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- [00:15]
A
Thanks for joining us for today's episode. But before we start the show, just a quick reminder that in addition to our podcast feed, we also sponsor events in physical places like live podcasts, panel discussions and programs featuring art, music, film and other such mediums. And we also host live events online where listeners are welcome to join in. Check out our website to see if we have any live events coming up to a place near you, or any virtual events you can join in as well. Or maybe you have an idea for collaboration. Feel free to get in touch with us and share your thoughts, but for now, let's get into the show.
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B
Sam.
- [02:03]
A
We're pleased on this episode of Insight Myanmar Podcast to be joined by Christopher Lamb, who is a former Australian ambassador whose diplomatic career spanned more than three decades, including a pivotal posting to Burma during the 1988 pro democracy uprising. As an eyewitness to that historic event, he quietly supported the movement and has continued advocating for Myanmar's democratic future ever since. Beyond Diplomacy as we'll listen in the interview that follows, Christopher Lam has played a major role in humanitarian work with the International Red Cross and then helped to found the Australia Myanmar Institute, bridging dialogues between the two nations with that introduction. Christopher, I'd like to thank you so much for joining us for the conversation that follows.
- [02:48]
B
That's my pleasure. I should also note that when I was there as ambassador, it was my second posting in the country. I was there as a young diplomat from 1972-74.
- [02:59]
A
Amazing. I that that was not in my notes. So I am glad that you have immediately corrected the record. So let's let's jump on to that addendum that you added and let's pick it up from, you know, 72 to 74, especially 74 was a was a very interesting period to to be there. We actually spoke to a former CIA agent, Wes Kingsley, who was posted in the country the same time and and he shared some of his reflections. But as a young diplomat, I would like to hear whatever reflections you remember from those two years in the 1970s.
- [03:34]
B
Well, it was the time leading up to and then I left just after it happened, the writing of the Constitution for the Socialist Republic. So I was there through that process, if you can call it that, of forms of consultation they undertook in order to form to set this constitution. The constitution itself was already predetermined, but nobody was told that. And a process went on around the country under which people offered their views about the way the country should be set up. But what was done in the end of course was what was wanted by General Ne Win, who at the time was the chairman of the revolution, the Revolutionary Council of the Union of Burma, that was its name. And when the Social Republic started, he became its first president and was outside the army for that purpose. So I was there through that consultation period. And that was very interesting to watch that and to see people position themselves and see how a military government transforms itself into the appearance, at least, of a civilian government. So people left the army and the forces dropped their military titles, picked up o or in one or two cases only, door for the women, and became, for all obvious, for all apparent purposes, civilians. But everybody knew that they were from the military and that the Socialist Republic was actually run by the military. But just watching that transformation was very interesting. And so then I was there at the Chakasan ground, which you might recall was the old race course, where the flag was raised of the Socialist Republic in 1974. And that was interesting all by itself as a spectacle. Then later, in 88, when ne win's rule came to an end and the Socialist Republic ended, a friend of mine, who was a very prominent Burmese at the time, had a party when I was leaving in 88, in 89, and he said this party that Chris Lamb is. He said he'd done some work on this. He said, Chris Lamb is the only foreigner who was present for the birth and death of the Socialist Republic. And I've held onto that quite well since then.
- [06:09]
A
That's an Interesting to be an eyewitness on that history taking place. Those are some interesting reflections that could come from that. And what I'm curious is, as you were watching these curious processes playing out, did you at the time, did you have any hope or thought that this could lead to any real change, any substantive change taking place in any, any way or even at the time, was it really pretty evident this was all a charade from start to finish that was just orchestrated or orchestrated to give a certain kind of feeling of what the process should be.
- [06:48]
B
I don't think anybody had a very clear idea about what would happen. There was going to be this Socialist Republic. The Burmese way to socialism would define the way people built their attitudes to what future policies should be, both internally and externally, and that would be that. But what I saw is I and I traveled around the country and went to some constitution seminars or whatever, whatever they were called at the time in different parts of the country. And what I could see was that the creation of the. What they called their Socialist Republic based on the Burmese way to Socialism, but incorporating a lot of lessons that they picked up from Eastern Europe, in fact, primarily in a constitutional sense, from East Germany. They saw. What I could see was that there was going to be the creation of a structure at all four levels of government, so national, provincial, township and village all set up with their own assemblies. And I don't know how familiar you are with these sorts of things, but the, these assemblies were at all those levels. And also at each of those levels there were judges, inspectors, in other words, auditors and attorneys, in other words, government lawyers. So each level had those four structures in place. And I said to people at the time that I just didn't see where they were going to get these people from to run the country according to the model that they'd chosen, and that I could see that that was probably going to lead to some discussion within the, the party at the time about how they could maintain control over so many arms of government at so many levels all over the country. You know, there are more than 300 townships, for example, so where do you get the people from just to populate the bureaucracy that was created and the. The assembly structure as well? I thought that would be very interesting to watch. And so when I came back to be Ambassador In 86, there it was. And so my question to myself, remembering what I'd seen before, was, how has this worked? And we'll come to that later, I think, in this discussion.
