CRUSH

Outsiders sometimes come here to Myanmar predisposed to look for evidence of past wrongdoing or present paranoia on the part of the country’s leaders. It’s not hard to find those things if you’re oriented that way, especially at institutions connected to the Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s armed forces. For example, I passed a sign this morning boasting that:

THE TATMADAW AND THE PEOPLE COOPERATE
AND CRUSH THOSE HARMING THE UNION

I shuddered at the starkness of the message. By contrast, the Burmese colleague I’ve traveled with nonstop for six weeks consistently exhibits a spirit of reconciliation and pride regarding the country’s history. He acknowledges poor governance during the recent past, but mostly faults former leaders only for sticking too long to policies that clearly weren’t working. As a person who has lived under the Tatmadaw his whole life, he explains that the military sees everyone as either a friend or an enemy: “There’s no in-between. If you’re an enemy, you must be destroyed. It’s not the same as the political way.”

My colleague’s background is part economist, part diplomat. He grew up in one of the provinces where we’ve been surveying. Over dinner in the evenings, having listened to villagers describe their lives all day, he and I sit and make sense of it all.

The two of us have arrived at solutions to most of the planet’s ills... Not to mention authoritatively chosen the best movie ever made in our home countries, endlessly divided the world into two kinds of people, and settled on the characteristics of an ideal colleague. In his words:

  Everyone should strive to drive the wheel rather than stick the spanner.
  Wheel drivers keep their eyes on the goals of a task; they don’t allow small
  problems or minor issues to prevent the machine from moving forward.

Of course he’s not talking about crushing those who would harm the union. In fact he doesn’t even always follow his own maxim. For example, in keeping with Asian tradition, he defers to my age—though I’m only a few months older. “You’re the decision maker,” he says, even in situations

where his language and experience make him much more qualified than I am to drive the wheel.

We’re pleased with the progress of the survey, and the skill of the teams we oversee. Yet recently permission to survey has been hard to get in some sensitive villages. These locations were chosen by computer to ensure that the data will represent the province as a whole. We're not sure if our interviewers will be stopped from reaching those places by one of the region’s many powers that be—including the Tatmadaw.

Because we have a central government ministry as our project partner, we know we can’t officially negotiate with the ethnic rebel groups. But we feel our survey’s mission is neutral, and that both sides will benefit from having the information we plan to collect about food security and poverty.

The lines of control shift frequently. We have contacts on both sides. Nobody has given us a green light. We have a deadline. The longer we wait, the more we suspect that nobody will ever tell us we can’t go there. Should we simply send our teams down the road toward the disputed areas and trust fate? Will we be putting them in danger? Will we be harming the union?