Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Moe Satt, an independent art curator, told me that Burmese artists had begun to talk about postmodernism. “But how can we make postmodern comments on a premodern society?” he asked. “There’s a lot of catching up to do first.” He felt that many Burmese artists and intellectuals were unready to create work from the vantage of authority. “We resist the end of pressure,” he explained, commenting on how artists can do their best work under oppression, be it political oppression or market oppression. Nay Phone Latt, who served four years of his twenty-year sentence for blogging about the Saffron Revolution, said, “The people are not accustomed to taking responsibility; they imagine it will be done for them. If there’s not yet democracy here, that is not only the fault of the generals.”

Even the partial and flawed reforms, however, have made for palpable change. Author and presidential adviser Thant Myint-U said, “For ordinary people, especially the bottom fifty percent, daily life is not much better at all. But the country was based on fear, and now the fear has been taken out of the equation.” Sammy Samuels, a Burmese Jew who owns a travel agency called Myanmar Shalom, said, “Two, three years ago, every time I come back from the United States, I am so scared at the airport even though I have nothing on me. The immigration officer starts asking, ‘What were you doing there?’ Now, they’ve start saying, ‘Welcome back.’ ” Even pessimists do not predict that things will slip back to the previous level of oppression; they worry about how reform might stall, not about how it might regress.

As the government began loosening its reins, people developed absurdly high expectations that foreign investment would pour in, new airports would be built, and everyone would become wealthy. A friend commented to a cabdriver on how bad the roads were, and the cabbie said, “If Aung San Suu Kyi is elected, this will all be paved.” In reality, the absence of basic services continues to impede authentic progress. Many have been disappointed to realize how slow development is anywhere. The Burmese call the Internet the Internay—nay being the Burmese word for “slow”—and the Web is accessible to only about 1 percent of the nation’s 60 million people. “Nothing works here,” said Lucas Stewart, literature adviser to the British Council in Yangon. “Everything breaks. Everything has been illegally bought so it’s all secondhand, broken crap from China and Thailand. Skype doesn’t work here. It takes a day to download a three- or four-minute video clip.” A recent survey showed that mobile-phone usage was lower in Myanmar than even in North Korea or Somalia, though the price of a SIM card has recently come down from over $1,500 to less than $15. Most cars are secondhand Japanese models outfitted with right-hand drive, even though traffic regulations are set up for left-hand drive. Automobiles are still unaffordable for most people, but much less out of reach; the streets, long empty, are now often choked with traffic.

Many great wars and revolutions are catalyzed: the assassination of Franz Ferdinand started World War I; the kidnapping of Mikhail Gorbachev heralded the demise of the Soviet Union; Mohamed Bouazizi set himself afire in Tunisia and launched the Arab Spring. The reforms in Myanmar seemed to materialize out of the blue. There is no consensus about the reasons for these changes, no agreement about why they happened at the precise time they did. They were not the consequence of a groundswell, but a top-down affair, a controlled process of reconfiguring national policy. US ambassador Derek Mitchell said, “Myanmar might have had a Tiananmen-like moment of voices coming up from the ground in 1988 or even 2007. But now it’s a bureaucratic move from on high.” He added that the regime could probably have limped along for a while, just as the Soviet Union might have persisted if Gorbachev hadn’t started to dismantle it. Openness can sometimes seem like the best option even to dictators.

The junta has claimed that liberalization is a seven-step process initiated in 2003, so it is possible that, like Gorbachev’s glasnost, the loosening was started by people who did not realize how far it would go. The final step on the 2003 road map was to vest power in a new government—but it was supposed to be a government of the military leaders’ choosing. President Thein Sein, who assumed power in 2011, is the first leader of Myanmar who has avoided the taint of corruption. “They erroneously chose a good guy instead of a corrupt one,” Ma Thanegi said. “So now they have to live with the consequences.”