Transcript: Episode #344: Rangoon Confidential
Below is the complete transcript for this podcast episode. This transcript was generated using an AI transcription service and has not been reviewed by a human editor. As a result, certain words in the text may not accurately reflect the speaker's actual words. This is especially noticeable when speakers have strong accents, as AI transcription may introduce more errors in interpreting and transcribing their speech. Therefore, it is advisable not to reference this transcript in any article or document without cross-referencing the timestamp to ensure the accuracy of the guest's precise words.
00:10
after an estimated 3000 were killed in the uprisings, a new military junta promised democratic parliamentary elections would be held in 1990
Speaker 1 00:21
Moe scooters Iraq, erupt in Myanmar in August, September and October of 2007 after Myanmar's ruling, milji junta removes fuel subsidies, causing prices to double,
Speaker 2 00:39
Myanmar is Back in the headlines because of scenes like these. The country is in turmoil after the military swept away the government the people voted for.
Host 00:50
Thank you for joining us for the next hour or two in this episode of Insight. Myanmar podcast. In an age of nearly limitless content, we appreciate that you're choosing to take valuable time out of your day to learn more about what is happening in Myanmar. It's vital for this story to continue to be heard by people around the world, and that starts right now with you.
Dominic Faulder 02:19
Otherwise my involvement with Burma, or my connection to Burma, started a very long time ago, when when I was probably about eight, and I used to go and visit my grandfather, who was retired down in Surrey in England, after a very long career with Dunlop all over the world, and for some reason, he always used to mention Rangoon, which had this extraordinary quality about it as a name that always sort of hung with me, and I never understood what what his interest was. And it could have been the rubber connection, I guess, with Dunlop, but probably it was because when he retired, one of his neighbors was Sir Hubert Rance, Major General Hubert Rance, who was, in fact, the last governor of Burma. And I used to go for walks with these two tweedy English gentlemen with the brown brogues, and they would talk about what went wrong in Burma, and I could hear this conversation going on and not realizing, from a journalistic point of view, that this would be absolute gold dust. 20 years later, it never, it never crossed my mind, and I never expected to have any interest in Burma. But when I came back from my first trip to Southeast Asia in late 81 the following year earlier, the following year, I went to visit lady rants, his widow, and she talked to me about her time in Burma. And very shortly after the Second World War ended, and they were there when Aung San was was murdered, and Secretariat and the governor and Aung San, the growing Premier, were pretty close, and they had a good relationship, and he never got over it. And she told me that when they left on the last day, they climbed aboard the British naval vessel that was taking them out down the Rangoon River, out of Rangoon forever, and Sir Hubert apparently got on board in his top hat and tails as the ship was slipping away, he moved to the BA out of sight and burst into tears, and quite clearly he knew that a disaster was on the way, and it was uno who replaced him, Aung San at that time. And it was unu who I interviewed in 1988 looking at the whole disaster from a different point of view. But as I say, I missed an interview exclusively. Well, I'm a British correspondent who's first arrived in 1981 my Burma coverage began at that time with publications like the Bangkok Post, but then went on to a relationship with magazine in Hong Kong called Asia week, which I ended up as a special correspondent with, and I've always maintained an interest in the country, for whoever I'm reporting. And currently I work for Nikkei Asia in Tokyo as an associate editor. And quite a lot of the work that I do there does continues to involve Myanmar, as Burma is now known, and continues to fascinate me. Well, it started in 1981 when I came out to Southeast Asia, and I was, you know, a young graduate from the UK. And prior to going to university, I done a big tour of South of South America, which was fascinating, and that was I wanted to see more of the world before I got into any kind of serious employment. And I came to Bangkok, which was basically because it was a cheap entree into Asia with an idea of doing a tour. And I have to say I hated Bangkok. I thought it was just the most appalling place I'd ever come to. It wasn't east or west. It was very poor architecture. Food was good, but I did not like it. And I was leaving, and I got caught up one morning when I was checking out my hotel, the lady I paid said, Well, where are you going? And I said, Well, I'm going to the southern bus terminal. And she said, Oh, no, you can't do that. We had a revolution yesterday, and all transport has been canceled for three days out of the city. And basically, they'd had a coup on April 1. It was the April Fool's Day coup, and I got stuck here. And in that very short window of time, I came across a New Zealand journalist who wanted to go to Burma, and basically for thingym Burmese, which is Songkran in Thailand, the Luni New Year. And he wanted to go up to Mandalay, and it all sounded quite interesting. So he needed a photographer. I was competent in photographs, and we went into Burma, and we landed in the afternoon, early afternoon, in Rangoon, and I'd never seen anything like this. It was like an aerodrome from the Second World War. Complete bureaucratic mayhem. Nobody knew what was going on, and we got ourselves into a taxi into town to buy a ticket at tourist Burma up to Mandalay. And it was just totally engrossing. I mean, it just absorbed you completely smell the atmosphere, the activity. And as I say, we run our way straight up to man bla and got on the train. And the tickets that we bought at tourist Burma had Burmese numerals on them, so we didn't even know what. So we got on this train, sat down, and this Burmese gentleman came up to us, and he had this incredibly white shirt and the longe, and basically was able to explain that we were sitting in his seats. Would we mind moving? And so we just moved over, facing him, and everybody's smiling. And suddenly this bucket of water came straight through the window and got this guy from head to foot who was totally saturated in the place where I'd just been sitting. What else going on was completely new to and so the poor fellow, it was an overnight train up to Mount ley, and he was wet, but he pulled out his meal, which was chicken in a box, and he shared it with us, and it was all very endearing and attractive. And we got up to Mandela, and we spent three days, you know, photo with me, photographing song thingy, and it was a rat, and it was very happy. And yet, even then, you could tell there was something very strange about this atmosphere. The wedding stations, as they called them, were all run by the military. All sorts of things were going on. Anyway, that was the entry. And we came out and we sold that story to Asia magazine, which at the time was the biggest circulating. English language magazine in this part of the world came out of Hong Kong, and we got the cover, and I liked it. I mean, I really thought this is interesting. You can do interesting things and get paid for it. And so that was really what sort of got me into Burma, and we spent a week there. But during the time, though, we were staying in a guest house. And the owner was a lovely old man who would sit there with tea and Charo and talk quite good English, which was a feature of Burma at that time. There were people who just seemed to speak quite good English. They spoke beautiful, antiquated English, the most extraordinary vocabulary, you know, can I touch you for a coffin? Nail old boy, coffer nails a cigarette. It's just weird stuff, but it was lovely. But I remember sitting there and he was telling me about fires in Burma during the central Burma during the hot season. And you know how you shouldn't walk around smoking a Charu? Know, there was a lot of nervousness about it. And he told me that there'd been a very serious fire. And anyway, I went back to Bangkok, and I my plans all changed. I decided this was a really interesting story, that Burma was this huge forgotten country, British colonial element in it that made it interesting, from my perspective, wonderful, wonderful scenery and culture. Very intoxicating, very absorbing. And it was, in a way, it was everything quite Surprise, surprise I hadn't found in Bangkok. Why would you I did travel around the rest of Thailand, so I knew a bit more, but I really thought this is interesting, and that made me decide that I would stay for a bit longer and see if I could get in again at that time, you know, seven days was your absolute limit. 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. You could sense that this was not something to play around with. And the other thing at that time was that the food was so bad, in the sense of unhygienic, that you were lucky to stay on your feet for two or three days. So you really you're up against it. And had to think. And you know, I mean, I used to consume enormous quantities of Ceylon tea, you know, the dark, sticky, milky tea, because that gave you energy and Chinese food, which was cooked in front of you anyway. So I came back to Bangkok and got in touch with Bangkok Post and started doing journalism stories with them, some success. And then I got wind of this fire in Mandalay, where I'd been. And, you know, it was, it was whispers, almost. And I thought it was quite interesting. And came, came back to Burma for a second visit, not that long afterwards, and went back up to Mandalay, because Mandela was one of the places that you could get to. You couldn't get somewhere like Mitch. Now, you know, even, even the border resort towns that we know, sandaways or places just that wasn't an option. And so we got up there, and I was on my own on this trip. And one morning, I went out for a tour of the town or the city in in a horse and trap, and it was raining, and I asked the driver quite clearly to take me to the fire. And he understood immediately, and so we were clipping along, and it's wet, and suddenly we turn and I can see through the front of the carriage, this absolute disaster looked like being bombed to the horizon, and I realized that this Fire was had been incredibly serious, and actually burnt something like a sixth of the city off. And Mandalay at that time, was the second largest city after Rangoon. So the estimated population, and these figures were actually surprisingly difficult to nail down, was about 800,000 so a sixth of that, who are talking over 100,000 people getting on for 200 had lost their houses, quite clearly, because the houses had gone. All that was left was the brick wells and a few brick walls. But everything had been burned. And so I started rattling around trying to find out how this had happened, and it turned out that it was black market fuel, and that they would be storing that in 40 gallon drums, diesel, gasoline. And this was absolutely a government scam. This was the military police. They were all in on it. And one of these things had gone. Off pop. And I actually found out which one it was and photograph what was left of it. And wandered around. And I went to the temples where people were, you know, taking refuge. I think many people had actually moved into the town with friends and relatives, but it was absolute devastation. And of course, the question was, How could something this series happen in such an important center of population in the country, and nobody know about it. And literally nobody did know about it. And so, you know, I'm a very young, inexperienced journalist trying to sort of fathom what what plays and what doesn't and I came out, and I had all this evidence, and I went to the wires in Bangkok, the big news agencies, and I said, this has happened. And they were distinctly underwhelmed by the idea that they were going to report a story they'd missed, you know, six weeks later, so that there was not much interest in it. And so this is the story I never wrote and But that wasn't all. So then I went back on another visit, and this is the pattern for me for the rest of that year that I would just nip in, do my week, learn a little bit more, find get some contacts and kind of on another visit, which would be the third visit, I was recommended by an Indian diplomat, and the Indians were was really good for information. They had much better contact, you know, on the ground in the western embassy, to go and talk to a policeman, a retired policeman, who was working for UNDP, and I went to see him about the Mandalay farm to get a perspective. And he told me what what he knew about, it was very interesting. And then we talked about the fact that it hadn't got out of the country. And I remember saying to him, you know, this means that a town of 100,000 could burn to the ground and nobody would know. And he said, Yeah, that's exactly what's just happened, or had happened before the Monday fire, and this town, Tun had been burnt to the ground. And it wasn't black market fuel that started. It was a fire in the kitchen. One of the big hoppers have gone off pop and but of course, it spread again because of, you know, the