Non-violent Resistance

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(continued)

 

Although the U.S. and major Western powers have taken a political hard line with Yangon’s generals, Myanmar’s closest neighbors and biggest trade partners are still doing business with it. In fact, one door being slammed on the military regime only makes other doors open wider, some observers have argued.

China, Myanmar’s northeastern neighbor and a key provider of loans and weapons to the military government, has seen double-digital growth in its trade volume with Myanmar during the last two years, said one trade official at the Chinese Embassy in Yangon, who declined to be identified.

“For the first time in history bilateral trade surpassed $800 million in 2002,” not including the value of arms sales, said the official. “We expect the figure to reach $900 million by the end of 2003,” she said.

Despite urgings by the United States, members of the Association of Southeastern Asian Nations (ASEAN) including Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia, have maintained strong trade and investment relations with Myanmar.

Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra of Thailand, who was elected in 2001, advocates “constructive engagement” by keeping close political and economic contacts with the Burmese junta.  Under Thaksin’s Economic Cooperation Strategy, which aims at boosting its regional political and economic clout, Thailand has promised $45 million in aid to Myanmar. Thaksin is also among the most enthusiastic foreign supporters of a seven-point road map to democratization proposed by Burmese Prime Minister General Khin Nyunt.

While no official figures are available, Prof. Khin San Yee said Myanmar’s trade volume with Singapore, its No. 1 trade partner, almost doubled between 2002 and 2003.

U.S. sanctions have pummeled some of Myanmar’s cash industries, but certain sectors of the economy managed to grow despite the odds. Tourism, for instance, has become one of the country’s fastest-growing sectors in recent years, with Myanmar’s rich cultural heritage sites and relatively primitive and unspoiled sub-tropical beauty attracting more and more tourists from Europe and other parts of Asia.

In front of “Okinawa,” a neat two-story guesthouse near downtown Yangon’s popular Sule Pagoda, owner Nay Win Aung said he expected his business to grow at least 10 percent from last year.

“I have got lots of reservations,” said the 30-year-old hotelier, who also owns a Japanese restaurant on the same street and a mid-sized hotel in Bagan, known during its golden age in the 12^th century as “the city of the four million pagodas”, and today a hot tourist attraction in central Myanmar. “Okinawa,” with six hardwood-floor guest rooms and an 18-bed youth hostel, was fully booked for the next three months, he said.

Nay Win Aung’s guest book showed most customers were from Japan, France, Italy and Germany. The number of Chinese and South Korean tourists i also on the rise, he said.

“Governments like the United States and the United Kingdom have warned their citizens against unnecessary travel to Myanmar, but the effects are relatively slight,” said Franz Fischer, the Yangon general manager of Diethelm Travel, a European agency operating in Southeast Asia for more than 40 years.

The Myanmar branch of the firm handled some 5,000 “packs” of tourists in 2003, one fifth more than the previous year, said Fischer.

Most of his customers come from France and the German-speaking part of Europe, where “governments don’t hassle their citizens as much” on political concerns, he said.

Although foreign tourists can no longer use their credit cards in Myanmar after U.S. sanctions cut off the country’s dollar transactions with the world, and the country’s crude and ill-maintained infrastructure precludes rapid development of the tourism sector, Fischer said he was very optimistic that the country would see a greater influx of sightseers in the future.

“Despite all the negative media coverage, there seem to be a lot of curious people looking for adventures (in Myanmar),” he said.

But some other private entrepreneurs said they were worried that business would become even worse with the increasingly negative image the Burmese junta casts in the international community, largely due to Aung San Suu Kyi and her overseas supporters’ vigorous lobbying efforts over the years. Among other things, they said, more public statements by “the lady” could put them out of business.

Suu Kyi’s name has become a taboo in public conversations in Yangon’s streets. People refer to her as “the lady” in hushed voices and take furtive looks around them when they do. Under detention in her house by the side of Inya Lake in the capital city, she has not yet been able to make any public statement concerning her position on the latest sanctions. Yet before her arrest in May 2003 she repeatedly voiced support for American sanctions.

