition.
Major Kea Htoo, the commander of the local battalion of Karen
guerrillas, had reddened lips and a swollen left cheek from chewing
betel nut. Like his comrades, he told me he saw no end to the war. They
were fighting not for a better regime composed of more enlightened
military officers, nor for a democratic government that would likely be
led by ethnic Burmans like Aung San Suu Kyi, but for Karen
independence. Tu Lu, missing a leg, had been in the Karen army for 20
years. Kyi Aung, the oldest at 55, had been fighting for 34 years.
These guerrillas are paid no salaries. They receive only food and basic
medicine. Their lives have been condensed to the seemingly unrealistic
goal of independence; since Burma first fell under military misrule in
1962, nobody has ever offered them anything resembling a compromise.
Although the junta has trapped the Karens, Shans, and other ethnics
into small redoubts, its corrupt and desertion-plagued military lacks
the strength for the final kill. So the war continues.
Endless conflict and gross, regime-inflicted poverty have kept Burma
primitive enough to maintain an aura of romance. Like Tibet and Darfur,
it offers its advocates in the post-industrial West a cause with both
moral urgency and aesthetic appeal. In 1952, the British writer Norman
Lewis published Golden Earth, a spare and haunting masterpiece about
his travels throughout Burma. The insurrections of the Karens, Shans,
and other hill tribes make the author’s peregrinations dangerous, and
therefore even more uncomfortable. He found that only a small region in
the north, inhabited largely by the Kachin tribe, was “completely free
from bandits or insurgent armies.” Lewis spends a night tormented by
rats, cockroaches, and a scorpion, yet wakes none the worse in the
morning to the “mighty whirring of hornbills flying overhead.” His
bodily sufferings seem a small price to pay for the uncanny beauty of a
country of broken roads and no adequate hotels, where “the condition of
the soul replaces that of the stock markets as a topic for polite
conversation.” More than 50 years later, what shocks about this book is
how contemporary it seems. A Western relief worker arriving in the wake
of last spring’s devastating cyclone could have followed Lewis’s
itinerary and had similar experiences. By contrast, think of all the
places where globalization has made even a 10-year-old travel guide out
of date.
But Burma is more than a place to feel sorry for. And its ethnic
struggles are of more than obscurantist interest. For one thing, they
precipitated the military coup that toppled the country’s last civilian
government almost a half century ago, when General Ne Win took power in
part to forestall ethnic demands for greater autonomy. With one-third
of Burma’s population composed of ethnic minorities living in its
fissiparous borderlands (which account for seven of Burma’s 14 states
and divisions), the demands of the Karens and others will return to the
fore once the military regime collapses. Democracy will not deliver
Burma from being a cobbled-together mini-empire of nationalities, even
if it does open the door to compromise among them.
Moreover, Burma’s hill tribes form part of a new and larger
geopolitical canvas. Burma fronts on the Indian Ocean, by way of the
Bay of Bengal. Its neighbors India and China (not to mention Thailand)
covet its abundant oil, natural gas, uranium, coal, zinc, copper,
precious stones, timber, and hydropower. China especially needs a
cooperative, if not supine, Burma for the construction of deepwater
ports, highways, and energy pipelines that can open China’s landlocked
south and west to the sea, enabling its ever-burgeoning middle class to
receive speedier deliveries of oil from the Persian Gulf. These routes
must pass north from the Indian Ocean through the very territories
wracked by Burma’s ethnic insurrections.
Burma is a prize to be contested, and China and India are not-so-subtly
vying for it. But in a world shaped by ethnic struggles, higher fuel
prices, new energy pathways, and climate-change-driven natural
disasters like the recent cyclone, Burma also represents a microcosm of
the strategic challenges that the United States will face. The U.S.
Navy underscored these factors in its new maritime strategy, released
in late 2007, which indicated that the Navy will shift its attention
from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean and the western Pacific. The
Marines, too, in their new “Vision and Strategy 2025” statement,
highlight the Indian Ocean as among their main theaters of activity in
coming years.
