Borderless News Online recently caught up with critically acclaimed Burmese-American author Wendy Law-Yone, who is currently in Switzerland, where she is the current Friedrich Dürrenmatt Guest Professor of World Literature at the University of Bern. Briefly imprisoned in Myanmar when the former ruling junta took power in the 1960s, she escaped the country and settled in the United States, where she would pen several books and later receive a National Endowment for the Arts award for creative writing. Law-Yone has expressed criticism of Myanmar’s current government, and concern over the country’s trajectory, even in the lead-up to this weekend’s crucial elections.
Borderless: Are you worried about the influence that radical monks can have on the country and the elections?
It isn’t only around election time that we should be worried about power grabs in the name of faith. As the Shwe Nyar War Sayadaw, a prominent Burmese monk, recently put it, ‘religion is the best marketing tool in politics.’ He was speaking of the current government’s concessions to Buddhist nationalists – now there’s a contradiction in terms! – as the means to getting a leg up in the coming elections. The race for votes does seem to highlight the mutually corrupting symbiosis between a radicalized clergy and a politicized military. The ultra-nationalist Buddhist organization known as Ma Ba Tha, the Burmese acronym for the Association for Protection of Race and Religion, is certainly true to its stated ideals. In their zeal to protect race and religion – their race and their religion – Ma Ba Tha members have stoked and perpetuated anti-Muslim violence throughout the country. They have lobbied for legislation that restricts the rights of ethnic and religious minorities. Two of the four bills under the pending Race and Religion Protection laws – discriminatory laws regulating interfaith marriage and birthing rights – have already been passed by parliament. A military-dominated parliament. To no one’s surprise, Ma Ba Tha leaders have pledged support for the ruling military-dominated USDP (Union Solidarity and Development Party). The clergy in Burma can’t vote. They don’t have to; They don’t need to. When church and state are so blatantly in each other’s pockets, it’s time to double-bolt our doors day and night.
Borderless: While Myanmar is making a transition to democracy, there is also a disturbing trend toward curbing freedom of speech, etc. Do you think this will get worse? Remain the same? Improve?
The habits of dictatorship die hard. It’s in the nature of authoritarian governments to look on freedom as a privilege to be conferred on the common citizen, not as a basic human right. It reminds me of a curious phrase that has stuck in my mind – the words of Alexander Patterson, a British penal specialist writing in the 1950’s. In his proposal on prison reform in Burma, he proclaimed all Burmese to be ‘fit for freedom.’ The report actually recommended that no criminal should spend more than two years in prison, and that the best way to reform the prison system in Burma was to close the jails altogether. But the idea of freedom being a state for which a people is either fit or unfit is a strange one to say the least. And yet this is clearly the way despotic rulers have always thought – and still think – about their subjects. Are the people really capable of handling freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought? “Without Censorship,” as General Westmoreland is supposed to have said, “Things can get terribly confused in the public mind.”
Borderless: Thinking back to your youth, could you compare restrictions on freedom of speech and press to the current situation? Do you see any similarities?
I’ve written in my memoir, Golden Parasol, about the nature of press freedoms and restrictions in the era of parliamentary democracy. As editor and publisher of the leading English-language daily, my father Ed Law-Yone was a fierce advocate of an independent press. He frequently locked horns with the government – usually on the page, in his newspaper reports and editorials, but also in the court-room. To characterize that era as a golden age of press freedom, as it’s often referred to, is to forget some of the real challenges and hardships that journalists were subjected to. But what’s undeniable is that newspapermen like my father and a number of his conscientious, hardworking fellow journalists could examine, question, and criticize government policies – not entirely with impunity, but with reasonable chances of a fair hearing. And that’s because two concepts that no longer exist in Burma today still counted for something in those days: due process and the Fourth Estate.
Borderless: What would be your advice on how to curtail radical religious groups and prevent them from becoming too influential?
