The Burmese Fairy Tale
By Ma Thanegi
FAR EASTERN ECONOMIC REVIEW
(The writer is a pro-democracy activist and former political
prisoner. She lives in
Like many Burmese, l am tired of
living in a fairy tale. For years, outsiders portrayed the troubles of my
country as a morality play: good against evil, with no shade of gray in
between-a simplistic picture, but one the world believes. The response of the
West has been equally simplistic: It wages a moral crusade against evil, using
such "magic wands" as sanctions and boycotts.
But for us,
That may sound like pro-government propaganda, but I haven't
changed since I joined the democracy movement in August 1988. I have lived most
of my life under the 1962-88 socialist regime-another
fairy tale, this one of isolation. In 1988 we knew it was time to join the
world. Thousands of us took to the streets and I joined the National League for
Democracy and worked as an aide to Aung San Suu Kyi.
I worked closely with Ma Suu, as we all called her, for
nearly a year. I campaigned with her until
I have no regrets about going to jail and blame no one for
it. It was a price we knew we might have to pay. But my fellow former political
prisoners and I are beginning to wonder if our sacrifices have been worthwhile.
Almost a decade after it all began, we are concerned that the work we started
has been squandered and the momentum wasted.
In my time with Ma Suu, I came to love her deeply. l still do. We had hoped that when she was released from
house arrest in 1995 that the country would move forward again. So much was
needed-proper housing and food and adequate health care, to begin with. That
was what the democracy movement was really about-helping people.
Ma Suu could have changed our lives dramatically. With her
influence and prestige, she could have asked major aid donors such as the
Instead, she chose the opposite, putting pressure on the
government by telling foreign investors to stay away and asking foreign
governments to withhold aid. Many of us cautioned her that this was
counterproductive. Why couldn't economic development and political improvement
grow side by side? People need jobs to put food on the table, which may not
sound grand and noble, but it is a basic truth we face every day.
Ma Suu's approach has been highly
moral and uncompromising, catching the imagination of the outside world.
Unfortunately, it has come at a real price for the rest of us. Sanctions have
increased tensions with the government and cost jobs. But they haven't
accomplished anything positive.
I know that human-rights groups think they are helping us,
but they are thinking with their hearts and not their heads. They say foreign
investment merely props up the government and doesn't help ordinary people.
That's not true. The country survived for almost 30 years without any
investment. Moreover, the
Two Westerners-one a prominent academic and the other a
diplomat-once suggested to me that if sanctions and boycotts undermined the
economy, people would have less to lose and would be willing to start a revolution.
They seemed very pleased with this idea, a revolution to watch from the safety
of their own country.
This naive romanticism angers many of us here in
Unfortunately, the Burmese fairy tale is so widely accepted
it now seems almost impossible to call for pragmatism. Political correctness
has grown so fanatical that any public criticism of the National League for
Democracy or its leadership is instantly met with accusations of treachery: To
simply call for realism is to be labelled pro-military or worse.
But when realism becomes a dirty word, progress becomes
impossible. So put away the magic wand and think about us as a real, poor
country.