- [09:01]
A
Yes, absolutely. That's quite an institutional history we'll get to cover here. Before moving on to when you came back as ambassador in 1986, I would be remiss if I didn't prompt you to talk about the events of 1974. I'm not sure if you were still there at that time. The infamous Utah funeral, was that something that occurred during your posting at the time?
- [09:26]
B
No. Uan died after I left. But I know the family and still do. I wasn't present at the time that Uthan's body came back, so I can't say anything about that period. Not from personal. I can say what I heard about and what I thought about it, but it wouldn't be valuable for the purposes of this podcast. I don't think now in terms of knowing the family. I knew, for example, that the Burmese people were and still are immensely proud of usant, the idea that their little country could provide a Secretary General of the United nations, which at that time, if you take yourself back to when he became Secretary General, it was still a young body. We're still way back in the 50s and u thant was some. It was a particular honor for many Burmese to have seen their country selected as the one which should stand astride superpower conflict, etc. Etc. To lead the world to a better place. And I think they still believe that that point. So Utan's museum in Yangon, as you would remember from your own side of it, I should think, is still an honored place. And there's the, the government, the military government's not fond of this, but they can't really do much about it because U still is what he was, always was, and certainly at the time of. In 74 when his body came back, people saw that very, very strongly. Uant is something you can't play with.
- [10:59]
A
Interesting. One last question I'd like to ask you about that 1972 posting is if you could back to the feel of the country, if, if you remember just the feeling of walking down the streets or talking to the people or how it was, what your experience was as a foreigner there. Because things in Burma have changed so much that even just sometimes a decade or two later, the memory of what had happened previously completely forgotten and erased. And so, you know, to whatever degree you can take us back to those times gives an insight into a, a kind of culture and society that's now long.
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B
Well, coming out of Australia and going and going there and having had an earlier diplomatic posting in Vienna in Austria, I arrived in the country not completely green. I'd been there before as a. As for one day, which was the maximum length of a tourist visa in 1965. So I'd seen the country and I, like a lot of Australians, I was aware of Burma and aware of its place in the, in the constitutional development of what was then the British Empire. And the. Burma was one of the first countries apart from Ireland, not to belong to the Commonwealth after the country became independent. And that kind of thing interested me. It was part of the, the political science that I grew up with and international law. So those sort of things were in my mind on arrival. It wasn't something that I picked up when I got there. And I then was able to look at the country's development, political and economic development, through the eyes of the people forming the Socialist Republic with its constitution. So the, the idea of the socialist constitution, I went into where it came from. Where did they get their advice, how did this build to assure them that the Burmese way to socialism would be an independent operator of the country, if I can put it that way. So they were going to, they were going to maintain their non alliance status. They got a lot of that non alignment ideology from UNO and U Thant, but the military maintained that and in fact intensified it. And so Nay, when it turned the country into a. Into a country entirely looking inward, there was very little external contact with the rest of the world. And lots of projects that have been started up by U Thant and by his colleague Union, who was the executive secretary of Ekafay, the Economic Commission for Asia in the Far east, now called escap. They regional projects, like the Asian highway, for example, were all set up with the thorough endorsement of UNO's government in, in Burma. And, and the plan was that Burma would realize its potential as what his grandson Dr. Thamir later described as the crossroads between India and China. And that was. That was the plan. But what didn't go well was the imposition of socialism as it was, because. And there were factions within the army in 1962 and thereafter which determined how the Burmese way to socialism would be created and what that would mean. This is all in the midst also of civil war, which had been running since April following independence in 1948. Independence was in January. The first shots were fired in the civil war, which hasn't stopped since in April that year. And it was still running, of course, in a big way when I came there. There were large parts of the country that foreigners weren't allowed to visit. And if you wanted to go anywhere at all outside what was then called Rangoon, you had to get permission two weeks in advance. So there were lots of limitations on what you could do. And we all knew there were lots of limitations on the way we could actually act and that we would be watched all the time. Military intelligence and the Special Branch police had people at every foreigner's house out there outside my driveway all the time I was there, there was a car with people in it looking at me. So you get used to those sorts of things. But then it gives you an appreciation of what it feels like to be an average citizen in the country. Everybody knew that they were being watched or that they were liable to be reported on. They knew they couldn't trust the people around them. And so there was a very difficult atmosphere for the Burmese people. And we foreigners who mixed with the Burmese and not many foreigners did, I have to say, found that they were able to understand the kinds of problems that they faced. But within all that there was still a general belief in the principles that people like USANT embodied. And so when he died, it didn't surprise me to hear that there was such A public uprising of support for him and his ideals and against the people who want to shut him down.
- [16:16]
A
That's a fascinating contrast and context to set because, you know, I think historically we've all heard, those of us who know recent Burmese history, we've all heard about these protests over Utan's funeral. But the context and contrast you're providing of this, this, this tightened down Burmese society where you couldn't trust your neighbor, where everyone was being watched, where they were, they were trying to not just crush the people and the humanity, but also the ideas behind them. And so what you're painting is this picture of a, of a, A, an expanding totalitarian state where the center was controlled, the outskirts were engulfed in conflict that had been going for decades and would more decades until today. And, and within that rising authoritarian state of, of constant surveillance there and where ideas couldn't spread freely, what U Thant embodied was this, had this, this kind of spontaneous expression of knowing what a better future and a better kind of Burmese path way could be. And, and so you're, you're showing the, you know, the juxtaposition between what the state was trying to do and where the spirit of the people was.
