Sebastian Strangio's Blog, page 3
August 14, 2017
The Past Isn’t Past
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Lumphat seemed forsaken by time. Stretched out along a bend of the Srepok River, this former town was now little more than a village, a mere sprinkling of civilisation in a landscape of red earth and pantone blue skies.
In the 1950s and 1960s, under Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the sleepy hamlet served as the provincial capital of Ratanakiri, an administrative outpost in the northeast of Cambodia. Until the late 1960s, when it was wiped off the map by American B-52 bombings, Lumphat sat at the frontier of the advancing Cambodian state: it had dirt roads laid out in a rough grid, with a Buddhist pagoda, a school and a few government buildings. On maps of the time it was marked by a black dot and, often, by a tiny picture of an aircraft, denoting the rudimentary airstrip that served as its main link to the outside world.
Lumphat never recovered from the bombings and the war, nor from the Khmer Rouge revolution that followed. After the ousting of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, a new provincial capital was established at Banlung, some fifteen kilometres to the north, and Lumphat was left to slumber.
When I visited in 2012, I found a village of a few hundred souls living amid the fading vestiges of the Sihanouk years. At its main intersection — a messy confluence of dirt tracks — there was a small roundabout with jaunty red arrows pointing to the right. There was a water tower, chipped and scarred by shrapnel. Facing onto the Srepok, Wat Aranharam, built in the early 1960s, sat in a yard with a flagpole and weeds that pushed up through the concrete.
I spent some time exploring what was left of the Samdech Eav Junior High School, still marked by a weather-beaten sign on the road. Most of the school buildings had been destroyed during the bombing, their walls wrapped, python-like, by creepers and vines. Just one schoolhouse remained intact, a thick layer of dust covering its chequerboard floor tiles. In the undergrowth nearby, I came across a stupa-like monument with a pointed roof. On its pediments, below the curling eaves, was stamped—shining and optimistic, and somehow still perfectly preserved—the crest of the Cambodian royal family.
The US bombing of Cambodia began in 1965, covertly, as part of an effort to cut off supply routes used by the Vietnamese communists. By 1969, the campaign had expanded into a fully fledged carpet-bombing campaign under the rubric of “Operation Breakfast”. This was followed, in due course, by a euphemistic “Menu”, comprising “Lunch”, “Snack”, “Dinner”, “Supper” and “Dessert”. After that began “Operation Freedom Deal”, which continued right up until the bombing campaign was halted by Congress in August 1973.
By then, the US had dropped more than 500,000 tons of ordnance on Cambodia, around the same that it dropped in the Pacific theatre during the Second World War. While academics and journalists have debated the death toll from the aerial bombings that destroyed towns like Lumphat — estimates run from 10,000 to more than half a million — and the question of the role they played in bringing the Khmer Rouge to power in 1975, they devastated wide swathes of the Cambodian countryside, driving thousands of rural folk from their land and scarring the landscape with lines of circular craters that can still be seen today.
More than four decades on, the history of the American bombing continues to bedevil Cambodia’s relationship with the United States. Tensions flare up over the issue every few years, usually in connection with the vexed question of whether Cambodia should pay back a $274 million loan that Washington made to the pro-US republican regime of General Lon Nol. Cambodia has refused to repay the loan, which was intended to help the government clothe and feed its people in the early 1970s, including many of those displaced by the bombing. In the years since, interest has swelled it to more than half a billion dollars.
From Washington’s perspective, the issue is simple: debts are debts, and exceptions can be made only by an explicit act of Congress. Cambodian officials counter that it is morally outrageous to ask them to repay a debt contracted by an illegal government (Lon Nol came to power in a coup d’état in 1970), in the course of a war that brought its people so much destruction. If either side is owed anything, the argument runs, it is Cambodia. As the country’s Prime Minister Hun Sen put it in a speech last year, “It is difficult for us to tell Cambodians to accept debt [that was used] to buy bombs and bullets to kill Cambodian people”.
Hun Sen, needless to say, is no dispassionate seeker of truth. Since becoming prime minister in 1985, he has picked up this history, twisted it about and wielded it as a cudgel against any critics of his government or its transgressions. He has revisited the issue with successive American administrations, testing their resolve with aggressive references to past US actions. (His latest outburst was timed to the inauguration of President Donald Trump.) But for Hun Sen, the political is also personal. Growing up in Kampong Cham in the 1960s, he personally experienced the terror of the B-52 thunder, subsequently joining the communist insurgency in order to fight the “imperialism” of the US-backed Lon Nol government.
Later, when Hun Sen defected from the Khmer Rouge military and helped overthrow the murderous regime in 1979, the new government of which he was part found itself embargoed and isolated by the US and its allies — precisely for having toppled Pol Pot. Until 1990, bipolar Cold War logic dictated that the US allow the Khmer Rouge to continue to occupy Cambodia’s seat at the United Nations (it finally vacated the seat in 1991), while support from its new-found ally China kept the movement alive in its bases along the Thai border. As the late Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national security adviser, explained it in 1985, the logic of US policy was to provide the political cover for Beijing to back Pol Pot’s movement in order to bleed Communist Vietnam. “Pol Pot was an abomination,” he said. “We could never support him, but China could.”
The Paris Peace Agreements, signed in October 1991 by Hun Sen’s government and three armed resistance factions, were supposed to bring an end to this tortured geopolitical alignment. In one sense, they succeeded: the superpowers detached themselves from Cambodia’s internal affairs, and the country emerged, after United Nations-organised elections in 1993, under the control of a single, universally recognised government. Despite the agreement, profound misunderstandings lingered.
For many US officials, the Paris Agreements and the end of the Cold War allowed an opportunity to draw a line under an uncomfortable chapter in the story of US empire. In the dawning post-Cold War order, the US would make amends for past actions by contributing to the country’s reconstruction and giving Cambodia the greatest gift of all: democracy. For Hun Sen and his colleagues, the new status quo was built on a colossal hypocrisy. The Cambodian People’s Party — formerly the Kampuchean People’s Revolutionary Party — was the one Cambodian faction that had played any role in the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge, and was therefore the one Cambodian faction with any right to rule the country. And after the experience of the 1980s, it saw democracy not as a gift from the West, but as an instrument for removing it from power.
Hun Sen sparred with US officials repeatedly throughout the 1990s, when the US — or more specifically, its Congress — emerged as one of the most outspoken critics of his government. However principled these criticisms might be — and there was plenty to criticise in the 1990s, a time of simmering civil war and violence in the streets — the Cambodian leader always stood ready to hurl history back in their faces. In 1995, in just one of many reactions to his US critics, Hun Sen gave a speech in which he threatened anti-US demonstrations and called for reparations for the US bombings of the 1960s and 1970s. “How much?”, he asked his audience sarcastically. “Only about $20 billion.”
***
By temperament, Americans are forward-looking and optimistic — perhaps overly so. Gore Vidal once wrote that the past, for his compatriots, was “a separate universe with its own quaint laws and irrelevant perceptions”. Whether or not this is the case in general, it is certainly so in the case of Cambodia, a faraway nation that the US government has never understood — or even really tried to understand — on its own terms.
It’s also true that the American political and pundit class, caught up in the quadrennial churn of the presidential cycle, moves on quickly from the wars and interventions of the past. The war in Indochina might have been a terrible mistake, but it is now firmly in the rear-view mirror, confined to the museum realm of the done-and-dusted. Whatever our past mistakes, this past is of only glancing relevance to the present. (And in any case, our intentions were good.)
More than four decades on, the history of the American bombing continues to bedevil Cambodia’s relationship with the United States.
The United States has always affected a certain aloofness from history. As the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in The Irony of American History, the US was born at the height of the Enlightenment with the sense of being a “‘separated’ nation, which God was using to make a new beginning for mankind”. Armed with a universal mission, Americans could contemplate interventions in far-off lands while thinking of themselves not as potential masters — successors to the European colonial enterprise — “but as tutors of mankind in its pilgrimage to perfection”. Within this architecture of good intentions, it is easy to see how US officials could pursue a policy of supporting a regime like the Khmer Rouge until 1990, and then turn around and lecture Cambodian leaders about accountability in 1994.
Cambodia, on the other hand, remains less able to transcend its history. It has neither the wealth and power of the United States, nor the continental basis of its optimism (“from sea to shining sea”). It reminds me of historian Garry Wills’ description of the South — the one part of the US to have known real defeat. Wills wrote that the South escaped “one of the worst character traits of America, its sappy optimism, its weakness of positive thinking. The North puffed confidently into the future, Panglossian about progress, always bound to win. But the South had lost. It knew there was an America that could be defeated.”
Cambodia has known defeat and decline — and devastation, too, worse even than that visited upon the South during Sherman’s march to the sea. For centuries it has sat amid an awkward geography, with few natural borders, its survival always in question in the face of repeated foreign interventions. Perhaps it is no surprise that, when seeking to explain his country’s recent history, Youk Chhang, the director of the US-funded Documentation Center of Cambodia, frequently reaches for William Faulkner, a Southern author: “The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past.” A more immediate reason that Cambodia’s history remains so current is that most of Cambodia’s political class came of age in the 1960s, steeped in an anti-colonial tradition that continues to dominate the country’s politics today. (Despite approaching the end of his thirty-second year in power, Hun Sen will be just sixty-five this year).
No matter how much Washington wants to put the history of the Cold War behind it, then, it remains alive for Cambodia’s government, making it difficult for the US to separate its criticisms of the CPP government from American actions of the recent past. The reason Hun Sen returns again and again to the history of the US bombing of the 1960s and 1970s is that it is both politically effective and morally unanswerable. As bad as it is and has been, what has his government done that comes even close to the devastation of “Operation Freedom Deal”?
One quirk of recent Cambodian history is that the country has been held to a different, higher standard than its neighbours; such are the wages, I suppose, of having been an international nation-building “project”. For Hun Sen’s critics in the US, Cambodian history often seems as if it began in Paris in 1991, when his government was offered, and spurned, the gift of democracy. But for these standards to remain morally tenable, they need to be balanced by the backstory. Forgiving the Cambodian debt of the early 1970s would go at least some way towards rebalancing the moral ledger. Cambodia’s pugnacious strongman has few friends in Washington, but US officials need to realise that it is possible to be right for the wrong reasons. At the end of the Cold War, the United States drew a line under its own history in Cambodia. It’s well past time for it to extend that line in the other direction as well.
Published in The Mekong Review, July-September 2017.
Suharto Museum Celebrates a Dictator’s Life, Omitting the Dark Chapters
Indonesia’s former dictator looms in bronze over the entrance to the small museum set amid the palm trees and rice fields of central Java. Depicted in a military uniform and peaked officer’s cap, he radiates calm authority over the village of his birth.
To many, the New Order regime that Suharto led from 1967 to 1998 is a byword for corruption and repression on a grand scale, including a brutal campaign of anti-communist purges that historians describe as one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century.
As president, Suharto jailed and exiled his political enemies, and crippled democratic institutions. In 2004, the antigraft organization Transparency International described Suharto as the most corrupt leader on earth, claiming that he embezzled as much as $35 billion while in power. But in a country where open discussion of his rule remains taboo, the General Suharto Memorial Museum celebrates him as a kindly father and heroic nation-builder. To some, this is a rewriting of history.
Housed in an imposing walled compound in Suharto’s hometown, Kemusuk, a short drive outside the city of Yogyakarta, the museum opened in 2013. It was built by Suharto’s younger half brother, Probosutedjo, who grew wealthy under his sibling’s rule, but in 2003 was tried and convicted of corruption. He was sentenced to four years in jail and ordered to pay back $10 million to the Indonesian state.
Gatot Nugroho, the museum’s director, said Probosutedjo, now 87, wanted to counter the criticisms of Suharto that emerged after he was forced from power amid mass pro-democracy protests in 1998.
“He built the museum so the Indonesian people could learn the positive side of Suharto’s rule,” Mr. Nugroho said.
