PHNOM PENH – On April 26, a prominent Cambodian anti-logging campaigner was shot and killed by military police in the Cardamom Mountains in the country’s southwest. Chut Wutty, the director of the Natural Resources Protection Group, was reportedly escorting two local journalists through a densely-forested part of Koh Kong province when his car was stopped by military police. An altercation broke out as the officers attempted to confiscate the memory card from the activist’s camera and shots were fired, leaving Wutty and In Rattana, a 32-year-old military policeman, dead.

Wutty, 46, is the highest-profile activist to have been killed in Cambodia since union leader Chea Vichea was gunned down in 2004. Over the past decade, the former soldier had built a reputation for his tireless grassroots campaigns and daring raids on logging operations in national parks and wildlife sanctuaries. Patrick Alley, director of London-based watchdog Global Witness, described Wutty as “one of the few remaining activists willing to speak out against the rapid escalation of illegal logging and land grabbing” in Cambodia.

“The national government and international donor countries must publicly condemn his murder and take swift action to bring the perpetrators to justice,” he said in a statement.

The tragic incident highlights the extreme risks run by those who go up against the powerful interests that control Cambodia’s illegal timber trade. In its explosive 2007 report “Family Trees”, Global Witness alleged that the country’s ruling and business elite, including officials closely linked to Prime Minister Hun Sen, were systematically stripping the country’s once-bountiful forests for personal profit, deploying state security forces including the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces (RCAF) to guard their operations.

In recent years, Wutty had become a particular thorn in the side of Cambodia’s timber mafia. Late last year, he and a large band of villagers clashed with around 500 police and military police after burning stockpiles of illegal timber in Prey Lang, a swathe of threatened lowland rainforest in northern Cambodia. Wutty had also worked closely with local and international media to produce a recent series of exposes on the axis of government, business and military interests cashing in on Cambodia’s rapidly-diminishing forests.

“People at the grassroots had been taking action, had been conscious of the importance of the forest to the nation, to their livelihoods, to the ecology,” said Lao Mong Hay, an independent human-rights activist based in Phnom Penh. “All these actions hurt the interests of a group of people.” He added that the killing was clearly intended to “send a signal” to others opposing the illicit trade in timber.

Journalists covering land issues – especially illegal logging – have also been subject to intimidation and threats. The Cambodia Daily journalists accompanying Wutty on his ill-fated trip to Koh Kong last week were forced to surrender their cameras; after the shooting they also recalled overhearing a soldier instructing his colleagues to “just kill them both”. In December, a reporter and photographer investigating illegal logging for the Phnom Penh Post were similarly stopped and forced to delete photos from their cameras, and were chased in their car by military police.

Though it’s still unclear whether Wutty’s killing was premeditated, the official response has raised some thorny questions. After a 24-hour investigation, military police announced that the man responsible for the shooting was in fact the dead military police officer, In Rattana. After gunning down the forestry activist with an assault rifle, officials claim, he then shot himself twice in remorse – once in the stomach and then, when that failed to do the job, in the chest.

“The military police officer fatally shot Chut Wutty and when he realized he had made a mistake and could not flee from the law, he decided to kill himself,” national military police spokesman Kheng Tito told Agence France-Presse.

The claim was greeted with incredulity by rights activists and opposition politicians, who said it was implausible that the officer would have been able to shoot himself twice in succession and that the “suicide” was being used as cover for the real culprit.

“It is impossible to call it closure, impossible to call it suicide,” said Mu Sochua, a lawmaker for the opposition Sam Rainsy Party (SRP), who said she was “alarmed” how little was done to investigate the killing. “The more they say it, the more you get suspicious.” In particular, Sochua said, four other military police on the scene were not taken in for questioning, suggesting that the responsible officers were in the pay of senior government officials.

“There were other people involved and they were around. They were very much part of the story and what led to the killings,” she said, adding that only a full and independent investigation would allay her suspicions. (The two Cambodia Daily journalists who were in Wutty’s car at the time of the incident reported that they did not see who fired the lethal shots).

Cycle of impunity

Government critics say the shooting – and the perfunctory investigation conducted by the military police – follows a familiar pattern of impunity in Cambodia, under which the murder and assault of anti-government critics goes largely unpunished. Lao Mong Hay drew a comparison between Wutty’s killing and the high-profile assassination of Chea Vichea, a popular union leader who had rallied Cambodia’s garment workers and spoken out strongly against labor abuses. After he was shot at a Phnom Penh newspaper stand in January 2004, police quickly framed two innocent bystanders for the crime, a story told in the 2011 Who Killed Chea Vichea? documentary.

The two were released by the Supreme Court in 2009, which was eventually forced to recognize the lack of evidence linking them to the murder. The real killers, alleged to be in the pay of powerful officials, remain at large.

This pattern has also been seen in a recent spate of shootings of activists and protesters working to expose land-related corruption and other abuses. In the past six months, Licadho, a local rights group, has documented five shooting incidents specifically involving land activists, causing 19 injuries. These included an incident in January in which security guards employed by the TTY rubber firm shot and injured four villagers protesting the company’s clearing of their land in Kratie province.

On February 20, a government official allegedly shot his handgun into a crowd of protesting garment workers at the Kaoway Sports factory in Bavet near the Vietnamese border, injuring three young women. After several unsuccessful attempts to buy the victims’ silence (local media reported sums ranging from $500 to $1,000), the alleged shooter, Bavet district governor Chhouk Bandith, was removed from his post.

In mid-April, the provincial court in Svay Rieng eventually caved to outside pressure and charged Bandith in mid-April with causing “unintentional injury”, a charge rights groups said was excessively lenient. The outcome was a familiar one. “One cannot help but conclude that Chhouk Bandith belonged to a certain powerful faction in the government,” said Lao Mong Hay. “He must have been protected somewhere.”

Rupert Abbott, Cambodia researcher for rights group Amnesty International, said the only thing that will stem the tide of violent incidents is if Cambodia’s leadership finds the political will to reform Cambodia’s pliant judiciary. “In none of these cases has anyone senior been held accountable,” Abbott said of the spate of recent shootings. “If you reform [the judiciary] and make people realize they can’t get away with murder and that there won’t be impunity, there will likely be a decrease in violence.”

But without concerted action to end impunity and investigate Wutty’s tragic killing, it’s possible that Cambodia’s annus mirabilis of 2012 – a year in which it is chairing the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and campaigning for a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council – could be marked instead by an escalating cycle of abuses, protests and state violence.

“This is going down as a bit of a dark chapter,” Abbott said. “And the story of this violence isn’t going away because the violence isn’t going away.”

[Published by Asia Times Online, April 30, 2012]

PHNOM PENH – Between their anodyne pageantry and colorless mission statements about regional economic cooperation, Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) meetings are rarely known for their excitement. But on the last day of this month’s annual summit in Phnom Penh, the current chairman of the 10-country bloc, Cambodia’s long-serving Prime Minister Hun Sen, did his best to inject some verve into the proceedings.

Speaking at an hour-long press conference at the close of the April 3-4 summit, Hun Sen unleashed a fiery broadside against his domestic opponents, labeling them “crazy analysts” and “stupid philosophers”. At the center of the strongman’s crosshairs was a “bald-headed doctor”- a thinly-veiled reference to Lao Mong Hay, a local rights activist – who has made critical comments in the media about China’s growing influence in this nation of 15 million.

The ASEAN summit had opened a day after the four-day visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao, prompting some to speculate that Hu had pressured Phnom Penh to keep the sensitive South China Sea dispute off the formal summit agenda. Hun Sen shot down the suggestion, telling his critics they “should learn more about the processes of ASEAN”.

“What I hate and am fed-up with is talk about Cambodia working for China and must be under some kind of influence. That is completely wrong,” he said. “We are a country full of dignity.”

That’s not how it seemed, however, to some of the regional correspondents covering the ASEAN meet. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Martin Vaughan noted that Hun Sen “seemed to forget” that he was speaking as the chair of a major regional bloc. “Mr Hun Sen’s outburst was all the more surprising, given that this week’s summit represents a powerful opportunity for Cambodia to burnish its reputation on the international stage,” he added.

But it is less surprising than it seems. After 30 odd years in the rough-and-tumble world of Cambodian politics, Hun Sen, now 59, has learnt to talk the talk – and talk it well. He first became premier in January 1985 of the government Vietnam installed during its decade-long occupation following the defeat of the Khmer Rouge in 1979.

