New Mandala

The soothsayers surrounding Than Shwe, the paranoid general at the apex of Burma’s monstrous military regime, are in high favour. Their prophecies of civil unrest followed by a great natural disaster swayed his decision three years ago to move the capital north to Naypyidaw (“abode of kings”), an isolated eyrie remote from storm-blasted Rangoon and the fetid sea of devastated or obliterated townships, bloated corpses and destitute survivors that the fertile Irrawaddy delta has become.

- Extracted from Rosemary Righter, “A test of the UN’s moral authority“, The Times, 12 May 2008. 

Of all the articles I have seen on Burma over the past week this is one of the better ones.  New Mandala readers hoping to get to grips with the immediate crisis, the prognosis for any (unilateral?) humanitarian intervention, and the longer term political dynamics will find that Righter’s brief argument rewards a close inspection.

Under normal circumstances I check the official websites of the Myanmar military dictatorship on a daily basis.  They are, afterall, “the ultimate guide to Myanmar”.  Right now, as some New Mandala readers may have already discovered, they are stuck on 2 May 2008.  Obviously nobody has had the time (or the capacity?) to get fresh content for The New Light of Myanmar, and all the rest in the myanmar.com stable.

At this time of great tragedy, the pictures on this slow to respond Kyamon page give some idea of the priorities of the country’s military rulers in the days leading up to the cyclone.  Stuck in time…

…tragedies have compounded tragedies.   

New Mandala readers in Canberra may be interested in my seminar on Wednesday:

“Now the companies have come”: local values and contract farming in northern Thailand

Andrew Walker
Resource Management in Asia Pacific Program

Anthropology Seminar
9.30 am Wednesday 14th May
Seminar Room A
Coombs Building
The Australian National University

Over the past five years the farmers of Baan Tiam, a small lowland village in northern Thailand, have participated in a rapidly changing agricultural sector. By far the most important change has been the adoption and rapid expansion of contract farming. Farmers who previously grew crops on their own account are now commonly entering into contracts with companies to grow crops according to predefined schedules and techniques. This paper examines the ways in which Baan Tiam’s farmers have participated in this agricultural transformation. Those looking for outright resistance to what might be portrayed as a process of rural proletarianisation will be disappointed. Overall, the arrival of contract farming in Baan Tiam has been welcomed as providing a range of low risk agricultural alternatives for cultivators. Farmers have actively participated in what is often clumsily described by academic commentators as the ‘penetration’ of capital into the countryside. But their agency and enthusiasm is not unqualified. Far from it. Farmers draw on an array of values to assess and critique their new forms of agricultural practice, and the role of corporate and government actors in agricultural transformation. My aim in this paper is to show how this new phase in the commercialisation of agriculture intersects with local perceptions about appropriate forms of economic activity and ongoing farmer commentary about their changing relationships with corporations and the state. I suggest that acts of resistance, to the extent they are evident in Baan Tiam, need to be understood in terms of a broader ‘experimental’ orientation to agricultural change.

[I have received the following statement and attached open letter from Ji Ungpakorn.]

Over 130 trade unionists, social activists, students and academics have put their names to an open letter condemning the behaviour of The Manager media group. 

Those signing the letter include many academics at Chulalongkorn and Thammasart Universities, including the Dean of the faculty of Political Science at Chulalongkorn University. Former Senator Jon Ungpakorn and Rawadee Prasertcharoensuk from the N.G.O. Coordinating Committee, Professor Niti Eawsriwong, Textile trade union leaders, worker activists and an academic from the Midnight University are among the signatures. 

The letter is in response to the actions of Mr Sonti Limtongkul’s Manager group in promoting violence against a young student activist Chotisak Oonsung, who is being accused of lèse majesté because he refused to stand up for the King’s Anthem at the cinema. Both Manager group websites and its radio station, Metro Life, have encouraged Ultra-Rightwing Royalists to attack Mr Chotisak. Ms Jitra Kotchadej, Chairwoman of the Triumph workers union has also been made a target for violence by The Manager media. Ms Jitra was singled out because she wore a T-shirt supporting the right to different views in society, including not standing up at the cinema. Both Mr Chotisak and Ms Jitra’s photographs and home addresses were published alongside urges to attack them. The Manager media also encouraged people to attack and break up a meeting on Human Rights at Thammasart University recently. 