But toward Burma specifically, U.S. policy seems guided more by
strategic myopia. The Bush administration, like its predecessors, has
loudly embraced the cause of Burmese democracy but has done too little
to advance it, either by driving diplomatic initiatives in the region
or by supporting any of the ethnic insurgencies. Indeed, Special
Operations Command is too preoccupied with the western half of the
Indian Ocean, the Arab/Persian half, to pay much attention to Burma,
which lacks the energizing specter of an Islamic terror threat.
Meanwhile, the administration’s reliance on sanctions and its
unwillingness to engage with the ruling junta has left the field open
to China, India, and other countries swayed more by commercial than
moral concerns.
But some Americans are consumed by Burma, and they offer a window onto
different, and perhaps more fruitful, ways of engaging with its complex
realities. I saw Burma through the eyes of four such men. In most
cases, I cannot identify them by name, either because of the
tenuousness of their position in neighboring Thailand, whose government
is not friendly to their presence, or because of the sensitivity of
what they do and whom they work for. Their expertise illustrates what
it takes to make headway in Burma, while their goals say a great deal
about what is at stake.
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THE SON OF THE BLUE-EYED SHAN
While the mess in Iraq has made the virtues of cultural expertise newly
fashionable, champions of such experience often conveniently forget
that many of America’s greatest area experts have been Christian
missionaries. American history has seen two strains of missionary area
experts: the old Arab hands and the Asia, or China, hands. The Arab
hands were Protestant missionaries who in the early 19th century
traveled to Lebanon and ended up founding what became the American
University of Beirut. From their lineage descended the State Department
Arabists of the Cold War era. The Asia hands have a similarly
distinguished origin, beginning, too, in the 19th century and providing
the U.S. government with much of its area expertise through the early
Cold War, when, during the McCarthy era, a number of them were unjustly
purged. One American who counseled me on Burma is descended from
several generations of Baptist missionaries from the Midwest who
ministered to the hill tribes beginning in the late 19th century. His
father, known as “The Blue-Eyed Shan,” escaped Burma ahead of the
invading Japanese and was conscripted into Britain’s Indian army, in
which he commanded a Shan battalion. Among my acquaintance’s earliest
childhood memories was the sight of Punjabi soldiers ordering work
gangs of Japanese prisoners of war to pick up rubble in the Burmese
capital of Rangoon. With no formal education, he speaks Shan, Burmese,
Hindi, Thai, and the Yunnan and Mandarin dialects of Chinese. He has
spent his life studying Burma, though the 1960s saw him elsewhere in
Indochina, aiding America’s effort in Vietnam.
During our conversation, he sat erect and cross-legged on a raised
platform, wearing a longyi. Gray-haired, with a sculpted face and an
authoritative, courtly Fred Thompson voice, he has the bearing of an
elder statesman, tempered by a certain gentleness. “Chinese
intelligence is beginning to operate with the antiregime Burmese ethnic
hill tribes,” he told me. “The Chinese want the dictatorship in Burma
to remain, but being pragmatic, they also have alternative plans for
the country. The warning that comes from senior Chinese intelligence
officers to the Karens, the Shans, and other ethnics is to ‘come to us
for help—not the Americans—since we are next door and will never leave
the area.’”
At the same time, he explained, the Chinese are reaching out to young
military officers in Thailand. In recent years, the Thai royal family
and the Thai military—particularly the special forces and cavalry—have
been sympathetic to the hill tribes fighting the pro-Chinese military
junta; Thailand’s civilian politicians, influenced by lobbies wanting
to do business with resource-rich Burma, have been the junta’s best
allies. In sum, democracy in Thailand is momentarily the enemy of
democracy in Burma.