The prime minister’s dramatic public speeches have over the years become a central part of the political strategy that has kept him in power for more than a quarter-century.

At regional talk shops and overseas trips, Hun Sen is all charm: the very picture of restraint and diplomatic poise. But back on his home turf, all bets are off. High school graduation speeches, ribbon cuttings, political party meets, even ASEAN summits – no event is too innocuous or important for Hun Sen to call out a local critic or deliver a dramatic verbal lashing.

Hun Sen has many strings to his rhetorical bow, and has used the podium to harangue everyone from rival Cambodian politicians and human-rights activists to corrupt generals and “meddling” United Nations officials. In recent years, he has called former Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva “stupid”, and referred to Mu Sochua, an up-and-coming opposition politician, as a jeung klang, a derogatory term meaning “strong legs”. Referring to Cambodia’s self-exiled opposition leader Sam Rainsy – one of his favorite targets – Hun Sen has grown fond of employing insulting canine metaphors.

“When the dog bites my leg, I don’t bite the dog’s leg – I use my leg to kick the dog,” he said in a transparent reference to Rainsy in September 2010. The following January, after Rainsy compared Hun Sen to the teetering autocrats in the Middle East, the premier shook his finger and scolded him for making the comparison. “I would like to tell you that if you want to strike as in Tunisia,” he warned Rainsy in a speech, “I will close the door and beat the dog this time.”

Observers say the premier’s speeches – beamed around the country on TV and radio – are particularly well-attuned to the worldviews of Cambodia’s mostly rural population. Peppered with village aphorisms and earthy turns of phrase, they help reinforce the political status quo and Hun Sen’s own position at the apex of Cambodia’s system of political patronage.

Ou Virak, president of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights (CCHR), said the premier’s use of language was gruff and basic, the sort of language “that the military normally use”. “It’s strongman language … In the Cambodian political culture we have now, that’s basically what works,” he said.

Threats and broadsides

The premier is especially intolerant of outside criticism. When former United Nations human-rights envoy Yash Ghai said in 2006 that Cambodia’s government had become too personalized around Hun Sen and was not “very committed to human rights”, Hun Sen responded by calling him “totally deranged” and labelling UN staff in Cambodia “long-term tourists”. The next year, at a bridge inauguration in Takeo province, Hun Sen warned Yash Ghai that “if I live 1,000 more years, I still will not meet you”.

However, it is Thailand – which many Cambodians see as a traditional enemy – that has brought out the best in Hun Sen. In a speech to the military in February 2010, at the height of the two countries’ heated standoff over Preah Vihear temple, a uniformed Hun Sen described Abhisit as a “true power thief” with “no family honor” and “chicken egg-yolk stars” on his uniform.

“If you don’t tell the truth about Siem [Thai] troops’ invasion in Cambodia on 15 July,” Hun Sen said, addressing the Oxford-educated Abhisit, “let the magic objects break your neck, may you be shot, be hit by a car, may you be shocked by electricity or [may you be shot] by misfired guns.” On another occasion he called Abhisit’s foreign minister Kasit Piromya a “gangster”.

Hun Sen also uses the power of the podium to keep his own house in order, publicly naming and shaming officials who have stepped out of line. In a February speech, he threatened to fire Information Minister Khieu Kanharith and Fine Arts and Culture Minister Him Chhem after they suggested “swapping” ministry buildings situated on valuable Phnom Penh real estate with new locations on the outskirts of the capital.

He has also called out military officials for their involvement in illegal land-grabs, and senior officials for letting their “spoiled” children run wild across Phnom Penh. Critics say Hun Sen’s blandishments have done little to fix a system of political patronage that feeds off widespread corruption and nepotism, but the tactic is in some ways Hun Sen’s own way of preserving the stability of the system-and creating a veneer of strongman-centered accountability.

“Such speeches represent his centralization of power,” said Lao Mong Hay, the target of Hun Sen’s outburst at the ASEAN summit. He said the strongman leader uses “personality-killing phrases” to publicly destroy his opponents’ reputations.

Far from being a “leadership style” or intended strategy of any sort, however, CCHR’s Virak believes Hun Sen simply can’t help himself. “It’s a part of who he is now,” he said of Hun Sen’s often blistering rhetoric. “It’s predictable but chaotic. It works. He rules by creating fear, and by making the public believe he has all the power.”

While this might account for Hun Sen’s headlining performance at the ASEAN summit, Yim Sovann, the spokesman for the opposition Sam Rainsy Party, said the high-profile meeting was an inappropriate venue for settling domestic disputes. “It damages our image a lot,” he said. “Cambodia is like our house and Mr Hun Sen and Mr Sam Rainsy are members of the house. They should close the door and solve it internally.”

Responding a few days later to the criticism, however, Southeast Asia’s longest-serving leader was having none of it. “I exercised maximum patience, waiting for the ASEAN summit to be over so that I could respond, but they say ASEAN is not a place to criticize others,” Hun Sen said in an April 9 speech broadcast nationwide. “Oh, so when I became prime minister, they took away my right to talk? When I became the ASEAN chairman, I lost my right to speak out? Excuse me!”

[Published by Asia Times Online, April 24, 2012]

Harmonising history with modernity is crucial to preserving Yangon’s stunning architectural past.

Colonial-era buildings in downtown Yangon. (Christopher Davy)

For the discerning visitor to British-ruled Yangon, the capital of what was then called Burma, deciding where to stay was a simple affair. The Strand Hotel, built in 1901 by the Armenian Sarkies Brothers, commanded a proud vista of the city’s waterfront, in the heart of the commercial district. With its marble floors, glass-panelled doors and liveried waiters, the Strand was widely regarded as the “the finest hostelry East of Suez” – a place where the likes of Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell and Noël Coward sipped gin and rubbed shoulders with the cream of Yangon society.

After the onset of military rule, the hotel was nationalised and fell into disrepair, but was rescued in the early 1990s by a $12m-refurbishment that returned it to its original state. Today, the Strand gleams amid the bustle of modern Yangon, a tiny enclave of high-tea hospitality and colonial chic.

Across the city, hundreds more colonial-era buildings remain standing, looming out of the dirt and noise like proud totems of a bygone era. Unlike many other Southeast Asian cities, where history has been covered with ugly urban sprawl, Myanmar’s decades of isolation have allowed Yangon to preserve a rich bounty of colonial architecture – the largest of any city in Southeast Asia.

“Yangon is a city that has been stuck in time,” says Ian Morley, an urban historian at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “It’s been trapped in a bubble.”

Today, visitors to Yangon marvel at the crumbling colonial buildings dotted across the downtown, and the small architectural details – the hundreds of spires, domes and towers – that lend the city a satisfying sense of aesthetic unity.

But all this might be about to change. While the Strand was thrown a lifeline, many of its colonial siblings are in sorry shape, derelict and on the verge of collapse after years of neglect. And as the country’s isolation draws to an end, bringing an expected influx of foreign investment, Yangon has found itself in the grip of a “culture of demolition” fuelled by spiking real estate prices and the lure of easy profits. “Every year that nothing is done,” Morley says, “there are more and more buildings being lost.”

When it was laid out by British planners in 1852, Yangon’s downtown grid stood in stark contrast to the chaotic districts to the north: a cartographic expression, so the British thought, of the order and prosperity of colonial rule. And prosperous the city became: plugged into the Empire’s trade networks, Yangon grew rapidly in the late 19th century, from a population of around 63,000 in the 1860s to more than 400,000 by 1931.

Many of the city’s neoclassical Beaux Arts masterpieces were erected in the first decades of the 20th century.

The best preserved of these are clustered around what was once Fytche Square, now Maha Bandoola Garden: the City Hall, an impressive edifice combining a garden-variety colonial style with Burmese idioms, and the nearby High Court, a crimson-bricked building topped with a six-story clock tower. However, the jewel in the crown of colonial Yangon was – and remains – the Secretariat Building.

Occupying an entire city block, this sprawling complex, a riot of turrets, domes and shaded walkways set amid lush tropical gardens, was built in the late 1800s as the seat of the colonial government, an icon of imperial prowess as imposing as anything in London or Calcutta.

It was here that General Aung San, the hero of Burmese independence, was assassinated along with most of his senior colleagues on July 19, 1947.

After Myanmar gained its independence in 1948, most of these old buildings were used as government offices. In 2005, however, when the capital was shifted north to Naypyidaw, the offices were vacated, causing many to fall into further disrepair.

The Secretariat has since stood empty, its brick-work discolouring and its windows opening onto musty, unlit passages.

