open letter to UN Sec. Gen. Ban Ki-Mon

Dear UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Mon,
I write in regards to developments in Burma. An international push is under way to put pressure on the dictators of this country whose population has been languishing outside our conscience and in China’s shadow for too long. The 2007 uprising of the monks and the dictators’ coldhearted response to both the uprising and cyclone Nargis highlight the urgent need for international action at the same time as our continued appeasement in the face of atrocities committed on a daily basis is a lowlight of global morality.

This lowlight will not be healed by inaction.

I recently spent a month in this country, whose people are, despite the awful conditions that they are forced to endure as a result of our unethical inaction and our thirst for cheap teak and rubies, the most hospitable I have ever encountered. They would have ample reason for hatred of individual visitors and the world at large. Yet their strength of conviction in a better day to come is unshaken and a welcoming smile greets the visitor as long as he does not carry the dictators' stick in his hand. Let us support them in this most noble of endeavors. Let us not ignore their plight in order to uphold an amoral status quo.

I urge you do add your voice to that of millions of people around the world as well as 112 former Presidents and Prime Ministers. My happiness at their unified message is only colored by the knowledge that it is certainly easy to call for change once they are out of office. Please do not follow their lead and add a useless, if morally compelling voice, to the chorus once you are out of office.

I am sending this letter to my friends to add themselves to the growing list of malcontent, as well as publishing it on my blog where you may read it at:

http://mindgloaming.blogspot.com/2009/04/open-letter-to-un-sec-gen-ban-ki-mon.html

Kind Regards,
P.I.

Sign here to to add your voice

travel report 28: dead airports and fat ducklings

I wish I had had more room on my memory cards. I would have loved to show you the Mandalay Airport. It is a rather foolish looking contraption. It was built in the 90s when the Burmese Junta thought it would do them good to invest in modern large scale tourist infrastructure. This was foolish because the large scale tourists (I am referring to numbers here, not girth. Americans do not travel in Burma.) never showed up. And since Cyclone Nagris, the Junta's ridicolous response to it, which was marginally worse than Bush's response to Katrina, and the subsequent demonstrations that Buddhist Monks started nobody visits the country at all. In fact one only meets foreigners that either are on some sort of humanitarian business in the country, or that don't feel bound by international sanctions (read: Chinese).

So this airport is built pretty large, and rather badly, and like most things Junta in Burma it is in shoddy condition. Volker and I sat in this huge lobby with nobody but us in it. Couple of local functionary's kids hanging around a "Cafe" which did not deserve that title. They are supposed to work there, but if no customers are buying none of the none-existing wares that are not on display it is best described as hanging around instead of working. Imagine your run of the mill Communist Russia store, with one piece of bread in the window. You get the picture, if not any sustenance. I Should not have been surprised at the spider in the window of the airplane I was about to board.

It is such a strange thing, to be in a country in which normal every day occurances are, well, normal everyday occurances. Markets are loud, streets are packed, chaotic typical representations of South East Asian cities, men drink green tea in copious amounts, women are gracious and girls ride three deep on scooters. Then you enter anything government, an airport, the palace in Mandalay, the embassy in Phnom Phen and it seems as if you are stepping into a Mausoleum. It is dead. The buildings seem dead. The eyes of the people seem dead. There is no life. Yet the Junta, and by extension its tentacles reaching into this society, maintains that status. It is as if an invisible fist is directing the country. One does not see who it benefits. The Generals do not bask in false adoration as Gaddafi used to. They hide in their bunkers and, I don't know, take baths in rubies and gold. It is the ultimate Scrooge McDuck existence. Apart from the occasional silly leather jacket and sillier government proclamation of serving the country one does not easily witness the perversities of the country.

One time I was on Shwedagon and saw a few burmese women walk around the pagoda. They were fat, waddling, ungainly things that also wanted to partake in the blessings of their religion. Only after seeing their fattness did I notice the human walky-talkied security cordon around them. I guess they were worried that the average - in this context meaning malnutrioned - Burmese person would try to ask them where they could also get calory rich diets. That fat needs to be protected from the unruly skinny masses. They might want to carve out a piece for themselves.

The eternal smile of the Burmese can apparently not even be wiped of their faces by the Junta's repression. But instead, I will suppose freely here, the Junta themselves are perhaps the unhappiest people in the country. At least those fat ducklings at Shwedagon seemed unduly stressed out. Whether the cause is the weight on their hips or on their soul I will never know.