The most obvious answer is to improve the living conditions of the desperately poor, undernourished, and uneducated populations that provide the seed beds for religious fanaticism. Marx’s dictum about religion being the opiate of the masses is better understood when we consider the quote preceding it: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.” Be that as it may, rational measures can’t serve as a kind of pesticide to zap the roots of fundamentalist ideology. No such containment of dangerous zealotry has proved effective – at least not since the Inquisition.
Borderless: From where does support from radical groups like Ma Ba Tha stem? Why are people following them?
Ma Ba Tha and the 969 Movement are extremist organizations determined to equate Buddhism with Nationalism. Their leaders seem possessed by the idea of a ‘pure’ Buddhist nation, as if such a thing could exist. A nation is notoriously difficult to define, but the Burma envisioned by such ultra-nationalists certainly fits the famous definition of a nation as “a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by a common hatred of its neighbors.” The neighbors, in Burma’s case, often include ethnic minority members of the same nation. The leaders of Ma Ba Tha and similar groups are skilled at exploiting these very delusions and hatreds in order to further their religious and/or political ambitions. What is not often said is that racial prejudice and discrimination in Burma aren’t just confined to the uneducated and dispossessed classes. I am constantly taken aback by the virulence of affluent, privileged and seemingly well-educated Burmese, both at home and abroad, toward minorities they consider inferior to themselves. And this is not a new phenomenon. I recently dug out an editorial on this very subject written by my father in 1952. It appeared in his newspaper, The Nation. It seems, then as now, both prescriptive and prescient:
“Races which have prided themselves on purity of blood, either because it is pure as with the Japanese, or because they have purged it as in the case of the Germans, are the ones which have come to grief … It would be idle to deny that intense nationalistic feeling does not exist … but narrow nationalism is an anomaly – a thing completely out of date … The weaker and smaller we happen to be, the more important is it for us to promote the ideal of cosmopolitanism in which alone, in these predatory days, we have the best – indeed the only – chance of survival.”
Borderless: Do you believe that with the ethnic strife, radicals with political influence, armed conflict, etc, Myanmar is becoming politically unstable? Do you believe it could become more unstable after the election? Why or why not?
If all this pre-eleciton turmoil you mention signifies anything, I believe Arundhati Roy says it best: ‘The noisier the carnival around elections, the less sure we are that democracy really exists.” She is speaking of India, but she may as well be summing up the carnival in Burma.
As to the question of stability: Democracy is the stated goal of the current Burmese government, but to equate democracy with stability is as naïve as equating stability with dictatorship. How can oppression and aribtrary rule – no matter how entrenched and absolute – make for a stable state? Despots and strongmen who bang on about stability under their rule are actually trapped in the most precarious of states – much as leaders who bang on about unity and peace are often dead set against both.
Borderless: What question have I not asked that readers need to know about what’s happening now in Myanmar?
Now that reforms are allowing new opportunities, a great deal of emphasis is being placed on education – but the wrong sort of emphasis, in my opinion. Earlier this year, during my visit to Burma to launch the Burmese edition of my memoir, I was asked time and again what advice I might have for a new generation of writers keen to make up for lost time in uncovering forgotten or buried aspects of Burmese history. My reply was that writing honestly and meaningfully about the past would involve not just learning, but unlearning many of the ways their generation had been taught to think and believe. That might require, for instance, not just questioning received wisdom but perhaps actually disrespecting one’s elders, the wise ones, in the service of truth telling. I could see what a radical idea this was by the way it kept getting misunderstood. “Oh, so you’re saying we should respect our elders even if we want to write honestly about them?” “No,” I insisted. “I’m saying you have to be prepared to disrespect your elders in order to write the truth.” I’m hoping, though, that the idea catches on, because it’s only when these bright, inquisitive, courageous young journalists, writers, and scholars begin to examine the consequences of the traditional Burmese tendency to respect, obey and even idolize their elders; when they question the ways they’ve been betrayed and brainwashed by generation after generation of ‘wise’ elders; it’s only then that they’ll begin to clear the path for a fundamental change in their political and social conditions. Healthy disrespect might get them there sooner than the insistent chant for Democracy does.
Photo credit: ©Vanessa Gavalya
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