For more detailed information on the DKBA, the various reports published by the Karen Human Rights Group (www.khrg.org) are an excellent source of information.
I believe I can answer your questions. I am the “United Nations peacekeeper.”
Before continuing I would like to make it clear that I have never worked for the UN. I was present in a private capacity as a researcher.
The trip was pre-arranged, as are most trips like this, and we didn’t “need” Roberto to get across. It was Karen New Year and I had been invited. Roberto was a friend of a friend – the English guy – who wanted to go to the new year’s celebrations, so we all went together.
There was no reason to claim to be a UN worker or make up any other cover stories. The relationship that Roberto claims needed to be built had already existed for some years. Journalists and other foreigners had been going to DKBA camps for Karen New Year celebrations for several years already.
The commander, Colonel Lah Pwe, while allegedly a drug trafficker, is a very gracious host and we had dinner with his family, soldiers and villagers and were even invited to talk with him in his personal bedroom/sitting room. We did not sleep in a barracks, but in a house in the village.
The DKBA and SPDC have been allies since the first day of their creation. Other than a few very isolated incidents, there has been no fighting between the DKBA and the Burmese Army. Technically the DKBA don’t really have a ceasefire with the regime since they have never been at war with each other. The DKBA have an agreement with the local Burmese battalion that they come into the town on a regular basis as a part of their patrolling.
I can understand why Roberto may have seen the soldiers as “mean”, since men in uniforms with large guns always tend to look that way. Most of the DKBA were very friendly, if anything they were reserved out of shyness. In fact, Roberto was able to get portraits of the commander of the battalion and his deputy who both happily agreed. The Burmese Army soldiers, however, were not so friendly. But then they have a distrust of foreigners taught into them by their officers and, as I’ve encountered in similar situations, are often under orders to not allow their pictures to be taken.
The DKBA unit at Waley has a very close relationship to the SPDC, which makes the final paragraph of the interview rather misleading. This battalion and local Burma Army units have conducted joint operations against the KNU in the area in the past.
masao imamura wrote:
> Perhaps it is useful to identify several separate questions.
> (1) What should a teacher do? Can a teacher refuse to teach a student on the ground that his or her father is an evil dictator?
> Of course not.
etc etc
OK, in the spirit of trying to break these issues down ….
Can you separate the granting of a privilege to an evil dictator (ie an elite foreign education for their offspring) from their offpring’s
right to equality in education ? No you can’t. You effectively grant
both, or you grant neither . You have to decide which causes the least
potential harm.
If teaching that offspring had no possible connection to their
countryfolk’s future misery, then I might judge them on their merits
alone, despite their unfair course to my classroom door. Unfortunately, that connection cannot be ruled out. As I said, show me the examples of foreign-educated elites using their privilege for the benefit of their countryfolk, rather than perpetuating the misery inflicted by their parents.
People lose their right to a decent education everyday, mostly by
poverty, exam failure, expulsion due to misbehaviour, etc. Unfortunately being an ordinary Burmese citizen is also on that list, by virtue of their leaders’ decisions. So adding being the spawn of a
leader who perpetuates such denials on illegitimate bases to that list is hardly an extreme position.
As I asked previously, “Is there no one you would not teach ?”. If you were a doctor (your other example), “Is there no one you would not treat ?”. Adolf Hitler ?
………here’s a very insightful and interesting article based on direct sources inside the Burma disaster zone that appeared in the May 23rd Los Angeles Times describing:
1. the elements that have been put together to make the “pretend” refugee camp that the UN Secretary General and other visiting dignitaries are being toured through, and,
2. descriptions of how groups of actual refugees gathered in makeshift locations centered around monasteries and schools are been forcibly dispersed under a law banning groups of 5 people or more from gathering together.
…….a few comments……….
1. it seems impossible to believe that the generals are really Buddhist and accept the karmic/reincarnation belief system as their bad intent and actions will certainly result in this group of generals suffering through an infinity of future cycles as cockroaches, marsh larvae, dung beetles, etc.
2. where are the younger generals with the courage, knowledge and skill to successfully act and overthrow the present group of geriatric generals who are imposing such a large amount of unnecessary suffering on their fellow citizens. Is it possible that any and all of the younger generals with courage, knowledge and skill have been shot?
….anyway, here is the the LA Times article……
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Suspicion trumps aid in Myanmar: Ban Ki-moon visits Myanmar
From a LA Times Staff Writer inside the disaster zone – May 23, 2008
MOULMEINGYUN, MYANMAR — Among the hundreds of cyclone survivors who staggered through the doors of a monastery here, staring straight ahead and too traumatized to even blink, was one village’s last living man.
The abbot was quick to care for the group, feeding refugees from rice stockpiled for students who, in better times, came to learn meditation and the wisdom of the Buddha.
Within a few days, however, local officials barged into the monastery. They argued with the abbot and ordered stunned and frightened survivors to leave, said Pone Nya, an assistant to the abbot.
“They were informed that if they continued to stay in this monastery they would be put in jail,” the 25-year-old monk said in an interview Wednesday.
“These local officials told us the refugees are from all walks of life, good men, bad men and rebels,” Pone Nya added. “They said, ‘If those people live in the town for a long time, it’s dangerous for the town.’ My abbot absolutely hated those words.”
But he was powerless. By May 13, just 10 days after Tropical Cyclone Nargis had washed away whole villages, 1,500 survivors had been evicted from the monastery, along with thousands more from six other relief camps in this Irrawaddy River delta town.
On Thursday, the day after the monk spoke, officials brought U.N. Secretary- General Ban Ki-moon on a carefully orchestrated tour here. Myanmar’s minister for border areas, Thein Nyunt, told Ban that everyone had gone home because the water had receded. A tent remained as an apparent distribution center for bags of rice and noodles and cartons of drinking water.
The effort to break up the relief camps so soon reflects the deep suspicion in which Myanmar’s military rulers, who have been in power for 46 years, hold their own people, even sick and hungry victims of a natural catastrophe.
Survivors and volunteer aid workers describe similar moves in other areas. If displaced people aren’t ordered to leave relief camps, officials controlling aid make sure they get so little food and other support that going back to demolished homes seems a better option, said witnesses interviewed in several delta towns and villages.
In a village near Yangon, the commercial hub, an official shutting down a relief camp in a state-owned restaurant said he was enforcing a long-standing ban on public gatherings of more than five people.
Almost three weeks after the cyclone struck, the United Nations says its supplies of food, medicine and other goods have reached only 25% of those struggling against malnutrition, disease and daily rains.
By describing the refugee evictions to a reporter in an area closed to people who might criticize the regime, Pone Nya risks being defrocked and jailed. But like many cyclone survivors, he is so angry about the ruling generals’ fumbling response and their refusal to allow a full international aid effort that he is willing to face that danger.
He identified the local official in charge of clearing out the camps as Ko Khin Mg Win, who the monk said was a low-ranking employee of the state telephone company. Pone Nya said scornfully, “He’s not helping anyone. He’s just watching.”
But rather than risk direct criticism of top military leaders, the monk quoted a song by Mar Mar Aye, a leading pro- democracy singer who lives in exile in the U.S. The song honors protesters killed and arrested last fall when the military crushed the biggest demonstrations against the regime in almost 20 years.
“There’s a pain in my heart,” the monk sang quietly. “We will never forget that pain until doomsday.”
With those two, brief lines, he made reference to what many here are too frightened to say publicly: Anger over the military government’s handling of the cyclone’s aftermath could set off a new wave of protests against a regime seen as deeply corrupt and bitterly coldhearted.
“They were telling refugees to leave in the middle of the night,” Pone Nya said. “They had to go back to their own villages on foot with flashlights.”
