Transcript: Episode #289: These Songs of Freedom
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.
0:17
Oh, there's a fire in the sky again, the sign of mortars breaks up my sleep in the darkness, I hear my children breathing, feel the pulse of my baby's heartbeat. I am a peaceful man.
0:35
I don't believe in the rule of the in knocking down my door. I'm gonna do I watch the TV, I see those families playing on the green grass, swimming in the blue sea, but where's the reason that they're them, and I am me.
1:14
I've never known one single day of peace. I am a simple man.
1:24
I am a simple man.
Host 1:42
You're listening to a special version of the inside Myanmar podcast, which covers the fallout from the military coup and the Democratic resistance during this crisis. We are not only ramping up the production of our podcast episodes, but also our blog and other social media platforms as well. So we invite you to check these out, along with signing up for our regular newsletter, all of our other projects have been paused indefinitely so we can focus entirely on this ongoing emergency. But for now, Let's get into the show.
Our guest today on insight, Myanmar podcast is Patrick Burgess, and that was his song that we heard in the intro, leading us into this interview that was Baghdad skies, and so this is our chance to connect with Patrick, welcome him on the show, and also learn about this piece of music and more pieces of music as we go in. So first of all, Patrick, just thank you so much for taking the time to sit with us.
Patrick Burgess 3:32
Thank you for inviting me. I'm very happy to be here.
Host 3:34
So the song that listeners were just treated to. Baghdad skies, this was a song that we chose to lead people into this interview. And we'll get into your whole life story, activism, Southeast Asian region and beyond that you've been working on. And I think that this little bit of music that listeners just heard is serves as a good introduction to you personally, as well as the wider themes that your life has involved around. So before we get into the origins of your story, if we can start with this, these particular lyrics that were introduced and why you felt this was significant. This was a window bringing listeners into what you're about in your organization does.
Patrick Burgess 4:21
Thanks very much. Yeah, I just, you know, I've written a few songs about Burma. This one was written actually about the Iraq war at the time, but it relates to the reality of what's happening in Burma now, and I've been working on Burma for more than 20 years, inside and out, where ordinary people are called on to do extraordinary things, people whose whole lives have been non violent and non confrontational have now been called. On to pick up weapons to do what needs to be done. And in that song, Baghdad sky, I was, I was looking at the same kind of situation in those days in Iraq, actually, when Americans invaded, and people who suddenly see an invasion taking place. In the chorus, I'm a peaceful man. I don't believe in the rule of the gun, but when they come knocking down my door, I'm going to do what needs to be done. And I was listening to that song the other day, and I thought, wow, I wrote that about Iraq, but all those CDMS and PDF in Myanmar, so many of them were lawyers like myself or students or doctors or government officials, and now they're, they're living this, this violent life of violence, because they're called on to do it courageously, and they inspire me. But it's a, it's a very interesting and very, very challenging situation for people whose life is based on peace and cooperation to be called on to enter into this type of standing up to violence in the only way that's going to work.
Host 6:18
That's so important, and you're really foreshadowing these themes that we're going to get into with, with Burma and under understanding, not only this outsiders view, but the internal reality of what happens when, when, when society collapses and the sky falls down and it I've referenced this several times, but I always go back to this quote that I heard about the French Resistance to Nazi occupation in World War Two, that there become, there comes a certain time of internal strife and society collapse, where you're reduced to three choices of who you can become in life. You can be a hero, a coward or a bad guy, and there's no alternative. There's no other person you can become. And the corollary of this is that you, before this point, you can't say which one of those you will become. You could hope that you're you could certainly hope you're pray you're not going to be the bad guy, and, you know, hope that you're also not going to be a coward. But I don't think anyone can really say that in those moments, they would actually be the hero. It's the circumstances which make you who you are, and I think as outsiders, having an understanding of something that most of us have never lived through, and to have a sympathy and an ear and an empathy for what you do do in those situations, when it comes when your choices become so limited that's certainly a focus of this podcast and of this conversation going forward.
Patrick Burgess 7:49
Yeah, thanks. It's just made me reflect back onto a very moment in my own life in East Timor when everything went to shit and became total violence in many areas in the lead up to the ballot for independence, and I found myself in a situation like that, hand to hand with the militia guys who had one of our Timorese NGO workers by the hair and a machete raised above his head. And it wasn't until later on, a Portuguese journalist had filmed the incident that I could actually remember what I did, and I ended up being able to get that guy out of the hands of the militia, and they chased me and smashed my car and all that. But I could just as easily have run away, and I don't know why I didn't, and nobody will know what they're going to do. And I don't blame anybody for taking any of those paths, because very few people are heroes. But in this context of Burma right now, one of the amazing things is that there are millions of heroes, and sustaining each other, and I just hope we can sustain that, that sense of community inspiration as time goes forward as well.
Host 9:11
And they're heroes whose stories are not really getting the proper recognition outside of their own society, this extraordinary unfolding human drama that has every element of any, any, any past, great human drama that's happened. And yet the scarcity of interest continues to confound me of of all these elements at play, and why they're they're not sparking the imagination in the ways past historical conflicts have done. I want to put a bookmark in it there, because, as we often do on this podcast, we want to know about a fuller dimension of who the guest is and what they're bringing to the Burma context, so that we better understand the actions and advocacy when we get to that point. So now that we've teased this a little bit for the audience of what's. To come. I want to go back into understanding you and your life, your early years, because, as I understand from your brief biography, you followed a path which one step after the other, after the other, led to Burma in incredibly fascinating and and and relevant ways. And so if you could take us on those early years and began to tell that story.
Patrick Burgess 10:24
Whew, that's a long story.
Host 10:25
We have time.
Patrick Burgess 10:28
Okay, I'm an Australian barrister, I'm an international human rights lawyer, and I'm a singer songwriter. So those two things I do now these days both very seriously, and it's a bit of a strange combination, but I come from Sydney, Australia, and I grew up on the beach. I'm also a serious surfer, daily surfer, BIG WAVE SURFER, that came from my childhood. And so I grew up down there on the beach, surfing, swimming, and then I ended up at University in Sydney. I studied psychology and law. I graduated with degrees in both. And I decided I didn't want to be a lawyer at that point. And I went traveling for a number of years. I worked any job I could get, barman, waiter, truck driver, laborer, and I spent a few years as a professional lifeguard on the beach in Manly Beach. And I played music full time professionally for a few years as a lead singer and playing guitar and harmonica and singing in rock and blues bands in Sydney. So I then, you know, during that time, I I was like, I don't know, I had this drive to adventure. And I think, you know, my father was a war correspondent who spent years in Vietnam on the front lines with the Australian troops. He was a war veteran from the Second World War, not, not a military guy. I mean in terms of what we see now with Burma. I reflect on my own past, and when I see, you know, conscription and these issues coming up, I think, Oh, shit. You know, my dad was 17 when he put his age up to join the Australian forces in the world in the Second World War, and he was shot three times in the leg and had a limp for the rest of his life. My grandfather, the same in the First World War, was a shearer, you know, in the countryside in Australia, and went to join the forces, and all his unit were killed on the beaches of France. So they were called on. They were not violent people, but they were called on to do extraordinary things. And in a way, working so much on Burma. Now I reflect on my own past. So I ended up, you know, kind of chasing adventure. So I got a job on a on a yacht and sailed across the Pacific. I rode a bicycle across Africa to the center, and then paid $25 for a dugout canoe to go down the Congo and hitchhiked from San Francisco to New York. Did a bunch of that stuff when I was and I would make enough money to do that, not wanting to tie into a profession, so I finally, after those years, came back to Australia and decided to become a lawyer. I tried being an environmental lawyer, which I liked, but it wasn't enough excitement for me. So I ended up as a criminal lawyer, and first, as we have a divided profession, so I was a solicitor, and then I became a barrister, you know, wearing a wigging gown in the more senior courts, doing criminal trials. So I was a practicing trial lawyer doing all kinds of trials, murder and drug cases, and, you know, robberies and and I did a lot of work in those days for the Aboriginal community, Aboriginal legal service in Australia. And then my life changed one night when I was sitting down watching TV. Actually, I was sitting there in and watching TV, and the vision of the Rwandan genocide came across the screen, and I saw 1000s and 1000s of bodies being washed down the rivers, and I just thought I had been in those villages on my bicycle, and I had I spoke, I spoke possible French, which is the language, and in the wandering years, I got. To Calcutta in India and volunteered at Mother Teresa's hospice for the dying. It's just something I don't know why. I just got that idea in my head and that had given me a view of a lot of dealing with a lot of death, because that hospice in Calicut in Calcutta is is a place where they just create a safe space for people to die. And every day, people who have been found on the streets of Calcutta. In those days, Calcutta was known as the worst city in the world, and they would drop them at the door. Some of them had been eaten hands and bit eaten all the way up to the wrist by rats or dogs. And we would nurse them until they most of them passed away. So I wrote to, I just, I didn't even know what an NGO was or a aid work was, really, but I'd done a lot of traveling. And I wrote to I looked up the phone book, and I looked wrote to care Oxfam Red Cross, and said, I've been in those villages. I speak French. I've seen a bunch of dead, death and dying. If I can help, let me know. So I was a barrister, and then the next day care Australia rang me up and said, Can you go home, pack a bag and be on the next flight to Canberra and then to Rwanda? We want you to be part of the emergency team. So I went to Rwanda with no idea, really, of what I was getting into. And when I arrived, it was the early days of the Exodus, and since that time, I've been in a lot of violent situations and post conflict situations. But when you reflect on what actually happened there, it was another, another level of of of of just insanity, 800,000 plus people killed in three months, not with bombs and nuclear weapons or but with knives, hand to hand, so the the level of human to human violence and the the vision and direct experience that people had was just unbelievable. So we were setting up on the what's now the Democratic Republic of Congo, what was then saya side of the border, as 2 million refugees came pouring over, and care had started gathering children who had seen their parents hacked to death. And had these little guys had, you know, like Tom Sawyer, they had a stick with a little rag on the end of it, and when you unraveled the rag, they had, like a pet stone or a little doll, or, you know, maybe a shirt, and they'd walk for weeks over the mountains after seeing things that no body should ever see. So in the early days, within a week or something, we had 500 kids in tents, and the area where I was had no infrastructure, so there was no there was a village, but no town, no buildings, millions of refugees. So it was all tense. I myself slept in a tent. We had a house for the 30 or 40 Australian doctors and nurses, and I was a logistician helping them. And so 500 kids in the early and then a few days later, we had 800 kids. And then we had 1200 and then within a couple of weeks, we had 1400 children in these tents trying to feed them so they wouldn't die. And we lost 15 a day, every day for the first weeks. And then I remember we had a we had a celebratory drink on the night, first day that we didn't lose one of our kids. So I I managed to do a few things, managing projects they gave me, and within a few weeks, the coordinator had to go home. He had just come to set up the program. They asked me to take over as the head of that program, which I was kind of stunned at. But I was then the team leader of this massive project where we had 1400 kids to look after. We had a medical clinic with seeing 1000 patients a day. We had a shelter for women in the camps. So that was my introduction to that sort of I. Working in the aftermath of mass atrocity, but I found that I I was home. I was at home there, I really, and I remember, yeah, I really,