“We would like the world to know that economic sanctions do not hurt the common people of Burma,” Aung San Suu Kyi said in a September, 1999 statement as Secretary General of the National League of Democracy. Instead, she argued, the government’s attempt since 1988 to build a market economy only aimed at strengthening the economic position and power base of military generals and those connected with them.

“This is why we think that economic sanctions are good and necessary for the fast democratization of Burma,” she said in the statement.

Despite her previous position, Suu Kyi may not be willing to again throw her weight behind the more stringent measures in place since August 2003, said one senior European diplomat.

The diplomat, who asked to remain anonymous, described himself as an advisor to Razali Ismail, the United Nations special envoy to Myanmar, and a facilitator in the negotiations between Suu Kyi and the military government in the past five years.

“Aung San Suu Kyi sticks to her position of opposing large-scale investment,” he said. “But I won’t say she supports [the most recent U.S.] sanctions… She has made it clear that she will not support sanctions that hurt the people,” said the diplomat, who has the privilege of visiting Suu Kyi occasionally during her confinement since the May 30, 2003 attacks in Depayin. He last met her in October 2003.

In fact, the sanctions in question, the most severe to be slapped on the military regime so far, threaten to destroy what little trust the NLD and the junta may have in each other, undermining Suu Kyi’s capacity to lead the country’s pro-democracy forces in future political reform, he said.

“For me, where the Americans did wrong was that by imposing these sanctions, they keep all possibilities out of the door,” he said. And they further convince the junta that Suu Kyi will become a representative the United States’ hard line. That makes them  paranoid about keeping her locked up and not letting her get into contact with the Americans, he said.

“It’s [the sanctions that are] keeping her inside. This is a real fact.”

While the economic losses due to the sanctions may have taken a toll on the generals’ treasury, they have also achieved the undesired effect of strengthening the military’s grip on power, said Moe Kyaw, the market researcher.

“By alienating the country as a whole, [the sanctions] have made the government more reliant on themselves,” he said. “[They] give the people in power more control.”

“Prime Minister Khin Nyunt told me himself that Myanmar would fight the U.S. policy,” said Prof. Steinberg of Georgetown University. “It hardens the view of the hardliners within the military, and further marginalizes the reformists.”

Proponents of the sanctions, including Burmese political dissidents and activists in exile overseas and some Western politicians, have pointed, as a measure of success, to the junta’s willingness to negotiate with ethnic minorities in an apparent reconciliation effort after the sanctions started. But the NLD, which has demanded the military government recognize the results of the 1990 election, and wants to play a major role in any national reconciliation process, has been generally shut out while its leader remains locked up.

“A big dilemma Suu Kyi and her supporters are facing is, should they stay out of the process or join it? What is the best way to maintain their credibility towards the people?” said the European diplomat. As long as the sanctions carry on and Suu Kyi remains in custody, there is little hope for the NLD to get out of the dilemma, he said.

Even some adamant advocates for international isolation of Myanmar’s military government say the current sanctions are not working.

Ludu Sein Win, 63, a prominent educator, political commentator, and longtime critic of the junta, said in an interview in his downtown Yangon home that he didn’t expect the U.S. sanctions to bring down the junta, or pressure it into any significant concession.

“No matter how much pressure is put on the generals, they will not change their policies. They will not relinquish power internally, because they are addicted to power,” said Sein Win, a 13-year political prisoner from the late 60’s to the early 80’s for his opposition to the junta. He has run a language school in Yangon for the last 20 years, and writes regularly for five weekly journals and dozens of magazines.

Instead of external pressure, he said, Myanmar’s hope lies in a revolution from within, when the desperate masses finally decide to risk all and rise up against the military dictatorship that has ruled the country for 42 years.

Paralyzed in the right side of his body in a stroke while in prison, Sein Win moves around on crutches in his bedroom and sleeps next to an oxygen tank because of serious heart conditions. He said he is a rare exception in being able to talk to foreign journalists, which is an offence punishable by prison terms or even death for most ordinary Burmese. It’s probably because of his fragile health and his old age, he said.

