Dan Snow's History Hit - What's Going on in Myanmar?

Episode Date: March 4, 2021

Myanmar is currently experiencing one of its worst-ever periods of violence and civil unrest as the population protests against the recent military coup. Many protesters have been killed and injured and Aung San Suu Kyi is once again under house arrest. To help explain what is happening in Myanmar and put the events into context I am joined on the podcast by the filmmaker Alex Bescoby, who has spent much of his adult life working and living in Myanmar. We explore this complex issue and how the current unrest is related to its history, colonialism, the country's partition in 1947 as well as the subsequent coups, revolutions and more recently genocide that has followed.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Whenever a big news story breaks, we like to try and bring you some context on History Hit. We've got Alex Beskaby back on the podcast now. He spent much of his professional career in Myanmar. He has made numerous award-winning TV shows about Myanmar. He's written about Myanmar. You've heard him on this podcast before and you've watched him on History Hit TV. In 2013, his debut documentary was the fascinating story of Burma's lost royal family. He became very close to senior politicians and members of that exiled royal family in southern India. It's an extraordinary story. As I say, he's been on the podcast many times before, but it felt like it was good to get him back on. Remind us all exactly what's going on

in Myanmar, how this is related to its history, the partition of the country in 1947, and subsequent coups, revolutions, and in the case of the Rohingya of Rakhine State, recent genocides as well. If you wish to listen to Alex's previous podcasts or check out some of his documentaries, please go to historyhit.tv. It's the digital history channel that we've launched. You get all of the old podcasts on there without the ads. You also get access to hundreds and hundreds of documentaries on there, all about history. You're going to love it.

Head over to historyhit.tv. If you're a real glutton for punishment, you come to the live tour. Sit around with us all in a beautiful big theatre, talking about history, learning about the area we're in. That's historyhit.com slash tour. Coming to a city near you, if you live in Britain, in the autumn. See you there. In the meantime, here is Alex Beskaby.

Alex, thank you very much for coming back on the podcast. Thank you, Dan, for having me back. How much time have you spent in Myanmar, what we used to call Burma, over the last few years? Yeah, it's been the main focus of my adult life. I mean, most of the last 10 years, it's been home for me. And for anyone who's heard us chat on here before about my work in Burma in the past, I've had the most privileged fly-on-the-wall position over the last 10 years, making historical films in Burma and watching this country go through the most transformatory decades of

its modern history. More liberal, more open, more free than it ever has been in a long time. Of course, there's been big problems along the way with the Rohingya crisis, and a lot of people struggle to understand what on earth is going on. But now we see Burma back in the news again with some really terrible news. When we've spoken before, I've always been quite upbeat.

And this time, it's really heartbreaking what's going on. I mean, just today, I'm chatting to friends who are taking part in protests right now, facing down riot police

in Yangon, facing down stun grenades, tear gas, rubber bullets. It feels like the clock's gone back 20 years overnight. And I'm glad that we can sit here and talk a bit about why it's looking like this. Let's dig into the background. Everyone talks about the partition of India into India and Pakistan in 1947. But actually, there were many partitions of the Raj, of Britain's Indian Empire. And Burma was part of the Raj, wasn't it?

It was part of Britain's Indian Empire. Yeah, as I've often said to you and to others, I mean, to understand what's going on in Burma today, with the caveat that I'm not there right now and I've been locked out since COVID began. So anything I'm giving you on the current situation is thanks to friends who are feeding me information from the ground. But I've always been passionate about the current situation is thanks to friends who are feeding me information from the ground.

But I've always been passionate about the history and I think to understand that you've got to go way back into the British Empire days in Southeast Asia. Burma had been annexed in pieces through the 19th century, starting in 1824 all the way up to 1885. And the last chunk of Burma that was swallowed up into the Raj was done so against the advice of everyone in Westminster. It was done on a bit of a, not an accident, but it was imperial overreach. And Burma was sort of swallowed up as an afterthought and tacked on to India. And there's been a lot of sort of historical resentment and historical trauma that has come

from Burma's experience of the British Empire. And I think yet to understand why Burma is the way it is, you have to understand how it exited the British Empire. How did it exit? With so much focus, obviously, on the partition of Pakistan, the extraordinary bloodshed and humanitarian disaster that accompanied that, what was Burma's exit like? And how was Burma defined, built, created as a state after that?

