Burma

A friend's father recommended that we not go to Burma. I wondered too, when it was first proposed to me, by Nick, of NxNE. Lonely Planet has sketched out the pros and cons. And a recent NYer article talked about engagement or not, with Myanmar. Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, under house arrest for more than a decade, opposes it.

LP's take:

Reasons not to go include:

* Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi opposes tourism
* The military government uses forced labour
* International tourism seen as 'stamp of approval'
* Money from tourism goes to the military government

Reasons to go are:

* Tourism one of few areas to which locals have access
* Carefully targeted spending reaches individuals in need
* Locals have told travel guide authors they are in favour
* Abuses less likely in areas frequented by foreigners

George Packer's recent NYer article:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/08/25/080825fa_fact_packer

One of the points that Packer makes is that with just a few multinationals in Yangon, it's easy for the SLORC (the ruling military junta now renamed to something else) to control international pressure such as it is:

The hope—and it isn’t much more than that—of critics of American policy is that a new generation of military officers will come to power with the understanding that government by plunder has hit diminishing returns. Thant Myint-U said that the pragmatists among Burma’s leaders-in-waiting will be helped if international pressure eases. "If there’s one thing that's fuelled Burma's many problems over the last half century, it’s been its isolation. If outside economic relationships are reduced to a few oil companies, Chinese logging companies, and twelve U.N. agencies, it's easy for the generals to play games. If we're talking about thousands of individual business relationships, even if it leads to a certain amount of corruption, you’ll have a much more open political space." But Win Min argues that only a combination of international pressure and engagement can bring about reform. "In the history of the Burmese military, pragmatists have never got the upper hand," he said.

I do personally feel that isolation as a policy hasn't always worked. A colleague at work boycotted watching the Olympics in Beijing this summer. Her rationale: it was preposterous the government would crack down on driving and other industrial processes to improve the air quality for the Olympics, only to crank it up again once the athletes, tourists, and foreign media left. Interestingly, post-Olympics Beijing has decided to retain some of those restrictions, an example of engagement at work.

The thing is, you can't talk about isolation or engagement without addressing the very basis of globalization in the first place. A very well traveled friend once complained that it shouldn't be so expensive to travel to Bhutan, where, at least recently, tourists had to hire a tour guide for $200/day. She thought it "unfair," as if she were entitled to go any place she desired. Yet on the other hand she would take the advice of a Tibetan lama in exile not to visit Tibet since doing so, he argued, only supports the Chinese government. To me, both perspectives don't describe the whole truth.

There is unavoidably a fundamental power imbalance in the world. How many Jordanians have boycotted visiting the US because of our foreign policy of the last 8 years? How many Tibetans come to "support" local artists and business people in New Orleans? (This reminds me of great piece recently from the Daily Show by Larry Wilmor on liberal black guilt.)

Everything we do is somehow connected with the rest of the world: when we buy an iPod or a pair of jeans, we support a system that encourages young women leaving the Chinese countryside for work in Dickensian conditions in Shenzhen, southern China: most have never left their homes before, and now travel a thousand kilometers to earn money, making this the largest peaceful migration in history.

So I guess my thought is to visit Burma, and to meet people, and to know more about what life is like for them, and to tell those we're able to meet that N&I at least care about their country. I know that this is a controversial decision, but globalization is here to stay. We are all connected one way or another: buying a ruby ring or a jade necklace connects us with people in Burma in a particular way. But to me, by visiting, we can have a richer connection, not just a commercial transaction.