His anger rising, the young monk took his biggest risk by declaring: “This military government is cruel.”
Businesspeople and other wealthy residents of this town about 20 miles northwest of Bogale welcomed the villagers.
A group of 400, the first to arrive two days after the storm on May 2-3, were the only people left from a village that doesn’t exist anymore. Private donors immediately gave money, food and other aid to care for them, Pone Nya said.
Local officials were almost as quick to put pressure on the abbot to kick them out, but he argued with them for days.
“The abbot told them he didn’t care if they reported him to higher-ups,” his assistant recalled. “He said, ‘Let’s see which is stronger, your report or my power.’ ”
During another angry encounter, the abbot wagged his finger in the face of three officials, and used a traditional phrase predicting they would be killed in a way reserved for the most evil: “You’re going to die in a lightning storm,” he shouted, Pone Nya said.
He later apologized, and pleaded for permission to keep the camp open, the assistant said.
“He said, ‘I have enough food. If you don’t want to spend money, I’ll take care of them,’ ” Pone Nya recalled. But that argument failed too, leaving the refugees with two options: return and rebuild homes with what they could salvage, or move north to camps still open in the town of Wakema.
Several said they didn’t want to move far from the land they farm because they feared being ordered to give up homes that they hope to rebuild.
U Tin Sein, a rice farmer who lives more than 50 miles west of here in Daung Kaung, a village near the town of Labutta, said that last year the regime evicted farmers in the western state of Rakhine to consolidate small paddies into larger farms for sale to Chinese investors.
As U Tin Sein spoke, 32 men were searching for any scraps of splintered homes that could be salvaged.
They left their wives and children in a relief camp because they were tired of getting just enough food from authorities to survive. The corpse of a child, bleached white by the sun and river water, lay next to the shore, wearing only pajama shorts decorated with cuddling cartoon figures.
There were 130 houses in the village before the storm. Not a single one is still standing.
About 300 of the 536 people who lived there are still alive. Alone on the horizon, surrounded by debris, scattered clothes and broken trees, is the shell of a Buddhist monastery.
Most of the roof is gone, so the men share the few dry spaces during the daily monsoon deluge. They plan to rebuild a single house for neighbors to share while they rebuild the village together.
As hard as that will be, the men say, it’s better than living in a camp where the government provided just two cups of rice each per day, and some instant noodles. Just twice in more than two weeks there, they said, they got a supplement of tinned tuna.
As the men made their way back to their village by boat this week, they came across a larger vessel carrying U.N. aid through the delta’s vast network of rivers and channels. The crew waved to them to pull alongside and gave them 500 pounds of rice, enough to feed their village for five days.
They had no idea when, or where, they would get more food when that ran out.
Relief distribution in the area’s 14 villages is controlled by a man the returning residents identified as Ko San Way, in the village of Kan Yin Koung. They asked him three times for help, and each time got nothing, the men said.
They suspect he is hoarding the aid for his own village.
“When we tried to meet with the top guy,” said Ko Saw Nai Win, 31, “he just disappeared.”
The strange thing was that her translation was not really official but certainly in its force has become very official.
There seems to be a clear conflict of interest that would be prohibited in an official translation. Given the conflict of interest, credentials seem to be irrelevant.
And why does it suddenly become an issue one year after the speech was given? It took one year for them to understand the speech and then use it as a basis for a legal suit?
Robert, I guess you can call them “supersititions” if you want to, but given that I live with the people who take them seriously. I have to show proper respect, even to those Jatukam amulets.
Michael Charney’s new book Powerful Learning (2006) discusses the Burmese analogue of what King Mongkut did with the Thammayut, documented by Craig Reynolds in his 1972 PhD dissertation.
In Burma they had a 100 year ongoing dispute in the Sangha on the way that the robes of monks should ne wrapped over their shoulders when they enter into villages for alms.
I think the bottom line is that as states got bigger, and they had to in the face of European colonialism, Kings had to assert control over people, economics, religion, culture, you name it. Basically, use it (and put a boundary down), or lose it. (This is supposedly the origin of the Prah Vihear dispute).
If local customs or rituals defy the laws of physics or other science, I just look at them as a form of poetry. Hopefully, it’s not poetry that makes people violent and nationalistic.
And by attitudinal change, I wish to see more critical thinking, a higher standard of proof, a lower tolerance for bullshit, the freedom to speak your mind honestly, more integrity less hypocrisy, earning respect, appreciating hard work, nonviolence, etc. To be honest, I’m rather tired of choosing the lesser of two evils.
[…] the border. Readers with an interest in these issues, and particularly those who have followed recent New Mandala discussions of foreign fighters linking up with the Karen National Liberation Army, will find much of what is […]
……you might want to post this insightful article from Friday’s New York Times put together from some people who got by the various Burma army checkpoints and traveled deep into the destruction and despair……
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Junta Offers Showcase Camps, but Most Burmese Lack Aid
THE NEW YORK TIMES – May 23, 2008
HLINETHAYA RELIEF CAMP, Myanmar – The 68 blue tents are lined up in a row, with a brand-new water purifier and boxes of relief supplies, stacked neatly but as yet undelivered and not even opened.
“If you don’t keep clean, you’ll be expelled from here,” a camp manager barked at families in some tents.
The moment, at what has been billed as a model camp for survivors of Cyclone Nargis, captured a common complaint among refugees and aid volunteers: that the military junta that rules Myanmar cares more about the appearance of providing aid than actually providing it.
As a result of heavy international pressure, the junta has embarked on a campaign to show itself as responsive and open to aid as China has been in the wake of the earthquake that killed tens of thousands in Sichuan Province. On Thursday, the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, arrived in Myanmar, as United Nations officials said that, nearly three weeks after the cyclone that left 134,000 dead or missing, they were finally seeing some small improvement.
The first 10 helicopters loaded with supplies from the World Food Program arrived Thursday. But of the 2.4 million survivors, United Nations officials say, only 500,000 have received any aid to date.
Mr. Ban received guided tours of apparently well-run government camps like this one for survivors, presenting one vision of the junta’s response to its people and the outside world.
But interviews with survivors and Burmese breaking rules to help them suggest a different story: of a government that seems to have assisted little and, at times, with startling callousness, has even expelled homeless refugees from shelters that the junta needs for other purposes.
This relief camp in the western outskirts of Yangon, the country’s main city, made headlines in Myanmar’s state-run press when the junta’s leader, Senior Gen. Than Shwe, showed up there on Sunday to inspect the government relief effort.
A few days after the general’s inspection, the camp’s tidy blue tents were still set up but bottles of cooking oil inside many of them remained in their boxes. Pots and pans still bore their brand-name stickers.
The camp’s sole “medical” tent, identified by a Red Cross flag, held neither patients nor medicine. Its desk was staffed by two teenagers in uniform. Police officers armed with rifles guarded the entrance, where a new water purification tank donated by a local company was on prominent display.
Just a short ride down a potholed road, a striking divide is evident, one between the model relief camp and the continuing plight of many victims.
In the village of Ar Pyin Padan, a few minutes’ walk from here and just an hour’s drive from the center of Yangon, 40 families who lost nearly everything they owned crowded a rundown two-story school building. They had pushed desks together to serve as makeshift beds.
Here, deliveries of relief supplies are so infrequent that the refugees say they draw lots to get a small share whenever a donation comes in. For drinking water, one said, the township authorities “threw some medicine” into a nearby pond and told the villagers to drink from it.