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B
Well, thank you. There's not a lot I can add to your question, I don't think.
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A
Just an observation. I want to ask one more thing about that period that just occurred to me. I've, I've read some context about Burma and Rangoon, especially in the 1960s. And I'm also thinking of Ken Clymer's book on US Burma relations in the 1970s and some of the context I remember that comes from those two. In terms of diplomatic circles, when I think of the 1960s, well, I just, I can't but think of the incredible book I recommend people to read called Inside a Soviet Embassy, which is about a true story of a KGB agent who defects from the Soviet embassy to the Americans. But he gives a view of what the diplomatic circles look like in Rangoon at that time in the 1960s, where it was because Burma was non aligned. In fact, it was so non aligned that it kicked itself out of the Non Aligned Movement. It was too non aligned even for that. It was kind of like a staging ground and a playground for a lot of Cold War actors to want to see where they can get influence. And the book really describes a lot of interplay between, you know, Western countries and then China, Russia and, and some of the Soviet bloc and, and some of the intrigue that went on with that. And then as we get to the 1970s. I remember from Kenton Clymer' book that he described Burma was such a completely dead outpost that there, there were several years there. I'm not sure if these coincided with your years where the NE Win prohibited any members of the government from interacting with any kind of diplomats, which was highly unusual because diplomats do is talk. They talk to their counterparts. And so he described this atmosphere, Ken Kleinmore described this atmosphere of American diplomatic officials who literally had nothing to do but twiddle their thumbs because they weren't allowed to meet anyone. And so bringing up both of those two contexts, the little that I've heard. Was any of that resonant with your time there in the 70s or the 80s?
- [19:43]
B
No. In fact, on the contrary, I can imagine that there would have been concern in the Ne Win regime about contact with the Americans, the superpower Americans. There might have also been some people here and there who might have had difficulty with the British, despite the fact. Well, despite the fact that they have an ambiguous relationship with the uk. They look back at the colonial period with distaste. But they also recognize that it gave them much of the structure that the country still has, such as the secretariat system of public servants and all that stuff that goes with that and basically the parliamentary system. So there was some concern, I suppose at those levels about contact. But as an Australian, at both times I was there, I didn't have any difficulty at all with contact. None at all.
- [20:39]
A
Okay, so let's move to when you arrived in 1986 as Australia's ambassador. This was a time when the country had largely faded from international focus during the Cold War, as I mentioned, had a non aligned stance. There was limited interest from some Western governments and in the Soviet bloc. But by the 80s it was, it was pretty tucked away from global affairs. And so when you took that posting, what, what did you expect of, in being in Burma at that time, especially considering your, your recent posting from a decade before and within diplomatic, within Australian diplomatic circles at the time, how was the country regarded? Was it a strategic concern? Was it a diplomatic curiosity? Or was it something just more of marginal backwater?
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B
I think that a way of looking at that is to look at the processes that determine who the Australian ambassador should be. We oscillated between having ambassadors who are young, like me, with a career ahead of them and who might be able to make something of that posting for that purpose, and those who are old and close to retirement and getting a last posting as an ambassador so they could retire with that, that achievement on their Record we've continued for quite a while. We oscillated like that. When I went young, I was preceded by a man who was, who retired after that posting and followed by somebody who was a good bit older than me but not quite ready to retire. And so the amount of energy that the embassy itself gave to its function varied according to the who the ambassador might be to some extent. But there was also, in terms of strategic value in a country like Burma, there were appreciations in Australia that the country was in our region. Rangoon and Perth are more or less on the same time zone. For example, Burma is in the middle of this Indo Pacific region. And there are lots of people in Australia who understand that that's important, important as well as that Burma as a country that had been part of the British Empire or actually technically the Indian Empire, but part of the British sphere of influence was a country which, whose young people had grown up with English as their language and external universities in English speaking world were the ones that they were likely to go to. For some of them the idea that Burma had been a British colonial possession was a little bit of a turn off. They a lot came to Australia when I was there as ambassador. Australia was the largest single destination for Burmese students. And so these sorts of things permeated the Australian understanding of what kind of country it was as well as that. This point that I made before about thumping Duru in his book and how the country is at the crossroads between India and China was important and we saw that in lots of different ways. I mentioned these. The civil war in the country since April 1948. The first shots were fired by the Communist Party of Burma which was the CPB was the party that stood and represented the communist ideal in the country for the best part of 20 years. But then when China and Russia went their separate ways and ideology and understanding of the world, the party split into the red flag Communist Party which was loyal to Moscow, the white flag which is loyal to Beijing. These two communist parties then fought each other and fought each other for the best part. I suppose going on 10 or 15 years. They fought each other as much as they fought against the government. And that for me underlined the, the importance of understanding what, what the Burmese appreciation of their own non alignment meant. It meant that they not only had to be non aligned in terms of the, the west and the east or the west and, and, and Communism, but they also had to understand that there was, there was a need to be non aligned as in the developing world or the, the countries that support the developing world. So they tried to stand back as much as they could from these, this kind of contest. In the end, the white flag Communists beat the red flag people and that was the end of that. Except that Russia never gave away its desire to make use of the, the strategic doorways that were available from the, from Burma's coast to the Bay of Bengal. And that continues today as we see right now. The civil war in the country has the Russians and the Chinese adopting stances that aren't necessarily complementary. And the Burmese military and Burmese political scene has to be aware of that too. So I thought all this was important when I went there as ambassador. But also looking at the country and the kind of country it was and had become, I was fascinated to see whether the Burmese way to socialism had actually produced any of the things that Neygwen had promised in 74 when the program was institutionalized. And I saw quite quickly that it had not and that Neuyun had maintained dictatorial control, but that the party itself was loose and flabby and unable to assert itself right through all the levels of government that I mentioned before. So I became interested very quickly in trying to work out what that might mean for the future of the Burma Socialist program system and its constitution. And that's, that's what occupied my mind a lot over the years ahead and was part of it all when, when the country collapsed in 88. The regime collapsed in 88.