He sees all the economic sanctions and embargoes against Myanmar as nothing but gestures of moral support. The West should step up the sanctions, he said, because “spiritual and moral support is the only thing we expect from the international community, to let us know that the world has not neglected us.”

Supporters of the sanctions, both inside and outside Myanmar, also argue that they won’t hurt the ordinary people because they affect only the “formal sector” of the Burmese economy, which includes large, mostly state-owned or controlled enterprises engaging in cross-border trades.

The informal sector, mainly in the form of subsistent farming in the vast rural areas and small family businesses in cities, feeds most of Myanmar’s 50-million population.

Of all the larger enterprises with more than 100 employees in Myanmar, four in five are owned by or affiliated to the junta, according to the Burma Campaign UK, one of the most vociferous Burmese exile groups overseas. It has campaigned successfully over the years to persuade major western investors or business partners to withdraw from Myanmar, including the British oil giant Premier Oil, and British American Tobacco.

“Sanctions are not the root cause of the Burmese people’s suffering; the military dictatorship is,” said Aung Din, a Washington. D.C.-based Burmese exile and pro-sanction lobbyist. With or without the sanctions, he said, the Burmese people would continue to suffer at the hands of the regime.

But Aung Din, a former student activist and a political prisoner of four years after the 1988 student movement, acknowledged that many of the country’s poorest are now bearing the brunt of the punishment meant for their dictators.

An estimated 70,000 people, mostly from the garment industry like Aung Myu of Mae Sot, have lost their jobs in Myanmar since the start of the sanctions, he said.

Aung Myu and his three brothers are now all working in Mae Sot factories, he said, and they each send 100,000 kyats ($110) a year, or up to one fourth of their annual earnings, to support their parents in Yangon. Despite the higher wages in Thailand, Aung Myu said he missed home dearly preferred staying in Yangon near his parents and friends.

“I wouldn’t have come this far if only I could survive back home,” he said.

While the young textile workers cross borders or linger in the cities’ dark corners in search of an alternative living, other Burmese youths inside the country say they, too, feel confused and despondent about the future.

Twenty-four-year-old Bawk Naw, an ethnic Kachin student at the University of Mandalay in central Myanmar, sat idly in the shade of a dilapidated bamboo dormitory watching his fellow students play ping-pong. He had graduated from the university five months before with a bachelor’s degree in engineering, but the prospect of finding a regular job couldn’t be further away.

“Jobs have been very hard to find. Many students become jobless the moment they get their diplomas,” he said. The son of small jade traders from the remote Phakant region near the China border, Bawk Naw had been supporting himself in the last few months working odd jobs such as a taxi driver or tour guide in Mandalay.

“Government jobs are almost impossible for an ethnic minority person with no connections,” he said. In the private sector, working for foreign or joint-venture companies in Yangon used to be a good alternative for college graduates. But now, with many foreign investors pulling out of Myanmar, hiring opportunities were rare and salaries very how, he said.

“I guess I will wait and see if my parents could get enough money for me to stay on in the university and get a master’s degree,” he said.

Increased government spending for education in recent years has led to an explosion of higher education institutions in Myanmar, from 38 in 1988 to 154 in 2003. But with a weak economy further undermined by embargoes and sanctions, tens of thousands of college graduates find themselves hardly better off than without their diplomas.

Some are becoming bitter and skeptical, and starting to see politics in a different light from the older generation of educated youths whose struggles led to the rise of Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD in the late 1980s.

“I have no particular likes or dislikes when it comes to the current government or Aung San Suu Kyi,” said Ye Kyaw Naing, an ethnic Chin from western Myanmar’s Chin state, in the small dorm room he shares with Bawk Naw and several other students. He used to doubt the generals’ intentions, believing they were too addicted to power to do the people any good, he said.

“I respected the United States, because I thought they helped people in the world.”

But his views have changed since the latter half of 2003, he said.

“The sanctions are hurting the people,” he said. “I don’t think the Americans are really interested in helping us.”

“If they help Aung San Suu Kyi get hold of power, their will be able to control and manipulate our country,” he said.