black market fuel that was done there. And anyway, so I wanted to go and see Tom winge, and Tom winge was right off the options for tourist Berman. They said, Oh, no, you can't, you can't do that. It's prohibited. It's banned. And this is what always happened. No, no, no, you cannot. You cannot. Cannot go anywhere. So I climbed on the train to Mandalay with an Australian fellow who was quite intrigued as well, and just people, somebody had met. And as we went north, we got to the junction line to town wingu, which was off to the west of the line a long way. I mean, it's about four hours on a branch line, and we just jumped off the train and went over and we bought a ticket. And nobody's seen anything like this, and didn't think there was anything odd about it. They just we bought the tickets and we climbed on this train, and it was box carts dark, and we arrived in town wenji at about 10 o'clock at night, and the place had been burnt, and we were taken to this Chinese restaurant was just completely blacked out, no roof, no floor, nothing left, just The brick walls, and serve this unbelievably good meal that cost nothing, I mean, mere dollars. And somebody at the forestry department kindly offered to put us up. There was no hotel, and so we we spent the night there, and I remember being incredibly badly bitten by mosquitoes, and I suspect went down with dengue from there, but the next morning, we got up in this I've never seen anything like it. This town had gone the pictures. I've still got them. They're very, very bleak indeed. And the rumor locally had been that they had mistreated the pagoda, they were re gilding the pagoda, and that they'd done something wrong in this process. And the pagoda, freshly gilded, still stood in the middle of the village of the town, and we were taken to that and in fact, we were allowed to climb it because the bamboo frame was so we got right up to the top to the hit the and looked out over this, this devastated area, and so basically, this, this, this is the second component in that story, and I did eventually publish it. It appeared in the Irrawaddy and it was commented on in the New York Times, I think, in conjunction with. The Cyclone slightly Cyclone Nargis, when we were looking at this whole business of disasters in Burma not being reported, how the government systematically lied that they'd rather block access to help than open up any kind of political risk. Cyclone Argus was very dramatic. But in the case, the Great Fire of Mandalay was never reported. Nobody knew it had happened. So anyway, that that was kind of that just made me more interested in the country, the fact that it could just simply go under the carpet and not be noticed, and that they were getting away with it, and what else were they getting away with. So that's basically how I got involved. And then I would write stories without bylines. It just wasn't possible. If you wanted to go in, you could not have a byline. And I was, I was prepared to pay that price, even though it actually wasn't, you know, a particularly good career move. You know, you should be getting people to notice you, but the stories were worth it, and I've never regretted it. So anyway, if you that was 81 and then I went back to the UK with all these stories from Southeast Asia. And I ran straight into the Falklands War. And the Falklands War basically sucked up all the consumer the feature space in the UK media for about six months, and there was almost nothing else running. And so stories from Southeast Asia, ironically, I'd sold them, but they didn't always get published. And I remember going to see the managing editor of Sunday Times, big newspaper in the UK, and I was granted an audience because of a mutual friend, and he was interested. And he said, Yes, this is interesting. But you know, when are they going to run in the streets? You know, I described this very repressive regime. And I looked at him, and I said, I have no idea, but they will, it will happen. And he said, Well, come back and see me then. And, you know, where was the pain? Why should people get interested? Yes, okay, this is the haunt of all and all the rest of it. But these weren't sexy features at the time. And so anyway, cut a long story short, I came back to Thailand because I was offered a job. And I worked at that job in Bangkok as an editor for about three or four years, three years, and then went back into correspondent type journalism, so reporting my own stories. And by that time, I'd linked up with Asia week, and there were a lot of people at Asia week that had a great interest in Burma, senior people. But also there was a feeling that Burma was, was a good lost market that, you know, there were a huge number of English speaking people there who belong to south the outside East Asian land mass and and weren't being catered to. So it was a business interest as well. And so in 87 I started doing stories, again, principally from Thailand, going up on the border, going up to see the Karens, going to Manipur, the MOE River. All very topical, again, for different reasons now. And you know, getting involved from from this side. And then I remember, it would be about September 87 there were all these reports coming out of Burma that the rice crop was going to fail, that the economy was well and truly great. I mean, it's always rock bottom, even more rock bottom than useless than usual. But the idea that the harvest was in jeopardy. Was, was what really sent me in and Asia. We wanted to use me because I could, I could report, and I could take pictures as well. And it was had a good visual component in its makeup. And we used to do these enormous double page spreads, eyewitness stuff that could run to five or six double spreads. And so for photography, it was very attractive. So they sent me in as a kind of double threat. I spent a week on the ground there, and I remember I had a wonderful Burmese Stringer, who had done work for Asia week, and he just looked after me through that week and sent me off up to Mandalay, where I got all this reporting, and there was this massive downpour, so the danger of the failed harvest seemed to. Passing, and everything was flooded. It was spectacular. And I came back down, and I think I met interesting people through him. He took me to the one of the clubs there that, I think it's the it wasn't the Pigou club, it was the the Sailing Club, and the Minister of Education, Lee Wynn's Minister of Education was sitting there who inadvertently bought me a beer, which is quite a funny thing, because nobody had any access to Burmese government at the time. He didn't realize who he was buying a beer, and anyway, it the thing that happened at the end of the week was that my stringers father suddenly became seriously ill, and he just disappeared, and he spent his whole the next 24 hours running around trying to find medicine for his father, and there was no medicine in the hospitals. You know, you, you if you, you had to go to the black market. The stuff on sale was beyond sell by dates, and it was it really showed me how awful the situation was, and this family of very well educated, cultured people who took me in, gave me dinner, looked after me, were glad that a foreigner was interested in their country for the best reasons, were then in such dire straits. I mean, the guy, I didn't follow up, but he was, he was at death's door at that time, and that was one of the things I didn't just launch into the future, but I didn't go back to Burma between 1998 and 2018 so it was a 20 year gap, and when I came back in 2018 I went in very quietly and just had to look around. One of the things that really struck me about the changes, tangible changes, was the fact that Rangoon Yangon, as it had been renamed, had a pharmacy on virtually every street that this was not just exactly what you expect in Bangkok Thais, don't bat an eyelid about it, but for me, for Burmese, this was an enormous leap into the future and and then all the department stores and everything less important, But the fact that those pharmacies were readily available, was such a big thing. And it goes back to that visit. So that was 87 and I was in for a week, and I could feel the sort of political tension. It was always there, really, and the way people whispered and talked to you, usually one on one, on one, if there were two others there that didn't know each other, conversations were never the same. Yeah, a spy might be present. And I pulled out, and I have to go back and look at the dates, but basically, the day after I left, Neil in demonetized the big notes, and there were actually demonstrations on the streets, which is, of course, had I known, I would have come in later. But there's no way of knowing that that was going to happen. But the important thing is not, not that I didn't know, but that there was no hint on the ground that this was going to happen. This took everybody completely unawares. And of course, what we're talking about is state sanctioned theft. People's savings were just suddenly wiped out, and they were the big notes, and that was horrific. So anyway, we had a news peg after the event, if you like, and I didn't get to photograph it. I don't know what would have happened if I had photographed it, because I would have been very conspicuous. So this, this political volcano, is just rumbling for the next nine months. And we knew, I think everybody knew, who followed Burma in any way knew it was going to blow off. And then come July, 1988 people were being sent in regularly to monitor the situation. And Christopher gunness of the BBC went in about two weeks before it really blew and very quickly picked up this, this common knowledge that these demonstrations would start on the eighth of the eighth the eighth day, the eighth month of 8888 and I think It was 8am I mean, it was all very so this was, this is public knowledge. The BBC then reported carrying his report saying this, and got accused of basically instigating the riots, which is absolutely false. He reported what. He was told, and he reported correctly, and then he had to leave. He was running around, and I would have come in at the end of the month June, and you could just feel the whole city resonating, and it was all coming out of Sue Dawn, that's where the students were and they were up around that area, and they were bills sticking on putting up these statements and calls for revolution, what have you. And I got pictures of all that. And I'm trying to think it would have been the afternoon of the third of August, and I went up to Schrader gone to see if I could catch any of these people, and I stopped in a tea shop, and I'd spent quite a while sitting there just trying to absorb anything. And then I got into a three wheeler, and we went up, and there's the traffic lights underneath sraddagon. I'll never forget this, because we got caught in a red light, and suddenly these students appeared. Are literally nowhere. I mean hundreds and hundreds high school students, ordinary students, and the flying peacock is unfurled, you know, the great symbol, the Student Union and and they set off down the road, down into the city, and the numbers were just staggering. How they'd put it together? I My estimate would be it was at least 10,000 people that came through. This is the first demonstration in in 88 and it was a test run to find out what would happen. And, you know, I've often commented, I have never seen a display of raw courage comparable. It just my heart stopped and the three wheeler, the driver, was in a panic. He wanted to go backwards and get out of it. I wanted to get out of the three wheeler and get into it, and he's trying to warn me, so no, so I just gave him his chats and set off down the road and Scott's market. There's a whole my geography might be a bit loose, but there's a whole area of shops up there that well, at that time, I don't know what it looks like now, and these people going down. And I got the camera out and started shooting pictures. Still got the pictures, and some of them, you can see people coming towards me with their hands in front of their faces, palms towards me. Don't photograph. Don't photograph. And and that's the extent of that. I wasn't hurt or anything like that, but just don't photograph. And then I ran down the hill with them, and I got to the bottom of the hill, and I had photographs of of these people coming down into the city, which were the cover for Asia week, the next issue. You know, not good pictures, technically, because, because everything was moving so quickly, but they certainly showed the scene. And then they went off from there. They turned left, they went past City Hall, SULI pagoda, they went around, and then they did this triumphant walk past the American embassy and the Indian Embassy, the world's most powerful democracy, the world's largest democracy, chanting, I forget, forget the Burmese phrase, but they were chanting it, and I was up a lamp post trying to take pictures of them. It was really difficult. And and then the most astonishing thing happened. This light rain was coming down, and they disappeared. Just I couldn't believe it. This, this huge number of people just dispersed, and they got on busses, which were pretty rickety at the time, but they must have just dispersed through the streets. It vanished. And so that was the end of it. And of course, the striking thing about that first demonstration was that there were no police or military at all. Apparently, there were a lot of secret policemen in longies and normal ATAR in the crowd. So it