Thant Myint-URezensionen

How did Aung San Suu Kyi go from being the next Nelson Mandela, with pop stars and world leaders queuing up to have their photos taken with her, to become a figure of universal disdain, presiding over a humanitarian crisis she seemed to refuse to believe was happening? Well, obviously, that has a lot to do with our own insatiable appetite for heroes and villains and our reluctance to read long foreign policy analyses, but it also has something to do with the realities of governing postcolonial countries, where the legacy of generations of inequality, poverty, lack of education and the complexities of geography, religion and ethnicity cannot simply be magicked away by the first free election.

Thant Myint-U, as U Thant’s grandson, a former UN official in his own right and a senior adviser to the transitional government of ex-General Thein Sein, has his own stake in Burmese politics and is not exactly a neutral outsider, but he does give us a very clear summary of the country’s history and its problems, as well as a lively memoir of the period in the early years of this century when he was personally involved.

When the British withdrew in 1948, Burma was given borders which roughly corresponded to the area that had been under the control of the Myanma kingdom that came to power in the late 18th century. The cities and the Irrawaddy valley and delta in the centre of the country formed a reasonably homogeneous area, Burmese-speaking, mostly Buddhist apart from Indian workers brought in by the British, and with a legacy of British administration. But the border areas, west, east and north, were ethnically diverse and had not been under colonial administration. After 1948, all these areas came under the control of a patchwork of local militias, most of which have been in a state of civil war or at best uneasy ceasefire with the Burmese government ever since. In the west there were tensions between Buddhists and Muslims, some of whom were the descendants of people who had been living there for centuries, others more recent immigrants from Bengal. In the east the militias had important economic links with China, controlling activities such as narcotics, gambling, logging and mining. Burma came to be governed by an authoritarian military dictatorship that more or less kept the lid on the civil war, taking rake-offs from these illegal activities, and violently suppressing political dissent.

The country’s political and economic isolation, and the extreme poverty of most of the population, were only increased by the sanctions the international community used to try to pressure the leadership into democratic reforms. The dictator Than Shwe attempted to find a way out of the impasse by setting up a succession plan for his own retirement that would lead to a new constitution with the appearance of democracy but all the real power still in the hands of the army, but events moved much faster than he had anticipated, partly due to the great popularity of the leader of the main democratic opposition party, Aung San Suu Kyi, who found herself de facto head of government at a moment when the country was still far from being governable in any meaningful way, with an army that was not under her control, and rebel forces on all sides ready to take advantage of the apparent weakness of the state. Tragically, the crisis that exploded first was in the west, with attacks by Muslim separatists provoking brutal army repression and resulting in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of refugees to Bangladesh.

Very interesting, both in filling in a lot I didn’t know about Burma, and as a first-hand case study of the realities of postcolonial states.½

All the basic information is here but not a compelling read.

THE RIVER OF LOST FOOTSTEPS is a remarkable, long and dense, yet smooth reading history of Burma, now Myanmar.

Though the tale would benefit from improved chronology, it is thorough with a strong vein of irony, which unfortunately
has not changed the Luck of Burma away from poverty, corruption, isolation, destruction, starvation, mutiny, ethnic hatred, and horror.

Monarchy. Army. U Nu and U Thant. Army.

One of those rare books which you regret finishing... you want more! The author comes across as a wise, utterly civilized, informed, enlightened soul with deep insights and a wide intellectual and emotional canvas. A bonus for Indians is his foray into the Indian Northeast, and his appeciation of the contributions to Southeast Asia from the Indian civilizational world.

Excellent read. A touch of humor, well-written, hugely informative, and written by an "insider'. tis easy to like this book which I acquired and read while in Myanmar.½

Excellent, highly readable and enjoyable overview of the country formerly known as Burma. My number #1 recommendation when a friend asks for an introductory book on Myanmar.

