The United States Government announced recently that, since Myanmar was going to be chairing ASEAN in 2006, if Myanmar didn't become more democratic, then the U.S. would boycott that year's ASEAN meetings. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face. This exemplifies the kind of arrogance that the current administration seems to feel it has the right to exhibit just because it's the United States.
My wife, Pam, and I recently visited Myanmar for the first time. We were there for 11 days. Before our departure, I, at least, agonized over whether it was "the right thing to do" to visit a country that trampled over people's rights as Myanmar supposedly did. Pam was more pragmatic about the whole thing and pointed out that we might never get an opportunity to visit the place if we moved back to the U.S. or one of us got sick, etc. I also read the Lonely Planet Guide and was encouraged by what they suggested we could do to lessen the chances of our "Yankee Dollars" ending up in the pockets of the ruling junta.
Accordingly, we made sure we were using private resources whenever possible. We got fooled a little bit when we found that Mandalay Air was partially owned by Myanma Air, the national carrier, but mostly we stuck to private hotels, restaurants, and touring agencies. Pam and I are veteran travelers and we rank this trip in our top five all time holidays. It was that wonderful.
The people we met were as hospitable as the Thais used to be before Thailand became inundated with tourists. The guides, in particular, went out of their way to insure that we got the maximum enjoyment possible from the experience. They also, seemed to have little fear of saying what they thought, good and bad, about their country and their rulers. Their degree of openness was refreshing.
I have been traveling around Asia for almost 30 years and personally experienced the regimes of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Suharto in Indonesia, the communists in China, Mahathir in Malaysia, and Lee Kwan Yue in Singapore. I remember a Filipino bartender in the U.S. totally clamming up when the subject of Marcos came up. He was in the U.S. and yet he still feared for his relatives in the Philippines. We spent 5 days with a young woman guide in China, who, when asked a very non-threatening question about a recently announced policy of Zhu Rongzhi, the Vice Premier, changed the subject and didn't utter another word for an hour or more. I won't go on but I have other stories.
One of our guides went so far as to call the Myanmar secret police, "Our Gestapo." They and their families freely talked about forced labor, their personal situation, the country's economic problems and the disasters of the early years of the regime. The only negative situation happened when one of our guides offered to take us to see the home of Aung San Suu Kyi, but when we actually tried to go there, she never told the driver and we were too tired to push it.
Speaking of Aung San Suu Kyi, I strongly recommend, if you are interested, that you read "The Burmese Fairy Tale" by Ma Thanegi, a pro-democracy activist and former political prisoner, now living in Yangon. You can find it at http://www.ibiblio.org/obl/docs/TheBurmeseFairy-Tale.htm. I also recommend Ron Gluckman's Asiaweek article at http://www.gluckman.com/BurmaLP.html.
So what's my point? It's simple. DO NOT BOYCOTT MYANMAR! The people are obviously benefiting from tourism. We could see it and we heard about it. The better the economic situation gets, the more likely democracy will follow. Witness China, Malaysia, and Vietnam. It almost never works the other way around. Witness Russia, the Philippines, Indonesia, etc. The situation has already liberalized some and it will get better, not worse, unless both the well-meaning idealists and the venal politicians - the two are almost always mutually exclusive - somehow manage to screw it up with their "interventions."
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