it was very telling. But it wasn't something that I felt like I wanted to run away from it was something where I felt I could help, and I felt kind of at home in that sort of chaotic and maybe all the years of traveling and adventuring. And, you know, I used to box. My dad was a boxer. He started us three boys, my brothers and I boxing when we were five years old. Maybe that, maybe all that came together in a way to prepare me for that sort of work. So then, you know, I only stayed there a few months, and then I went back to my legal practice, cause the project was then set up. The early emergency days were passed and but it also gave me a view as to what happens in those humanitarian emergencies. When the entire world sends help and the circus arrives in the early days, there's nobody to do the work that desperately needs to be done, and people are dying. They don't have enough food. You have to distribute everything they need. And then the circus arrives. And at some point, sometimes it becomes kind of a notice of all the journalists are there. Everybody is feeding on the information. And then within a very short time, within months, they all leave. And in some ways, the real work begins. And I saw that in Rwanda, in the Congo, and later on in my work in Yemen and Indonesia, East Timor and Burma. So I went back to my practice as a barrister in Sydney, and I used to the next year, I got another call from one of the NGOs saying, can you go back to Rwanda? There's the and this is interesting for refugee camps, because I saw you could see what was happening within a refugee camp like now our work in the in the Rohingya camps in Bangladesh, and I saw, I had the same thoughts when I arrived there in 2017 when the Rohingya was still coming over the river. I'd been in Rwanda. I saw, when the camps were set up, that they become lawless, subject to those who are strongest, and the interhome militia armed up in those camps in Rwanda, they became the authority and in unfortunately, the Rohingya in, you know, our team has been working For six years, constantly in the Rohingya camps. In Bangladesh, the Agile my organization, Asia justice and rights team, and we've seen that same lawlessness develop. So in Rwanda, the Rwandan government then ended up attacking the camps to break up that power base. I got called to go back again. I did that the next year again. I used to come and go from my legal practice, and I had this pair of boots that I wore in the mud, and I used to leave them in my barristers chambers in Sydney, just to remind me of what was kind of a schizophrenic life, very different, two very different lives. So I did that. I went to back to Rwanda. I went out to the central part of a Congo working on refugees. And I would do a few months. And then I went to Yemen the next year, the most armed country in the world. I thought, although it's I've read, and it's number two after the US, of course. And then in 1998 I ended up doing a consultancy for Oxfam in Indonesia, and that was in the lead up to the fall of the Suharto military dictatorship and the ballot for independence of East Timor. So it was just, I mean, I was going to say accident, but kind of things fit together in in strange ways. And I always and I get a lot of young lawyers and others saying, How do I get to work for the UN like you did? And how do I and I just tell them, just keep learning new things and building up your skill base, and they will combine in ways that you can't imagine. Now, but if you don't have all those different pieces, they won't combine. So I learned how to speak Indonesian because I used to go surfing in the Indonesian islands with amazing surf, and I couldn't communicate with people in those villages unless I spoke Indonesian. Then when I went to Indonesia in 1998 I got hired by the UN because I spoke Indonesian and I'd had refugee experience and worked in so in 1998 I went to West Timor, and the head of Oxfam Indonesia was galluandita, a well known young Indonesian human rights activist, and who's now my wife, and we went to East Timor. She had set up a an organization to protect women victims of sexual violence by Indonesian military. So she's Indonesian, but she was setting up organizations and bringing out the truth of what the Indonesian military were doing, which was not a popular thing to do during the military dictatorship and the so I then ended up working for the UN and I put aside three months to work on the ballot for independence, and ended up staying six years there and giving up my practice, legal practice in Australia. And that experience of East Timor, I think, is really interesting for Burma. And the more I think about it, the more valuable I think it is for for Burmese to have a close look at that what was done, not to copy or learn, but just to see, oh, that's what happened in that situation. And for example, it was a situation in which there was a military occupation for 30 years, 24 years, actually, 30 year dictatorship of suhatto. The military were absolutely brutal to try and squash the movement for democracy and independence. Using torture, they killed a third of the I mean, they killed but a third of the population died as a result of that, mass rape, mass torture, and then the there was a gap where there was a space when Suha to the general fell And they agreed to having a nationwide ballot to choose whether they wanted to be part of Indonesia or independent. Now, those sorts of things may or may not come up for Burma, but it's interesting to see what happens. So then we held the ballot. I was part of that mission, working for the United Nations and the military tried to upset it so that they would force the people to vote in a particular way. So they created the way they did, that was to create local militia and say, Oh, these are, this is not us. This is the local militia groups terrorizing people, killing burning villages, saying, if you don't vote to stay as part of Indonesia, you're all going to be killed. Like the Burmese, the Timorese are incredibly courageous and and one of my UN colleagues who'd been in a number of elections, he said, I can see the Timu is now going to crawl over broken glass to come to the ballot box. You know, when we were going to, you know, there was a call to call it off. Call off the whole thing, because there was so much violence, they said. And shanann Gusmao, who the leader who was in prison in Jakarta, said, don't call it off. Give my people a chance to vote. And they voted 78% for independence. Then the military decided to destroy everything before on their way out. So again, just scenarios which are interesting, I think for Burma, they destroyed every government building, the water works, the electricity, the port, the airport. We counted the black holes of houses, 60,000 houses in three weeks, systematically burned to the ground to destroy everything, and we were stuck in a inside a high school, the UN presence. I was with the UN and there was increasing calls for us to evacuate. We were ordered to evacuate in. When things got completely out of control, and we were trying to get and again, what? What do you do when, when you get to that level of chaos and violence, and we needed armed intervention, there were people being killed all over the place. The sky was black morning till night, with the burning of the petrol works the ports, you need an armed intervention. So the UN peacekeepers were being discussed. The US Congress had to vote on it. It needed time. Australia sent troops to the edge of the northern edge of Australia in readiness. But the Indonesian government wouldn't accept that troops could come in because they'd been given authority to defend it. So in the end, Bill Clinton, I understand, rang Jakarta, and they then agreed that there could be international peacekeepers. So we were in a very I mean, this is another long story that I won't tell today, but we're in a very difficult situation because we were then ordered to evacuate. But we had 2000 Timorese who fled in terror to the small compound where the UN those who of us who remained, were we with razor wire around the fence, and I was part of a group when we were ordered to leave them, we knew they'd be killed, all of them. We just thought we couldn't live with that. And we ended up going to the head of the UN and telling him we didn't, we couldn't live with that. And they ended up, I mean, there was a there's another story in that, but changing the UN order, we got a letter directly from Kofi Annan, then saying, I'm relieved that you have decided not to leave and to and we took the 2000 Timorese with us on the c1 30s to Australia to save them. So that's the first time the UN had ever done that, I think. And Kofi Aung was directly involved in Rwanda, so I think that was behind that letter we received where he said, you know, you have the right to make that decision on the ground. So it was a proud moment for the UN and in a situation of where there have been a number of other other results. So yeah, there I was again, and in the middle of a mess and doing what I could. So when I came back in maybe 10 days later after the Australian peacekeepers that arrived in force with the Special Forces and established order. I was asked, Do I want to stay and what sort of job I would like? So I said they were establishing the heads of regional administrations, like a governor or because in that situation, and again, to think about it in terms of Burma. I mean, Burma is very different, and they already have well functioning, to some degree, local structures in Timor. What happened was, in that chaos, the UN, the Security Council passed a resolution saying the UN would be the government for two years, or for a period of time, in order to prepare for free and fair elections and the Timorese government and a new country to to be created. So we had to be the government, and I was appointed as the head of one of the regions. So I was in charge of education and health, infrastructure, roads, bridges, the police, the international peacekeepers, and also refugee returns and and it was in I chose a district where I had been attacked myself, and where there'd been a lot of massacres, so I had to deal with those issues as well. So I was in that position. And it goes on. You know, I was there for six years, so I then was asked to I was appointed as the Director of Human Rights for the UN for the peacekeeping missions, and I was that was in the early days of the war crimes investigation. So I went back into my legal hat and began the early days of the war crimes investigations. And then the hybrid court was. Established, and we decided we were asked. Joah mashota came to my boss, Sergio de Mello, and said, Can we have a we would like a truth and reconciliation commission. So Sergio called me into his office one morning and said, Jose Rama saw to would like us to help them establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Can you do that? It's like I had no idea. So I that was my job, to take the lead for the UN on on that. So I got some South Africans to come, and we looked at various models, helped draft the law and set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and I ended up working in that commission for three years. I was kind of the counterpart to the chair, his advisor, and I was appointed as the principal legal counsel. So that was a very interesting experience, and also and that led on then to many years now of working in this field called transitional justice. So it was my first, you know, I was in the war crimes investigations and then the truth commission. And so that was that ended up my the last three years of my six years in East Timor.
Host 36:29
That's such a quite a full story, so many elements that are there, the personal and the professional. And then looking beyond that to these, these issues that transcend everything. And I think I want to go back to something that you said about your time in Rwanda, and I think there's a couple of themes that emerged from your very first initial experience of just touching down there that I think continue to highlight the both the personal journey, as well as some of the cycles that we see keep happening with conflict and international engagement, from one crisis to the next. But to start with the personal one. First, you mentioned how when you first came to Rwanda, I can't remember the exact word you used. It was something familiar, something like coming home, something that that that you felt at ease being in this place of extraordinary conflict and violence, and you talk about the schizophrenic aspect of back and forth between being an Australian barrister, and then in this, this chaotic situation and and then eventually, these things come together in ways that your biography goes into and through today. But I wonder if you can flesh out what, what about it as a, as a, as a young person, having from a privileged Western background, going to a place in such extreme conflict that that elicited that kind of feeling or reaction of that, I think would be very different from many other people in your situation.
Patrick Burgess 38:05
Yeah, I'm not, I'm not too sure about why that is, you know, I guess I had a family background which was caring in a wave and taught to care for other people. That's one part of it. My mother was a very caring person who both my parents were journalists, and then she brought up the four kids, and then ended up becoming a school teacher and then a grief counselor. So I guess I had some element of that. And I also had this kind of rough and tumble life, boxing, playing rugby on the beach, and kind of it, it was a, kind of a tough period during Australian history. There was a lot of, a lot more violence and drinking. And, you know, we'd go to the pub, and then people would be fighting outside. And it was, was pretty rough and tumble. And so were my years traveling, you know, in, you know, hitchhiking across the US, and riding a bike across Africa and all that stuff is it was, I was kind of, I liked, I mean, to be honest, yeah, I liked a little bit of that, trying to figure out how to solve problems when they're very complex emergencies. I just felt at home. It's interesting because last month, I had a kind of a similar feeling when I was in my SOT doing a train in a very different stage of life. You know, I was in my SOT doing a training for Burmese judges and Ministry of Justice, and I also did some civil society work, but I felt, you know, this is where I should be. This is this is what I have right now, at this stage of my life, to to share my experience with judges who are going into the. Are non junta areas of the country and trying to deliver justice. When there's no a court. You can't set up a court, because it'll be attacked by the junta. You can't, you know what's a normal police investigation. There are sold, you know, junta soldiers who've been captured, and they the judges asked me, What, how do I deal with these war criminals? I said, Well, you know, do you have a process? And they say, well, they worked for the junta. They're a war crimes organization. So they're war criminals. So, you know, moving from that to try and find practical solutions and and helping them understand what war crimes are, and, but not in some academic sense, in some university far from the field, but they're in the mud with the prisoner, no no structures, no investigators. And you might, you know, I've been in these situations where, where international lawyers will often say, oh, you can't do anything. Okay, then you have a you have prisoners, and you, you know, in a real sense, you're facing the challenge of them being killed if there's no justice. So, yeah, this is it's funny in my life, I find myself once again, kind of being able to think I need to draw on everything that I've ever done and ever learned to try and be able to help in some way with solutions that have to be simple? Yeah, you can't. I can't be talking about the dissenting opinion of the judge in these cases in the ICT, why and the International Criminal Court. It's not going to make any difference to those I'm teaching. So, yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's a combination of things. I count myself to be incredibly fortunate, and I do one of the lessons that I learned, that I hold very, very dear in my entire life has been informed by it was in in Calcutta when I went to work in Mother Teresa's hospice, I learned that something I call efficient happiness, in a way, the most efficient way for me to feel good was to help other people. It's not a I don't have to look at altruism or charity or any of those. I'm selfish, yeah, yeah. How am I going to feel good? I also feel good when I go surfing and when I go out and have a few beers and but being involved with where you can help some other people is such a privilege and such an amazing thing for those who have the chance to do it, because we all feel better.
