Karaoke Fascism: Burma and the Politics of Fear

Preface

Preface December 15, 1996: Two-dozen student protesters, carrying shoulder bags, gather in a knot in the center of a major arterial road in Ahlone Township. They stop sixty meters away from a roadblock hastily erected by soldiers who are scrambling to get to the scene of each hit-and-run demonstration. Approximately eighty soldiers stand in front of twelve troop carriers with their automatic rifles aimed at the students. The soldiers cover the whole street and there are sometimes several rows of soldiers lined up in formation, holding circular wooden shields or bayonets. Their hats seem comical-khaki green plastic with a red star in the center-and yet these soldiers radiate menace and a lethal potentiality . Scarves are tied around the faces of the students, concealing all but their eyes. Some wear T-shirts with their heroes, General Aung San and his daughter Aung San Suu Kyi, emblazoned on the front. Others carry the fighting peacock insignia of Rangoon University and some wear the orange jacket common to the main opposition party, the National League for Democracy. Taxis and private cars with the license plates removed drive up to the students and thousands of bank notes are thrown out the windows at them before the cars race away. An unnatural and suspenseful silence descends upon the street. All traffic, commerce, and everyday conversation stops as the tense standoff begins. I walk slowly down Ahlone Road until I am adjacent to the front line of demonstrators. Crouching behind the open door of an old Bedford truck, I listen with amazement as for the first time since the failed democracy uprising in 1988, Rangoon residents begin to speak to each other in public about what is occurring. ‘‘Aren’t you afraid?’’ I whisper to a government engineer in his early forties standing beside the truck. Tears glisten in his eyes and he looks over his shoulder as he replies: ‘‘my whole generation has become familiar with fear and repression, and we’re not really afraid of it anymore on a daily basis. There are government spies in the crowd. They have taken over every sector in Burma.’’ A nineteen-year-old skinny student beside him wearing khaki army trousers whispers to me: ‘‘I’m scared, but I’m hopeful.’’ Fear is evi- x Preface dent in these snatches of conversation and in the body posture of the witnesses who partially turn their bodies away from the confrontation and seem to half crouch or draw in upon themselves. They gather in knots of two or three persons and keep their heads down. The character of the fear is that of anticipation, a barely repressed hope for change. I am startled by the thought that we are all within the range of the new Tatmadaw (ta’ ma do) (armed forces) weapons. The students begin to chant but then break off, a nervous shuffling occurs as they almost imperceptibly move together, leaving a gap between themselves and the onlookers at either side of the road. They advance a few steps until they are opposite a side road leading deeper into the township. The Tatmadaw men lower their shields and raise their weapons. The question, ‘‘are they just threatening the students?’’ races lightly across my thoughts, chased away by the nervous tension, the breathlessness of the moment. At that instant the students reach some silent consensus, perhaps from fear, or maybe pragmatism, and break off their advance, charging with a shout into the side streets, some behind me, and others seem to melt into the dark recesses of the tea shops lining the opposite side of the road. The troops clamber into their trucks and roar off in pursuit, but I am too busy breaking cover and scuttling away with the rest of the onlookers, longyis (lun: gjei) flapping around their legs as they puff and wheeze along the sidewalks and disappear into the gloom of individual houses.1 The following day the troops are everywhere. Tanks are conspicuous in government institutions and bayoneted soldiers wearing flak jackets roam the streets and are positioned every fifty yards along major routes into the city. A month later the BBC announces that the Burmese military has sentenced twenty pro-democracy supporters to thirty years in jail for their role in the street unrest in December. The student demonstrations were evidence of what I had suspected for half of a year: that I was conducting fieldwork in a war zone, yet another of the...