(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Hans Olav Lahlum, historian and journalist
hanso.lahlum@c2i.net,
[essay] "You must not endure so badly the injustice that does not affect yourself," wrote the writer Arnulf Øverland in 1936. That call for the Norwegian people is still in place 71 years later, especially in relation to the Burmese people's history of suffering. Burma is a country with over 50 million inhabitants that has been ruled as a military dictatorship for 45 years, and where the population is likely to suffer even more than in Afghanistan and Iraq. Why did politicians and public opinion in Norway as well as in other Western European countries until last week overlook it?Hidden in one of the dark shadows of the Cold War, the Burmese people, through the 25 years after the coup in the 1962, became the victim of an increasingly violent repression. No one knows how many people lost their lives in Rangoon's streets in 1988, when opium-drunk soldiers with automatic weapons were deployed against unarmed protesters. But it probably died far more in the streets of Rangoon then than at the Tiananmen Square in China the following year. The figure 3000 has been used for the total losses, but also for killing in a single day in Rangoon. However, there were few pictures from there, and Burma disappeared some news stories later in the shadow of other and more important events for the West.
In 1990, Burma attracted some attention by first holding a parliamentary election, then not convening a parliament, as the democratic opposition led by Aung San Suu Kyi turned out to win over 80% of the seats. But even when the Nobel Prize ceremony in Oslo in 1991 went without prize winner Suu Kyi, it gave only a brief flash of interest even in Norway. The press coverage in the West for the next 15 years was limited to scattered news reports about peace prize winner Suu Kyi's house arrests. The regime changed its name first to SLORC and then to SPDC, made some internal replacements – and steered undisturbed with a strengthened iron grip on land and people. They even found a long-awaited new source of income as an exotic destination for western package tourists.
Prison for internet. It was a bomb ticking for many years that was detonated with this autumn's mass demonstrations. Despite its vast natural resources and rich cultural traditions, Burma has become one of the world's poorest countries, and the vast majority of the country's more than 50 million inhabitants are among the Earth's weakest in terms of democracy, the rule of law and virtually all other human rights. In August 2007, Burma had at least 1150 political prisoners, who for the most part were imprisoned without trial, under torture and in inhumane conditions. Having an internet connection, talking to a foreign journalist or organizing a union meeting can lead to many years in prison. The army of nearly 400 soldiers is largely funded through opium sales and looting, and is increasingly accused of organized mass rapes and massacres. The inhabitants are controlled through an intelligence service that to a large extent surpasses both the Stasi and the KGB: It is from bitter experience that a proverb claims that "Where four Burmese are gathered, there are at least five spies".
In one of the world's most corrupt countries, the regime's revenues are spent predominantly on the military and on lavish luxuries for a small oligarchy of generals. The result is that the most disadvantaged 80% of the population is almost without rights to education and health care. And that most children grow up in the fight against hunger and distress, in a country where the average annual income is barely 1500 kroner. The fact that the military forcibly relocates tens of thousands of people where oil, gas or timber provides short-term income opportunities has resulted in refugee flows to neighboring countries as well as millions of internally displaced persons. The population is also controlled through landmines, in a society based on the use of forced labor – often performed by children.
All this has for many years been known to anyone who wanted to see or could hear what Amnesty International, Save the Children, the Norwegian Burma Committee and other interested parties have been able to tell. New in 2007 is also not the knowledge about the way to an improvement of the Burmese situation. Today's Burma, like the apartheid regime's South Africa in the 1980s, is vulnerable to international pressure. However, it requires not only sanctions and political pressure directly against Burma, but also broad and sustained pressure on China, Pakistan, Malaysia, India, Japan, Russia and other countries that, through their support, enable the SPDC to retain power.
The left has downgraded Burma. One would think that the basis for a cross-party mobilization in Norway was rarely good for Burma. Despite the uncertainty about the size of the invisible iceberg, there is no doubt about the suffering of the Burmese people. And one hardly finds in Norway a paid lawyer willing to defend the SPDC. Nevertheless, the tragedy of the Burmese in Norway, as in the western world, has otherwise remained the tragedy of the forgotten people: They are the people all in principle sympathize with, but who very few in practice do anything to help. Religious movements have not given priority to Burma, although there is overt persecution of all religious minorities. The environmental movement has not prioritized Burma, although the deforestation in particular has made the country an environmental nuisance. The feminist movement has not given priority to Burma, even though it is one of the countries in the world where women suffer the most. The labor movement has not given priority to Burma, even though it is one of the countries where workers have the lowest wages and the fewest rights. And no political party in Norway has given enough priority to Burma to be able to say "What did we say?".
A few prominent bourgeois politicians, such as Kjell Magne Bondevik and Børge Brende, have highlighted good personal intentions in Burma issues. But even when the two were in government together, the answers from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were a study in non-committal gossip and explanations, when Amnesty or the Burma Committee called for Norwegian initiative and concrete measures to improve the Burmese situation. Aung San Suu Kyi's repeated desire for sanctions and sanctions against the military regime has been overlooked by all Norwegian governments to date. And it has been possible to do so because Norwegian opinion has cared so little.