wasn't they weren't watching, but they weren't a presence, and they didn't try to prevent it. And, you know, learnt, took lessons for themselves from what was going on, and then they disappeared. So this is the third and you know, it was clear that 888, there was going to be an enormous turnout. And it was inconceivable that there would be no security response to it. And I remember booking myself into the guest house that overlooked Suu pagoda, because it was my guest that if something kicked off, that was going to be the. Point where it happened. You know, City Hall, very, very central, mahabandhula Park, it's all there and and I booked a room very carefully with a good view down on Suu pagoda so that I could witness and photograph whatever happened. And I was planning to move in on the seventh so I recall, and then this call came from Hong Kong saying that I had to pull out and and I said, you know, it hasn't happened yet. You know, this is why I'm here for this. You've got to come out because we have absolutely no material. We've got to get this is how difficult it was to get reports out of Burma time you've got to come out, because you've got to report it, and we need your pictures. And even then, they'd have to be shipped to Hong Kong, you know, by courier, overnight and everything. And so very reluctantly, I did pull out, and I have to look at my passport to see whether it was the sixth or the seventh when I left, and it was chaos at the airport. I had to ensure that my films didn't go through their x ray machines, because they were so primitive, they would have zipper marks and everything all over the film. And that, of course, made me very suspicious to the guys, the customs folk, and one of them came at me and said, Are you a reporter? And I said, No, I'm here on holiday, and the weather's terrible, and all these people are running around, making problems, so I'm leaving. I was quite aggressive, and so fortunately, my bag was didn't go through the machine. He allowed it, you know, hand check only. So my films were saved, and I got out and I saw my replacements coming in. And I have wrote the Belgian photographer who took amazing pictures on the day of the military suppressing the population on the eighth and sure enough, on the night of the eighth, the shoot, the first shooting that I'm aware of was around Suu pagoda. I think they killed about five people. Anyway, you can't regret what you didn't do, but, but it was kind of frustrating. And so I spent the next six weeks, or not even that five weeks, five six weeks in Bangkok, gathering pictures, reports, interviewing people, all secondhand reporting. And we knew that something serious was coming. There were some Western journalists in in Rangoon at the time. There was a time correspondent who pulled out on the 17th, the day before the slaughter came into being, without realizing how close he was, he was a saint. Obviously, there was a Newsweek correspondent there, Melinda Liu and some freelancers and new civils freelancers like me. I wasn't employed by a Joah. We were important because the major news services simply would not allow they got their reporters to go in on visas that mis declared their activity because in case they got arrested, and so they just weren't there, none of the big people. So they depended on freelancers. And so anyway, it all went down. Come the 18th, we had the coup, which was basically the military taking over power again in the in the inter intervening period, we estimate some 3000 people were killed nationwide, because these protests were everywhere. There wasn't just Rangoon, by any means, and then probably another 500 people killed in Rangoon on the pretext of being looters, and they were being shot with carbines, you know, single bullets, boom. And they were all being targeted in the in the waist and hip area, which is really a nasty thing to do to people because of infection. I mean, an arm wound or a leg wound, that's bad, not diminishing it, but to shoot people there is wicked. But about 500 people went down. So I came back in on when would it have been? It would have been the 20th of September. So it was within two days of the military takeover, and the place was still a rat. And when I landed at the airport with a colleague, there was a British embassy so British Council fellow with a bag of antibiotics that he couldn't carry across the time. Went. So we helped him in the antibiotics. He found out who we were and what we were doing. And the result was that within three hours of learning, I was sitting with Aung San Suu Kyi in her parlor, the room that she worked in with Michael Aris, her husband, on the sofa to find out what was going on. And of course, Suu Kyi was a very new phenomenon, and she'd, she'd popped up in the middle of August with her great speech at schwedem and that that was electric, because probably half a million people saw that Burmese first hand on the site. And, you know, she's the son of bog Joah Aung San, the great hero, pre independence hero, sure. So it's legend, yeah. And she's living history, and she's talking, and then she, you know, decided that she was going to get involved with this thing and lend her support to the pro democracy movement, which was absolutely in its infancy. But anyway, I sat down, and we got off to a really bad start, because she's sitting there. And I said some, you know, this might be a slightly sensitive question, you know, is your future in Burma or the UK? And she absolutely bristled. And she said to me, I've always made it perfectly clear that, you know, should my country need me, I will come, come back to it, because this is a very Suu Kyi thing to imagine that anybody would know that she came up with this. And then she turned to me and said, and said, very frostly. She said, Why is that such a sensitive question. And I just remember Michael Aris kind of cringing on the sofa when she said this, because their lives had just changed irrevocably, and there was no way that anything was going to be normal again. And she was in for in for the duration.
Host 41:58
Yeah, so it was he was almost learning this in real time as well. It sounds like.
Dominic Faulder 42:03
No, he must have thought this through. He must have been well aware of what she thought. Yeah, so, no, it's not, but to have her ticking off a reporter for asking a rather basic question, it's we all know what happened. So it's a very sad story. I mean, he basically it was the end of their family life and and she was on course, but very driven, very committed, obsessed with her father's legacy, if you Like, all magical stuff for writing a great copy, this Phoenix, the political Phoenix, resurrecting itself. And so anyway, she ticked me off. But we we got some other questions in and find out what was going on. But basically what had happened was, you had the coup on the 18th, the two day period before I got there. And then this fortnight opened up and I overstayed the visa. Just didn't, didn't follow the rules at all, but it gave me this amazing opportunity to go and track down all the people that were involved. So I went off to see unu, who was the prime minister, who was kicked out by Le win in 1962 in the coup. And uno had reformed his cabinet and was having cabinet sections in in the garden house. And I went and photographed that and met him, and he interrogated me about my religion, because he, as you know, he was obsessed with Buddhism, and it muddled up his politics, but he interrogated my religion, and I sort of said, well, I hope that God's with you. Thank you. And the thing about his cabinet was half of them were dead. So this was a very strange room of very, very old people, survivors and ghosts, basically. And that was the cabinet. And then I Saw Suu Kyi on a number of occasions, and, you know, made requests to photograph her, because one of the things that emerged was that we didn't have pictures of all these people on the outside. And in that period, I was able to come in one morning and just photograph her at her desk, with Michael Harris sitting in the background, going through her boxes, if you like, becoming a politician and and then, of course, the next year, she got locked up. But what it meant was that those were almost the only pictures that were taken of her inside her own home where she was locked up for six years. So they got tremendous use. This was the image of Suu Kyi, and indeed, it was the picture that was used when she won the Nobel Prize, of her sitting at her desk when she was still under lock and key. That was what 91 her. Um, so, yes, it was, it was a very interesting piece. So it was Uno. Then Aung Ji. Aung Ji was the, you know, the Secretary to Ne Win during the Revolutionary Council. And then they had a huge falling out, which included a big argument about who was responsible for blowing up the student union in in Rangoon, doing demonstrations, which would have been, I think there's 73 but anyway, there was an argument about it, but the pair of them went the different ways. And Aung Ji was really important because he'd been writing these letters to Ne Win before 888, before Ne Win resigned as chairman of the bspp the party about how bad things had become. And so he was very much a catalyst in this whole business, and he was happy to talk about it. And at that time, Sandra Wynn, who was the daughter of Ne Win, who's considered extremely influential, was somebody to get to. And I was talking to Aung ju who'd been garrulous like he wouldn't believe for the past hour. And I said, Do you think you'd get me an interview with with Ne Win or San to win, his face went absolutely white. It took him about 15 minutes to get back his composure, and he said, Sander wins got nothing to do with any of this. I've known her since she was a little girl, bouncing on my knee, completely dismissive of it. But Aung chi was very interesting because, I mean, he was a soldier, and he belonged to a generation that believed that things could be better, whether it all gone completely bonkers when they went but he actually thought that way. Contrast that with today, where you got this group but have had no clue about economic development. They don't know what you're talking about. Tinu, who's Suu? Kyi is? Number two is another person in the same category, different generation of military with different agendas. Then who else did I see? I think Minang was was really important, and he didn't. I didn't get to him until early in September, sorry, early in October, very close to the time I was leaving. And min ko nang was the student leader at that time. His name is, you know, conquer of kings, and he was very defiant, and I met him in a diplomat's house in the suburbs, and we blanked everything out, so there's no way anybody can know where that was taken. And he was, you know, very inspirational character. I mean, he was, he was passionate about what he was doing, but we knew that time was running out for him, that he was going to be arrested, and he gave me an interview, and then he gave me a speech, a list of demands, which I passed on to the BBC, and that was Broadcast. And he and I had an arrangement whereby I would take pictures of him with a bandana across his face to protect his identity, because, you know, the photography levels were so low at that time in Ringo, and then I took pictures of him that were of him just sitting in a long g white shirt, purple Aung, she and nothing. And he's sitting on a stool with a white background, and he just looks like a sparrow like I mean, he just looks you cannot believe that this man is the conqueror of kings, and harmless and benign. And the agreement was basically the pictures of him with his his face unmasked, would not be released until, until he was captured. And that was well understood, and it applied, actually, to all the student leaders, the eight, eight generation that I met at that time. And those films caused me a considerable worry, because if they fell into the wrong hands, things would not be good. You know, they had to be managed. This is a very important element in covering Burma, that you didn't do more damage was necessary, and you didn't take risks with other people's well being. So you had to be very protective, and, you know, cynical about what might happen. And so those pictures were actually smuggled out of the country. Those films and my notebooks were all taken out at the early in October, separately from me, so they couldn't get me at the airport. And they did. They stopped me at. Airport. So they knew I was coming. And when I look back on that time, you know there were about six of us, half a dozen foreign journalists. There people from mainly British journalists, actually the observer, Sunday Times, Financial Times. And I was there for Asia week principally, but reporting for other people as well. And you know, we were just all sitting locked up for a fortnight after curfew, seven o'clock in the evening at the strand hotel, and when just literally nothing happened, and the strand hotel was the center of operations for the foreign media, because it had a telex. It had one international phone line, I believe, and all the phones have been disconnected because they were all being monitored previously, and the Telex machine didn't actually work correctly. I mean, you couldn't type in a message and send it on the ticket tape. You had to send it live, treating the Telex machines if it was a telephone line. So it just went live, and then you actually typed it live to Hong Kong. And that resulted in Asia week getting the biggest telex bill of it. And they were appalled. I think it was $3,000 or something, but I sent more than one message. But anyway, so that was the center of operations. And basically we had one of the intelligence units on the same street as a strand. Which one was it? Anyway we knew. And they all went on. They all started demonstrating, so they were part of the revolution, so they weren't watching us. The staff at the strand were all on our side. I mean, they were fantastic and warning us when things were going to go wrong. That was an interesting time. I It's