 

 

  

Source List:

Individuals

n        Aung Myu, migrant Burmese textile worker, in Mae Sot, Thailand.

n        Khin San Yee, professor, Yangon Institute of Economics, Yangon, Myanmar.

n        Moe Swe, exiled Burmese labor advocate, Mae Sot, Thailand.

n        Zar Zar Tin, migrant Burmese textile worker in Mae Sot, Thailand.

n        Nu Wah, an ethnic Karen girl working in a brothel in Mae Sot, Thailand

n        Moe Kyaw, Myanmar Marketing Research & Development Co., Ltd., Yangon, Myanmar.

n        Han Tun, vice president –2, Myanmar Fisheries Federation, Yangon, Myanmar.

n        Scot Gerber, spokesman for Sen. Diane Feinstein, Washington. D.C.

n        David I. Steinberg, professor of Asian studies, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.

n        A female social worker in Yangon, Myanmar.

n        A trade official at the Chinese Embassy in Yangon, Myanmar.

n        Nay Win Aung, owner, “Okinawa” restaurant, Yangon, Myanmar.

n        Frank Fischer, general manager, Diethelm Travel Ltd., Yangon, Myanmar.

n        A European diplomat in Yangon, Myanmar.

n        Ludu Sein Win, veteran journalist, educator, author and political commentator, Yangon, Myanmar.

n        Aung Din, director, U.S. Campagin for Burma, Washington, D.C.

n        Bawk Naw, graduate of University of Mandalay, Mandalay, Myanmar.

n        Ye Kyaw Naing, student, University of Mandalay, Mandalay, Myanmar.

 

Documents and Publications

l        President George W. Bush’s statement on the Burmese Freedom and Democracy Act and Presidential Order, July 28, 2003. http://www.state.gov/p/eap/rls/rm/2003/22851.htm

l        Burmese Freedom and Democracy Act of 2003 and accompanying Executive Order.

http://www.theorator.com/bills108/hr2330.html

http://www.burmaproject.org/070003bush_letter_eo_sanc.html

l        Statement by Aung San Suu Kyi, secretary of National League for Democracy, September 1999. 

http://www.burmafund.org/Pathfinders/nld/ASSK/Economic%20sanctions%20are%20necessary.htm

l        NBR Analysis Volumn 15, Number 1, March 2004, Reconciling Burma/Myanmar: Essays on U.S. Relations with Burma (edited by John H. Badgley). David I. Steinberg, Burma/Myanmar: A Guide for the Perplexed? http://www.nbr.org/publications/analysis/vol15no1/

This is a feature story I wrote three years ago, for my Master's Project. I chatted with a friend today about my trip to Thailand and Burma back then, and I suddenly realized how much this experience  has haunted me every since.  

 

 

With downcast eyes, Aung Myu, 21, sipped his tea outside a shabby stall by the side of a dirt road. He was killing time on another jobless afternoon in late December, in a remote border town in northwestern Thailand.

He chatted and smiled quietly. With several co-workers, he had walked 15 minutes along the dirt road from a sweater factory six miles outside the town of Mae Sot, which lies on the border of their home country, Myanmar. 

“All I want is a job and better conditions,” said Aung Myu.

Three months earlier, after losing his job in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, he fled to neighboring Thailand as an illegal migrant.

But the cause of his misfortune remains a mystery to Aung Myu.

“Some of my co-workers murmured something about sanctions by the United States,” he said with a confused look. “But I don’t understand it. Politics is too complicated for me. I cannot think about this.”

For Aung Myu, as thousands of other Burmese workers like him, analysts and economists say, the journey to unemployment began six months ago when President George W. Bush signed the Burmese Freedom and Democracy Act of 2003.

“These measures reaffirm to the people of Burma that the United States stands with them in their struggle for democracy and freedom,” said President Bush in a statement on the July 28, the day he signed the act.  

Citing worsening human rights conditions in the country and the military government’s refusal to negotiate with pro-democracy politicians, the act bans all imports from government-related companies in Myanmar. Since most of Myanmar’s export businesses are somehow connected to the government, the legislation has effectively stopped all Burmese imports to the United States.

