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Wednesday 3 December 2008

The sweet contagion of freedom

The sweet contagion of freedom will outlast the bloodshed in Burma

Burma is awakening from a nightmare of greed and repression. 

Fergal Keane meets a family on the Thai-Burma border whose tragic story is Burma's story but remains optimistic about the chances of the Burmese desire for freedom ultimately triumphing over the junta. 

But on this occasion there was nothing Cynthia’s doctors or nurses could do. The child died two days after arriving at the clinic. His body now lay wrapped in tarpaulin in a small room at the rear of the building. Two hours after he died the parents were still sitting at the entrance to the children’s ward. The father sat slightly apart from the mother and two little girls. His eyes glistened and were red but I had the strong impression that he did not want to weep in front of the children. The mother cradled the younger of the two girls. She was three years old, a year older than her dead brother. Mother and child trembled together. The other daughter — who was seven — showed no emotion but stared out into the yard where some other children were playing.

I noticed that the father had an artificial leg. Five years before he’d stood on a landmine in the forest. The army has sown thousands of mines in its war against ethnic minority rebels along the Thai border. Along with the mines the Generals’ troops have carried out a campaign of murder, rape and forced labour against the minorities, among them the Karen whose men fought so bravely alongside the British in the second world war. The family were not remotely political. They expressed no opinions to us. But their story was the narrative of Burma itself.

There isn’t a crime in the international law-book that the Generals haven’t committed. Still they have managed to trade and travel, sending their looted wealth to foreign bank accounts and their foreign minister to make speeches at the UN. The junta lives by slogans that come straight from the Chairman Mao lexicon of political thought. ‘Crush all internal and external destructive elements as the common enemy,’ the propaganda machine declares. And that is one of the more inspired outpourings.

The Junta leader, General Than Shwe, recently spent a small fortune on the wedding of his daughter. The happy couple’s present list was said to be worth around £26 million and sparked a run on precious stones as guests hurried to cosy up to Burma’s de facto royal family.

The couple poured lavish quantities of champagne and posed for photographs in front of an ornate golden bed. Like most kleptocracies, the regime in Rangoon has a relaxed attitude to matters of taste. Back in the 1990s, when foreign firms were heading to Burma in search of lucrative contracts, the businessmen I lunched with in Rangoon would argue that ‘constructive engagement’ was the way forward with the Generals. As Burma prospered, so the argument went, the wealth would trickle down to the general population. Exposure to the outside world would draw the Generals into a more civilised, Western way of doing things. But it didn’t happen that way.

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