Now the authorities are allowing no more refugees into the school. Instead they are trying to evict those who are already there so that the building can be used as a balloting station on Saturday. Despite the devastation and misery left by the cyclone, the junta is pressing ahead with voting in the two hardest-hit administrative divisions, Yangon and the Irrawaddy Delta, to complete a referendum on a new Constitution intended to perpetuate military rule. The Constitution was already overwhelmingly approved in other parts of the country.
“They want us to move out,” said one man in the school shelter. “But we have nowhere to go. Maybe if I had four or five sticks of bamboo, I could rebuild my house and start over but they don’t even give us that. So please donate to us. We need urgent help.”
He called the blue tents a short distance away beyond the rice paddies a “V.I.P. camp” – hastily constructed and occupied by villagers tutored to receive visiting junta generals or envoys from the United Nations.
In the past week, the state-run news media have given lavish coverage to General Than Shwe and other generals visiting areas devastated by the storm. At the same time, some critics say the junta has been obstructing attempts by Burmese to deliver assistance to isolated villages.
“The government is not really interested in helping people,” said U Thura, a dissident comedian who has been jailed four times in the past two decades for his outspokenness. “What they want is to show to the rest of the country and the world that they have saved the people and now it’s time to go back to business as usual.”
Mr. Thura and other volunteers have been lugging relief goods into remote villages in the Irrawaddy Delta over the past two weeks.
“Only a very small percentage of the victims get help at government-run camps,” he said in an interview. “Those fortunate enough to live near roads and rivers also get help. But people in remote villages that are hard to reach don’t get anything. To make it worse, the people in the Irrawaddy Delta have traditionally been antigovernment, so the junta doesn’t like them.”
“Even if they die,” he said, “the generals won’t feel sorry for them.”
For these outlying villagers in the delta, occasional visits by people like Mr. Thura have been virtually the only help they could get. But even people like the ones much closer to Yangon, like Ar Pyin Padan, do not appear to be faring much better.
“If they don’t get help soon, so many of them will die,” said a 36-year-old Yangon resident who has made four private aid runs into villages near Hpayapon, a delta town. “It’s hot when the sun shines and cold when it rains. When you see the villages, you just wonder how these people sleep at night in the rain. They have no shelter to speak of.”
“They are still so stunned by what had happened to them that they show no emotion,” he said. “They don’t even thank us when we give them food. They just accept the help with no expression in their faces.”
He said that during their aid runs he and his friends saw people with pneumonia, cholera and diarrhea. He spoke on condition of anonymity because the private aid deliveries that his group conducts are prohibited.
Mr. Thura and other aid runners said they were hampered by reinforced military checkpoints as well as by roads washed away and streams clogged with storm debris. Those who reach towns with aid are told that such goods must be distributed through the authorities. Many groups like Mr. Thura’s break away and head deeper into the delta on their own.
“We usually drive from Yangon in five hours, switch to a boat and travel four more hours and then we carry whatever we can – rice, noodles, energy drinks, medicine, gaslights – on our backs and walk,” he said. “You really need helicopters and boats to help these people.”
One of his recent trips took him to a village called Mangay. The village, whose name means “gaze at” in Burmese, was a sorry sight, he said. Once a prosperous community of 1,000 families who supplied dried fish throughout Myanmar, Mangay was virtually wiped out: 700 families were left homeless and 500 people were reportedly dead or missing.
Mr. Thura said more than 400 people were making donations for his aid runs as a way of helping the victims directly. Still, his five teams of renegade aid runners, who often use Buddhist monks as scouts, could only manage to deliver 6.5 million kyats, about $6,500, of relief a day into 32 villages.
The aid runners are coming under increasing pressure from the government.
Twenty of Mr. Thura’s team members have received calls from the police warning that they will be punished if they continue their work. On Sunday, he said, his photographer, U Kyaw Swar Aung, was arrested and has not been heard from since. He had been traveling around the delta making videos of dead bodies, crying children and villagers who went insane after the storm and distributing them as DVDs.
Meanwhile, Mr. Thura said the government seemed less focused on aid than on making sure there were no more scenes like those to film. In one place, he said he saw a pile of floating bodies clogging the narrow mouth of a stream after they were dumped into the water by soldiers on a cleanup operation.
“Then the soldiers used dynamite to blow up the bodies into shreds,” he said.
Personally, I want to play a part in this attitudinal change, maybe by trying to convince a person one by one. On a more visionary scale, I see the Internet as a platform for this change to take place… We’ll see what I can do.
Unfortunately, the ‘song mai ao’ position seems to be a minority position in these internet wars – I would rather not see any side ‘win’, but yes, I confirm that if forced to choose I would stick with the old guard, as at least I can see that change (for the better) is inevitable and is already happening slowly (I acknowledge it has been forced on them, rather than by choice).
IMO the path to change for the better is not so clear if the current main opponent is victorious.
Jon: That’s interesting. In my experience the water was just poured on trees or used to water plants, after the chanting. I have seen water scattered on people with a sort of bamboo whisk/brush thing as a blessing but only very rarely. My experiences are mostly at a Thammayut monastery and I think they kind of frown on too much “superstitious” ritual. (I was just reading about how King Mongkut, founder of the Thammayut, rejected the traditional Buddhist/Hindu/Indian cosmology in favor of modern science along with rejecting a lot of superstitious practices.)
Thank you Masao Imamura and Beth for that valuable information. I also remember encountering many Burmese studying and teaching in Thailand. Australia does seem to be the forefront in providing education to the poor in Southeast Asia.
When you mentioned that people who study near their own country (e.g. Thailand is near Burma) are more likely to go back home in the end, that immediately raises the question of what people can feasibly do with their education once they are done. For most people in Thailand and Burma an education in business provides them more opportunities on this front, that’s why I focus on entrepreneurship, SMEs, and small business, in learning English for Academic Purposes (EAP). In fact, preparing a book on that right now.
It would also be productive to see more informal contacts between prestigious western universities like ANU and the informal education scene and therefore affordable to Burmese with little money in Southeast Asia. The Thai government has a whole informal education department and then there are also places like Midnight University, although its Marxist orientation rather ironically, does little to take care of the immediate subsistence needs of poor people.
Thank you Robert for the reference to Janussonin Sutta (On Offerings to the Dead). That sounds exactly like what I saw, but water was thrown over people also, as a sort of blessing, I guess, and the food was given to Akhas waiting outside.
“First Army commander Lt-Gen Prayut Chan-ocha was among those behind the 2006 overthrow of the Thaksin government…
…his wife, Naraporn, an associate professor of English at Chulalongkorn University.
…deputy chairwoman of the Klai Kangwon long-distance learning via satellite project.”
Heads up, Sidh, an example of network monarchy. A less nefarious part of the network, but surely you can see the connection between coup, crown, and capital.
What about the “For any seeing PMThaksin as a ’saviour’ of Thai democracy’…” portion? Is that also part of your imagination Teth?
I hope you are privy to my “song mai ao” stance.
Today in 2008 (not 1976), which poses a bigger threat to the development of Thai democracy and civil society – this imagined “network monarchy” (and what about un-networked, critical monarchist like myself?) and PMThaksin’s moves to gain his power and money back at all costs to the country?
They are equally undemocratic in agenda, but I was given a good comparison the other day. How would you choose between Mao and Deng?
If he is pretty sure of his innocence, why not let the court cases run its courses? This will set great precedence for the practices of Thai democracy and society – and we, as Thai citizens, are entitled to know the facts behind these cases. Even if he meddles with the process through money and influence (as he would be expected to do), I’m sure both your imagined network monarchy and an un-networked monarchist like myself can live with. Frankly I’d prefer that PMSamak runs the country, address the pressing socio-economic problems, without these unnecessary and unstabilizing influences of the puppet-master.