But the Chinese, the Son of the Blue-Eyed Shan implied, are still not
satisfied: they want both Thailand’s democrats and military officers on
their side, even as they work with both Burma’s junta and its ethnic
opponents. “A new bamboo curtain may be coming down on Southeast Asia,”
he worried. This would not be a hard-and-fast wall like the Iron
Curtain; nor would it be part of some newly imagined Asian domino
theory. Rather, it would create a zone of Chinese political and
economic influence fostered by, among other factors, American neglect.
While the Chinese operate at every level in Burma and Thailand, top
Bush-administration officials have skipped summits of the Association
of Southeast Asian Nations. My friend simply wanted the United States
back in the game.
“To topple the regime in Burma,” he says, “the ethnics need a full-time
advisory capability, not in-and-out soldiers of fortune. This would
include a coordination center inside Thailand. There needs to be a
platform for all the disaffected officers in the Burmese military to
defect to.” Again, rather than a return to the early Vietnam era, he
was talking about a more subtle, more clandestine version of the
support the United States provided the Afghan mujahideen during the
1980s. The current Thai administration would be hostile to that, but
the government in Bangkok, and its policies, routinely changes. The
military could yet return to power there, and even if it doesn’t, if
the U.S. signaled its intent to support the Burmese hill tribes against
a regime hated the world over, the Thai security apparatus would find a
way to assist.
“The Shans and the Kachins near the Chinese border,” my friend went on,
“have gotten a raw deal from the Burmese junta, but they are also
nervous about a dominant China. They feel squeezed. And unity for the
hill tribes of Burma is almost impossible. Somebody from the outside
must provide a mechanism upon which they can all depend.” Larger than
England and France combined, Burma has historically been a crazy quilt
of vaguely demarcated states sectioned by jungly mountain ranges and
the valleys of the Irrawaddy, Chindwin, Salween, and Mekong rivers. As
a result, its various peoples remain distinct: the Chins in western
Burma, for example, have almost nothing in common with the Karens in
eastern Burma. Nor is there any community of language or culture
between the Shans and the Burmans (the ethnic group, not the
nationality, which is Burmese), save their Buddhist religion. Indeed,
the Shans have much more in common with the Thais across the border.
But Burma should not be confused with the Balkans, or with Iraq, where
ethnic and sectarian differences simmering for decades under a carapace
of authoritarianism erupted once central authority dissolved. After so
many years of violence, war fatigue has set in here, and the tribes
show little propensity to fight each other after the regime unravels.
They are more disunited than they are at odds. Even among themselves,
the Shans, as my friend told me, have been historically subdivided into
states led by minor kings. As he sees it, such divisions open a quiet
organizing opportunity for Americans of his ilk.
THE FATHER OF THE WHITE MONKEY
Tha-U-Wa-A-Pa, or “The Father of the White Monkey” in Burmese, is also
the son of Christian missionaries, originally from Texas. Except for
nine years in the U.S. Army, including in Special Forces, from which he
retired as a major, he has been, like his parents, a missionary in one
form or another. He also speaks a number of the local languages. He is
much younger than my other acquaintance and much more animated, with a
ropy, muscular body in perpetual motion, as if his system were running
on too many candy bars. Whereas my other contact has focused on the
Shan tribes near the Chinese border, the Father of the White Monkey—the
sobriquet comes from the nickname he has given his daughter, who often
travels with him—works mostly with the Karen and other tribes in
eastern Burma abutting Thailand, though the networks he operates have
ranged as far as the Indian border.
In 1996, he met the Burmese democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi in
Rangoon, while she was briefly not under house arrest. The meeting
inspired him to initiate a “day of prayer” for Burma, and to work for
its ethnic unity. During the 1997 Burmese army offensive that displaced
more than 100,000 people, he was deep inside the country, alone, going
from one burned-out village to another, handing out medicine from his
backpack. He told me about this and other army offensives that he
witnessed, in which churches were torched, children disemboweled, and
whole families killed. “These stories don’t make me numb,” he said, his
eyes popping open, facial muscles stretched. “Each is like the first
one. I pray always that justice will come and be done.”
