Burmese Daze.

AuthorCaryl, Christian
Position'The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar's Hidden Genocide'; 'Blood, Dreams, and Gold: The Changing Face of Burma' - Book review

Azeem Ibrahim, The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar's Hidden Genocide (London: Hurst, 2016), 160 pp., $19.95.

Richard Cockett, Blood, Dreams, and Gold: The Changing Face of Burma (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 296 pp., $35.00.

Southeast Asia is a miracle of modernization. In the course of a few generations, the region has experienced startling change. Singapore makes parts of the United States look like the Third World; you can barely turn around in Thailand without bumping into a convenience store or a car-parts factory. Malaysia, too, has raised living standards dramatically. Over the past fifteen years, even former laggards like Vietnam and Cambodia have managed to get into the act.

There has been one particularly glaring exception to this pattern of growing prosperity: Burma (also known as Myanmar). For most of the past half-century, the country of fifty million people has been sinking steadily deeper into poverty and stagnation. The generals who seized power in 1962 took what had been one of the region's engines of growth and drove it into the ground.

If anyone dared to complain, the junta threw them into jail--and when the jails grew full, they filled them again. In 1988, with a ruthlessness that presaged Tiananmen Square a year later, the generals slaughtered thousands of protesters who had taken to the streets to challenge their rule. A grudgingly granted election followed--and when it was won, predictably, by the prodemocracy opposition, led by a charismatic young political novice named Aung San Suu Kyi, the generals annulled the result and threw still more of their foes into prison. The leaders of an entire generation spent decades of their lives behind bars.

And then, in 2011, to widespread astonishment, the new president--an ex-general and junta alumnus named Thein Sein--embarked on an unexpected opening. Aung San Suu Kyi, having spent much of her adult life under house arrest, was suddenly released and encouraged to return to political life. Political prisoners emerged, blinking in the sunlight. The press found its voice again. Elections came, at first modestly, and then more elections, on a national scale.

Burma may be a faraway country about which we know little, but what happens there is of considerable import to the rest of the world. It is virtually guaranteed an outsized international role by its unique position between India and China. As Economist correspondent Richard Cockett reminds us in his wonderfully readable book Blood, Dreams, and Gold, during World War II Burma served as the main Allied supply route to Nationalist forces in the rear of Chinas Japanese occupiers, thus assuming "enormous strategic importance in the existential struggle over the world's most populous country."

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Today, Burma offers the Chinese a useful outlet to the sea for their western flank as well as a lucrative source of raw materials. Indeed, the old junta's excessive closeness to Beijing may well have factored into the decision to embark on the current opening, since liberalization was a prerequisite for good relations with the United States and Europe. And Washington's much-ballyhooed "pivot" from the Middle East...

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