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| (Photo - Reuters) |
Andrew R.C. Marshall
Reuters
December 28, 2012
Pyinyananda was chanting with dozens of fellow Buddhist monks when an
object landed in the folds of his orange robes and blew up.
The canister contained tear gas, the police later said, but the
explosion flayed so much skin from his arms and legs that he remains in
hospital weeks later.
"The police gave no warning before they fired," said Pyinyananda, 19, nursing his bandaged arms.
He was one of at least 67 monks and six other people injured on November
29, when riot police raided camps set up by villagers protesting
against a $1 billion expansion of the Myanmar Wanbao copper mine in
northern Myanmar.
The raids sparked nationwide outrage that dented the reformist
credentials of President Thein Sein, a former general whose
quasi-civilian government replaced a decades-old dictatorship in 2011.
They also underscored how, after a year of often breathtaking change,
the bad old Myanmar still looms over the new.
"Our leaders haven't kicked their dictatorial habits," said former monk
Nyi Nyi Lwin, better known as Gambira, who was jailed for his role in
2007 pro-democracy protests. "We're no longer an absolute dictatorship,
but we're not yet a genuine democracy."
Few ordinary Burmese have felt the impact of reform, but most have high
expectations and feel emboldened to speak out. The mine dispute suggests
that while 2012 was Myanmar's year of hope and change, 2013 has the
potential to be a year of protests and crackdowns.
INTERSECTION OF GRIEVANCES
The copper mine sits at a crowded intersection of grievances and
interests - local, national and international; political, economic and
religious.
Myanmar Wanbao is a unit of China
North Industries Corp, a Chinese weapons manufacturer. It operates the
mine - the country's largest - with the Union of Myanmar Economic
Holdings Ltd (UMEHL), a vast holding company belonging to the powerful
Myanmar military.
Villagers say the expansion at Letpadaung, a set of low hills on the
west bank of the Chindwin River, involves the unlawful confiscation of
thousands of acres of their land. Monks say it has destroyed or damaged
the holy sites of a famous Buddhist teacher who died in 1923.
Their months-long protest ended in a pre-dawn, military-style operation
reminiscent of the suppression of monk-led protests in 2007. Back then,
Thein Sein, a former general, was the loyal prime minister of retired
dictator Than Shwe.
The November crackdown triggered a public-relations nightmare. A
government headed by an ex-general and filled with former soldiers had
used force to protect the business interests of the Myanmar military and
of the giant neighbor that had armed and supported it during decades of
Western sanctions: China.
Amid nationwide street protests by monks, Thein Sein cancelled a state visit to Australia
and New Zealand to focus on damage control. Police and ministers
apologized to the monks, and a commission was established to investigate
local grievances about the mine. It is headed by Nobel Peace
Prize-winning opposition leader Aug San Sul Kyi.
The crackdown came just 10 days after Myanmar basked in a visit from
U.S. President Barack Obama. His November 19 appearance in the former
pariah state lasted just six hours, but for many Burmese it heralded
their re-entry into the world after decades of isolation.
Obama's trip followed news that the U.S. military would invite Myanmar counterparts to observe war games in neighboring Thailand
in January 2013. The invitation was a powerful symbolic gesture toward a
Myanmar military that has yet to acknowledge its well-documented human
rights abuses.
The mine crackdown now has some wondering if the U.S. rapprochement is
too hasty. In a paper published December 12, the Heritage Foundation, a
conservative Washington think tank, said the Obama Administration's
policy "lacks sufficient protections against Burmese backsliding on
reforms." It urged Congress to re-impose major U.S. sanctions if
Myanmar's progress was insufficient.
DENTED OPTIMISM
Myanmar's reforms have not stalled. But they have entered a complex and
less headline-grabbing phase that could test the nerve of Thein Sein's
reformers and the patience of his long-suffering people.
This year the government has held a free and fair by-election, all but
scrapped media censorship, reformed Myanmar's antiquated currency, and
set in motion a crowded legislative agenda to tackle rural poverty and
encourage foreign investment.
But there have been setbacks. A year that began with the release of
hundreds of political prisoners ended with activists alleging that the
government is arresting dissidents almost as fast as it is freeing them.
In the days after their crackdown at the mine, police detained at least
eight activists in Yangon.
The government still has the trust of the people, said Aung Min,
minister of the president's office and one of Thein Sein's top
reformers. "It was not a crackdown. It was crowd control," he said,
adding that the government has already apologized for the injuries.
The year also started with a slew of ceasefires with ethnic insurgent
armies. Several are now looking shaky, and a 20-month conflict in Kachin
State between government troops and Kachin rebels is escalating.