Now, as Congress prepares to renew the sanctions for another year, some analysts, human rights workers and economists warn that economic sanctions have failed. Instead of bringing a repressive regime to its knees, the law and sanctions have resulted in unemployment and worsening conditions for many Burmese.

Thousands of young women who have lost their jobs in manufacturing have become sex workers. The nation’s once-thriving fishing fleet has been largely idled because of the embargo. And educated young Burmese have few jobs – and some blame American policy for their lack of opportunities.

For many of Myanmar’s 50 million people, the inspiration for action against the dictatorial military government is Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel laureate who has been under house arrest in Yangon since May 2003. She has been a firm supporter of sanctions in the past.

But as the economy deteriorates, there are indications that Suu Kyi’s long support for broad sanctions may be softening because of their effect on the workers and their failure to mitigate government repression.

“We have a feeling that the sanctions are not smart enough, and they come very slowly, giving enough time for the government to counter them,” said Khin San Yee, a professor at Yangon Institute of Economics.

Textile worker Aung Myu may not understand the political issues, but the effect of the sanctions had changed his life. Previously employed in a sweater factory in Yangon’s industrial district, he made 8,000 to 9,000 kyats a month, worth just over $9 on the black market, the only functioning currency market in Myanmar.  “It was not even enough to feed myself,” he said.

Even that modest income ended in September 2003 when the Taiwanese owner closed the factory and dismissed all the workers, giving each only 2,000 kyat ($2.20).

“Nobody gave us an explanation. We only knew that we had been getting fewer and fewer orders in the months before the closure,” said Aung Myu.

Tens of thousands of other Burmese textile workers, stripped of a livelihood since the latter half of 2003, faced similar lay-offs.

Burmese labor groups in Mae Sot estimate that some 70,000 to 80,000 migrant workers from Myanmar have crossed into Thailand to churn out a living, mostly in the dozens of textile factories that dot this little border town. In poorly lit and ventilated workshops, they toil from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. on knitting machines to make sweaters or other garments, most of which are shipped to the United States, Europe and other Asian counties such as Japan and Malaysia. The working conditions are no worse than in Yangon, but the young workers are making five to six times their old wages -- that is, when they have work to do.

For Aung Myu and his tea pals, the flight into Thailand in no way meant their ordeal was over. Although currently employed at a sweater factory owned by a Hong Kong businessman, he hadn’t made a cent in the last two months.

“Winter is the idle season for the garment industry,” explained Moe Swe, head of a Burmese labor activist group based in Mae Sot. Retailers around the world have stopped stocking warm winter clothing but are instead focusing on spring apparel, he said. The seasonal nature of this trade, coupled with their illegal status, makes the Burmese workers particularly vulnerable in these idle months, he said.

Although housing is free in the dingy, crowded factory dorms, Aung Myu and his tea pals have each run up a debt of more than 2000 baht ($51), or a month’s wages, to the factory owner and stalls nearby for food and daily supplies. They hope spring would bring more orders, but with nobody is sure.

Even worse, they live in constant fear of Thai police and militia, who often arrest the undocumented migrant workers and deport them to Myanmar, truckloads at a time. Police crackdowns have become more frequent and rigorous in recent months, as the Thai government steps up border control for fear of a large-scale refugee influx. Armed militias from local villages, blaming the outsiders for taking away their jobs, constantly harass the young workers, beat them and hand them over to the police.

Aung Myu said he has already been arrested twice.

“I had no money to bribe the police so they put me in a detention center for three days and sent me back to Myanmar.” But each time he bought a one-day travel pass in Myanmar and slipped back to the factory. “I have no other choice,” he said.

Myanmar’s garment/textile export is one of the country’s few hard currency-making industries. Before the sanctions took effect in August, 2003, the industry’s total export value was more than $300 million a year, with a labor force of 70,000 to 80,000, said Moe Kyaw, a market researcher based in Yangon. Most of the exports went to the United States, he said.

“But since the U.S. sanctions in late July, business has dropped 60 to 70 percent,” he said in an interview in early January. Moe Kyaw, the son of a Burmese diplomat who was raised and educated in Britain, is also a member of the semi-governmental Union of Myanmar Federation of Chambers of Commerce and Industry.