He described the strongman as an independence hero and “father of development,” who safely navigated his country through the tumult of the Cold War.
On a recent visit, schoolchildren gazed at the foundations of the home where Suharto was born in 1921, and the well where he hauled water as a youngster. Visitors posed for photos next to a bust of the “great general,” while a music system blared New Order anthems, including the song “Suharto Is Our Father.”
Across the street, small shops sold cold drinks and souvenir T-shirts featuring an elderly Suharto smiling, above these words: “How are you doing, bro? It was better in my time, right?”
The Indonesian dictator, who died in 2008, is still largely revered in this quiet town of dusty back streets and shaded Javanese cemeteries. Locals spoke of the economic development brought by the New Order and the gifts bestowed on the area by the Suharto clan.
Biyono, 82, who runs a small shop near the museum selling cold drinks and Suharto T-shirts, said the New Order introduced electricity and paved roads to the area and took a harsh stance on crime. “If there was a criminal then, Suharto ordered them to be shot directly,” he said.
The New Order did notch some significant achievements. Suharto oversaw an economic boom, drastically reducing poverty and expanding access to health care and education. In 1984, Indonesia achieved self-sufficiency in rice production — a milestone that is celebrated at the museum.
But the museum displays are silent on the darker side to the story.
Dioramas and panels focus on Suharto’s roles in the independence struggle against the Dutch and in prying the region of Papua from colonial rule in the early 1960s. Video screens show footage of the dictator giving speeches and greeting foreign leaders, including Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
Mami Lestari, 38, a niece of Suharto’s who lives in Kemusuk, said that despite the excesses of some of her uncle’s cronies, he always stood up for the little people.
“Maybe right now people’s salaries are higher, but there is a bigger gap between the rich and the poor,” Ms. Lestari said.
In the last presidential election in 2014, the tycoon Aburizal Bakrie, the presidential nominee of Suharto’s old Golkar party, ran a campaign that leaned heavily on New Order nostalgia.
Across Java, posters and T-shirts appeared in which an elderly Suharto encouraged the public to remember how much better it was “in my time.” Golkar and members of the leader’s family have also petitioned the Indonesian government to grant him the title of “national hero,” so far unsuccessfully.
The effort to rehabilitate the New Order has been vigorously opposed by activists like Bedjo Untung, who spent nine years imprisoned without trial in the 1970s. “It is completely wrong,” said Mr. Untung of the museum. “It is manipulated history.”
Mr. Untung heads a group that seeks to open up discussion of the anti-communist massacres that Suharto presided over in late 1965 and early 1966 — a crucial episode in his ascent to power.
The killings were provoked by a failed coup against then-President Sukarno by a group within the Indonesian armed forces, during which six generals were kidnapped and executed. Suharto and other top commanders quickly quashed the uprising, pinning it on the Indonesian Communist Party.
Security forces and local vigilantes then hunted down people suspected of being communists. An estimated 500,000 people were killed, many of them innocent, and thousands more were locked up without trial.
A large section of the museum is given over to displays justifying the crackdown. Illuminated panels show gory photos of the bodies of the six executed generals, next to a life-size photo of Suharto wearing military fatigues and sunglasses.
There is no mention of the many innocent people killed. Mr. Nugroho, the museum’s director, acknowledged that some killings took place in 1965, but put them down to the spontaneous anger of the Indonesian people.
Baskara T. Wardaya, director of the Center for Democracy and Human Rights Studies at Sanata Dharma University in Yogyakarta, said it was “predictable, and to a certain extent understandable” that a museum built by Suharto’s family would present a one-sided version of history.
But when it comes to the 1965-66 events, he said, the museum mostly reflects the official story that is still told in Indonesian schoolbooks and state museums.
For Mr. Untung, the fact that a monument to Suharto’s legacy could exist while silence prevailed about the killing of thousands of innocents showed that the battle over Indonesia’s history will be drawn-out.
“Suharto is not a legitimate hero,” Mr. Untung said. “If he was a hero, my struggle will be useless.”
Published in The New York Times, August 13, 2017
Reporting for this story was supported with the kind support of the International Reporting Project.
August 11, 2017
Ghosts of Pogroms Past Haunt Indonesia
After the jailing of Jakarta’s former governor, Chinese Indonesians find themselves caught between age-old prejudice and fears of a rising China.
JAKARTA — Nearly two decades after anti-Chinese riots tore through this part of Indonesia’s capital, one busy road still bears the scars.Amid the clamor of heat and traffic of Glodok, Jakarta’s Chinatown, a row of shop-houses lies abandoned, an octagonal feng shui tile still attached to a bricked-up window. Across the street, through locked steel shutters, one can still make out the charred beams and blackened walls of rooms gutted by fire in 1998.
A nearby three-story building stands in ruins: a former furniture store destroyed during the rioting. “It’s been empty since 1998,” said Iskandar, 60, a street-side portrait painter who stores uses the space to store his wares. While the building has a Chinese owner, he said that they appear to have abandoned it. “Maybe it’s because they have bad memories,” he said. “Some of them have very bitter memories here.”
But anti-Chinese feeling in Indonesia is more than just a matter of memory. A rising tide of Islamic conservatism is now opening up the country’s ethnic fault lines as well as its religious ones. That leaves Indonesians of Chinese descent, who make up around 1.2 percent of the population and are traditionally one of the country’s most prosperous groups, dangerously vulnerable — and might magnify local tensions into international clashes.
In May 1998, when Indonesia’s dictator Suharto fell from power after 31 years, much of the popular anger was directed at Jakarta’s small but wealthy ethnic Chinese community. More than 1,000 people were killed in the riots, many of them Chinese; dozens of Chinese women and girls were raped. The Chinese were targeted on the assumption that they had grown fat from Suharto’s rule, even though many of the victims were small-scale traders.
Latif Yulus, 67, the owner of Kopi Es Tak Kie, the oldest café in Glodok, which his grandfather opened in 1927 after migrating from Guangdong, recalled a city on fire. “People were yelling, ‘burn, burn, destroy!’” he said. “It was chaos. There were fires everywhere. They took everything that they could from the Chinese.”
For many of Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese, echoes of May 1998 could be heard in the recent maelstrom surrounding Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, the jailed former governor of Jakarta who convicted of blasphemy in May and ousted from office..
The 51-year-old, better known by his nickname “Ahok,” was both ethnic Chinese and Christian — the first “double minority” to govern Indonesia’s capital for half a century. A brash, polarizing figure, his reelection campaign became the center of a sectarian storm after he referenced a passage of the Quran during a speech last September. (Around 42 percent of Indonesia’s Chinese are Christian; very few belong to the majority Muslim faith.)
After an edited version of the speech went viral, hard-line Islamist vigilante groups, including the Islamic Defenders Front, or FPI, mobilized; in late 2016 hundreds of thousands of protesters poured into the streets, calling for Ahok to be charged under Indonesia’s controversial blasphemy law. After losing an April 19 runoff election to his opponent Anies Baswedan, a court found him guilty of blasphemy and sentenced him to two years in prison.
Underpinning the anti-Ahok backlash was the creeping rise of Islamic conservatism in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation. This has been fueled by decades of funding from Saudi Arabia, which has poured billions into the construction of mosques and pesantren (Islamic boarding schools) that promote its austere brand of Wahhabi Islam.
During the Jakarta election, Ahok’s political opponents used the public’s growing piety as a weapon against the governor and his ally, President Joko Widodo. Like other Chinese in Indonesia, Latif Yulus, the café owner, now fears that the politicians and Islamist radicals who railroaded Ahok will cause further difficulties for his community in the run-up to the presidential election scheduled for 2019. “In the end, they will target the Chinese,” he said.
Ahok was in many ways the ideal target for sectarian troublemakers. Ethnic Chinese have been a part of Indonesian society for centuries, but have long been perceived as occupying a privileged perch in the country’s economic hierarchy. Michael Vatikiotis, the author of the new book Blood and Silk: Power and Conflict in Modern Southeast Asia, likened the Chinese of Indonesia to the Jews of Europe. “They are seen as a people apart,” he said, “and in their pursuit of commerce often become the victims of periodic bloodletting — pogroms, if you like.”
It is a pattern that dates to the beginning of Dutch rule in the 17th century, when Chinese merchants were granted a preferential role and helped develop Batavia (today’s Jakarta) into a flourishing entrepôt, prompting occasional eruptions of violence from other locals. These prejudices persisted after independence, and Chinese were singled out during the 1965-1966 anti-communist bloodshed that preceded Suharto’s takeover. At the time, they were seen as fifth-columnists for Communist China, then in the midst of exporting revolution throughout Southeast Asia. Since then, anti-Chinese rhetoric has tended to go hand in hand with paranoid imaginings of a renascent communism.
Suharto’s “New Order” government subsequently shuttered Chinese schools and newspapers, and banned the use of Chinese dialects. At the same time Suharto cultivated Chinese tycoons, who became economic pillars of his rule. When the Asian financial crisis hit Indonesia in 1997, setting off protests that culminated in Suharto’s overthrow the following year, popular anger was directed at the familiar scapegoat.
Charlotte Setijadi, a fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, said that Ahok came to embody many traditional stereotypes about ethnic Chinese — a perception only amplified by Jakarta’s widening gap between rich and poor. “He was kind of like the perfect embodiment of all of that: a Chinese Christian, an impolite man in a position of power, who insulted the faith of the majority of Indonesians,” she said.
As a result, opinions about Ahok are divided among Jakarta’s Chinese. While many people express pride that one of their own could rise so high, others accuse him of disturbing the city’s delicate ethnic balance. “It’s better to stay quiet,” said Ie Tiat Fo, 57, a Hokkien textile merchant in Glodok. “When he chose to be quiet, everything was okay.”
But this defensive crouch may be harder to sustain in an era in which China has become a formidable economic and political power in Southeast Asia. China is now Indonesia’s top trading partner, and recently overtook the United States to become the country’s third-largest source of foreign investment. These ties are straining relations on the ground, where Chinese are resented as newcomers and interlopers.
President Joko Widodo has generally welcomed Chinese investments, including a $5 billion high-speed rail line connecting the capital to the West Java city of Bandung. But Chinese firms’ importation of mainland workers to complete infrastructure projects has recently fanned the flames of anti-China sentiment.
During the Ahok affair, rumors circulated on Facebook claiming that the governor was reclaiming land in northern Jakarta to house 10 million mainland Chinese workers (according to official figures, 21,271 work permits have been granted to Chinese); another “fake news” item involved a purported Chinese plot to import dried chilies infested with bacteria. Many of these claims were repeated to me in a recent interview with Habib Muschin Alatas, a senior FPI leader, who denounced Ahok quite openly as an “agent of Chinese imperialism.”
Setijadi, the scholar in Singapore, said the emergence of China has put Chinese Indonesians in an awkward position. They are well-placed to act as an economic, cultural, and linguistic “bridge” between mainland China and Indonesia. But in doing so, they run the risk of reinforcing old prejudices about their divided loyalties. She has observed that positive perceptions of China rarely transfer to Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese, “while negative stuff almost certainly gets connected to Chinese Indonesians.”
One prominent Chinese-Indonesian businessman, who requested anonymity, said that Indonesia had a great deal to gain from China: “There’s real meat there. You have Chinese who have lots of capital … and we need that capital to invest in infrastructure.”
While anti-Chinese sentiment would probably never go away, the businessman said that the outcome of the Ahok election was actually a sign of the resilience of Indonesian tolerance. “A Christian Chinese governor, who was extremely divisive and rude, still won 42 percent of the votes,” he said.
Still, the Indonesian situation hints at the ways in which China’s rise might affect the Chinese diasporas scattered across Southeast Asia. Next door in Malaysia, where ethnic Chinese make up around a fifth of the population, a $38 billion Chinese real estate megaproject in the state of Johor, bordering Singapore, has become the focus of fresh anti-Chinese politicking by Malay politicians.