Yes, let the justice system run its course. In the meantime, get the generals for their corruption while in power too.
All puppet-masters should stop their puppetry.
We don’t need this totally unnecessary end-game. And I’ve said before, IF there’s a ‘network monarchy’ pulling the strings on Thai democracy, they’ve retired long time ago – maybe since the passage of the 1997 constitution (which ‘they’ had a hand in pushing through).
So you don’t deny their existence? ‘They’ did not push through the 1997 constitution, otherwise why would ‘they’ overturn it completely in 2007? Its all about convenience and their ability to remain extra-constitutional. Haven’t you gotten the memo?
If we go by that storyline, the extreme greed and ambitions of a group of businessmen/politicians bought ‘them’ out of retirement and what did ‘they’ do? Kind, aging grandfathers can’t run a country and they don’t want to. It was quite apparent, really. What did I miss and not see?
Its funny how one side can be so easily characterized with ‘extreme greed and ambition’ while the other are ‘kind, aging grandfathers’.
What do you use to support those images? Or is it just the perception in your mind?
The point I’m trying to make is that why does the Thaksin puppet master exist but not the network monarchy’s puppetry? Why is one theory so true to you but another so false? I dare say that for every ‘connection’ you see from Thaksin to Samak, the same can be said of the network monarchy. For the record, I don’t deny Thaksin’s puppetry.
Secondly, why are the old grandfathers the good side? Have you met them personally? Or is it just your view that they are the good side? Are they actually kind? Is Samak not aging?
In the end, the evidence points that both sides are equally bad. Neither have ever been truly democratic. Neither have actually given the country long term, institutional growth except for their own cults of personality. Both are myopic, both have committed human rights violation (on a barbaric scale). Both have vast sums of money at stake. Both bought the people’s hearts and minds with populist policies (with taxpayers money). Both are fairly entrenched with their respective networks.
So from here, its who is the lesser of two evils. Some (like hobby/nganadeeleg) will prefer the devil you’re familiar with. Some, like me, will prefer a Deng, though he was a dictator in a totalitarian state, he (unwittingly?) turned China towards the world.
The dream situation, though, is that Thai society itself will mature, that change will start from bottom up. Maybe an honest, capable leader will arise. Personally, I want to play a part in this attitudinal change, maybe by trying to convince a person one by one. On a more visionary scale, I see the Internet as a platform for this change to take place… We’ll see what I can do.
A team of neutral experts whould be appointed to certify the translation of Jakrapob’s text, and also to evaluate its content and merit or demerit. It would be unfair to take the text only in part or out of context, and then criticize it with bias.
This discussion is very important. Perhaps it is useful to identify several separate questions.
(1) What should a teacher do? Can a teacher refuse to teach a student on the ground that his or her father is an evil dictator?
Of course not. A teacher is supposed to teach everyone in his or her classroom, like a doctor is supposed to treat a patient regardless of his or her background. Students have to be treated as individuals in the classroom, and what matters is his/her performance and behavior. Family association must not be taken into account–positively or negatively–in determining the qualification. (So, a student should not be given special or preferential treatment on the ground that his/her parent is a pro-democracy activist leader either.)
(2) Should members of the junta be strategically targeted for educational experience abroad? And should they receive financial aid? This is precisely the question that exploded in the United States when a former Taliban spokesperson was admitted to Yale for their undergraduate (non-degree) program. (The New York Times Sunday Magazine’s cover story “The Freshman” is worth reading: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/26/magazine/26taliban.html?_r=1&oref=slogin). And the Wikipedia entry is also helpful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayed_Rahmatullah_Hashemi) In Burma/Myanmar’s context, a question is: Should a foreign government (say Australia) give young promising officers in the Naypidaw government financial aid for study abroad because they might lead to long-term improvement of the government?
(3) How can we better help qualified and motivated students in Burma/Myanmar who cannot afford the high cost of studying abroad? How do we design and implement a fair and workable selection mechanism for scholarship. If you work for an embassy or an aid agency (like AusAID) in Yangon and if you are hoping to have an official scholarship program approved by the Naypidaw government, then your realistic hope is to achieve a mechanism that is least unfair possible under the circumstances. You would have to make considerable compromise. I imagine, for example, that the eligibility requirement would include USDA membership. You would to reach an agreement with the junta and then you would also have to be able to explain and justify the agreement to the tax payers and others. In reality it would be quite difficult today to gain support for this sort of compromise with the Burma/Myanmar. Unless negotiation and compromise towards long-term impact becomes a more acceptable foreign policy orientation, I think it will remain very difficult to have an official financial aid scheme in the country.
Indeed The Irrawaddy magazine reported in the beginning of the year that the junta had put additional restrictions on the state scholarship program, making it more difficult for government staff to study abroad:
“Under the decree, no government staff member can be nominated by a foreign government for a scholarship program. Nominations must be made by the Burmese government.
All state scholarship students who study abroad must have approval of the government. A female student is prohibited to study abroad alone; she must be accompanied by at least one female student.
Military officials studying abroad must obtain permission of the Ministry of Defense.
For state scholarship programs, staff members must have worked in the government for at least two years. Students’ parents and spouses must be of Burmese nationality. Also, students who study abroad and return home may not leave the country again to study abroad for three years.” (http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=9881)
But it is not all hopeless and there are encouraging facts lately. Firstly, I understand for example that that it has become generally easier for a young person to obtain a passport in Burma/Myanmar (as long as he is she can pay). Obtaining a passport used to be extremely difficult for a young, especially a woman. Secondly, the spread of internet services in major cities has been extremely helpful in finding information about different scholarships. And thirdly, there have been less expensive study abroad programs now. In recent years there seem to be more financial aid available for Burmese students (who live inside the country) to study in Thailand. These are made available by non-governmental organizations. (See for example Heinrich Boll Foundation Southeast Asia: http://www.boell-southeastasia.org/en/web/index_112.html). The international (that is, English-language) graduate programs in social sciences at Thai universities today have more students from Burma/Myanmar. (Those programs should be applauded for actively seeking and supporting students from the country.) The social science programs in Thailand have been especially effective in terms of research production because the students go back to Burma/Myanmar for field work and collect rich empirical data that are impossible for foreign students to access. There have been a number of good MA theses by these students in recent years.
Another positive effect about students from Burma/Myanmar learning in Thailand is that many of them go back to the country after completing the program. (I have observed that it is much less likely that students return to the country if they leave Asia.) They go back and work hard there to make use of the education they received abroad. (In this respect, the contributions made by the alumni of the Asian Institute of Technology have been especially significant.) In the country where the brain drain is extremely serious, these young and independent minds staying in the country play a very important role.
Craig Raynolds wrote nearly a decade ago a short book chapter titled “The Ethics of Academic Engagement in Burma.” In there he suggests that we “find the little spaces where it is possible to speak even in the face of constraints that academics would not ordinarily accept.” This point is more important today. Rather than waiting for a political breakthrough, we should actively seek these little ambiguous spaces–“gray areas” and “sites of opportunity and possibility”–today.
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Pictures of the DKBA on the Thailand-Burma border
For more detailed information on the DKBA, the various reports published by the Karen Human Rights Group (www.khrg.org) are an excellent source of information.
Pictures of the DKBA on the Thailand-Burma border
I believe I can answer your questions. I am the “United Nations peacekeeper.”
Before continuing I would like to make it clear that I have never worked for the UN. I was present in a private capacity as a researcher.
The trip was pre-arranged, as are most trips like this, and we didn’t “need” Roberto to get across. It was Karen New Year and I had been invited. Roberto was a friend of a friend – the English guy – who wanted to go to the new year’s celebrations, so we all went together.
