Beyond Black & White
Coming Soon…
During a lifetime of advocacy for Burma, Larry Dohrs still remembers when he hit upon a winning strategy. “There was a character in the cartoon Bullwinkle, the scariest guy of all, who was named Mr. Big. And Mr. Big was actually this tiny guy, but he would always have a flashlight next to him and portray a big shadow on the wall,” he says. “What you really saw was the big shadow. That was us! Optics.”
Since the 1980s, Dohrs has wielded that flashlight to project outsized influence battling corporate titans such as PepsiCo and Unocal, bringing accountability to the World Trade Organization, and leveraging international support for the pro-democracy movement. As the founder of the Seattle Burma Roundtable, a director of the Free Burma Coalition, and longtime chair of the U.S. Campaign for Burma – among many academic and NGO affiliations – Dohrs has written extensively on the economic and political situation while visiting the country regularly, including meetings with Aung San Suu Kyi and other pro-democracy leaders.
His travels down this road in a way follows his parents. His father was a geography professor, a family member married a USAID engineer, and his parents spent 10 days in Burma in 1967 bringing back stories and souvenirs of a country that few Americans knew anything about. At eight-years-old, “Burma was a real place in my mind,” Dohrs says. “You just don't hear people being able to have that sort of experience at that time period.”
After graduating from university, amid a flagging U.S. economy, he worked a year in Australia and travelled another year in Asia, with one-week visa to Burma allowing a circuit from Rangoon to Inle, Taunggyi to Bagan, and back to Rangoon. That was it. No extension possible without leaving the country.
But his experiences during that trip – amazing, interesting, quirky– stuck with him for life. In Taunggyi, he found a library and asked to be admitted. “The lovely, sweet, kind, older lady who was at the desk gives me a big smile and says, ‘Oh, I'm sorry, the man with the key is not here, he’s in Rangoon.’” When would he be back? She didn’t know. “So here was a library full of books that nobody had access to,” Dohrs says. “That was a good image.”
The came to have an irrevocable hold on him. Dohrs pursued a master’s degree in Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Michigan, where he met his wife and studied under the influential historian of Southeast Asia, Victor Lieberman. At the time, the field of Burma Studies in the U.S. was a small world, but Dohrs rated the Southeast Asia library at the University of Michigan as one of the top three in the country, along with the Library of Congress and Cornell University. “For a library nerd like myself, it was incredible,” he says. “To the extent that these resources existed, they existed in Ann Arbor in that library. I spent many hours the good old-fashioned way: in the stacks.”
After graduating, Dohrs began writing for a Southeast Asia journal published out of Ann Arbor and, with a summer business in Seattle, he was free to travel in the winter backpacking across the region. In 1988, his plan was to spend a month or more in Burma, doing border runs every week, for “as many times as they were willing to put that new visa stamp in my in my passport.” And then came the 8888 Uprising in August… which he watched from the sidelines in Thailand.
“It was easy to get your hopes up for something good to happen and then it went so terribly wrong,” Dohrs says. “There were Burmese flowing into Thailand to escape the killings. At that point, I was not too politically focused – history and culture and economics were more what I was interested in. But things began to change at that point, and in subsequent years it was people looking at it as a normal country, a normal situation, that I found offensive! That’s where I started to push back.”
Over several years living in Seattle, his activism gained momentum, as he first volunteered helping Tibetans resettle in the United States. Through a friend, he encountered Edith Mirante’s “Burmese Looking Glass” and met her when she came to town. “I had a cup of tea with her, and she said, ‘You know, there's a movement, there’s something happening, and you should be part of it. You should start a local group.’ And so I did,” Dohrs recounts.
PepsiCo became emblematic of multinational corporations working with the military, then in the form of the so-called State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC). “I was keen to promote awareness against Pepsi's involvement in Burma, but I didn't have any network for distributing it,” he says. “Edith plugged me in to the Free Burma Coalition that was just starting up. She was sort of Johnny Appleseed travelling across the U.S. in Greyhound busses and leaving groups behind.”
In those early days of activism, he was learning to shine a spotlight on the abuses of the military and the complicity of multinationals, in a process of narrative construction shaped by the technologies of the day. He printed boycott Pepsi stickers and organized phone calls to their 800 number, which cost them $1 a minute to operate, inflicting costs where he could. In the process, he started a group that became the Seattle Burma Roundtable.
Dohrs credits Maung Zarni, the Nobel Peace Prize nominee and co-founder of international platforms such as the Free Burma Coalition and Free Rohingya Coalition, with the Ethiopian-origin slogan they used: “When spiders unite, they can tie down a lion.” Zarni was also using email at a time when when this was a “revelation,” allowing them to network internationally and magnify their influence.
Reflecting back on their information operation, he recognizes where nuance was sometimes lost in the narrative. “Burma is an incredibly complex place, and that doesn’t particularly serve you well when you are engaged in advocacy,” he says. “To the extent possible, you want a simple, clean, black-and-white narrative, but most issues are not particularly black and white.”