Weeds sprout from its towers and turrets, while a clock mounted on the east side of the building came to a stop years ago, frozen at twenty past one. The complex is now only inhabited by a squad of police, who bathe in the old cisterns on the grounds and hang their laundry from the old office windows.

In 1999, the Yangon city authorities placed 189 buildings on a heritage list, but preserving old buildings is not the government’s top priority, given the constant challenges of ethnic insurgency, political reform and gradual economic opening.

“I think the government has taken a policy to maintain these old buildings, but the main thing is that they don’t have the funding to do these things, and don’t pay attention enough to do this,” says Aung Soe Min, the owner of the Pansodan Gallery in central Yangon.

“These buildings are important for the image of Yangon,” he adds, “because these are the only things that [let you] see how the city experienced different eras.”

Another hurdle is popular attitudes. Soe, a Yangon resident, says many of the city’s inhabitants are more focused on development than historical preservation.

“Most people, they are really well-dressed and they might have a really good hand-phone and good shoes,” he says, as we stroll past the Immigration Building, formerly the Rowe and Co. department store – once one of Asia’s largest. “They’re only thinking about money. They don’t care about anything like this.”

This is only compounded by the fact that many of the city’s old apartment blocks have become dangerously unsafe. In March 2010, a 15-year-old girl was killed when an old building collapsed downtown, spurring calls for pre-emptive demolitions.

With developers now lining up to develop central Yangon, Morley says it’s hard to be optimistic. The cityscape has already grown taller and more “disjointed” as old buildings have been replaced by skyscrapers, hotels and apartment blocks, an almost inevitable process that has disfigured cities across the region.

“Development will destroy the cultural heritage of the city,” he says, “and the quality that it has today will be replaced by the kind of international face that you find almost anywhere in Southeast Asia.”

But if the current reforms bring threats in the form of rampant development, they also offer the hope that rising numbers of foreign visitors will encourage the government to kick-start preservation efforts.

Indeed, a number of old buildings downtown have been given facelifts as of late, and the state-run New Light of Myanmar recently opined that “big cities are the image and glory of the nation”. But beyond a few basic repairs and a fresh coat of paint, it’s still uncertain where the fate of Britain’s colonial relics will rate for a country still emerging from a haze of isolation and economic backwardness.

“There are changes definitely occurring in Myanmar,” Morley says, “but nobody’s really sure yet where conservation and preservation of buildings fits in with that picture.”

[Published in the Southeast Asia Globe, April 2012]

Life behind the lines of Kachin state’s bloody ethnic conflict.

A golfer tees off from Hole No. 6 at the Laiza Golf Club in Kachin State on April 1. (Sebastian Strangio)

LAIZA, Myanmar — Stray dogs scurry across the fairway, the greens have seen better days and a civil war rages just 10 miles away. But here in the conflict-torn hills of northern Myanmar, the Laiza Golf Club (est. 2006) remains open for business.

This six-hole course — three more are planned — sprawls along a small river in rebel-held Kachin State, so close to the Chinese border that a sliced shot might land your ball in a different time-zone. The club house consists of a small sheltered area with benches, where scores are written up on a blackboard.

It’s an unlikely place to tee off, but for the leaders of the ethnic Kachin guerrilla force that’s fighting Myanmar’s powerful military, a few rounds is good for cementing relationships — and it soothes war-weary minds.

“Golf is a gentleman’s game,” says Col. Maran Zaw Tawng, the secretary of the Laiza Golf Club and a senior commander in the Kachin Independence Army (KIA). “When we play golf we learn to respect each other. You have to be silent while the others are taking their shot. If there are other things in your mind you’ll miss.”

Golf courses exist across Myanmar (formerly Burma), a legacy of British rule. Col. Maran first came across the game as a child in the Kachin State capital Myitkyina, where he would watch golfers playing at the local course. Laiza’s course, designed by Nay Min, a well-known Indo-Burman golfer from Myitkyina, was built to service the large influx of traveling businessmen and visiting officials from Myanmar’s government.

Soon, however, members of the KIA, and its political wing, the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), developed a taste for the game. The golfer Nay Min was kept on to teach local commanders the finer points of driving and putting.

One convert of recent years is Laiza’s mayor, Maj. Kareng Naw Awn, who hits the links in a tan Nike polo shirt, slacks and white golf shoes. “I just play for friendship and relationships. If we play golf, my colleagues and I can understand each other better,” he says as he tees off from Hole No. 1, a 358-yard par 4, sending a shot hurtling towards the distant green.

When fighting broke out between the KIA and Myanmar’s forces last June — shattering a 17-year cease-fire and driving tens of thousands from their homes across the region — the golf club remained open to the public, for a fee of 1,000 Myanmar kyats (about $1.15) per game. But many KIO officers say they have had to scale back their golf habits due to the demands of the war. The club has also had to cancel its monthly tourneys.

For better or worse, the war has provided caddies: young Kachin girls displaced by the fighting, who wheel golf bags around to earn some spare change. “The Burmese troops attacked our village,” says Dau Nan, a 13-year-old in a floppy blue baseball cap, who makes 3,000 Myanmar kyat (around $3.70) for caddying an 18-hole game.

The relaxed pace on the links reflects the atmosphere at large in this border town of 7,500, the capital of the KIO’s autonomous zone in northern Myanmar. The jungle conflict has triggered an influx of displaced residents, but a surprising air of normality reigns in Laiza. Street-side barbecue restaurants do a bustling night-time trade. Rows of import-export shops hawk everything from Johnny Walker whisky to Chinese-made shampoo (not to mention golfing gear).

“The fighting is happening so close to Laiza, but all the civilians believe that the KIO soldiers can defend [the town], so they can just stay here like normal,” says Mayor Kareng Naw Awn back at his office, where bags of golf clubs are lined up outside the door.

The conflict led to a fall in cross-border tax revenues, but has allowed the KIO to restart tax collection in other areas — including the jade-mining mecca Hpakan — excluded under a 1994 cease-fire agreement. And, unlike many other parts of Myanmar, the lights in Laiza nearly never go out: the KIO’s statelet is well-served by its own hydropower facilities.

God in the time of war

Doi Seng, 27, and his 26-year-old fiancée Labang Mi May are two who have tried to preserve some sense of normality in wartime. Recently, the pair were married at the town’s small Baptist church, a white brick building sitting against a backdrop of wooded hills. Many Kachin were converted to Christianity by colonial missionaries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

After the ceremony, in which the couple recited their vows and the groom cut a wedding cake with his ceremonial sword, the happy couple exited the church to the strains of “Here Comes the Bride” played on an out-of-tune upright.

Flower girls sing at a wedding at a Baptist church in Laiza, Kachin state, Myanmar, on March 30, 2012. (Will Baxter)

Khawng Lum, 35, one of the pastors presiding at the wedding, says the conflict has led to a renewal of faith among the Kachin. “Our spirituality has become a little bit more serious since before the war broke out,” he says. “Christianity is our key, the tone that unites us and binds us together. … It’s crucial for us.”

At a Sunday church service later in the week, worshippers — women in rainbow-hued tribal skirts, men wearing Western slacks and longyi (sarongs) — spill out into the car park surrounding the church. The arrival of displaced civilians from conflict zones has swelled church attendance by a third.

For nine months, the church has also maintained a wartime vigil, praying around-the-clock for an end to the conflict. Groups rotate between six small prayer rooms. Tu Lum, a 57-year-old KIA veteran volunteering for one of the prayer groups, has come for three days a week for the past eight months and says he will continue “as long as the fighting takes place.”

“We’ve been praying for nine months already — everyday, 24 hours,” Khawng Lum says.

Traditionally animists, the Kachin took readily to the gospel preached by colonial missionaries. The most revered is the Swedish-American missionary Ola Hanson, who was posted in northern Myanmar between 1890 and 1928. Hanson was the first to transcribe the Kachin language into Roman script, and provided a translation of the Bible and the Swedish hymns that are still sung in Kachin churches today.

In his book “The Kachins, Their Customs and Traditions,” published at the height of British rule in 1913, Hanson predicted a bright future for Myanmar’s minority peoples.

“The future of the hill tribes is bound up with the future of Burma,” he wrote. “The Burmans of the past have had their day, they have done their work, and are slowly but surely passing away. Burma is a melting pot where a new people with a new destiny is in the making.”

But things took a different turn. The ethnically Burman majority, tired of being oppressed under colonial rule, reasserted themselves after the British departed in 1948, fueling an unending string of civil wars along the country’s ethnic periphery.