Among them are nonagenarian former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who has turned on his former protégé, Prime Minister Najib Razak, accusing his government of selling off the country’s “most valuable land” to foreigners — an issue that now looms over elections due in 2018. Significant Chinese diasporas also exist in Myanmar and Vietnam — two nations that are apprehensive about China’s rapid rise, and also have histories of anti-Chinese attacks and discrimination.
Vatikiotis said that in Indonesia, fears of China have yet to really connect with local anti-Chinese prejudice, which remain overwhelmingly rooted in local economic inequalities, perceived or otherwise. A more pressing question was what Beijing might do in response to another round of bloodletting.
The 1998 riots prompted a nationalist backlash on the Chinese mainland, where the incident is now remembered as “Black May.” In August 1998, demonstrators in Beijing defied a government ban to protest both the Indonesian violence and what many saw as the lukewarm response from their own government, which initially forbade domestic reporting on the riots.
Christine Susanna Tjhin of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta, who has done extensive research in China, said that the incident still resonates there. From taxidrivers to students to members of the business community, she said, “the image of May ’98 is firmly ingrained in the minds of mainland Chinese.”
Though the Chinese reaction was muted in 1998, a far more powerful Beijing is unlikely to take such a hands-off position today. In 2006, when anti-Chinese violence tore through Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands, Beijing responded immediately by evacuating 312 ethnic Chinese residents by air. The episode received extensive coverage in Chinese state media, which declared that “the government attaches great importance to the security and rights of the overseas Chinese.” Though it is hard to say just what Beijing’s reaction would be in Indonesia, Vatikiotis said that “there is every indication” that Beijing is watching closely, and would be “willing to do something to help its fellow Chinese.”
Despite their uncertain place between rising domestic tensions and a rising China, most Chinese Indonesians say their loyalties are clear. In Glodok, I talked with the owner of a small restaurant selling soto betawi, a local beef soup. Giving his name only as Afung, the 73-year-old spoke about his parents’ migration to Indonesia from Guangdong in 1940.
Afung said he was proud of his heritage — “everywhere we can see the sunrise, the Chinese are there,” he said — but it was hard to feel allegiance to a country that he has never seen with his own eyes. “I was born in Indonesia,” he said, “and I will die in Indonesia.”
Published by Foreign Policy, August 11, 2017
Reporting for this story was supported by a grant from the International Reporting Project.
July 8, 2017
Myanmar refugees find a foothold in North Carolina
For the Myanmar residents of Chapel Hill, hopes of a return home are tempered by fears of continued ethnic tensions
CHAPEL HILL, North Carolina — It has been 20 years since Lupu last saw his hometown, a small village in the hills of eastern Myanmar. One day in 1997, he and his family fled after the Myanmar military arrived on an operation against ethnic rebels from the Karen National Union, torching homes, killing livestock, and destroying paddy fields. “If you ran, they caught you,” the 42-year-old recalled. “If the police thought you belonged to the KNU, they killed you immediately.”
Two decades on, Lupu finds reminders of his homeland at Transplanting Traditions, a community farm outside the college town of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, that has become a center for the area’s large and growing community of refugees from Myanmar.
Amid the rows of beans and strawberries, there are hints of the country Lupu left behind. Children play on shaded bamboo platforms; signs are written in Burmese script; and there is even the occasional sour smell of betel nut, Myanmar’s national stimulant of choice. Since its establishment in 2010, the farm has also given Myanmar migrants the space to grow crops from the old country, including snake gourds, roselle leaf, pennywort, lemongrass and fiery chilies. “I feel like I’m back in Burma when I come here,” Lupu said. “In my mind I can see the country that I come from.”
His recollections of Myanmar’s longest-running civil war seem a world away from the sunshine and pollen of North Carolina, nicknamed the Tarheel State, which has become home to a large and growing community of refugees from Myanmar, many of them Karen.
Flicka Bateman, director of the Refugee Support Center in nearby Carrboro, which aids recent arrivals, said that the first Myanmar refugees came to the area in the early 2000s to take up housekeeping jobs at the University of North Carolina, which required no English and provided good benefits. Since then, the presence of community and family networks has attracted more arrivals. “It’s just snowballed,” she said.
North Carolina’s Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill “triangle” is now home to one of the largest Karen communities in the U.S., alongside the large communities in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Omaha, Nebraska. There are some 3,000 Karen in the area, in addition to smaller numbers of Chin, Burman, Rohingya and other Myanmar ethnic groups, said Eh Tha Pwee, 46, who heads the Karen Community of North Carolina, a local organization.
Troubled homeland
Despite being far from their troubled homeland, political developments in Myanmar are still followed with great interest, particularly since the election victory of Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy in November 2015. Many refugees expressed disappointment that the Nobel laureate had failed to end Myanmar’s wars and heal its deep ethnic divisions. Eh Tha Pwee said that Suu Kyi’s main aim was to “lure” Western governments back to the country with promises of reform, but that she cared little about ethnic minority people. “They want to make Burma as a Burmese country — a pure Burmese country,” he said.
People admitted that a lot has changed since political reforms began in 2011, including the possibility of returning home. Myanmar’s recent opening even prompts comparisons with Vietnam, another war-torn country where, four decades after the communist victory in 1975, former refugees are now returning to fuel an economic resurgence.
According to census data, some 4.25 million people born in Myanmar live abroad, a source of human potential that could one day play an important role in the country’s development. Eh Tha Pwee said that many refugees in North Carolina expressed a desire to contribute in some way to their homeland’s development. After earning a degree in business administration in India, he said his own goal was “to go back to Karen State and establish a business to help Karen people.”
Khin Shwe Aye, a 22-year-old Karen woman who came to the country with her parents as a child in 2001, said she was aware of how lucky she was to reach the U.S., but “definitely” wanted to do something to benefit her homeland. “I know I have to get more education, and experience, and money to go back, to find a way to help them,” she said over coffee in nearby Carrboro, where her mother and stepfather run a small grocery store selling Myanmar specialties like betel nut and pickled tealeaf.
But while Vietnam’s political divisions have faded, Myanmar’s ethnic divisions remain entrenched — even in the U.S. Khin Shwe Aye recalled how in middle school, refugee students would form themselves into separate cliques: Karen, Burman and Chin. “Like, they would separate the ethnic groups,” she said. “We never seemed to be judged as one group.”
Reports from home
This mistrust continues to be fertilized by reports from back home, including allegations that the military is building Burman Buddhist temples and statues of Gen. Aung San — widely considered the architect of independence, and the father of Suu Kyi — throughout Karen State, in a bid to dilute local identity. Several times in interviews around Chapel Hill I heard a quote attributed to Gen. Ket Sein, who reportedly said in 1992: “In 10 years all the Karen will be dead. If you want to see a Karen, you will have to go to a museum in Rangoon.”
Continuing tension has also complicated the return or resettlement of those still in the string of refugee camps along the Thai border. While the situation in Karen State has improved since the KNU’s signing of a Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement in 2015, voluntary repatriations from the camps back into Myanmar have been slow.
Duncan McArthur, the director of the Border Consortium, which coordinates aid to the camps, said that while around 13,000 refugees had returned to Myanmar in the past four years, 98,000 remained. “The democratization and peace-building processes have not built as much confidence amongst refugees as one might have hoped, which is largely because there has not been any troop withdrawals from contested areas,” he said.
Jimmy Shwe, a pastor at the Karen Chapel Hill Seventh Day Adventist Church, who came to the U.S. after more than 20 years in a refugee camp, said that while many refugees in North Carolina wished to return, it would not be easy — and not just because of the conflict. “We’d have to start a new life again, the same as we started a new life in the U.S.,” he said at his home in Chapel Hill.
For now, the Myanmar community in North Carolina is doing its best to put down new roots. Maung Paung is an ethnic Chin farmer who arrived in the U.S. in 2008, after fleeing forced porter duty in the military. Shortly after arriving he underwent surgery to remove a piece of shrapnel from his leg. When asked what first struck him about life in America, he answered with a single Burmese word, lokelatye — “freedom.”
As his wife Cing Neam dished out a picnic lunch from a cooler painted with the blue logo of the Tarheels, the local university football team, Maung Paung spoke about his son, 23, currently at community college. He hoped his son might one day return to Myanmar to help his people. “We have many, many steps to go if you compare Burma and America, Burma and many other countries,” he said. “But I feel there’s been a little bit of change.”
Published in the Nikkei Asian Review, July 8, 2017
June 2, 2017
Cambodian Democracy Makes Its Last Gasps
An indifferent United States and assertive China have emboldened one of Asia’s longest-serving leaders to embrace outright authoritarianism.
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Two weeks ahead of local elections in Cambodia, the country’s long-serving prime minister issued a stern warning to undecided voters. In a May 25 speech that the local Cambodia Daily described as a “mammoth three-hour rant,” Hun Sen accused the main opposition party of plotting a “color revolution” to overthrow the government and said the armed forces stood ready to see off any challenge. Delving into specifics, he then announced that he was willing to “eliminate 100 or 200 people” in order to preserve his party’s hold on power.
Hun Sen has been no stranger to violent rhetoric during his 32 years in power, but such a chillingly specific threat spoke to the depth of his party’s concern ahead of the June 4 elections. Warnings of a destabilizing “color revolution” have become a mainstay of government rhetoric since 2013, when tens of thousands of Cambodians poured into the streets to protest alleged widespread voter fraud at that year’s national election. (The language is taken straight from Chinese media, which regularly scaremonger about “color revolutions,” by which they mean not popular uprisings but illegitimate, foreign-influenced coups.)
While commune elections don’t usually attract much attention outside Cambodia — the poll won’t elect a new government, only local officials in each of the country’s 1,646 communes — a strong showing for the opposition could give it vital momentum heading toward the next national election, scheduled for mid-2018. It could also be the final push for Hun Sen to discard the remaining substance of Cambodian democracy. This reflects the broader retreat of democratic principles in Southeast Asia, a region that has seen serious reverses in Thailand, where a coup brought Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha to power in 2014, and the Philippines, where a “drug war” waged by President Rodrigo Duterte has claimed more than 8,000 victims. With China eager to back potential autocrats, and the United States in retreat from global affairs and human rights promotion, Hun Sen and others see a chance to solidify power and cast off the troubling trappings of democracy.
In 2012, the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) won around 60 percent of the vote and gained control of more than 97 percent of commune councils, amid scattered claims of intimidation and flawed voter lists, but hemorrhaged support at the following year’s national election. Then, as now, the main challenger was the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), which has effectively harnessed the deep public discontent linked to the government land grabs, deforestation, and myriad varieties of corruption that have flourished on Hun Sen’s watch, salting the stew with potent anti-Vietnamese appeals. On a stop during the official two-week campaign period, CNRP President Kem Sokha said his party was primed to win a majority at both upcoming elections, declaring that support for the CNRP was “stronger than at any other time, both in the city and in rural areas.”
The rising opposition poses a potentially existential threat to the CPP, which was installed into power by communist Vietnam after its 1979 overthrow of the murderous Khmer Rouge regime. In the years since, the CPP has repeatedly trumpeted its role in ending Cambodia’s nightmare and depicted itself as the only thing preventing the country from spiraling back into chaos. But that message is increasingly lost on a young generation with little or no experience of the country’s past turmoil and which has become fed up with the lack of opportunities and endemic corruption that has mushroomed under Hun Sen.
“The Cambodian people are ready to go for the election on June 4,” said But Buntenh, a dissident monk who heads the Independent Monk Network for Social Justice, which sits outside the official, CPP-controlled Buddhist hierarchy. “Most of them think this is a time to change to a real democracy.”
While political crackdowns are seasonal events in Cambodian politics, usually coinciding with the electoral cycle, the current repressive phase has gone further than at any time since the mid-1990s.