Those signing the open letter compare the behaviour of The Manager with the past behaviour of Rightwing media such as Dao Sayam newspaper and the Tank Corps radio station in inciting violence that led to the 6th October 1976 blood bath. 

The letter calls on people to boycott The Manager media group for abusing basic human rights. The letter also calls on P.A.D. leaders Somsak Kosaisuk, Pipop Thongchai and Somkiat Pongpaiboon to come out and officially condemn The Manager.

Associate Professor Giles Ji Ungpakorn
Open Letter Coordinator

The full text of the open letter and the list of those who have signed it is available here.

From time to time, especially in lower Burma, someone decides to float a Shin Upago image on a river down to the ocean. This is meant symbolically to return the saint to his home. It is an occasion for special festivities, at the end of which the statue is installed on a specially constructed raft and towed out to mid-river, where it is released. Often, villagers downstream, upon seeing a Shin Upago raft, will intercept it and take it back to their own village, where a whole new cycle of ceremonies in honor of the saint will commence. Then they, too, will put him in the water and send him on his way.  (From John S. Strong, The Legend and Cult of Upagupta, page 14)

It was Shun Upago (Upakhut or Upagupta) who defeated the evil Mara. He is still called upon to provide “protection from all kinds of danger, from the evils of government, fire, thieves, storms, ill-wishers, and from sixteen types of anxiety and disease” (Strong, Legend and Cult, page 286).

All strength to him.

Taka Furuichi of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University, has compiled this animation of the path of the cyclone in Burma.

A few weeks ago, as part of my songkran sortie in northern Thailand, I visited one of the more remote villages in Chiang Mai province to look at a local agricultural project. While I was there I heard that a new temple had been established nearby by some monks keen to spread the work about sufficiency economy and environmental protection. Of course, given my interest in sufficiency philosophy, I was keen to visit and jumped at my host’s invitation.

At first the drive to the temple was routine. A slightly meandering road, making its way up a small river valley with lovely views of paddy fields on the valley floor. But things changed when we arrived at the elaborately constructed temple gate. Turning off the road we commenced an improbably steep climb, winding up, up, up, up a narrow concrete road that had been cut into the side of the hill. After a few kilometres, and a climb of several hundred metres, we arrived at a car park. From there it was another few hundred metres up a rough set of concrete steps.

As I climbed the steps I imagined a modest, rustic little temple barely visible within the forest that dominated the landscape.

I was wrong.

As I reached the top of the steps I was shocked by the construction site that lay before me. An elaborate hill-top chedi was completely surrounded by a Buddhist architectural folly: a huge concrete pavilion, with an elaborately tiered roof supported by massive concrete pillars (painted brown to give an impression of timber).

According to one of the villagers who travelled with me the budget was a cool 50 million baht! (That’s equivalent to a Thaksin-style village credit fund for every village in the district. But, of course, this isn’t populist spending - its not popular and it doesn’t really help anybody!)

Apparently, one of the monks was from a well-connected family in Bangkok and had been able to use his “hi-so” network in business, the bureaucracy and the army to mobilise donations and technical assistance.

And this was done in the interests of sufficiency economy! The hill-top concrete wonder advertised itself on prominently displayed banners as a centre for training in sufficiency economy! A larger-than-life poster of the king swung gently in the breeze beside the chedi.

I’ve got nothing against the occasional act of conspicuous merit making. And I have no doubt that this extravagant construction has generated some employment and other commercial opportunity for local villagers (and, I suspect, for some lowly-paid Shan labourers who can be found on most construction sites in this part of the world).

But this sort of pseudo-religious folly - with its budgetary indulgence and completely unnecessary environmental impacts - should be a thing of the past. Thailand has more than enough hill-top places of worship. Those seeking to conspicuously display their merit and royal virtue may want to consider appropriate and sustainable ways of engaging with local livelihoods.