In 1997, after that trip inside Burma, he started the Free Burma
Rangers, a relief group that has launched more than 300 humanitarian
missions and has 43 small medical teams among the Karens, Karennis,
Shans, Chins, Kachins, and Arakanese—across the parts of highland Burma
that embrace on three sides the central Irrawaddy River valley, home to
the majority Burmans. As he told it, the Free Burma Rangers is an
unusual nongovernmental organization. “We stand with the villagers;
we’re not above them. If they don’t run from the government troops, we
don’t either. We have a medic, a photo¬grapher, and a reporter/intel
guy in each team that marks the GPS positions of Burmese government
troops, maps the camps, and takes pictures with a telephoto lens, all
of which we post on our Web site. We deal with the Pentagon, with
human-rights groups … There is a higher moral obligation to intervene
on the side of good, since silence is a form of consent.
“NGOs,” he went on in a racing voice, “like to claim that they are
above politics. Not true. The very act of providing aid assists one
side or another, however indirectly. NGOs take sides all the time.” The
Father of the White Monkey takes this hard truth several steps further.
Whereas the Thais host Burmese refugee camps on their side of the
border, and the ethnic insurgents run camps inside Burma for internally
displaced people—even as the Karens and other ethnics have mobile
clinics near Burmese army concentrations—the backpacking Free Burma
Rangers operate behind enemy lines.
Like my other acquaintance, the Father of the White Monkey is a very
evolved form of special operator. One might suspect that the Free Burma
Rangers is on some government payroll in Washington. But the truth is
more pathetic. “We are funded by church groups around the world. Our
yearly budget is $600,000. We were down to $150 at one point; we all
prayed and the next day got a grant for $70,000. We work hand to
mouth.” For him, Burma is not a job but a lifelong obsession.
“Burma is not Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge,” he told me. “It’s not
genocide. It’s not a car wreck. It’s a slow, creeping cancer, in which
the regime is working to dominate, control, and radically assimilate
all the ethnic peoples of the country.” I was reminded of what Jack
Dunford, the executive director of the Thailand Burma Border
Consortium, had told me in Bangkok. The military regime was
“relentless, building dams, roads, and huge agricultural projects,
taking over mines, laying pipelines,” sucking in cash from neighboring
powers and foreign companies, selling off natural resources at below
market value—all to entrench itself in power.
Once, not long ago, the Father of the White Monkey was sitting on a
hillside at night, in an exposed location between the Burmese army and
a cluster of internal refugees whom the army had driven from their
homes. The Karen soldiers he was with had fired rocket-propelled
grenades at the Burmese army position, and in response the Burmese
soldiers began firing mortar rounds at him. At that moment, he got a
message on his communications gear from a friend at the Pentagon asking
why the United States should be interested in Burma.
He tapped back a slew of reasons that ranged from totalitarianism to
the devastation of hardwood forests, from religious persecution of
Buddhist monks to the use of prisoners as mine sweepers, and much else.
But, ever the missionary, the Father of the White Monkey barely touched
on strategic or regional-security issues. When I asked him his
denomination, he responded, “I’m a Christian.” As such, he believes he
is doing God’s work, engaged morally first and foremost, especially
with the Karens, who number many Christians, converted by people like
his parents. He is the kind of special operator the U.S. security
bureaucracy can barely accept, for becoming one involves taking sides
and going native to a degree. And yet, operatives like him offer the
level of expertise that the United States desperately needs, if it is
to have influence without being overbearing in remote parts of the
globe.