For the Kachin, divided from the Burmans by language, religion and decades of suspicion, the prospect of a lasting settlement with the central government is remote. For some it’s not even desirable. “There are two forces fighting: one side are the evil forces, one side are the godly forces,” says the pastor Khawng Lum. “It’s better for us to separate away from the Burman majority and establish or build another country.”

Until then, life in Kachin goes on. Back at the golf course, Lum Hkawng, 38, is hanging his comrades out to dry. After just eight months playing the game, the ex-KIO administrator and Greg Norman fan has developed a powerful drive and an ice-cool putting game. “When I was a youth I used to play football. [Then] I saw [golf] on TV and got interested in playing,” he says.

As the players get set for their final trip around the six holes, the light is quickly fading into a roseate dusk framed by the darkening hills of China and Myanmar. By the time it’s dark the game will be over; then it will be back to town, and the burdens of the KIA’s long fight for autonomy.

[Published by GlobalPost, April 16, 2012]

PERHAPS THE BEST way to grasp the sad and desperate state of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is to glance at a satellite photo of Northeast Asia by night. From this vantage point, a few hundred miles above the earth’s surface, the southern half of the Korean peninsula is fretted with dazzling lights, neon-ribbed and pulsing with energy. Over the northern border, however, the land lies under a blanket of Stygian black, a near-total absence broken only by a tiny pinprick: the showcase capital Pyongyang.

A few years ago, in her fascinating book Nothing To Envy, the American journalist Barbara Demick described how this nightly blackout dominates ordinary life in North Korea. Since the country’s economy collapsed in the early 1990s, North Koreans have learned to live without power, a fact of life that has retarded industry and development and plunged the nation into famine. Paradoxically, however, the darkness also hides the awful reality of life and allows some measure of freedom. She tells the story of one teenage girl who takes advantage of the darkness to arrange secret meetings with her sweetheart, and wanders with him on cracked pavements under the brilliant night sky. Lenin famously said that communism equalled “electrification and Soviet power.” After losing its access to electricity, North Koreans now at least have some sort of respite from the prying eyes of Lenin’s heirs.

Like many of the North Koreans whose stories Demick tells, Park Jun Do, the hero of Adam Johnson’s new novel, is accustomed to the darkness. Indeed, he has been taught to flourish in it: plucked from an orphanage at the age of fourteen, Jun Do is drafted into the army and trained to fight in pitch darkness, confined to the unlit tunnels that run deep under South Korean territory. From this starting point, Johnson sweeps the young man up into a grim adventure that leads him through the various warrens of the North Korean state—from its prison camps to the Pyongyang opera—and gives us a surprisingly convincing (although slightly lengthy) fictional panorama of the world’s most isolated and repressive state.

Any novelist attempting to tackle North Korea runs considerable risks, either of being overshadowed by the bleak majesty of the topic or falling prey to tinny clichés about “the hermit kingdom.” In researching his book, Johnson made one trip to the North and spent seven years reading the testimonies of North Korean defectors, and the legwork has paid off: he has rendered his world in a surprisingly vivid manner. Every backdrop—from the looming martyrs’ monuments that dot Pyongyang to the flow and cadence of North Korean propaganda radio broadcasts—resonates with verisimilitude.

This is a world of near-total euphemism and dissimulation, where all aspects of life are dominated by the propaganda that is blared each day into every household. As a counterpoint to the literal darkness of the North Korean night, this blanketing state control also creates a sort of metaphorical fog, through which Johnson’s characters grope blindly. Each goes by a nickname or a pseudonym, their true identities and origins buried under the swaddling of their official—and ever-shifting—“biographies.” In the torture cells of Division 42, where these identities are broken down and reconstructed, a nameless interrogator describes the pain of torture as “a dance with identity”—a pas de deux with only one possible outcome. In the following passage, he speaks about the torture of a university professor caught playing illegal South Korean pop songs to his students.

We ramp up the pain to inconceivable levels, a shifting, muscular river of pain. Pain of this nature creates a rift in the identity—the person who makes it to the far shore will have little resemblance to the professor who now begins the crossing. In a few weeks, he will be a contributing member of a rural farm collective, and perhaps we can even find a widow to comfort him. There’s no way around it: to get a new life, you’ve got to trade in your old one.

“For us, the story is more important than the person,” another character, later to be purged, describes it: “If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change.” (As if to underline this rift, sections of Johnson’s narrative are written in the style of propaganda broadcasts, which provide an increasingly absurd—almost magical realist—parallel to the main action. The book both opens and closes with these hectoring passages.)

Park Jun Do, Johnson’s main protagonist, is one of many characters who occupy both sides of this equation, and the one who bears most of the strain of the conflict. Conscripted into a work camp for orphans after his mother (a singer) is kidnapped and dispatched to entertain the Pyongyang elites, Jun Do—he is named after one of North Korea’s revolutionary heroes—soon becomes an agent of the state’s security apparatus, traveling abroad to kidnap foreigners and monitor foreign radio broadcasts. After failing in his main mission as part of an official delegation to Texas (where his name is tellingly mistaken for “John Doe”), Jun Do is pitched into the deepest recesses of the North Korean prison system. This is a place of horror, where doctors drain the blood from dying prisoners in order to keep the hospitals of Pyongyang well-stocked, and lobotomies are performed on inmates with a long nail—the “preferred method of reforming corrupted citizens.” One hopes—probably in vain—that these are figments of Johnson’s imagination.

After taking the identity of another man, Jun Do manages to escape the camp and unexpectedly falls in love with one of the North Korea’s most famous actresses. As Jun Do rises through the ranks, using a new identity and moving into the world of the Pyongyang elite, he also edges closer to the penumbra of danger surrounding the “Dear Leader,” Kim Jong-Il himself.

The “Dear Leader” that appears in these pages is ingenious: a trickster, impish and insecure, whose good humor is almost more dangerous and unpredictable than anything else. In this respect, Johnson’s Kim bears a certain family resemblance to the Stalin conjured up in The Case of Comrade Tulayev, Victor Serge’s great novel of the Soviet purges. This is the sort of avuncular despot who would beam and clap you on the shoulder one moment, and then ship you off to the Gulag the next. Or as one of Johnson’s characters says of Kim fils, “I didn’t know which was worse, to displease him or to please him.”

Johnson has said he actually had to rein in his own version of Kim Jong-Il, worried that the real-life excesses of the Dear Leader would come across as phoney or contrived. But it is this atmosphere of caprice and playful menace, rather than the platform shoes and Swedish concubines, that make Johnson’s Kim chillingly effective. Backed by the world of make-believe created by official propaganda, this is a leader who treats North Korea and its people as personal playthings, to be used and disposed of at will. (One cannot help being reminded here of the Führer himself, stooped and gazing with malign enthusiasm over his prized architectural models.)

When Kim Jong-Il died last year, many observers in the West were puzzled by the displays of public mourning that took place in Pyongyang. For days, apparently ordinary men and women wept and flagellated themselves in the snow-filled squares of the capital, like aggrieved relatives ready to heave themselves into the grave of a departed loved one. Surely these tears had to be fake, coerced by peer pressure, like the crowd of Soviet officials afraid to be the first to stop applauding. Surely these people could not possibly accept the absurd lies about this withered tyrant, whose death, according to North Korean state media, caused frozen lakes to crack and the hallowed Mount Paektu to glow red.

Much of the mourning was undoubtedly exaggerated, but few stopped to consider that the show of affection may also have also been partly genuine. One young North Korean woman I met in Seoul said she once viewed Kim Jong-Il and his father Kim Il-Sung “as gods”; it was only when she got out to the south that she saw the awful extent of the lies about the Dear Leader and the desperate situation in her homeland.

In The Orphan Master’s Son, Johnson has provided a striking sketch of this horrific psychological landscape; he shows that the people of North Korea are victims of a sort of national Stockholm syndrome, by which affection for the trinity of Kims is coerced, yet also strangely heartfelt. To love one’s oppressor: many nations and political systems have attracted the epithet “Orwellian,” but Johnson’s novel is a timely reminder that none have deserved it to such a chilling extent.

[Published by The New Republic, April 16, 2012]

Despite reforms elsewhere in the country, Kachin Independence Army troops maintain their tense daily vigil, eyeing off a Myanmar army post across the valley.

KIA soldiers near the front in Kachin State, Burma, on April 4. (Will Baxter)

LAIZA, Myanmar — There’s little sign of a democratic awakening in Laja Yang.