One correction: The correct date for the Portuguese travel writer Duarte Barbosa is the 1500s, not the 1600s. (He was the brother-in-law of Ferdinand Magellan and died in the Philippines on May 1, 1521--one month after Magellan.)

An additional recommendation: Not a book, but an excellent DVD I've just watched that I want to recommend to anyone interested in the history of Burma during WW2: The film is by Kon Ichikawa, and is called The Burmese Harp. The story of an imperial Japanese Army regiment that surrenders to British forces in Burma at the close of WW2, it follows the decision one of its members makes in disguising himself as a Buddhist monk and remaining behind. Made in 1956 and recently restored in high-def digital transfer, it "remains one of Japanese cinema's most overwhelming antiwar statements, both tender and brutal in its grappling with Japan's wartime legacy." It's in Japanese and Burmese with English subtitles. If you have a chance to find it in a DVD library or on-line, don't miss it. It is a movie you will not forget.

The book's title should have read "Where China collides with Burma". A country not known for preservation of any kind. Having wiped out most of their cultural and architectural heritage during the cultural revolution and in this mad rush towards the 21st century, and having eaten through pretty much all of its fauna, It is the repeat of this same story for it's much poorer neighbor. Mercilessly cutting down it's forests and decimating it's wildlife. This is certainly not responsible behavior but a kind of rapaciousness that would put even the meanest pirates and poachers to shame.

In the later chapters that are focused on India, the spotlight is on the seven states of the northeast. The author has taken the trouble to to pen in short histories of the various kingdoms that have dotted this region.

The book's title should have read "Where China collides with Burma". A country not known for preservation of any kind. Having wiped out most of their cultural and architectural heritage during the cultural revolution and in this mad rush towards the 21st century, and having eaten through pretty much all of its fauna, It is the repeat of this same story for it's much poorer neighbor. Mercilessly cutting down it's forests and decimating it's wildlife. This is certainly not responsible behavior but a kind of rapaciousness that would put even the meanest pirates and poachers to shame.

In the later chapters that are focused on India, the spotlight is on the seven states of the northeast. The author has taken the trouble to to pen in short histories of the various kingdoms that have dotted this region.

There is surprisingly little about both Burma and the supposed meeting of India and China in this book. This is not an introduction to the country but more a stream of consciousness account of a new great game between China and India.

The interest in Burma is much greater from the Chinese side. India doesn't seem to particularly care and has enough poor parts of its own to care for. China's interest in Burma seems triggered more in securing transportation access from the Indian ocean to Yunnan and the ability to exploit Burmese resources than to improve the lives of the Burmese people. It just happens that both China's and India's provinces bordering on Burma are very poor themselves and also filled with ethnic strife. It is unlikely to see such a coalition of hillbillies succeed. If Burma is to emerge out of its misery, instead of looking at its two giant neighbors, it might have a more promising look at its similarly sized neighbor Thailand - which is not covered in this book.

Part travelogue, part history, the book suffers from the unstructured, touristic discovery mode of its author. The Burmese themselves are also not actors in this "great game" (neither are any Westerners). It is the author's view that China and India will develop and carve up Burma on their own terms. Given India's rather lethargic approach, this means it falls to China which is only interested in business. This doesn't bode well for Burma's democratic ambitions and economic development.½

This was a fascinating book, although it was not the book I expected based on the title. Burma is the center of the story, but Thant Myint-U takes the reader on a tour, geographic, historical, economic, and cultural, of the surrounding regions in China and India, regions that are very far from the political centers of their respective countries and that in various ways have functioned as frontiers. At the beginning and end of the book, he talks about the potential role of Burma as the gateway for China to the Indian Ocean (without going through the narrow Malaccan straits) and as the pathway for India to Southeast Asia.

