Friday, December 10, 2004

When generals go daft

When generals go daft

Updated 01:03am (Mla time) Dec 09, 2004
By Juan Mercado
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the December 9, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


"HE'S mad, is he? Then, I wish he'd bite some other of my generals," George II reportedly snapped when told that Gen. James Wolfe had gone daft.

That's also the reaction surging among members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations toward Myanmar's junta for stalling, yet again, on restoring freedoms.

Myanmar's caudillos dance an "incorrigible one-step forward, two-steps backwards foxtrot," Malaysian Member of Parliament Lim Kit Siang told legislators from seven Asean countries in Kuala Lumpur. The shuffle blocks the release of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, journalists and other detainees.

Some parliamentarians are now pressing their governments to object when Yangon assumes the rotating chairmanship of Asean in 2006. The generals' "seven-step road map" to democracy is fake.

Myanmar today is "the largest prison for journalists in Asia," the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders says in a new report documenting the plight of 18 detained journalists.

Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy won a landslide victory in the 1990 general election. But the military never allowed parliament to convene, and unleashed waves of arrests. Yet, Suu Kyi continues to draw widespread support at home and abroad.

The stakes for the press are high. Offending the regime means prison. The 72-year-old journalist Win Tin has been detained for 14 years now.

"Torture is commonplace and some journalists suffer from serious mental disorders resulting from long isolation," Reporters Without Borders says. Newsmen have received long sentences for articles deemed "hostile to the state," talking with foreign journalists, even "owning undeclared video cameras"-an eerie clone of the Marcos regime's order to register mimeograph machines.

Yangon's daily newspapers are government-run outlets for turgid propaganda. The military and their families control most publications. As in our "New Society," censorship is clamped on. Censors blue-pencil words such as "democracy," "corruption" or "education."

To beat the censors, "the trick is in the presentation," Thint Bawa (Your Life) editor U Tin Maung Than told The New York Times' Seth Mydans. The 47-year-old doctor-turned-writer "played the game hard, bobbing and weaving, winking and nudging, honing his metaphors, comparisons and historical references until it all became too much and he fled from Myanmar for safety."

It's a game played by all independent-minded writers in dictatorships from the Philippines of Marcos to Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran and today's Myanmar: writer versus censor, says Mydan's analytical feature titled, "Burmese Editor's Code: Winks And Little Hints."

In repressive states, writing under censorship is an art form. Many of their rules are universal. Write only upbeat articles or "sunshine news." Thus, many confine themselves to gossip, sports and lifestyle features. Praise the regime. That guarantees publication. It's also safer.

Direct criticism is taboo. Even factual reports on drought or poor crop yields are forbidden. These could arouse fears of price increases. You cannot knock those in power. Imelda and the First Family, for example, could be accorded only fulsome hosannas.

A few in Myanmar, as in martial law Philippines, push against the boundaries of what's acceptable. "You cannot blame," Tin said. "You have to give hints that you are being critical, that you are talking about the current system. The hints are in your choice of words, your tones, your composition. You use words with double meaning. The challenge is to get through to those keen readers without tipping off the censors."

He wrote about flag burning in the United States, ostensibly to criticize it but, between the lines, to give a glimpse of freedom.

Still the government remains paranoid about Suu Kyi's drawing power. Favorable references in the press to the opposition leader are "clearly forbidden." It's verboten to write about female heads of state. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, Corazon Aquino, Megawati Sukarnoputri, Indira Gandhi or Margaret Thatcher would be blacked out.

Given the muzzled press, the pressure for reform is coming from outside. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, for example, said that Suu Kyi and other political prisoners must be included in the current spate of releases involving more than 9,000 prisoners. Asean foreign ministers, meeting in Phnom Penh last July also pressed for the release.

President Arroyo and Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra were reported to have reminded Myanmar Prime Minister Soe Win at the Laos Asean summit of still unfulfilled pledges. Now, the parliamentarians are weighing in.

Whether these pressures will cause the hard-line generals, like Soe Win, to unbend, remains to be seen. Less than 40 political detainees, or one percent, were among those freed to impress Asean heads of state meeting in Vientiane.

Then-President Fidel V. Ramos argued for Myanmar's acceptance by Asean. He insisted that Asean credentials would restrain the junta from taking even more repressive measures. Both national and regional interests, he claimed, were served by having Myanmar in instead of "peeing from the outside." The track record says otherwise.

"As for being a general, well, at the age of four, with paper hats and wooden swords, we're all generals," the actor Peter Ustinov once said, adding: "Only, some of us never grow out of it."

As Yangon shows, generals who never mature can go daft. They can impoverish a once-rich nation and crucify a gentle people, as our own "Rolex 12" did.

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