Cunningham: Burma Fades from View

PHILIP J. CUNNINGHAM

After years of frustrating quietude, Burma's long-simmering discontent has broken out into an open boil. A daring spiritual protest was followed by a cruel and callous bloodletting, the kind of event that brings out the best and worst of the global media. The uplifting image of maroon-robed barefoot monks with upturned alms bowls gliding down grubby Rangoon streets surrounded by masses of adoring civilians was the penultimate performance art, created by anonymous thousands, hand-delivered to journalists as a gift to a jaded world. Such footage was obtained under trying conditions and supreme personal risk, the work of intrepid individuals willing to forsake comfort and safety to tell a story that needs to be told.

Compelling images, enhanced by an exotic setting, captured the gist of the Burma story. It is in the nature of the medium to focus on stories with good visuals; indeed TV news at its most engaging is packed with sights and sounds that not only awe but educate.

To the extent the maroon revolution was televised, the work was done mostly by amateurs. Then the screen went dark, as Buddhist monks, the penultimate moral authority in the orthodox Theravada Buddhist culture of Burma, were shot at and beaten in scores, cameras confiscated and thousands of witnesses and participants put under lock and key.

Despite the momentary lull, the crackdown bodes ill for the superstitious Than Shwe kleptocracy that has until now been able to rule Burma with an iron fist, because even the military, through its mindful cultivation and supervision of the Buddhist clergy, would be the first to admit that no good karma can come from the killing of monks. By the same token, no good can come of the killing journalists, who collectively, despite individual imperfections and failings, serve as a lay clergy of sorts, moral arbitrers for much of the world outside of closed countries like Burma, from Moscow to Baghdad, from Johannesburg to Japan.

When Burma reinvented itself as Myanmar after the bloody massacre of Burmese students in 1988, the Japanese media, like the blindly politically correct CNN, embraced the unhappily revised status quo with such linguistic zeal that a Tokyo-based reporter would have to argue with editors to use the word "Burma" rather than "Myanmar", even, absurdly, in at least one instance, in an article that made reference to George Orwell's "Burmese Days."

But the cold-blooded on-camera killing of Japanese journalist Kenji Nagai on September 27, 2007 as he filmed the unfolding of protest in the streets of Rangoon has shocked and galvanized the Japanese media, even the quasi-governmental NHK, enough to cause Japan's "neutral" stance to be reconsidered. As the regime that calls itself "Myanmar," becomes synonymous with horror, the old word "Bi-ru-ma" the Japanese rendering for Burma, is likely to make a comeback.

That the killing of a single Japanese citizen has provoked more outrage than the deaths of a dozen unknown local demonstrators speaks partly to the tribal nature of the media in today's world, but also points to the importance of access and the elements of good story-telling. Nagai's story can be shared effectively because documented facts and images exist that make a rounded telling possible. His parents and coworkers were interviewed, his camera work put on view. But even allowing for bias in the coverage, Nagai's fate was not only supremely newsworthy, but appropriately paired with the pain and loss suffered by dignified Burmese monks and civilian demonstrators.

Kenji Nagai was shot in the back while doing his job, his body and passport returned but not his camera. Through him, the world got a shocking glimpse of Burma's shoot-to-kill politics. Even a casual TV viewer fuzzy on the details --and who isn't given the dearth of information coming out of Burma—can see that there is something terribly wrong about a regime that operates in such a way. The brutal imagery of people with guns gunning down people without guns speaks for itself.

If it bleeds, it leads. Long the mantra of the tabloid press and TV stations desperate to find an audience, these callous words might as well be the mantra for the global cable and network giants.

CNN and other news giants have done a decent job using other people's footage to catch up with a story that took the world by surprise in part because of their own negligence, bestowing with its obligatory 15 minutes of fame and then a bit more. But few if any card-carrying cable stars and camera crews can get into Burma, effectively putting the story back on the back burner. Photos posted to the Internet strain to fill the gap, and a range of motley voices from refugees and militant minorities to a handful of bloggers inside Burma, have tales to tell, but bloggers are not journalists and verification remains vague.

Even as one of the world's great humanitarian struggles fades from the screen, the 24/7 news show must go on. Celebrity practitioners of TV journalism will fill in the gaps as before, inadvertently focusing on the celebrity of celebrity, whiling away precious air-time, re-directing attention away from the afflicted to the affluent and their own fastidiously groomed selves.

Meanwhile, as Burma, the land once lovingly described by Kipling as full of "sunshine, palm trees and tinkly temple bells" recedes from view, its people are at risk of being felled like trees in a far-off forest, invisible and all but unheard.

Phillip Cunningham
Dosisha University
Japan Read more on this article...

Cunningham: Burma More or Less Needs Help

BURMA MORE OR LESS NEEDS HELP

BY PHILIP J CUNNINGHAM
SEPTEMBER 30, 2007

At first glance, the unfolding crisis in Burma ("Myanmar") offers America a golden opportunity—after four years of bad news from Iraq and Afghanistan, suddenly a popular uprising in a land hungry for the ostensibly American values of freedom, democracy and perhaps even capitalist development.

Problem is, US President George Bush has almost single-handedly frittered away US prestige and credibility to the point where just hearing him mention the word freedom is enough to send the smart, and in some cases shell-shocked, running for cover. Under his watch, an immigrant country that had a not entirely unearned reputation for caring about human rights and humanitarian causes has become a global laughingstock, if not bogeyman.

