Episode #344: Rangoon Confidential
Colonel Thein Swe, a senior military intelligence officer, was intrigued by Dominic Faulder’s evident interest in Myanmar.
“How many times have you been here?” he asked politely. “Is it two or three?”
“This is my 13th visit,” Dominic replied.
Thein Swe was blindsided. How could this have been missed in a country where it is wise to assume every third person is a spy? The exchange took place in January 1989 in a decrepit suite at The Strand, reputed to be the finest hostelry east of Suez in its ancient British colonial glory days.
Dominic Faulder’s vague awareness of Burma began long before he ever set foot there. As a child in the 1960s, his grandfather often mentioned Rangoon at Sunday lunches, and the sonorous name lingered oddly in his mind. His grandfather had a long overseas career with Dunlop Rubber, but was never anywhere near Burma. He was, however, in retirement a neighbor of Major General Sir Hubert Rance, the last governor, who interacted closely with Bogyoke Aung San, the pre-independence Burmese leader assassinated in 1947, and father of Aung San Suu Kyi. The two old English gentlemen, with their canes, tweeds and brogues, took frequent walks in the Surrey countryside. The old governor would often ruminate on what had gone so badly wrong after World War II before independence in early 1948. Dominic had no idea he would one day develop a deep interest in this distant land – or the extraordinary interview opportunity that had passed him by.
Rance died in 1974. Dominic’s first encounter with Burma in 1981 was almost accidental. After graduating from university, he traveled to Thailand, intending to explore Southeast Asia before settling into any serious employment. Bangkok did not appeal to him much, and he was about to leave. But matters took an unexpected turn with an attempted coup on April 1 – the so-called April Fool’s Day Coup – that pretty much shut down bus services out of the capital for two days. During that brief window, he met a journalist from New Zealand who needed a photographer for a trip to Burma to cover the Thingyan festival in Mandalay. A new door opened.
Dominic’s first impression of Burma at Mingaladon Airport with its five layers of immigration papers was almost surreal. “It was like an aerodrome from the Second World War and complete bureaucratic mayhem,” he recalls. “Nobody knew what was going on!”
That was the first of many journeys to Burma, initially severely constrained by seven-day visas. His plans changed completely, and he based himself in Bangkok for the rest of the year as a freelance journalist. He felt he had stumbled across a unique story waiting to be told. “Burma was this huge, forgotten country,” he says. “The British colonial element made it interesting from my perspective and the wonderful scenery and culture were very intoxicating, very absorbing.”
The country’s political repression and isolation in a mid-century time lock were also enthralling. In May 1981, Dominic came across the the aftermath of a massive fire in Mandalay that had razed a sixth of the city due to black-market fuel storage and official corruption. It struck him that a town of 100,000 could burn to the ground in Burma without anyone in the outside world ever knowing about it. A retired Burmese policeman working for the United Nations Development Programme confirmed that exactly that had happened in Taungdwingyi weeks before the Mandalay blaze, but nobody knew. “What else were they getting away with?” Dominic wondered.
Years later, when the first demonstrations in 1988 were starting, Dominic was there. “I’ll never forget this,” he recalls of August 3, when students staged a large flash protest from below Shwedagon pagoda. It was a trial run for the main event coming on August 8 – ‘8/8/88’.
Dominic was jammed into a three-wheeler stuck at a rare red traffic light. “Suddenly these students appeared from literally nowhere. Hundreds and hundreds of high school students, ordinary students. Then, the flying peacock was unfurled, the great symbol of the Student Union.” They set off behind it down the road, racing into the city. The numbers in the end were just staggering. “My estimate would be at least 10,000 people that came through,” he says. “I have never seen such a display of raw courage.”
Dominic was on assignment to Asiaweek, the Hong Kong-based newsweekly, which pulled him out on August 6. He returned just two days after the military coup led by Senior General Saw Maung on September 18 that established the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC). On the apron at Mingaladon, he came across Tom White of the British Council struggling toward the terminal with bags filled with antibiotics. Because of that chance encounter, within three hours of landing he found himself sitting in a room with Aung San Suu Kyi and her husband, Michael Aris.
Suu Kyi had returned to Rangoon from Oxford to care for her sick mother and got swept up in the vortex of Burmese revolutionary politics. The military had just gunned down hundreds of alleged looters on the city’s streets, many of them children. Suu Kyi sat quietly in the darkened room, reflecting.
“This might be a slightly sensitive question,” Dominic began. “Is your future in Burma or the UK?”
Suu Kyi bristled. “I’ve always made it perfectly clear that should my country need me, I will come back,” she said. “Why is that such a sensitive question?”
Michael Aris shifted uncomfortably on the sofa when she said that. “Their lives had just changed irrevocably,” says Dominic. “There was no way that anything was going to be normal again – and she was in for the duration.”
In the following weeks, Dominic crossed paths with many of the other key political players, including U Nu, who had been overthrown by General Ne Win in the 1962 coup. The former premier declared that he was still the elected prime minister, and convened what remained of his ancient cabinet in a garden room at his home – a gathering of geriatrics and ghosts. He recalls how U Nu questioned him intently about his religion. “He was obsessed with Buddhism, and it muddled up his politics,” Dominic recalls.
Another unforgettable, much more secret encounter was with Min Ko Naing, the main student leader whose nom de guerre can be translated as “Conqueror of Kings”. Min Ko Naing knew his arrest was imminent when he gave Dominic an interview. He presented a list of demands that were later broadcast by the BBC before being photographed behind a bandana
“The agreement was the pictures of him with his face unmasked would not be released until he was captured,” Dominic recalls, adding that he could release the masked-up images of Min Ko Naing in the meantime.
