Take-Aways

We are caught up in history. Myanmar is experiencing its biggest mass protests in 20 years. Protests crying out for desperately needed reforms. Asking for compromise from a military regime that does not understand the meaning of the word. It’s funny being caught up in history. It’s not dramatic and unless you get access to the BBC World Service on the radio, Aljazeera on TV (the only international channel we seem to occasionally have access to) or are right in the thick of it you cannot tell the difference from everyday life. Outside of Mandalay and Yangon where hope is trying to find its voice nothing has changed. Even in Mandalay, the changes are so small that they are imperceptible. As imperceptible as the imposed 9-5 curfew that unless a local told you about you would not know. As small as not being able to get a taxi at 4.30 am in front of a hotel normally swarming with tuk tuks, rickshaws and pick up trucks begging for much needed business. It’s new but we could have equally missed it in the non-existent street lights of Mandalay. There are soldiers lurking at every corner of the city hidden in the shadows of the dawn, no doubt busily enforcing the curfew. We no longer can make international phone calls. The cost was prohibitive even for us but we could get through. Now it’s not possible. We tried at the private street phones, we tried in the telecoms office, we tried in the big hotels and over the internet. No go. The crackdown is complete and inconvenient. There is not a person here that does not want and privately speak for change. But there is fear. They know that they are dealing with a power that does not respond to reason and that reacts with disproportionate and oppressive force. A power that does not understand that the situation in untenable. This is not about democracy. In the end people care little about who rules them. They want to see their lives improving and they want to join the world. Democracy just symbolises the exact opposite of what they have now, mismanagement, ignorance, indifference to the wellbeing and progress of the whole country. Everywhere, people take into their hands the basic institutions that the complete incompetence and corruption of the state does not fulfil. Education, justice, policing. Even primary school can be too expensive while teachers are under paid. Monks and monasteries fill the gaps and in the rural areas at least teach the children how to read, write and do math. In the tribes of the Shan hills a locally elected, temporary and renewable chief dispenses order and justice in each community. It is a complex place this Burma: intensely diverse, uncannily unique. It deserves better than it has. Lets just hope that not another twenty years needs to pass before the generals do learn the language of compromise.