Despite the political reforms that have captivated attention in other parts of Myanmar, this dusty village remains a ghost town, abandoned last year when clashes broke out between the Myanmar military and ethnic Kachin rebels, who began their fight for independence in the 1960s. With most of its residents gone, the village now lies along a bloody ethnic fault-line in the country’s north, a fortified encampment threaded with foxholes and trenches.

Last week, the election to parliament of democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi to parliament triggered scenes of jubilation across Myanmar, but little of this optimism has trickled through to Laja Yang. From fortified bunkers, troops from the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) maintain their tense daily vigil, eyeing off a Myanmar army post across the valley. The KIA is the military arm of the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), a political organization made up of ethnic Kachins.

The soldiers were on high alert one morning last week after gunshots rang out behind enemy lines. That time, at least, it was a false alarm — Myanmar troops were soon spied hauling a freshly-slaughtered cow back to camp — but the wider conflict in Kachin State, which lies along the Chinese border in northern Myanmar, shows no sign of abating.

Clashes have been raging here since June 2011, when a 17-year ceasefire between the KIA and the Myanmar government collapsed into armed conflict. Fighting since has been sporadic but deadly. More than 150 KIA troops have been killed in hundreds of jungle skirmishes, and tens of thousands have been driven from their homes.

“They came into the village and burnt everything down,” recalls La Htaw La Ring, a 39-year-old KIA soldier whose home in Nam San village was destroyed by Myanmar troops in October. “Everything they saw in the village they shot — even the dogs.”

Since gaining its independence in 1948, Myanmar (formerly Burma) has been in a state of near-constant civil war with a raft of ethnic militias seeking independence or autonomy from central control. But the stakes are especially high in Kachin State, a region rich in jade, gold and timber, with surging rivers that are being dammed by Chinese hydropower projects.

Under a 1994 cease-fire agreement, large swathes of the state were controlled by the KIA, which claims to have up to 20,000 men under arms, while the KIO used tax revenues to fund an autonomous statelet in the mountainous territory along the Chinese border.

At the moment, however, the Kachin rebels are under siege. Since June, the Myanmar military has forced the KIA back into its core regions along the Chinese border. As the fighting has escalated, the zone has been put on a war footing. The KIA has shifted its command headquarters to a hotel in Laiza, the Chinese border town that serves as the capital of independent Kachinland, while men and women of all ages have volunteered for military service.

Shang Hting Tang is one of 225 new recruits graduating from the KIA’s basic military training course — a 56-day boot-camp in which volunteers learn basic military maneuvers and attend lectures on Kachin history.

But there are few fresh faces in this crowd of cadets: like Shang, many of the recruits are middle-aged farmers driven from their land by the fighting. “I don’t want to kill Burmese troops, but I want to defend our country,” the 42-year-old says after the one-hour graduation ceremony, which comes to a close with a full-throated rendition of the Kachin national anthem.

Since the outbreak of fighting, human rights groups have accused Myanmar troops of pillaging and destroying Kachins’ property, and shooting at unarmed villagers with small arms and mortars. Around 75,000 Kachins have fled their homes since June, according to a recent report by the US-based Human Rights Watch, hiding in the jungle or seeking refuge in some 30 camps for the displaced in KIO-controlled areas.

But despite a recent visit by United Nations officials, the Myanmar government continues to block outside aid to the KIO areas. At Jeyang, a camp outside Laiza that houses 5,800 displaced people, food, building materials and other supplies are beginning to run low.

“Some people have fled to the Chinese side, but the Chinese authorities don’t take care of them,” says Doi Pyi Sa, the head of the KIO’s relief operations. “If the conflict lasts much longer, there will be many difficulties. We can’t survive without international help.”

Many outside observers, however, are paying more attention to developments elsewhere. Since March 2011, President Thein Sein, the country’s first civilian leader in half a century, has captivated international attention with a series of political reforms that are pushing many Western nations to relax long-standing economic sanctions.

An injured KIA soldier recovers at Laiza Military Hospital, in Burma's Kachin State, on March 30. (Will Baxter)

There has also been the appearance of progress on the ethnic front. In January, the government signed a historic cease-fire with the Karen National Union, the world’s longest-lasting insurgency. It has concluded a similar agreement with the 7,000-strong Shan State Army (South), in addition to smaller ethnic Chin, Mon and Karenni groups.

In a state of the union speech delivered last month, Thein Sein called for an end to “misunderstandings and doubts” among Myanmar’s ethnic groups, and made unprecedented calls for ethnic equality.

But whatever the progress elsewhere, relations with the Kachin have deteriorated under Thein Sein. Three months after he took office, in June, fighting with the KIA erupted close to a Chinese-built hydropower project and quickly spread to other parts of the region.

In December, a presidential order for the Myanmar military to halt fighting ahead of peace talks was apparently ignored, casting doubt on whether Thein Sein, a former general, has any control over Myanmar’s powerful military.

Meanwhile, Kachin leaders doubt the sincerity of Thein Sein’s ethnic charm offensive. Samlut Gam, the KIO’s head negotiator, says the Myanmar government is pressing hard for a cease-fire agreement it can present to Western nations as proof of “progress” on the ethnic issue. “They want us to sign a cease-fire agreement quickly, but we want to make a political dialogue and sign a more permanent kind of agreement,” he says.

KIO spokesman Kumhtat La Nan says that the government’s strategy is to force the KIA and other ethnic groups to disarm and abandon their push for self-determination. As a stick, it prevented Kachin parties from registering for the November 2010 national election and postponed last week’s by-election vote in Kachin constituencies, citing the security situation — something he denies would have prevented voting.

“The military guys just changed their uniforms, but they’re using the same strategy,” he says, sitting in the KIA’s command headquarters under a banner that proclaims “God is Our Victory.”

But while the recent talks with ethnic groups are overt signs of progress, a recent briefing by the Burma Center for Ethnic Studies argues that overcoming six decades of conflict could take years.

“For the last 60 years all parties have been so heavily involved in waging war that they have little understanding of what is required to maintain peace,” it states.

In the meantime, the Kachin are digging in for a long fight.

After 10 days of being battered by mortar and small arms fire, a tranquil calm prevails at a small KIA post behind the Nam Sam front. Off-duty troops strum a guitar and sing military songs as the light fades, sipping a traditional cocktail of rice whisky and fresh deer blood.

Like elsewhere, many of the troops here are recent civilian recruits, including several KIA veterans who dusted off their old uniforms and re-enlisted after the fighting restarted. One of the them is Capt. Len Aung, 64, a 38-year veteran of the KIA, who seems unfazed at having his 10 years of retirement interrupted by a return to the barracks life.

“We can’t stay here peacefully,” he says, “so I’ll keep fighting until my last breath.”

[Published by GlobalPost, April 9, 2012]

In Kachin State, ‘reform’ remains a distant concept.

A displaced Kachin woman at the Wai Shyai camp for displaced civilians in Laiza, Kachin State, on March 31. (Will Baxter)

LAIZA, Myanmar—The world watches today as Myanmar goes to the polls to elect 45 new members of parliament. Though limited, the by-election caps off a remarkable year of reforms by the country’s new government, which has released political prisoners, loosened press controls and lured Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s world-famous democracy icon, back into the political fold. If the 66-year-old Nobel laureate wins a seat in parliament — as her party is already reporting she has — it will be a symbolic milestone for a country emerging from decades of military dictatorship.

But in the mountainous regions of Kachin State in northern Myanmar (formerly Burma), a different story is unfolding. Since June 2011, bloody fighting has raged between government troops and ethnic Kachin rebels, displacing tens of thousands of civilians.

The clashes shattered a 17-year-old ceasefire that had preserved a fragile peace between the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), which has been fighting for autonomy since the 1960s, and the Myanmar military, which is seeking to disarm ethnic rebel groups.

In contrast to the boisterous campaigns being staged by Suu Kyi’s supporters, optimism in this rebel-held area of Kachin State — a sliver of territory nestled along the Chinese border — is in short supply. “We’re not interested in the elections,” says Maran Aung, a 52-year-old farmer who fled his land after the outbreak of fighting last year. “I wanted to stay and harvest my crops but it’s impossible. I was afraid of the bullets from the Burmese army.”

Over the last nine months, the population of Laiza, the shabby border town of 7,500 that serves as the capital of the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) — the KIA’s political wing — has been inundated with civilians fleeing the fighting. For many of the displaced, “reform” remains a distant concept.