- [26:46]
A
That's. It's really interesting that you had again, you, you had that background, institutional history of remembering what things were like 10 years earlier and that you were able to kind of follow on this trajectory of what you had seen of the, the, the Burmese Socialist Party in those early days. And then what you saw of it at that time, and you know, it was not good news in terms of how things had gone. Can you pick up on that, that transition from those 10 years? What else did you notice at that coming about 10 years later? What had, what else had changed? What had stayed the same? And as you looked more at the nature of the Burmese Socialist Party, I think that this is especially important to, to reference because this is then leading to the, the 1988 protests. And so as, as you started to observe those couple years, what stood out in a way that might be able to, to help frame and, and provide context for the events of 88, I'd
- [27:48]
B
always been interested in the way people in the country took decisions for what you could call traditional reasons. And by tradition in this case, I mean astrology. You would have seen when you were there that astrology occupies a very important part in the political process for the whole place. Ne Win had a fascination with astrology, as I'm sure you remember yourself, and that maintained itself. And so I wanted to get to know the people who could be helpful to me in understanding what the astrologers were saying, so that I could work out from that whether there's anything I could feed into an assessment you might make along more traditional Australian lines. And I don't say western necessarily, but Australian for this purpose, lines in order to determine where the country was going and what might happen. And so I met people and new people who could introduce me to astrological circles of relevance to Ne Win if I needed them. And I used those from time to time to understand where they were going. And so I tried then to understand things like the demonetization that took place, the arrival of that new currency, if you remember, with all the different values of notes that no one had ever seen before, 75 chat notes, 90 chat notes, etc. How did this all add up to what and where might that mean we were going? And what did that mean in terms of the way logical decisions should be interpreted? What decisions should be interpreted? Short of logic, but making use of astrological input to understand what that meant. Now, I had to spend some of my time educating the people in Canberra about the way these things impacted on Burmese decision making, because they were disinclined, as I'm sure they would have been in Washington, to believe that astrology needed to be understood. What is astrology? It's the astrological column in the newspaper. It tells you whether you're going to have a good day for love or life. It's not like that. The Burmese approach to astrology is completely different, and that had to be understood in order to interpret the way the country was going. So I was interested to see as well, whether the arrival of this East German model in the Socialist Republic constitution could adapt itself to the realities of astrology in a country like Burma. And that was very interesting indeed.
- [30:28]
A
That's incredible. It's incredible you had that foresight and interest into looking at astrology at that time, when this is a topic that's been covered so much more by journalists and scholars and academics and many others. This become much more well known. But, yes, it would have been an outlier then. And I imagine people back in Canberra saying, yeah, you know, so you're, you're, you're saying heads of state are looking at the, the horoscope column on you know, page seven of the newspaper or something about love and, and, and job and everything else did. As you were, as you were looking through those, deeper into the effect that astrology had on leadership, what stood out and to what degree was that examination into that astrology then intersecting with your understanding as to what was happening with the party and its leader? Ne Win.