But the heart of the book is his travels through Burma, the Chinese southwest, and the Indian northeast. In these sections he delves into the history and culture of ancient kingdoms and contemporary ethnic groups, the long and partially continuing isolation of these border areas from the mainstream of their country's culture and economic development the formidable geography, the vital importance of the major rivers coursing down from the Himalayas, politics, military events and strategy, the Chinese need for oil, religious and linguistic diversity and similarity, and much more. For me, this provided insight into areas and history I knew nothing about and broadened my awareness of the complexity of the region.

Thant was born and grew up in the US and did his graduate work in England, but his family returned to Burma to visit during his childhood summers (he is the grandson of former UN Secretary General U Thant). One of the parts of the book that interested me was his awareness of people's appearances: whether they look "Burmese" or "Southeast Asian" versus looking "Chinese" or "Indian." There was a long history of Indian presence in Burma, and he finds people and communities in India's Northeast (a region, connected to the main part of India by what's called the "chicken neck," that still is largely under military control because its various ethnic groups, who formerly had their own kingdoms there, don't feel they are Indian) similar in many ways to the Burmese.

The Chinese are building roads, railways, and pipelines through Burma, and Burma is poised to become the crossroads between China and India, as the title states. But as the author writes, "Burma would not be connecting the parts of India and China most familiar in the West, the maritime Asia that runs from Bombay to Shanghai and Tokyo, via the beaches of Thailand and Bali, Singapore and Hong Kong -- the Asia that is developing fast, the Asia of high-tech manufacturing, glittering fashion shows and luxury tourism. Instead, Burma would be connecting the vast hinterlands of India and China, much less visible, poor and with a spine of violent conflict running right through." Furthermore, it is not clear how the Burmese themselves would benefit from this.

I have one quibble. I love maps, and enjoyed looking at the maps at the beginning of the book. But the contemporary map was printed so the spine of the book goes right through Burma, making it impossible to see some of the most important locations in the book.

Burma has been a sad place for the last 50 years, using the surrounding ring of mountain ranges and the coast to fully isolate itself from the rest of world, hiding in its own little bowl, the military government quite content with the international sanctions that are supposed to force it to open up. Only the people suffer. It wasn’t always this way. At one point, in the 15th century, with Mughals in India next door, the Arakan coast in southwest Burma formed its own coastal empire where the capital included “a mix of Arakanese, Bengalis, Afghans, Burmese, Dutch, Portuguese, Abyssinians, Persians, even Japanese Christians from Nagasaki escaping the persecution of the dictator Hideyoshi Toyotomi.” That’s a mixture worth a moment of reflection.

Thant Myint-U is the grandson of U Thant, the UN secretary-general through the 1960’s. He has written a formal history of Burma (The Making of Modern Burma), but this isn’t it. Here he focuses on the story of history, mixing the chronology, an adding in personal and family history and an odd interview here and there. He has sources (wonderful ones), but no index and only one map, albeit a very good one. He does cover everything to some degree, going back into ancient history. It’s an all absolutely fascinating history, and the book is able to capture that. The Burmese racial mixture itself is quite complex, including, among many others, Burmese, Karen, Kachin, Shan, Chinese and the Mon who at point were the dominant population in the south of the country, until they were essentially massacred our by a Burmese warlord. Some tribes in the mountainous areas are essentially independent. And there are the descents of the Portuguese and Dutch who settled in Burma long ago when it was cosmopolitan…and whose families remained in the same neighborhoods these hundreds of years.

But Myint-U’s main focus is the modern era, which begins in 1885 when the ever victorious British army sauntered in to Mandalay unopposed by the army that had once been the only one to fully defeat the Manchu armies of China, preventing an invasion, and the British simply deposed the King whose lineage went back into legendary history…and Burma has never recovered. During WWII the whole country formed a long now forgotten battlefield front that quickly went west, when the Japanese nominally “liberated” Burma, and then slowly went back east again. The Burmese eventually achieved independence from Great Britain after WWII, but were left with a mixture of allied- and Japanese-trained soldiers to lead them, and who were largely divided on ethnic lines for various reasons. Then most of the leaders were assassinated in one event on July 19, 1947, including Aung San (father of Aung San Suu Kyi), who was Burma’s great unifying hope. It was about 15 years before the military, after refining themselves by somehow winning the various civil wars where their enemies actually greatly outnumbered them but were composed of various completely unrelated groups, including a Nationalist Chinese soldiers, took over and went for an odd purity that stalled all economic development, and all political processes and debate, evicted the once large Indian population and then closed the whole country off from everyone else.