And urban commentators sometimes wonder why rural folk don’t take sufficiency economy seriously!

There are reliable reports circulating via email that the major International Congress on Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences to be held in July in Kunming has been postponed. At present the website for the conference does not have any mention of this. As one colleage commented, perhaps the conference - in which ethnic minority issues would, no doubt, feature prominently - was too close to both the Olympics and Tibet. Many anthropologists working on mainland southeast Asia were planning to attend the conference.

Does anyone have clear information on what is going on, and why?

Here is a statement by the Asian Human Rights Commission on the cyclone in Burma.

BURMA: International assistance needed now, especially from Asia

The physical damage caused by Cyclone Nargis, which swept through Burma this May 2 and 3 is clearly enormous. In addition to the at least 350 dead and uncounted numbers of injured, hundred-year-old trees have been uprooted, powerlines brought down everywhere, billboards collapsed, and houses demolished. According to government reports, at least 20,000 homes housing 100,000 people have been destroyed. These numbers are likely to vastly underestimate the scale of the damage. In a city with few sturdy concrete structures outside the city centre, there are reports that in the new towns and satellite suburbs of Rangoon occupied by the poorest workers and their families, there is very little left fit for human habitation. The electricity and water supplies, which were never good, have stopped completely. People are queuing to buy water from tankers being run by the fire brigade.

So far, there are even fewer reports coming from the Irrawaddy region to the west, and Pegu and Karen and Mon States to the east, which have together with Rangoon been declared disaster areas. It is likely that people in these regions have also suffered heavy losses and that the death toll too will rise in coming days, especially in the delta where the cyclone reached land: at least two-thirds of the dead are believed to have been in Irrawaddy Division, a third from one island that bore the brunt of the storm as it swept in from the Bay of Bengal. [Read more →]

Contributor’s note: This post was written before Cyclone Nargis went through Myanmar on May 2 and 3. The government has since not said whether or not the May 10 referendum will be postponed. It has declared Ayeyarwady, Yangon and Bago Divisions, and Kayin and Mon States disaster zones. At this time housing, food and clean water for the hundreds of thousands affected are the priorities. (Update: According to latest reports, state media has said that the referendum will go ahead as planned.)

In the last week or so, campaigning for and against a new draft constitution of Myanmar has intensified. It’s lopsided campaigning, with government newspapers, television and billboards insisting that everyone is duty-bound to vote YES while radio stations and websites operating from abroad cry foul and report on small efforts inside the country to encourage people to vote NO. But it’s campaigning nonetheless.

The manner in which the campaigning and voting are conducted is in many ways more interesting than the draft constitution’s contents, which leave no doubt about those supposed to remain in charge and what they think about having a constitution at all. (There is a bilingual version of the draft on the New Mandala website here, and Human Rights Watch has, among others, a short critique of its contents in a new report here.)

The government insists that the ballot will be closed and it has distributed a lengthy document full of orders to this effect, parts of which have been reproduced in domestic periodicals. One, the popular news journal Weekly Eleven, also has on the front of its latest edition a bold title that, “Having only one box, on account of secret ballot, voters can freely reveal true desire”. The text that follows offers views on the merits of the voting procedure this time around, in contrast to the last referendum in 1974 when there were two separate ballot boxes and voters had to stroll over to one or the other in full view of their friendly neighbourhood administrators. “As far as I know,” one ex-voter is quoted as saying, “In some parts of Shan State where there were no ballot boxes they used two bamboo tubes.” Clearly, things are supposed to have moved on since those days.

This insistence upon a closed ballot is at odds with the army’s track record. It did not get its way either time that the public was free to choose for or against it. The candidates it backed in the general elections of both 1960 and 1990 were thrashed. Plans for further attempts at electoral legitimacy were thereafter shelved until the house could be put back in order, or in the former case, until it fell to bits again. Unlike in some other countries of Southeast Asia, this army has never adapted to political life. Its officers in 2008 remain, as they were when they forced their way into power in 1958, military men. Political life has instead been forced to adapt to them. So if they can achieve a victory this time around it will be unprecedented. [Read more →]