- [31:28]
B
Ne Win used to get used to ask his astrologers for advice about which way the country was going, where it was heading, what needed to be done. And I'm sure that you remember some of the stories there were. Now, I can't vouch for the accuracy of all these stories, but I can vouch for the consistency of stories that would sometimes come from different unrelated places, but say the same thing. So the first one that I heard was when I went there in 1972, when I was told about how the country had changed across to drive on the. On what you would call the American side of the road. In 1972, it was only a couple of years after the change. The country was, as you would imagine, had no money. And so the cars in the country and the buses were all things that had come in much earlier, including the old Ford Blitz trucks from the Second World War, which were used as buses. They all had the steering wheel on the English side of the car. They all, all the buses had the doors on the English, on the English curbside. But when they changed to drive on the other side of the road, it meant the passengers had to get out of the bus into the middle of the road. They couldn't get out to the curb because that was. The bus didn't go that way. And I saw this with a lot of interest. And I thought about some other things that made me sort of appreciate in a different way. I. I knew, for example, that there were no traffic lights in Rangoon at that time, so there were no traffic lights to. To determine which would have had to have been altered or fiddled with to accommodate the change in the side of the road. But nevertheless, there was still traffic on the roads and there was a side of the road where people were meant to be. None of this mattered. There weren't enough cars to matter a lot. But the buses all led to the passengers out into the middle of the road, and the cars just had to navigate themselves around that. So I saw that and, and then understood that as I talked to Burmese about it, that Nwin supposedly, and there were lots of reports of this, had an astrological prediction that the country would move to the left. He interpreted this as meaning that he would be deposed by a move to the communist left. But he also knew, as a good student of astrology, that you could, you could, I'm not sure of exactly the right word, you could interfere with the astrological prediction by preempting it. So if you could do another move to the left instead of the one that he thought he was being told about, that would obviate the need to worry about being overthrown in a left wing coup, because the left move would have already taken place. And that's why, and everybody understood this in Rangoon at the time, Ne Win switched the cars to drive on the left hand side of the road immediately, overnight. Tomorrow we drive on the other side of the road. And so without any preparation or planning or rules or any other thing, even signs that was it, you drove on the other side of the road and that was the way it stayed. And, and it was interesting to see that. And I thought about that at the time. Then later, much later, in fact, when I was there in the 80s, there was the stories that naming had been given the astrological prediction that Rangoon would no longer be able to remain the capital of the country. And so there needs to be a new capital and that capital would be found. According to the story that I didn't hear very widely, but I've heard it more than once, maybe a couple of times. Nawin was told by the astrologers that if he could ride a horse over the area of his home village, he would be able to see where the capital should be, the new capital should be. Now, riding a horse over an area isn't an easy thing to do. But according to the stories, Ne Win got a horse out of the Merry go round at the circus and it was bolted to the floor of a plane. The plane took off and he then mounted this horse and the plane flew backwards and forwards over his home village area. And that's how Naypyidaw was selected as the site of the new capital of the country. Now, this may sound ridiculous, and I'm sure it is ridiculous, but I don't think it's without foundation. So it's worth, when you hear these stories often enough and when you see the way people react to astrological prediction, and you see Ney Win's immediate successor was General St. Louis. He was fanatically astrologically inspired. He had a doll in the garden of his house, which is not very far from the house of a friend of mine, and he used to dance around this doll after he had seized Power. And from that he would get predictions or instructions. It's very common and I'm sure it still happens now.
- [36:45]
A
It's extraordinary. And I mean, we know these things, but you're talking about these wild insights or, I mean, insights is probably too, giving it too much legitimacy. But these, these predictions that, these wild predictions that, these, that, that, that these seers are making and these, these fortune tellers are making, that happened decades ago that have changed the lives of tens of millions who've come to Burma since, whether it's foreign currency being demonetized or whether it's which side of the road you could drive on or, or where the capital gets moved, you know, all based on this mad quest to just stay in power. And, you know, coming from a Western government, it must have been. I can only imagine what that reporting back must have been like. As you were. You were going through this material and trying to highlight. This is not hocus pocus stuff, or maybe it is hocus pocus, but it's having a direct impact on the stability and future of this country in foreign relations. I'm also curious. Did you ever get a chance to meet Ne Win in person, and if so, what were your impressions?
- [37:57]
B
No, I didn't meet him personally. I, I met him at a couple of parade lines where you sort of shake hands as he walks past you, but I didn't get a chance. I was too junior to meet him.
- [38:11]
A
Right. And so then, as you're observing all of this in your role as ambassador, and this is two years coming in upon two years of where the great 88 movement would take place, did you have a feeling that something Was coming? Did 88 take you by shock? Or did. Were you, were you watching those signs and just kind of feeling something is going to break pretty soon?
- [38:37]
B
There's some. A little bit more time needs to pass before I'm going to be able to talk in detail about this. But I worked out quite quickly after I came at the end of 86, in November 86, that the country was facing serious problems, mainly because it was unable to feed its people. One of the consequences of demonetization was that people had no money. And that meant. And the price of commodities, especially things like rice, was out of reach of the ordinary people of the country. And the rice that there was was being exported for hard money, hard currency into Thailand or elsewhere and not going into the markets in Burma. And so I thought this was the sort of thing that would really trouble the government. And as people got more and more deeply into financial difficulty and unable to feed their families, educate their kids and do those sorts of things. This is the sort of thing that could provide a break on the way the Burmese way to socialism was going to be analyzed and seen and perhaps be the end of the regime. And I began to say that. I began to see it in about November 86, and by about January, February 87, I could see that they, Sorry, I'm going to start this again. I could see it in about November 86, and by the end of 87, I could see that it was accelerating as an issue. And so by January 88, I was confident that the system was going to collapse. And what we did in the Australian Embassy as a consequence of that was to stop paying our staff in chats, but to pay them instead in cash, in US dollars. Cash. Wow. And then they could go and work that out. And there was an. Some of the other embassies were very unhappy about that, but they all did it in the end and so did the UN And I'm sure the US Embassy, who I didn't talk to about their own dollars, would have had the same experiences. The people in Canberra had to be persuaded this was the right thing to do because it was. Of course, they were committed to supporting the normal financial institutions of countries where they had embassies, but they ultimately agreed to it as well. And so that was the beginning of a realization for a lot of people that the economy had gone down the drain and that with that, the people were unable to eat. If you couldn't pay the people in their own national currency, you had to resort to dollars so they would have enough to be able to feed their families and do those things. Then you're making a statement all of its own about the nature of the country. So when the first tea shop riots took place in what I think it was March 88, it didn't surprise me at all. And I could see how that was likely to affect the way the country would run. So they called a party congress. The vice president of the party was a man called General A co. He was ordered by NE Win to produce an economic reform package, which he did and which was ready to be introduced at the congress, but it never was introduced because the government fell NE when resigned and stalked away before that could even happen. But the A Code document became the guide for the liberalization of the economy that followed straight after those events and isn't given enough credit by people looking back to the history of those things. But they could see themselves that this had happened. And so you get a rise and fall in the relationship of solid fact based policy making and astrological prediction. Sometimes they coincided, but often they didn't. And then the circumstances of the day would determine which ones would have precedence in the way the country would go forward.