THE COLONEL
Timothy Heinemann, a retired Army colonel from Laguna Beach,
California, does think strategically. He is also a veteran of Special
Forces. I first met him in 2002 at the Command and General Staff
College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he was the dean of
academics. He now runs Worldwide Impact, an NGO that helps ethnic
groups, as well as a number of cross-border projects, particularly
sending media teams into Burma to record the suffering there. Another
kind of special operator, Heinemann, with his flip-flops and his
engaging manner, embodies the subtle, indirect approach to managing
conflict emphasized in the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, one of the
Pentagon’s primary planning documents. Heinemann says that he
“privatizes condition-setting.” He explains: “We are networkers on both
sides of the border. We try to find opportunities for NGOs to
collaborate better in supporting ethnic groups’ needs. I do my small
part to set conditions so that America can protect national,
international, and humanitarian interests with real savvy. Our work is
well known to various branches of the U.S. government. The opposition
to the military dictatorship has no strategic and operational planning
like Hezbollah does. Aung San Suu Kyi is little more than a symbol of
the wrong issue—‘Democracy first!’ Ethnic rights and the balance of
ethnic power are preconditions for democracy in Burma. These issues
must be faced first, or little has been learned from the lessons of
Afghanistan and Iraq.” Heinemann, like the Father of the White Monkey,
also lives hand to mouth, grabbing grants and donations from wherever
he can, and is sometimes reduced to financing trips himself. He finds
Burma “exotic, intoxicating.”
Burma is also a potential North Korea, he says, as well as a perfect
psychological operations target. He and others explained that the
Russians are helping the Burmese government to mine uranium in the
Kachin and Chin regions in the north and west, with the North Koreans
waiting in the wings to supply nuclear technology. The Burmese junta
craves some sort of weapons-of-mass-destruction capability to provide
it with international leverage. “But the regime is paranoid,”
Heine¬mann points out. “It’s superstitious. They’re rolling chicken
bones on the ground to see what to do next.
“Burma’s got a 400,000-man army [the active-duty U.S. Army is 500,000]
that’s prone to mutiny,” Heine¬mann went on. “Only the men at the very
top are loyal. You could spread rumors, conduct information warfare. It
might not take much to unravel it.” (Burmese soldiers are reportedly
getting only a portion of their salaries, and their weapons at major
bases are locked up at night.) On the other hand, the military
constitutes the country’s most secure social-welfare system, and that
buys a certain amount of loyalty from the troops. And yet, “there is no
trust by the higher-ups of the lower ranks,” according to a Karen
resistance source. The junta leader, Than Shwe, a former postal clerk
who has never been to the West, is known, along with his wife, to
consult an astrologer. “He governs out of fear; he is not brave,” notes
Aung Zaw, editor of The Irrawaddy, a magazine run by Burmese exiles in
the northwestern Thai city of Chiang Mai. “And Than Shwe rarely speaks
publicly; he has even less charisma than Ne Win,” the dictator from
1962 to 1988.
Heinemann and Aung Zaw each recounted to me how the regime suddenly
deserted Rangoon one day in 2005 and moved the capital north, halfway
to Mandalay, to Naypyidaw, “the abode of kings,” which it built from
scratch, with funds from Burma’s natural-gas revenues. The date of the
move was astrologically timed. The new capital lies deep in the forest
and is fortified with underground bunkers designed to protect against
an American invasion. Heine¬mann sees China, India, and other Asian
nations jockeying for position with one of the world’s worst, weirdest,
wealthiest, and most strategically placed rogue regimes, which is
vulnerable to a coup or even disintegration, if only the United States
adopted the kind of patient, low-key, and inexpensive approach that he
and my other two acquaintances advocate.
Heinemann’s last job in the military was as a planner for the
occupation of Iraq, and he was an eyewitness to the mistakes of a
massive military machine that disregarded local realities. He sees
Burma as the inverse of Iraq, a place where the United States can do
itself a lot of good, and do much good for others, if it fights smart.
THE BULL THAT SWIMS
And then there is Ta Doe Tee, or “The Bull That Swims,” another
American, whom I met in his suite in one of Bangkok’s most expensive
hotels. His impeccably tailored black suit barely masked an
intimidating physique—the reason for his Burmese nickname—and his
business card defines him as a “compradore,” an all-purpose factotum
steeped in local culture, the kind of enabler who was vital to the
running of the British East India Company. The Bull was a staff
sergeant in Special Forces in the 1970s and now works in the security
business in Southeast Asia.