Host 43:02
It's interesting because it's I'm going in a totally different direction with this. But the thing that brought me to Myanmar was Buddhist meditation, and one of the things I've learned in the practice of Buddhist meditation is that the ultimate transcendence that one is aiming for is liberation from from all of the cravings and aversions that life brings and being selfless and egoless. But I think one of the the the ways that that path has been misunderstood and mistaught in the West is a kind of warp speed into that final goal without the presence of actually living in the world through it. And I've seen Buddhist teachers come in and try to correct that misunderstanding and problems that students begin to face by instructing that the pleasures that you're getting, you should be seeking higher pleasures. And there are and there, if you're coming from a selfish point of view and looking at the refined pleasures of the world. The world, the immediate sense pleasures of fulfilling cravings that are in front of you to to think that you're feeling good being shifted into looking that sure certainly, the final Buddhist goal is to be able to transcend all pleasant and unpleasant experiences and not be create, have craving or a version for either of them. But up until that point, there's a way to to recognize the higher sense, the more refined states of pleasure that can come from ethical behavior and living concentration of mind, developing wisdom and insight being, developing compassion and empathy for others and that these are sublime experiences that are actually from coming from a selfish point of view of wanting to really feel better and better and better as you're progressing on the spiritual path. These are higher. States of refinement and pleasure that you should be inclining the mind towards from the more base and gross and obvious forms of pleasure that as you get more trained and developed in this path, you start realizing these, these are actually not so pleasurable at all. It's actually a greater sense of selfish pleasure for me to seek these, these, these other ways to incline my mind and to seek, and that comes from very much, falls in line with the feeling of giving to others and being fulfilled by seeing what it is that you give. It also reminds me, at one point, I had someone who asked me about the engagement that I have in Burma and wanting to know like, what is, what is the real thing? Personally, that's driving you? And I gave varied answers to that, but one of the answers I gave is I said, Honestly, speaking from a selfish point of view, just a purely selfish point of view, to feel that I'm in a moment of history where my skill set and my involvement can, in some small way, be able to help a people going through the worst time in their life. It's a sense of fulfillment. And I would even use the word pleasure, even it's a sensitive word to use in this particular situation. But the the fulfillment that I get in this moment from feeling that I have something to give and something greater than myself. It's, it's something pretty powerful.
Patrick Burgess 46:23
Yeah, it's a it's a privilege. You know, people think, Oh, don't you get sad and don't you, isn't that? You know you're sacrificing, but I'm not sacrificing. I'm actually quite a hedonist. I and I, you know, I love to feel good physically. I'm a sports person. I I like to socialize and have a few drinks, and I love surfing and playing music. It's, it's just that, it's just that core thing that actually, when you can help people as well, it's, it's the most efficient way to feel good all this stuff. I've got all these friends who are very, very wealthy, and they don't know what else to do other than to keep making more money. Some of them say, I want to come with you. I want to go, yeah, it's just, I mean, that's just, that's just a lesson that I think I'm really glad that I had early in life, and it's something that is a lesson that we, we all should realize. I also, I also realized that there are millions of people, you know, especially in our western countries, who want that, yeah, they actually want an opportunity to help other people, right? And they don't know how, yeah, and there aren't avenues to do it. So it's not a rare thing. I don't think, I think, I think that's a very, very common thing, that people want to help other people to human part of our humanity, and it's just such a shame that we can't set up the structure so we can harness all that power of people who do want to help and have all these other skills. It's quite complex to actually do that so and I also, I mean, I'm I wandered around a whole bunch of religions for a long time. Am I was brought up a Catholic. I married a Muslim. I spent quite a bit of time in India, you know, looking at different ashrams and and spent a lot of time in Buddhist centers. I lived in with the Tibetans for a year in northern India, and where the Dalai Lama lives in Dharamsala. And then I used to go to, you know, Thai Mona Street in southern Thailand and and through those, you do 10 day retreats and Vipassana retreats and all of that. So what you said about meditation and craving, it rings true to me, although I'm a very, these days, very bad practitioner, but some of those core lessons, and when you look at the Buddhist teachings of the Eightfold Path, it's like it's a school of psychology, that of how you know it's right work, people think it's some big esoteric thing, and then you look at right work, you know, don't harm anybody when you work. So right speech, you know, right thought. The only thing that's different to others is right meditation, really, but all the others are in the other religions. But what is right work? Right work where you don't harm anyone else? Well, you can't really be working for a company that's poisoning the earth or poisoning people through chemicals or whatever else. And consider. That to be right work, and you can't if you're doing that, and it's very difficult to see how that, how you can see that you're doing something that's going to feel good, whereas you could be a garbage collector and you can be, you know, serving drinks at a stall, and it's all an equal part of the mosaic that we have to bring. So I respect all equally. I mean, I think we, you know, our entire culture can't exist without the garbage collector and the sales person and the cleaners and so we're all completely equal. But if you, if you're conscious and you know that you're working for an oil company, then you you want to be changing the oil company's behavior, or you're not going to be able to see that you're you're living a good life. I think that's that's about as basic as I can get.
Host 50:59
Yeah, yeah. The other part in what you said a bit ago that I wanted to comment on was this sense of the Western observers coming and trying to use their models and in situations that are outside the box. And as I think this, I kind of go back in time, and I think that the ways that a lot of our rule of law structures have developed. They all developed out of chaos. They all developed out of things wrong and broken that were happening and they just got it. Just became more and more of a matured set of standards and rule of law and complicated bureaucracy and precedents and everything else that has got formed up, and as later generations came into that system, we forget very easily what came before it, and the kind of, you know, chaos and absence of rule of law that wasn't so far away in all of our past and and how these systems were built on it. And so in some ways, as we're looking at societies that are are going through an earlier version of ourselves, and some I tend to think that we're coming with this base of knowledge, with having forgotten where this base of knowledge developed organically. We're just holding on to those structures that are in place, and then losing the sense and ability of remembering how those structures came about and how we're now back to a situation where, like our four generations and our own countries had to wade into those messy environments and come up with those rules and systems in the first place. And so I think this also goes on to shine a light on something that we were talking about before the interview in which you brought up here, which is the way that that that international observers and and people involved in crises as these crisis in the last half century, have moved from one place to another to another. There's these familiar iterations that the genesis of the crisis might be different the people involved, the geography, the religions, what they're fighting for, etc. All these might have their own unique backgrounds based in where they're located, but there's kind of this familiar cycle of how the conflict is playing out, and then, importantly, how the international community is coming to be involved in that conflict, what they're continuing to get wrong and from and this is also why It's so fascinating to check in with you, because you've seen these iterations play out up close and personal at high levels and grassroots levels, of how different international actors are continuing, going back to Rwanda all the way up until present day Burma, how they're continuing to misread and misbehave in the same set, carrying the same set of standards and bureaucracies from their own mindset and background into a context that is very different, and perhaps not being so So interested or curious in what those ground realities are, as much as what it is they think they need to impose. Yeah.
Patrick Burgess 54:06
I mean, I've worked in a lot of those situations. And as I said, I I became involved in in working on this, this issue that we call transitional justice, and that relates to transitions from violence and mass violations to democracy, hopefully, and there are the four parts of that model, which are to pull out the truth, to seek the truth of what's happened, not only in the last six months, but in decades that have gone past. Why have these cycles of violence been allowed to continue? What are the root causes, learning from that second part is prosecuting those most responsible. The third part is trying to repair the lives of victims or reparations, and the fourth part is doing whatever strategies are needed to be. Break the cycles of violence and stop recurrence. So I, I became involved with that model. It's just a label transitional justice. It's not some magical solution. It just helps us to identify what to do. So in these situations, you know, I've worked on that. I worked for five years for an organization and set up transitional justice programs in a range of countries. And we had programs in Afghanistan and Cambodia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Timor Leste, Solomon Islands, Burma and so looking how that relates to all those situations. And I think, you know, I'm not, we need international intervention and support. We need international funding, and it's difficult to have enough accountability for that to be distributed and who it should be distributed to. These are very complex things, but there are some you what you refer to as mistakes. We over and over and over again hear that it should be informed from the local communities in the local context. And the second label that I work with all the time is that it will be victim centered. And those two things aren't, aren't rocket science, and they're said over and over again, and they're not done. And that's, that's a great shame, and that's what informs a lot of the mistakes that are made. They say, Oh, it's going to be informed by the local communities or the local stakeholders, but they bring in concepts and examples that don't fit necessarily, or all these organizations saying that victims are at the center of their work, and actually, in some cases, victims are at the center of their fundraising. Their work is in Europe and the US and other places. The victims are in Burma and Timor and Papua and, you know, Afghanistan. And they'll help. They'll spend most of the money raised for the victims on large events in Europe and North America and invite a couple of two or three Rohingya or others to who can travel to be part of that. But that's not putting victims at the center of your work, in our view, and that's that's what led me to want to create our own organization. And my wife, gallu and I did that 14 years ago. We set up Asia justice and rights, or agile and agile means to teach or to learn in Indonesian and Malayo. And we were in that situation where we thought, well, we've worked both, worked for international NGOs, local NGOs, the UN during the 90s. I was also when I was a barrister in Sydney, I was then appointed as the senior member of the Australian refugee tribunal. So I'd worked in the government independent institution, and for a while I was the head of that tribunal, and that's the tribunal that has the duty to make decisions about government decisions on asylum. So I had Burmese cases, for example, the government might say yes or no to asylum, and the Tribunal can overturn those judgments. So I'd been the head of a government agency, worked for the UN etc, and thought, and we're in a position where we thought, What's the most useful thing that we can work on, which is quite a daunting question. And I'd worked on first aid, you know, humanitarian relief and rule of law and legal aid. And we came up with the answer, that unless you have a accountable society, then everything's going to fall apart if you and and that if you can't be accountable for mass murder and rape and no one's going to be held to account, then what are the chances that you're going to be accountable for your budget that's going to be spent the way that you are supposed to, or that the environmental regulations are going to be complied with? So the issue of accountability, which relates to also justice truth, is at the core of what we decided was going to be the most important thing we would work on for agile Asia, justice and rights, and that we would do what we would put at the very core of our work, what every. What he says they're doing, which is make victims the center of our work. So it's now 14 years. We are based in Jakarta. We have about 20 staff there at the head office, and we have offices in Dilley and is Timor. We've got a small office in Sydney, Australia, and we have an office outside the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh and in Chiang Mai working on Burma issues, and work in about 10 Asian contexts. So in response to the point that you raised about the international community, our approach is when we sat down and thought, what can we add? We thought, the idea of investigation and naming and shaming and human rights is critically important, but relatively well done. You know, our friends at Amnesty International Human Rights Watch and iCj, other organizations, do a great job of that. We don't need to do that. But in terms of building the knowledge and capacity of those national actors, that's not well done and adding so we thought. And I think for me, the basis of my work and my understanding is that, all across these countries where I've worked, I see that when there's mass injustice, human beings resist. I personally, I believe that's an inherent quality of human beings, that we need water, food and justice. And I see my children and other people's children almost before they can talk, the first words will be, he got more than I did. They feel it. And what happens when they see that you got the other one got more cake than they did, the reaction is this feeling that humans get when there's injustice inside them, around the heart region, and then anger. And if I look at the work that we do across Asia and agile is involved in there's, it's a lot of it is around a lack of respect and equality for minorities. And the injustice. The feeling of injustice is then the and when I talk about this, this same injustice which has led to conflict, if I look at Indonesia, you see the two parts on the edges of Indonesia, Ace and Papua and is Timor Papuan Christian East Timor Christian in a Muslim majority population not getting treated fairly. You go to the Philippines, you see Mindanao, the conflict area, a Muslim minority not being treated fairly by the Catholic majority. Moved to Thailand, the Buddhist majority and the Patani in the south not being treated fairly by the Buddhist majority. You go to Burma, and you see all the ethnic groups, the minorities, not being treated fairly by the BA Mar. Moved to Sri Lanka, you see the Hindu the Buddhist majority not treating the Tamil minority equally.
