Burma Boycotts, To Go or Not to Go:
FBC Founder Reflects on the Chosen Strategy for Change

23 June, 2005

Oxford, United Kingdom

Dear Friends:

In addition to the general state of affairs in the military-ruled birth place of mine, I as a former boycott campaigner have been so pained by the
country's norminal and symbolic opposition and its repeated call for the prolonged boycott of travels and tourism to my country, not just
foreign direct investment and trade.

Boycotts or sanctions are a means to an end, not an end in and of itself that needs to be feverishly adhered to.

And that end is change on the ground as lived by the ordinary citizens in whose name the opposition exists, change in the regime's behaviour, and change in the opposition's bargaining power. Obviously, by any objective measures, the boycotts have been a categorical failure. The generals fight against the boycotts because it pricks their existence. The opposition holds on to them because it has nothing better to do than cry foul and beg for help from the international community.

The prolonged boycotts or call for them in the face of unarguable futility are nothing but a symptom of despair, dependency and slave mentality of a community that cannot find alternative routes to their own freedom.

Even in my heady days as the lead boycott campaign organizer, I always argued against boycotting anything or any enterprise (for instance, post and telecommunications industry) that by default encourages or makes it possible for the intellectual and cultural interactions between our people and the world at large. The junta has no need for DHL. It has foreign diplomatic outposts, and if need be they can simply send an army or air force plane to deliver an order or a message.

I was born into a society that was completely cut off from the outside world by General Ne Win and his version of socialistic military rule.
From 1962 until early 1970s, the country was effectively sealed off from the international community, both 'East' and 'West'.

During the early years of Ne Win's reign, Rangoon was a busy international/regional hub for air travellers. In those days Bangkok and Singapore were simply materially and intellectually backward swamps, in our backyard. (Since then the latter two have become important international hubs for commerce, trade and transport).

Reversing the trend of the country's active international engagement along the lines of non-align movement pursued by the deposed PM U Nu at the time, the good general only issued 24 hour transit visas to international travellers and tourists who had to take their international or regional connecting flights to other destinations. Starting in the mid-1970s, Ne Win's Burma Socialist Programme Party government relaxed the visa rule and began issuing 7-day tourist
visas. In 1986 a total number of Foreign Independent/Individual Tourists or FITs visiting Burma was less than 40,000 per year.

As isolated as it was the country then was - and still is - a dark beauty for backpackers who wanted to see and experience off-the-beaten-path places.

In those days,we the Burmese had no satellite TV, no access to the Internet, no DHL (they won't be having this vital service soon because of DHL's withdrawal under threats of boycotts), no computer discs or DVDs through which all kinds of ideas, images, and stories, good and bad, could spread. Some of us university students with rudimentary knowledge of the world and less-than-fluent English were happy to see the tourists - even the smelly, stinky backpackers travelling in
Burma.

Through the eyes of the locals, tourists and educational or business travellers serve multiple purposes. Tourists mean bread and butter - rice! - for thousands of families who eke out a living as rickshaw drivers, small hoteliers, restaurant owners or waiters and cooks,
taxi-drivers, cottage industries in arts and crafts, tourist agency staff, etc.

For young university students and other members of the intelligentsia hungry for ideas and first-hand knowledge about what was beyond the imaginary (but nonetheless effective) intellectual wall General Ne Win had built around our intellectual life, three tourists meant a rare window through which we could peak into the outside world beyond our pathetic nationalist pond where in our collective myopia we were still the centre of the universe.

The children of the ruling cliques and counter-elite were able to go in and out of the country, with or without their parents. Some went abroad on shopping trips and the more serious and fortunate ones went abroad on for their studies in elite universities in North America, the then Western Europe, Australia or Japan.

The rest of the society - 99.9% of the total populace - had no connection with or exposure to the outside world, and one of the very very few opportunities for exposure to the world was through the tourists. For us, the tourists in those days meant books - fiction and non-fiction, magazines with domestically banned articles about Burma's politics, economy, the socialist regime. In a place which is characterised by mistrust and distrust among citizens, honest intellectual conversations were had with the tourists. And for us it was an informal and invaluable educational experience, an eye-opener.

Now the number of tourists and other travellers to Burma has increased by 3 or 4 folds - from about 40,000 in 1986 to about 160,000 annually.
But compared with other destinations such as Thailand or Singapore where tourism constitutes a good national income, the numbers are still very, very low.

As someone who benefited fist-hand from tourism - intellectually and opportunity-wise - and who knew intimately the politics and dynamics of really
existing tourism in Burma -- I had been a tour guide, first as a student hobbyist and later a certified professional from 1980-86 -- I strongly believe the boycott of tourism and travel is morally despicable, intellectually indefensible and strategically and politically useless.

People in the West who claim they don't go there because Aung San Suu Kyi asks them not to is simply suspending their reasoning and allowing themselves to be misled by the short-sighted morality divorced from the daily and miserable realities of ordinary Burmese people. Indeed the campaign has been guided by the absolutist morality emblematic of the opposition, short on workable ideas or strategies and lacking in the political - as opposed to personal - courage to do the right thing.

The right thing is to review and reflect what has been accomplished by these boycotts.

Political strategies and policies are not divine - and they are man- or woman-made. Despite wearing false modesty on its sleeve, the opposition leadership lacks genuine intellectual humility.

Well-armed and geo-politically well-positioned, the junta dogmatically holds onto to its "Our-Way-or-High-Way" National Vision and attendant personal and institutional interests. Well-supported by the West and drunk with its own sense of moral superiority, the opposition self-inflicts a different incurable wound of dogma on its body politics.

The real looser in this contest of different versions of institutionalized delusions and myopia is the country and her future.

As blasphemous as it is, I for one - as a Burmese citizen -will never be prepared to surrender my reason to the logic that leaders can do no wrong, be they Evil Generals or Noble Dissidents. I'd rather burn at stake in Hell than embrace the country's extraordinary delusions and myths of the times manufactured and promoted, within and without Burma.

Sacrifice in the name of anticipated or promised future happiness and haven has always been the rhetorical hallmark of delusional World Savers and Messiahs.

Messiahs, by definition, lack any understanding of structural constraints, and their politics are Faith-based, either in supernatural powers or in themselves as Super-humans or in their Absolutist Principles.

Like all utopias of all ideological stripes and colours, their democratic utopia and the concomitant campaigns need to be measured against the realities which our people have to live. For the great majority of Burmese people have to eke out a living - as opposed to live off the West's investment in Third World political welfarism, which it uses to incubate its brown, black, and yellow Boys and Girls who could potentially become part of the ruling cliques in their own countries.

Not aided by either the generals or the dissidents, the Burmese people have to fend for themselves under extremely trying circumstances politically and economically, in a conflict-torn, isolated and intellectually backward country such as Burma.

Like the junta, the opposition justifies its existence in the name of people.

By all indications, neither is doing a good job of serving the immediate interests of the people, let alone the long-term national interest of the country, however defined.

In my eyes, both have failed the nation and her people as measured solely against the yardstick of public welfare and what is being done to address the
needs of ordinary citizens.

So much for the Revolution or Nation-building!

Zarni
FBC Founder