Host 52:02
wonderful. It's It's really amazing to get this time travel caption, and you really have the mind and the voice of a journalist as you tell this to us, because you're, you're using this evocative language and a remarkable memory to take us back to these experiences, the weather, the feelings, the what it's like to be there. I mean, this is obviously the your background, in training as a journalist, in photography and writing, to bring that story objectively and to be aware, to be curious, and then bring that to your readers or viewers. And yet, all these decades later, this memory of this time ago is coming back to us in the starting clarity. And what I really appreciate too, is that you're you're describing this really as events are unfolding, you know, really as not with the knowledge of what came after, but with the chaos and confusion of what was happening then and all that was known and unknown. So that's another part of it. And as you're describing these different characters that you're meeting, you're having first hand encounter. Many who you have first hand encounters with, they win, not so much, but Aung Ji and Aung San Suu Kyi and Michael Aris and min ko nine, and within andu, etc, etc, you're, you're meeting them in, in the case of some such as Aung San, Aung San Suu Kyi and and min ko nine, you're meeting them as they be, as they became who they were, as They as really, in the moment of inception of where their personality and decisions met the circumstances of the age, and they would forever, they and the nation would forever be changed by decisions they were making. In other cases, such as unu or u tunu, you're meeting individuals with an extensive background, but who this situation has changed them in the decisions they are making in those moments and and responding to I'm also curious what you were able to glean about the relationships between these individuals, not just their profiles, but you know, you have many Of the people you've talked about, ostensibly on the same side. You know, Min ko nay, Aung Ji, Aung San Suu Kyi U Tun nu, promoting wanting to look at a future beyond the military rule. And yet, you know, I imagine that it was, it was not entirely smooth sailing. How they, they, they were, they were envisioning their role and the future they wanted to see beyond the military, even though they all wanted to see some kind of democratic future beyond military rule. And so I wonder what you could tell us about the kind of personality tensions and relationships between these individuals as
Dominic Faulder 54:59
well. Well. I mean, I wasn't a fly on the wall in that sense. So it would be second hand, except close second hand because I was in the country, but that this is the period when the National League for Democracy was being formed. And so you had Aung Ji there in the very early stages, and Suu Kyi and Uno and this things I've talked about unus cabinet, and that really irritated the other players, because they felt that he he'd sort of jumped the gun and put himself back in the driving seat, and I interviewed him on this very subject, probably on the more interesting of the interviews. And he said, Well, you know, I have to do what I think is correct and and then afterwards, consult with others to see if it is and whether that's democratic or not. And so he wasn't apologetic for it, but Aung Ji and Suu Kyi were the two more obvious younger players at that time, and they had this falling out whereby they just didn't agree on a thing. And this would this would dog the NLD all the way through the 90s, the military, the old retired military elements. Q Aung is in the distance coming, coming down for the 1990 election. So they didn't, they didn't agree on everything. And the students and the workers, the unions, you know that that sector were basically willing to lock in behind anybody that gave them a structure to take the situation forward, and that's where it all went wrong. They couldn't make those key decisions at that point and stand up against, you know, to have something locked in to confront the military. But of course, the military was utterly brutal. And I talked about the shooting of the alleged looters. Well, you know, we used to go into Rangoon General Hospital, particularly to check what was going on, how many people were still being shot. You know, who was being looked after. The first thing that struck us, this colleague of mine, when we went into Rangoon General was how empty it was. And what had happened was that people had got wounded. They'd come in, been dressed, gone off, because they knew the first place that they would be looked for would be in the hospital. So there were a lot of people at that time suffering terribly from very serious wounds in the privacy of their homes. And I think it was a UNICEF convoy went up country at this time with, you know, basically medicines found exactly the same thing. All the hospitals were empty. So it wasn't just happening in Rangoon. So anyway, that level of brutality against people trying to maneuver and create a political structure that didn't exist. These things are crashing around. They just don't go together. It's not going to come it's not going to be a happy ending. So on the first of October, the general strike that had been in position was declared formally over illegal by the SLOC, the state law and order restoration Council, and they put the 22nd light infantry out on the streets in front of City Hall. So it's that right near SULI pagoda. And these troops were on the streets. So there were big lorries, you know, lorries, the standard stuff, and I'll never forget the scene of them standing there with their helmets on cheap, little rounded helmets, tatty uniforms, cooking their brains in the morning sun. I mean, it was just not a nice place to be standing around. And at the back of them was the officer in command, and he's sitting in a good uniform with a kind of Australian flat, soft hat on. And the thing I remember was that he was carrying this massive bowie knife that went right down his thigh. And I really thought to myself, what kind of officer has need of a weapon like that? Just creeping, and I was I'd crept into Sule pagoda to try and photograph this, this formation because, and there were others of my colleagues who had trouble in the morning trying to do the same thing. Nobody succeeded. And I remember getting in there, and the portico of the pagoda has been changed since it doesn't look today like it did at that time. Gave me a view out, and I saw this, this opportunity, and I remember putting my bag down, pulling the camera. The minute I moved the camera, all these people started moving towards me, you know, like three or four people in the shadows. Uh, military intelligence and and they just, sort of, they didn't even say this, just wave of, no, don't do that. And I realized I wouldn't have a chance if they wanted to call my bluff. So I dropped the camera, but I walked straight out of that doorway towards the troops, because I couldn't I couldn't see that they could really and so I walked behind them, and I walked past the officer who just looked at me, and they didn't make a single move against me. And that told me that, in a way, they wanted me to see it, which means that we're rather stupid not to let me photograph it, but they wanted the word to be out about how hard line it was, whoever I might be, they guessed why, why I would be interested, so that that kind of unbelievably brutal opposition undermined all the political moving maneuvering of that period. And then I came back to Bangkok after that, and I'm sorry, there was something else that was really important that happened in that time, and that was that the slurk did the one good thing that they during their early days, and that was the announced the creation of the elections commission. And this was really significant. And the head of the elections commission was a retired diplomat who was, he was well thought of Secretary. The Secretary was a good man. And I looked at this and I thought, I should talk to them, even though theoretically or technically, they're government. But I thought I should talk to them and show that there's an effort to get their side of the story, and also to hear what they had to say, because, you know, it's great, great information. So I made contact with them, and they invited me to see them, and they were extremely, courteous and helpful and gave me a full report. And you know, if anybody had been wondering what I was up to, they would then confirm that I was a journalist, but at the same time they would say, hey, this guy's he's not hostile. He's not antagonistic. Gratuitously. He's trying to find out what's going on. And at that point, a lot of very wild reportings coming out of places like Bangkok. So better to have this small handful of people, even if you weren't talking to them, genuinely, reporting accurately. I mean, Rangoon was had been brutally suppressed, so it was calm. That was a big, something significant to report. And so I made contact with these people. I think that was appreciated. And when I came out at the end of the year, I made contact with various diplomats in Rangoon, particularly the Australians. And Chris lamb was the ambassador at the time. And I said, Would, do you think you could get a letter from me through to general Suu man, the senior general the head of the school, asking for an interview? And and I said, you know, I actually think that it would help if they were able to give their side of the story and tell us what they're planning. And anyway, it's a complicated story, but in fact, it worked, and I got this strange letter in the middle of January saying that I was allowed to come to to Rangoon, and the possibility of an interview with the senior was being considered. They were very careful not to say I was getting an interview, but just that, I was welcome to arrive. And so I went out. And of course, I was arriving as a journalist this, there was none of the deception that had gone before. I mean, previously, I'd arrived with all my cameras, the first thing I'd do would be put half my equipment in different places, so that if I got nabbed or my equipment was damaged, I would have a backup system to carry on working if I was not under arrest. And so that was always in my mind. But anyway, I remember arriving, and military intelligence had sent my minder to collect me and Mazda, little Mazda, 323, so I had my own car, and I went through customs, and I opened the suitcase, and it had more film than anybody had ever seen, more recording equipment, TV, videos. I've got the whole thing covered. All these people looks and their jaws just dropped. It was so flagrant they'd never seen anything like it. And then I went to. The to stay at the strand. And my mind is a very nice young captain, and his wife had sent a gift of you know, so it was as nice Burmese as you can possibly imagine, was in the room next door to me, and the next morning, I got up and had breakfast in the restaurant, and he suddenly came running in, absolutely panic stricken, half dressed and everything, because he thought I'd given him the slip when he went to knock on my door and I wasn't there, just having breakfast now. So it's more than his life was worth to lose me. But anyway, so they called me in and Brigadier General David Abel interviewed me, and we both knew what was going on that it was a polite encounter, and I wasn't going to wind him up. He's a very nice, easygoing sort of character, anyway, sensible, and he was basically sent there to test me. But when I'd arrived at the strand, Aung Joah, who was the acting foreign minister, was waiting downstairs to talk to me, and then sent me upstairs to meet tan Suu, who was one of kinin offsiders who vetted me as well. And Aung Joah was full of the sort of Van killer stuff about, you know, saw Mungs, a wonderful family man with great sense of humor. You'll love him. And then I went upstairs to be interviewed by Tun Suu, who's military intelligence, and he wanted to know about my visits to Burma. And he sort of said, oh, you know, we understand that you're very interested in our country and that you like to visit here? And I said, Yes, that's true. He said, Well, how many times have you been here? Is it two or three? And I said, this is my 13th visit. And he was just livid, all that surveillance I got because I never put my name on anything, because I was a very young kid, yeah, who didn't, didn't look like much of a threat to anything. And I got away with it, and it was a very funny moment. And then finally, and I the, this is for Asia week, and technically I had not been allowed to apply for an interview in the name of a publication, that that's their prerogative, so they felt that they should back it up with their own letter, which didn't cancel mine or anything like that. But it meant that a chap called David ring, who was the chief of correspondence, was sent in to join the interview, plus, in fact, another Asia week