There was no reason to claim to be a UN worker or make up any other cover stories. The relationship that Roberto claims needed to be built had already existed for some years. Journalists and other foreigners had been going to DKBA camps for Karen New Year celebrations for several years already.
The commander, Colonel Lah Pwe, while allegedly a drug trafficker, is a very gracious host and we had dinner with his family, soldiers and villagers and were even invited to talk with him in his personal bedroom/sitting room. We did not sleep in a barracks, but in a house in the village.
The DKBA and SPDC have been allies since the first day of their creation. Other than a few very isolated incidents, there has been no fighting between the DKBA and the Burmese Army. Technically the DKBA don’t really have a ceasefire with the regime since they have never been at war with each other. The DKBA have an agreement with the local Burmese battalion that they come into the town on a regular basis as a part of their patrolling.
I can understand why Roberto may have seen the soldiers as “mean”, since men in uniforms with large guns always tend to look that way. Most of the DKBA were very friendly, if anything they were reserved out of shyness. In fact, Roberto was able to get portraits of the commander of the battalion and his deputy who both happily agreed. The Burmese Army soldiers, however, were not so friendly. But then they have a distrust of foreigners taught into them by their officers and, as I’ve encountered in similar situations, are often under orders to not allow their pictures to be taken.
The DKBA unit at Waley has a very close relationship to the SPDC, which makes the final paragraph of the interview rather misleading. This battalion and local Burma Army units have conducted joint operations against the KNU in the area in the past.
Time for AusAID to rethink Burma
masao imamura wrote:
> Perhaps it is useful to identify several separate questions.
> (1) What should a teacher do? Can a teacher refuse to teach a student on the ground that his or her father is an evil dictator?
> Of course not.
etc etc
OK, in the spirit of trying to break these issues down ….
Can you separate the granting of a privilege to an evil dictator (ie an elite foreign education for their offspring) from their offpring’s
right to equality in education ? No you can’t. You effectively grant
both, or you grant neither . You have to decide which causes the least
potential harm.
If teaching that offspring had no possible connection to their
countryfolk’s future misery, then I might judge them on their merits
alone, despite their unfair course to my classroom door. Unfortunately, that connection cannot be ruled out. As I said, show me the examples of foreign-educated elites using their privilege for the benefit of their countryfolk, rather than perpetuating the misery inflicted by their parents.
People lose their right to a decent education everyday, mostly by
poverty, exam failure, expulsion due to misbehaviour, etc. Unfortunately being an ordinary Burmese citizen is also on that list, by virtue of their leaders’ decisions. So adding being the spawn of a
leader who perpetuates such denials on illegitimate bases to that list is hardly an extreme position.
As I asked previously, “Is there no one you would not teach ?”. If you were a doctor (your other example), “Is there no one you would not treat ?”. Adolf Hitler ?
The Irrawaddy interviews Zarni
………here’s a very insightful and interesting article based on direct sources inside the Burma disaster zone that appeared in the May 23rd Los Angeles Times describing:
1. the elements that have been put together to make the “pretend” refugee camp that the UN Secretary General and other visiting dignitaries are being toured through, and,
2. descriptions of how groups of actual refugees gathered in makeshift locations centered around monasteries and schools are been forcibly dispersed under a law banning groups of 5 people or more from gathering together.
…….a few comments……….
1. it seems impossible to believe that the generals are really Buddhist and accept the karmic/reincarnation belief system as their bad intent and actions will certainly result in this group of generals suffering through an infinity of future cycles as cockroaches, marsh larvae, dung beetles, etc.
2. where are the younger generals with the courage, knowledge and skill to successfully act and overthrow the present group of geriatric generals who are imposing such a large amount of unnecessary suffering on their fellow citizens. Is it possible that any and all of the younger generals with courage, knowledge and skill have been shot?
….anyway, here is the the LA Times article……
—————————————————————————–
Suspicion trumps aid in Myanmar: Ban Ki-moon visits Myanmar
From a LA Times Staff Writer inside the disaster zone – May 23, 2008
MOULMEINGYUN, MYANMAR — Among the hundreds of cyclone survivors who staggered through the doors of a monastery here, staring straight ahead and too traumatized to even blink, was one village’s last living man.
The abbot was quick to care for the group, feeding refugees from rice stockpiled for students who, in better times, came to learn meditation and the wisdom of the Buddha.
Within a few days, however, local officials barged into the monastery. They argued with the abbot and ordered stunned and frightened survivors to leave, said Pone Nya, an assistant to the abbot.
“They were informed that if they continued to stay in this monastery they would be put in jail,” the 25-year-old monk said in an interview Wednesday.
“These local officials told us the refugees are from all walks of life, good men, bad men and rebels,” Pone Nya added. “They said, ‘If those people live in the town for a long time, it’s dangerous for the town.’ My abbot absolutely hated those words.”
But he was powerless. By May 13, just 10 days after Tropical Cyclone Nargis had washed away whole villages, 1,500 survivors had been evicted from the monastery, along with thousands more from six other relief camps in this Irrawaddy River delta town.
On Thursday, the day after the monk spoke, officials brought U.N. Secretary- General Ban Ki-moon on a carefully orchestrated tour here. Myanmar’s minister for border areas, Thein Nyunt, told Ban that everyone had gone home because the water had receded. A tent remained as an apparent distribution center for bags of rice and noodles and cartons of drinking water.
The effort to break up the relief camps so soon reflects the deep suspicion in which Myanmar’s military rulers, who have been in power for 46 years, hold their own people, even sick and hungry victims of a natural catastrophe.
Survivors and volunteer aid workers describe similar moves in other areas. If displaced people aren’t ordered to leave relief camps, officials controlling aid make sure they get so little food and other support that going back to demolished homes seems a better option, said witnesses interviewed in several delta towns and villages.
In a village near Yangon, the commercial hub, an official shutting down a relief camp in a state-owned restaurant said he was enforcing a long-standing ban on public gatherings of more than five people.
Almost three weeks after the cyclone struck, the United Nations says its supplies of food, medicine and other goods have reached only 25% of those struggling against malnutrition, disease and daily rains.
By describing the refugee evictions to a reporter in an area closed to people who might criticize the regime, Pone Nya risks being defrocked and jailed. But like many cyclone survivors, he is so angry about the ruling generals’ fumbling response and their refusal to allow a full international aid effort that he is willing to face that danger.
He identified the local official in charge of clearing out the camps as Ko Khin Mg Win, who the monk said was a low-ranking employee of the state telephone company. Pone Nya said scornfully, “He’s not helping anyone. He’s just watching.”
But rather than risk direct criticism of top military leaders, the monk quoted a song by Mar Mar Aye, a leading pro- democracy singer who lives in exile in the U.S. The song honors protesters killed and arrested last fall when the military crushed the biggest demonstrations against the regime in almost 20 years.
“There’s a pain in my heart,” the monk sang quietly. “We will never forget that pain until doomsday.”
With those two, brief lines, he made reference to what many here are too frightened to say publicly: Anger over the military government’s handling of the cyclone’s aftermath could set off a new wave of protests against a regime seen as deeply corrupt and bitterly coldhearted.
“They were telling refugees to leave in the middle of the night,” Pone Nya said. “They had to go back to their own villages on foot with flashlights.”
His anger rising, the young monk took his biggest risk by declaring: “This military government is cruel.”
Businesspeople and other wealthy residents of this town about 20 miles northwest of Bogale welcomed the villagers.
A group of 400, the first to arrive two days after the storm on May 2-3, were the only people left from a village that doesn’t exist anymore. Private donors immediately gave money, food and other aid to care for them, Pone Nya said.
