The “dirty secret” of the 2010s transition
It was so great to get a chance to talk with Michael Haack, an American activist and advocate who has been pushing for democracy and human rights in Burma for over two decades. The excerpt that follows traces his experience being a witness to the dramatic transformations that took place in the 2010s. He brings a remarkably nuanced perspective in acknowledging the genuine transition that this period brought to some, while acknowledging those who were excluded and even exclusively harmed through this as well. In other words, there are no easy answers for Michael. Take a read of the following passage, and check out the full episode for more.
“Having worked democratic politics in Burma from outside, and particularly promoting Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s image, I do feel I have a degree of blood on my own hands.”
“I one hundred percent believe that is why people have fought so hard and sacrificed so much. Because it's much harder to give somebody a taste of something, and a promise and hope. But then there is the feeling of just having the rug pulled out from under you. I think that that is 100% what the organized workers were experiencing, and so many people in the country as well, and it is really tragic.
Having from worked on this from the outside, I remember going back to Yangon the first time when things opened up a bit. I remember walking down the street and I saw a copy of The Irrawaddy being sold, and I was like, ‘Holy shit!’
In around 2002, staying in their house in Thailand, it just all just seemed like such a dream, that any of that would add up to anything other than a bunch of people selling a newspaper that is hard to be read, only by so many people. But then all of a sudden, this is being sold everywhere!
And in Yangon… for whatever reason, during my flight in, I had opened The New Light of Myanmar, or whatever the title is now, that government run-paper, and David Mathieson was on the cover for human rights law, and I was like, ‘Oh, my God!’
But I don't know. To some extent those things are a bit superficial. But then once you start going deeper, and you talk to the workers, and they talk about how much how much better they feel it is under that the new regime-- or the ‘now-gone regime’—and I think that sometimes that's missed, especially by a lot of my friends on the Left who are really quick to criticize liberalism, and criticize all the contradictions, and the horrible way that the Rohingya were treated.
Having worked on democratic politics in Burma from outside, and particularly promoting Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's image, I do feel I have a degree of blood on my own hands. I remember going to the border in the early 2000s, and the white people would be like, ‘Women's League of Burma! They've got all the ethnic groups too… except the Rohingya, wink wink, dirty secret!’
We all knew that it was going to be terrible. I remember my old boss in 2008 saying to me, “If the democratic forces ever get power, the Rohingya are still fucked!’ I think he literally said that to me. So we all knew that, and it's terrible.
But I guess one of the things with all the contradictions of the opening, and all the ways that the people on the Left rightly criticized it, that it was actually so much better for so many people! It’s easy to miss that. And I think that, especially this recent engagement with the workers, it has really brought that home for me.”