He is of the Army Special Forces generation that was frustrated about
having just missed service in Vietnam, with little to do overseas
during the presidency of Jimmy Carter. Stationed at Fort Devens,
Massachusetts, in the mid-1970s, he was mentored, commanded, and led by
some of the Son Tay Raiders. “Dick Meadows, Greg McGuire, Jack Joplin,
Joe Lupyak”—he recites their names with reverence—were SFs who stormed
the Son Tay prison camp near Hanoi in 1970 in a failed attempt to
rescue American prisoners of war. “Vietnam and Southeast Asia were all
they ever talked about,” he told me.
But in 1978, Jimmy Carter’s head of the CIA, Admiral Stansfield Turner,
fired or forced into early retirement almost 200 officers running
agents stationed abroad who had been providing intelligence, and many
of them were in Southeast Asia. The CIA’s clandestine service was
devastated. As the Bull tells the story, many of the fired officers
would not simply “be turned off,” and decided to maintain
self-supporting networks, “picking up kids” like himself along the way,
just out of Special Forces. They sent him to learn to sail and fly, and
he became a certified ship’s master for cargo vessels and an
FAA-certified pilot. In the 1980s, he became involved in operations in
Southeast Asia, such as bringing equipment to the Khmer Rouge in
Cambodia. He blurred the line between such controversial and shadowy
government operations and the illegal means sometimes used to sustain
them: in 1988, while trying to bring 70 tons of marijuana to the West
Coast of the United States with a Southeast Asian crew under his
command, he was boarded by the U.S. Coast Guard. He served five years
in prison in the U.S. and has been back in Southeast Asia ever since.
The Bull put on reading glasses and opened a shiny black loose-leaf
notebook to a map of the Indian Ocean. A line drawn on the map went
from Ethiopia and Somalia across the water past India, and then north
up the Bay of Bengal, through the heart of Burma, to China’s Yunnan
province. “This map is just an example of how CNOC [the Chinese
National Oil Company] sees the world,” he explained.
He showed me another map, which zoomed in on Ethiopia and Somalia, with
grid marks on the significant reserves of oil and natural gas in the
Ogaden Basin on the Ethiopian-Somali border. A circle was drawn around
Hobyo, a Somali port visited in the early 15th century by the Chinese
admiral Zheng He, whose treasure fleets plied the same Indian Ocean sea
lanes that serve as today’s energy routes. “Oil and natural gas would
be shipped from Hobyo direct to western Burma,” the Bull said, where
the Chinese are building a new port at Kyauk Phyu, in Burma’s Arakan
state, that will be able to handle the world’s largest container ships.
According to him, the map shows how easy it will be for the Chinese to
operate all over the Indian Ocean, “tapping into Iran and other Persian
Gulf energy suppliers.” Their biggest problem, though, will be cutting
through Burma. “The Chinese need to acquire Burma, and keep it stable,”
said the Bull.
There are other routes to energy-hungry inner China besides the one
through Burma. The Chinese are also developing a deepwater port in
Gwadar, in Pakistani Baluchistan, close to the Iranian border, and have
plans to do the same in Chittagong in Bangladesh. Both ports would be
closer than Beijing and Shanghai to cities in western China. But the
Burmese route is the most direct from the Indian Ocean.
This whole development is part of the Chinese navy’s “string of pearls”
strategy, which—coupled with a canal that the Chinese may one day help
finance across Thailand’s Isthmus of Kra, linking the Bay of Bengal
with the South China Sea—will give China access to the Indian Ocean.
China is, in effect, expanding south, even as India, to keep from being
strategically encircled by the Chinese navy, is expanding east—also
into Burma.