correspondent who wasn't allowed to come into the room. And so we ended up at the Ministry of Defense in the compound with the new wall that just been built around it to keep out all the marauding citizenry, citizenry. And we met so Mun and he was accompanied by Khin Yun, Secretary one. Tun was sitting next to him, and Suu Mung, Deputy Tun Suu, senior general Tun Suu, who would take over in 92 was sitting within four feet of me for the next three hours. But I was starting around doing all sorts of things, taking pictures, and asking all the questions, almost all of them. And song Aung was very, very interested, because this, this interview got going, and he immediately went to the 1947 constitution talked about clause 10, secession possibilities for the minorities if they didn't get on this so called promise, or this open door that the British had left, when, when, when they departed. And and my heart sank, and I thought, Oh, God, all this effort, and he's going to give us a stupid lecture on the usual crap, yeah? And it just welled up in me, and I said, Well, General, that's all very interesting, but Dada and I went straight off on on what had just happened. And for him, it's like, almost like a relief. I thank God for that. Somebody's telling me what to do, you know, and someone talked, and he, he promised, this is the first form of promise. I will lay flowers on the road to democracy. It's somewhere in there you'll find it. And that, you know, he had all these intentions, and there would be an election and everything. And in a way, it was much better than people might have expected. But just to get the junta to talk, which we can't do today in 2025 these people are completely impenetrable. You cannot get to them. But just to get this conversation. Conversation going and for it to last for that length of time was an achievement, and not for myself, but for the western concept of how coverage should be. And it went on for a long time, and I concluded that these general Burmese generals have bladders of steel because they were feeding us coffee, and life was getting fairly miserable for the end of it. And but anyway, that interview was published and Asia week. It was a cover story for Asia week, but the headline was, I saved Burma sorman quotation marks, and it's all about, I say, Burma from an abyss. And this is a rehearsed line that he came out with. But when I arrived in Rangoon, I contacted Suu Kyi, who was down in the south, and she was doing the tour in which she was nearly shot. Do you remember where she walked down the street and didn't stop and the soldier backed off? Yeah, and I'm not absolutely clear my own my mother, I spoke to her before after, but she was on that she was in that part of the world, and she was absolutely furious that this interview was happening and it wasn't directed at me personally, but her point of view was that the military should not be talking to two journalists from a from Hong Kong or from Asia week, which was in Hong Kong, but they should be talking to her and the political parties who cannot, Who can argue with that. That's perfectly correct from a from a media point of view, as a reporter, that just didn't fly. We got the interview. Is probably the first interview of Burmese Head of State in about 30 years, and they win spokes gave some frivolous interviews to Italian journalists and things like that, but a serious one about about Burmese politics. And I'm sure who knew would have been pretty talkative in his day. But anyway, this is, this was an event, and this was something to be encouraged. And so anyway, she was very upset, and I don't know whether I was in her bad books at that point, this is early 89 but when I came back in, I was allowed back in. I had a certain latitude. So quite noticeable, so did other people, but a certain latitude for the first half of 89 so I was able to get in and then just thinking we had the elections, sorry, 89 Suu Kyi then began the demonstrations, not so much demonstrations, but Giving these great talks speeches in the suburbs of Rangoon and moving around on her own in a little cream Corolla, very vulnerable. Tun was there by her side, and she'd go and she'd give these speeches, and I remember these crowds. They were so utterly peaceful and kind of in awe. Just how can she talk like this? How can she say these things, and the looks in their faces were just astonishing, and I would follow her convoy with other other journalists in open truck, Open to open pickup trucks. And I can't I, I was so struck by a vulnerability at that time. You know, I've got pictures of that car just just waiting to be ambushed. It could be taken out at any moment. And I got a message from military intelligence to stop riding around in the back of pickup trucks because it was annoying them. But it all came from one particular incident, and that was that I was on the pickup truck. Suu Kyi was up on a balcony talking. And because I had this elevated viewpoint, I could see these military trucks suddenly appearing to disperse the crowd. And they had these big hinos, little Mazda Jeeps in front big speakers on them telling people to disperse, not yelling at them, but just disperse. Disperse. Break it all up. And I was with a time correspondent, and we got off the pickup, and we walked towards the police who were leading it in the master there was a major and a policeman, and this major suddenly starts shouting at me to stop taking pictures. Don't do it. And I picked the. Just took the camera and took a shot of him, you know, three frames on an f3 nickel neck three, and the crowd went ballistic. They had never seen anybody do something like that. Seems so, so trivial. I didn't even think about and this, just this roar went through the crowd. And the time correspondent, well, sort of Gosh, and picked up his camera and went pick, you know, took a very firm picture, and there was another cheer. And it was a very interesting moment. It could have gone very badly wrong, and it was nothing I did intentionally, but the idea that people could just do something like that and ignore the authority on the ground not to finally just do it, because that's what they were there to do it. Foxxed, everybody, and it was very, very not common in Rangoon at that time. So anyway, that happened. That happened in 1989 and then June. So I timed my visit, because I used to do all my own visas, and because I knew that things were boiling at this point. And then I ended up, you know, going to see Suu Kyi a couple of times, and the second visit would have been about the 12th of July. We're sitting in the same room where I'd first interviewed her, and it's just that she and I, and she's pouring tea, and she said, I'd like you to stay. And I said, what you mean? And she said, I need, I'd like you to be around when whatever's going to happen happens and and I said, I've got a big problem with that, because I bust my visas previously when it didn't matter, but this time, I'm on an official visa. I had seven days, and I it would be very unwise to compromise my access again going back to the earlier time. So I said, No, I can't. And she said to me, Well, what do you think is going to happen? I said, Well, why don't we do this interview on the basis of what might happen and what, what you are doing now, and why you are doing, yeah, and, and my undertaking to you is that that if anything goes wrong, I'll have the interview published the next day, come high or hell or high water. It was, it was a very interesting situation. So she said, Well, what do you think? What do you what are you expecting? I said, Well, I think there are three options. One is that they could kill you, which I think is very unlikely. That's not the way they're behaving. They could try and put you on a plane out of the country, which is very difficult in terms of diplomacy, if you suddenly expel somebody to a third party, to a third country, without asking any permission or clearing it in advance, is very hostile, basically, or they can put you under arrest. And I said, I think either a prison or house arrest. I'm expecting to put you under house arrest. And she said, Yes. So then we had the interview together, and that interview was published the day after she was locked up by Asia week. So all the timing worked. It was a news weekly, but it happened to work, and I think she was locked up on the 20th of July, 1980 8189 and we would have printed it that day or the next day, the next day, extraordinary. And you'll find that that interview in in her book freedom from fear, which was published when she won the the Nobel Prize in 1991 so that was and then life got much harder for me in terms of getting in. I think there was a right here or wrongly. I think it's wrong actually, because I will always talk to everybody, but there was a feeling I was too pro Suu Kyi, and on the other hand, I had access to her, and I got good material. So you can't, I don't think you can play the game of reporting to ensure that you're going to get the next visa. You just can't do that. You have got to go in do the story, do as much as you can to get all sides so because it makes it a much better story, and then hope that they're going to be reasonable. But everything was turning again. Against me at that point, basically because people had got into saw Mungs ear talking about foreign conspiracies and the BBC, they published a collection of BBC reports, and it was called sky full of lies, and then saw Mung was giving very, very long, unfathomable, erratic speeches that just got worse and worse. And so the whole thing was derailing. But there was a particular character involved in this called Son junta, who was the editor of the working people's daily, which today is the new light of Myanmar, but it was working people's daily, and he used to write this very, very nasty column under the byline, both on money General Steel, and it was complete nonsense. But anyway, he used to write this thing. And I was, I did a story for the Asian Wall Street Journal. It wasn't a story. It was an op ed about the war of words. And I was talking about all these different things that were going on, and in the course of that, I revealed that San junta was both only, and he went ballistic. He thought this could never leak, get out. So he wanted to get me. So I remember I was late in for the 1990 election. Results, and asked for I was about three weeks after, and asked for an interview with the information Committee, which was given to me literally overnight. Yes, please come and see us. And what I didn't realize was that it wasn't as much of an interview as I was expecting. It was going to be my show trial, and I arrived, and they're all sitting on the sofa, and they laid out a beautiful tea for me, and bananas and cakes and God knows what, and I'm taking pictures of them on the sofa, which were marvelous. And I've forgotten his name now, but he was an elderly chap who was the head of the stalk information committee. And he said, But before, before we have our questions, and I'd given fed some samples ahead of time, Gus has something he'd like to tell you. What he had to tell me was a four page denunciation of all my crimes as a journalist and my failings and everything, and they all looked it was really quite funny, because the rest of the talk information committee was clearly rather embarrassed by this, and they were all looking in different directions. Had hands and their knees, and Sonja was just going through this stuff, and I was getting worse and worse, Dominic Fulton was admit to his failings, and then he finally got to my punishment, and that was that I had to write an apology and an explanation for for my journalistic sins in the Fauci Economic Review. And everybody in the room at that point just looks at each other, because I didn't work for the forest Economic Review. The correspondent for The Far Eastern Economic Review was Bert linner, the Swedish journalist who was, you know, number one target, because he he'd reported Burma for years and years, and so this, this thing was very embarrassing. And anyway, the the whole thing came to an end, and they, they bundled out of the room. And there was a particular editor from the working people's daily who was Anglo, Burman and and he just said something like, so now you know who both and min he is, literally, as he said that the door opened and the cameraman came in to retrieve the live mic that he'd forgotten to take out and this guy's face, the guy from working, just horror being caught. I don't know what happened after that.
Host 1:24:04
What stories so many threads there from what you said, I think the one I'd like to pull first and examine is is, is your relationship with Aung si with Aung San Suu Kyi, which is really Aung San Suu kyi's relationship with media and with Western media, because there's two different kind of strands of the way that you described interactions with her, which I think then revealed themselves more once she came to power in 2015 and relationship with with media and diplomats at that time. On one hand, she's certainly seen the value that you bring doing sit down interviews, wanting to make sure that the coverage of aspirations of her and her people and her movement are being understood by a sympathetic western audience of what they're up against and what they're trying to do. And you know, really, really these laudable and I. And forward thinking, sophisticated ways of how the world works and how you can you can talk to the media to have yourself represented, but what you're saying is very interesting.
