Burmese days
Myanmar, or Burma as so many still dub the country, is trying to have its moment in the fulvous sun.
Sometimes travel is just complicated.
With another change of power, and some very helpful international attention, Myanmar is finding itself somewhere new – and perhaps, totally reborn. The country’s hope is again riding on its lauded hero and freedom fighter, Aung San Suu Kyi, recipient of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize - and the latest is that the military (who’s in power right now) are ready to negotiate with her once more. But, muddying the waters even more, in July this year, four democracy activists have been executed by Myanmar's military in what is believed to be the first use of capital punishment in decades.
So let’s say this hope is precarious to say the very least.
Here is my podcast episode about my trek in Burma.
Perhaps the no-longer-State-Counsellor (Prime Minister really) San Suu Kyi is now caught in a wild crossfire, and the facts aren’t crystal. Perhaps the world should be giving her the benefit of the doubt, but then again power does all kinds of crazy things to people, right? Could she have done more? Almost certainly, it's not really imaginable that she couldn't. But how much of this “genocide” (as the United Nations dubbed it) was/is out of her hands and control? And you could argue that her hard lines assisted in the country falling back into a form of military rule…That would be a question mark on your travel plans to Burma for the moment, yes sure. But hey, I was an adventurer and it was five years ago…
It was 19 year old Eric Arthur Blair (pre-pen name George Orwell) who, in the 1920s, ventured to the furthest reaches of the British Empire - including Burma, where he spent five years and joined the Imperial Police Force. His first novel, Burmese Days, was set in the north of the country - detailing the British ruling with corruption and imperial bigotry as intrigue.
But Orwell was always destined to end up in Myanmar - as a child his obsession was with the work of Rudyard Kipling (I mean, who didn’t love The Jungle Book) who described this “faraway” land in great detail in his poems. Today these poems seem too pro imperialism-colonialism for my fancy. So much less interesting to me. Speaking of which, as for the country's name in case you were pondering, in 1989 the country decided to replace the English name "Burma" with "Myanmar" (the official name of the country in the Burmese language).
Myanmar, at this very time, is a complicated and partly dark place, as was South Africa when Mandela came to power, for instance.
But, there is always hope. And Myanmar has sort of erected a symbol of change. But this adjustment here has not come without a cost to too many lives, and to the heavily adjusted expectations of the improvements needed for a growing economy. And then there is the persecution of the Rohingya people in Myanmar who have been forced to flee to Bangladesh.