But whether Asia’s longest-serving autocrat will allow even the possibility of change is another question. Hun Sen’s threats carry weight. Twenty years ago next month, Hun Sen’s forces launched a lightning strike against his royalist rival and coalition partner, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, murdering many of his key commanders. Human Rights Watch, a longtime nemesis of the Cambodian leader, claims that more than 300 people have been killed in politically motivated attacks since 1991. In that time, Hun Sen has ruled Cambodia through guile and manipulation, underpinned by a supple form of patron-client politics that has bound him closely to a mesh of loyal political, military, and business elites.
In 2013, reeling from the CPP’s loss of support, Hun Sen promised reforms. He reshuffled his cabinet (twice) and announced wage hikes for soldiers, teachers, and garment workers. He pledged to wipe out illegal logging and timber smuggling. After being caught out by the CNRP’s use of social media in 2013, the 64-year-old strongman even became an avid convert to Facebook, using it to soften his belligerent public persona and project a more responsive, populist image to the public.
At the same time, the government has launched an unprecedented political crackdown. Over the past two years, it has arrested a wide array of individuals including two opposition senators, a prominent land rights activist, and a group of staffers from the Cambodian human rights organization ADHOC. (Another local human rights group puts the current count of political prisoners at 25.) In February, the government tweaked political party rules to give the courts the power to abolish political parties on a range of vague pretenses, a move that forced exiled longtime opposition leader Sam Rainsy to resign as president of the CNRP. Kem Sokha, who took over the top CNRP job in March, was also targeted last year by a “sex scandal” involving a young hairdresser, leaked phone conversations, and confected allegations of witness tampering. In July 2016, this political sparring reached a horrific climax with the killing of Kem Ley, a grassroots political organizer, who was gunned down at a Phnom Penh petrol station and has since become an icon of opposition to CPP rule.
Phay Siphan, a spokesman for the Council of Ministers, as Cambodia’s cabinet is known, denied any political motive to the recent arrests, saying that those in jail had simply violated the law. He also said Hun Sen’s threats had been blown out of proportion by the foreign press and accused the CNRP of campaigning to “incite the people against CPP members.”
While political crackdowns are seasonal events in Cambodian politics, usually coinciding with the electoral cycle, the current repressive phase has gone further than at any time since the mid-1990s. “They seem more draconian, sinister, and clever than usual,” said Sophal Ear, the author of Aid Dependence in Cambodia: How Foreign Assistance Undermines Democracy. “I guess the message is: If you can’t beat them, dissolve them.”
Former opposition leader Sam Rainsy said in this context there was no way the upcoming election could be seen as even minimally free and fair and called on the United States and Western governments to stand up for democratic principles. “Only the prospect of international isolation can push Hun Sen to reverse his authoritarian drift and to show more respect for democratic rules and principles,” Sam Rainsy said in an email.
Cambodia’s autocratic turn has been aided by the decline of Western leverage as Chinese power has risen in the region. Over the past two decades, Hun Sen has been one of the greatest beneficiaries of China’s economic and political emergence, receiving billions of dollars in soft loans and infrastructure funding. Cambodia has been an enthusiastic participant in China’s new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and when Chinese President Xi Jinping presided over last month’s showcase Belt and Road Forum in Beijing, Hun Sen was among the 28 world leaders in attendance.
In return for Chinese support, the Cambodian government has supported Beijing’s position on a range of issues, including China’s contentious claims in the South China Sea. The Cambodian government has even started promoting a Khmer-language edition of Xi’s doorstopper, The Governance of China.
The long-term effect of Chinese backing has been to effectively mark an end to the era inaugurated by the 1991 Paris Peace Agreements, which created the country’s current democratic political system, and the subsequent United Nations peacekeeping mission that presided over landmark elections in 1993. While Cambodian democracy has always been shallow, a side effect is that the country’s political space has been subject to close scrutiny by Western governments, international development agencies, human rights monitors, and a bevy of local civil society groups, many of them supported by foreign donor funding.
China’s aggressive strategic push has been matched by the apparent retreat of U.S. influence under President Donald Trump.
Foreign scrutiny has produced a seesawing political climate, in which periods of repression have alternated with phases of relative freedom, carefully calibrated to maintain the support of traditional aid donors like the United States, Australia, and the European Union. Now, with domestic support rising and Beijing offering an escape hatch from Western pressure to improve governance and respect for human rights, Hun Sen has the ability to make the current crackdown a more permanent feature of the Cambodian political landscape.
As elsewhere in Southeast Asia, China’s aggressive strategic push has been matched by the apparent retreat of U.S. influence under President Donald Trump. As if to preempt American criticisms of the upcoming election, the Cambodian government has taken recent steps to unilaterally downgrade its relationship with Washington, canceling a planned bilateral military exercise and kicking out a U.S. naval engineering battalion that was building schools and maternity wards. In April, the Cambodian Foreign Ministry issued an 11-page “white paper” defending its record and slamming Western governments for colluding with nongovernmental organizations and media outlets that have “twisted historical facts and events in an attempt to portray a negative image of Cambodia”—another distinct echo of China, which regularly publishes such “white papers” lauding its own human rights and attacking the West. Lao Mong Hay, a human rights activist and longtime critic of Hun Sen’s government, said the prime minister was unlikely to give up power willingly, unless he suffered a “big defeat” at the 2018 election.
Even if the aging Cambodian leader survives these elections without a repeat of past events, it will not resolve the contradiction at the heart of Cambodia’s political system: that true reform would undermine the powerful interests that have propped up the CPP for so long. One way or another, Hun Sen will have to find ways to address the rising expectations of a young, connected, and increasingly demanding population. “He’s been in power 32 years. His party has been in power 38 years,” Sophal Ear said. “At some point, things change whether you want them to or not.”
Published by Foreign Policy, June 2, 2017
March 8, 2017
Pankaj Mishra on the Violent Transition to Modernity
At the center of gravity shifts east, Pankaj Mishra argues that the West’s own fateful experience of modernity is playing out globally
IN HIS FINAL YEARS, the late historian Tony Judt spilled much ink lamenting the decline of Western social democracy. In a series of articles and talks that culminated in his final book Ill Fares the Land (2010), he argued that in an age of market fundamentalism, the achievements of the European welfare state had been vastly understated. Not only did its social safety nets underpin the long economic boom of the decades after 1950, but by promoting equitable growth, they also foreclosed the return of extremist politics to Europe, ushering its industrialized western half into a halcyon era of prosperous security.
Consequently, Judt viewed the eclipse of the welfare state by privatization and free market economics in the late 20th century with great consternation. In his last public speech in late 2009, he expressed concern that the embrace of the market faith was pushing Europe and North America toward a new “age of insecurity” — one foreshadowed by the financial catastrophe of 2008. “Few in the West are old enough to know just what it means to watch our world collapse,” he said. “Why have we been in such a hurry to tear down the dikes laboriously set in place by our predecessors? Are we so sure that there are no floods to come?”
Well, the deluge is here. In the United States, a wave of populist nativism has swept Donald Trump into the White House. Across the Atlantic, the ghosts of nationalism have returned, casting shadows over the future of the European Union. The same, and worse, is happening in places that never enjoyed the benefits of European-style social democracy in the first place. Cultural chauvinism is resurgent in Russia, India, and Turkey, while large parts of the Middle East are in the grip of chaos and a horrifying extremism. Everywhere, Pankaj Mishra argues in his new book Age of Anger, the driving force is the same: a deep disillusionment with economic globalization and its beneficiaries, which, far from spreading prosperity and “universal civilization” around the globe, have created dislocation and inequality on an unprecedented scale.
At the same time, this provocative book argues, our current malaise is nothing new. The world’s present turmoil — from the rise of ISIS in the Middle East to the populist forces reshaping global politics — echoes the West’s own violent transition to modernity two centuries ago. If Western pundits persist in seeing these changes as unprecedented, it is because they cling to a faith that under the influence of modernization, the world is slowly converging toward “a benevolent Enlightenment tradition of rationalism, humanism, and liberal democracy.” But as Mishra argues, these assumptions overlook both the contingency of the current liberal order — what Tony Judt came to recognize as a late 20th-century “parenthesis” — and the West’s own “extraordinarily brutal initiation into political and economic modernity.” In simplifying history, he writes, we have adopted a dangerous illusion.
Mishra may well be the ideal writer to diagnose our current moment. For more than two decades, the Indian essayist has grappled with the epochal question of what it means to be modern. His first book Butter Chicken in Ludhiana (1995) chronicled the effects of the global free market on the rhythms of small-town India. In From the Ruins of Empire (2012), he documented how Asian intellectuals grappled with the challenge of Western imperialism, responding with a mixture of resentful mimicry, cultural humiliation, and reactionary nationalism. Like the British philosopher John Gray, Mishra has become one of the most interesting public intellectuals in the West: a sort of anti-Thomas Friedman who tears down the reigning clichés of our political and intellectual elites.
Trying to account for the rise of al-Qaeda and the spectacular violence of ISIS, Western pundits have fallen back on cultural explanations
Written after Narendra Modi’s election in India and completed right before the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, Age of Anger offers a scathing broadside against the historical provincialism of our current moment. Since 1989, Mishra writes, we have lived in an Age of No Alternatives, in which all the key questions about human affairs are deemed to have been settled. Francis Fukuyama famously argued the collapse of the Soviet Union had led us to the “end of history,” a world in which the prosperity and liberal democracy of postwar Western Europe and North America was seen not as a hard-won contingency, but as something like the resting state of humanity. These “bland fanatics of Western civilization,” as the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr termed them, posited a self-reinforcing pattern of global convergence: as economic growth accelerated, national borders would melt away and societies in Asia, Latin America, and Africa would become, like Europe and North America, more secular and rational.
[image error]These “dangerously misleading ideas,” Mishra argues, not only elided the “carnage and bedlam” that accompanied the West’s own transition to modernity; they have also made us spectacularly ill-equipped to explain the current global turmoil. Trying to account for the rise of al-Qaeda and the spectacular violence of ISIS, Western pundits have fallen back on cultural explanations, many positing “a worldwide clash of civilizations in which Islam is pitted against the West, and religion against reason.”
Age of Anger argues that the roots of our current turmoil lie much deeper: in the contradictions of modernity itself. Since its origins in 18th-century Western Europe, Mishra argues, secular modernity has held out the promise of freedom, equality, and the transcendence of history — only to repeatedly fall short of the mark. Everywhere, the creation of a modern commercial society has been experienced as both a dizzying excitement and a wrenching dislocation. Disrupting old religious and social structures, but often failing to fulfill its own promises of emancipation, it has created powerful countercurrents of what Nietzsche termed ressentiment, “an existential resentment of other people’s being, caused by an intense mix of envy and sense of humiliation and powerlessness.”
Mishra traces this contradiction back to the 18th-century Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the first Enlightenment thinkers to take aim at its shortcomings. A gruff outsider once described by Isaiah Berlin as “the greatest militant lowbrow in history,” Rousseau repeatedly faced off against Voltaire and the philosophes, staunch advocates of secular rationality and the commercial society then emerging in Britain and France. Rousseau argued that the urbane philosophes — forerunners of today’s TED-talkers and “networked elites” — had deposed superstition and religion only to replace it with an alienating new world of wealth, privilege, vanity, and endless striving. In its place, Rousseau tried to articulate a social order in which “virtue and human character rather than commerce and money were central to politics,” a community in which “the tension between man’s inner life and his social nature could be resolved,” even if this part of his argument remained somewhat vague.
While Rousseau’s existential yearning had its own dark side — Mishra shows how it would inspire future generations of exclusionary nationalists in Germany and elsewhere — he was the first person to think seriously about the problems of the new secular, commercial society. He saw “the deep contradictions in a predominantly materialist ethic and a society founded on individuals enviously emulating the rich and craving their privileges.” Conducting a swift tour through the work of key 18th- and 19th-century thinkers — from Diderot and Dostoyevsky to Rimbaud and Tocqueville — Mishra charts the march of commercial society as it migrated eastward to Germany and Russia, and then, at the point of a Western gun, to societies in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. As he shows, ressentiment was never far behind.