Local officials were almost as quick to put pressure on the abbot to kick them out, but he argued with them for days.
“The abbot told them he didn’t care if they reported him to higher-ups,” his assistant recalled. “He said, ‘Let’s see which is stronger, your report or my power.’ ”
During another angry encounter, the abbot wagged his finger in the face of three officials, and used a traditional phrase predicting they would be killed in a way reserved for the most evil: “You’re going to die in a lightning storm,” he shouted, Pone Nya said.
He later apologized, and pleaded for permission to keep the camp open, the assistant said.
“He said, ‘I have enough food. If you don’t want to spend money, I’ll take care of them,’ ” Pone Nya recalled. But that argument failed too, leaving the refugees with two options: return and rebuild homes with what they could salvage, or move north to camps still open in the town of Wakema.
Several said they didn’t want to move far from the land they farm because they feared being ordered to give up homes that they hope to rebuild.
U Tin Sein, a rice farmer who lives more than 50 miles west of here in Daung Kaung, a village near the town of Labutta, said that last year the regime evicted farmers in the western state of Rakhine to consolidate small paddies into larger farms for sale to Chinese investors.
As U Tin Sein spoke, 32 men were searching for any scraps of splintered homes that could be salvaged.
They left their wives and children in a relief camp because they were tired of getting just enough food from authorities to survive. The corpse of a child, bleached white by the sun and river water, lay next to the shore, wearing only pajama shorts decorated with cuddling cartoon figures.
There were 130 houses in the village before the storm. Not a single one is still standing.
About 300 of the 536 people who lived there are still alive. Alone on the horizon, surrounded by debris, scattered clothes and broken trees, is the shell of a Buddhist monastery.
Most of the roof is gone, so the men share the few dry spaces during the daily monsoon deluge. They plan to rebuild a single house for neighbors to share while they rebuild the village together.
As hard as that will be, the men say, it’s better than living in a camp where the government provided just two cups of rice each per day, and some instant noodles. Just twice in more than two weeks there, they said, they got a supplement of tinned tuna.
As the men made their way back to their village by boat this week, they came across a larger vessel carrying U.N. aid through the delta’s vast network of rivers and channels. The crew waved to them to pull alongside and gave them 500 pounds of rice, enough to feed their village for five days.
They had no idea when, or where, they would get more food when that ran out.
Relief distribution in the area’s 14 villages is controlled by a man the returning residents identified as Ko San Way, in the village of Kan Yin Koung. They asked him three times for help, and each time got nothing, the men said.
They suspect he is hoarding the aid for his own village.
“When we tried to meet with the top guy,” said Ko Saw Nai Win, 31, “he just disappeared.”
Will any of these sites get banned?
The strange thing was that her translation was not really official but certainly in its force has become very official.
There seems to be a clear conflict of interest that would be prohibited in an official translation. Given the conflict of interest, credentials seem to be irrelevant.
And why does it suddenly become an issue one year after the speech was given? It took one year for them to understand the speech and then use it as a basis for a legal suit?
Is this rule by law?
Scholarly comments on religion and the cyclone
Robert, I guess you can call them “supersititions” if you want to, but given that I live with the people who take them seriously. I have to show proper respect, even to those Jatukam amulets.
Michael Charney’s new book Powerful Learning (2006) discusses the Burmese analogue of what King Mongkut did with the Thammayut, documented by Craig Reynolds in his 1972 PhD dissertation.
In Burma they had a 100 year ongoing dispute in the Sangha on the way that the robes of monks should ne wrapped over their shoulders when they enter into villages for alms.
I think the bottom line is that as states got bigger, and they had to in the face of European colonialism, Kings had to assert control over people, economics, religion, culture, you name it. Basically, use it (and put a boundary down), or lose it. (This is supposedly the origin of the Prah Vihear dispute).
If local customs or rituals defy the laws of physics or other science, I just look at them as a form of poetry. Hopefully, it’s not poetry that makes people violent and nationalistic.
Samak’s talents!
And by attitudinal change, I wish to see more critical thinking, a higher standard of proof, a lower tolerance for bullshit, the freedom to speak your mind honestly, more integrity less hypocrisy, earning respect, appreciating hard work, nonviolence, etc. To be honest, I’m rather tired of choosing the lesser of two evils.
Volunteering to fight in Burma
[…] the border. Readers with an interest in these issues, and particularly those who have followed recent New Mandala discussions of foreign fighters linking up with the Karen National Liberation Army, will find much of what is […]
The Irrawaddy interviews Zarni
……you might want to post this insightful article from Friday’s New York Times put together from some people who got by the various Burma army checkpoints and traveled deep into the destruction and despair……
—————————————————————————-
Junta Offers Showcase Camps, but Most Burmese Lack Aid
THE NEW YORK TIMES – May 23, 2008
HLINETHAYA RELIEF CAMP, Myanmar – The 68 blue tents are lined up in a row, with a brand-new water purifier and boxes of relief supplies, stacked neatly but as yet undelivered and not even opened.
“If you don’t keep clean, you’ll be expelled from here,” a camp manager barked at families in some tents.
The moment, at what has been billed as a model camp for survivors of Cyclone Nargis, captured a common complaint among refugees and aid volunteers: that the military junta that rules Myanmar cares more about the appearance of providing aid than actually providing it.
As a result of heavy international pressure, the junta has embarked on a campaign to show itself as responsive and open to aid as China has been in the wake of the earthquake that killed tens of thousands in Sichuan Province. On Thursday, the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, arrived in Myanmar, as United Nations officials said that, nearly three weeks after the cyclone that left 134,000 dead or missing, they were finally seeing some small improvement.
The first 10 helicopters loaded with supplies from the World Food Program arrived Thursday. But of the 2.4 million survivors, United Nations officials say, only 500,000 have received any aid to date.
Mr. Ban received guided tours of apparently well-run government camps like this one for survivors, presenting one vision of the junta’s response to its people and the outside world.
But interviews with survivors and Burmese breaking rules to help them suggest a different story: of a government that seems to have assisted little and, at times, with startling callousness, has even expelled homeless refugees from shelters that the junta needs for other purposes.
This relief camp in the western outskirts of Yangon, the country’s main city, made headlines in Myanmar’s state-run press when the junta’s leader, Senior Gen. Than Shwe, showed up there on Sunday to inspect the government relief effort.
A few days after the general’s inspection, the camp’s tidy blue tents were still set up but bottles of cooking oil inside many of them remained in their boxes. Pots and pans still bore their brand-name stickers.
The camp’s sole “medical” tent, identified by a Red Cross flag, held neither patients nor medicine. Its desk was staffed by two teenagers in uniform. Police officers armed with rifles guarded the entrance, where a new water purification tank donated by a local company was on prominent display.
Just a short ride down a potholed road, a striking divide is evident, one between the model relief camp and the continuing plight of many victims.
In the village of Ar Pyin Padan, a few minutes’ walk from here and just an hour’s drive from the center of Yangon, 40 families who lost nearly everything they owned crowded a rundown two-story school building. They had pushed desks together to serve as makeshift beds.
Here, deliveries of relief supplies are so infrequent that the refugees say they draw lots to get a small share whenever a donation comes in. For drinking water, one said, the township authorities “threw some medicine” into a nearby pond and told the villagers to drink from it.
Now the authorities are allowing no more refugees into the school. Instead they are trying to evict those who are already there so that the building can be used as a balloting station on Saturday. Despite the devastation and misery left by the cyclone, the junta is pressing ahead with voting in the two hardest-hit administrative divisions, Yangon and the Irrawaddy Delta, to complete a referendum on a new Constitution intended to perpetuate military rule. The Constitution was already overwhelmingly approved in other parts of the country.
