Burma: where are all the cops?

Where are all the cops?

A simple question we continually asked ourselves on our recent trip to Burma. It’s not like we wanted to meet the men from ‘Special Branch’, it just that we expected to see more of them.

The country has a well-earned reputation for following, questioning, beating-up, locking-up and generally abusing journalists over the years. The isolationist generals who have run this place since the early 60’s have worked hard to restrict information at home and protect their image abroad.

So imagine our surprise on arrival at Rangoon’s airport, when a plain clothes operative came back with our press cards and passports with a watery smile and a (barely-audible) ‘welcome to Myanmar’ (Burma’s official name).

That’s not how it’s done I thought. Where is the stuffy room with the broken fan and the intimate questions about my employers? No, this policeman was trying to be pleasant. Still, I could sense the inner-conflict, the burning desire to interrogate – but he backed off, pointing the way to customs.

I think this experience is representative of some the dramatic political reforms that have electrified this hard-pressed nation in recent months. Burma’s president, Thein Sein, may have spent his entire career in the military but he seems to have resolved any of his own internal conflicts on the side of more openness and democracy. The best example of that – long-time political prisoner Aung San Suu Kyi, currently campaigning for a seat in the Burmese Parliament.

But all this reform business poses troubling questions for policemen and bureaucrats and just about everyone else in this hierarchical, top-heavy, command and control state. People here are used to taking orders (or in a small number of cases giving them). Changing one’s behaviour or even thinking for oneself – well that would be unnatural.

An excellent place to find this reform-era dilemma is at the country’s parliament in Naypyidaw. The generals have designed an institution which, on paper at least, comes equipped with some of the rigor-inducing features we’d recognise in the west – like parliamentary committees. The committees are supposed to question ministers and scrutinize legislation – but this is Burma. Government ministers are former military men – they’re not inclined, by all accounts, to sit around and ‘negotiate the details’.  As for the parliamentarians, it takes courage to stand up and criticise the big guys and without an institutional culture which supports that sort of thing, no one’s going to do it.

Still, there’s plenty of inspiration on offer. Tens of thousands of people are now packing themselves into sports grounds and out-of-town clearings to hear Aung San Suu Kyi preach her pro-democracy message – and every one of these meetings involves a thousand of more acts of defiance. Such events are illegal – five or more people are prohibited from assembling in Burma. But Ms Suu Kyi’s audience don’t seem to care. With their clapping and singing and shouts of support, they’re breaking with the past and moving on to somewhere new.

One final thing – we did see a Burmese policeman – but it was only after we’d started going through our interviews back at our bureau in Bangkok, in Thailand.  Just over the shoulder of a number of our interviewees, we can see a man with a floppy hat pulled down over his eyes filming us – as we filmed him. I bet he was itching to stop us – but he didn’t – and that’s progress at least.

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