And a relationship once considered essential to the reform process is
showing signs of strain. Suu Kyi speaks privately with increasing
bitterness of Thein Sein, say diplomats and other visitors to her
semi-fortified lakeside home in Yangon. Her spokesman, Ohn Kyaing,
denied there is any rift.
The mine protest also capped a year in which Myanmar's monks returned as
a major political force - for good and for bad. Monks have been famed
for years for their pro-democracy stance. This year, some of them were
shown to have an anti-Muslim stance as well.
Monks have held street rallies to oppose the mostly stateless Rohingya
Muslims of Rakhine State in western Myanmar. There, two eruptions of
sectarian violence this year with Rakhine Buddhists left hundreds dead
and tens of thousands homeless.
In an October outbreak, monks openly incited Rakhine mobs to attack
Muslims. The ethnic cleansing that followed has left Muslims elsewhere
in Myanmar fearing for their own safety.
The setbacks should serve as a reality check for foreign investors
eyeing business opportunities in one of Asia's last frontier economies,
some Myanmar watchers say. The reform process will be lengthy and "very
hostage to events," said Sean Turnell, an expert on the Myanmar economy
at Macquarie University in Australia. "The mine illustrates the sort of
event that could send things off the rails."
"THEY ARE NOT OUR ENEMIES"
You could fit Yankee Stadium into the Myanmar Wanbao copper mine. Twice.
Giant trucks look like toys as they ascend on switchback curves from its
depths. The hole is surrounded by towering heaps of copper ore which,
with every new truckload, inch their way towards surrounding villages.
The company's compound in Letpadaung is a neat grid of bungalows
surrounded by a fence topped with barbed wire and security cameras.
Outside the gate is a singed and threadbare lawn where the main protest
camp once stood. Inside, riot police march back and forth, shouting and
banging riot shields with their truncheons.
"Regular training," said Police Lieutenant Colonel Thura Thwin Ko Ko,
49, one of commanders on duty the night of the crackdown. He is a former
army major decorated for bravery during bloody jungle campaigns against
rebels in Karen State. ("Thura" is a military honorific meaning
"brave.")
Thwin Ko Ko said police had been patient with the demonstrators, who had
no legal permission to protest. "They are not our enemies," he said.
"They are our brothers and sisters. They are not educated and don't
understand the law."
But he said this patience wore thin as people from other areas joined
the protest, along with "outside groups" whom Thwin Ko Ko didn't
identify. "Our country cannot stand it forever," he said. "So we had to
take action."
On the evening before the crackdown, "we asked them to go back to their
homes and monasteries at least 15 times," he said. "Nobody wanted to
make violent action." More warnings were made at 3 a.m. on November 29,
before police used water cannon and threw tear-gas canisters.
The order to clear the protest sites, he said, came from "our superiors"
in the Ministry of Home Affairs, which oversees the police, and from
the office of the prime minister of Sagaing state, of which Monywa is
the capital.
Police were told not to fire rubber bullets or even to use truncheons,
said Thwin Ko Ko. "We only used water cannon and tear gas." This action
was "in accordance with the law." The president's office issued a
statement on the day of the crackdown which used similar language.
BURN INJURIES
The burn injuries of dozens of monks still recuperating at Mandalay General Hospital tell a different story.
According to Western diplomats in Yangon, two types of munitions were
found at the protest site. One was a canister bearing the letters "CS" -
an abbreviation for the active chemical in tear-gas. The other was a
smaller, bullet-like munition with no markings.
The munitions were standard-issue police weapons for dispersing crowds,
said Twin Ko Ko. If the police had known what kind of impact the
munitions would have, they would never have deployed them, he said. "We
were really surprised what kind of smoke bomb it is."
Why did tear-gas canisters explode like incendiary grenades? That's one
mystery opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi's commission investigating
the incident hopes to solve by the end of December. "When we can find
enough evidence, then we will announce who is guilty and why," she said
at a December 6 news conference.
At her request, four children with mental disabilities aged from one to
16 years were sent to Yangon Children's Hospital, after locals claimed
they had been poisoned by emissions from a sulphuric acid factory in the
area that's owned by UMEHL.
Doctors found "no symptoms of exposing to acid," said a government news
release printed on the front page of the state-run New Light of Myanmar
on December 14.
BURMESE BIN LADEN
The state-run media also has been running photos of Thein Sein making
offerings at Buddhist temples. With the monk-led Saffron Revolution of
2007 so recent a memory, the president seems at pains to persuade his
people that the mine crackdown was an aberration.
The monkhood has about 400,000 members and remains a powerful force in
Myanmar. CDs with sermons by celebrated monks take pride of place on
street stalls that also sell pirated Hollywood movies.
A key monk in the mine protest was Wirathu (his holy name), a short,
shaven-headed abbot at New Massoyein in Mandalay, a vast monastic
complex housing almost 3,000 monks.