“They want us to move out,” said one man in the school shelter. “But we have nowhere to go. Maybe if I had four or five sticks of bamboo, I could rebuild my house and start over but they don’t even give us that. So please donate to us. We need urgent help.”
He called the blue tents a short distance away beyond the rice paddies a “V.I.P. camp” – hastily constructed and occupied by villagers tutored to receive visiting junta generals or envoys from the United Nations.
In the past week, the state-run news media have given lavish coverage to General Than Shwe and other generals visiting areas devastated by the storm. At the same time, some critics say the junta has been obstructing attempts by Burmese to deliver assistance to isolated villages.
“The government is not really interested in helping people,” said U Thura, a dissident comedian who has been jailed four times in the past two decades for his outspokenness. “What they want is to show to the rest of the country and the world that they have saved the people and now it’s time to go back to business as usual.”
Mr. Thura and other volunteers have been lugging relief goods into remote villages in the Irrawaddy Delta over the past two weeks.
“Only a very small percentage of the victims get help at government-run camps,” he said in an interview. “Those fortunate enough to live near roads and rivers also get help. But people in remote villages that are hard to reach don’t get anything. To make it worse, the people in the Irrawaddy Delta have traditionally been antigovernment, so the junta doesn’t like them.”
“Even if they die,” he said, “the generals won’t feel sorry for them.”
For these outlying villagers in the delta, occasional visits by people like Mr. Thura have been virtually the only help they could get. But even people like the ones much closer to Yangon, like Ar Pyin Padan, do not appear to be faring much better.
“If they don’t get help soon, so many of them will die,” said a 36-year-old Yangon resident who has made four private aid runs into villages near Hpayapon, a delta town. “It’s hot when the sun shines and cold when it rains. When you see the villages, you just wonder how these people sleep at night in the rain. They have no shelter to speak of.”
“They are still so stunned by what had happened to them that they show no emotion,” he said. “They don’t even thank us when we give them food. They just accept the help with no expression in their faces.”
He said that during their aid runs he and his friends saw people with pneumonia, cholera and diarrhea. He spoke on condition of anonymity because the private aid deliveries that his group conducts are prohibited.
Mr. Thura and other aid runners said they were hampered by reinforced military checkpoints as well as by roads washed away and streams clogged with storm debris. Those who reach towns with aid are told that such goods must be distributed through the authorities. Many groups like Mr. Thura’s break away and head deeper into the delta on their own.
“We usually drive from Yangon in five hours, switch to a boat and travel four more hours and then we carry whatever we can – rice, noodles, energy drinks, medicine, gaslights – on our backs and walk,” he said. “You really need helicopters and boats to help these people.”
One of his recent trips took him to a village called Mangay. The village, whose name means “gaze at” in Burmese, was a sorry sight, he said. Once a prosperous community of 1,000 families who supplied dried fish throughout Myanmar, Mangay was virtually wiped out: 700 families were left homeless and 500 people were reportedly dead or missing.
Mr. Thura said more than 400 people were making donations for his aid runs as a way of helping the victims directly. Still, his five teams of renegade aid runners, who often use Buddhist monks as scouts, could only manage to deliver 6.5 million kyats, about $6,500, of relief a day into 32 villages.
The aid runners are coming under increasing pressure from the government.
Twenty of Mr. Thura’s team members have received calls from the police warning that they will be punished if they continue their work. On Sunday, he said, his photographer, U Kyaw Swar Aung, was arrested and has not been heard from since. He had been traveling around the delta making videos of dead bodies, crying children and villagers who went insane after the storm and distributing them as DVDs.
Meanwhile, Mr. Thura said the government seemed less focused on aid than on making sure there were no more scenes like those to film. In one place, he said he saw a pile of floating bodies clogging the narrow mouth of a stream after they were dumped into the water by soldiers on a cleanup operation.
“Then the soldiers used dynamite to blow up the bodies into shreds,” he said.
Samak’s talents!
Personally, I want to play a part in this attitudinal change, maybe by trying to convince a person one by one. On a more visionary scale, I see the Internet as a platform for this change to take place… We’ll see what I can do.
Unfortunately, the ‘song mai ao’ position seems to be a minority position in these internet wars – I would rather not see any side ‘win’, but yes, I confirm that if forced to choose I would stick with the old guard, as at least I can see that change (for the better) is inevitable and is already happening slowly (I acknowledge it has been forced on them, rather than by choice).
IMO the path to change for the better is not so clear if the current main opponent is victorious.
Scholarly comments on religion and the cyclone
Nicholas: Looks like it’s working now. Thanks!
Jon: That’s interesting. In my experience the water was just poured on trees or used to water plants, after the chanting. I have seen water scattered on people with a sort of bamboo whisk/brush thing as a blessing but only very rarely. My experiences are mostly at a Thammayut monastery and I think they kind of frown on too much “superstitious” ritual. (I was just reading about how King Mongkut, founder of the Thammayut, rejected the traditional Buddhist/Hindu/Indian cosmology in favor of modern science along with rejecting a lot of superstitious practices.)
What does Akhas refer to?
Time for AusAID to rethink Burma
Thank you Masao Imamura and Beth for that valuable information. I also remember encountering many Burmese studying and teaching in Thailand. Australia does seem to be the forefront in providing education to the poor in Southeast Asia.
When you mentioned that people who study near their own country (e.g. Thailand is near Burma) are more likely to go back home in the end, that immediately raises the question of what people can feasibly do with their education once they are done. For most people in Thailand and Burma an education in business provides them more opportunities on this front, that’s why I focus on entrepreneurship, SMEs, and small business, in learning English for Academic Purposes (EAP). In fact, preparing a book on that right now.
It would also be productive to see more informal contacts between prestigious western universities like ANU and the informal education scene and therefore affordable to Burmese with little money in Southeast Asia. The Thai government has a whole informal education department and then there are also places like Midnight University, although its Marxist orientation rather ironically, does little to take care of the immediate subsistence needs of poor people.
Scholarly comments on religion and the cyclone
Thank you Robert for the reference to Janussonin Sutta (On Offerings to the Dead). That sounds exactly like what I saw, but water was thrown over people also, as a sort of blessing, I guess, and the food was given to Akhas waiting outside.
Will any of these sites get banned?
“First Army commander Lt-Gen Prayut Chan-ocha was among those behind the 2006 overthrow of the Thaksin government…
…his wife, Naraporn, an associate professor of English at Chulalongkorn University.
…deputy chairwoman of the Klai Kangwon long-distance learning via satellite project.”
Heads up, Sidh, an example of network monarchy. A less nefarious part of the network, but surely you can see the connection between coup, crown, and capital.
Samak’s talents!
What about the “For any seeing PMThaksin as a ’saviour’ of Thai democracy’…” portion? Is that also part of your imagination Teth?
I hope you are privy to my “song mai ao” stance.
Today in 2008 (not 1976), which poses a bigger threat to the development of Thai democracy and civil society – this imagined “network monarchy” (and what about un-networked, critical monarchist like myself?) and PMThaksin’s moves to gain his power and money back at all costs to the country?
They are equally undemocratic in agenda, but I was given a good comparison the other day. How would you choose between Mao and Deng?
If he is pretty sure of his innocence, why not let the court cases run its courses? This will set great precedence for the practices of Thai democracy and society – and we, as Thai citizens, are entitled to know the facts behind these cases. Even if he meddles with the process through money and influence (as he would be expected to do), I’m sure both your imagined network monarchy and an un-networked monarchist like myself can live with. Frankly I’d prefer that PMSamak runs the country, address the pressing socio-economic problems, without these unnecessary and unstabilizing influences of the puppet-master.