At Manau Wang camp, one of three for displaced civilians in Laiza, former KIA soldier Hting Hput Tu leans on his wooden crutches as children play on the concrete nearby. The 34-year-old, who lost his leg to a landmine while on patrol in October, is skeptical about what changes the by-election will bring.

“This kind of election and this kind of campaign — who is it for?” he says. “I don’t think Aung San Suu Kyi can stop the fighting. If the Burmese authorities don’t accept our offer, the fighting won’t stop … This kind of campaign is just for inside Burma, not for the frontier areas.”

As if to underline his point, Myanmar’s electoral commission announced last week that it was suspending voting in three Kachin State constituencies under government control, citing the security situation.

Such complaints are common in the KIO territories, where mistrust and suspicion of the central authorities stretch back years. While President Thein Sein’s government has quickly won over old critics in the West with its reforms, prompting some nations to start rolling back their economic sanctions, the country’s troubled ethnic periphery looks a lot like the Myanmar of old.

In a report released last month, the New York-based Human Rights Watch documented how Myanmar troops have pillaged and destroyed Kachin villages during the past year’s conflict, firing indiscriminately at civilians. The developments in Kachin State, it states, “stand in stark contrast to hopeful human rights developments in lowland Burma in recent months.”

A child fills a bucket at the Jeyang camp for displaced civilians in Kachin State on April 5. (Sebastian Strangio)

Mark Farmaner, spokesman for Burma Campaign UK, says the publicity surrounding Suu Kyi and the reforms has drawn attention away from the country’s restive north. “If abuses like those taking place in Kachin State were happening in and around Rangoon no-one would be talking about Burma being a reforming country, or talking about lifting sanctions,” he says.

Ethnic conflict remains Myanmar’s original sin. Since winning its independence from Britain in 1948, the country has been in a state of near-constant civil war with an alphabet soup of ethnic militias occupying its hilly borderlands.

Despite some positive signs — Thein Sein’s government recently signed tentative cease-fire agreements with ethnic Mon and Karen militia — a long-term political solution for Kachin State remains elusive. After years of aborted cease-fires and failed negotiations, it’s hard to be optimistic that Myanmar can solve this problem without deeper structural reforms.

“As long as ethnic minority populations continue to suffer abuses, Burma’s prospects for reconciliation and development will be stifled,” the Human Rights Watch report states.

Given the depth of the mistrust, however, it’s unclear what Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD) will be able to do to unpick Myanmar’s Gordian knot. The party says it hopes to use its new parliamentary presence as a platform to promote peace and dialogue, but Kachin attitudes towards Myanmar’s democracy icon remain mixed.

One who reveres “The Lady,” as Suu Kyi is affectionately called, is 43-year-old Kaw Hpang, another resident of Manau Wang camp, who thinks her election to parliament could trigger “some kind of change” in Myanmar.

“Aung San Suu Kyi is trying to make Myanmar a democratic country,” she says, cradling her 18-month-old son in a pink and white checked sling. “She’s a very nice person. We can trust her.”

But when Suu Kyi campaigned in the Kachin State capital Myitkyina in February, she drew a notably smaller crowd than on the other stops of her campaign tour.

Pawk La, 71, a KIA veteran and church minister who fled the fighting, says he is worried Suu Kyi will follow in the footsteps of her father Gen. Aung San. Though widely considered the father of Myanmar’s independence, Aung San established policies that privileged the majority Burmans ahead of ethnic minorities, according to Pawk La. “She’s following her father’s ways, so we’re afraid of Burmanization,” he says.

In any case, few here think the NLD will have much power in a lower house of parliament where a quarter of the seats are reserved for the military. Maj. Kareng Naw Awn, the mayor of Laiza, says that the 75 percent vote needed to amend the 2008 constitution — a major sticking point for the KIO — will be nearly impossible for the opposition to engineer.

“I believe Aung San Suu Kyi has done some good things,” he says, “but if she wins the election and is in the parliament and can’t change the constitution, it will just be meaningless.”

Whatever the NLD’s intentions, the reforms taking place in Yangon and the capital Naypyidaw remain far removed from the chaos of the Kachin conflict zones.

At a military hospital perched in the hills overlooking Laiza, Saw Htet Aung nurses a bullet wound sustained last month during a surprise attack on government troops. Sitting on a metal bed frame covered with a thin mattress, he talks about the distant reforms that have captured international attention and cast the former pariah state in a rosy new light.

“I have no idea about the elections,” he says. “If you want freedom you should fight for it.”

[Published by GlobalPost, April 1, 2012]

Burma’s democratic icon is expected to take a seat in parliament following this weekend’s by-election. But is the junta using her as a fig leaf?

A young NLD activist shows his support in Yangon ahead of April 1's by-election. (Sebastian Strangio)

RANGOON, Burma—It’s not too hard to see where Khin Soe’s allegiance lies. In the run-up to Sunday’s by-elections, the 60-year-old activist has turned his Rangoon home into a giant shrine to the National League for Democracy (NLD), covering it in red party banners and images of its leader, Burma’s democratic icon Aung San Suu Kyi.

In constituencies across Burma, Khin Soe and his fellow activists in the NLD are nearing the end  of their first election campaign in two decades – and they’ve done it in style. Restricted during years of military dictatorship from showing their support for “the Lady”, tens of thousands across the country have turned out to hear her speak. In Mingalar Tuang Nyunt Township, one of four competing constituencies in Rangoon, the party is in the throes of a full-blown celebration. The NLD’s red peacock insignia is plastered on taxi windshields, shop fronts and t-shirts, while campaign trucks filled with young party members drive through the streets blaring campaign songs.

“People are getting more interested in politics day by day,” Khin Soe says, sitting in the shade outside his home. “First of all, the people were a bit afraid to enter membership [of the NLD]. But later the political situation changed so people here have dared to join.”

The outbreak of Suu Kyi mania in parts of Burma is a symbol of the progress the country has made over the past year under the quasi-civilian government that took office in March 2011 under President Thein Sein, a former general. Before then, it was dangerous even to possess a portrait of Aung San Suu Kyi; now her smiling image is for sale on t-shirts, key-rings, mugs, posters and countless other merchandise, and supporters can openly voice their praise. “Daw Suu is like a second mother to me,” says Mohammad Salim, 30, another NLD member attending a recent rally.

After winning a landslide election in 1990, a result that was annulled by the military junta, the NLD was cast into two decades of semi-legal limbo: key activists spent long periods in prison, and the Lady was kept for many years under house arrest. For many observers, the party’s involvement in these by-elections, after its boycott of national elections in November 2010, carries great symbolism, as well as being a significant moment in the country’s re-engagement with the West.

During a visit in February, Tomas Ojea Quintana, the United Nations’ special envoy to Burma, said the by-election would be a “key test” of the government’s commitment to reforms. “I must stress that the credibility of the elections will not be determined solely on the day of the vote, but on the basis of the entire process leading up to and following election day,” Quintana told reporters. Similarly, the European Union and United States have said “free and fair” elections are a precondition to any future rollback of economic sanctions.

Aside from the newfound freedoms enjoyed by the NLD, however, it’s uncertain just what these by-elections will mean in the wider context of political reform. Just 48 seats are up for grabs, including 40 in Burma’s 440-seat lower house, which is dominated by the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP). Under the 2008 Constitution, a quarter of the lower house remains reserved for military candidates, making it all but impossible for opposition parties to muster the 75 percent majority required to amend it. With the game already on their terms, the government can arguably afford to cede a few dozen seats to the opposition, and the election of the massively popular Aung San Suu Kyi – all but a sure thing – will be a heaven-sent advertisement for the reforming regime.

Maung Wuntha, a Rangoon-based journalist, says that with the West watching, and election monitors from across the world in attendance, the government is likely to play nice during the by-elections. “They will try to be tolerant for the time being, especially on these by-elections, so [that] in the eyes of international watchers, there will be a sort of free and fair election,” he says.

Still, the run-up has been marred by claims of electoral abuses. NLD Party spokesman Nyan Win said that while support for the party can be expressed openly in Rangoon, it has experienced more difficulties in rural areas. “We are very concerned about the countryside, because many people are afraid of the authorities,” he said. The party says it has already documented a range of abuses, including voter list problems, voter intimidation and restrictions on public gatherings.

“The Burmese government has already failed to reach the benchmark of free and fair by-elections, before a single vote has even been cast,” says Mark Farmaner, spokesman for Burma Campaign UK. “Western governments should not consider the by-elections as a key benchmark, they are for a small number of seats in a military dominated Parliament which is constitutionally powerless.”

