LA Times: THE MYANMAR DILEMMA

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LA Times

Los Angeles Times
Sunday, August 11, 1996  

THE MYANMAR DILEMMA: Should You Go?  

Burmese and American travel promoters want you to visit this exotic 
Southeast Asia nation for its shimmering golden pagodas and bargain 
shopping. Human rights groups want you to stay away because of its 
repressive government and heroin trade. So when tourism and politics 
clash, the question for travelers is . . .  

 By CHRISTOPHER REYNOLDS, Times Travel Writer

YANGON, Myanmar--If you're one who believes in visiting the former  Burma,
you may or may not be up-to-date on the fatal repression, the  global
heroin trade and the strange stranded-in-the-'50s atmosphere  here. But
either way, your most visible enticement to this Southeastern  Asian
country is probably the tower that stands gleaming on a hill above  the
city once known as Rangoon.

The 300-foot-high spire of Shwedagon Pagoda is layered with tons of gold 
and thousands of jewels, a 76-carat diamond on top, surrounded by a riot 
of red and yellow paint, dragons and elephants in effigy, steeply pitched, 
ornament-heavy roofs and smoldering incense.

>From dawn to dusk, long-suffering workaday Burmese and red-robed  monks
circle the 2,500-year-old site, their faces protected from the  sun's rays
by yellowish rice paste. They nod to tourists, acquiesce to  photos, kneel
to meditate, perhaps reach to place a drooping blossom in a  cup beneath a
holy figure. W. Somerset Maugham wrote that the pagoda  stood out "like a
sudden hope in the dark night of the soul." 

One can take it as a symbol of Burmese spiritual resilience despite tyranny
and poverty, as many American visitors do; or one can take it merely as a 
pretty picture, as Myanmar's governing but nonelected State Law and  Order
Restoration Council (SLORC) would probably prefer. 

In any event, the pagoda sells well. And the SLORC, eager to silence human 
rights activists calling for a tourism boycott of the country, is looking
for  more customers.

Over the last year, even as political pressures have led several 
international corporations to scale back their Burmese investments, 
Myanmar's leaders have stepped up a ferocious campaign to lure Western 
tourists--and their hard currency. That campaign will accelerate in 
October with the start of "Visit Myanmar Year."

The tourism campaign may pique the interest of adventurers who have  heard
of Myanmar as a gorgeous, exotic land that is only now beginning to  show
Western influences after more than 30 years of isolation. But the  case of
Myanmar raises a nagging question for modern-day travelers: Is  my vacation
a political act?

Many travelers, and most of those who make their living from tourism, 
argue that a tourist can't be blamed for all doings in their destinations, 
or  no one would ever leave home. Under that philosophy, crossing borders 
may put some money in the pockets of objectionable leaders but stands as a
chance to communicate the ideals of democracy and perhaps spread some 
wealth among strangers living in need.

Over the last decade, travelers' boycotts have been waged against 
destinations as disparate as South Africa, Arizona, Taiwan, Alaska and 
Norway in efforts to fight apartheid (now abandoned), the absence of a 
holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. (the state has since adopted one), 
black-market trading in rhino horns, controversial wolf-control  programs
(now suspended) and whale-killing. Those who wage these  campaigns see
tourist dollars as contributions to the wrong side, pure and  simple. 

Accordingly, visiting Myanmar "is not appropriate," says Kyaw Tint, who 
fled the country in 1985 and now lives in Alhambra. "All the 
facilities--the roads, the hotels and almost all the infrastructure used by
  tourists--are built by forced labor or foreign workers. Almost all of
these   hotels where tourists are going to stay are owned by the military
or their  families. If you go, the military is going to get profits. And if
they have   more money, they are going to make more oppression."

*Yet by some measures, the "Visit Myanmar" campaign is a success  already. 