Until 2001, India, the world’s largest democracy, took the high road on
Burma, condemning it for its repression and providing moral support for
the cause of Aung San Suu Kyi, who had studied in New Delhi. But as
senior Indian leaders told me on a recent visit, India could not just
watch Chinese influence expand unchecked. Burma’s jungles serve as a
rear base for insurgents from eastern India’s own mélange of warring
ethnic groups. Furthermore, as Greg Sheridan, foreign editor of The
Australian, has observed, India has been “aghast” to see the
establishment of Chinese listening stations along Burma’s border with
India. So in 2001, India decided to provide Burma with military aid and
training, selling it tanks, helicopters, shoulder-fired surface-to-air
missiles, and rocket launchers.
India also decided to build its own energy-pipeline network through
Burma. In fact, during the 2007 crackdown on the monks in Burma,
India’s petroleum minister signed a deal for deepwater exploration. Off
the coast of Burma’s western Arakan state, adjacent to Bangladesh, are
the Shwe gas fields, among the largest natural reserves in the world,
from which two pipeline systems will likely emerge. One will be China’s
at Kyauk Phyu, which will take deliveries of oil and gas from as far
away as the Persian Gulf and the Horn of Africa, as well as from Shwe
itself. The other pipeline system will belong to India, which is
spending $100 million to develop the Arakanese port of Sittwe as a
trade window for its own landlocked, insurgency-roiled northeast.
There is nothing sinister about any of this: it is the consequence of
the intense need of hundreds of millions of people in India and China
who will consume ever more energy as their lifestyles improve. As for
China, it may not be a democracy, but little in its larger Indian Ocean
strategy can be decried. China is not, and will likely never be, a
truly hostile state like Iran.
But China’s problems with Burma are actually just beginning, argues the
Bull, and the United States must exploit them quietly. As he observed,
the minutiae of tribal and ethnic differences can easily displace grand
lines on a map and the plans of master strategists. Just look at
Yugoslavia, at Iraq, at Israel-Palestine. Given the energy stakes, he
sees the struggles of the Karens, Shans, Arakanese, and other
minorities as constituting the “theater of activity” for his lifetime,
something that the Turner firings had denied him. Burma is where the
United States has to build a “UW [unconventional-war] capability,” he
said. Such would be the unofficial side of our competition with China,
which should be forced over time to accept a democratic and highly
federalized Burma, with strong links to the West.
Like the other three Americans, the Bull talked about the need to build
and manage networks among the ethnic hill tribes, through the
construction of schools, clinics, and irrigation systems. In
particular, he focused on the Shan, the largest of the hill tribes,
with 9 percent of Burma’s population and about 20 percent of its
territory. Allying with the Shans, he said, would give the United
States a mechanism to curtail the flow of drugs in the area, and to
create a balancing force against China right on its own border. In any
Burmese democracy, the Shans would control a sizeable portion of the
seats in parliament. More could be accomplished through nonmilitary aid
to a specific Burmese hill tribe, he argued, than through some of the
larger weapons and other defense programs the United States spends
money on. The same strategy could be applied to the Chins in western
Burma, with the help of India. Not just in Iraq, but in Burma, too,
American policy in the coming years should be all about the tribes.
WINNING THE ENDGAME
But while the former Special Forces and other Asia hands I interviewed
see Burma as central to American strategy, the active-duty Special
Operations community does not, because it is under orders to focus on
al-Qaeda. This, my acquaintances say, shows how America’s obsession
with al-Qaeda has warped its strategic vision, which should be
dominated by the whole Indian Ocean, from Africa to the Pacific.
Larger U.S. policy toward the Burmese regime, meanwhile, has remained
unchanged over several administrations. George H. W. Bush, Bill
Clinton, and George W. Bush have all declared their support for Burmese
democracy, even as they have demonstrated little appetite for
supporting the ethnic insurgencies, however covertly. In that respect,
American policy toward Burma can seem more moralistic than moral, and
President Bush in particular, despite Laura Bush’s intense interest in
Burma, may seem prone to the same ineffectual preachiness of which
former President Jimmy Carter has often been accused. Bush, by some
accounts, should either open talks with the junta, rather than risk
having the U.S. ejected from the whole Bay of Bengal region; or he
should support the ethnics in an effective but quiet manner. “Right
now, we get peanuts from the U.S.,” Lian Sakhong, general secretary of
the Burmese Ethnic Nationalities Council, told me.