It is this, Mishra writes, that connects today’s terrorists — from lone-wolf operators like Timothy McVeigh to the bearded scions of al-Qaeda and ISIS — to the generation of anarchists and messianic revolutionaries that emerged from the maelstrom of modernizing Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries. These include half-forgotten figures like Giuseppe Mazzini, who promoted militant nationalism as a replacement for religion, and the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who saw history as a blank slate on which the visionary individual could inscribe his own destiny through theatrical acts of violence.
Mishra may well be the ideal writer to diagnose our current moment
Mishra depicts the smartphone-toting fighters of ISIS as radically modern figures, “the canniest and most resourceful of all traders in the flourishing international economy of disaffection.” Poorly versed in Koranic scripture, they resemble less the flock of the seventh-century Prophet than the followers of Gabriele D’Annunzio, the Italian nationalist poet, who, in 1919, took over the Adriatic town of Fiume and proclaimed a proto-fascist “free state,” complete with black uniforms and the raised-arm salute — a comic opera preview of the real fascisms to come.
Today, as power’s center of gravity shifts east, Mishra argues that the West’s own fateful experience of modernity is playing out globally. From Egypt and Syria and the slums of Mumbai, hundreds of millions of people “herded by capitalism and technology into a common present” have become marginal to the workings of global capital, creating powerful new vectors of ressentiment. It has also returned with a vengeance to the West, the homeland of secular modernity, where “the mythic Volk” — “Make America Great Again” — “has reappeared as a spur to solidarity and action against real and imagined enemies.”
We live in revolutionary times. In Age of Anger, Mishra has produced an urgent analysis of a moment in which the forgotten and dispossessed are rising up to challenge everything we thought we knew about the state of the world. It will be a time of “blunt reckonings,” Mishra writes, one calling “for some truly transformative thinking, about both the self and the world.” Beyond this, he offers little in the way of solutions. But the wisest response may be to accept that the modern contradiction is unsolvable, and get to work erecting bulwarks against the deluges to come.
Published by the Los Angeles Review of Books, March 1, 2017
March 7, 2017
Welcome to the Post-Human Rights World
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Geopolitical realignments and the rise of populist nationalism have unleashed a global backlash against human rights.
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Less than two months in, President Donald Trump is already shaping up as a disaster for human rights. From his immigration ban to his support for torture, Trump has jettisoned what has long been, in theory if not always in practice, a bipartisan American commitment: the promotion of democratic values and human rights abroad.
Worse is probably set to come. Trump has lavished praise on autocrats and expressed disdain for international institutions. He described Egyptian strongman Abdel Fattah al-Sisi as a “fantastic guy” and brushed off reports of repression by the likes of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan. As Trump put it in his bitter inauguration address, “It is the right of all nations to put their own interests first. We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone.” Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, has written that Trump’s election has brought the world to “the verge of darkness” and threatens to “reverse the accomplishments of the modern human rights movement.”
But this threat is not new. In fact, the rise of Trump has only underlined the existential challenges already facing the global rights project. Over the past decade, the international order has seen a structural shift in the direction of assertive new powers, including Xi Jinping’s China and Putin’s Russia, that have openly challenged rights norms while at the same time crushing dissent in contested territories like Chechnya and Tibet. These rising powers have not only clamped down on dissent at home; they have also given cover to rights-abusing governments from Manila to Damascus. Dictators facing Western criticism can now turn to the likes of China for political backing and “no-strings” financial and diplomatic support.
This trend has been strengthened by the Western nationalist-populist revolt that has targeted human rights institutions and the global economic system in which they are embedded. With populism sweeping the world and new superpowers in the ascendant, post-Westphalian visions of a shared global order are giving way to an era of resurgent sovereignty. Unchecked globalization and liberal internationalism are giving way to a post-human rights world.
All this amounts to an existential challenge to the global human rights norms that have proliferated since the end of World War II. In that time, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, has been supplemented by a raft of treaties and conventions guaranteeing civil and political rights, social and economic rights, and the rights of refugees, women, and children. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War served to further entrench human rights within the international system. Despite the world’s failure to prevent mass slaughter in places like Rwanda and Bosnia, the 1990s would see the emergence of a global human rights imperium: a cross-border, transnational realm anchored in global bodies like the U.N. and the European Union and supervised by international nongovernmental organizations and a new class of professional activists and international legal experts.
The professionalization of human rights was paralleled by the advance of international criminal justice. The decade saw the creation of ad hoc tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia and the signing in 1998 of the Rome Statute that created the International Criminal Court — an achievement that then-U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan hailed as a “giant step forward in the march towards universal human rights and the rule of law.” On paper, citizens in most countries now enjoy around 400 distinct rights. As Michael Ignatieff wrote in 2007, human rights have become nothing short of “the dominant language of the public good around the globe.”
Crucially, this legal and normative expansion was underpinned by an unprecedented period of growth and economic integration in which national borders appeared to disappear and the world shrink under the influence of globalization and technological advance. Like the economic system in which it was embedded, the global human rights project attained a sheen of inevitability; it became, alongside democratic politics and free market capitalism, part of the triumphant neoliberal package that Francis Fukuyama identified in 1989 as “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution.”
In 2013, one of America’s foremost experts on international law, Peter J. Spiro, predicted that legal advances and economic globalization had brought on “sovereigntism’s twilight.” Fatou Bensouda, the current chief prosecutor of the ICC, has argued similarly that the creation of the court inaugurated a new era of post-Westphalian politics in which rulers would now be held accountable for serious abuses committed against their own people. (So far, no sitting government leader has.)
But in 2017, at a time of increasing instability, in which the promised fruits of globalization have failed for many to materialize, these old certainties have collapsed. In the current “age of anger,” as Pankaj Mishra has termed it, human rights have become both a direct target of surging right-wing populism and the collateral damage of its broader attack on globalization, international institutions, and “unaccountable” global elites.
If the human rights age was one in which the contours of history were clear, today it is no longer obvious that history has any such grand design.
The outlines of this new world can be seen from Europe and the Middle East to Central Asia and the Pacific. Governments routinely ignore their obligations under global human rights treaties with little fear of meaningful sanction. For six years, grave atrocities in Syria have gone unanswered, despite the legal innovations of the “responsibility to protect” doctrine. Meanwhile, many European governments are reluctant to honor their legal obligations to offer asylum to the hundreds of thousands of people fleeing its brutal civil war.
To be sure, not all of these developments are new; international rights treaties have always represented an aspirational baseline to which many nations have fallen short. But the human rights age was one in which the world, for all its shortfalls, seemed to be trending in the direction of more adherence, rather than less. It was a time in which human rights advocates and supportive leaders spoke confidently of standing on the “right side of history” and even the world’s autocrats were forced to pay lip service to the idea of rights.
If the human rights age was one in which the contours of history were clear, today it is no longer obvious that history has any such grand design. According to the latest Freedom in the World report, released in January by Freedom House, 2016 marked the 11th consecutive year of decline in global freedom. It was also a year in which 67 countries suffered net declines in political freedoms and civil liberties. Keystone international institutions are also under siege. In October, three African states — South Africa, Burundi, and Gambia — announced their withdrawal from the ICC, perhaps the crowning achievement of the human rights age. (Gambia has since reversed its decision, following the January resignation of autocratic President Yahya Jammeh.) Angry that the ICC unfairly targets African defendants, leaders on the continent are now mulling a collective withdrawal from the court.
African criticism reflects governments’ increasing confidence in rejecting human rights as “Western” values and painting any local organization advocating these principles as a pawn of external forces. China and India have both introduced restrictive new laws that constrain the work of foreign NGOs and local groups that receive foreign funding, including organizations advocating human rights. In Russia, a “foreign agent law” passed in 2012 has been used to tightly restrict the operation of human rights NGOs and paint any criticism of government policies as disloyal, foreign-sponsored, and “un-Russian.”
In the West, too, support for human rights is wavering. In his successful campaign in favor of “Brexit,” Nigel Farage, then-leader of the UK Independence Party, attacked the European Convention on Human Rights, claiming that it had compromised British security by preventing London from barring the return of British Islamic State fighters from the Middle East. During the U.S. election campaign, Donald Trump demonized minorities, advocated torture, expressed admiration for dictators — and still won the White House. Meanwhile, a recent report suggests that Western support for international legal institutions like the ICC is fickle, lasting only “as long as it targets other problems in other countries.”
In the post-human rights world, global rights norms and institutions will continue to exist but only in an increasingly ineffective form. This will be an era of renewed superpower competition, in what Robert Kaplan has described as a “more crowded, nervous, anxious world.” The post-human rights world will not be devoid of grassroots political struggles, however. On the contrary, these could well intensify as governments tighten the space for dissenting visions and opinions. Indeed, the wave of domestic opposition to Trump’s policies is an early sign that political activism may be entering a period of renewed power and relevance.
What, then, is to be done? As many human rights activists have already acknowledged, fresh approaches are required. In December, RightsStart, a new human rights consultancy hub, launched itself by suggesting five strategies that international rights NGOs can use to adapt to the “existential crisis” of the current moment. (Full disclosure: I have previously worked with one of its founders.) Among them was the need for these groups to “communicate more effectively” the importance of human rights and use international advocacy more often as a platform for local voices. Philip Alston, a human rights veteran and law professor at New York University, has argued that the human rights movement will also have to confront the fact that it has never offered a satisfactory solution to the key driver of the current populist surge: global economic inequality.
In a broader sense, the global human rights project will have to shed its pretensions of historical inevitability and get down to the business of making its case to ordinary people. With authoritarian politics on the rise, now is the time to re-engage in politics and to adopt more pragmatic and flexible tactics for the advancement of human betterment. Global legal advocacy will continue to be important, but efforts should predominantly be directed downward, to national courts and legislatures. It is here that right-wing populism has won its shattering victories. It is here, too, that the coming struggle against Trumpism and its avatars will ultimately be lost or won.
Published by Foreign Policy, March 7, 2017
March 1, 2017
Pankaj Mishra on the Violent Transition to Modernity
At the center of gravity shifts east, Pankaj Mishra argues that the West’s own fateful experience of modernity is playing out globally
IN HIS FINAL YEARS, the late historian Tony Judt spilled much ink lamenting the decline of Western social democracy. In a series of articles and talks that culminated in his final book Ill Fares the Land (2010), he argued that in an age of market fundamentalism, the achievements of the European welfare state had been vastly understated. Not only did its social safety nets underpin the long economic boom of the decades after 1950, but by promoting equitable growth, they also foreclosed the return of extremist politics to Europe, ushering its industrialized western half into a halcyon era of prosperous security.
Consequently, Judt viewed the eclipse of the welfare state by privatization and free market economics in the late 20th century with great consternation. In his last public speech in late 2009, he expressed concern that the embrace of the market faith was pushing Europe and North America toward a new “age of insecurity” — one foreshadowed by the financial catastrophe of 2008. “Few in the West are old enough to know just what it means to watch our world collapse,” he said. “Why have we been in such a hurry to tear down the dikes laboriously set in place by our predecessors? Are we so sure that there are no floods to come?”
Well, the deluge is here. In the United States, a wave of populist nativism has swept Donald Trump into the White House. Across the Atlantic, the ghosts of nationalism have returned, casting shadows over the future of the European Union. The same, and worse, is happening in places that never enjoyed the benefits of European-style social democracy in the first place. Cultural chauvinism is resurgent in Russia, India, and Turkey, while large parts of the Middle East are in the grip of chaos and a horrifying extremism. Everywhere, Pankaj Mishra argues in his new book Age of Anger, the driving force is the same: a deep disillusionment with economic globalization and its beneficiaries, which, far from spreading prosperity and “universal civilization” around the globe, have created dislocation and inequality on an unprecedented scale.
