Episode #203: Jack Myint, Part 2
“In Myanmar, there are certain cultural norms, where you certainly don't interrupt the professor,” Jack Myint says, describing the traditional Burmese classroom experience. “The first time out to the United States, I was just enthralled by the experience of the whole thing. Sitting in on college classrooms for the first time and seeing the interactive nature of how students and teachers interact… This was real conversation! This was debate… The free flow of ideas, I was hooked. That was it!”
This is the second part of our interview with Jack. The first segment covered his childhood and youth, and left off just before he had the opportunity to visit America in 2008, when a US State Department initiative called the Southeast Asia Youth Leadership Program selected him to come to the US. Jack was still just a teenager, and it was his first time ever on an airplane. He split his time between Northern Illinois University and Washington, DC., and the environment he found in the States, from college classrooms to beltway conversations, left him yearning to find a way back. One particularly impactful moment happened during a session at the Asia Foundation. “I raised my hand and I asked this question [to the moderator], ‘Well, what do I do if I want to sit where you're sitting 20 years from now?’ And he said, ‘Learn to stay in touch, and learn to keep in touch. Because your net worth really comes down to your network.’ That really stuck with me.”
As listeners will recall from the first episode with Jack, he was already something of a networker, maintaining pen pal correspondence with foreign tourists who he had met as a young child at Shwedagon Pagoda. These letters not only improved his English ability, but helped him develop friendships around the world, some of which would play a key role in opening the right doors, or making the right introductions, later in his life. Yet returning to Yangon, Jack still had a lot to figure out. Leaving a vibrant American college campus and submerged back into a stifling Burmese public school was real reverse culture shock for him.
He remembers one incident in particular that contrasted the free and open environment he’d experienced in the US with the political repression back in Myanmar. A teacher stumbled upon an Aung San Suu Kyi bookmark that he had been using, and told him in hushed tones just how much danger he would have been in if it had been found by someone else. “Technically, it doesn't matter if you're 14 or 40,” he explains. “Holding onto that material is punishable by up to seven years in prison, bar none.” It was a stern reminder of the climate of fear that governed nearly every aspect of life, and the lack of freedom and critical thought.
Aware of Jack’s engaging personality and the military regime’s oppression, his mother realized that they were on a collision course. “’You're going to either get killed or end up in jail,’” he recalls her telling him one day. “So you're getting out of the country one way or another. I don't know how you're going to do it, but you're going to do it!” So he took all the required tests for college admission, researched which schools had a good political science program, and began applying, which was no easy feat given the country’s power shortages and internet limitations. But he was accepted at several US colleges, and through a series of fortunate breaks and hard work—Jack says, “You miss all the shots you don’t take!”—he managed to secure enough scholarship money to enable him to enroll in one.
As luck would have it, soon after he arrived at school, he learned that Aung San Suu Kyi was being awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in DC. Although he was just 17, Jack jumped on a Greyhound and traveled across the country, sleeping on the floor of Shwe Nya Nwar Sayadaw’s hotel room. This was Jack’s monastic mentor discussed in Part 1, who was also in town for the special event as an invited guest. The monk brought him along with him into the Capitol Rotunda, where young Jack soon found himself mixing with the likes of Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Hilary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi. To see the admiration these powerful American politicians held for that democracy icon from his home country had a tremendous impact on him. “[As Burmese,] we're either looked at with pity, or if you're on the other side of the spectrum, where you're colluding with the junta and it doesn't matter how rich you are, you're looked at with disgust and disdain everywhere else in the world.” Jack acknowledges that Aung San Suu Kyi’s reputation has more than dipped following the Rohingya crisis, but he stresses how the Burmese view of her contrasts with the international perspective. “For us Burmese, there's no one like her. There's no one at that level of brilliance, sophistication, worldliness and recognition, just bringing and keeping Myanmar on the map, a country that would have otherwise been forgotten. And to this day, I still get people question where it is, and I have to bring out the map!”
Jack reflects on the conflicted nature of Aung San Suu Kyi’s legacy. He makes a distinction between the iconic beacon of hope that Aung San Suu Kyi represents to the downtrodden people of Myanmar, and her work as a politician, which Jack thinks is certainly deserving of criticism. He challenges the international community for not properly understanding how her presence gave hope to the Burmese people in a way that no other individual could possibly achieve during those long spells of darkness. On the other hand, he sees that “the problem with most Burmese is once they love an individual, they're protective of everything that that individual does. And in that process, they have trouble distinguishing the person from the action and vice versa.”
Regarding her less than stellar political career, Jack thinks that, to be fair, it needs to be contextualized by understanding the environment she was working in; namely, the military still held the levers of power, and as he says, “The NLD government was fighting an uphill battle from the get-go.” And because of the country’s dearth of democratic institutions, Jack understands why she felt the need to rely on her personality to get things done. At the same time, he acknowledges that she made extremely poor decisions in establishing something of a cult of loyalty rather than developing civic institutions, and unfortunately believed questionable reports from unreliable advisors that influenced her stance on the Rohingya crisis. In fact, he says he finds some of her actions not only problematic and wrong-headed, but in some cases, “morally reprehensible.” And yet, despite all of this, Jack is not sure that his country had any, better alternatives.
And in any case, to see a Burmese person honored on the world stage like that—the very popular, former UN Secretary General, U Thant, was the only other Burmese figure who been similarly admired on such a global scale— inspired Jack to devote every effort to his own development in the hopes that he could one day walk into a room and get a similar reception.
