“For years, Burma’s plight was one of the most under-reported tragedies in the second half the twentieth century.” Benedict Rogers, Burma: A Nation at the Crossroads

I’ve been aware of just how little I know about Burma as the days before entering near.  The world is full of just so much tragedy and injustice, violence and sorrow, and for too long a time the decades-long suffering of the Burmese peoples has dwelt in that category of my prayers “God help (fill in the blank) and bring peace to that land…please bring an end to the bloodshed and horror there.”  And so it feels like a deep privilege to be able to visit this place that for so long has been difficult to visit by people like me, a foreigner.  I can’t wait to hear and see and learn, and to meet the Burmese living in Burma.

I’ve been grateful for Benedict Rogers’ recent book, Burma: A Nation at the Crossroads, which I’ve brought along as my guide to understanding the last 70 years of Burma and the years to come.  Ben’s been a friend for a long time, albeit from a great distance, and he’s the closest thing I personally know to an expert on this country, and I deeply appreciate the Christian faith that grounds his insights, hope, and work.  Most of what I’m learning about Burma I’m learning from him (augmented by a lot of web research and reading).  If there are unascribed quotes in the writing that follows, they’re from him.  If you’d like to learn more about Burma and understand, I highly recommend that you get Ben’s excellent book.

And tomorrow we’ll learn from the Burmese themselves.

At the onset I don’t want to opine too much, or look forward too much, or even try to describe the current situation.  Rather I’ll just list some learnings as I try to get my head around a very unfamiliar land.

• Burma has between 56-60 million people, the world’s 24th most populous country, and geographically is the second largest country in Southeast Asia, and 40th in the world.  It’s no small place with no small population.
• The major ethnic groups, which fall roughly along geographic lines, are the (dominant majority at 68%) Burman, also the Karen, Karenni, Shan, Mon, Kachin, Chin, and Araken.  And then there are many sub-groups of peoples, 135 total separate ethnic groups that are recognized by the government.
• Buddhists make up 89% of the country, Muslims 4%, and Christians another 4%
• The British conquered and colonialized Burma from 1824-1885, which was a main battleground between the British and the Japanese during World War II, and then was freed from British rule on January 4, 1948, modern Burma’s independence day.
• For the first ten years of independence, there was a fragile democracy led by civilians, which was replaced by military rule by generals in 1958, which returned to civilian rule in 1960, and then in 1962 military rule was established by a coup led by General Ne Win, which would remain in effect until August of 2011.  Burma continues to have one of the world’s longest-running civil wars.   While the progress in the last two years has been unimaginable even perhaps five years ago, it’s too soon to tell how things will develop. But even my 3-month visa was unheard of not that long ago.
• The military dictatorship in Burma has been brutal, lethal, and effective for decades, despite many efforts from the various ethnic groups to protect themselves from it, and despite many popular protests from within the majority Burman population, often led by students, and always brutally put down with great bloodshed and loss of life.  The military regime has also been pro-active to stamp out resistance throughout the country.  For example, “between 1996-2011, over 3,700 villages in eastern Burma were destroyed by the military, and more than a million people were internally displaced.”  Among the dictatorship’s primary strategies has been to sow constant division between the minority ethnic groups.
• That said, democracy groups and the minority ethnic groups have made their own mistakes along the way, but on a very different scale.
• Atrocities consistently committed by the military regime include, but are not limited to torture, killing and execution, politically motivated imprisonment, burning villages, forced slavery and labor, conscription of child soldiers, human trafficking, using human beings as living minesweepers, and of course, using rape as a weapon of war.  This list sounds dangerously like, well, a list.  But we must remember that behind each phrase are very individual stories that have happened to a man, a woman, or a child, and each one our brother or sister in the eyes of God.
• For both the majority and minority populations in Burma, there is a “common enemy:  a brutal military regime that has sought to maintain power and deny them freedom at all costs.”

In the last year, I will have been to the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Israel and Palestine, and now Burma.  How much can a head hold?  How much can a heart hold?

There is a massive common denominator in this list of countries, and that is the dark and lethal legacy of European colonialism, in these cases French and very much British.  National boundaries drawn in pencil on flat maps at a mahogany table over drinks, and chaos when the benefits of ruling over a country that was not theirs diminish, followed by despots and dictators.  And it’s the most vulnerable who always suffer the most.

I so appreciate, and resonate, with Ben’s driving conviction which I take with me tomorrow:  “I am not biased in favor of one or other ethnic, religious or political group, but rather in favor of the basic values of freedom and human rights.  I have a moral framework, informed by my own personal faith and humanity, which tells me that rape, torture, forced labor, the conscription of child soldiers and the use of human minesweepers is wrong, and that we all are entitled to express our political or religious beliefs freely, without hindrance, and without fear of discrimination, detention, or death.”  Amen.

I now, ten or so hours from a flight from Singapore to Rangoon, am so excited to go to Burma.  And I simply cannot wait to see what God is doing there, through his Church and through the people of Burma.  No doubt there are stories of light breaking into the darkness, by many means… that’s what God does, and it seems as though that’s what he’s doing in Burma, through many people after a long long time.

**INTERNET ACCESS IS VERY LIMITED IN BURMA (AND NO PHONE CONTACT), SO IT MAY BE A BIT BEFORE I CAN POST BLOGS.  BUT WHEN I CAN, I WILL.  THANKS **