Several large, upscale American travel companies have begun bringing 
travelers into Myanmar, including Abercrombie & Kent International, 
Classical Cruises & Tours, Geographic Expeditions, Butterfield &  Robinson,
Mountain Travel-Sobek and Radisson-Seven Seas Cruises.  Stressing that they
put as little money as possible into the government's  pockets, those
companies report a small but growing number of bookings  from adventurous
American travelers.  

Beyond Yangon, visitors to Myanmar are likely to head for the 4,000 
pagodas and ruined temples of Pagan, the floating gardens of Inle Lake, the
long and winding Ayeyarwady (formerly Irrawaddy) River, the former capital
of Mandalay or a handful of other prime attractions. The tourists  are on a
tight leash, however: Travel to many regions is forbidden.
Jim Sano, president of Geographic Expeditions (formerly InnerAsia) of  San
Francisco, started sending travelers to Myanmar in 1991 and expects  to
send about 100 travelers this year. He reasons that visitors "constitute  a
critical source of information and base of support for the Burmese people."

The other factor, says Sano, is that "if the vast majority of U.S. tour 
companies were to boycott Burma, it would be a speck of the entire  tourism
revenues going into that country"--an assertion that Myanmar's  boycotters
dispute.

Burmese government officials say tourist arrivals have grown from fewer 
than 10,000 in 1989--the year after troops opened fire in the streets of
Yangon, killing an estimated 3,000 pro-democracy demonstrators and 
bystanders--to more than 60,000 in 1994. (Last year's numbers weren't 
available.)Those travelers who reach Myanmar find a world unto itself.  

 *As tourists arrive on a sunny Saturday outside the monstrous concrete
red-and-yellow Karaweik restaurant, designed to resemble a hulking royal
barge on Yangon's Kandawgyi Lake, a mysterious fellow appears, wearing a
Department of Tourism badge and wielding a video camera. He tapes the
foreigners, then vanishes.  

On a muggy afternoon in the rural outskirts of Yangon, amid the buzz of
mosquitoes and the smell of cows and chickens, a load of foreigners steps
down from their bus, expecting a glass factory, finding instead a sort of
junkyard path strewn with dust-coated glassware from years past. But 
inside a broad barn, they find a crew of shyly smiling workers standing in 
the blasting heat of a furnace, prodding, turning and blowing orange ingots
of molten glass.

The cooled, hardened results of their work are spread on a table, including
dozens of egg-size art pieces, twinkling with blue and green hues and 
suspended bubbles. These nuggets are the kind one finds in the elegantly
lighted shop windows of Laguna Beach and Cambria for $40 apiece.  "A year
ago, the price was about 5 cents each," proprietor Myat Aywe  confesses in
halting English. Now that more foreigners have come, he says,  "it's 50
cents. Half a dollar. Still not too high."

The most affluent visitors stay at the teak-lined, 95-year-old, 
$300-a-night Strand Hotel, once the refuge of old colonials, now restored 
and run by the Amanresorts luxury chain. Others choose a cruise on a  newly
refurbished 128-berth luxury ship, The Road to Mandalay, that  since
December has plied the Ayeyarwady between Mandalay and Pagan  under the
operation of Orient-Express Hotels. With two cruises weekly scheduled from
September through May, and prices beginning at $1,500 per person for a
three-night cruise, the company forecasts about 4,000  passengers this
year.

The tourist options multiply weekly. As of March, Burmese officials 
counted 34 hotels under construction in Yangon, including projects from the
prominent Asian chains Mandarin Oriental and Shangri-La.

"Generally, Myanmar people are quite content," a government tour guide 
announces to a busload of Americans as they head toward the waterfront. 
One American asks if the bus can make a detour past the home of Aung San 
Suu Kyi, leader of anti-government dissenters. Guide and driver ignore the 
request. Another American asks how many people died in the 1988 unrest. 
"Nobody knows," says the guide. Shopping is next.

