Our Heroines: Aung San Suu Kyi

Aung San Suu Kyi, Politician and Nobel Peace
Prize Laureate, 65. Photographs © Platon (2010).

Keeping Your Eye on the Ball: Burma

Harn Lay (2010). Photograph © Platon, for Human Rights Watch.

It has been roughly a week since the military junta in Burma released Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest. At the time I noted here that while this was a welcome turn of events, it represented a quite minimal step by the authorities. There are many prisoners being held and many others who have been driven into exile. Cartoonist Harn Lay is among the latter group. He has been in exile in Thailand since 1988. Human Rights Watch has commissioned photographer Platon to portray some of the many others who have born (and continue to bear) the brunt of military rule in Burma. You can find the results of his work on this project here.

The upshot? It is important that we outside of Burma continue to speak out against the junta and its authoritarian policies. And it is more important still to devise policies that might bring pressure to bear on the junta. Many observers think that is impossible given their intransigence. For example, here are remarks (part 1, part 2) made by Amartya Sen at this conference coordinated by Human Rights Watch last month. What is called for is not just moralizing, but concerted political action.

“We haven’t seen each other for so long, I have so much to tell you.”

So, it is reported, said Aung Saw Suu Kyi as she emerged from house arrest. You can read another report here. This is good news. But it hardly is cause for jubilation. Why? . . . well, the Burmese junta has freed one of the political prisoners they've been holding for years. That is a start. One outrage has ended for now. What about the anonymous thousands? What about the travesty elections that the regime just orchestrated?

Burma Eats Its Young

In a just world, the names Min Ko Naing and Ko Ko Gyi would be as well known as Steve Biko and Adam Michnik. These two leaders of Burma’s 88 Generation students, now in their forties, have spent almost their entire adult lives in prison for organizing pro-democracy demonstrations. After a short period of freedom, between 2005 and 2007, they and their colleagues were jailed again for staging a long walk around Rangoon, in August of 2007, in protest of soaring transportation prices—a gesture that sparked the so-called Saffron Revolution, the largest demonstrations in Burma since 1988, both times put down in blood. [. . .]

That is the opening paragraph of this brief notice George Packer posted at The New Yorker on Friday. As he points out, this new 'trial' and the 65 years in prison that the regime has imposed on Min Ko Naing, Ko Ko Gyi, and their compatriots amount to an unambiguous 'F#*K YOU!!' from the Burmese Junta to anyone and everyone urging them to 'reform.' Of course, Packer starts out on the wrong foot. In a just world we would not have regimes that imprisoned and killed dissidents

The Company We Keep: Guess Who Else Uses 'Harsh Interrogation Techniques'?

Stress positions? Sleep Deprivation? Beatings? Our military and intelligence agencies use such "aggressive" methods of eliciting information from detainees even though the resulting "intelligence" is well know to be useless. Of course "we don't torture!"; just ask W if you need reassurance. How do you differentiate our reliance on those techniques from those reported here?

A General Strike as a Sign of Hope

Over at Alternet Jim Hightower asks "Is a Presidential Coup Underway?" From there I was led to a brief essay in Harpers calling for, of all things, a general strike starting November 6th. I am sure most people who read this manifesto will dismiss it. Why? Americans rightly were inspired by the people of Burma who took to the streets in defiance of the junta. If the Burmese could imagine mass resistance to an authoritarian regime that has an established record of brutality to its domestic opponents why does it seem so difficult to imagine Americans resisting the current political drift not just of the ruling Republicans but the barely oppositional Democrats?

Burma

This image (no photographer credit available) is from a story in The New York Times today on the current situation in Burma. I must say that I am amazed at how politically effective the military junta has been in only a couple of weeks. Not long ago, you will recall, hundreds of thousands of Burmese monks and civilians were in the streets clamouring for freedom and democracy and economic reform. And now, quite miraculously, the junta apparently has persuaded them that they were mistaken in pushing those demands when what they really want is more stability and order (dressed up in blind optimism of the sort only a brutal dictatorship can provide). I am certain that this billboard is a spontaneous and sincere expression of popular attitudes.

Repression in Burma: The Uses of Photography

This passage is from a story in The Guardian today:

"Troops with loudspeakers toured Rangoon's suburbs, threatening
and cajoling terrified residents and warning that they would arrest
anyone they suspected of taking part in the demonstrations that
swelled to 100,000 people before security forces crushed the
uprising with beatings, tear gas and bullets.

'You must stay inside,' the soldiers warned in their
pronouncements. 'Don't come out. We have
photographs of the people we're looking
for. We will arrest them.'"