Dominic Faulder 1:25:09
And yes, she was well aware of the importance of the outside world getting to know more about this completely forgotten the country. We were starting at Ground Zero. Nobody knew where it was, yeah, and that's that had been the great appeal to me, of the country. And this is a great story to get involved with. You know, it's going to happen. Suu Kyi was very media savvy in many, many ways, to the point where there were, there were bureau chiefs in Bangkok tearing their hair about reporters going in and asking softball questions. Get to put her on the spot, grow up, basically. And of course, she's a very attractive Yeah. So all that plays into it. And, you know, I don't think I fell into that trap. And she and I had, you know, not a huge number of inches, but she did know me. She knew me from that first wave, and that meant that she would talk to me on the telephone. There were some journals she just didn't want to have to deal with because she couldn't, couldn't, not control the narrative, but she she couldn't trust them not to be cognizant of the situation that she was in and appreciate her difficulties. But she would do things that were irritating, like, for example, you would I would say, well, what's the Manifesto of the of the NLT. And she said, Well, I can't tell you that. Well, of course you can. I mean, this is what politicians do. I would do this. I would do that, and everything. And there was another funny incident, which I said to, well, do you give smoke, any credits at all? Is there anything that they've done, right? And she said, Well, joining Austan was a good idea, but that was our idea. Anyway. They couldn't get any credit. And, you know, they basically were ideologically so far apart. And tan Suu, who succeeded, Suu man was so irritated by Suu Kyi ba chiefsness, from his point of view, that that they were hardly on speaking terms. They weren't on speaking terms. I mean, they were very, very few meetings between her and the slurk and the SBDC as it developed. But I think this has actually turned out to be a problem. I remember going into Burma shortly after she was released, so that would have been about 96 and I went in to do a story on the gas pipeline, the Adenauer pipeline, and Moe ki sponsored my visa in and extract some promise from me that I wouldn't try and talk to Suu Kyi when I was there. And since you know, this was the story, and they were supplying the visa, but they weren't placing any conditions on what I reported on the bike line. And if I remember correctly, it was, yeah, sorry, dude, it was the start of visit Myanmar as well. So you have to go back and pin down the dates on it. And I'd said to moe k I'll do the pipeline, but I want to cover the start of visit Myanmar. And there was me and one other correspondent from the economist in the group. And after we'd finished all the pipeline stuff, we were told to leave the country. And this is not what was agreed. And, you know, so we had these very peculiar phone calls with military intelligence, with people we never saw, and said, This is not what was agreed. We'd like to say we'd like to cover visit Myanmar. And finally, this voice comes on the phone. Says, yes, you can do whatever you like, and you don't have to leave until you've done it. And that was it. There was no no encounter, all down a phone line and and I thought, well, stuff it. Moe went back on their word. So I went straight off to CCG, and I arrived at her university of a new house, and there was a guard contingent just inside the gate. And I went through, and they said, you know, why are you here? And I said, It's none of your business. Can I? Can I speak to somebody from the house? And they sent out one of her secretaries, a man, I have no, no idea what it was called. And he came up to me, so can I help you? And I said, we, I'd like to interview. I'd like to see Duan Suu Aung San Suu Kyi. And he said, well, she's quite busy today. Um. Um, you know, can I say who is asking? And I certainly introduced myself, and he disappeared into the house, and he came back, literally five minutes later, said, Come tomorrow at three o'clock. And the interesting thing is about this story is that for Suu Kyi, I would have been one of the very last people she expected to see, because basically, she dealt with different waves of journalists. And this was a period after her release, so she was talking some Western journalists, and so she was constantly having to get used to new personalities the interaction. And so she was, you know, very good to talk to it. And for me, it was just like carrying on the conversation we'd had in 89 just sitting in a different room. In fact, it was her front room, and she gave a very good interview. But the point is that she constantly had to, you know, trim her sails and work out who the personalities were, who were the effective journalists who actually got stories to move and then, of course, this went on. You know, you'd see all these appearances on the gates of University Avenue, and she'd be answering questions, and she'd be giving interviews as usual, but went through more lockups and finally reappeared. But the interesting thing, I think, was that when she actually finally became state councilor, she's very elusive, she didn't talk to the foreign media. There wasn't, there wasn't a sort of, well, I owe you anything. It was that's a different period. And she, I think partly, it's to do with her little time she had. I mean, she's trying to manage everything she's notorious for, you know, not giving herself enough space and not delegating work, that's one issue. But also, I don't think she liked to be challenged. There were so many things up in the air. The relationship with the military was so incredibly difficult to manage anything could set anything off? Yeah, and so I think she was very, very cautious once she came to power, and relatively inaccessible.
Host 1:32:18
But that's the way it was moving to her time as State Counselor, and what has largely been called a fall from grace of her status at that time. And I think that fall from grace can be interpreted in one of two ways, or maybe a combination of both one meaning, that she held certain values and aspirations and and then once she got in that position of power, that there was that that some of her beliefs and policies at that time became revealed themselves to be more concerning than was known at that time. That's one way to interpret it. Another way to interpret it was that we never really understood who she was, and that people, quite literally fell in love with her, that were diplomats and activists and journalists as well as you described with the softball questions, and that we were, I say we, I mean we, as in the general sense of the Western world that was covering her at the Time, and that was following her and learning about her. Learning about her, and that we saw what we wanted to see and and so the fall from grace was more an indication from our side of never really seeing things that clearly or that critically before. But I wonder, and of course, this quote, unquote, fall from grace that happened 2015 on. There are also those Western journalists and observers that have different interpretations of, you know, the difficult positions that she was in and what she actually meant when she went to the Hague and what she and how much control she actually had and will will, in some ways defend from her side. You know what she really meant and what she was trying to do so as someone, as yourself, that was there, as we've established, from really the inception of her being on the scene, of NLD arising as a movement, and having those early conversations, and then a period of conversations with her over those number of years, getting to know her, to know her personally as as an individual, as well as as an emerging leader, and having all those critical conversations as a journalist asking those critical questions, what is your interpretation of what happened after 2015 And was there anything that surprised you? Were there indications that you could glean from those early days? Did you see a transformation or a change?
Dominic Faulder 1:34:47
Firstly, I'd be very careful about getting to know her. Met her. I interviewed her on a number of occasions on the phone, and so I had access. But to claim that I. Had some special relationship and be really very uncomfortable with that. It's just it's not correct. Suu Kyi was set up for a terrible fall. You know, when she finally came out, 2015 2016 when everything's going you had people like Madeleine Albright coming in, just totally enchanted. This is back in the 90s, totally enchanted with Suu Kyi then gets locked up at the strand hotel and eats room service for three days and doesn't see anybody because the Burmese are keeping everything away, Hillary Clinton, Obama, they all came in, put her up on this great pedestal and claimed credit for what had happened that was absolutely not due the Americans did not bring change to Burma at that time. Nonsense, the ASEAN is just as bad. Some of the claims that were made that it was the ASEAN, ASEAN way of doing absolutely nothing finally brought about a result. Well, okay, where are you now? Why can't you bring up any kind of solution to the present predicament that Myanmar is absolute Robert so Suu Kyi was set these unbelievable expectations that were completely unachievable, and everybody's falling all over her and and then when things get really difficult, and she's realizing that, that she's in a very, very difficult position every day, that she that she is State Counselor, it doesn't, It doesn't follow through. And then, of course, all these fair weather krap long observers who actually know nothing about Burma turn on her after the Rohingya thing. I'll come back to what I think she did wrong. But they all turn on her. And people like Bono say, Well, you should have resigned. Are you mad? You know, you fought for all this time. You've spent all these years locked up in your house. You don't just resign. You carry on fighting, and you're in a very difficult position. Geldof calls handmaiden of hell, some absolutely appalling thing. So the way everybody turned on her when it went really pear shaped, and she didn't deliver, and she missed out very, very badly on the Rohingya is it's just terrible. So what happened the outside world's treatment, the complete lack of understanding of the predicament that she faced, that is all wrong, but she made mistakes. And when you go back to this disaster at The Hague and defending, just disputing with people like Fergal King, whether Khin of the BBC, whether there was ethnic cleansing going on when it quite clearly was going on, these were dreadful mistakes that she made. Why did she make them, or did she think that she could finesse something from the position that she was in that was not apparent to the rest of us? I mean, if you talked about something like Sean Tunnell, he will, he will give you those sorts of arguments and say, Yes, this is, this is, and still say that she got it wrong, yeah. But so it's a tragedy. Yes, it all went wrong. Should you blame Suu Kyi for that? Certainly not. Because it's the military that caused the problem with the Rohingya. It's the military that are completely wrecked the country. They've wiped out all the economic gains that we've seen. You know, in the past two decades, at least, they have killed people. Basically, they've shattered the country that they pretend they are trying to unify. So you can't blame Suu Kyi for that. You can say that she was wrong on the Rohingyas and that with time, maybe she would have rectified that situation. Personally, I doubt it. I think it's It's so awful, it is almost unrectifiable. But to blame her for that, no, the outside world didn't understand Burma. Maybe people like me should take some blame for not trying to explain it more. Maybe editors should take responsibility for not commissioning the right question. But 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. The terrible things that happen in Burma, see,seem to repeat themselves. Yeah. And so for a casual reading audience, it's very, very hard to follow. And yes, anyway, I don't think anybody comes out of it very well. It's a bit like, you know, Cambodia. I mean, who did more damage to Cambodia was it the Chinese. Was it the Americans bombing the place? Was it the UN failing? Was it the French colonies? Mean, go on. Everybody should step up and take their share of the blame.
Host 1:40:14
You mentioned that she was in a very difficult put in an almost impossible position, given the circumstances when she came on, and yet you also say that there were some critical mistakes that she made. So do you feel that as hard as the situation was, that she found herself, if she had navigated it differently, fully recognizing what those challenges were, it's not smooth selling. You'relooking at if she had found a way to rectify away from some of you can get into what those mistakes you think were made? Do you think that things could have turned out differently, or do you think that it was just impossible through and through?