Yeah, really good question. So Burma had been an independent kingdom before it was annexed into the British Empire. And it was one that was quite militaristic, quite proud of carving out its own space between India, China, and Thailand. But the colonial Burma by 1947,48, when independence was finally on the table. It was a country that had largely been finally built by the British imperial project. So there were lots of parts of it that might not have been part of the original kingdom of Burma,

but what we now see as Myanmar was essentially what the British cobbled together from a lot of disparate feudal kingdoms, the major kingdom of Burma, into what we now know as Burma. And that sort of state-making project was still very much ongoing when Burma was up for independence. So all focus was on India. Britain had been there for over 200 years. It had been a major focus. It had been the heart of the empire. Burma, very much an afterthought and tacked on. And so when independence was being discussed in the mid-1940s after the war, there was a central question of what is Burma and how should we govern it? And I think that, for me, is the central question of Burma today. And I think what we're seeing on the streets

in Yangon right now is that question still playing out. Now to understand the exit game of Burmese politics from the Raj or from the British Empire, you have to understand one figure, and that guy is General Aung San. He becomes the sort of father of the Burmese independence movement. He's only a young man at the time, he's only in his early 30s. And through the 1930s, he'd been agitating as a student protester. And then during World War II, when Japan and Britain are fighting over Burma, and Burma's being torn to pieces, he emerges as a soldier and as a leader of troops. And he becomes one of the founders of the Myanmar military, which is called the Tatmadaw. And first of all, they're trained by Imperial Japan to fight against the British. And then Aung San switches sides and he fights with the British against the Japanese.

And so by the time of independence, so 1947, 1948, he's the man that Atlee's talking to. And he's the man that is credited as being one of the fathers of the Myanmar military. And he's the man that is credited as being one of the fathers of the Myanmar military. But he's also the father of the idea of a Burma that is democratic, federal, multi-ethnic, multi-faith. And there's a lot of hope vested on this young man's shoulders. Now, sadly, in 1947, he's assassinated in quite mysterious circumstances. And the way I read modern Myanmar history is that at that point, you have this great division between two visions of Myanmar or two worlds within the country of Myanmar. And that,

again, is what we're seeing playing out right now. Those two worlds are this. One is the army, the Tatmadaw, the military. They are the ones that secured independence for Burma. In their total mythology, they are the ones that fought against the Japanese, then fought against the British, carved out this space and brought Myanmar's independence. At the same time, you have this other world within Myanmar, which are those that believe in a democratic, federal, civilian Burma that can be ruled by the will of the people and in which the army are just a sort of tool of the civilian government. Now, the problem we've had since 1948, since Onsans assassination,

is that those two worlds, those two visions of them have become separated and incompatible. And if we see what's happening right now, the big thing to say about what's happening right now in 2021 is this is not the first time this has happened. We're seeing these mass street protests, we're seeing the army stepping in and seizing civilian power from an elected government. This all happened back in 1962. So after independence, we have a brief period of a democratic experiment under Aung San's successors. And then by 1962, the country, which is, as I said, sort of this hodgepodge of different ethnic groups who've been stitched together under the British Empire, starts to fragment. We've got communists, we've got ethnic minorities who want independence or

autonomy. The country's falling to pieces. The civilian government actually asks the army to come in and save the day. But then the army gets a bit of a taste for power. And by 1962, they step in unabited, and they take over the country until 1988. And so for a long period of modern Burmese history, the army had been in control. Now in 1988, again, we have a massive uprising where we see these two visions of Burma being pitted against each other. So the country has been run into the ground by Ne Win and the army. They stepped in thinking they were the savers of the country and they totally run the place into the ground. Now by 1988 people are so fed up with this that they have a massive uprising and they demand elections at last to return to civilian rule after all this

time and the vision that Aung San had promised of a democratic federal Burma. Ne Win, the dictator, does step back. He resigns. He was mad. He's completely ruined the country. But he does step back. And onto the stage, we have this figure called Aung San Suu Kyi emerges, who we now all know as the Lady of Burma, this sort of heroine figure,

who in more recent years, obviously, has become a bit of a villain in the ASEAN community. Very complex story, but we'll come on to that. But in 1988, she has returned to the country to look after her ailing mother. And the Democratic opposition that's out on the streets, as they are right now, protesting for change, they coalesce around Aung San Suu Kyi as the daughter of Aung San. So she's the little flame around which the opposition can build their fire that they're going to take down the military at last. And she comes out of relative obscurity to lead this opposition movement. In 1990, we have the