* Alistair Ballantine, president of Abercrombie & Kent, which brings high 
end tours into the country, has suggested that "being exposed to the 
political aspects of day-to-day life in Myanmar . . . turns ordinary 
travelers into advocates for a cause. They return home as goodwill 
ambassadors, bringing pressure to bear on their own governments to 
facilitate change."
 But Carol Richards, an independent anthropologist who is co-founder of the
 Santa Monica-based Burma Forum, asserts that there really is no free 
communication between the Burmese and tourists because "it's very risky 
for a common person to speak with foreigners, and many tourists don't
realize that."

In the armchair tour of Myanmar's unromantic realities, the first stop
would be just a few miles northwest of the Shwedagon Pagoda, on  University
Avenue. There, under constant surveillance, stands the home of  Suu Kyi,
51, winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize. In that home she endured house
arrest for six years. Since her formal release in 1995, Suu  Kyi has
delivered regular anti-SLORC speeches here, sometimes with  American
tourists in her frontyard audience. But in recent interviews, she  has
denounced casual tourism to her country as "tantamount to supporting
authoritarianism in Burma" and thrown her support behind the effort to keep
tourists away during Visit Myanmar Year.(The SLORC issued its edict
changing the country's place-names in 1989; most opponents still use pre
SLORC terms.)

Suu Kyi gets vehement support from many Burmese refugees. An estimated
10,000 expatriates now live in Southern California. Many of them are active
in groups that not only oppose tourism to Myanmar but call for consumer
boycotts of companies that do business with the country, such as Los
Angeles-based Unocal, which is helping build a $1-billion gas pipeline to
Thailand, and PepsiCo, which recently sold a bottling plant in Myanmar but
continues to maintain a presence in the country.  

Next stop on the anti-itinerary might be the forests along Myanmar's
western and eastern borders. There, poppy-planting drug lords produced an
estimated 220 tons of heroin last year, which the U.S. State Department
says makes Myanmar the world leader in opium and heroin production.

By the State Department's estimate, 60% of the heroin seized in the United
States comes from Myanmar. But some is consumed at home, through dirty
needles. Burma is believed to have the highest HIV infection rate in the
world among intravenous drug users. Government complicity in the drug trade
is widely suspected.

Next stop: perhaps a prison somewhere up the Ayeyarwady, where SLORC has
jailed two comedians whose crime was making jokes about the government on
Independence Day, Jan. 4. Amnesty International estimates the country's
political prisoners at more than 1,000, which doesn't count most of the 300
dissidents arrested and released in a May crackdown.Following that action,
on May 23, the U.S. State Department  cited "the potential for violence"
and recommended "that U.S. citizens  exercise all due caution in traveling
in Burma and consider curtailing  nonessential travel to Burma for the time
being."That statement gives many travelers pause. Yet bookings continue.
What is it, exactly, about Myanmar?

The average temperature is 80 degrees and the rainy season runs May through
September. The leading sport is chinlon, which combines the challenges of
volleyball and soccer using a ball woven from dried plant fronds. The
common attire is a sarong known as a longyi. At some public bathrooms,
men's and women's doors alike show skirted stick figures--the men's figure
has broader shoulders. Buddhism is the dominant religion, and the
population of 46 million is about 65% ethnic Burmese, the remainder made up
of several minority groups, many of whom persist in rebellion against the
current regime.  

After about a century of British colonialism and a Japanese invasion during
World War II, Burma achieved independence in 1948. But in the course of the
struggle, Burmese leader Aung San, head of the provisional government, was
assassinated with most of his cabinet members in 1947. (Among the family
members who survived him: a 2-year-old daughter, Aung San Suu Kyi.) But
after a brief spell of fledgling parliamentary  democracy, Gen. Ne Win
grabbed control of the country in 1962 and set it  on a doomed course of
isolationist, superstitionist socialism.  