Over and over and over again, we see this issue of unfairness for minorities, and then what happens to the victims of the unfairness, they feel unjustly treated and angry. And what I see playing out in many places is they try politically to get peaceful resolution and equality, equality of development, etc, for the minority that's resisted and not complied with by the majority. And then the young guys get angry and say, we're going to we have to do something to make them pay attention. And what they usually do is attack police stations. Because, you know, police have small units in various places, and you see this in Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Burma, Sri Lanka, they attack a police station, and then what happens with the majority that they then send the military in, with an overwhelmingly disproportionate force to punish not only those involved, but the villagers, rape the women, and then that sets up. I mean, what do you do when your sisters and mothers have been raped by how do you feel? It sets up a massive reaction against that, and then you've got something which is out of control for generations, like we're seeing unfold now in Palestine. How do you think that those Palestinians. Are going to feel for generations about what's being done to them, and they will have weapons of AI, and, you know, created by AI, biological weapons and cyber weapons. You know, there's no solution in in that type of injustice, because we will not be able to control the pushback. The only solution is to try and reduce the hatred, and that's the opposite of what's being done in so many places. So our view is that what we can do as agile primarily, is to try and increase contribute to increasing the knowledge capacity and linkages of those working on justice and human rights in these problematic contexts, because in every one of those contexts, there are victims who want things to change and don't want further victims and want justice. There are human rights defenders who, for various reasons, are committed to this, and those guys are going to be involved for their whole life. We've got this massive resource, if we want change that. We've got these groups of people who are committed to working on this stuff, not for money or but because they feel it. So if we can make them more effective, we can help them to be more effective, they're going to do the job in their own context that we could never do, and that's why agile focus is on empowerment. You know what we do? We do a lot of training workshops to increase the capacity of those who work on justice and rights. We teach them about international law, about the national laws. We teach them about best lessons learned is particularly from this region, like when we work with Burmese, we don't, we're not really looking at European examples and a lot of the other academic lessons that are brought but we look at, you know, how did they do that in Papua and ace in Indonesia, what's that small truth commission that's Now finish in finishing its work in a che in Indonesia, I'll be there in two weeks to work with them. And there's a group from Mindanao that I'll be working with who are coming to ace to look at that small Truth Commission, which is a model that might be interesting for Khin. Or Khin or I worked in in the Somali Region in Ethiopia, on a small sub national truth commission in the past years. But the lessons from this region resonate much more so agile does a lot of that we do exchanges. It's increasing knowledge, increasing understanding and ability to make strategic decisions. And the second part is linkage. Human beings work much better when we're together and we learn from each other. So if we can help link national actors with each other, break down the silos and also link them to regional initiatives and international initiatives, Agile has access to those so that's the work that we can do. And I'm very proud, in a way, of the fact that we can work at those levels. We have a very strong grassroots focus. But this last month, I was in Europe, agile was invited to be at the table of the annual NGO round table at the International Criminal Court, which is an honor as well, because it's not many NGOs that get invited. And five days of listening to those, all those cases, interacting with the prosecutor in charge of the case, who I actually know from East Timor. Days it was a prosecutor there and then with the double I, double M, with the head of that, Nicholas cum Jan, also a friend from Timor. We're able, and we met with the EU in Brussels and national government, Swiss German etc, the UN in Geneva, we're able to operate at that level and link the voices of the victims in the we have 30 partners inside Burma, Mostly women led organizations whose voices we can then take to those higher levels of of the UN and governments. And I think that's one of the values that they see of agile work as well, that when they want to link at the grassroots level, we can, we can for. Facilitate that, because we've made a decision that most of our focus will be at the grassroots, with some focus at the international level, whereas many others are most of their work at the international level, with a little bit at the grassroots.
Host 1:10:15
That's an incredible space that Agile has filled and filling it from the direct experience of seeing what has continued not to work year after year, and trying to go in and present a different model and a different way of being that is being this fusion, this beautiful fusion of bringing in the best of all worlds, and I would also imagine quite a bit of trial and error and playfulness and creativity of trailblazing. And as we talked about again before this recording my background of training and the emphasis on the reflective learning cycle, the experience, the experiential learning model, which in my background, background of training, so much of that goes into the experience of trying something, seeing where it goes, bringing an outside theory to then try something a new and seeing where that fits, and really having being able to bring a sense of playfulness that but playfulness with intention and knowledge and expertise and an interest in the grassroots level. And that goes back to something that you said earlier. You were, you were you describe this practice of being victim centered as not rocket science. That's, that's, that was your words. And yet, despite the fact that it's not rocket science, so many of these international actors have continued to make these claims while not having their actions, not exactly aligning with their words, and some of the examples you gave even inferred a sense of victim exploitation, of using, of using, and even inferring the experience of exploiting victims and victim stories for their own fundraising and privileged Western settings that are not necessarily going back to those home countries, and the amounts at least that one would hope. And so you've done things quite different. But I'm wondering, looking at those examples of of how some of these international actors, year after year, conflict after conflict, have, have, have put out messages and intentions of being victim centered and yet not having actions that align with that. Why do you think that is if it's something that is so simple to do, why? What are the factors behind why it keeps being missed?
Patrick Burgess 1:12:37
I mean, I don't, it's not, it's not so helpful for me when I think I'm going to blame people for not doing things. It's more trying to understand why that, why that the way this? Because, you know, the people involved in these initiatives are good people, yeah, almost overwhelmingly wanting to do the right thing. And I think we can. We can also go down the wrong track by saying, Oh, these guys that work with a big organization or this, and they're bad people, and they don't, they're only after themselves. And that's actually not my experience. My experience is that it's, you know, a lot of people want to do the right thing, but you know, if you're, you're a Buddhist, you know, you know that the A lot, a lot comes down to ignorance. And I think that's the core reason, which that people Westerners, and the money and the funding and the organizations are Western and North based. That's the core of the challenge and the context that we mostly work on, we work on a South based and that level, the education, the cultural knowledge, the linkages, the language, all of that, you know, in Europe and US, Australia, etc, that's Very different from Burmese and Indonesians and Timorese and Cambodians and and I think people, they don't know how to link to victims. They don't really know very well how to link into they can do an incredibly complex PowerPoint, and it can open up into all sorts of other fantastic visuals and all that stuff. And so that's what they'll do. They'll come and they'll do training, and nobody will have any idea what they're saying, right? Wow, lawyers. I find lawyers and scientists. In a way, I'm a lawyer, so I suffer from this the worst, in a way, because our language has to be extremely precise when I'm doing when I used to do an appeal case in Australian courts, I can't afford for one word to be not the most precise word, and that level of precision works totally against communicating with. With a Burmese audience of judges and civil society activists, and who Burmese is, I mean, English is their third or fourth language. The level of precision that I might present as an international lawyer is not going to reach the target of their ears and mind. And yet, many international lawyers will not be capable of surrendering their need for precision in order to communicate. And climate scientists are another example. I've done some work in that area where, you know, I've been with local organizations, and these guys come and then they finish their session, they say, I don't understand a word of what he said. So this is the challenge. They don't they don't know how to simplify their language. They don't know how to communicate with these groups. So that's the challenge we face. But the first step to any solution is truth and understanding the problem. So I think first of all, we need to think, Okay, this is one of the challenges we have that the funding and the institutions are built brick by brick from highly complex English language often institutions language, etc, in the north and the victims and the human rights defenders and the national actors in these Asian contexts, English is their third, fourth language, and their experience is very different, and they are the masters of their context. Which are, you know, some that's another issue is that sometimes Westerners think that, because we come from these highly sophisticated education and analytical backgrounds, that these are more complex, but they're not the level of knowledge and complexity of Burmese society and the way that they interact with each other, the number of armed groups, for example, the number of different things in play and the family relationships and the that is more complex than all the stuff that we learn at university, and I always say when I'm training, I'm a I'm the expert on the international experience here and the international law, and I'm ready to help you, but you're the experts in your context, and I will never be able to understand that to the level of expertise that you have. So that's why, I think the first step is to understand that that we're not dealing with simple, complex, simple context. We're not dealing with unsophisticated people. We're dealing with very sophisticated, intelligent people who have a handle on so many issues that we'll never have, so that's why we need to give the driving seat and accept that they have to be in the driving seat. But the next question then is, Well, should we just leave that? Do we have anything to offer at all? And then reflecting on that, I think the answer is yes, right? Because when I'm working with our Burmese colleagues, for example, they are the masters of their context in a way that I can work and read and study, and I'll never know 10% of what they know from their life experience, right? But when they're trying to apply that to the to this context of transition, they only have their life experience to deal with it. And one thing that strikes me in many of the places that I work on on transitional justice is that many countries only have one transition they have one chance to get it right in a way, and they've got no there's nothing in their experience that's going to help them deal with war crimes and a truth commission, or, you know, reparations, this stuff is not the normal life of a country, right, right? And so they don't have a department of transitional justice. They have a they'll have a Justice Department now how to run courts and all of that they don't know. They don't know how to do a transition, right? They will learn, and they will do their own transition. But do we have something to share? Well, you know, in some ways, I've worked in scores of transitions, and. And there are lessons from those that I'm happy to share, as long as I don't say, Well, this is a good idea for you. I just say, Look, this is what they did in Timor. This is what they've done in Mindanao in the Philippines. You know, this is the lessons from Sri Lanka or Nepal or somewhere close by. This is what they did with the Khmer Rouge tribunal in Cambodia, and this is the pluses and minuses. And then they can take that and use it in their own way. But yeah, I don't think it's a I think it's, in a way, a natural weakness of having a North based funding and support system applied in the south. But what I do object strongly to is what I've heard in, you know, people calling South washing. You know, we have greenwashing now, where you say that your activities are green, but they're not really green. And then if you say, Oh, we're all about working in, you know, with victims, working with, you know, South based organizations, and we're and yet, the money is cyclical. The money gets raised for this Asian context and then spent on this beautiful, big office in New York or London or somewhere else. And we're going to have another event on Asia in London. Am I going to have another event about Burma in New York? Or we're going to and, you know, it's all very well we need some of that. But there's also a great deal of self serving South washing or Asia washing, or whatever saying that they're working on, especially when the big need in Asian justice context, including Burma, is support for the national and local initiatives. They're starved of low levels of funding. They're committed to doing good work. All they need. They need some help in understanding issues and some funding. But when, when organizations and you know, funding cycles, raised money for that and then spend it in Europe and the US? I mean, it's not ethical actually,
so we need to be aware of that and repair it.