At the same time, this provocative book argues, our current malaise is nothing new. The world’s present turmoil — from the rise of ISIS in the Middle East to the populist forces reshaping global politics — echoes the West’s own violent transition to modernity two centuries ago. If Western pundits persist in seeing these changes as unprecedented, it is because they cling to a faith that under the influence of modernization, the world is slowly converging toward “a benevolent Enlightenment tradition of rationalism, humanism, and liberal democracy.” But as Mishra argues, these assumptions overlook both the contingency of the current liberal order — what Tony Judt came to recognize as a late 20th-century “parenthesis” — and the West’s own “extraordinarily brutal initiation into political and economic modernity.” In simplifying history, he writes, we have adopted a dangerous illusion.
Mishra may well be the ideal writer to diagnose our current moment. For more than two decades, the Indian essayist has grappled with the epochal question of what it means to be modern. His first book Butter Chicken in Ludhiana (1995) chronicled the effects of the global free market on the rhythms of small-town India. In From the Ruins of Empire (2012), he documented how Asian intellectuals grappled with the challenge of Western imperialism, responding with a mixture of resentful mimicry, cultural humiliation, and reactionary nationalism. Like the British philosopher John Gray, Mishra has become one of the most interesting public intellectuals in the West: a sort of anti-Thomas Friedman who tears down the reigning clichés of our political and intellectual elites.
Trying to account for the rise of al-Qaeda and the spectacular violence of ISIS, Western pundits have fallen back on cultural explanations
Written after Narendra Modi’s election in India and completed right before the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, Age of Anger offers a scathing broadside against the historical provincialism of our current moment. Since 1989, Mishra writes, we have lived in an Age of No Alternatives, in which all the key questions about human affairs are deemed to have been settled. Francis Fukuyama famously argued the collapse of the Soviet Union had led us to the “end of history,” a world in which the prosperity and liberal democracy of postwar Western Europe and North America was seen not as a hard-won contingency, but as something like the resting state of humanity. These “bland fanatics of Western civilization,” as the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr termed them, posited a self-reinforcing pattern of global convergence: as economic growth accelerated, national borders would melt away and societies in Asia, Latin America, and Africa would become, like Europe and North America, more secular and rational.
[image error]These “dangerously misleading ideas,” Mishra argues, not only elided the “carnage and bedlam” that accompanied the West’s own transition to modernity; they have also made us spectacularly ill-equipped to explain the current global turmoil. Trying to account for the rise of al-Qaeda and the spectacular violence of ISIS, Western pundits have fallen back on cultural explanations, many positing “a worldwide clash of civilizations in which Islam is pitted against the West, and religion against reason.”
Age of Anger argues that the roots of our current turmoil lie much deeper: in the contradictions of modernity itself. Since its origins in 18th-century Western Europe, Mishra argues, secular modernity has held out the promise of freedom, equality, and the transcendence of history — only to repeatedly fall short of the mark. Everywhere, the creation of a modern commercial society has been experienced as both a dizzying excitement and a wrenching dislocation. Disrupting old religious and social structures, but often failing to fulfill its own promises of emancipation, it has created powerful countercurrents of what Nietzsche termed ressentiment, “an existential resentment of other people’s being, caused by an intense mix of envy and sense of humiliation and powerlessness.”
Mishra traces this contradiction back to the 18th-century Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the first Enlightenment thinkers to take aim at its shortcomings. A gruff outsider once described by Isaiah Berlin as “the greatest militant lowbrow in history,” Rousseau repeatedly faced off against Voltaire and the philosophes, staunch advocates of secular rationality and the commercial society then emerging in Britain and France. Rousseau argued that the urbane philosophes — forerunners of today’s TED-talkers and “networked elites” — had deposed superstition and religion only to replace it with an alienating new world of wealth, privilege, vanity, and endless striving. In its place, Rousseau tried to articulate a social order in which “virtue and human character rather than commerce and money were central to politics,” a community in which “the tension between man’s inner life and his social nature could be resolved,” even if this part of his argument remained somewhat vague.
While Rousseau’s existential yearning had its own dark side — Mishra shows how it would inspire future generations of exclusionary nationalists in Germany and elsewhere — he was the first person to think seriously about the problems of the new secular, commercial society. He saw “the deep contradictions in a predominantly materialist ethic and a society founded on individuals enviously emulating the rich and craving their privileges.” Conducting a swift tour through the work of key 18th- and 19th-century thinkers — from Diderot and Dostoyevsky to Rimbaud and Tocqueville — Mishra charts the march of the commercial society as it migrated eastward to Germany and Russia, and then, at the point of a Western gun, to societies in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. As he shows, ressentiment was never far behind.
It is this, Mishra writes, that connects today’s terrorists — from lone-wolf operators like Timothy McVeigh to the bearded scions of al-Qaeda and ISIS — to the generation of anarchists and messianic revolutionaries that emerged from the maelstrom of modernizing Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries. These include half-forgotten figures like Giuseppe Mazzini, who promoted militant nationalism as a replacement for religion, and the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who saw history as a blank slate on which the visionary individual could inscribe his own destiny through theatrical acts of violence.
Mishra may well be the ideal writer to diagnose our current moment
Mishra depicts the smartphone-toting fighters of ISIS as radically modern figures, “the canniest and most resourceful of all traders in the flourishing international economy of disaffection.” Poorly versed in Koranic scripture, they resemble less the flock of the seventh-century Prophet than the followers of Gabriele D’Annunzio, the Italian nationalist poet, who, in 1919, took over the Adriatic town of Fiume and proclaimed a proto-fascist “free state,” complete with black uniforms and the raised-arm salute — a comic opera preview of the real fascisms to come.
Today, as power’s center of gravity shifts east, Mishra argues that the West’s own fateful experience of modernity is playing out globally. From Egypt and Syria and the slums of Mumbai, hundreds of millions of people “herded by capitalism and technology into a common present” have become marginal to the workings of global capital, creating powerful new vectors of ressentiment. It has also returned with a vengeance to the West, the homeland of secular modernity, where “the mythic Volk” — “Make America Great Again” — “has reappeared as a spur to solidarity and action against real and imagined enemies.”
We live in revolutionary times. In Age of Anger, Mishra has produced an urgent analysis of a moment in which the forgotten and dispossessed are rising up to challenge everything we thought we knew about the state of the world. It will be a time of “blunt reckonings,” Mishra writes, one calling “for some truly transformative thinking, about both the self and the world.” Beyond this, he offers little in the way of solutions. But the wisest response may be to accept that the modern contradiction is unsolvable, and get to work erecting bulwarks against the deluges to come.
Published by the Los Angeles Review of Books, March 1, 2017
January 2, 2017
Reading Burma
Sebastian Strangio explores four books that complicate the international image of Burma’s emergence from a half-century of military rule
I.
THE NATION OF BURMA was born under a dark star. At 20 past four in the morning, on January 4, 1948 — the specific time was determined by astrologers — Burmese and British colonial troops assembled in the tropical gardens of the Secretariat, the headquarters of the colonial government in Rangoon. In a short ceremony, they ran down the Union Jack and hoisted in its place the new six-starred flag of independent Burma. As nearly a century of British rule came to a close, Burmese troops broke into patriotic anthems in their barracks.
Almost immediately, however, the country started to fall apart. In the east, ethnic Karen military units mutinied and turned their guns on the central government. Communist rebels rose up in the north, along the borders of soon-to-be Red China. In its first year, the new Republic of the Union of Burma came close to the brink of collapse. The Burmese military eventually succeeded in beating back the rebels, but ethnic conflict would persist around the country’s mountainous periphery, with profound implications for the subsequent development of the state. In March 1962, arguing that Burma’s squabbling politicians were unable to hold the country together, the military, or Tatmadaw, seized power in a coup, initiating more than half a century of military rule. Henceforth, military control and ethnic conflict would be mutually inflaming: heavy-handed army rule further fueled the desire of Burma’s various minority groups for self-determination; this, in turn, bolstered the Tatmadaw’s claim that it, and it alone, could prevent the country from flying apart.
The effects echoed through the second half of the 20th century. As regional neighbors like Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore shot to prosperity in the 1960s and 1970s, Burma slumbered under the rule of General Ne Win, who led the 1962 coup and introduced what came to be known as the “Burmese Way to Socialism.” This fatidic doctrine had little to do with socialism in any meaningful sense. As a writer for the Far Eastern Economic Review was to note in 1974, its dominant characteristics — ethnic Burman chauvinism and economic autarky — were instead an exaggerated reaction to the humiliations of the British colonial period, when migrants and ethnic minority peoples had been empowered at the expense of the lowland Burman majority. Military rule and its pathologies, the writer concluded, were the reflex of a people who “remain victims of their history and ideological prisoners of their past reactions.” Astonishingly, things remained largely unchanged until the first decade of the 21st century.
When I first visited the old British capital Rangoon in 2009, the city seemed locked in an aspic of neglect. The pavements were cracked and covered with moss. Colonial-era dwellings sat in overgrown gardens, like apparitions out of Edgar Allan Poe. Everywhere the city was permeated by the same peculiar smell: a mix of betel quid, car exhaust, and wet-season damp. Dark, haunted Rangoon couldn’t have been further from the gleaming modernity of metropolises like Bangkok or Kuala Lumpur. Indeed, the city seemed to have changed little since the writer Paul Theroux had passed through in 1973, at the musty high noon of Ne Winism. The junta’s “notorious bureaucracy” — that was certainly unchanged, if the complaints of local people were any indication. So too the crowds passing along Sule Pagoda Road in the dilapidated downtown, the “men and women alike puffing thick green cheroots […] like a royal breed, strikingly handsome in this collapsing city, a race of dispossessed princes.”
And then there were the generals themselves. However deeply unpopular, Ne Win’s heirs still somehow clung to power despite successive waves of mass protests: most notably, in 1988, when anti-government demonstrations were drowned out with blood, forcing Ne Win’s resignation, and again in 2007, when Buddhist monks took to the streets in the so-called “Saffron Revolution.” By the time of my visit, Burma occupied a special category of international opprobrium. It was, like Iran and North Korea, a pariah-state.
As a slew of recent books recounts, however, the past five years have brought about a remarkable transformation of Burma’s international image. This was largely the result of economic and political reforms introduced by President Thein Sein, a slight, bookish general, who took office at the head of a new quasi-civilian administration in March 2011. The first sign of serious reform was the government’s September 2011 decision to cancel a controversial Chinese hydropower project in Kachin State in the north. Nearly overnight, stasis gave way to dizzying change. This was quickly followed by the release of hundreds of political prisoners and the abolition of Burma’s antique press censorship regime. In April 2012, Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s magnetic Nobel-Bodhisattva figure, was allowed to compete in by-elections that saw her National League for Democracy (NLD) sweep the field. Under near-constant house arrest until November 2010, “the Lady” was now elected to political office for the first time, and portraits of her appeared in public, like religious icons. Western governments rushed to endorse the changes, suspending or canceling the economic sanctions that had been imposed on Burma since the 1988 crackdown; thousands of aid workers, foreign investors, and tourists followed.
The reform-drive reached an ecstatic crescendo on November 8, 2015, when Burma went to the polls for a national election, the first freely contested poll for a quarter century. Despite some expectations that the military’s proxy, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), might find a way to preserve its governing majority, the people unambiguously voted for change. Suu Kyi’s NLD won a vast majority, just as it had the last election in 1990, when the Tatmadaw had annulled its victory and refused to give up power. This time, however, the military yielded. It seemed like the country’s stars were finally starting to realign.
II.
