“They would come up to me on the street and whisper, ‘tell the truth.’
In a career filled with encounters with war, violence and bloodshed across the globe, American journalist and author Barbara Victor spoke from experience about the fear and repression she saw in her visit to Burma.
Burma Day, part of the Asian American Heritage Conference at NEIU, ended with Victor’s speech about the ongoing political and humanitarian situation in Burma, a nation of 50 million in southeast Asia.
She described her sense of the country as she spent more time there: “The thing I felt more than any other place in the world was the undercurrent of fear.” Victor visited the country to chronicle the human rights abuses in the country and to interview Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of the revolutionary leader of Burma, Aung San, who engineered Burmese independence from the British Empire in 1947.
According to Victor, agents of the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), the military junta that has ruled the country for 19 years, followed her from the beginning of her stay and bugged her phones. She was forbidden to meet with Suu Kyi, but she arranged a meeting that became the nexus of her biography of Suu Kyi, titled, “The Lady.”
Victor remembered citizens asking her to tell the world what was happening in the isolated nation, which has endured one form of dictatorship or another since Aung San’s assassination in 1947.
Visiting a protest scene late one evening, Victor asked a police officer that was responding to the scene what his orders were, the officer responded, “shoot to kill.” Such scenes were common in the country, Victor added, but the outside world knew little of the situation because the population remained cutoff from the rest of the world.
“It’s not a sexy story,” Victor says to explain the lack of media attention. “There are no large street protests. You have an oppressed population ruled by a handful of sadistic, violent men.”
Victor describes the Burmese as a “loving, kind people,” who are not prone to voicing their concerns over the way they are treated. With almost no TV, radio or Internet in the country, information is difficult to come by about the activities of the SLORC from within the country.
Despite her years of experience as a journalist, which includes interviews with suicide bombers, heads of state and others, Victor described the humanitarian and political situation in Burma as unlike anything she had seen. “What I saw there, the people I talked to, I was stunned.”
Victor favors pressuring the foreign companies that do business with Burma to make the SLORC less effective in ruling the country and undermining them politically and economically.
Victor also says that the West, to include the U.S, won’t do much good in improving conditions in the country, saying, “It’s not going to be the west. We barely understand democracy in the Middle East, and we’ve been there for over 40 years. We don’t have the wherewithal to understand what democracy means to other cultures.”
After having observed Suu Kyi, who is under house arrest for several years and won a Nobel Peace Prize for her resistance to the SLORC, Victor cam away impressed with her. “I watched the reaction of people to her. She’s magic.”
In the audience for the speech was Maung Maung Win, a journalist who fled Burma in Dec. 2005 after threats were made on his life. Win says “plainclothes intelligence men” questioned him about whether he arranged a meeting between CBS journalist Philip Robertson and student resistance leaders.
Win led the Guardian Daily as a censorship-free English-language newspaper for 22 days before the SLORC took power in 1988, and he was awarded the Herman Hemmet Award by Human Rights Watch for publicizing the situation in Burma.
Artist and activist Kyi May Maung was also at the speech, and lamented the conditions that forced her to flee Burma in 1982. “The repression is so severe. Young people are taken off the street and used as slave labor.”
Maung warned of engaging the SLORC, saying “Some people think, ‘if you can’t beat them, join them,’ that really bothers me.” Maung believes the best course is to expose the workings of the SLORC to the world, and lists Youtube as an effective means of spreading word about Burma.
Maung also praised NEIU Burma Day, commenting that, “a lot of these conferences, are stage-managed. This was a very honest one.” Maung said that pro-SLORC speakers and panelists often tried to dominate other such discussions on the subject of Burma elsewhere.
For more information on Burma, go to freeburmacoalition.org, freeburma.org
or burmacampaign.org.