American officials respond that they have in fact backed their
affirmations of democracy with actions. The United States has banned
investment in Burma since 1997 (though the ban is not retroactive,
thereby leaving Chevron, which took over its concession from Unocal,
free to operate a pipeline from southern Burma into Thailand). The
United States added new sanctions in 2003 and 2007 and provides
humanitarian aid through NGOs operating from Thailand. As for
cross-border support for the Karen and Shan armies, officials note that
the moment the word of such a policy got out, America’s embassy
presence in Burma would be gutted. Of course, it’s unclear what good
the U.S. diplomatic presence in Burma is doing.
Nevertheless, according to a top member of the nongovernmental-aid
community, the United States is the only major power that sends the
junta a “tough, moral message, which usefully prevents the
International Monetary Fund and World Bank from dealing with Burma.” As
a result, Burma has less money to build dams and roads to further
despoil the landscape and displace more people. U.S. policy, this
source went on, “also rallies Western and international pressure that
has led to cracks in the Burmese military.” The regime will collapse
one day, maybe sooner than later; when it does, America would
presumably be in excellent stead with the Burmese people.
Though the prospect of another mass uprising excites the Western
imagination, what’s more likely is another military coup, or something
more nuanced—a simple change in leadership, with Than Shwe, 75 years
old and in poor health, allowed to step aside. Then, new generals would
open up talks with Aung San Suu Kyi and release her from house arrest.
Even with elections, this would not solve Burma’s fundamental problems.
Aung San Suu Kyi, as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and global media
star, could provide a moral rallying point that even the hill tribes
would accept. But the country would still be left with no public
infrastructure, no institutions, no civil society, and with various
ethnic armies that fundamentally distrust the dominant Burmans. As one
international negotiator told me, “There will be no choice but to keep
the military in a leading role for a while, because without the
military, there is nothing in Burma.” In power for so long, however
badly it has ruled, the military has made itself indispensable to any
solution. “It’s much more complicated than the beauty-and-the-beast
scenario put forth by some in the West—Aung San Suu Kyi versus the
generals,” says Lian Sakhong. “After all, we must end 60 years of civil
war.”
Burma must somehow find a way to return to the spirit of the Panglong
Agreement of February 1947, the pact that the nationalist leader,
General Aung San, negotiated among the country’s tribes shortly before
independence from Great Britain. It was based on three principles: a
state with a decentralized federal structure, recognition of the ethnic
chieftaincies in the hills, and their right of secession after a number
of years. Failure to implement that agreement, which collapsed after
Aung San’s assassination that summer, has been the cause of all the
problems since.
Meanwhile, the war continues. When I asked Karen military leaders in
the Thai border town of Mae Sot what they needed most, they told me:
assault rifles, C-4 plastic explosives to make Claymore mines, and
.50-caliber sniper systems with optics to knock out the microwave relay
stations and bull¬-dozers that the Burmese army uses to communicate and
to build roads through Karen areas.
In his bunker in the jungle capital of Naypyidaw, Than Shwe sits atop
an unsteady and restless cadre of mid-level officers and lower ranks.
He may represent the last truly centralized regime in Burma’s
postcolonial history. Whether through a peaceful, well-managed
transition or through a tumultuous or even anarchic one, the Karens and
Shans in the east and the Chins and Arakanese in the west will likely
see their power increased in a post-junta Burma. The various
natural-gas pipeline agreements will have to be negotiated or
renegotiated with the ethnic peoples living in the territories through
which the pipelines would pass. The struggle over the Indian Ocean, or
at least the eastern part of it, may, alas, come down to who deals more
adroitly with the Burmese hill tribes. It is the kind of situation that
the American Christian missionaries of yore knew how to handle.
Source:Ocnus.net 2008
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