The big and thought-provoking question remains in the autumn of 2007: Why this indifference? The answer must of course partly be sought in the fact that Burma is still far away, and is still a religiously and culturally foreign country with which Norway has little contact. But this also applies to many other countries, where much less human rights violations have received much more attention. It therefore seems as if the explanation has to be sought in ourselves – and in our enemy images. Christians have been more concerned with Iran and other Muslim-ruled countries, especially those close to Israel, than with a Buddhist-ruled country where religious persecution hits Muslims the hardest and Buddhists the hardest. The political right has followed it up, and in addition has been eager to cut in terms of countries such as Cuba and Venezuela. They are by no means in Burma's class in terms of human rights violations, but are governed in return by authoritarian leaders with a clear left-wing radical ideology.
Conversely, it is striking how otherwise action-happy parts of the left have for decades downgraded Burma in favor of Chile and other Latin American countries, where the enemy has been the United States and regimes with a clear right-wing profile. In recent years, Afghanistan and Iraq have been completely overshadowed by the radical left's outlook, although even more are likely to suffer even more in Burma. This is because the enemy in Burma is not Bush and the United States, but the unknown Than Shwe and a homemade military dictatorship that, in addition to its general hostility to human beings, has an unclear political profile. If one tries to take up Burma's case in a forum of Norwegian left-wing radicals, the commitment illustratively is often greatest to get to countries where the United States may have been guilty of almost as serious crimes. One can even hear that Norway, after its failure in Afghanistan and Iraq, lacks credibility to intervene against Burma. It is, of course, a completely unknown concern for the Burmese people and their supporters. A reality is, on the contrary, that Norway's credibility is constantly being undermined by Norwegians' tendency partly to pit oppressed people against each other, and partly to ignore those who are not oppressed by our desired enemies.
The history of the last century should have taught us to see our own century with open eyes. If you ask surviving Nazis about the 1930s, they often claim that they went against Stalin, while communists of the same age answer that they went against Hitler. In that case, both went against an anti-human dictator, but at the same time with another. The pattern was repeated during the Cold War most grotesquely as large sections of the right defended US war crimes in Vietnam, and many on the far left Mao's genocide in China and Pol Pots in Cambodia. Our century should be the century in which people in Norway and other democratic countries see the dictatorship in white. And where over all our political and religious disagreements we can work together for the forgotten people out there who need it most, no matter what country they live in and who oppresses them.
The crisis in Burma has so far become yet another demonstration of the widespread popular opposition to the SPDC, but also of the regime's persistent contempt for human life. That it has at the same time also become an illustration of the powerlessness of the UN and the world community is largely due in large part to the fact that the United States, through seven years with George W. Bush, has created deep mutual mistrust between the great powers. But in terms of reactions and punitive measures against Burma, the United States under Bush has so far shown greater will than Norway under Bondevik and Stoltenberg. It should be a great crossroads for the latter two – and for many other well-meaning people in Norway. The same should be true of the surviving voices' testimonies of mass murder and other war crimes in the conflicts the world community displaced in previous episodes, such as in Rwanda, Congo and Sudan.
Alarm clock. Right should be right: Interest in the cause of Burma has been rising in both Norway and other Western European countries in the last two years, as an ever-increasing flow of refugees has given the Burmese tragedy faces in the midst of us. And in the last two weeks, Burma has suddenly become the most talked about foreign country in the West. Although it is reported that several hundred pro-democracy activists may have been killed and several thousand sent to concentration camps, the regime's violence is probably less now than in 1988. The difference is largely that it is now easier to get reports in and out. It remains to be seen whether the voices and images from the Burmese tragedy will be the alarm clock for Norway and other western countries. The first test will be whether the Norwegian government will give priority to following up Amnesty's demands for an international arms embargo against Burma. The second and more critical test will be whether the media, parties, organizations and citizens of Norway in the coming months and years will continue their interest in Burma, even though the surviving protesters have now been imprisoned and the surviving journalists thrown out. In that case, it may well turn out that the SPDC with its use of force in the autumn of 2007 won a Pyrrhic victory, which leads to the freedom of the Burmese people already in 2008 or 2009. The SPDC still has so many weapons and so few hesitations to use them against its own population, that strong, broad and long-lasting international pressure is required.
But gloomy predictions that Burma without the SPDC could end up as a new Yugoslavia are heard less and less. It gives reason for optimism that the opposition has to such an extent managed to gather across all its ethnic, religious and political divisions. It remains to be seen whether we in Norway manage to gather across our ethnic, religious and political divisions to help them.
An often repressed part of our Western European history is that Francisco Franco was allowed to remain as dictator in Spain after World War II. "Franco's method" of retaining power consisted, first, of sitting still without threatening any other country. Secondly, in not provoking any great powers. And thirdly, through murder, violence and torture, to keep their own people in such a harsh position that they could not rebel. It is a shame for the world community that "Franco's method" was allowed to work in Western Europe until the autumn of 2, when the dictator died of Alzheimer's and old age. But it is becoming an even greater shame that "Franco's method" in the autumn of 1975 will still work in Burma. It is to be hoped that Norway and the world community can otherwise learn from their past mistakes, and follow up on good intentions by demonstrating their solidarity in practice in the coming years. So that the Burmese and other long-forgotten but still severely oppressed people can hope to gain their freedom without having to wait for the death of the last dictator. ■