From a distance — particularly an American distance — it is tempting to see Burma’s transformation as a simple reversion to the democratic mean after decades of anomalous military rule. In her memoir Hard Choices (2014), former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote at length about the role played by the United States in encouraging Burma’s opening. “While the Arab Spring was losing its luster in the Middle East, Burma was giving the world new hope that it is indeed possible to transition peacefully from dictatorship to democracy,” she wrote. This affirmed “the unique role the United States can and should play in the world as a champion of dignity and democracy.” Clinton offered a strong expression of what historian Timothy Snyder has termed “the politics of inevitability”: the intellectual tendency, ascendant after the Cold War, which sees liberal democracy and free markets as the Final Idea — something of a default position of humanity. In this view the arc of history, whatever its short-run deviations, always bends in the direction of justice.
In Blood, Dreams and Gold (2015), his refreshingly pessimistic account of Burma’s recent transformation, Richard Cockett argues that a troubled history is not so easily transcended. As he observes, many of the country’s conflicts have continued — even worsened — since the reforms. Nowhere is this reality starker than in situation facing Burma’s Muslim Rohingya minority. In 2012 and 2013, waves of violence broke out in coastal Arakan State in the west, where Buddhist Arakanese razed Rohingya neighborhoods, driving more than 120,000 into squalid displacement camps. The Rohingya have been refused citizenship by successive Burmese governments, including the new NLD administration, who assert they are all illegal “sneak-ins” from Bangladesh. This sentiment is inflamed by radical nationalists in the Buddhist sangha, who argue that a rising Muslim population threatens to swamp the country.
Things worsened in Arakan in mid-October, when the military was deployed in northern Arakan in response to coordinated attacks by militant Rohingya on police outposts. Since then the army has created a 7.7-square-mile “operation zone” in northern Arakan from which it has barred independent journalists and human rights workers. Despite the restrictions, reports have since emerged of rape, torture, and the extrajudicial killings of Rohingya civilians by soldiers and police, and a wave of arson attacks in the area that has destroyed around 1,250 buildings. Despite the real and significant improvements that have taken place in Burma since 2011, Cockett writes, “in important respects little has changed.”
Throughout his book, Cockett, a former Southeast Asia correspondent for The Economist, describes how Burmese leaders have failed, again and again, to reconcile monoethnic aspirations with multiethnic realities, and to turn Burma into a true “plural society.” The concept of the plural society was coined by the British colonial administrator-turned-scholar J. S. Furnivall, one of Burma’s first serious Western chroniclers. Furnivall, who lived in the country from 1902 until 1931, defined the plural society as one with a wide range of ethnic and religious groups “living side by side, but separately, within the same political unit.”
In Furnivall’s day, this accurately described the situation in freewheeling colonial port-cities like Rangoon, a “physical embodiment” of the imperial doctrine of free trade, where a wide range of creeds and ethnicities mingled in the marketplace. Fittingly, it is here that Cockett chooses to open his book, navigating down from the pinnacle of the city’s golden Shwedagon Pagoda into the old colonial downtown to the south. He effectively describes the still-bustling mercantile pluralism of the downtown, a gridded jumble of churches, mosques, temples, and imposing colonial edifices. He profiles its tiny Jewish and Armenian communities, shrunk now to handfuls of families, fading tinctures of the cosmopolitan brew created by British rule.
As Cockett points out, Furnivall didn’t exactly mean the “plural society” as a compliment. While it produced winners — including the waves of “bustling, ambitious migrants” who flocked to Burma’s cities from places like Nepal, Armenia, and Gujarat — there were many who lost out in the game of imperial mercantilism. Perhaps the central flaw of colonial Burma’s plural society was that it embraced pretty much everyone except the country’s ethnic majority, the Burmans, who made up some two-thirds of the population. As a result of British policy, Cockett writes, “The Burmans found themselves forced to the margins of their own towns, physically and culturally […] At best they were passive onlookers, at worst resentful victims.”
This resentment lies at the root of the fierce reaction that followed independence, and the fiercer one that followed the coup of 1962. Leaving aside his mismanagement of Burma’s economy, which did much to spark the 1988 protests, Ne Win’s worst legacy was to entrench a monocultural vision of Burmese identity, centered on its once-repressed Burman majority. Despite occasional nods to diversity, Cockett writes, the new government’s central thrust “was always towards ethnic, cultural, and religious homogeneity — to make Burman-ness a stand-in for an all-embracing national identity.”
The result of was an incoherent national selfhood which excluded, implicitly or explicitly, a full third of the country’s population. For Cockett, this is best symbolized by the junta’s 1989 decision to change the country’s English-language name from “Burma” to “Myanmar,” and to Burmanize dozens of ethnic minority place names. The Burmese monoculture has also been manifested in (literally) concrete form by the country’s showcase capital Naypyidaw, where the national government relocated in late 2005. The vast scale and geography of the new city, with its meandering, empty highways and towering statues of ancient Burmese heroes, stands in stark counterpoint to Rangoon’s multiethnic mix.
Cockett then turns his attention to the outlying parts of the country: the broken shards of Burma’s ethnic mosaic. He offers sketches of the Kachin, Shan, and Karen peoples and their continuing struggles for self-determination. Visiting Myitkyina, in Kachin State, he finds the capital of a militarized internal colony. He sojourns through the bizarre landlocked entrepôt of Mong La, part of an old Shan principality now controlled by an ethnic rebel army, which, under the terms of a ceasefire signed with the central government, has turned it into a seedy Chinese tourist colony of brothels and casinos. Cockett ends where he began, in Rangoon, arguing that unless the country embraces its extraordinary diversity, elections and further reforms will likely “only serve to disguise the country’s underlying divisions rather than resolve them.”
Tackling recent events from a different angle is Delphine Schrank, a former correspondent for the Washington Post. In The Rebel of Rangoon (2015), she provides the view from inside and below: from the perspectives of the Burmese activists who kept the flame of opposition burning in the years running up to the reforms of 2011. In a lush, novelistic narrative, Schrank introduces us to two members of this “band of hard-bitten oddballs and dreamers”: Nway, a young street-brawler-turned-activist for the NLD, and Nigel, his friend and rival.
Through the eyes of these two activist Everymen, we are immersed in the milieu of the Burmese underground. We follow them from moldy safe-houses to the dank cells of Insein Prison, where activists underwent grueling tortures, and dimly lit internet cafes, where they fired off furtive bleeps to the outside world. We witness the distribution of samizdat and hear the black humor of the activists, armor against the seeming uselessness of the cause, in part “because the jokes […] were mostly on them.” In places Schrank’s technique overreaches, and the narrative loses itself in long, descriptive thickets. But for the occasional mushiness of the prose, the reader is left with a vivid sense of what motivated ordinary people to oppose the military government, and the accretion of small frustrations that could tip a law-abiding citizen like Nigel — for whom politics previously “brought nothing but trouble” — into open dissidence.
Schrank depicts the dissident community as an extended family, with all the affection and rivalry that the term implies. At the top, a mostly disembodied absence in the narrative, is Daw — “Auntie” — Aung San Suu Kyi, a talisman to the young activists. Sketched in clearer lines is “Grandpa” Win Tin, the crusading journalist who is released from prison in 2008 and takes Nway under his wing. A hard-bitten sage, he refuses to swallow the bait of scant or partial reform. “People say we can see the light at the end of the tunnel,” he says after the 2012 by-election, “but we are still in the tunnel.” (Right up to his death in 2014, Win Tin continued to wear his prison blues, refusing to remove them until the country’s last political prisoner was freed.) Then there are the “Uncles,” members of the 1988 generation of student activists, tempered by prison, but ready nonetheless to thrust wedges into the chinks of freedom.
By telling her story from the perspectives of Nway and Nigel, Schrank is able to give an impressionistic rendering of the junta’s “villainous absurdity”: its bizarre blend of extreme paranoia and extreme incompetence. In a memorable scene early in the book, Nway, tailed home from the NLD office one evening by a Special Branch intelligence operative, ducks into a beer garden and phones in a dozen friends, who then proceed to out-wait — and out-drink — the lurking spooks, before splitting into the night.
Like Cockett, Schrank recognizes that for all the bravery of the men and women she describes, right up to Suu Kyi herself, military rule is not just a cause of Burma’s problems, but also a symptom. As the activists realize, “it would never be enough to simply replace the military junta with parliamentary democracy without simultaneously addressing the grievances of the minority groups.” This becomes clear after the 2012 by-elections, when Nigel is elected to parliament for the NLD. As the underground emerges into the light, the hard lines of opposition blur. “There were no easy answers,” Schrank writes, paraphrasing her Everymen. “There was no sense of arrival.”
III.
If anyone promised Burma deliverance, it was “Auntie.” Born in 1945, Suu Kyi was the youngest daughter of General Aung San, the storied independence leader — half Gandhi, half Subhas Chandra Bose — assassinated in July 1947, in the dying months of British rule. As a young woman Suu Kyi enjoyed a cosmopolitan upbringing. In the early 1960s, she studied in New Delhi, where her mother served as Burma’s ambassador to India, and later read P. P. E. at Oxford, where she met and fell in love with Michael Aris, a scholar of Tibet. After a few years working at the United Nations in New York, Suu Kyi returned to Oxford to raise her and Aris’s two children. Life for the couple unfolded in quiet domesticity until August 1988, when Suu Kyi paid a visit to Rangoon to tend to her ill mother and became drawn into the protests then roiling the city. On August 26, Aung San’s daughter addressed a mass rally in front of the Shwedagon Pagoda, and issued an electrifying call for democratic government.
The rest, as they say, is history — or perhaps more accurately, myth. If Burma’s recent developments have been seen by Hillary Clinton and others as an example of history’s universal, democratizing thrust, Suu Kyi’s has sometimes taken the form of a fairy tale. Its moral lines are drawn stark and clean: the beautiful daughter of an assassinated national hero opposes the gang of tyrannical generals who have driven their country into poverty and stagnation. Despite being cruelly condemned to house arrest, she becomes a world-famous tribune of democratic values, is garlanded by the Nobel Committee, and inspires a boycott campaign that casts Burma out of civilized international company. Eventually, the generals bow to the popular will and announce democratic elections. The Lady wins in a landslide and takes her rightful place as the country’s democratically elected leader.
Even before her party’s ringing victory in the 2015 election, however, the narrative has grown muddy. After five years of reforms, Burma’s former leaders had successfully remolded their country’s image while giving up relatively little real power. Enshrined in the junta’s 2003 “Roadmap to Discipline-Flourishing Democracy,” President Thein Sein’s tweaks represented not a capitulation but an orderly withdrawal to the battlements of the 2008 Constitution. This guarantees the Tatmadaw a quarter of the seats in parliament, and thus a de facto veto on any amendments, which require a 75 percent vote. It also bars Suu Kyi from the office of president, due to her marriage to a foreigner. (Instead, she serves now as “state counsellor.”) As Peter Popham writes in The Lady and the Generals: Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma’s Struggle for Freedom (2016), Suu Kyi’s entry into parliament in 2012 was a great victory, but one that dulled her insurrectionary edge. By luring her out of house arrest and into active politics, the army effectively bottled her up.
Popham’s book offers a breezy précis of the years since Suu Kyi’s release in 2010. In places, it shows signs of having been prepared quickly, and seems to have been padded with previously published material, some of only tangential relevance to the main narrative. The reader is sidelined by a chapter detailing the attempts of a band of British treasure-hunters to locate a rumored cache of Spitfire aircraft buried in Burma during World War II. Also included is a bizarre and contradictory piece of reporting from remote Chin State, in which Popham can’t decide whether to lament the loss of Chin traditions, or to romanticize the fact that they have persisted for so long. Immodestly, he boasts of being “among the first foreigners to travel to Burma’s Chin state in more than half a century.”