Others argue that the by-elections, like many of the past year’s reforms, are a surface-level development that has left Burma’s underlying military-dominated structures of power largely untouched. Bertil Lintner, a Swedish journalist and Burma expert, has written that the Burmese reforms are part of a well-plotted “master plan” drawn up by the Burmese military in 2004, the aim of which was to reduce the regime’s reliance on China, re-engage the United States and sideline the domestic opposition. A key “focal point” of the plan, he writes, was the West’s focus on Aung San Suu Kyi, and the implied insight that releasing her from house arrest (which happened in late 2010) was a fast-track to improving ties.

Thant Myint-U, author of Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia, says that after years of opposition, Suu Kyi’s desire to contest the by-elections was “not a small compromise.” But her iconic status in the West has to some extent obscured the motives for her action and the complexity of the factors driving the country’s reforms. “I think the worry is that in some Western democracies, there’s a desire always to simplify situations and look for interesting stories – and her story is an incredibly poignant one,” he says. “Burma itself is…never going to be a very important foreign policy issue, so it’s very easy to see why her story has substituted for a more complex examination of the situation in the country and what role Western policy can play.”

In this context, a barrage of international media coverage focusing on the Lady and her party’s campaign – journalists here say that 300 media visas have been issued for Sunday’s by-election – is only likely to strengthen the government’s reformist credentials. Aung Myint, editor of the Myanmar Post Global news journal, says the current by-election is designed to create an impression of democratic momentum that will lead to the removal of sanctions. The end-goal, he says, is a system of cosmetic openness similar to that in Cambodia, where a powerful party under Prime Minister Hun Sen maintains its grip on power through regular semi-democratic elections, yet still receives hundreds of millions in foreign development assistance.

Could the Lady’s participation help “sell” a series of half-baked reforms to the West? The unknown quantity, as always, remains her massive popularity, and whether she will be able to use the party’s small presence in parliament as a lever for change. NLD representatives are confident they will be able to punch above their weight in parliament. “If the Lady and I get into the parliament, I believe that other members of the parliament will want to cooperate,” said Phyu Phyu Thin, the party’s popular candidate in Mingalar Taung Nyunt Township.

But Farmaner remains skeptical. “They may be able to change some laws and make some small incremental change,” he says, “but even if the NLD had a majority in parliament no reforms could take place without the approval of the military. The military still have ultimate overall control.”

It’s too soon to say whether the Burmese “master plan” will proceed according to the government’s wishes, or whether the Lady will manage to shunt it onto an alternate path; but it may be too soon for Western observers to leap from their old stance of excessive criticism to the opposite pole of excessive praise. “We’ll see some indications or some hints of genuine democracy,” Wuntha says of the by-elections, “but I don’t expect too much.”

[Published by The Diplomat, March 30, 2012]

Many of Aung San Suu Kyi’s supporters view her as a national messiah able to overcome any obstacle.

A woman makes NLD flags at a silk screening shop ahead of by-elections in Yangon. (Will Baxter)

YANGON, Myanmar (Burma) — Standing outside his wooden home in central Yangon, Aung Kyaw Moe proudly shows off his latest piece of ink-work: a portrait of Gen. Aung San that wraps around his muscly upper arm.

Like many Burmese, the 29-year-old rower, a member of Myanmar’s national team, idolizes his country’s national hero, who fought for independence from British colonialism. But with by-elections approaching, Aung Kyaw says his tattoo is also a sign of his support for the general’s daughter, the country’s iconic opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Ahead of Sunday’s poll in Myanmar (formerly Burma), thousands of residents in Yangon, the country’s largest city and former capital, have poured into the streets in support of Suu Kyi and her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD). Restricted during years of military dictatorship from showing their support, the party’s activists have gone to town, putting on a full-throated political celebration of a talismanic leader many refer to simply as “The Lady.”

“She represents the truth. She’s always doing the right thing,” Aung Kyaw says of the 66-year-old Nobel laureate, who is standing for elected office for the first time (the country’s junta barred her from doing so in 1990). “I trust her like I trust my father.”

For weeks, Mingalar Taung Nyunt Township, one of four townships in Yangon that are contesting the by-election, has been in the full grip of NLD fever.

Touring the constituency in the final days of campaigning, the party’s local candidate, Phyu Phyu Thin, is mobbed by crowds. Whole families, from infants to hunched village elders, turn out to see The Lady’s chosen representative, waving small paper flags and plastering their cheeks with party stickers.

Trailing behind her are groups of young NLD die-hards in party bandanas and T-shirts declaring “We Must Win.” They dance and chant party slogans, while others drive by in trucks blaring catchy campaign songs. “Come and support the NLD,” runs the refrain of one upbeat number. “To overcome all kinds of miseries/Vote for the NLD.”

This carnival atmosphere would have been unthinkable just a year ago, when displaying a picture of Aung San Suu Kyi was a government-enforced taboo: a one-way ticket to arrest and interrogation.

“The Lady has sacrificed her life for decades, [but] people have not had a chance before to express their feelings,” says Phyu Phyu, a stout woman with a beaming smile who seems relieved to have a break from the hectic campaigning. “Now they have a chance and you can see their support everywhere.”

In Mingalar Taung Nyunt, the NLD’s red insignia — printed on T-shirts, flags and banners — smothers all competing campaigns, including the dark green of the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), which currently holds a massive majority in parliament following flawed elections in 2010.

If a fair national election were held tomorrow, it’s hard not to see the NLD being swept to power on a towering wave of popular support.

For now, however, they’ll have to wait. Just 48 seats, including 40 in the country’s 440-seat lower house, are up for election on Sunday, recently vacated by lawmakers promoted to cabinet positions. (The next national poll is in 2015). Even if the NLD wins most of them, which many here expect, it will hold a tiny minority in the lower house, which reserves a quarter of its seats for military candidates.

For the NLD, however, there’s arguably more at stake than a few dozen seats.

It’s been more than two decades since the party won a landslide victory in the 1990 election — a result that was simply ignored by the clique of ruling generals. Since then, the NLD has been forced into the margins by official crackdowns. Those of its activists who avoided arrest were kept under close official surveillance. Suu Kyi was confined for years to her crumbling lakeside villa in Yangon.

When the country held general elections in November 2010, the NLD opted to boycott the proceedings, which many criticized as a fig-leaf for continued military rule.

But following a string of unexpected reforms under the quasi-civilian government that took office in March 2011, the NLD returned to the political fold, triggering an eruption of pent-up public support. This weekend’s elections are a small but significant litmus test of whether the reforms will continue moving in the right direction.

Meanwhile, a side-effect has been a hot market in Suu Kyi merchandise.

Daw Babi, 52, the owner of a print shop on Ko Min Ko Chin Road, started printing NLD T-shirts in December and has already sold between 20,000 and 30,000. “Now I have lots and lots of orders,” she says, as her staff work a production line, screening Suu Kyi’s portrait onto piles of T-shirts and assembling dozens of small NLD flags.

Maung Wuntha, a veteran journalist based in Yangon, says that despite the small number of seats up for grabs this week, the atmosphere in competing townships is much more electric than during the last campaign. “In 2010, there was no appropriate rival for the USDP… So it is a very, very important race,” he says.

Yazar, 34, one of Phyu Phyu Thin’s three campaign managers, has another theory for the explosion of support. “It is more than excitement or surprise or any other emotion you can express,” he says. “It’s more like a second religion, and now as soon they have a chance the people worship her.”

Indeed, the main challenge for the NLD going forward might be how to keep popular expectations in check.

After years of struggle and personal sacrifice, and despite the obstacles she will face in a military-dominated parliament, many of Suu Kyi’s supporters view her as a national messiah able to overcome any obstacle.

“If she gets into parliament and gets some sort of power, the poor are going to become rich,” says Nwe Win, 35, a resident of Mingalar Taung Nyunt Township.

Aung Naing, 39, an old student activist clad in shades, NLD bandana and Suu Kyi T-shirt, says similarly that The Lady will “provide every need” if she enters government. “It’s a very precious moment,” he adds.

Swedish journalist and Burma expert Bertil Lintner says that in the minds of many people in Myanmar, Suu Kyi exists on a higher plane to other politicians. “They see her as the female bodhisattva who is going to deliver them from the evils of the military regime,” he says. “How she feels about that, I don’t know.”

It’s a crushing burden for any leader, and the NLD may be hard-pressed to avoid a post-election hangover.