I heard a similar report on npr this morning. I assume that the regime has monitored many of the outlets publishing photographs of events in the country over the past couple of weeks. So they may well have many photographs of those active in the opposition. Even if they don't their claim is unverifiable and likely to sow fear among the population.
__________

P.S.: The point here is that there is a potential massive down side to the very positive uses of photography by the opposition diring the protests last week. There was a pretty typical story about the strategic contest between oppoisiotn and regime for control of the visual media in The New York Times today

Symbolic Politics and Hope

Photograph © Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The news out of Burma (see here and here too), restricted by effective government censorship, is not encouraging. It appears that the regime is attacking, imprisoning and, in many instances, killing the Buddhist monks who had led last week's demonstrations. In large measure this state of affairs seems to represent the victory of "real" politics backed by military might over "symbolic" politics. As this story from The New York Times makes clear, what the monks wielded against the regime was symbolic power.

[These three images © Reuters ~ Unknown Photographer.]

As this story from The New York Times makes clear, what the monks wielded against the regime was symbolic power.

"As they marched through the streets of Myanmar's cities
last week leading the biggest antigovernment protests in
two decades, some barefoot monks held their begging
bowls before them. But instead of asking for their daily
donations of food, they held the bowls upside down, the
black lacquer surfaces reflecting the light.

It was a shocking image in the devoutly Buddhist nation.
The monks were refusing to receive alms from the
military rulers and their families — effectively
excommunicating them from the religion that is at
the core of Burmese culture.

That gesture is a key to understanding the power of
the rebellion that shook Myanmar last week."

Among the events that this claim brought to my mind was the eruption in 1981 of Solidarity in Poland. That movement too, was laced not just with symbolism, but with distinctly religious symbolism. And members of the opposition proved more than willing to use symbols to coordinate themselves and to try to discrcedit the Communist regime even more than it already had done itself. In the short term the symbolic power that Solidarity commanded was dramatically inadequate in the face of the overwhelming military force that the regime mustered. Thus, in the spring of 1982 shortly after the Communist Regime had imposed martial law, one Polish worker lamented: “We’ve got all the symbols, and they've got all the guns and tanks.” Just so. But of course, in Poland the resistance moved underground, continued a surreptitious symbolic battle with the regime, and arguably was instrumental in the way, eventually, Polish Communism fell in 1989.

Like the Polish resistance in 1982, the Burmese opposition now confronts the crucial, immensely difficult task of maintaining Hope in the Dark. Easy, perhaps, for me to say. But true, I think, nonetheless. So this is my note of encouragement.
__________

P.S.: I found all these images on line. I have not credited the final two photographs because they were taken and distributed by someone in Burma who may be in danger should their name be widely published.

Reflections on Burma, Democracy & Faith

"For what is the faith of democracy in the role of consultation,
of conference, of persuasion, of discussion, in the formation of
public opinion, which is the long run self-corrective, except
faith in the capacity of the intelligence of the common
man to respond with commonsense to the free play of facts
and ideas which are secured by effective guarantees
of free inquiry, free assembly, and free communication? I
am willing to leave to upholders of totalitarian states of
the right and the left the view that faith in the capacities
of intelligence is utopian." ~ John Dewey

A group of monks sit in protest after being halted
by riot police and military officials as they headed
towards the Shwedagon pagoda.
Photograph: STR/Reuters.

Riot police block a monk's path to the Shwedagon
pagoda in Rangoon. Photograph: Stringer/Reuters.

I do not consider myself a religious man, having had any illusions regarding divinity and holiness beaten out of me in the course of a half-dozen years in Catholic schools. My support for the opposition among Burmese monks and others stems not from faith in God, but from faith in democracy. I admire the courage the monks are displaying and identify with their commitment to democratic reform. Is that enough to restore something of my faith in religious conviction? I tend to agree with Richard Rorty's assessment of the role of religious leadership in politics. Here is Rorty in an interview:

"Whether the possibility of rearing new Martin Luther Kings is worth
the risk of rearing new Jerry Falwells is a matter of risk management.
To my mind the advantage of getting rid of the Falwells is worth the
risk of getting rid of the Kings. But I have no knock-down argument
to bring to bear. I suspect that the continued existence of the churches
is, by and large, more of a danger than a help to the rise of a
global democratic society."

The prevalence of religious intolerance and fanaticism throughout the contemporary world seems, to me, to represent a standing hindrance to the operation of democratic practices and institutions since the latter truly require a commitment to fallibilism, the idea that even our most deeply held and cherished commitments will turn out to be false or mistaken. It may turn out that my own faith in democracy is mistaken. To the best of my knowledge, no religious faith embraces such a basic commitment to un-certainty.