Host 1:22:41
I'd like to invite you to select one of your Burma related songs that you can give us a title and some background and treat listeners to some more music. Okay?
Patrick Burgess 1:22:51
Thank you. Yeah, I was looking at my songs when you asked me to come on the podcast. And I think I have, I have three of my original songs that deal directly with Burma. One is and the one we'll play now. It's quite a long story, so I hope the listeners have got five minutes to listen to this story. It's called Mandalay. I hope to it hasn't been released yet, but I hope to release it in time for the takeover by the PDF of Mandalay, which is coming soon. And the second song that I'll play a little later is called Love will conquer fear, which I wrote in honor of the CDM marches and resistance. And the third song is the song that I wrote in East Timor, nearly 20 years ago, but in the middle, I mentioned Burma, and it's a song about resistance. So this first song is called Mandalay. I wrote it after a workshop in Jakarta with torture victims from a number of Southeast Asian countries. And it's quite strange, because the stimulus for it, I went out to dinner with some of the survivors, and we're having a simple dinner together, and two of the Indonesians who were in their late 60s said, basically said we were having this kind of, you know, NGO ish love affair starting thing when we were student demonstrators, and then we were both arrested for being students demonstrating and put into prison for 15 years and 16 years. And you could see that now they'd only just met up again, and there was this spark happening, at least these older people from those days, way back when, in 1965 when they had been demonstrated and they were very old now and then, there was a Burmese woman who'd been in prison for 20 years, and they were talking about the prison conditions. And the the guy said, I was hard in, you know, we had four people in a single person cell. And then the woman said, Well, we, you know, they held women in larger groups. And then the Burmese woman said, I was in solitary for many, many, you know, years of that time. So anyway, we had this discussion, and I don't, songs are like mystical things. And many songwriters say we don't own our songs. They exist. I mean, this is a weird thing to say, but you know, you'll hear Neil Young and Bob Dylan, Chris Martin from Coldplay. Say, you know, Chris Martin said, the songs exist outside me. I just happen to be able to grab one from time to time. So I don't those things came together with this story. It's the story of a love affair in Burma, 88 generation or of students who become part of the resistance. And you can, I wanted to capture the the feeling of that romance as a resistance, being part of the resistance. And then he takes a code name and chooses George Orwell, after you know George Orwell the the his book Burmese days, and she chooses the code name of Mandalay. And then the story goes into him being held and treated very badly, but holding on to this feeling that one day he's going to meet up again with Mandalay. So you'll have to listen to the song to to see whether he does or not at the end. But you see, it was written in 2000 I think, 12 or 13. So as part of the story, he's released when. And it says the ladies when the lady was released, the lady stood up and the general stood down. So at that time, I thought this was a transition which was going to hold. And, you know, the line says, the lady stood up and the general stood down. She said, Let them all out. And I took my plate and my prison cup and walked out into the sunlight. That's That was a time in history where we were so optimistic about Burma that it was going to keep going. So anyway, yeah, this is the song. It takes five minutes, so you'll have to wait till the end to see if he meets up again with his girlfriend.
1:27:31
Mandalay. Mandalay, I'll be calling your name. Will you stand by the river? I'll be traveling by train. Mandalay. Mandalay. Will you wear a white dress? I'm coming to tell you. I never confessed. I can feel it. It's light, but I close my eyes tight? I don't want to wake up, cause the day brings the nightmare. Again. I put a flower in your hair. Smile at me and you wash will you come on a train? I'll be calling your name. Will you stand by the river? I'll be traveling by train. We were students and dreamers believers that with love and courage and faith, we could build a new they just let us march. Then they came in the dark and with silent, cold hands, Mandalay, will you wear a white dress? It's not calling to tell you, I never going to. And to tell you are never confirmed. The revolutionary leaders that will meet in secret our names will be cold so that no one will know, with a new and the smell of your hair falling in love as the smoke filled the air, I said, I will beat your Joah, you said you can call me mandam. The captain says, Boy, you can go home today. All that you have to do is tell us her name as the iron Moe falls and the world fades away. Dream that you're in my arm becoming I hope you can believe Mandalay, I'll be calling your name. Will you stand by the river? I'll be traveling mountain. Traveling mountain. I was 18. Now I'm 35 I spent all of the years in between inside this little cell when the general stood down, and the lady stood up. She said, Let them all out. I took my plate and my prison down to Yangon station. I said, I'll have a one way ticket. She said, What's your destination? She said, I can't hear you, and you repeat it. I said, Sorry, ma'am, I'm not used to talking. I have a one way ticket. She said we're going. Mr. Mandalay. Oh. Mandalay. Mandalay, 'm on the four o'clock train. I hope you could Mandalay. Mandalay, it's late in the day with your back to the river as you run to the tree. Mandalay. Mandalay, in your lovely white dress, I'm calling to tell you come all right.
Host 1:33:02
So that was your song, Mandalay, and that's a great introduction into some things we've been talking around. But to hit at more explicitly and directly here looking at a Joah activities and programming in Burma going back to the last number of years, up until today. So can you start us off and talk about some of the really incredible, innovative things you've been doing there?
Patrick Burgess 1:33:33
Yeah. I mean, I think when I when I was thinking about our work in Burma, we agile Asia justice and rights. We What's unusual about our approach is that we have five different elements to it. We have a quite a strong team on the Thai Burma border, about 10 staff, working civil society, and working with ethnic groups and the nug and the nucc focused on capacity building, building understanding. We also work with about 30 partners inside Burma, mostly women's led survivor organizations, trying to keep them alive and to their organizations alive. What's unusual, I think, is that we have a strong team that we set up in 2017 in Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh. So I just team there outside the camps has trained 200 facilitators, Rohingya facilitators that work every week on number of times, sharing information, empowerment, learning. You know, there's one and a half million people in the camps. They should understand where they are and what's. Happen, and what's happening about them without, without people making decisions and making representations in their name, far away from where they are, with no participation. So it's a big job, actually, to do that, but we we work on that in the camps, so we have the work on the on the book inside the camps. We have the work based on in Thailand now, which was previously we had an office in Yangon and an office in Michigan, but all our team, of course, had to flee. We also work at the level of ASEAN. So we have a full time staff person in our Jakarta office working on advocacy for Burma with ASEAN, slow progress, but important, I think, and we also work with at the international level. So myself, gallu and some others work at those senior levels with the UN the double I double M, the ICC, etc, on this case, so we're able to work across all those elements of the Burma program. And it's challenging, but I think it's really enriching, especially the fact that our our Burma program, includes a significant element focused on Rohingya and other victims as well, and the universe of victims of the of The Junta. And I think what's really unfortunate is that people don't understand how much manipulation there has been to turn them into hatred, to build the hatred of the Rohingya inside Burma, the report that was issued just a couple of months ago by the double I, double M said they have found more than 20, I think might be 30, something different Facebook pages and other social media outlets that were controlled by the junta for the purpose of turning the population against the Rohingya, and that they were using pop stars and cooking classes and all of this stuff that Burmese were tuning into thinking it was a pop star, thinking it was a cooking class, but mentioning, you know, building hate speech of the Rohingya and and they were, they were not pop stars and cooking. It was the junta funding them to do that, to build a level of hatred in the population in preparation for this attacks that they that they did. So, you know, it's taken quite a lot for victims of other ethnic groups in particular to understand that they're all victims of the same perpetrators. And the other point is, where are the Rohingya supposed to go? You know, we may like or dislike or have differences with all kinds of people, but there's one and a half million people. You know, I go to the camps regularly. They're living under plastic sheets in the mud. Some have been there 32 years. It's plastic sheeting, mud floors. And they say, well, where's our the only home we have is Rakhine state, there and there. The camps in Bangladesh have barbed wire around them. People are not allowed out. They're not allowed to go to have high school education. They're not allowed to have a job. Where are they supposed to go? If it's not Rakhine State. So as uncomfortable and as difficult as that challenge is, we need to at least recognize what the reality is. This is the biggest refugee camp in the world. So the other part that agile works on is another part of that is the Rohingya refugees arriving in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. And we just put out a report of what we call Rohingya Oral History Archives, which is taking the stories of those arrivals by boat. You know, what's their experience been? What are their hopes? Where do they want? And documenting and publishing that? So, yeah, our program is across a number of areas, which I think makes it rich, and you mentioned also art and music. And, yeah, I mean, it's a very big part of agile programming that we include art and music and other crafts and other having. Is, and that's that's not only a you know nurtures us, but it's a very strategic part of what we do and and it's not something that we shy away from. It's centrally included in our strategic strategy, strategic approach. And the reason for that is that, first of all, this road on for justice, truth and human rights is is long and hard, and you don't get a lot of positive news quite often, and we're not going to last for this on this struggle unless we're having some nurturing connection enjoyment along the way. Right? So it's all very well to say I'm a self sacrificing activist, and I only do this, but you probably won't last two years in the field. The reason I'm doing this 30 years after I started, is because I've been having a good time on the way as well. Right? So we believe you can do really good work, and in fact, better work when you're having some enjoyment as well. And human beings in every corner of the globe. What do they have in common? They play music everywhere, right from in Iceland to the bottom of Latin America to Africa, Europe. All human beings play music. They sing songs. And every Resistance Movement has been driven by resistance songs as well. So music is a big part of a Joah approach. Someone sent me something once where Nelson Mandela said, without the songs, we would never have been successful with the revolution.