Popham is at his best when discussing the theory and practice of Suu Kyi, the subject of his 2011 biography The Lady and the Peacock. He writes that the myth of “The Lady” arose in an absence. Confined by the junta to her family’s crumbling home on Rangoon’s Inya Lake, with only fleeting connections to the outside world, Suu Kyi became an outsized figure, the vehicle for a wide range of often contradictory hopes and imaginings. The paradox was that when she was finally released in 2010, Burma’s towering democratic icon, a woman feted around the world as her country’s legitimate leader, “was as close to being a political virgin as any world-famous political leader has ever been.” Though armed with an iron will, she was unschooled in the arts of barter and compromise, and unable to negotiate the constitutional booby-traps strewn along the junta’s road to “Discipline-Flourishing Democracy.”
While acknowledging the huge sacrifices she has made for her country, Popham pours acid on the fairy tale and its subject. In the course of the book, he describes Suu Kyi’s transition from “girlish gaucheness” through “precious upper-class hauteur” to “a ravenous egotism that perhaps the years of isolation only made worse.” Like many others, Popham rightly lashes Suu Kyi for not speaking out about the repression of the Rohingya, something that he puts down both to political calculations — not wishing to alienate her anti-Muslim support base — and to her “complex and ambivalent feelings about the Burmese army,” in whose founding in 1945 her father played a key part.
Ultimately, Suu Kyi’s dissonant attitude toward the Rohingya raises important questions about how we fashion political idols, and for what ends. It calls to mind Orwell’s dictum that saints “should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.” It’s a pertinent suggestion in the case of “The Lady.” Orwell made this observation in his essay “Reflections on Gandhi” (1949), in which he eventually ruled, almost reluctantly, in favor of the Mahatma. While “one may reject the claims of sainthood made on his behalf,” Orwell wrote — and he himself admitted “a sort of aesthetic distaste” for the Indian leader’s calculated humility and “medievalist” program — Gandhi could ultimately claim a positive political legacy. “Compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!”
Since the end of her house arrest, Suu Kyi has repeatedly claimed that she is not an icon, but a politician. She is right that she never claimed the mantle of sainthood, which was instead thrust upon her, as with Gandhi, by supporters at home and abroad. But when the time comes to render a verdict on Suu Kyi, the politician, the following fact must be entered into evidence: despite her huge reserves of political capital, and the fact that control of the army remains largely out of her grasp, Burma’s Nobel Peace laureate has said little, and has done less, to end the repression of the Rohingya. When pressed, Suu Kyi has instead taken refuge in NGO-speak, calling for the “rule of law” to be respected in Arakan State. Leave aside the question of whether the laws on the books, such as the 1982 law barring the Rohingya from citizenship, are just; in a country which has never known truly independent courts, calling for the “rule of law” is tantamount to calling for everything — and therefore for nothing at all.
IV.
What, then, is to be done? U Kyaw Win, a Burmese exile now living in the United States, writes that a lasting solution to Burma’s problems can only come from deep introspection. Introspection is the keynote of My Conscience: An Exile’s Memoir of Burma (2016), in which the octogenarian Win offers an elegy to the country he once knew, and the country it might have been. As a Burman who is old enough to remember hearing the troops singing at the dawn of independence — one of the many interesting recollections that scatter this personal volume — he is well placed to anatomize the ethnic chauvinism that lies deep in the country’s heart. One of the most refreshing elements of his book is that Win remains immune from the anti-Muslim sentiments that infect even some Burmese activist circles. Pondering the plight of the Rohingya, Win poses the obvious moral question: “How can we remain indifferent to such an assault on human dignity?”
Born in 1934, Win was not a typical exile. He left Burma to teach in the United States in 1961, “not with the intention of staying away permanently, but because I was denied the change to put to best use the education and experiences I had acquired abroad to benefit my fledgling country.” His citizenship revoked, Win started thinking, writing, and acting against Ne Win’s junta — his “nemesis” — long before it became an international cause célèbre. When he organized his first protest at the US Capitol in the summer of 1975, just four other people attended. In 1973, Win established the activist Burma Bulletin, “just to say something” about affairs in his country, and produced it for 19 years in the United States. Later, he helped establish the Foundation for Democracy in Burma, and became a familiar face in the refugee camps and exile entrepôts along the Thai–Burmese border. Looking back, from the remove of exile and advanced age, he acknowledges the difficulties of slowing the weighty inertia of Burmese history.
Kyaw Win offers no grand solutions to his country’s problems, merely some humble gestures. He suggests that the government rebuild the Rangoon University Student Union building, dynamited by Ne Win’s troops while putting down post-coup protests in 1962, as a monument to those men and women who have nudged their country toward a more democratic future. He also calls for the repatriation from India of the remains of King Thibaw, Burma’s last monarch, exiled by the British after his defeat in the Third Anglo-Burmese War of 1885, whose tomb lies neglected on the outskirts of the coastal city of Ratnagiri, in Maharashtra. This symbolic act would “unburden the present and future generations of Burmans, if not all Burmese, to know that their last sovereign, exiled to foreign turf, has finally been brought home to rest in eternal repose.” It could even take the form of a “royal swap”: after the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, was banished to Rangoon, where his tomb remains.
Win admits that these would be quixotic gestures, merely the “first steps in a long journey.” But they pinpoint Burma’s need not simply to introduce technical reforms, but also to somehow excavate and set on new foundations the myth of the country’s founding. Like the nobleman Cassius in Julius Caesar, Kyaw Win writes that fault lies not in Burma’s stars, but in the acts of its leaders, especially its Burmans, who took it as “their right, if not their destiny, to rule over others.” His rays of humanity serve to illuminate the scale of the challenge.
Published by the Los Angeles Review of Books, January 1, 2017
November 7, 2016
Dictators Everywhere Are Stumping for Trump
From Cambodia to Zimbabwe to North Korea, the Republican nominee has cornered the authoritarian autocrat demographic.
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With endorsements like these, one might ask, who needs enemies? Last week, as an enervating U.S. election race reached its final stretch, Republican nominee Donald Trump secured the support of another of the world’s leading authoritarians. Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, a pugnacious former soldier who has dominated his country’s politics for over three decades, threw his support behind the real estate mogul and former reality TV host. He did it, he said, for the sake of world peace. “To be frank, I do want to see Trump win,” Hun Sen told an audience of police cadets on Nov. 3. “If Trump wins, the world can change.… Trump does business, so Trump would not want to have war.”
It’s tempting to put Hun Sen’s endorsement down to shared authoritarian traits — an expression of strongman respect. For more than half his life, the 64-year-old Hun Sen has ruled his country through a blend of force, guile, and The Apprentice-style theatrics. Like Trump, he is thin-skinned; he is also partial to rambling speeches. Neither figure has any tolerance for opposition, which both see as a sign of treason or shadowy conspiracies (“the whole system is rigged”). While Trump has threatened to arrest his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, if he wins on Nov. 8, Hun Sen has effectively done it in advance. Since mid-2015, he has jailed more than 25 government critics, including two opposition lawmakers, while the main opposition leader, Sam Rainsy, has been forced into exile in France. To top it off, Hun Sen has repeatedly warned that the country will descend into civil war if his Cambodian People’s Party, or CPP, is not re-elected at the next national poll in 2018.
There’s also the magnetic attraction of Trump’s wealth. The Donald’s vulgar flaunting of the gilded and the marble not only reflects the rococo tastes of Cambodia’s own ruling elite. It also appeals to an aspect of Cambodia’s Buddhist-inflected political culture in which those with money are seen as persons of merit: rich because virtuous, virtuous because rich. Hun Sen might expect that an able and meritorious businessman like Trump would be liable to treat a wealthy counterpart with respect and “do deals” with Cambodia of the sort Washington now does with allies like Saudi Arabia or Vietnam — deals that would spare him lectures on civil rights or the treatment of workers.
Hun Sen’s endorsement of Trump, however, goes beyond superficial affinities of character or style. Indeed, an administration headed by Trump stands to produce something concrete for Hun Sen: a slackening of Washington’s position on the state of human rights and democracy in Cambodia. The Cambodian leader isn’t the only autocrat to see the upsides of a Trump presidency. In recent months, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe have all expressed support for the Republican nominee. (So has Ashin Wirathu, a rabidly nationalist monk in Myanmar who has fanned the flames of hate against his country’s Muslim minority.) For these leaders, Trump’s appeal goes beyond issues of style to touch on something more troubling: the possibility of a sudden and dramatic reshaping of U.S. power.
One of the few consistent themes to emerge from the bag of tricks of emotional appeals and knee-jerk nativism that comprises the Trump foreign-policy platform is the prospect of a broad American retreat from the world. Throughout the campaign, Trump has railed against free trade and slammed U.S. military adventures in the Middle East. Trump has made virtually no reference to democracy promotion, another sacred cow of U.S. foreign policy. His campaign has even adopted the slogan “America First,” annexed from the isolationist movement of the early 1940s whose spokesman, the noted aviator and racist Charles Lindbergh, praised the “organized vitality” of Nazi Germany and argued against U.S. involvement in World War II. “America first,” Trump said during his first major foreign-policy address in April, “will be the overriding theme of my administration.”
For a dictator like Hun Sen, this approach to foreign policy has obvious appeal. Since the early 1990s, as he has slowly bent Cambodia’s threadbare democratic system to his will, U.S. criticism has been a constant thorn in his side. When the Cambodian leader ousted his coalition partner Prince Norodom Ranariddh in an armed coup in July 1997, the United States immediately cut off aid, restoring it only after fresh elections the following year. (Hun Sen’s CCP won.) Even then, a vocal bipartisan congressional lobby, representing the large Cambodian diaspora in the United States, has kept up a steady drumbeat against a leader who some have referred to as “Saddam Hun Sen.” In 2013, facing another call from the U.S. Congress to cut off aid, Hun Sen said, “People can say what they want, but the right to decide the country’s destiny is in the hands of the people of Cambodia.”
International pressure has grown especially strong over the past year as the CPP, reacting to an unexpected loss of support at the last election in 2013, has tightened the vise on its opponents. In July, the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a resolution condemning this latest crackdown, which Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.) said laid bare the “thuggish nature of the Hun Sen regime.” Similar condemnations have been issued by the European Parliament and the U.N. Human Rights Council. Although the U.S. Congress would operate independently of a possible Trump White House, an executive who stays out of Cambodia’s domestic affairs, and maybe even offers a measure of legitimacy, would be something of a dream come true for Hun Sen.
In line with Trump’s “America First” philosophy, the former Apprentice host has also made repeated threats to withdraw U.S. forces from Europe and East Asia, depicting the United States as a colossus that is being leeched by a host of ungrateful allies and suggesting he would abandon long-standing obligations to protect NATO members and other allies. Threats to reconsider U.S. military deployments in South Korea until Seoul “pays its way” have led North Korean state media to offer their own endorsement of Trump, writing that he is “not the rough-talking, screwy, ignorant candidate they say he is, but is actually a wise politician and a prescient presidential candidate.”
For similar reasons, Trump also appears to have won some limited support within the political establishment in China. Although Trump’s very pronunciation of the country’s name drips with insinuation and disdain, and much of the country’s ruling elite appears to support Hillary, a weakened U.S. presence in East Asia would be a clear strategic win for Beijing. Trump “could in fact be the best president for China,” a commentator on Phoenix Television, a private station in Hong Kong that skews nationalist and pro-Beijing, said in April. Another commentator on Phoenix Television, recently declared, “It looks like Trump is God’s tool to end American imperialism.”
For the first time in living memory, a presidential candidate is offering a break from what has long been a firm bipartisan foreign-policy consensus: that the United States can, and should, do what it can to make the world safe for democracy. And although solid arguments can, and should, be made for the scaling back of American adventures abroad, Trump’s apparent willingness to toss out long-standing alliances in a vague bid to “start winning again” threatens a sudden realignment of the global security environment that carries serious and unpredictable risks. Hun Sen might be right: A President Trump is unlikely to go abroad in search of monsters to slay. But the Donald’s policies, such as they are, herald a world of dangerous uncertainty. Dictators of the world, rejoice.
Published by Foreign Policy, November 7, 2016