- [42:37]
A
So you had an inkling that things were heading for a break and started to make logistical and perhaps even policy changes based on that, that anticipation coming down the line.
- [42:52]
B
I wasn't at all, I wasn't alone in these sorts of things. Don't get, don't get me wrong on that. Rather, people felt the same way. The people who didn't like what I was doing with the US dollars and paying the staff weren't, weren't surprised by what I was doing or what needed to be done. But I think some of them were unhappy about what it might mean for themselves.
- [43:15]
A
You were seeing the writing on the wall and seeing where it's going in terms of the economy, the leadership, everything else. The one missing piece of this is who are those leaders? What is the resistance movement? And we know from 88 that at the time it was a bunch of, of unheralded youngster students who have, since, you know, those names have since become iconic and, and what they've done. And of course Aung San SUU Xi stepped in. But none of that was preordained. None of that was. Those were individuals who rose up in that moment and, and were not, you know, those networks were not there pre 88. And so did, did you have any understanding of, you know, resistance networks, pro democracy forces, pro human rights forces, that as, as things were going towards a downfall, that there was a group that, or, or individuals at least that would do something to try to shift in another direction, or was that just not on the scene at all before it actually happened?
- [44:14]
B
It's very difficult to know exactly what motivated what the. We think of the Tishoff incident, where people just rose up against the behavior of a, a person from the government in a tea shop and they were complaining about the price of tea and rice and those sorts of things. This guy tried to tell them that the regime had the right, had all the right ideas, and they just had had enough and they come forward and when they came forward, they did so in a place that was frequented by a lot of students. It was a place close to one of the main university campus areas and it took off from there without leadership. Then leadership came in a little later, but the violence broke out sporadically after that in different parts of the country, but a little later, only a Month later, I think it would have been, Aung San SUU Kyi came back to see her mother. Now, her mother was a good friend of my wife in particular and me, and we saw a lot of her. And we also knew other people who supported her mother. I actually met Aung San SUU Kyi for the first time at her mother's bedside in the hospital. And I could see then that what she was supplying was something which the people urgently needed. They needed a figure who could lead them forward with the respectability of the. The family history and name, and with the knowledge obtained from time in the uk, in India and other parts of the world and that. And so she became a rallying point quite quickly. And she. She took to the task very strongly, very well. And so there wasn't a leader who said, it's time to rise up for human rights. It was never really a movement for human rights. It was a movement set up by the price of rice.
- [46:13]
A
And, you know, I'm also struck that you met Aung San SUU Kyi at her mother's bedside before she found herself in the grips of this historic event and movement taking place at that time. And so when you think back to that meeting, what strikes you in who she was then and what that interaction was like?
- [46:33]
B
Well, nothing much. There's not a lot to say about that, because she came when she arrived in the country to see her mother. She went straight to the hospital. And it just so happened that that was when we were there. So we met her and we didn't want to interfere with her opportunity to see her mother. After a long time away and with not long to live, presumably everybody thought that. So we didn't stay and create a conversation. We chatted with for a few minutes, but then we moved on. But we saw her in the year, in the year that followed now and then, quite often
- [47:13]
A
back in 1988, as we've set the stage for. Burma was a very tightly closed country. Foreign media had little access. Communication was restricted. There was no Internet or mobile technology back then to capture what was happening. And the regime knew this. So when the crackdown did come, they tried to bury it in silence. But in the midst of this, as I understand at that time, your wife, gay, filmed the scenes of violence. This and this footage then became smuggled out and became one of the only visual records of some parts of that massacre and crackdown seen by the outside world. That's extraordinary. And can you take us back to that moment and how that footage got out and what it meant knowing you were breaking through this attempted enforced silence to show the world what was happening at the time.
- [48:01]
B
Gay had a video camera and she videoed lots of scenes in the country, north and southeast and west, including during the things that you describe in Yangon. And a friend of ours in Bangkok received them and edited them. And that was that more or less,
- [48:29]
A
Right? Well, those were. Those certainly had an important impact in those pre Internet days of getting that information out and looking at 88. You know, you. You witnessed all of that up close. You saw the hope and the violence, the turning point of a country trying to find its future. And I'm curious how that experience affected you in that moment, in the years that followed. And what stays with you from having been there during that pivotal part of history.