This was a supposed to be a “quick and dirty” review, but instead became a long wandering under-edited review. Well, if you’re still reading, the book comes highly recommended from me. It’s a nice find that will entertain you even if you couldn’t care less about Burma.

2010
http://www.librarything.com/topic/90167#2207635½

Traces Burmese history since the fall of the last Burmese king--Military dictatorship, colonialism, Japanese invasion, economy collapsing with the American Great Depression--afterword discusses monk's walk, but comes prior to the 2008 earthquake, which further devastated the country. The role of peace-loving Buddhism seems far away in this account of Burmese history--seems not to have had much impact on the politics within the country throughout its modern period.

The grandson of U Thant, former Secretary-General of the United Nations, recounts the history of Burma, interwoven with family stories and leading up to the present events. A welcome source of information on this land in turmoil.
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Thant Myint-U sees the fundamental problems of the country as rooted in the disintegration of the structures of government immediately after the British conquest in 1885; from then on, the Burmese faced extraordinary hurdles in getting things together. The history of foreign involvement goes way back, of course, with for instance the Portuguese playing a very prominent role from much earlier than I had realised. But Myint-U really gets into his stride in the 20th century, and I found his account of the lessons the Burmese learnt from the Irish revolution of 1916-22 very interesting.

The story of Aung San is fascinating - imagine if the Germans had invaded Ireland in 1916, and the IRB, having been installed as a provisional government backed by Berlin, then did a deal with London to kick the Germans out in return for recognition as the rightful government; this is more or less what the Burmese did in 1941-48 with the Japanese. Aung San's successful navigation of his country to independence was remarkable, and reminiscent of Michael Collins in rather different circumstances. Like Collins, of course, he was killed by his own fellow-countrymen before the transition was complete, still in his early 30s.

Burma's history since the military coup of 1962 is a grim story of oppression and poverty. Thant Myint-U mingles Burma's recent history with his own life story, growing up a Burmese emigré in New York as the grandson of the UN Secretary-General. U Thant's funeral was the occasion of extraordinary displays of popular resistance, and of correspondingly awful repression. The River of Lost Footsteps takes the story up to the unmourned death of the dictator Ne Win, and hopes for increased international engagement in the issue.½

This excellent book provides a broad history of Burma from prehistoric times to the present day. Myint-U's retelling jumps about chronologically, but the narrative is still easy to follow. He also spices things up a bit with some biographical sketches of various family members, which adds some immediacy to the events he chronicles. Best of all, he does an excellent job of suppling just enough background information on the international players--Britain, India, and China chief among them--that I really felt I had learnt a great deal of world history as well, and he never loses sight of the main narrative. My only quibble with "River" is that it would have benefited from an index, as unfamiliar names and Burmese terms are sprinkled throughout the text, and it's difficult to remember precisely who did what several hundred pages later. That said, this is a lucid, well written book and should appeal to anyone with an interest in East Asia.

I have travelled and worked in Burma now since late 1995. The intriguing question for me is how the military junta survives there, when the economy and society is falling down around everyone's ears. other dictatorships fall at this point - but not this one.
U Myint's book gives a compelling account of Burma's history, adding his own personal story along the way, and as I read it, I am beginning to see more clearly just how closely today's Burmese people are caught up in thei own history - this may be at least part of the reason they are unable to get out from under the yoke of these particular oppressors.
It is a wonderful book - not the least because the author's gift for explanation and description. In this he is not alone among those from Burma who can write so captivatingly.

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