Bush has dug himself into a diplomatic hole so deep it is beginning to resemble a black hole. That a man at the end of his tether might be desperate for a bit of high ground, something to cling to, something to show he isn't an entirely spent force is understandable, but a Bush intervention in Burma would be an unmitigated disaster.

Anything Bush or his minions have to say is colored by the actions of an arrogant administration that has shamelessly promoted torture, eavesdropping and kidnapping, not to mention a self-serving and totally manipulative war on terror. Bush invaded Iraq for all the wrong reasons, a family vendetta being central among them, and he has continued to shamefacedly lie about it. Unfortunately for the people of Burma in their hour of need, Bush has shot the wad of US credibility, and anything he touches is likely to be contaminated, if not broken and crumbled to bits, by know-nothing neo-con greed.

Had Bush not invaded the wrong country, or had he faced up to his mistakes with at least an ounce of accountability, the US government, as the representative of the American people, might not be hamstrung in its ability to help. Had Bush and the cosseted "chickenhawk" architects of the war in Iraq, the most abjectly craven of whom are now pressing for a war with Iran, shown even a glimmer of humility to atone for setting Iraq on the road to disaster which has cost a million-plus souls, perhaps Uncle Sam could offer a lending hand without scaring the very people he seeks to help. But Bush remains unrepentant and imperious, making the prospect of a ham-fisted US-led intervention in Burma too frightening to contemplate.

Burma needs help, desperately, but with a "friend" like Bush trying to capitalize on his "freedom" agenda, they might do well to look elsewhere.

ASEAN is a good place to start, Burma is a member country and informal personal, cultural and trade links provide intelligence and potential leverage. Surin Pitsuwan, ASEAN's new Secretary General is a veteran diplomat who as foreign minister under Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai, chose not lend support to the dictators of Burma, in sharp contrast to the devil-may-care profiteering in Rangoon and elsewhere on the part of the successor government led by Thaksin Shinawatra.

And Japan, the largest aid donor and home to a community of Burmese exiles has a modest role to play.

But the real wild card in the Burma conundrum, with immense leverage for better or worse, is China.

Just as it might be prudent at this checkered moment in US history for the US to tame its impulse to intervene, China conversely, needs to discard its traditional policy of radical non-intervention, the product of a time when China was poor and powerless, to a more responsible global role commensurate to its rising power.

China President Hu Jintao and his foreign minister Yang Jiechi have inherited a seemingly idealistic and lofty model of diplomacy that was only truly lofty in proportion to China's poverty and inability to project power. Even during the heyday of non-intervention under the guidance of Zhou Enlai and Chen Yi, China engaged in significant, albeit largely clandestine, meddling in Southeast Asia and provided some significant development assistance in Africa.

Times have changed and China is neither altogether poor nor powerless, indeed it is a lopsided power in which the supremacy of economic considerations is running havoc with environmental and humanitarian concerns at home and abroad.

For China to now claim fealty to political non-intervention at a time when it is economically active, if not rapacious, as it secures and consumes natural resources across the globe from Burma to Zimbabwe at an unprecedented rate is disingenuous. It's like trumpeting economic reform in the absence of political reform, it's awkward, ungainly and ultimately off-pitch.

What Hu Jintao's foreign policy needs is what pre-Bush America once claimed to possess in spades, a willingness to engage in humanitarian intervention not because it can be commercially profitable or even politically advantageous but simply because it is the right thing to do. China's deaf ear to people crying out for help is the mirror image of the US telling people what they need to do; both extremes overlook the genuine possibility of outreach to the downtrodden, the bullied and disenfranchised.

In recent months, China has made modest adjustments to its Africa policy, recognizing that being "neutral" with respect to cruel and tottering regimes in Zimbabwe and Sudan is not only a public relations failure in the run-up to the Olympics, but endangers long-term stability and interests in the region.

Similarly Beijing, which has enjoyed profitable if not entirely cordial relations with Burma's military dictators, is said to be cultivating some support among opponents of the current regime. In addition to solid trade and military ties, China additionally boasts perhaps a million of its own citizens eking out a living in Burma as a petty bourgeois Peace Corps of sorts, providing an unusual degree of leverage and exposure in both formal and informal terms.

For China's foreign policy to meet the needs of Burma's downtrodden calls for deft, timely intervention, a prudent policy guided by something more than laissez faire trade-at-any-cost and something less than the bombs-and-bullets of military intervention of the sort currently favored by the Bush administration.

A more nuanced and humanitarian thrust from China, effectively unmooring itself from the darkest forces in Burmese society, while putting economic considerations on hold, could prevent things from spiraling out of control and provide a bridge of interregnum stability until a new government can coalesce. The risk of continuing to put one's weight behind the despicable Than Shwe is that China will be a tarnished if not unwelcome player in the inevitable post-Than Shwe Burma that is certain to emerge from the ashes of the current crisis.

The courage of journalists covering the courageous mass demonstrations allows the world to peer into Burma's closed society with compassion and concern. And clearly help is needed. But for now, US governmental help would be as unhelpful as China's unwillingness to engage in truly humanitarian intervention. Read more on this article...