And the same for the Bernies. I think you know the songs at one of the training I did in my site recently, at the end of the training, you know, what was great is people have different opinions, from civil society to the nug and the Minister of this and the minister and, you know, there's a lot of divisions. But then when someone brought out the guitar and they played one of the resistance songs, and everybody is singing, and they remember, there's more Unifying them than dividing them. So we do that. We've held, we held, you know, we hold. We held a song competition in the Rohingya camps for human rights related songs. And it was amazing. We got like an old Imam singing a human rights song solo, and then we had a 10 piece band and an amazing woman, older woman, who basically raps about her experiences in the camp over harmonium. We've held those similar contests in Timor, where the human rights we hold film competitions for Burmese filmmakers. We have a project in the Rohingya camps, where the women survivors of mostly sexual violence during the attacks, so their experiences onto a small they're very good at embroidery, and they love embroidery, so they sew a story into a square piece of material, and then we take that and have it professionally put into a quilt. And we call those quilt of memory and hope so we use those at exhibitions in Asia and Australia in the US Europe, as a way of promoting and having people be aware of of these human rights situations. So also we Agile has a strong youth team. And I think you mentioned earlier, you know, language and the way people act and communicate, that they act in a completely different way than I do, in a way and and often they'll do trainings and they just say, you know, Patrick, will you come and do a session and then piss off, You know, because they want to do things their way. And you know, the future belongs in the hands of the young people, and we need to have them understand enough to be able to engage with their leaders as well. There's too much division between generations as well as between ethnic groups and everyone else. So that's also a big focus. And they want music and they want art. We do theater. We also make, I mean, this is getting a bit broad, but we make television. We've made some television series and documentary films. Aung San as well.
Host 1:45:00
Yeah, that storytelling really caught my eye. And looking at, I think they were themes of rule of law during the transition period by bringing in dramatic elements from popular Burmese themes, I wonder if you could share some of those.
Patrick Burgess 1:45:15
Yeah, that's an interesting story, actually, because soon after the 2011 transition, I think it was probably 2012 European Union held a big conference in Burma on the rule of law. It was called high level conference on the rule of law. So I was invited to speak on a panel. And it was a three person panel, and the the other persons involved with or Aung San Suu Kyi and the at that time, Attorney General and myself. So we spoke, and then after that, Aung San Suu Kyi said to me, let's have a cup of coffee, which we did. And she said, why don't you come to my office next week and we'll talk about some things. So I was working with my colleagues at Pyo bin, and we went to the torso office the next week. And these were the days before the Rohingya issue, when, which was incredibly disappointing for me and for so many others. But at that time, you know Aung San, she still had that aura, and she said, What we need is a television series to teach Burmese about democracy and human rights and gender equality. Will you work on that? We were like, how the hell do we do that? Okay, yeah, all right. What you know, in that situation, you say yes and then work out how to later. So I had a friend who was an award winning Australian scriptwriter, Phil and we formulated a process. We went to Burma, we met with a whole range of all kinds of groups and individuals to formulate and work with them, developing stories and a content. And we wrote the first series of the series, the sun, the moon and the truth came. The name came from one of the Buddha's sayings that says three things cannot remain hidden for long, the sun, the moon and the truth? Well, it's about time the truth was revealed about Burma, but so we wrote that TV series, and it was produced eight hours of television, and we set it in a NGO and civil society organization working on legal aid, because that gave us an avenue to work on different rights cases that that office could be working on. And Philip, being a very talented storyteller, brought in all these, you know, we, I think we had four different love triangles with the, you know, 17 year old, a 25 year old, a 35 year old, and then an old widow. But not relationships. They have to be triangles. That's where the tension. And he introduced me to the Tun ust. And I was like, what? What's the UST? He said, I was in Hollywood, reading, you know, writing room with some and I asked the same question, but it's unrequited sexual tension, which you need if you're going to create a TV series, even when it's relevant, when they kiss, it's all over, you've got to you've got to have it. Nothing happening. So and we then were able to have those love stories, family drama where the mother wants her to marry this guy, but she's falling in love with this crony. She doesn't know he's a bad guy. We are. We know football a street kid becomes this is amazing football player, but hasn't got any football shoes. We wove all those through and then every hour, we dealt with an issue. We had someone arrested wrongly, an unfair trial, workers rights and the right to strike. We had two cases of defamation and were brought to the court rape, a character gets taken to the Thai fishing boats as a captive. And we had a young girl trafficked up to the border into a sexual trafficking case and then rescued at the last minute by the hands of policemen who did Kung Fu, right? So, I mean, I think that was a good initiative. Unfortunately, some of the people involved in that series now apparently are pro military, so it just kind of took a whole lot of the shine of our work off that. But the product, I think, is still, was still very interesting. For example, we the one hour episode on domestic violence was accepted to be taught into every. Lease Academy in the country. Oh, wow. And then, following that, we wrote a second series, which was taken on by another organization who formed a Burmese team to further develop that. And then the EU asked us to do it in in Timor Leste as well. So we wrote 20 half hour episodes in Timor Leste, similar type of thing. And in terms of agile, strategic approach, we have four levels in like a triangle. The bottom level is trying to influence as many ordinary people as you can in small ways so that they understand more about democracy and rights. So the TV series fitted into that broad base of the triangle that people learned a little bit about the land law, about workers rights, about equality, about sexual why? Why You Should, for example, the episode on rape in both countries centered around a victim who didn't speak out, and then her family wanted to deal with it within the family, and then she sees the perpetrator doing it again with someone she knows, and the idea that, you know, We need accountability, or the perpetrators, go on and on and on and do it again and again and again. So, yeah, we can influence them. And our, our goal for the TV series was to promote discussion. It's not so that we, and apparently, you know, we showed it, we gave it away in DVDs on the streets of Yangon. It was shown in tea shops in the mountains, and 8 million people saw that series. Wow. Yeah, that's amazing. So yeah, it has its flaws. And I think, I think some of the Burmese filmmakers think it was a bit simplistic and but we were trying to reach, not the, you know, we're trying to move across areas, but we wanted, you know, to reach as many people as possible. So that's the base. And then the second level of the triangle and agile, strategic approaches with groups that are committed to work on rights. So NGOs victims organizations, empowering them. And then the third level of the triangle is connection. So connecting them to each other, connecting them and we. We are the Secretariat for the transitional justice Asia network. Tian has 10 countries in it working on transitional justice and connecting different countries in Southeast Asia on these issues. So we have the base of the whole population small incremental increases of understanding through broad based things like a TV series. The second level with NGOs and people working on the issues train, and we work mostly there trainings and all that. The third level is connection. And the fourth level is when you can reach policy makers legal change, which in the Burma context, you know, we've been involved in helping to provide some inputs on the new constitution in relation to human rights and transitional justice. We connected the nucc to Rohingya in the camps around the draft Rohingya policy, which they didn't really know how to connect with the Rohingya in the camps. We work with the Transitional Justice Alliance, which is a group of about 14 Burmese organizations working on transitional justice, putting forward policies on truth, seeking, reparations, etc, to the to the nug, and we will be doing, you know, so that's the sort of levels we're working on, also at having some inputs at those senior policy levels. And I personally do quite a lot of that work. I've decided myself that at this point in time I should, you know, I work in a lot of contexts, but I should focus a lot on Burma, because that's where I can contribute perhaps most at this point of time, right?
Host 1:54:40
So I think that storytelling is such an important thematic way to be able to bring these wider elements in, and that links back to your songwriting and your song. So it's a good opportunity here to take a listen to a second of one of your Burma songs.
Patrick Burgess 1:54:57
Sure, yeah, this is a relatively. New Song. It's called Love will conquer fear, and I wrote it immediately after the 2021 junta take over. And it's about the CDM movement, the marches. And it, it's just, it's written through the allegory of rain and water. And you know, it says, the water falls onto the mountains and falls, it makes its way for the river to the seas, and the rain falls to the earth of our land, watering all our hopes and dreams, and that, you know, the theme is that the marchers will eventually win this struggle, and that in the end, love will conquer fear. And I think there's a line in the song that you'll hear where it says, greed and power nurture dark and lonely hearts and watch that, watch their tower split and fall apart. And I think that's kind of happening now. You know, greed and power don't make us happy, and you see the those who are involved in this, it breeds this dark, lonely hearts, it can't breathe, can't make you, bring you to a good place. And we believe that there's in the core of that, that's where the junta tower is going to split and fall apart. And then the song says that the you know, I believe when this when the rain stops falling, when this all ends, the sun will shine and all our tears will dry. I believe, when the rain stops falling, the sky will clear and love will conquer fear. So this is written directly inspired by the CDM marches, and it hasn't come out yet. It will come out very soon. As part of the new album.
1:57:12
Raindrops fall unto the mountains. They fill the river. Fill the rivers that flow down to the sea and teardrops fall to the earth of our land, ordering the sea for all our hopes and dreams. You and I stand together on the front line with all our friends behind and if one falls, 10 more will replace them, cause the river flows from darkness into light, greed and power breathe dark and lonely hearts watch the tower split and fall apart when the rain stops falling, the sun will shine, the tears will dry. When the rain starts falling, the sky will clear and love will conquer fear. Behind your eyes, the reflection of blue skies, the white door, fields of time and I believe. When the rain stops falling, the sun will shine and all our tears will grow. I believe when the rain stops falling, the sky will cling and love will conquer fear. Yes, I believe when the rain starts fall, this guy will cling and love will conquer fear.
Host 2:00:53
So that was Love will conquer fear, and both in the song title as well as in the way you introduced it, I couldn't help but think of the famous expression and book title of Aung San Suu Kyi, freedom from fear. And I've had numerous conversations with Burmese and long time foreign allies and people who've lived in the country for years, who have reflected on their journey of kind of understanding the profundity of that line of what and why that line was so relevant to Burma, particularly freedom from fear. Why? Why those choice of words was so relevant to the to to what Burma had gone through and and so I, I wonder, as you were writing this song, and particularly using focusing on this, this conquering of fear, which is another way to say a freedom from fear. If To what degree in your longtime involvement with Burma, Burmese people, Burmese society, you find fear in these particular cases as something that is predominant and relevant in the struggle.
Patrick Burgess 2:02:04
It's an interesting point because you just led me to reflect on something I hadn't thought about for a long time. But when I first went to Burma in the 1990s I had this incredible thought about fear, because I'd been in during those years, you know, and I was involved, to some degree, in working with some diaspora groups in Australia. And I went to East Timor, which is also under military occupation by the Indonesians, you know, covertly as a tourist, just to see what the situation and I did the same. I went to Burma and in Timor there were Indonesian military everywhere, and the occupation was brutal and obvious. And everywhere I went, there was a guy with short hair and shiny military boots with a T shirt and jeans on following me or whatever, you know. And when I went to Yangon that and I thought, wow, there's not as many military and yet, the occupation, I knew, was just as brutal and Aung. And then I came to realize it's because it's fear. They have created such a blanket of fear that they don't need to be physically present on every street corner like the Indonesians did, right? And the fear and the length of the occupation, you know, the dictatorship was longer and deeper, I think. And maybe that was it. In Indonesia, during those years of the Suharto regime, civil society still carved out a place for themselves. In fact, it was interesting, because a lot of them, the human rights organizations, formed into legal aid, the legal aid organization, and then after the transition, they emerged as human rights. But that blanket of fear and in in my song Mandalay that we heard earlier, I just was remembering. That's what informed it. When I said they came in the night and with silent, cold hands, took us and led us away. That's what was happening in Burma. They would, they would let people do, connect with each other, yeah. And they just turn up at night take you away, right? Whereas in in Indonesia, they would try and stop you from connecting and be physical. So the blanket of fear that the junta uses has and is a massive issue for you know, when we we believe that the love will conquer fear and the transition will come. So we're going to have to deal with, you know, this generational, cultural issue of fear and fear of authority, as well as many other issues such as the, you know, the emergence of corruption and authoritarianism in in new forms of government, which are bound to come. But, yeah, fear is a very interesting issue, and living with fear and living free from fear is an incredible thing for society. I often, when I used to be a practicing lawyer and defense counsel, people say, you know why. You know you're defending people that may well be guilty and and having worked in so many other places, where the police can decide who's locked up and who isn't, without any real legal aid or strong defense, I my view in in developed societies, is that what we buy for all the cost of having strong defense in every case, is a freedom from fear that the state will not take us away, because they do that in every country where there isn't strong defense and a strong opposition to the power of the state. The state then uses that power to target those who are criticizing it, those who are business opponents of their friends, those who might not want the environmental destruction of the big companies. Whoever they want to target they can, because there's no balance of that power. And those forces are inherent and natural, and I think they're going to be hopefully when we have a transition to democracy again in Burma of whatever form it takes, it's up to the Burmese I know from my experience of so many countries that there will be a tendency to authoritarianism, and there will be a tendency to using violence and guns for personal purposes. That will be there in small groups, ethnic areas, large areas, wherever, because it's there in every place of the world, and we need to be aware of that in order to combat it and lessen, to lessen its influence.