Nonetheless, in some ways Burma did fit that narrative, with “the beautiful and well-spoken Aung San Suu Kyi and the grumpy, uncommunicative and murderous military,” and the NLD winning more than 80% of seats in the 1990 election. “I’ve been in enough meetings in Congressional offices when you begin to describe nuance, that’s when the BlackBerries come out and you just simply lose people,” Dohrs says. “If you don't want to lose them, you got to keep it simple, and that means you cut some corners here and there.”
The marching orders at the time followed two tracks: organizing boycotts and using selective contracting law, which had been effective in the anti-apartheid struggle, to pressure businesses by excluding them from contracts. Eddie Bauer, a Seattle-based clothing company operating in military-owned factories in Burma, fell within activists’ sights as the target of a fax campaign, eventually buckling after the Irish peace activist and Nobel Laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire visited Seattle and rallied women business leaders.
It got to a point where many companies simpy ran from the minute that Dohrs and company began exerting any level of pressure. “Generally, we started to announce a boycott, and the next day that the company would withdraw,” Dohrs says, remembering one L.A.-based company that succumbed after only three people showed up to picket its offices. “For Pepsi, eventually, the local partner stood up at some big rally and called for the annihilation of the ‘internal and external destructionists’, which meant the NLD, and I knew that was the end. Pepsi itself couldn’t be seen calling for the annihilation of anybody. It was a little ironic, because during the Pepsi boycott, it was super easy to organize university students,” he says. “After Pepsi pulled out, it was more difficult. Sometimes not winning helps the movement.”
Activists were by now looking past the strategy of boycotting companies—even those as big as PepsiCo—as they realized these firms were earning a pittance for the military, compared to energy-extraction revenues. The lawsuit brought by Burmese people against Unocal, accusing the oil giant of human rights violations committed in construction related to the $1.2-billion Yadana gas field project, yielded a groundbreaking settlement in 2005. Reports from organizations such as Karen Human Rights Group were spurring actions against the junta on multiple fronts, bringing Dohrs to arenas such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), where he never expected to be.
“There were so many things that had been put in place in order to promote and protect the rights of these companies to pursue profit, and not very many things to protect and promote human rights,” he says. Burma was a member in good standing at the WTO, while at the same time accused by the International Labour Organization of systematic forced labor. “By default, if you want to achieve the direct goal to try to help justice and democracy in Burma, you have to deal with the WTO. Who would have thought? I didn’t.”
Dohrs remains ambivalent about U.S. policy during the transition period led by former general and then-President Thein Sein. Although not a fan of George W. Bush, he evaluates his Burma policy as “pretty good,” while during the presidency of Barack Obama, who oversaw the loosening of sanctions against Burma in his second term as they hoped to usher in a feel-good story of the transition, Dohrs feels that “there simply was no room for any narrative that did not agree,” despite the ongoing atrocities in ethnic areas., particularly among the Kachin and Rohingya
“But on reflection, when you look at that period from 2012 to 2021, a lot was accomplished!” he acknowledges. “I think the resistance now only exists because of that time period and people connecting to the whole rest of the world,” he says. “They were not willing to go back after after the coup in 2021.”
The focus of his concerns has changed as well, where he’s no longer as concerned about garments manufactured in the country, even though labor protections are much weaker since the military takeover. Resource extraction, including with the influence of China, and the scam centers have become dominant earners at the cost of communities and the environment. During the first Trump Administration, the country barely registered in U.S. policy, but rare earths and resources might now command Washington’s attention. “But then you got to ask yourself, do you want the attention of the Trump Administration or not?!” Dohrs asks rhetorically.
Overall, Dohrs is not optimistic about the prospects of a negotiated peace, agreeing with many who view the generals as incapable of compromise. “The purpose of engagement, from the Burmese military side, is to slow down whatever adversarial behavior is going on in the international community and domestically, meanwhile, do whatever the heck you were going to do anyway,” he says. “They just simply are not partners for dialogue.”
Complicating that black-and-white portrait, however, is an international community that approaches the country based on assumptions that are not grounded in reality. “The narrative that’s dominating right now is a fear of disintegration of an existing nation state,” he says, pointing to Thailand and India as “scared to death” of political instability. “The discussion that we need to promote on the activist side is a more nuanced view,” he argues. “The fear that Burma as a nation state will cease to exist, when it doesn’t actually exist right now, is ridiculous and not respectful of the suffering that people are going through.” He acknowledges that major organizations such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and multinational corporations can only envision that nation state framework, “even if within that state is the most outlandish suffering, 500-pound bombs dropped on wedding parties” carried out by the military.
These issues will outlive him, he readily admits, even as he plans to live out his golden years in the region, some 40 years since his journey began. “It’s kind of funny, because Southeast Asian Buddhists have a very easy explanation. They just shrug and say, ‘Oh, well, you must have lived here in a previous life,’” Dohrs says. “And you know, that explains it, and now we can move on to other things.”