Episode #340: Lost In Translation
RELEASE DATE: APRIL 29
“I really like my students. They're very thoughtful, insightful people, and just getting to know them was a wonderful experience.” Tony Waters is an educator, and it was through his initial contact with Burmese graduate students that he began to find himself pulled into the complexities and intrigue of Myanmar.
Waters’ background—spanning refugee camps in Thailand and Tanzania, academic posts, and mentoring doctoral students from Myanmar—has revolved around understanding the pain and potential of countries fractured by decades of war, repression, and misguided foreign involvement. He first came into contact with Myanmar through Peace Corps service in northern Thailand in the early 1980s, and later managed refugee programs. Between 2016-2022, he taught a graduate-level Peace Studies program at Chiang Mai’s Payap University, where he was drawn more deeply into the lives and histories of his Myanmar students.
Waters describes how his students frequently grappled with the country’s long history of fragmentation and suffering across political, social and cultural divides. A common question came to animate them: “If we are good people, with strong values, cultures, and families—then why are we in this situation?” Adapting a methodology of student-led inquiry, the approach fleshed out his own understanding of the society, its diverse cultures, and its multi-layered history. He references dissertations on Karen nationalism, education in refugee camps, Burmese literature, and political history, among other topics.
Waters provides a standout example of one thesis that profoundly affected his own thinking on the subject: a dissertation exploring how Ne Win’s regime eroded ethnic minority identities through his systematic policy of “Burmanization.” This term refers to the attempt to forge a singular, Bamar-centric national identity through language and education policy while simultaneously suppressing ethnic modes of expression. Waters learned it had its roots in Cold War-era, counterinsurgency doctrine. “What [the student] found out from his research was that Ne Win's assistants had, in fact, been prepared for this in a unit called the Psychological Warfare Unit... in the 1950s.” This further evolved into the Myanmar military’s infamous Four Cuts Strategy targeting ethnic communities—cutting off insurgents’ access to food, weapons, the population and intelligence, through scorched earth tactics, forced relocation of villages, mass arrests, indiscriminate violence, and targeting civilian infrastructure.
Waters next highlights the often-overlooked theme of CIA involvement in Myanmar, arguing that it has been neglected in both academic and policy discussions. His curiosity about the CIA's role in the region began during his Peace Corps days in Thailand, when the Thai military forced the notorious drug lord, Khun Sa, back across the Myanmar border. Khun Sa, of mixed Shan and Chinese descent, had built a powerful militia that advocated for Shan ethnic autonomy while amassing wealth through a thriving opium trade. During this period, the U.S. was heavily involved in Vietnam, aiming to contain the spread of Communism, and viewed Khun Sa as a threat to Chinese interests. Through covert support, the CIA largely ignored the drug trade, allowing any group opposed to Communism to operate freely, as long as they acted as a buffer against China. Empowered by this support, Khun Sa eventually clashed with the Burmese military, which at the time was adhering to socialist policies based on a command economy. Fleeing to Thailand, where the government was a strong U.S. ally, Khun Sa continued his operations. However, in the 1970s, U.S. policy on the drug trade shifted under President Nixon, leading Thailand to turn against Khun Sa as well. Waters ultimately describes a Cold War strategy, driven by CIA involvement, that helped create a Southeast Asian landscape where drug lords like Khun Sa thrived, militias spread, and the Burmese military embraced violent tactics in response.
Waters further emphasizes that the ever-shifting allegiances and ephemeral militias as exemplified by Khun Sa as are not products of cultural deficiencies, but responses to the absence of a stable, legitimate and inclusive state. In particular, the proliferation of militias—from ethnic armies to border guard forces, such as in Shan state and other ethnic enclaves—is, to Waters, “a product of the type of self-defense unit” found all over the world before the advent of a “modern, bureaucratic rule.”
One of Waters’ sharpest critiques is reserved for international aid, particularly the Western humanitarian apparatus in Myanmar. Based on his own years of interaction and as an author of multiple articles addressing these issues, he contends that USAID, first and foremost, represents American interests, and “they want to help, [but] on their terms.” Donors arrive with pre-packaged programs developed from other contexts and geared for other communities, and highly paid “experts” with little knowledge of Myanmar are charged with delivering these programs. In one article written for The Irrawaddy, Waters mocked the absurdity of an American aid worker complaining about “the hard life of being an aid worker in Yangon on $48,000 a year.” He speaks of embassy personnel claiming to act in the Burmese people’s interests, but who really just talk to fellow diplomats in a kind of echo chamber; and of projects claiming to advance peace but not realistically assessing the complexity of the situation.
Waters is also particularly critical of the aid sector’s structural incentives, noting that evaluation reports are often designed not for accountability, but “to lead to the next grant.” This feedback loop promotes self-congratulatory narratives rather than the critical introspection that is sorely needed. He is equally skeptical of the romanticization of “political dialogue” efforts from international NGOs post-coup. It takes two to tango, and the concept of “political dialogue” is a chimera because, as Waters says, the junta is “incapable of having a dialogue.”
Waters notes that the geopolitical rivalries of China and the U.S. act as constraints to making real progress. The result of competing spheres of influence, he concludes, most often ends in stalemate. He says, “As long as both the Chinese and the Americans just use [Myanmar] as a playground for their Cold War... they're not going to provoke the other one enough to make it overthrow the Tatmadaw.” As far as the U.S. agenda in particular is concerned, Waters notes that even agents who operate with cultural intelligence— like the former CIA operative and late missionary William Young or Free Burma Ranger founder David Eubank— are often considered too “gone native” to be trustworthy by their own agencies. “You're somehow kind of a poison chalice, because you have interest in Myanmar people.”
He closes by summarizing his stressing the nuance required to better understand and engage in Myanmar: “I'm not looking for good and evil, I'm looking for the story and trying to understand the processes.”