Host 2:07:36
And that goes into this idea of, well, the whole idea of rule of law and of Legal Aid, and how you can trust the society that you're living in all levels, from the what the police can and can't do to the courts to to the politicians and business interests and one important part of that, which is your background, is the representation of those that have been accused and the right to a fair trial, and looking at the the experience and the safety of Burmese lawyers, something that you're quite familiar with, and to just to illustrate how the stress that they've been under For these decades, and yet how they've tried to persevere and to continue to advocate for representing their clients, which really is not just those particular people in the facing questions of justice, but is this wider society and the stability and the trust that you have of a wider society, that these processes actually can take place. I wonder if I can prompt you to tell a story that you shared before we started recording, if you feel comfortable sharing that publicly about the conference that you attended in Bangkok and how that kind of what that anecdote tells us about the strain and stress that they're under, and how even with those dangers and those fears to go use reference that word and that emotion again, there is still this effort to continue to find a way forward. Yeah, that's
Patrick Burgess 2:09:16
it's quite some time ago. I can't remember exactly when it was maybe 2004 or something like that. There was a conference held in Bangkok on the issue of Burma and the International Criminal Court, as I remember it. And I was at the conference, I spoke, and there was a whole lot of Burmese activists, diaspora, etc, there. And then suddenly we got news that the entire hotel complex was surrounded by Thai police and Intel and being shut down, and no one was allowed to leave. And the reason was because Burmese military intelligence had in full. Graduated the conference and had been moving around, observing who was who was involved, taking photos when they could. And the Thai then Thai authorities became angry because they hadn't given permission for the Burmese Intel to come. So they shut down the whole operation, we weren't allowed to leave and at that time, I mean, it was interesting, because it was during that time that, even at that during those time, there was a move how to have people understand International Justice mechanisms and how we can possibly have no apply. And on that day, I remember watching Aung tu speak from the Burma Lawyers Association and the junta declared this, that organization as a terrorist organization on that day. So yeah, it was still that movement and that drive for justice, that's was still there, looking for international justice and and I think, I mean, what's what's very interesting is that these issues around law and the rule of law and Justice, we often have kind of a love hate relationship with people hate the restriction and the technical part of it and all of that. And they wish, in a way, they wish they didn't need it. They wish they didn't need these technical laws and all of that. And I recently, spoke to someone who asked me to help with their job of being asked to set up a law school in one of the ethnic areas, and would I help them? And I said, Well, to some degree, but what you need is a law school from one of the one of the developed countries to give you serious support. But I said, What kind of applicable law are you going to use? He said, Oh, we don't really think we'll need that. I thought, oh. He said, Yeah, we don't believe in any of the Burmese laws. And I said, well, then what will you use to judge whether people have committed a crime or taken land unjustly, or, you know, not fulfilled their contract to build something, or he didn't really have an answer. And you know, my experience is we don't like this, and we rail against the law often, but it's what keeps society stable and in check is a list of rules that everybody understands, and we get mad, and we should, because the rules become so technical that only those who have the language, who are lawyers, can understand it. We need to work on making it more simple, but without the rules. We're in the worst place. And I was thinking, and again, for Burma, it's interesting. And I was reflecting back to our time in Timor when suddenly we had this 30 year occupation, 24 year occupation, 30 year dictatorship, and a complete rejection by the people of the Indonesian military. And actually, the actions of the military made it impossible for the people to accept them, and I think that's happened in Burma as well, in a situation where you may be able to accept a role for the military or a role for Indonesia in that context, or to be part of Indonesia, that may have been possible, but not after you've killed 1000s of innocent children and raped 1000s of women, and you've destroyed the chance that you will be accepted into any legitimate place by through that intense human suffering. And so we have to work with that. How do we work with the fact that the hatred that's that's built from that sort of behavior? So there was a complete rejection of the Indonesian system by the Timorese at that time. And then we thought, well, what? What are we going to use for the applicable laws? What? What laws are going to apply now, because the UN was brought in to be the government, and I was a part of that. And I was in the when I was the director of Human Rights, there was, I think, six of us who were part of the senior management team for 8000 un personnel. I. Yeah. And what happened was we looked at the laws and thought, and then the Timorese looked at them and said, actually, the timar, the Indonesian laws, aren't so bad. We can live with them in general, until we can draft our own laws one by one. But you can't have a vacuum and no laws. And we passed a regulation from memory, something like saying that Indonesian law will apply except where it's in contradiction to international human rights principles. Interesting. So that was the applicable law. And then we we worked on the most crucial laws, the criminal justice code. And at that time, I remember, I went to Ireland, to Galway, to a big event. I was part of a group of experts that drafted a un model Criminal Procedure Code, four transitions, because we needed, we realized, because Bosnia happened, Kosovo, East, Timor and these missions suddenly needed something to apply in terms of law. So I was part of this group of experts that drafted a criminal procedure code that we could the UN kind of take when a country had collapsed and say, well, at least we've got this code. So I haven't looked at that for 20 years, but the Burmese may may find that interesting in the future, because I also looked at the Burmese Criminal Code 100 years old and not a great, great model, but I mean, that point is interesting. We do need these, these laws to operate, and so that different parties who have different needs and wants can look and see that there's a single set of laws that will apply. And I think that many people don't understand what the rule of law means. And in those early days following the true 2011 transition, when I was working in Burma, I gave a lot of presentations about the rule of law. And I remember I used to refer to an 400 or 500 year old British San, British statement by, I think, Samuel Rutherford, who used Latin. And he said, you know, what we want is Lex Rex and not Rex Lex, Lex meaning the law and Rex meaning the king. So what we want is the law to be king, not the king to be law. And I thought, wow, which made me reflect, because what we have in many of these situations is many little kings, and they are the law Great. Whatever they want is the law in this area or that area, and if they they're not going to be necessarily just, or it's just. So what we want is the law to be the king of all one set of rules and and the rule of law is having a set of just laws that apply equally to everybody. So if a law is not just, it's not the rule of law and it's applied, it's not the rule of law. The Burmese junta might say, well, we're applying the law and we're applying the 2008 constitution. That's not the rule of law, because that's not a just law. You need just laws, and they need to apply equally to everybody, and that is the cornerstone of a successful society. And I think you know, we can't reject that, because if you look at societies that are relatively successful, they all have that.
Host 2:19:06
I think one of the questions that some observers ask that they're confused by is that the there is, there is, and there has been, through all the iterations of the military regime, this kind of real, intentional facade and charade to show that they're doing everything according to plan to law to judicial procedure to electoral protocol, etc, etc, etc, every everything from the prosecution of a criminal to even the death of a protester that we've seen since the coup in Myanmar, and how they've tried to disappear bodies and attribute different causes of death of prominent protesters to judicial proceedings and just on and on. And I think one of the confusions that's come is, why do they go to this trade at all? Why not just say we're the freaking dictator, like we're gonna, like, you live by our role, or you. No, instead of just having this whole what seems like make believe of, oh no, no, we're going according to this judge is impartial, and there's this ruling we're going on, and this is the proper way we have to go when it seems like they're not fooling anyone. They're not fooling anyone inside the country or in the the region, or certainly not the western audience. And yet this, and even, and now it's more ridiculous than it's ever been, because there if they were fooling a small group of people before, it's certainly not the case. Now, with the access to information, they still keep going through this charade instead of just saying, Well, you know, actually, we're going to do what we want.
Patrick Burgess 2:20:34
Yeah, that's it. You know, that's an interesting point. It's also, it also often occurs to me how many dictators and set up this dictatorial regime and put the word democracy in the top Democratic People's Republic, People's Republic North Korea, you know, why do they bother putting why do they bother pretending that there's democracy.
Host 2:20:59
Or elections in Russia.
Patrick Burgess 2:21:02
Why don't they just say, you know, I'm the leader, I'm the king, as they used to. It's quite interesting that they feel the need to pretend. Because, you know, if you look at that and analyze it, they recognize that there is, there's something in that word democracy, or they're not doing it. But in a way, you wonder whether they feel like, yeah, you know, we do know that that kind of what should be done in elections. But, or they just, maybe just, you know, using it as a camouflage. But it is true that it's not it's legal systems and elections that are the core of a stable and prosperous country, and they're both manipulated and and painted in different colors in order to serve the dictators, and I think it's one of the interesting things, is to look at another thing that we bring to the table when we've worked in many places and been able to study many places, is what are the common elements of countries that people like to live in and which have high levels of freedom and prosperity. And you know, I've told I've spoken to people involved in authoritarian regimes many times in those terms, you know, like Sri Lankan military, or that, you know, the Indonesians during that time, etc, that there aren't examples of wealthy, prosperous countries where the military in charge or where corruption is allowed to be rampant. There aren't examples. So if you want your country actually to be a wealthy country, more wealthy and more money and more hospitals and schools, then you can't have a situation of rampant corruption and and the military in charge, because that doesn't work. And if you look at Latin America, there were, you know, 10 and more 11, I think military dictatorships during a 30 year period, all of which every single one ended up with mass killing, rape and torture of their own people using those guns and economic collapse, or it's not and yet, you look at Europe, you get the Scandinavian countries, you know, and you look at the stability and the economic prosperity and the ability to send your kids to school and have good hospitals and all of that. They're not corrupt, that the military is not involved in the government, all of those things. So, you know, that's something which often people who don't have a broader perspective can't see that. We can see that actually this, there's not even much of an argument to say this works. China is a little bit of a challenge in that regard, because they have brought a lot of people out of poverty through our terrain authoritarian means, but they have lost freedom and you can't who wants to live in a country where you can't say what you think?
Host 2:24:32
Yeah, and there's a lot of people that haven't benefited from That's right, right? Yeah. So let's transition to your third and final Myanmar song.