One notable skeptic is U Thein Nyunt, chairman of the New National Democracy Party. A long-time NLD activist, Nyunt left to start his own party after Suu Kyi and her colleagues opted to boycott the 2010 election, and won himself a seat in parliament.

Nyunt remains critical of the overwhelming expectations surrounding The Lady’s candidacy, and thinks she will find it hard to cooperate with the military members in parliament. In 1990, he said, “people were convinced that if The Lady wins, they’re all going to be rich … But in reality, all we got was international sanctions.” With such a small presence in government, the way forward for the iconic leader is anything but clear.

“It will be remarkable if The Lady gets into the parliament,” he adds, but “… what are they going to do to make their reality happen?”

[Published by GlobalPost, March 28, 2012]

According to a government tourism plan, 14 Khmer Rouge sites are set for a makeover.

The Anlong Veng memorial marking the site where Khmer Rouge Brother No. 1, Pol Pot, was cremated after his death in April 1998. (Sebastian Strangio)

ANLONG VENG, Cambodia — The memorial is eerily mundane: a simple mound of earth covered by a low roof of rusting corrugated iron and a hand-stenciled sign. Mixed into the sandy soil, amid the stalks of scrawny pink flowers, are the ashes of one of the worst mass murderers of the 20th century, Pol Pot — the mastermind of the bloody Khmer Rouge revolution that left as many as 2 million people dead in the late 1970s. Its dark history notwithstanding, this makeshift grave in northern Cambodia attracts a steady trickle of visitors, many of whom actually revere Pol Pot. They light incense and pray to the ghost of a departed tyrant.

“Without Pol Pot, I wouldn’t have survived till today,” said Khim Suon, a 56-year-old who has a job selling tickets to the cremation site. “Pol Pot was a leader who protected the nation, so foreigners and locals come to respect him. … They come to pray and take souvenir photos.”

It’s a common sentiment in Anlong Veng, the last stronghold of the Khmer Rouge, which lies near the Thai border and around 60 miles north of the famous temples of Angkor. Between 1975 and 1979, under Pol Pot’s leadership, the Khmer Rouge turned Cambodia into a vast rural labor camp in their bid to create a communist utopia, leaving one in four Cambodians dead from execution, starvation or overwork.

More than three decades on, countless survivors struggle to put the past behind them, even as surviving leaders of the regime stand trial at a UN-backed war crimes court in the capital Phnom Penh.

But in this remote district of red earth and cassava fields, nostalgia for the Khmer Rouge lingers. Until it fell to government forces in 1998, Anlong Veng was a nest of die-hard communist fighters who took refuge there after a Vietnamese invasion overthrew their regime in 1979. Many residents still have fond memories of the Khmer Rouge years, and pay regular visits to their old leaders’ homes and gravesites.

Many of the sites have fallen into disrepair, and the Cambodian government, which has largely failed to hold members of the genocidal regime accountable, is now poised to give these landmarks a makeover. Under a 2010 plan that is now reaching the implementation stage, 14 former Khmer Rouge sites, including Pol Pot’s cremation memorial, will soon be restored and furnished with improved signage and visitor information. A museum is also in the works. The government’s stated aim is to preserve Anlong Veng’s historical sites in a bid to allow “national and international guests to visit to understand the last political leadership of the genocidal regime.”

Khmer Rouge nostalgia

Of the old Khmer Rouge leaders, the most revered figure is probably Ta (Grandfather) Mok, the one-legged Khmer Rouge military commander who once ruled the area. In the 1980s and 1990s, “The Butcher” — as he was nicknamed for his violent purges — turned Anlong Veng into a private fief, building a small fortune from the sale of the area’s hardwood forests to the Thai military and using the proceeds to buy the loyalty of his supporters.

“Everything in Anlong Veng was built by Ta Mok,” said Sam Roeun, 59, a Khmer Rouge veteran with a prosthetic leg who shows visitors around his boss’ former home, which overlooks an eerie manmade lake filled with dead trees. “Even the lake here was not natural,” he added. “Ta Mok made it.”

Except for a few basic, hand-painted signs, however, there is little to suggest the historical significance of the site. An old Chinese radio truck sits derelict in a grove of mango trees near the house, slowly falling to pieces. Many visitors are ignorant of the area’s history. Some recent arrivals in the area, like 33-year-old Oeung Long, say they come to Ta Mok’s house to marvel at the massive hardwood trunks that hold up the structure. “I don’t know much about the history,” he admits.

Others come simply to hang out. In Ta Mok’s yard, a group of local youths gather at sunset around a white Toyota Corolla, drinking beer and listening to Khmer pop songs, the music’s synthesized calypso beat echoing through The Butcher’s empty halls. Other former Khmer Rouge sites are more dilapidated. An old munitions warehouse, perched high in the Dangrek Mountains along the Thai border, is scrawled with graffiti, while Pol Pot’s cremation site sits in a sandy lot close to the makeshift shacks of construction workers.

Former Tuol Sleng prison photographer Nhem En holds up what he claims is a hat pin once worn by Pol Pot. (Sebastian Strangio)

A trip to Anlong Veng

For foreign visitors, Anlong Veng — like Tuol Sleng, the infamous prison in Phnom Penh where as many as 15,000 people were tortured before being executed as “enemies of the revolution” — offers a harrowing counterpoint to the grandeur of Angkor Wat and the laid-back atmosphere of the coastal backpacking scene.

Most Cambodians tremble at the mention of Tuol Sleng or Comrade Duch — the gaunt chief of the prison who was handed a life sentence by the Khmer Rouge tribunal earlier this year. So, the warm recollections of many Anlong Veng residents raise a disquieting question: Will government preservation efforts serve history, or burnish the legacy of a bloody regime?

In this poor and forgotten corner of the country, where the prospect of an influx of foreign tourists is undoubtedly welcome, there are also some who hope to cash in on the renewed interest in Khmer Rouge history.

One of these is Nhem En, the former photographer from Tuol Sleng who snapped the chilling monochrome prison portraits that have become an icon of the regime’s systemic murder of its opponents. Over the years, Nhem En has amassed an impressive collection of Khmer Rouge relics, including thousands of photographs, Khmer Rouge-era songs and what he claims are Pol Pot’s shoes and toilet seat, pilfered from the former leader’s home in the late 1990s. Now a deputy district governor in Anlong Veng, Nhem En has announced plans to set up a private museum about 6 miles outside town to house his collection.

The project has stalled due to a lack funds, but Nhem En says he is eager to see his memorabilia preserved for future generations. Though he is willing to hand it over to the government, Nhem En says he won’t turn down more lucrative private offers. “I would like to sell my museum and all my Pol Pot material if anyone is interested,” he said, flashing a winsome smile. “I plan to sell everything I’ve got for $500,000.”

But for the director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), an NGO devoted to historical research of the genocide that has helped plan Anlong Veng’s preservation, the goal is not simply to cash in on the region’s legacy. “Memories should not be commercialized. It’s not about tourism; it’s about history,” said the director, Youk Chhang.

In a country where Khmer Rouge history wasn’t even taught in schools until recently, tourism officials hope that the preservation effort can better educate the young about the country’s past. “If the government did not protect this area, the young generation wouldn’t know about the history of the last Khmer Rouge,” said Sieng Sokheng, the tourism director in Anlong Veng district.

He also said profit-seekers like Nhem En would have “big problems” if they tried to cash-in on the area’s history. “The government will not let him set up a private museum, and all his material must be given to the museum here,” Sokheng said.

As the final stronghold of the Khmer Rouge, Youk said Anlong Veng has great historical significance. It was here that Ta Mok’s forces arrested Pol Pot in June 1997, an act that precipitated the final disintegration of the movement. A year after Pol Pot’s death under house arrest in April 1998, Ta Mok himself was arrested by the Cambodian military. He was set to be tried at the war crimes court in Phnom Penh, but died in 2006 before the trials got underway.

Given the strong local sympathies for the Khmer Rouge, and the recentness of its history, Youk said DC-Cam is also training local guides to educate visitors, and will later this year publish a written history of Anlong Veng, based on interviews with around 500 local residents. He hopes that both will help forge a dialogue between old communist supporters and outside visitors, promoting reconciliation between perpetrators and victims in this final bastion of Khmer Rouge terror.

“When you talk of Anlong Veng, people are afraid,” he said. “That is the final chapter of the Khmer Rouge, and it has yet to be written properly.”

[Published by GlobalPost, March 20, 2012]