statewide elections, the first since the 1950s. And she wins by a landslide. Again, we've just seen this happen in 2021 and 2015. And the military, again, they don't like this idea that another person or another force within the country can take their first among equal status. And they lock up Aung San Suu Kyi, they arrest all the newly elected MPs, and they lock up the country again for another almost 20 years. Two different worlds in Samyama. We have the military who think that they know what's best. They know how to run this country in terms of territorial integrity and to keep the place together. But they run it essentially as a dictatorship and they take over the economy and they try and squash out any dissent.

You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about the history of Burma and how they got into this present state with Alex Beskaby. More coming up after this. Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that

inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. It's so interesting, isn't it, Alex? Maybe it's just the fact that we love history and we see history at the roots of everything but if you look at syria if you look at burma so much of the problems those countries derives from just a fundamental lack of legitimacy of buy-in from the people that

found themselves living in those places after they were all partitioned and set up and created by the Western allies after the Second World War. It's so true. And I think that's the fundamental question that I think is at the heart of Burmese politics, how to govern this country and who to govern it for. It's the central question of any state, really. It's just that in a post-colonial state, I think that the stakes around that question are just so much higher. And there's been so much trauma and so much damage done by the colonial experience, particularly in Burma, that it's very hard for everyone just to come together in a moment of peace and understanding and go, okay, this is the vision for our country that we want. Yes,

there are 135 different ethnic groups in Burma. Yes, there are every religion you can imagine. Yes, there are hundreds of different language groups. It's territorial, fragmented. It's incredibly complicated. But we can sit down and we can think of a vision where we all buy into. And I think with Aung San's death in 47, that was the chance they had. Ever since then, we've seen this conflict play out. And what we're seeing now is just the latest chapter. So Aung San Suu Kyi was eventually released from house arrest after almost 20 years of prison. She does finally say, I can work with the military, I can work under this constitution they've drawn up, which is unbelievably rigged, in which the military has 25% of all the seats in parliament. It has the home office, it has the

police, it has the border control. The military basically runs the country. Yet they carved out this space in which they're happy for Aung San Suu Kyi to play politics. Now, what's baffled a lot of people in the last month, the last six weeks, is why the most senior general of Min Aung Hlaing, or those around him, have decided to seize power. We've had an election in 2015, which Aung San Suu Kyi fought in. She won by a landslide. And we've had five years of relatively uncomfortable coexistence between the military and the democratic leadership. She's come back and she's done it again in 2020 in November. And I think partly in thanks to Donald Trump, the military leadership in Myanmar has called fraud on an election which has been won by a

thumping landslide. I mean, more than 60% of the seats have been taken, as opposed to the military's party, which is getting about 7%. So there's some sort of regularity. It's got to be an enormous irregularity for fraud to have lost the military this election. And now what we're seeing here is, again, even the most experienced Myanmar watchers in the country were baffled by this move. And we've got some theories about why it might be. But the senior general, after all that, even though they've rigged the game and they control the country, they've decided that that second election win was too much. And they've seized control under really spurious, nonsensical context. They've arrested Aung San Suu Kyi again, and they're promising elections in a year's time.

But the question is, will she compete? Will she be allowed to compete? Will she be arrested? Have we lived this man for the opposition party? Will those elections mean anything to anybody? What we're seeing in Myanmar is people are furious, absolutely furious. There's a whole generation that have grown up

knowing nothing else almost than the internet, mobile phones, voting, free press, freedom to buy, freedom to party, freedom to travel. And they've had it taken away overnight. And these are all my friends who I've grown up with in Burma, and they are livid that the military could be so stupid to try and wind up the club. Now, one of the big questions in the West is our confusion, our sadness about Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Prize winner, great hero of democracy, and yet she appeared to support the genocide of a minority in Western Myanmar, the Rohingya. You've been on the pod talking about that, but just give me a quick rundown of what happened there.

Yeah, so the Rohingya crisis, which many know, where the Muslim minority in the northwest of Burma in Rakhine State bordering Bangladesh, they have been subject to decades of persecution. And they're slow ramping up with sparks of violence, which goes back to the Second World War and before it goes back to the imperial days. It's been going on for a long time.