As a journalist, Dominic also wanted to try and make sure he captured the government’s side of the story, and contacted the newly announced election commission. Back in Bangkok, Dominic also requested an interview with Senior General Saw Maung, the SLORC chairman. That was provisionally approved, and he was allowed to travel to Yangon in January.
“I remember arriving, and military intelligence had sent my minder to collect me in a little Mazda 323, so I had my own car,” he says. “I went through customs, and I opened the suitcase, and it had more film than anybody had ever seen, more recording equipment, TV and videos -- I’d got the whole thing covered. All these people looked, and their jaws just dropped. It was so flagrant -- they’d never seen anything like it.”
After vetting by de facto Foreign Minister Ong Gyaw, Colonel Thein Swe and Brigadier General David Abel, the junta’s economic czar, the big interview with Senior General Saw Maung was allowed to go forward in the defence ministry compound. David Ring, Asiaweek’s chief of correspondents, had also flown in from Hong Kong. It was the first such interview with the foreign media since the 1960s, such had been Burma’s isolation and xenophobia.
“It was much better than people might have expected, just to get the junta to talk -- which we can’t do today in 2025,” Dominic comments. “These people are completely impenetrable.”
Being a journalist in Burma has never been easy. Getting caught could mean deportation or worse. Foreigners were restricted to just a week-long visa, which made travel very difficult. “Seven days was our absolute limit,” says Dominic. “So, if you went in as a traveler, you couldn’t go more than three and a half days from Rangoon -- you had to be back, and it was quite a serious issue.”
Given these constraints, he describes how he managed to report on Burma undetected in the early days. “All that surveillance -- I got off because I never put my name on anything. I was a young kid who didn't look like much of a threat to anything. And I got away with it.” In 1988, films, tapes and notebooks had to be smuggled out separately, usually by friendly diplomats, to ensure they were not confiscated. Photographs of student leaders were the biggest concern.
A solo official interview with the SLORC Information Committee about the 1990 election did end up nearly getting him into trouble, however. “What I didn’t realize was that it wasn’t as much of an interview as I [was] expecting,” he says. “It was going to be my show trial.” Soe Nyunt, the editor of the Working People’s Daily (which is known today as the New Light of Myanmar) was keen to use the meeting to expose Dominic’s journalistic failings and nefarious reports, and to get revenge. Dominic had filed stories to the Asian Wall Street Journal and the BBC’s Burmese-language service revealing that Soe Nyunt was also Bo Thanmani (‘General Steel’), the most acid-penned columnist at the WPD.
“What he had to tell me was a four-page denunciation of all my ‘crimes’ as a journalist and my failings,” he says. “He finally got to my punishment, and that was that I had to write an apology and an explanation for my journalistic sins in the Far Eastern Economic Review. Everybody in the room at that point just looked at each other because I didn’t work for the Far Eastern Economic Review.”
Times have changed greatly, and Dominic reflects on what it means to be a journalist in Myanmar today. “At the end of the day, for most people in the outside world, it’s an incredibly complicated story. It’s somewhere that’s out of sight, and the terrible things that happen in Burma seem to repeat themselves,” he says.
“I personally have a problem with journalists who come in and say, ‘This is how a country should be run.’” For him, the role of journalists is to inform, not to instruct. “The job of a journalist is to go in and to get a story as accurately as possible -- to explain what they think is going on, and present that in an unvarnished, accessible way to whoever their audience is on television, whatever,” he says.
While some people believe Burma has been forgotten, Dominic has a different take. “This idea that Burma is not getting the attention it deserves because the media are neglecting it -- I do not accept that at all,” he says. “The problem is it’s not being read and it’s not on the agenda.”
There is also a pattern of Burma always managing to fail on the international stage and being overlooked. It happened in the 1950s when membership of the British Commonwealth was shunned, and the country became involved with the non-aligned movement; in the 1960s with the economic insanity of Ne Win’s Burmese Way to Socialism; and in the 1990s when other economies in Southeast boomed and crashed.
In August 1988, when a nationwide uprising finally made Burma the top global news story, some of the largest demonstrations ever seen on Earth were abruptly overshadowed by the spectacular inflight assassination of General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, the president of Pakistan.
“That just wiped the Burma story off -- it just disappeared,” he recalls. “Burma always misses the boat.”
Burma has had a tumultuous history, and Dominic believes that things should have turned out very differently for the Golden Land. “Everything you can see about the country is a disaster,” he says. “Yet this should be one of the great success stories of Southeast Asia -- it’s got everything for success potentially.”
Dominic warns that observers who remain engaged with Burma are committing to something of on an emotional roller coaster. There were times he also felt hopelessness, and this led to monitoring his own involvement. “I basically reduced all personal coverage of Burma in the early 90s because I found it so depressing,” he says. “This story was just so difficult, so inaccessible and slow-moving.”
On the other hand, the resilience and spirit of the people still animates him. “You see the most amazing things. Go back to the students in ’88 and their passion, their idealism -- and just the sheer guts of going up against a security state, and a security apparatus as ruthless as that.”
In closing, like many other past guests who have described their multi-decade relationship with the country, Dominic reflects on the pull that Burma exerts on those who come to be involved with its story. “Foreigners get involved with Southeast Asia and stay much longer than they ever anticipated. But Burma, it is the one story that you always go back to, [asking] what-ifs and why do you think that is?”
Yet, no matter the darkness, there is always optimism.
“[There is] always a lot of laughter, even in the most terrible situations,” Dominic says.