About 30,000 to 40,000 workers, or almost half of the garment industry’s work force, have lost their jobs, he said. Many factory owners from Hong Kong, Taiwan or South Korea have closed their factories in Yangon and moved their business elsewhere.

“The only way out for those who remain is to find new orders from the European Union or Japan, with a sharp decrease in price,” said Moe Kyaw. That in turn has led to a mark down in Burmese workers’ salaries.

“In terms of labor cost and prices, we are already at the rock bottom of the world market,” he said.

That is a tremendous decline in the fortunes of the ancient Buddhist kingdom, which, after being colonized as part of the British-ruled India, became the world’s largest rice exporter in 1939, and was described as “the rice bowl of Asia”.

Flanked by the world’s two most populous nations, China on the east and India on the west, Myanmar occupies a strategic position as a key link in the land route between Southeast Asia and the Subcontinent. The country, which grew to its modern size in the 11^th century, also boasts some of Asia’s richest natural resources. Oil, gems and other valuable minerals lie under its lush green mountains and fertile subtropical soil.

During the 19^th century, Britain annexed Myanmar as a province of its Indian Raj through three Anglo-Burmese wars. While the British tapped into Myanmar’s natural resources, they also helped lay down the country’s modern infrastructure and maintained a fragile peace between its more than 130 ethnic minorities by granting autonomy to some of the biggest groups.

Myanmar became a major Asian battleground during World War II, when retreating Chinese Nationalists and British troops engaged in bloody jungle wars with the Japanese Imperial Army marching through Southeast Asia.

Burmese soldiers led by the charismatic General Aung San switched allegiance from the Japanese to the Allies during the war, and were finally able to break free from both to bring about independence in January 1948. General Aung San himself was assassinated in 1947.

The country, gaining self-rule after more than half a century of colonial dominance, enjoyed a parliamentary democracy for a relatively peaceful and prosperous 14 years. The elected government managed a shaky unity of the country’s ethnic minorities by granting autonomous statehood to the seven biggest groups.

But a coup d’etat led by military strongman General Ne Win in 1962 overthrew the democratic government, and the country has been dominated by juntas ever since. Under Ne Win’s iron fist, the dictatorial Burma Socialist Program Party (BSPP) pursued its self-proclaimed “Burmese path to socialism” by isolating the country from the international community, banning all exports and imports. The once-vibrant economy deteriorated steadily. The country fell back into the nightmare of incessant strife as many ethnic minorities took up arms to fight the military government dominated by Burmans, the nation’s ethnic majority.

Resentment and resistance against the junta flared up in the 1960’s and 1970’s, but were ruthlessly crushed by the regime. In 1988, soon after the United Nations declared Myanmar the poorest nation in Asia, university students, monks and public servants took to the streets in Yangon and demanded freedom and democracy. Violent crackdowns against the protesters soon led to large-scale demonstrations throughout the country.

The junta responded by emptying machine gun rounds into the marching crowds in Yangon on August 8, 1988 (known since as “88-8-8”). Soon afterwards the military announced another coup, handing power to the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), but to the people it was just a new tag for the same, if not a more belligerent, dictatorial regime. An estimated 10,000 students and protesters were killed throughout Myanmar in 1988.

The 1988 bloodshed had a lasting impact on the nation. Although largely overshadowed by the Tiananmen Square incident in China a year later, the Yangon massacre sealed the illegitimacy of the junta, which would come under numerous international boycotts and sanctions in the years to come. Most western governments have since suspended non-humanitarian aid to the country, imposed arms embargoes and denied it tariff preferences. Then U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright championed a ban in 1997, which prohibited American companies and individuals from new investments in Myanmar. Japan, a major provider of economic support in the 1980s, also cut down heavily on its official development assistance to Yangon.

Not surprisingly, many in Myanmar now blame their downtrodden lives on the military regime that has ruled the country for 42 years.