The country's territory is 1 1/2 times the size of California, rich with 
teak forests that are being rapidly felled, punctuated with deposits of
jade and rubies, oil and gas, surrounded by racing engines of Southeast
Asian economic growth. Under British colonialism, it was the world's
leading  supplier of rice. Now it is counted among the world's 10 poorest
nations,  with per capita income estimated at $280 a year.  

Myanmar does, however, have its very own time zone, a perplexing half an 
hour ahead of Thailand's, and thus 30 minutes out of step with the rest of
the world. Since the early 1980s, Myanmar has had television, too, all 
government-programmed.  

This is a country where numerology counts. In 1987, Ne Win introduced
currency in 45-kyat and 90-kyat increments because he believed nine to be a
lucky number. That same year, he declared 25-, 35- and 75-kyat  notes
worthless, thereby wiping out an estimated 80% of the country's money in
circulation, plunging millions of his subjects deeper into poverty.  

Then there is the traffic. The prevailing explanation is that Ne Win's 
astrologer told him that left was unlucky, and so in 1974 Ne Win rewrote
the nation's British-devised traffic system, instructing that cars would
henceforth drive on the right side of the road. But since the country is so
poor and trade so feeble, the streets of Yangon today are a jumble of
battered bicycles with sidecars, some newish cars and many older, British
style, right-hand-drive vehicles, whose drivers crane their necks to see
while jouncing down the right side of the road.  

"Burma is the dotty eccentric of Asia, the queer maiden aunt who lives 
alone, and whom the maid has forgotten to visit," wrote Pico Iyer in 1988.
Later that year, Ne Win resigned, SLORC took over, and it all began to seem
 a bit less quaint. Even as the nation's leaders cracked its door open to
outsiders--lengthening the maximum tourist stay from seven days to the
current 30--the repression grew deeper and more violent, but no less  
eccentric. 

Consider: Government leaders endorsed the massacre of protesters in 1988,
then jailed Aung San Suu Kyi, and, in 1990, held parliamentary  elections
apparently expecting to win fair and square. When pro-democracy candidates
instead won in a landslide, the SLORC voided the balloting.  

*Still, for a Westerner who sees a benefit to crossing lines, curiosity can
 be stronger than repulsion. Along the alleys between Bogyoke Aung San and
Anawrahta streets, travelers browse among booksellers who stack their wares
on the sidewalk, the inventory running to Paul Erdman ("The Crash  of
'79"), Thomas Hardy ("Tess of the D'Urbervilles"), a few Tom Clancy
offerings and many romances. English-language books are so prized that an
entire cottage industry has risen in improvising cardboard bindings to
lengthen these volumes' lives.

Downtown in the Bogyoke Aung San Market, where locals gather to gossip and
sip tea, visitors wander through a cavernous market area stuffed full of
lacquerware, puppets, jewelry of varied quality and cheap T-shirts.  Hand
carved teak picture frames fetch $9. In the dim bar of the Strand hotel,
meanwhile, a Mandalay beer goes for $4. On a slow Friday night, the freshly
mopped marble floor is empty of customers and a melancholy
clarinet-guitar-piano trio is at work. With a ceiling fan slowly circling
overhead and colonial ghosts of Maugham and Rudyard Kipling floating just
out of view, the players struggle through "Love Me Tender" and "Blue Moon,"
waiting for those Westerners their government wants so badly to come.  

* * *If you decide to go ... A visa is Required. For more information 
contact the Embassy of Myanmar, Information Officer, 2300 S St. NW, 
Washington, D.C. 20008, (202) 332-9044; fax (202) 332-9046. 

The  State Department's Office of Overseas Citizens Services computerized 
phone system offers travel warnings and consular information updates on 
Myanmar and other countries. Telephone (202) 647-5225.  

 Copyright Los Angeles Times

==========Concept========Of===========Discussion================================

Instead of looking upon discussion as stumbling-block in the way of action,
we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all.

                                Pericles 
                                (490-429 B.C.)
                                Great Democratic Reformer
==========Concept========Of===========Discussion================================