Alienated Nation: An Inside Look at Burma

For far too long, and for far too many, Burma has meant only one thing: isolation. In 1962 General Ne Win closed the doors to the country, going on to nationalize even the Boy Scouts and the Automobile Association of Burma, and turned his land into the most secretive and reclusive place this side of North Korea. And ever since the brutally suppressed popular uprising of 1988, more and more foreigners have tried to isolate the country still further, through the sanctions called for by Burma's main opposition figure, Aung San Suu Kyi. Meanwhile, the country's 47 million people suffer through what Thant Myint-U calls both "the longest-lasting military dictatorship in the world" and "the longest-running armed conflict in the world," a civil war involving a tangle of groups and now in its seventh decade.

In his historical treatise The River of Lost Footsteps, Thant contends that foreign boycotts against Burma have only intensified the ruling junta's xenophobia and plunged the nation deeper into solitary confinement. His country is not, Thant suggests, an oppressed state waiting to be released, like Cuba or North Korea, so much as a war-wrecked society (like Cambodia or Afghanistan), lacking even the basic facilities and recent history to set up a real democracy. The reasons for that, he tells us, are best understood by examining what he calls, in his subtitle, the "Histories of Burma."

For Thant, such histories are not an abstract or far-off thing. Fully Burmese himself, he is descended from courtiers, and grew up (in Riverdale, New York) in the same house as his maternal grandfather, U Thant, the onetime small-town Burmese headmaster who became the U.N.'s third Secretary-General. The author's first trip to Burma came in 1974 when, just 8 years old, he returned to help bury his grandfather. That visit set off confrontations in the streets between rebellious students calling for a state funeral and the hard-line government eager to downplay the event—eerily prefiguring the violence of 1988. But Thant was also educated at Harvard and Cambridge, and has worked on U.N. peacekeeping operations in Phnom Penh and Sarajevo, so he approaches Burma's history both as the rare outsider who knows the country's family secrets and as the rare insider who has the perspective of an international diplomat.

Thant is not by profession a writer and sometimes his pages are so clotted with detail that they read like a dusted-off doctoral thesis. But as a storehouse of facts about a history too little known, his book is fascinating. In the 17th century, he tells us, the Burmese capital of Mrauk-U was seen as a "second Venice" for its rivers as well as its mix of Japanese samurai, Islamic customs and Portuguese priests. To this day the highlands around the Irrawaddy Valley, crowded with minority groups, are "one of the most linguistically diverse places in the world." And as late as 1927, more immigrants streamed into Rangoon than into New York City. "For many Indian families," as Thant nicely puts it, "Burma was the first America."

It is Thant's belief that centuries of such foreign intrusions have left his country without a sense of pride or self-direction. The British stripped the land of its ruling class when they attacked King Thibaw in 1885 and packed him off to an Indian exile, and then the Indians who came in took over many of the country's middle-class positions. Nowadays, Rangoon is full of Chinese mobsters and Russian prostitutes, while the foreign media traffics in exotic tales about 12-year-old twins running an eccentric force known as God's Army and Wa former headhunters now thriving as heroin warlords.

In recent years, more and more books have tried to open the doors (or windows at least) of this hermit country. Amitav Ghosh's big novel, The Glass Palace, filled its pages with research about Burma under the British. Pascal Khoo Thwe, in his From the Land of Green Ghosts, offered a lyrical and inspiring look at life within a Karen Christian village (and the ongoing Karen insurrection), and of his own unlikely passage from guerrilla and waiter to Cambridge student. Even Amy Tan's last novel, Saving Fish From Drowning, is set in Burma, among American tourists who bat back and forth the arguments for and against boycotts. Thant Myint-U does not command the page as these others do, but he gives us both the savory details and the cruelties of colonialism, as well as a rare feel for palace intrigue. In the process, he suggests that isolation is in fact just what the military regime feeds on. It's in its blood.