Patrick Burgess 2:24:42
Yeah, this is, it's called ole lay le. It's a song I wrote in East Timor. I actually wrote it about East Timor, but it's in the center of the song you will hear. I just have a refrain where I say four words, Timor. Burma, Tibet Palestine, and this song is about human rights defenders and resistance. And it's sad to me, in a way, that 20 years after I wrote the song, three of those four contexts that I was writing about are still not free. Tima is Timor is free. Tibet, Burma and Palestine, far from it. So the song is written from it's actually, I always say it's inspired by the death, the murder of my friend and very close friend of all Indonesian human rights activist Munir, who was the head of a Indonesian human rights organization and flew to Amsterdam, boarded the plane to fly to the Netherlands, and was killed on the plane a Garuda flight by the Indonesian intelligence service. Actually, when he stopped in Singapore, he was followed, and they put arsenic into his tea before boarding again. And that case, it's not conjecture, that's what happened. So Munir, you know, I always dedicate that song to Munir and all the human rights defenders who have lost their lives. And it's written, you know, it came out of in Timor during the occupation resistance I saw sprawl painted across a wall freedom, alive or dead. And the chorus of this song, in the melody, is actually taken from a Timorese folk song, resistance song, and that song says it's a bit different. Oh, hey, le. And then it says, I am, I am the land of Timor, and my corpse is also the land Timor. And in a way, it's like, it's like the courage and inspiration of so many Burmese activists that I know who've lived through years and years of torture, and to say you can do what you want, I'm not going to give up. And so this song, the persona is the spirit of resistance or human rights. And it starts, you know, I am a mountain. It, you know, I run like rivers to the sea. I am this spirit that you you cannot drive down. And then the chorus is freedom, alive or dead. That's our battle cry, and that's what the Burmese have now. O le lay for everyone that you cut down, 1000 more will rise. And I think that this song, which was written when I was living those six years in Timor, it applies so so directly to Burma now, where so many courageous Burmese have said, Enough is enough freedom, alive or dead. This is, and you know, when I was looking at some of the experiences of this, the the CDMS, who'd marched and were killed in custody, even, you know, jumping out of multi storey buildings to to kill themselves rather than commit to this authoritarian regime. The Burmese spirit is amazing, and it's inspiring us all, and this song is really connects me to them through that spirit of resistance in defense of human rights that that ran through Timor that is still informing the Palestinians. And I met with the Palestinians at the recently in the International Criminal Court, resisting under incredible pressure. So yeah, that's this song is. It's a sing along song, and we had at the recent conference in Chiang Mai, we got a lot of people to sing along with the chorus, and I owe the melody to Timorese, but the spirit to Timor Tibet Palestine and Burma.
1 2:29:11
I am a mountain. I am a rock. I'm the ocean tide that no man can starve. Ma, breath is winding trees, my blood is open. Dreams I run with wild horses and rivers to the sea. Freedom that you cut down 1000 times. Lessons of history seem hidden from your view, human spirit doesn't critical. You can't force us to be silent. You can't force us to agree. You'll fail cause we'll struggle. U, freedom, day, the more you push us down, the MOE will hold our ground time and God are on our side. Can you hear that sound? The it's the scream of the lion, the wolf's quiet night, the rumble of the volcano, freedom, alive or dead. On the freedom for everyone that you Cut down you Freedom. That's a Moe. Everyone that you cut down.
Host 2:33:12
And that was ole lay le and I, as I listen to that, I really can't help but think about Just the joy, the passion, the exuberance that's coming from that which is combining, on one part, just the real sense of joy that you have and you bring to activism, giving, selflessness. It's not just this sense of altruism because that's the right thing to do or out of an obligation or a morality not that alone. It's out of this, this, as we talked about before, this kind of selfish joy that's operating to want to give in this way and and yet also this, this sense of joy of the revolution, of the promise of freedom and the experience of believing that you'll overcome tyranny. And so the last question I'd like to ask you, as we reflect on this moment is, we've talked a lot, you've shared quite a bit about the kind of cycles and repetition of different conflicts, what to expect, how from one place to another, things lessons learned that can be shared and brought over from one of the other. And the question I'd like to ask now is actually the opposite of this question, in looking at not so much, in looking at the similarities that run across these conflicts and their life cycles and the international involvement and such, but in looking at Burma specifically and particularly at this moment, the curiosity of, how is this different? How is from everything that you've seen in your long life journey and career, in looking at this particular moment and how the Burmese resistance is shaping what are you seeing that is actually an outlier? What are you seeing that is actually. Standing out and and breaking out of certain kinds of cycles and boxes that you've become accustomed to before that's drawing your attention in new and surprising ways.
Patrick Burgess 2:35:12
Hmm, that's a that's a great question. I'm not sure how I can answer that without a deep reflection, but I think, I mean, there's a number of things that make this situation different. One is the the number and strength of groups that have guns, which is a power and a weakness. Both, it's the power that's driving this resistance movement, and without all those groups that have guns, there would be no there would be not sufficient force to make a real threat to the junta. But following a transition, that's going to be a major challenge, because what we what I've seen in so many other contexts, is that once people have guns, nobody can argue with them. And so if you want to rob a store or take someone's house or their land and you've got guns, then you can do that. So where is that going to leave all those armed groups following the transition, because they've been armed. But this is something which is not only in Burma. I mean, look at the Taliban were armed by the US to resist the Russians when they invaded Afghanistan. You just you can't get the guns back off them. So yeah, that will be a big issue for Burma, but the number of groups is quite amazing. I think the the strength of the of the resistance. I mean, I have seen that before. Timor was like that in the clandestine movement, the whole country resisted. But it's incredibly strong. And Burmese communities are they have an amazing sense of community and joy in life, and all of the small things that make the culture, and, you know, amazing cultures in Burma. So that's different. And I think the the pride and joy that they have in their own distinct cultures, whether it be from whatever ethnic background they come from, that's that's an incredible strength moving forward, and that's, that's something which they will need to to build whatever society comes after the junta. So that's and the other thing is this, this, that's interesting. Is this interesting mix between the the tensions between the will to be autonomous and a realization that certain things only come from a larger group. And I think I've had some insights into that that one would never have expected. For example, in Timor, which is a small area, you know, a million people in Indonesia, which is 270 million people immediately after they voted to be independent. Then I was back in there, and they were saying, Patrick, can you bring some reading glasses. Nobody could read the older people because there's no optometrist in a in a small country of a million people, people got sick and they're like, Well, where do we go to get a cancer surgeon in a small country, we're not going to have that level of medical assistance, so they go back to Indonesia, to the larger country, to and pay a much more as foreigners for that. So these issues around you know, there's arguments, and what's interesting in Burma is some people saying there's going to be balkanization, or some people saying we want to be completely independent, or no, we want to be part of a federal system. How that into place and and understanding? And I think it's very difficult for people who've only known one context to understand some of the bigger issues. And it's part of our job to just present those issues, you know. And I say to them, to some of our friends, you want to go to university in Germany or Australia or us? You know what passport do? Do you think that they will accept in order for you to or your kids to go to university? There are they going to accept a passport from a, you know, a sub national group of a million people? Will you be able to travel? Which countries will accept you to travel to those countries with that passport? And that's the issue of state recognition, which I think people need to think about. I mean, they should make their own decisions. There's arguments for small states, for autonomous regions, for federal systems, but there are some things which are clear, and that is, you know, the UN will not recognize as Member States, areas that have not, at least had a free and fair election that has been a recognized will of the people to be a state. You're never going to get recognition. You're never going to get recognition from the European Union, which means development aid, assistance, access to travel, education, etc. So in making those decisions for the Burmese around what is, what is the future look like? Independence, autonomy, federalism, those issues need to be taken into account. And they might say, well, we don't care where we'll be okay, fine, but don't think we're going to make this decision, and then I'm going to be invited to study at the Australian National University, because they won't, they won't have a passport to be allowed in, or we're going to access European Union funding, because they're not going to give money to a situation where they're not sure where it's going. And you know, there's very strict guidelines about corruption, and so you need to. So these are all all issues for the future, and I think that's it makes it really exciting, but also for my work, what we recently sat down and thought about what Agile can do in this situation and in a very small, you know, a smaller window as I can express that all we can do is to try and help people to learn more, so that they can make better decisions. So by learning more about transitional justice, what's been done in other countries coming out of military dictatorships? What about the rule of law and justice systems human rights victims by learning more, then they can make better decisions, because we'll, we'll never be have the, I'll never have the expertise about Burma to even be able to enter into those decisions. But they have that. But by learning more, they'll take all those myriad of things into consideration and make the best decisions they can. So that's, that's the role that we have. All we can do is believe in the spirit of resistance and rights and do what we can to support it.
Host 2:43:31
Thank you for that, and thank you so much for your generous time here today, going into an incredible life and the work that's being done in so many places, and particularly in Burma.
Patrick Burgess 2:43:42
And thanks very much for inviting me in. It's been quite a it's quite an unusual experience to be asked to talk for a couple of hours about your life and your work. So yeah, it's also been interesting for me. Thank you.
Host 2:43:56
So we will close out this interview with an outro of another one of your songs. And so I'd like to ask you to take a moment to choose a song you'd like to treat listeners to one last time and give us some background on that song.
Patrick Burgess 2:44:14
Okay, I'm gonna, I'm going to choose another human rights song, I guess, because that's what this session is about. This is a song called the stolen children of Timor, and this is dedicated to all those kids, all those children who get taken in times of war. And I know that in Burma, it's a particular problem for decades and decades, children, young people, have been taken into the junta and used to carry weapons and carry and so the same thing has happened in so many other countries. And in Timor, the Indonesian occupying forces took children to do that and then stole 5000 Or more children, took them from Timor into Indonesia. And it's interesting that now the arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin in the Ukraine conflict, if you look at what it's for, it's for stealing children to the International Criminal Court has charged Putin, and he's the head of the Child Protection Agency for transport, for transport, transporting Ukrainian children over the border. So when we started to learn about this in in Indonesia and Timor AG, began a program which is very difficult and has gone on for a number of years where we tried to trace, like these people in Timor said, was 30 years ago. We we put flowers on the grave of our child. So we went to the military housing complexes and others led by Galu Juanita, and traced these families and said, Okay, do you know? You know? They said, Do you have any Timorese here? And they said, Yeah, these guys and then trace their families back in Timor and ended up identifying if they had any knowledge or memory of their village. We went to the village and tried to find out who they were, and then we've now reunited about more than 101 by one identify and brought them back to this reunion in Timor. So it's a it's a happy human rights story, in a way where we don't get very many and the reunifications I've been on in Timor are amazing. The first group was invited to visit to the office of the Prime Minister, and they were all very damaged off of them. They're taken at the age of five years old or 10 years old, and they've been laborers and and he just welcomed them into his prime minister's office and said, Welcome home. And this is a very it's a positive story from Aung Joah work, and it's like one of those projects that takes us a lot of work for individual cases, but it helps to nurture us all, because we get a positive result sometimes. And this song is called the stolen children of Timur. There's also a video for this song and Ole Lele on YouTube, shot in T Moe.
2:47:23
I was holding on tight two year old blue dress when the car came into view. The men in Green said, I'll take this one. I thought he meant to school. They put me in the car and drove away. Rivers of tears ran down your face. 30 years passed slowly blind today, I'm coming home. I'm coming home. They took me in a ship across the sea and left me in a strange house. The man and the woman seemed kind to me till the lights went out. Please don't leave me here alone. Take me in your room. I wanna go home.
Host 2:48:56
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