Wirathu, 44, lives in a monastery whose walls are decorated with
larger-than-life photos of himself. In an interview, he said he
dispatched 170 monks to Monywa - not to demonstrate, he stressed, but to
safeguard the protesters. The police crackdown enraged him, he said.
"Honestly, I felt I wanted to fight weapons with weapons," he said.
Wirathu is also one of the most prominent articulators of Burmese
resentment against the country's Muslims, whom he refers to by the
pejorative "kalar."
He blames Muslim Rohingyas for recent sectarian violence in Rakhine
State, despite evidence, first documented by Reuters, of ethnic
cleansing by Buddhist Rakhines in October. He alleged that Muslims
deliberately razed their own houses to win a place at refugee camps run
by aid agencies. Wirathu said his militancy is vital to counter
aggressive expansion by Muslims, who he says marry and forcibly convert
Buddhist women.
"I am a Burmese bin Laden," he grinned.
Valerie Amos, the United Nations humanitarian chief, visited the refugee
camps in December and described conditions as among the worst she had
ever seen. Thousands of Rohingya men, women and children are cramming
onto ramshackle fishing boats and setting sail for other Southeast Asian
countries.
Former political prisoner and monk Gambira said monks are less
anti-Muslim than Wirathu's views suggest. In a nation where a third of
all people live below the poverty line, the monkhood will inevitably
reflect the beliefs of an ill-educated populace, he said. Gambira also
noted that Buddhist monks in Yangon recently held an interfaith meeting
with Muslim, Christian and Hindu religious figures.
ANTI-CHINESE SENTIMENT
The copper mine is not the first Chinese project to become the target of
popular anger. Thein Sein stunned Beijing after suspending the $3.6
billion Chinese-built Myitsone dam in Sep. 2011 after fierce public
opposition to its construction.
In the aftermath of the mine crackdown, the fear now is that simmering
resentment could spark protests over Myanmar's largest project, also
Chinese-built: a twin oil and gas pipeline being built across the
country into China's energy-hungry Yunnan province.
In most of Myanmar, Chinese populations are long-established and
well-integrated. Not so in Mandalay and the north, where the copper mine
lies. Here, hundreds of thousands of Chinese migrants have settled in
the past 20 years, often with citizenship papers obtained illegally.
Their access to credit and business networks in China gives them an
advantage over existing native-run businesses, which has raised tensions
with locals, reported the Brussels-based think tank Crisis Group in
November. "There is clearly a risk of intercommunal violence, something
that the Chinese government has long been concerned about," it said.
Suu Kyi's investigation of the mine crackdown will likely be highly
critical of the Myanmar police. But it's unclear how far she will risk
antagonizing either of the mine partners, Myanmar Wanbao (meaning China)
or the military-run UMEHL. Both Beijing and the military are powerful
supporters of Thein Sein.
"There will never be an answer with which everyone will be satisfied,"
she said at a December 6 press conference in Yangon. "But our
commission's only mission is to reveal the truth."
POLITICAL PRISONERS
Still, Suu Kyi feels that Thein Sein reneged on promises to release all
political prisoners, said activists who have spoken with her recently.
Fifty-one dissidents were released on November 19, just as Obama arrived
on the first visit to Myanmar by a serving U.S. president. But at least
200 remain behind bars, according to the Assistance Association for
Political Prisoners, a Burmese human-rights group.
Obama spoke at Yangon University of "a future where a single prisoner of
conscience is one too many." Listening from the front row was the
former monk Gambira, a lantern-jawed 33-year-old with thick-rimmed
glasses.
He had been sentenced to 68 years in prison for his leading role in the
2007 Saffron Revolution protests by monks. He was freed in January 2012
with many other prominent political prisoners. He says he suffers from
poor mental health due to torture and abuse while in custody.
On December 1, less than two weeks after Obama's speech, Gambira was
arrested for an act of civil disobedience. Soon after his January
release, Gambira broke the padlocks on monasteries shut down by the
former junta, so that monks could occupy them again.
He was charged with trespassing and vandalism, then released on bail after spending 10 days in the notorious Insein Jail.
Gambira believes he was arrested to prevent him from organizing
anti-mine protests. He admits to meeting with "angry" Mandalay monks
just after the crackdown. "The monks won't budge until the whole
(mining) project is cancelled," he said.
The opponents of the copper mine seem unfazed by the government's
tactics. As of two weeks ago, half a dozen monks and about 60 lay
people, mostly from surrounding villages, had set up a new protest
encampment east of the mine's Letpadaung expansion.
"Every crackdown creates a new generation of activists," Gambira said.
(Reporting by Andrew Marshall; Editing by Michael Williams and Bill Tarrant)
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