“The Burmese authorities are responsible for what we are suffering now,” said 22-year-old Zar Zar Tin, a co-worker of Aung Myu’s. “If they were good, other countries would be helping us instead of sanctioning us.”

Zar Zar Tin came to Mae Sot to work in a garment factory in 2001. Her goal was to save one to two million kyats ($1,100 –$2,200) and return home to Yangon. “Depending on the situation, that will take at least another four or five years,” she said.

On the other side of town, Nu Wah, an 18-year-old girl from the ethnic state of Karen, said she wanted to join the armed rebel group Karen National Union (KNU) to fight the military government. “I hate Khin Nyunt,” she said, referring to the military government’s prime minister.

Nu Wah’s father, a former school-teacher once jailed by the junta for supporting the KNU, died in September 2003 after working as a laborer for nine years in Myawaddy, a Myanmar city across the border from Mae Sot. He left his wife and three children nothing but the 100,000 kyats ($110) debt they incurred in burying him.

To pay off the debt, Nu Wah said, she crossed the border in November 2003 to work in an underground brothel. The Burmese owner has five girls her age working for him, and he “doesn’t treats us too bad”, she said.

“If I didn’t have a mother and a young brother to support, I would have joined the fighters,” Nu Wah said. Without the basic training required to work in a textile factory, she had no choice but to follow some friends and join the sex trade. She said she had already saved 50,000 kyats ($55), and hoped to return home to Myawaddy within a month, with enough money to pay off all the family’s debts.

“I lied to my family and said I was working at a clothes store,” she said. “It would have broken my father’s heart to know what I am doing.”

Zar Zar Tin, the garment factory worker, said she had heard horrible stories about young Burmese girls working in Thai brothels.

“I am very afraid of those [human] traffickers. You could never go back home and live a normal life if people knew you had worked in a brothel,” she said.

Apart from shutting down the garment and textile industry, the U.S. sanctions have almost killed Myanmar’s fisheries and seafood exporters, analysts and industry executives say.

Han Tun, second vice president of the Myanmar Fisheries Federation, a quasi-governmental chamber of commerce, said, “the sector, which accounts for 7 to 8 percent of our total GDP, is collapsing,” he said.

“I am very pessimistic,” he said.

As in the case of garment exports, the United States was once the largest market for Burmese prawns and shrimp, the cash crops of the country’s seafood production. In the fiscal year 2002-2003, the total export value of Burmese seafood was $317 million, said Han Tun, a former Fishery Ministry official who now owns a small fishing company in the western Burmese state of Arakan, with two trawlers in the Bay of Bengal and 40 employees.

Starting in September 2003, only one month after the embargo began, all exports to the United States halted, he said.

Although Burmese fisheries have been desperately trying to expand their market in China, Japan and Europe, “this year (2003-2004) the exports will drop at least 20 percent,” Han Tun predicted.

Bearing the brunt of the sanctions will be the country’s thousands of private fishing companies and half a million fishing hands, he said.

Export prices have gone down at least 30 to 40 percent, but the prices of fuel and supplies have almost doubled since the sanctions, said Han Tun.

“My company is in the red this year. I don’t know how long I can last like this,” he said. Many other companies facing similar problems have started laying off workers and suspending operation, he said.

Worse still, the country’s economy-illiterate military government has taken no steps to salvage the quickly deteriorating situation. The government has adamantly refused to lower the decades-long 10 percent export tax it levies on the fishing sector, said Han Tun.

“Some people in the government have realized that something needs to be done, but the top officials just have no idea,” he said.

By further isolating Myanmar from the world market, the U.S. government has made it clear that it hopes to impose enough economic and political pressure on the country’s military government, force it to loosen its repressive grip and transfer power to a legitimate civilian government. The Burmese Freedom and Democracy Act of 2003, along with an executive order freezing Burmese officials’ assets in America and banning all remittances to the country, said President Bush in a statement on July 28, 2003, are “a clear signal to Burma's ruling junta that it must release Aung San Suu Kyi, along with all other political prisoners, and move down the path toward democracy.”

So far much of the world’s attention has focused on the fate of one Burmese woman, 59-year-old Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD). She has spent nine of the past 15 years in prison or under house arrest.