Damian Marley on Burma

Along the Banks of the Irrawaddy

She knew that around the next bend of the river the tree would come into view. She knew this as the knew home. It had been many years, since she last saw the tree rise out of the mist, arching over the ancient stupa, spreading its canopy over half her village. it would still be some time before the chinese made wreck of a freight ship, which gave her passage from Mandalay, would reach her long left behind home, for the waters of the Irrawadddy ran strong and its banks were deceptive.

The flash of the sun, mirrored of the stupa's gilden roof and jewel encrusted parasol, caught her eye from afar. This crystal of light brought her home, and brought it home that life as she knew it was no more. The short few years of her absence stretched to an eternity in her mind. An eternity away from the self that left this village on the banks. How fitting it was: the river in the dry season bore her back across muddy flats, when it was swollen like a soon-to-be-mother when she had embarked and left for good, she had thought. Back in that ancient time, she felt as full as the river, and now she was dry and searched a hole the size of a shadow in her midst. She should have known how this would play, when the captain played Country Roads - in Burmese - on his one pride and Joy, his Flashlight/Radio combination device. That stupid song would stay with her until that long an dark river finally took her home. To the place she never wanted to be.

But the tree drew her in. As it used to before. Its ancient roots, growths from the depths of the earth, tangling her feet, holding her soul on a wisp of a wind. Climb it, she would, one more time with Sao Kya. To proof that she could, like going away, like returning a changeling. This golden land, with its golden stupas. Never mind the steeples she had seen in every village, the temples from times unknown to gods well loved. These had use, they made those who built them belong. The stupas of her land belonged to the tax man from heaven, and that was all. The rules where wrong from day one, or should have been updated a long time ago. When you bought yourself your own personal heaven with your own personal stupa, something went missing in the human process in between life and death.

Banks full of sand, like the heads of her people, floating past. Reflected on the ceilings of silvery waters they shone as dull beacons of no hope at all. In Burma the giver of life deigned not to return her heirs to paradise. What paradise you ask, and find no answer as eyes full of cold and bleak and rancid empty stare through you, while they ask for your permit. What permit you ask. Theirs to give and yours to crawl for. To her the only bright spot that reveals itself on this bright sunny day is the inch long insect that electrocutes itself in a flash upon the never before working outlet of power. Flags in the wind, race paddies verdant, palm trees in bloom, bamboo on huts. Rain in the past of the last season reminds us of futures full of that. That never was. She sings Country Roads in English to the captain. He shows her his rotten teeth, appreciating the tone of her voice, if not the thought of her words.

The tree now spreads further, his roots forge deep down the banks of heart when she steps to the railing - a white knuckle grip on herself. Nobody at the shoreline. Empty as it was when her father, with is crooked gait, forbade all who wanted to come see her off. Not that it was that many.

A lone figure on the lowest branch, still higher than most steeples, silently greets her in a film running backwards. Was her life backwards as well? Was he that point in time and space, on that tree that her life focaled around? Saying goodbye and hello in the same manner. Her white knuckles loosing their grip on reality. Has he been sitting there, on that steeple high branch, this whole time? All these lives? All these branches of memories? Like the Buddha under the tree, waiting for divinity, only that made more sense.

"Nobody left" Sao Kya says, "They all went your way, followed you like the lemmings that they are, even though saying you wronged them by showing them the a-way."
"No, everybody is still here" she hugs in his ear, she whispers to his arms, she un-knuckles her grip, he fills in her shadow. And takes her hand up that tree of shade over the whole village.

Burma: Suggested Reading

One would not want to be accused of not having your literary welfare at heart. So even though the title of this post might scare you. Take heart, over the course of these silly little drivel travel blog posts (say it five times fast) of mine you have worked yourself at least through a supermarket checkout magazine. At least in size, if hopefully not in style or content. At which point I find it appropriate to once again do a kowtow as I feel quite flattered that you all would bother to come back to reading about my travels again and again.

... kowtowing...

In this spirit I would like to draw your attention to two rather well known greats of English Literature, who both started their careers in Burma. I figure if you are going to be reading about this place might as well be some of the truly great stuff ever written, anywhere.

On the Road to Mandalay
Rudyard Kipling

By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' eastward to the sea,
There's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me;
For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:
"Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!"
Come you back to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay:
Can't you 'ear their paddles chunkin' from Rangoon to Mandalay?
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin'-fishes play,
An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!