And it's one of many conflicts within Burma where an ethnic minority, whether it's the Karen, for a long time. And it's one of many conflicts within Burma where an ethnic minority, whether it's the Karen, the Kachin, the Mon, they are a distinctive linguistic religious group that live on the periphery of the Burman heartland. The difference with the Rohingya was the severity with which they were eventually treated. I remember you saying that's another little British imperial hangover as well. Didn't a lot of them move to that part of what is now Burma under the Raj? Yeah. So the story of the Rohingya, again, just to put it in context, we just see Myanmar burst onto the headlines every

now and then. And we think there's often not a lot of history around these things, but the whole world was appalled by what happened in Rakhine with the Rohingya. There's a sense that it just exploded overnight and all of a sudden the military and the majority population decided to persecute this Muslim minority. But there's a long story here, but to try and make it short, when Burma was annexed into the Raj, into India, freedom of movement was encouraged between different parts of the Indian Raj. So there was large migration from what's now India into Burma, particularly down to the south and into Yangon, but also particularly into that corner, which borders Bangladesh. And the British understood the sort of Indian labour market, they understood Indian labourers, they were happy to see more Indians coming into Burma, into this new colony, to help them build it, annex it, farm it.

And there was a massive population influx during the Raj, during the 19th century and early 20th century. And that did cause a lot of resentment in what had been the kingdom of Arakan. Again, they don't like the Burmese. I mean, they're very independent, the Arakanese, the Rakhine. And they saw a real demographic change under the Raj, which they didn't like. And that built up resentment over decades around land ownership and about religious tension. That was building up. And then what we saw in the 70s and the 90s was friction between the Buddhist community in Rakhine and the Muslim community in Rakhine. And that really exploded in sort of 2013, 14, 15, 16, 17, where there was increasing

ratcheting pressure on the Muslim minority group up there. And eventually, a terrorist organization, a militant movement, however you want to designate it, ASA, they came and started attacking police stations, killing people. And the military used that as their final excuse, I think, to just push up to three quarters million people across the border back in Bangladesh. and the whole world watched this and ang san su chi was supportive or was just insufficiently critical of this action and lost a lot of friends in the west this comes back to my sort of point at the beginning about ang san su chi and about her father so ang san su chi relationship with the military is complicated and people sort of have understand this if you understand her.

She was locked up by these guys for 20 years. She didn't see her husband die. Michael Harris, an amazing golf and academics, didn't see her children grow up. And still, when she came out of house arrest, she said that she would work with these guys. And she didn't hold resentment towards them, which was quite astonishing. And the reason for that, she always says that we have a great thing in common. My father, my father was the founding father of the Tampador. He is my father. You are not my enemy. You are a part of our civil body. And she was, in that sense, incredibly magnanimous towards her enemies. And I think what we saw in the Rohingya crisis,

there's a certain streak of Burmese nationalism to Aung San Suu Kyi. She is in many ways a Burmese nationalist, the majority group. And inside Myanmar, the perception of the Rohingya and the Muslim minority is not a good one. There is a lot of hostility towards the Rohingya within the majority population. She is the democratically elected leader of the Burman majority and some of the ethnic minority. For her to take the side of the rest of the world, the interstate community, in favour of the Rohingya, there was a political calculation there in that she would have had to go against probably the bellwether of opinion in her own country and amongst her own electorate. So there's a sense that she probably kept quieter than people

expected her to because of that astute political move. The other thing, and this is where I think you can say she's callous, ruthless to have done this, but to understand the game that she was playing, I think she was willing to let that issue go or to let them sacrifice on the altar. But I think there was an element of that. Her vision was to make the army buy into a vision of a civilian, federal, democratic Burma.

And to do that, she needed to get the army to willingly relinquish some of the power they had built into the constitution that they had written. And all the way through the last 10 years, she's been agitating and saying that she wants to change these provisions in the constitution that essentially give the military a stranglehold over political life in Burma. And so I think she was willing to sacrifice everything, her international reputation, all the goodwill, to achieve that goal. And you can call Callas and Rufus and what happened to the Rohingya and what the army have done is awful. But I think if you want to understand

why she acted like she did, that's certainly my interpretation of what's going on. But if she did, it's a gamble that has not paid off because of what's going on now. Which is the most heartbreaking thing. As I said, you know,