- [48:58]
B
It may sound strange to say this, Joe, but I don't think I was particularly affected by this. I considered myself very fortunate to be there at such a critical time for the country. I loved the country very much then and still do now, but I was there to be the Australian ambassador. I didn't want to become emotionally involved in what I was looking at. I wanted to be there and to report on it as honestly as I could and to think about what that meant for Australia, but also what did it mean for the Burmese people. And this mixture of roles, if you like, didn't really allow their roles to interfere with each other until much later. And when we founded the Australian Myanmar Institute, that was the first time I actually allowed the official governmental role and the personal observation to mix with each other.
- [49:58]
A
We have spoken to other people, other foreigners who happen to be in Burma before or during the 1988 protest. We spoke to Chris Guinness, who said that. That simply, he was the one that, for the BBC, simply reported the date and time of the protest. It was enough to spark this nationwide movement in a country that was otherwise this information black hole. And we also spoke to the British journalist Dominic Folder, who described the moment as being kind of like the silent explosion where the streets were suddenly filled by students and dock workers acting on little more than just rumor and radio. And. And so you, you know, you describe knowing years in advance that something was coming. And though both of those, both of their observations are coming from the journalistic field, from the diplomatic field, as the events did start to unfold, do you remember what you were thinking as you were watching them and how you were understanding? And then when things really took off and people really took to the streets, how your background was informing you on the significance and the possibilities as to what was going on?
- [51:17]
B
I mentioned one other thing that I. I thought I would mention earlier but didn't, decided not to, but I think I should say it now. In November 86, when I arrived in the country as ambassador, I went around renewing acquaintance and friendship with people that I had known those years before. When I was there as a young diplomat, there were quite a few people like that. One of the people who was not one that I had known well in the earlier time, but was now one of the most senior people alongside NE Win in the country and who in the earlier time, in 73, had been a person who was central to the processes of consultation towards the new socialist constitution. And so I met him first of all, his staff told me that they would arrange for me to meet him, but I needed to understand that he couldn't speak English. And I said that I had met him before and I hoped that he would agree to see me. And they said probably won't. But I said, in that case, I'll write him a letter and will you give it to him? They said okay. So I hand wrote a short letter to him saying, I'm back, I'm looking forward to seeing you again, I hope we can meet and get together. And they gave it to him and then they called me and said, he will see you for morning tea. And so I went there to have morning tea with him to the place where I was told to go, and they came in with me into his room and he then said to them in English, I'll speak to him alone. So I thought this is quite interesting, just for a start, this. They claimed that he couldn't speak English, but I knew that he could at least make himself understood in English. And he said to me, what do you think now that you're looking at the country after all those years and after you saw that consultation on the new constitution? And he said, I don't remember meeting you at that time, but if you say you did meet me, I said, look, it's okay, you met millions of people and I don't expect you to remember them all by any means. So he smiled. I said to him that what I had thought when I saw what the new constitution was, and I mentioned it being modeled on the East German constitution, I said, I don't see how Burma can afford to have so much of its intellectual strength given to these four levels of assembly, four types of assembly at the full four levels of government in 330 townships right around the country. I don't see how you can do that. He said, I agree with you. He said, we did. We overreached somewhat there, but we will sort that out. We'll have to attend to that. And so we then talked a little further about the inability of the government to meet the the needs of people. He said, we're attentive to that too. But I can tell you one thing, he said, the government will survive for as long as the people can eat. And that was why a year later, I said to people in Canberra, they can no longer eat. The government's on its last legs. And I said this to other people. And now looking at the country today, Minang Hyang, I thought would be unable to feed the people. But in fact the things survived more or less not quite so much collapse around the structure under Minang Lang because the structure is pretty much non existent now as it was before. And the thing, and the thing about structure that was important to the Socialist Republic was it had all these elected assemblies that I've kept on referring to during this discussion all around the country. And they all included people from across the boundaries that make up society. Those people in those elected assemblies, even though they're all elected on the Burma Socialist Program Party banner, they all stood as representatives in their own way of populations, small or large. And that's where the problem lay in the end, for the Ne Win Republic. Its own structure was part of the reason why it fell. And what Minang Hliang and the current government will have to be very concerned about is that if they set up a system through after the elections that they're going to stage manage at the end of the year, they need to understand that stage managing the election doesn't guarantee the next stage going smoothly, nor did it for Ne Win. The elections that produced administrations at all those four levels during the time of the Socialist Republic were in the end, part of the reason why it collapsed and that will happen again.
- [56:08]
A
So I want to shift for a moment and look at some of Australian foreign policy towards Myanmar because we've had the privilege of speaking to another former Australian ambassador to Myanmar, Nicholas Capel, who served as an ambassador decades after you and during the transition period. And during our interview with him, he referenced how Australia's interest in Myanmar has rarely been transactional. It's not driven by trade or geopolitical politics, but rather by a desire to see the country as peaceful, stable, integrated in the region. He also noted during his time how the military always kept the diplomats at arms length, rarely granting meetings. It never truly accepted a civilian role of Governance. Looking back at your time, these reflections that Nicholas shared when he was on our platform, does that resonate with your experience? Do you feel that you were engaging with a. A unified state or with parallel forces, one civilian, one military, each with its own logic? And do you think Australia's approach over the years quiet, principled, if not forceful, that it helped or limited your ability to influence anything during the periods you were there?