Dominic Faulder 1:40:54
Well, I think just as one point, I don't think anybody reckoned with the personality of min Aung Lang, that's that this guy would behave in this way wasn't foreseen. And there was some attempt to have a, you know, pseudo democratic process in place and take things forward. The economy was picking up. Tourism was was becoming was not out of control, and was was doing well, everything was was on the up and but, you know, you can still see lots of problems. I, personally, I have a problem with journalists who come in and say, This is how a country should be run. They're Crusaders. They're evangelists. I think they're deeply suspect people. That's not their job. So I put that up as a kind of defense, in a way. But 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. That's the job of a journalist. When you look at what was going on in in Burma under the last government, and I think much more will come out about how difficult the relations were with the military. Stuff isn't easily accessible. The apparently, the body language between Suu Kyi and min Aung rang was incredibly bad. You know, from about 2017 onwards, it was on a collision course. And did she handle it as well as she could, I don't know. I mean, she's criticized for micromanagement. She's criticized for complete failure to delegate, and also the whole issue of succession. What comes next, institutional. These are the areas that we should look at and where she's probably open to criticism. But min Aung rang is something else. Yeah. I mean, this guy should have retired ages ago. So his his, you know, his game is staying in power, just in case people come after him, possibly. Tun Suu is clearly out of the picture. He's doesn't have any kind of influence over him. He we know that the elections happen. They didn't go the way the military was hoping, and that the NLD did even better. Then they turn around saying, well, it's all corruption, but it was all done according to the system that the military put in place from 2008 so what's going on here? It's your it's your framework. They've done better within that framework. Why are you now criticizing? There's a lot to criticize about that framework. You know, if there was more proportionality, then you could say that, you know, ethnic parties would have done better, that the NLD should not be so dominant, that it should have the you know, there's more counterbalance to it politically, which is not to say that you want the military to be more powerful. There's all sorts of things that you could look at, but I the idea of the coup, which was rattling around, if you remember, months before it actually happened. But ideally, actually do that and look at disasters. He doesn't control the country. He's lost control of his borders, his stuffed up, investor confidence. Everything that you can see about the country is a disaster. Yet this should be one of the great success stories of Southeast Asia. It's got all everything for success. Potentially, it hasn't happened. So it's, you know, you go around chasing your tail on this. It's an absolute disaster. And I think one of the things from as a journalist, one of the things that's. Interesting is that I see, I look at the stories that are fired, and there's a lot of material coming out, a lot is being reported. This is not 1988 when it was a handful of foreign journalists running around, desperately trying to work out without revealing themselves, what on earth is going on? You know, that is difficult. This time, they've been trained. They've worked for successful Burmese operations, Frontier, Myanmar, the irwadi, you know, these are good, good reporting standards. They're world class. So in that side, it's good. And the idea that Burma is not getting the attention it gets it deserves because the media are neglecting it, I do not accept that at all. Is getting the attention. The problem is it's not being read and it's not on the agenda. Finally, Gutierrez finally, has just appeared in Bangladesh to inspect the Rohingya. He's been to Kyiv, he's been everywhere else, and he's not really even coming in to find out what the ties have got on their plate, or the rest of Aung. It's not, it's not the same. So, yes, it's not followed as story. And I think this is something really ironic about aboutBurma historically, because if you go back to 88 this thing kicked off, these demonstrate, the whole country is demonstrating, and the world suddenly notices Burma for the first time in decades. Yeah, look at what's going on. And if you go back and follow through it. It's the world's top news story. Where's this going? It's difficult to report. And then suddenly, general Zia Ul Haq. Is that his name? Yeah, I think it is. Who's the president of Pakistan gets blown out of the sky. The American ambassador, a crate of mangoes has exploded, who's been assassinated. He just wiped the Burma story off. It just disappeared. And Burma always misses the boat. You can talk about reporting. That's one aspect of it, but also economically. I mean, the 90s, the whole of Southeast Asia lit up. I mean, everything happened at that time. So yeah, there's a there's a lot. But anyway, that my point is that the idea that Burma is neglected because it's Asia, because these people don't Massimo, I don't accept that. It's because it's not getting the attention that it deserves. If you compare it to Ukraine, for example, and Ukraine is really interesting because it's an example of a country that has become a black hole in a war created by one person, Putin Burma. It's the same story, different circumstances, but it's one person's madness that created this huge problem for the whole country. So, you know, why is it that Kyiv, sorry, why is it Ukraine gets so much attention? Well, one thing that helps is that you've got a full international press corps operating from Kyiv throughout it. We're sitting here. We're in Bangkok, and this is as close as we're getting. We do not have the access that we have before, that you have there. So I think that's keeping that story really well sloped, well reported. It's much harder for from this point of view, even with all the stuff that's good now, the recent cut in in aid from the US is not going to improve the situation, because a lot of these organizations require funding. So the rest of the world needs to look, look around very seriously and find more funds to get into these pockets, otherwise it's just going to dry out that situation is often very difficult already.
Host 1:49:04
Now, in past decades, you've talked about how there were aspects of the media, especially the foreign media, in this case, covering Burma, fundamental things that they were getting wrong, that they were misunderstanding. It's a different picture. Now in 2025 and post 2021 but do you feel there are certain prevailing narratives or kind of soft or lazy explanations, or a lack of nuance understanding of a very complex situation? Do you feel that in the reporting that you're seeing today that there continue to be certain flawed narratives that aren't being examined in greater detail that should be very careful with that.
Dominic Faulder 1:49:49
But I think partly because of Suu Kyi incredible aura, the projection of. The people got very badly misled on Myanmar, as it is now, and they thought that this was a nascent democracy full of, you know, COVID little Buddhists, who would, you know, turn into wonderful Democrats, yeah. And that really is an illusion. I mean, the level of violence that you see around the country is shocking, the atrocities, it's just unbelievable. So a lot of the people in play at the moment are not aspiring Democrats at all. They're people who are competing for primary resources. If you look at all the insurgencies, they've usually got one thing that's that's feeding them, you know, Jade, finger, chin, teak, for the currents, whatever it is. And then there's this sort of struggle that goes on for that. So you need to be very careful about what you're talking about the idea that democracy is the solution. It might be very desirable, but it's not. It's only one thing in the whole setup. And really, what you're looking for in Burma is a cease fire, some kind of cessation of violence and stabilization that will take you to another stage, and then you've got a very, very big problem with who is going to exert the influence to take the country to the next stage. Because what are we talking about? The countries of ASEAN, for example, are not democracies. They've all got different types of government, and we don't need to go into that. But all I'm saying is there isn't an ASEAN model of government. India is a huge democracy, but I don't think it's got that much say, compared to China, which is anything but a democracy. So, you know, democracy is part of of what is desirable to many people, many Burmese, I'm absolutely sure that they, you know, you've only got to look at the turnouts of free and fair elections in Burma to know that everybody there would like some kind of peaceful transition to a better place that's not in dispute. But you've got people in the country who don't think like that. And you know the national unity government is, is there, and they're very important, and they have points of view to convey. But How much control do they have? The military obviously doesn't have control of the country going backwards. They're fighting for their lives. They're not going to be very amenable to reasonable solutions. And so anyway, when you're looking at it now, where are we? Are we trying to get back to the 2021 situation? Which is being discussed, which is what was discussed last year, the idea that you have an election and you go back to something that the military shattered in 2021 and basically checked out, and they exercised this horrible clause in the Constitution. And I think really what's happening now is that a lot of people are talking about federalism and trying to find a way of keeping Burma unified within a federal framework. But who, who is going to lead on that? Who's going to come in and say, this is, this is in your interest. Who's going to be able to get all of them into a hall and they say, Okay, well, we'll sign up for it, which means a new constitution. This is a real mess. It's such a mess and the Americans have zero interest. It's China's back garden. I'm not going to be creating problems there. ASEAN doesn't know what to do with the best will in the world. I'm sure lots of people here who would like to see a much better situation, particularly from a business point of view. I mean, you know, normal trading relations, normal interaction, everything. There's nothing wicked about that. So who are you looking to I think that is, that's a big gap and a very, very big problem, but it is extremely frustrating, and I don't see any way forward. And, you know, bringing in the Norwegians and sort of saying, Oh, you've got it all wrong. It doesn't work like that. This isn't, isn't going to happen. Pretty depressing. And you know, considering the you could criticize the last government for many, many failings, for not getting to places fast enough and identifying it, but what you couldn't say is that there wasn't progress. But. Made, right? You cannot say that, yeah. And so, okay, it's not at the pace that you would like to see what anybody would like to see, but going forward is better. I mean, I, you know, it's a personal experience. I basically reduced all coverage of Burma personal coverage in the early 90s because I found it so depressing. Wow, this story was just so difficult, so inaccessible, slow, so slow moving. So, you know, as a business proposition, it wasn't that good, yeah, and also that it was kind of hopeless. It just wasn't resolving itself. And so I focused on Cambodia for for the second half of the 90s, and people used to chide me for being too optimistic about Cambodia and and I said, Well, no, I'm coming from coverage of a country that never, never gets anything better. And you can't say that of Cambodia. There's a lot that's going on, but Cambodia has come back from a holocaust, from a civil war, from being bombed to oblivion by a foreign power. And first, I'm not going to defend the government in Cambodia, but Cambodia is in a much better place than it was in the early 90s, when all the peace processes went through. So just, let's be realistic and be grateful for some of the things that have gone right now, in Burma's case, it's just all it was going in the right direction. There was a lot that was positive, and it's just all been thrown out the window. And it's a bit like dismantling US aid in some Cavalier where just totally reckless. If you do those sorts of things, can you put it back together again? And this is in Burma. I really Myanmar. I really worry about that. There's so much damage that's been done. So I mean that for in terms of journalism and what should be done about Burma? I think journalists need to keep on at it absolutely. But we need to look for stories that will get traction, that are not repetitive, not ignoring terrible things, but finding new ways of explaining it. And I mean, I, I worked for the Nikkei Nick Asia, which is, you know, online news board, and we were talking, I was talking with one of the editors about what I felt was was problematic in coverage, and that was that we weren't explaining how the situation had come to be. And I pointed out and the min Aung Lang and Putin occupy in terms of villainy, this slot of having basically taken a pair of countries and thrown them completely into a black hole, they both had that thing, whereas Putin has had any number of profiles done of him analysis. And if you looked at min Aung Lang, nobody's done anything. There are almost no profiles. He's mentioned. His background is given, but nobody's gone in and analyzed it. And so we did a cover story in micai On the third, I think it's the third anniversary of the coup. Judy, is that right? Yeah, the third and basically did a profile and used all sorts of interesting sources, and that story did very, very well, which is nice, nice to be read. But the point was that if you go on telling people that a village hall in Karen state has been bombed and 60 people have been killed, it's wicked, it's horrifying, it should not be not reported, but it's more of the same. But if you put out a story that says this is the character that's responsible this is the sort of person that can do this, perform a travesty of this kind. Then people say, Oh, I've been wondering about that. Where did it all come from? So that ended up as the best read story in that category that year. So I think that's interesting. It reveals something. There is interest, but it's you've got to find a way of getting to it. And of course, we live in a world where people are very short term. They don't read long stories. I was talking with a retired ambassador from from Australia who said that about coverage of Southeast Asia. You see, there's none. There's not enough. It's not it's just, it's simply not covered in any way at all. It's gone.