Yes, let the justice system run its course. In the meantime, get the generals for their corruption while in power too.
All puppet-masters should stop their puppetry.
We don’t need this totally unnecessary end-game. And I’ve said before, IF there’s a ‘network monarchy’ pulling the strings on Thai democracy, they’ve retired long time ago – maybe since the passage of the 1997 constitution (which ‘they’ had a hand in pushing through).
So you don’t deny their existence? ‘They’ did not push through the 1997 constitution, otherwise why would ‘they’ overturn it completely in 2007? Its all about convenience and their ability to remain extra-constitutional. Haven’t you gotten the memo?
If we go by that storyline, the extreme greed and ambitions of a group of businessmen/politicians bought ‘them’ out of retirement and what did ‘they’ do? Kind, aging grandfathers can’t run a country and they don’t want to. It was quite apparent, really. What did I miss and not see?
Its funny how one side can be so easily characterized with ‘extreme greed and ambition’ while the other are ‘kind, aging grandfathers’.
What do you use to support those images? Or is it just the perception in your mind?
The point I’m trying to make is that why does the Thaksin puppet master exist but not the network monarchy’s puppetry? Why is one theory so true to you but another so false? I dare say that for every ‘connection’ you see from Thaksin to Samak, the same can be said of the network monarchy. For the record, I don’t deny Thaksin’s puppetry.
Secondly, why are the old grandfathers the good side? Have you met them personally? Or is it just your view that they are the good side? Are they actually kind? Is Samak not aging?
In the end, the evidence points that both sides are equally bad. Neither have ever been truly democratic. Neither have actually given the country long term, institutional growth except for their own cults of personality. Both are myopic, both have committed human rights violation (on a barbaric scale). Both have vast sums of money at stake. Both bought the people’s hearts and minds with populist policies (with taxpayers money). Both are fairly entrenched with their respective networks.
So from here, its who is the lesser of two evils. Some (like hobby/nganadeeleg) will prefer the devil you’re familiar with. Some, like me, will prefer a Deng, though he was a dictator in a totalitarian state, he (unwittingly?) turned China towards the world.
The dream situation, though, is that Thai society itself will mature, that change will start from bottom up. Maybe an honest, capable leader will arise. Personally, I want to play a part in this attitudinal change, maybe by trying to convince a person one by one. On a more visionary scale, I see the Internet as a platform for this change to take place… We’ll see what I can do.
Will any of these sites get banned?
A team of neutral experts whould be appointed to certify the translation of Jakrapob’s text, and also to evaluate its content and merit or demerit. It would be unfair to take the text only in part or out of context, and then criticize it with bias.
Time for AusAID to rethink Burma
This discussion is very important. Perhaps it is useful to identify several separate questions.
(1) What should a teacher do? Can a teacher refuse to teach a student on the ground that his or her father is an evil dictator?
Of course not. A teacher is supposed to teach everyone in his or her classroom, like a doctor is supposed to treat a patient regardless of his or her background. Students have to be treated as individuals in the classroom, and what matters is his/her performance and behavior. Family association must not be taken into account–positively or negatively–in determining the qualification. (So, a student should not be given special or preferential treatment on the ground that his/her parent is a pro-democracy activist leader either.)
(2) Should members of the junta be strategically targeted for educational experience abroad? And should they receive financial aid? This is precisely the question that exploded in the United States when a former Taliban spokesperson was admitted to Yale for their undergraduate (non-degree) program. (The New York Times Sunday Magazine’s cover story “The Freshman” is worth reading: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/26/magazine/26taliban.html?_r=1&oref=slogin). And the Wikipedia entry is also helpful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayed_Rahmatullah_Hashemi) In Burma/Myanmar’s context, a question is: Should a foreign government (say Australia) give young promising officers in the Naypidaw government financial aid for study abroad because they might lead to long-term improvement of the government?
(3) How can we better help qualified and motivated students in Burma/Myanmar who cannot afford the high cost of studying abroad? How do we design and implement a fair and workable selection mechanism for scholarship. If you work for an embassy or an aid agency (like AusAID) in Yangon and if you are hoping to have an official scholarship program approved by the Naypidaw government, then your realistic hope is to achieve a mechanism that is least unfair possible under the circumstances. You would have to make considerable compromise. I imagine, for example, that the eligibility requirement would include USDA membership. You would to reach an agreement with the junta and then you would also have to be able to explain and justify the agreement to the tax payers and others. In reality it would be quite difficult today to gain support for this sort of compromise with the Burma/Myanmar. Unless negotiation and compromise towards long-term impact becomes a more acceptable foreign policy orientation, I think it will remain very difficult to have an official financial aid scheme in the country.
Indeed The Irrawaddy magazine reported in the beginning of the year that the junta had put additional restrictions on the state scholarship program, making it more difficult for government staff to study abroad:
“Under the decree, no government staff member can be nominated by a foreign government for a scholarship program. Nominations must be made by the Burmese government.
All state scholarship students who study abroad must have approval of the government. A female student is prohibited to study abroad alone; she must be accompanied by at least one female student.
Military officials studying abroad must obtain permission of the Ministry of Defense.
For state scholarship programs, staff members must have worked in the government for at least two years. Students’ parents and spouses must be of Burmese nationality. Also, students who study abroad and return home may not leave the country again to study abroad for three years.” (http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=9881)
But it is not all hopeless and there are encouraging facts lately. Firstly, I understand for example that that it has become generally easier for a young person to obtain a passport in Burma/Myanmar (as long as he is she can pay). Obtaining a passport used to be extremely difficult for a young, especially a woman. Secondly, the spread of internet services in major cities has been extremely helpful in finding information about different scholarships. And thirdly, there have been less expensive study abroad programs now. In recent years there seem to be more financial aid available for Burmese students (who live inside the country) to study in Thailand. These are made available by non-governmental organizations. (See for example Heinrich Boll Foundation Southeast Asia: http://www.boell-southeastasia.org/en/web/index_112.html). The international (that is, English-language) graduate programs in social sciences at Thai universities today have more students from Burma/Myanmar. (Those programs should be applauded for actively seeking and supporting students from the country.) The social science programs in Thailand have been especially effective in terms of research production because the students go back to Burma/Myanmar for field work and collect rich empirical data that are impossible for foreign students to access. There have been a number of good MA theses by these students in recent years.
Another positive effect about students from Burma/Myanmar learning in Thailand is that many of them go back to the country after completing the program. (I have observed that it is much less likely that students return to the country if they leave Asia.) They go back and work hard there to make use of the education they received abroad. (In this respect, the contributions made by the alumni of the Asian Institute of Technology have been especially significant.) In the country where the brain drain is extremely serious, these young and independent minds staying in the country play a very important role.
Craig Raynolds wrote nearly a decade ago a short book chapter titled “The Ethics of Academic Engagement in Burma.” In there he suggests that we “find the little spaces where it is possible to speak even in the face of constraints that academics would not ordinarily accept.” This point is more important today. Rather than waiting for a political breakthrough, we should actively seek these little ambiguous spaces–“gray areas” and “sites of opportunity and possibility”–today.
Extending the life of the junta
Thaksin is educated….PhD…from where? What institution? Have you ever taken a closer look?
The Nation on “what Thai people want…”
That’s it.
That’s what we want.
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http://www.sheddoe.com
Forest guardians, forest destroyers
andrew, just ordered it and can’t wait to read it after a long, busy semester.
congratulations to you and tim!!
nancy