So Jack spent the next two years devoted not just to his studies but also expanding his DC rolodex. Then in the summer of 2012, he managed to secure an internship at the US-ASEAN Business Council. It was an exciting time, coming just after sanctions had been lifted, and for the first time in history, a business delegation composed of 40 American companies headed to Myanmar looking for investment opportunities. Jack was thrilled what this meant for the future of his country. “I believe that it is through economic development that we will be able to dig ourselves out of the hole that we've been dug into all these years of oppression and restriction and censorship that have created a culture of fear, hate, and just cut us out from the rest of the world,” he explains of his thinking at the time. “We didn't want handouts. We didn't want aid at this point anymore. We wanted to have the capacity to be able to do our own thing, to compete regionally and globally and have open markets and free competition.”
The NLD had been victorious at the polls, and the country’s opening was accompanied by the arrival of cheap internet, cell phones, and banks. Jack’s vision of economic development was beginning to coalesce right in front of his eyes. Moreover, he recalls how scores of Burmese professionals living overseas left cushy positions to work for almost nothing back home, embracing the chance to be a part of rebuilding their country out of the decades of oppressive military rule. “Their efforts and their innovative thinking and approaches placed it on the right path. It didn't quite take a U-turn because you have 50-60 years of damage to repair. But they tore down what needed to be torn down and tried to build back a foundational ground.”
Yet despite all the movement towards a freer and more open society, Jack sees the transition period as having many flaws. However, he again points to the importance of not holding it to an idealized, Western standard, and understanding the real challenges reformers in Myanmar were facing at that time. “The way that things are structured, the way that the power bases are centered and how the military has interwoven itself and all major economic interests and the core power centers, that's very hard to dismantle,” he notes. So while he believes it is fair criticism to suggest that Aung San Suu Kyi did not work hard enough to reverse past Burmanization policies, and in some cases even extended them, he also feels it’s unreasonable to think she could have made any significant progress in helping heal the deep divisions in the country. In part, the enmity between the Ethnic Armed Organizations and the military was so entrenched that it is unclear what, if any role, the civilian government could possibly have played in ameliorating them.
Moving ahead to the 2021 coup, Jack speculates that there might have been a small possibility that it could have been averted if Aung San Suu Kyi had attempted to cultivate her own faction within the military, using the military’s own modus operandi of “divide and conquer” against itself. He also faults the NLD’s weak leadership and its emphasis on patronage, loyalty and “personality politics”—as well as acting in an authoritarian manner against dissidents, just like the military—as also maybe facilitating the eventuality of a coup. But he assigns full blame for the actual coup and the atrocities that followed to the military.
Jack addresses an issue that had been quite polarizing since even long before the coup: the pros and cons of sanctions. For Jack, it is obvious. “Sanctions as a tool of changing the behavior of a despotic regime has never been helpful,” he says. “I'm a firm believer in that.” For a resource-rich country like Myanmar, surrounded by questionable actors such as China, Thailand, and India, Jack is all the more convinced that ultimately, sanctions end up punishing the people, while the regime is able to effectively skirt the consequences. Much as previous podcast guests, such as former US Ambassador Scot Marciel and former CIA analyst Erin Murphy have shared, Jack feels that the call for sanctions against Myanmar is more of an emotional response—viewed as a kind of moral victory—than a practical one. “Our friends in the West look at sanctions as a tool to check a box that something is and has been done,” he says. “As far as Myanmar is concerned, I don't necessarily see the impact of sanctions so much as a benefit to the average citizen, but more so as a policy checklist for the rest of the developed world to say, ‘Okay, well, we were doing our part, here's what we did.’ That's my frank and honest observation.”
Discussing the current state of the resistance, Jack mirrors what many other past podcast guests have shared, about how different the current movement is than in the past. He points to the unity between groups, the fact that this current generation has actually tasted freedom and is steeped in the use of technology. “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” he says about the positive impact that the transition years had in opening up the country, so that the Burmese people—in particular, the younger generation—feel more connected to the wider world than ever before. He also feels the movement had no choice but to turn to an armed struggle, given that the military simply does not understand any other language. “The nature of what initially was a peaceful protest turning violent, this is the military's own doing, by not taking people's voices and desires into account,” he says. “I do worry that the mantra of our younger generation, in their solving problems, instead of coming together through a meeting, a melding of the minds, would be a more violence-oriented route. And that's something that we as a nation will have to figure out and cope with and heal together through all this trauma.”
Because the Burmese military is losing on the ground, and the Burmese people are no longer susceptible to the military’s fear-mongering propaganda, Jack suspects its senior leadership may be now looking for an exit strategy. “They're trying to figure out ways to find a face-saving off-ramp that still protects their interests, and still protects their political power, because they know that they've gone too far with this one.” He is certain that the generals are looking for a way to keep their fortunes, if not their very lives, as they come to see this conflict as unwinnable. A more pressing, longer-term challenge, however, will be integration of hundreds of thousands of soldiers back into normal Myanmar society, which will be no easy task.
Jack concludes the discussion with a resounding sense of hope for the democracy movement, while calling out foreign observers who wrote them off long ago. “Never underestimate the resiliency of the Myanmar people! We've seen pretty bad stuff, and we've lived through it, and we've survived it.” He points not just to the dedication of those actively resisting the junta in-country, but also to educated Burmese professionals around the world who he expects would, as in the transition period, leave their cushy lives overseas to return and help rebuild Myanmar in a post-Tatmadaw world. “If I don't have hope, I have nothing,” he says in closing. “And at least in my lifetime, I think we'll we will see a return to the promise that Myanmar once showed the world.”