Host 1:59:50
So you did do the interview with San Aung back in the day, and got to know him at a time when wasn't they weren't, as you mentioned. They weren't quite as inaccessible then as they are now, by no means, but they were not quite so accessible then either.
Dominic Faulder 2:00:06
If you remember, Ne Win stepped down. San win appeared and and they win had gone off saying, we need democracy, but we'll shoot anybody that demonstrates. I mean, it was horrificdeparture. San win then appears, and one of one of the stories that followed him around was personally beheading nine dacoits. This is a horrific story, and that he believed, found meditation. He managed to clear the faces of five dacoits side of his his consciousness. This was meant to show that he was reasonable and improving. He was horrific that that is a facet of Burma that must be recognized, that there is awful butchery that goes on. It's been going on since, since the British times. You know, the British actually put a lid on a lot of these. That's one of the reasons the Karens are so fond of them. I didn't have, I would love to have gone back and spent time with him, you know, seen more of his sense of humor as Aung Joah was promising, but I didn'thave that. I had. I had the three hour session with him, and the time just to watch him. And it struck me quite interestingly. I mean, he was talkative. He wanted to tell his side of the story. He was garrulous. He was, I don't really think, at any point, particularly vile or aggressive or threatening. That wasn't part of it. But what struck me about him was that he was just he was trapped. The situation that he was in was completely insoluble. I mean, the problems that have been handed down to him as the head of the army were not new. They've been going on forever, the three cuts, the four cuts, the butchery of ethnics, all this murder of stuff, had been going on for decades, and the insurgencies had started literally as the British left. You know, the British left, the Karen were virtually on the border of Rangoon, threatening to come in. So he was dealing with something that had come to him, which personally, he must have known he wasn't equipped to deal with. He must have known he couldn't succeed. And so I did have a feeling of a very tortured person. And as we know, everything went wrong for him, and he lost his mind and succumbed to alcohol, and was basically removed in 92 in a palace coup. That is a very unusual incident in time in Burmese military history that basically it's a monolith nobody ever challenges, not like the Thai system of competing classes and what have you. It doesn't work like that. So saw Mungs removal basically for incompetence, because he was no longer capable of handling it. Was basically somebody had broken down. And there are these strange stories that follow saw Mung around. I mean, like, for example, that when Suu Kyi appeared at her gate that saw Mungs in the crowd, you know, just very normally. And that's such a Burmese story, you know, you've got to be so careful with it. It's a, it's a wonderful color this, you know, evocative population of the great imaginations, and something like that comes out. And you think, Oh, that's really interesting, but be very careful about reporting it. But I think something that would point in that direction is that there was the election in 1990 and it was saw Meng who promised it, and it was saw Meng who made the mistake of believing his intelligence agencies that they've got to do much better than they were so complete wipe out because of Ji Mung, Ji Mung organization. But I think if you go back, you'll find that so Mung was the only member of the junta sort of vote in civilian at our so I actually think that that he was there was something there, but he was sincere in that. And then, of course, it comes back, and it's, it's all NLD, it's just such a slap in the face for the military that all that propaganda is just a lie, and that may be what tipped him, that he tried and failed. I don't know. I don't know. It'd be good to find out.
Host 2:04:46
So you've been covering Burma for all these decades, and I'm just kind of pausing because I'm reflecting on this, this heavy note that still hangs in the air for me, of just the the, uh. Um, for lack of a better word, you know, the hopelessness, the pessimism that, the heaviness that, that that you're holding at this time. You're far from a newcomer to observing this you've you've been around the block, so to speak, so many times over and through those experiences, who you've met, what you've studied and what you've thought through, that you're bringing this wealth of background and experience into the present day. And I'm just, I'm just, you know, holding this heaviness from that statement of where you see it at this present day, how complex the problems are. And so I guess as we close, I just invite you to to further flesh out the the prognosis, or the the the uncertainty you feel in getting to a better place than we are now and and if there's you know, if where You do see things going, or if there are any, any bits of rays of hope that are in there, or if really you're holding it, and something that we should, that you feel that we might have to steal ourselves for, for more more bad news, or more difficult times coming.
Dominic Faulder 2:06:18
Well, I think it is a very, very grim outlook. The what we can see, what's different from 88 Okay, is that they ran out of steam in that six week period. They got to the end of when the coup came. But basically the military were waiting just to take with the coup de grace and knock them off. They were out of food. The kids had to go back to school. They were all getting sick, any number of problems that just basic survival meant they couldn't carry on. That did not happen in 2021 yeah, that is an astonishing, I agree, slap in the face, and it's a tremendous credit to these people that they simply are not going to lie down and say, carry on. By virtue of that, the idea that we we have elections and pretend to go back to what failed in 2021 is ridiculous. That's just not going to work. So something new has to be put on the table that people can get around to it. And the lesson of, I think, where the real problem here is. The lesson is of 2021. Is something that the ethnics has always known, that you cannot trust the military. So when we had the peace process under Suu Kyi, which did less well than 10 San the previous government, people were going around saying, Well, you have to lay down your weapons. And the ethnics, we'll never do that. I mean, maybe put them close to them somewhere and have some agreement, but give up your weapons, and then the peacemakers will say, Well, why not? Because we can't trust the military, then you have 2021 What does that prove you cannot trust the military? So that probably is the big, huge, you know, elephant in the room. What do you do with the military? Yeah, unless you can get the military to suddenly come out and say, Look, this was a really terrible mistake, and can we just try and go back to zero and settle our differences and remove, you know, the kind of the head of the military, basically, I don't think it's going to happen. I used to look at the parliament, and you've got the segmentation, you've got the military represented in that and I thought, well, that's not an ideal parliament, but it does have one big interesting possibility, and that is that you've got these middle ranking officers, right, major colonels, whatever they are, sitting side by side with elected politicians. And there's got to be osmosis. There's got to be some kind of talk, and politicians coming away saying, well, that chap's really not so unreasonable. You know that that, in a way, was a kind of a potentially promising midway stage, but now you the military have guzzled, dealt with, decapitated the elected politicians. It's not there. The trust is gone. It's been shattered. So that is the elephant in the room. What do you do with the military if you can't get them right out of politics, which obviously would be ideal, but it's not very realistic. So we're going to be batting around with this particular problem. And then it goes back to what I was saying before about who leads the way, and Suu Kyi has been locked up in this terrible prison in Naypyidaw. She's pushing 80. She's in poor health. She's not part of the future. She's I'msure she would wish the best for. The next generation. So where are we looking to now for the new generation of leaders? Given you know how appallingly these people have been abused, they're there that there are certainly the people with the competence to say what should be happening. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about putting them in a position to actually take the situation forward. And I think that's very, very hard. And I think this is all part of anybody who gets involved with Burma is is on a absolute roller coaster. You know? It goes you see the most amazing things. This the people I saw. I got access students in 18 one and you know, their passion, their idealism, and just the sheer guts of it going up against something, a security state, security apparatus as ruthless as that was, I'm not saying like I Hmm. Anyway, as I say, up and down and BOMA does surprise people from time to time, so let's not rule this out.
Host 2:11:14
Well. Thank you so much for your time in sharing these really priceless memories and experiences and reporting, bringing that bring it to us in the reality and the color that you have done today.
Dominic Faulder 2:11:27
I think it's wonderful that these sorts of podcasts are done because it's a different format, and the sound bites are aggressive, so the opportunity just to reflect on things in a much more general way is quite cathartic. But um, these things, I have to say, they live with you. You know, you can't you can't imagine that. You can be involved and totally dispassionate, walk away and well, it'snot my problem. It's not my beat anymore. That doesn't happen. And I think Burma is I've discussed this with colleagues who've covered it as well. It's the one country that really gets under your skin. For some reason, Burma's Cambodia is also fascinating. I think it's got that. And this part of the world has it. People, foreigners get involved with Southeast Asia and stay much longer than they ever anticipated. But Burma is the one that's the story that you always go back to the.
Host 2:12:31
What if and why do you think that is?
Dominic Faulder 2:12:33
I don't know. It's, It's intoxicating. I mean, it's such and there I think, all right, one thing that I love about Burma is that it's, it's a goldfish bowl. They're all completely wrapped up in themselves. And, you know, you know, the the meditation side of it, and the wonderful monasteries, is that something I've never been a part of. But the the, whenever you come across cultures that are self sufficient, self renewing. I'm not talking about killing each other, but, you know, there's something about that that's very interesting. And Burma is a kind of a world unto itself. And I remember in 81 when I first went there to pinch me, can someone, somewhere like this really still exist. It's just astonishing, just Astonish. There's
Host 2:13:23
Always something new to learn, isn't there?
Dominic Faulder 2:13:26
Yeah, and it's a great sense of humor. The people are lovely. So that's that's not that's never been in doubt. But I think it's that kind of goldfish bowl element that is so different to what you know, and that's what makes it very appealing, something you just want to get involved with and see more of and and some of it's tremendously amusing as well. Always a lot of laughter, and even in the most terrible situations. I mean, I was having my fortune told on near Suu di pagoda once, as one does, and everybody was, it was they were all amused because I was there and was sitting down on stalls. And finally, we about 15 minutes, and everybody's entranced. And I said, I'm going to now make a prediction. I think if we don't disperse now, we might be arrested.
Host 2:14:29
Everybody scuffled up.
2:14:39
Music.
Host 2:14:50
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