Suu Kyi, daughter of Myanmar’s independence hero, General Aung San,  founded the NLD months after the 1988 massacre in Yangon. The junta, stunned by the burgeoning popularity of the barely one-year-old pro-democracy party, placed her under house arrest in 1989. But that didn’t stop the NLD from a sweeping victory of 82 percent of parliamentary seats in the 1990 national election. The generals refused to hand over power and instead arrested many of NLD’s leaders and elected Members of Parliament.

Suu Kyi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize of 1991 while she was in Yangon’s notorious Insein Prison, was released in 1995. She continued to lead and inspire the country’s pro-democracy forces despite the junta’s relentless tactics of isolation and intimidation. She made pubic speeches that drew large audiences and appealed to the international community for democracy in her country.

On May 30, 2003, stick-wielding pro-government thugs ambushed Suu Kyi’s motorcade convoy in the town of Depayin as she toured northern Myanmar. Witnesses put the death toll of Suu Kyi’s supporters from dozens up to a hundred. Along with many leading members of the NLD, Suu Kyi was arrested again and held incommunicado for almost four months, before being returned again to house arrest in her Yangon residence.

“The fact that Aung San Suu Kyi was arrested and then put under house arrest last year was really the last straw that broke the camel’s back,” said Scot Gerber, spokesman of US Senator Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., an enthusiastic sponsor of the Burmese Freedom and Democracy Act. Feinstein has also supported previous U.S. sanctions against Yangon’s generals.

“Senator Feinstein has long been concerned about the cause of democracy and freedom in Burma, and believes that Aung San Suu Kyi should be freed and allowed to pursue political freedom for the country,” said Gerber.

Supporters of a more flexible U.S. approach to Myanmar have warned against placing all American bets on the political fate of Suu Kyi.

“The reliance of U.S. policy on a single person (no matter how talented or dedicated) has created dangers,” wrote David I. Steinberg, a professor of Asian studies at Georgetown University, in an essay published in March 2004.

Steinberg, a veteran Foreign Service officer in Asia who has close relations with the Burmese junta and has visited the country many times in recent years, testified before a congressional hearing in late March. Despite his finding that economic sanctions have failed to force the military government from power, the Congress would almost certainly renew them for another year, he said.

There exists almost no incentive for a fresh look at the sanctions for either the Congress or the administration, as U.S. policy towards Myanmar is based largely on a moral judgment and being “politically correct”, said Steinberg.

“Nobody wants to be seen as being in favor of the regime,” he said.

While sanctions have done considerable damage to the Burmese economy, many in Myanmar say that they have not hit the intended targets. Instead, they are making the SPDC generals’ grip on power even tighter.

“It’s the poor and normal people that are suffering from the sanctions,” said Khin San Yee, the Yangon-based economics professor. “But on the other hand, we have been suffering for 40 years and our economy had deteriorated for years before the sanctions kicked in,” she said.

The masses, despite their own plight, are generally happy to see the military government in trouble. Yet the sanctions haven’t generated enough popular discontent for people to rise up against it either, she said.

But for those living on the bottom of the food chain, alternatives are scarce. While already a sizeable number of Burmese women like Nu Wah have become prostitutes in Thailand, the sex trade is now becoming an undesirable but inevitable employment choice for many more back in Myanmar, especially the thousands of female workers ejected from Yangon’s shuttered textile factories,

“From what we know, about 5,000 to 6,000 women workers have lost their jobs in recent months” in and near the city, a Yangon-based social worker said, asking not to be named for fear of repercussion. Others estimate the number to be between 3,000 to 10,000, she said.

“Some 40 to 50 percent of these now engage in the entertainment or sex industry,” she said.

The workers, many of whom come from remote ethnic regions, refuse to go back to their poverty-stricken hometowns, but stay on in the city in search for other opportunities. “For many, the only way out is to go into the ‘indirect’ sex trade, working as waitresses, singers in restaurants and night clubs, or becoming temporary, ‘rented wives’ to businessmen and military officers,” she said.

 

(to be continued)