I'm a natural optimist and I think I've been lucky to have dedicated my academic life, my working life to this country, which has only been on the up and up. It's been an amazing story of human goodness. And apart from that episode we just talked about, of a country in a region which is full of dictatorships and military dictatorships and crackpot theocracy next door, was doing okay. And we've seen the most dramatic reversal. So what happened? Again, in the most experienced Myanmar watchers who are inside the country,

I am not right now, the military is a world unto itself. What is going on in Naypyidaw in the capital, inside the barracks, is still pretty opaque. One theory is that the senior general, Min Aung Hlaing, was so shut off from the world that he genuinely thought the NLD's slightly faltering experience over the last five years in running the country, they'd become a fair bit of criticism about him running the country. He thought that with his 25% of military seats, plus the military party putting in a good showing, the USDP, he might actually get to become president. He's retiring this year at 65 from his job as the most powerful man in Burma, and he wants to secure his next job.

This is the theory. And the world did not work out like that, because obviously he did not realize how unpopular the military are in the country. And it goes right back to what I've been hammering on about. The military is a world within a world in Myanmar. They have this sense that they are the defenders of the nation, that they rule in the best interest of the country. And unfortunately, when an election comes around, and they lose by a stonking landslide, they cannot take it. They didn't take it in 1990. And it looks like now in 2020, 2021, they're not going to take it again. But the real question is what's going to happen next, because it feels like a massive miscalculation on behalf of the military. I don't think they realise just how unpopular this move would be. Friends I was talking to just this morning, they were there in 88, which up until now had been the biggest uprising the country had seen. They're saying what we're seeing now in 2021

is bigger than that. It's more groundswell, It's all across the country, all sections of society. And what's different now, and I can sit here in London watching this, the whole thing is playing out on social media. It's absolutely astonishing. People are using social media to mobilize, to communicate, to make memes and GIFs, to spread hashtags around the country, to coordinate. And I feel often powerless. I'd love to come on to what we can do about this. Sharing stuff online, it does help because every day my friends are going out and putting their lives at risk against being shot on the street, tear gassed, rubber bullets. And I'm getting messages saying, please, can you share stuff on Twitter? Please, can you share stuff on Instagram? Can people just see what is going on here?

And that's astonishing because we did not get that in 88. We got photos that came out in 2007. We had the Saffron Revolution. I'm using air quotes there. Monks being shot on the street. We only got snippets and instantly the country was shut down. The key difference about what's happening now is while the internet stays on, we are seeing this play out in real time. I'm so deeply proud and amazed and humbled by the response all across

the country. But I am really scared about what's going to happen next. We've had more than 20 people shot. Every time the military have come up against their own people, they've always used excessive force. All I hope is that this time it's different. That's all I can say. Because the protest and the opposition is so overwhelmed. It's been going for a month now. People are exhausted, but every day they're going out there and they're protesting.

It's incredible. It's heartbreaking as it is. Alex, thank you for coming and bringing us up to speed. You're about to do some more of history. We'll tell everyone about that later. But tell everyone how they can learn more about Burma, follow you and check out your work. Yeah, well, first of all,

if you want to do something, there's a great site called isupportmyanmar.com where you can donate to the grassroots movement. There's a wonderful magazine called Frontier Myanmar, which is fantastic local journalism, which is giving us a story so we can follow on what's going on. I'll be tweeting incessantly about this. I'm at Alex Beskaby on Twitter.

I'm on Facebook at Alex Beskaby. I'm at Abe Eskaby on Instagram. But all I would say is please share and please support the grassroots movement because, frankly, with Anxiety and Cheat,

the generals, we've got a new player in town that is Generation Z. That is the generation that are out on the streets now risking their lives. They're the real heroes of this chapter of the story.

Thanks so much, buddy. Thanks, Dan. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school Thanks, Dan. I've been just a quick message at the end of this podcast. I'm currently sheltering in a small windswept building on a piece of rock in the Bristol Channel called Lundy. I'm here to make a podcast. I'm here enduring weather that frankly is apocalyptic because I want to get some great podcast

material for you guys. In return, I've got a little tiny favour to ask. If you could go to wherever you get your podcasts, if you could give it a five-star rating, if you could share it, if you could give it a review, I'd really appreciate that. Then from the comfort of your own homes, you'll be doing me a massive favour. Then more people will listen to the podcast, we can do more and more ambitious things, and I can spend more of my time getting pummeled. Thank you.