'Er petticoat was yaller an' 'er little cap was green,
An' 'er name was Supi-yaw-lat -- jes' the same as Theebaw's Queen,
An' I seed her first a-smokin' of a whackin' white cheroot,
An' a-wastin' Christian kisses on an 'eathen idol's foot:
Bloomin' idol made o'mud --
Wot they called the Great Gawd Budd --
Plucky lot she cared for idols when I kissed 'er where she stud!
On the road to Mandalay . . .

When the mist was on the rice-fields an' the sun was droppin' slow,
She'd git 'er little banjo an' she'd sing "~Kulla-lo-lo!~"
With 'er arm upon my shoulder an' 'er cheek agin' my cheek
We useter watch the steamers an' the ~hathis~ pilin' teak.
Elephints a-pilin' teak
In the sludgy, squdgy creek,
Where the silence 'ung that 'eavy you was 'arf afraid to speak!
On the road to Mandalay . . .

But that's all shove be'ind me -- long ago an' fur away,
An' there ain't no 'busses runnin' from the Bank to Mandalay;
An' I'm learnin' 'ere in London what the ten-year soldier tells:
"If you've 'eard the East a-callin', you won't never 'eed naught else."
No! you won't 'eed nothin' else
But them spicy garlic smells,
An' the sunshine an' the palm-trees an' the tinkly temple-bells;
On the road to Mandalay . . .

I am sick o' wastin' leather on these gritty pavin'-stones,
An' the blasted Henglish drizzle wakes the fever in my bones;
Tho' I walks with fifty 'ousemaids outer Chelsea to the Strand,
An' they talks a lot o' lovin', but wot do they understand?
Beefy face an' grubby 'and --
Law! wot do they understand?
I've a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land!
On the road to Mandalay . . .

Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a thirst;
For the temple-bells are callin', an' it's there that I would be --
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea;
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay,
With our sick beneath the awnings when we went to Mandalay!
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin'-fishes play,
An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!

Now, I ain't saying that my emotional state in regards to, or understanding of Burma is anywhere close to Kipling's. After all he spent a couple years more there than I did (Rereading this I realize it implies that the difference between me and old Rudyard is a couple of years in Burma - oops). But, that second to last verse sort of hits my current state of mind on the head. Except that I am going to Seattle instead of England, which will probably be worse in terms of precipitation.

Guess who started his literary career in Burma. George Orwell lived in quite a few places in Burma but Kathar provides the setting for his first novel Burmese Days.

My Uncle at Kathar

This one is required reading before you go to the Golden Land. As obvious as that is, it is way more surprising to actually be offered that book everywhere in Burma, because the Burmese, as much as the British overlords, could probably complain that Orwell must have been in a bad mood when he wrote that thing. Seldom have I come across a more sarcastic, cutting description of British Empire, or native populations for that matter.

Soccer playing monks in Kathar, I played with these cats,
thinking "How cool, playing random soccer with Monks in Burmese Days Location".
Until I read later in Lonely Planet that this is quite normal in that Monastery.
Trust LP to screw it up. Yup, they wiped the floor with me.

In SEA one is constantly offered books to read about the Killing Fields, and What they did with one girl's Father, and whatever else you like to depress yourself with. Of course it has nothing to do with generating pity for those poor downtrodden peoples; that they sell you only books of rape and pillage about their countries. Burmese Days is one that is offered everywhere, and particularly in Burma. These books are all copies, as in pirated. I am not sure if I am more amused that they think white people actually like to read, or that I can buy pirated books for a dollar the same way I steal movies and TV shows online.

Yeah, I said it!

I read Burmese days on my father's shelf in Vienna, and did not realize that it was a pirated copy until I saw it in Burma on the road to Mandalay. I just thought that it was a bad print job back home, and wondered at the Quality Assurance process of that particular publisher. But as it turns out one can get it on most street corners where there is the slightest chance of a tourist walking by, which is where Pa got it from.

None-soccer-playing monks in Kathar

Of course, closer examination of reading materials that I see in Burmese hands on Buses, ships, and planes reveals that their tastes run more to the mundane Zwei Groschen Roman - we would call it in German - romance novels and crap like that. I was waiting for one of them to say to me "I cant believe it's not butter". So really the Generals do not have to worry about the Word, as it were, to be the cause of their downfall. But was there ever a revolution without it before?