- [57:18]
B
Well, I think that the. The life of ambassadors is to some extent determined by the way they approach life themselves. And I have always believed that the way to understand a country is to move as much as possible with the local people, not to sit there as an ambassador in a big chair and make pronouncements about what was good for the country. I used to get among the people to the extent that I could and see what they wanted to make of their country and to use as starting points for that. We were fortunate as Australians in Burma, Burma fortunate because we were a country which had a long relationship with Burma. We were one of the first countries to establish an embassy in Rangoon after independence. And it was in the early 50s when the Australian embassy was established. And we had been seen by most Burmese, most Burmese, and I mean that in the right sense of the word, as a friendly regional country, despite the fact that we were obviously a Western country and that we had our own connections to the British. I represented that not entirely innocently, but as a friendship which came from a shared background as part of the British Empire. And therefore we had a lot of institutions in Burma, in Australia, that were similar to those that had been erected in Burma with its independence and still persist in then and even today, to some extent. So the concept of the rule of law that Australia has is not very different from that which Burma has and which Burma inherited from its own kings. The way the kings ran the legal system was not that different in terms of the development of what we would call common law, from the way the Burmese king saw law and saw their place in the country as kings. They weren't there by divine right, for example. They were there because they owed something to a population within the country that supported them as king. And the nature of the country came from similar sorts of base. And because we were a country even in the 1970s, that saw itself as what later became known as a multicultural country, we had something in common with a Burma which had a system of multicultural character built by the British on the basis of the census that they ran in the 1890s, which determined that the country had all these different nationalities. So I looked at that and looked at the kinds of things that had us following a similar kind of illegal thread around the purpose and nature of government. And from that I saw it as possible to divine for the purpose of people in Canberra making policy what Burma was. We were not just a foreign kingdom. They were not just a foreign kingdom for Australia. They were part of our own psyche in a curious way. And I used that in my discussions with the various Burmese and got on very well with people. So I had quite good access. I said before, in answer to your question, that I didn't know Ne Win personally, but I knew a lot of people who were very senior in government and I could meet them, I could see them in their homes, I knew their families and wives and these sorts of things. It was not a difficult relationship to be able to maintain. But to do that you had to be an ambassador who was ambassador, but also a human being and one who shared aspirations and interests similar to theirs from our place in the world. And I worked that as, as best as I could. Well, I saw it as part of my function on part of Australia's interest to help them towards their own aspirations on a path that would help them protect the rights and interests of their own people. And I could see how that could benefit Australia if they were doing that. And so I spent time on looking at those sorts of things and so to the displeasure of some of the people in the Western embassies when the new government was installed. Well, I should say that when Ne Win stepped down, he said we will have multi party elections in the country. And this was a great shock to a lot of people in the Socialist Program Party. We will have multicultural elections and they will then set the, the tone for the time ahead. And he said that will happen. And then he stepped down. He was succeeded by General St Lynn who I mentioned before, who only lasted three weeks before he was replaced by Dr. MAU MAU as President. Dr. Maung Maung was only there for a short, very short time. But in his time he set up the Union Election Commission which there had never been anything like that, that before I knew those people. I knew the, the, the man who was the chairman of the commission, who was an elderly gentleman I, I also knew less well, but I got to know them better, the other two members of that commission and I met with the people in the commission. They told me that the military regime was, had asked them to create an election law or to give a recommendation for an election law law. And they shared the election law the draft with me and I went through it with them together. They gave me, they gave it to me with an English translation. We went through the election law and we discussed what could be better or could be done differently, how it should achieve a result and what sort of a result do we want, etc. Etc. And the election law that was produced from that is the law which, which made it possible for Aung San SUU Kyi's party to win such a handsome majority in the assembly that was elected in 1990. The assembly that never met that law was a good law for the purposes of a country like Myanmar, as it was by then known. And that has basically stayed the course through to now, although the way the law is being interpreted now is not very helpful. But nevertheless, the law itself is okay. And it's okay in terms of the way the voting is organized, the way it's done, the way the campaigning is done, the way results are counted, all of that. Those mechanics, I thought would be important to the way the country should run in future. And it should be as transparent as possible for the purposes of the people throughout the country. And, and part of the starting point for that I said to the people in the election commission is that for better or for worse, since 1974 you've had the Socialist Republic and it's had elections, but because it was a one party election system, it didn't enable the people to express their interests and views about what kind of country it should be for the future. So how can we make it do those things without interfering too much with the structure that was put in place? And so the structure, the basic structure that the 74 constitution created was the one where there would be seven states which were the ethnic states, seven divisions which were the Bama divisions in the country. And so you had these blocks of 7 and 7 matching each other in the upper house of the Parliament. So the smaller ethnicities should be able to have a significant say in the way the future, the directions of the country should be based. And I thought that was a reasonably good model for the, the way the futures would go. And so that, and it was maintained and it's still there now. They've changed. They're not called divisions anymore, they're called regions. But the system has the same purpose and same result. And the elections which are going to be staged, managed, starting in December this year, will still have that structure as part of it all. But for me, that was therefore part of what Australia could, could do, both because it was likely to help promote stability in the country. But also it was once something that might be able to provide enough strength within itself to lay down the forces of insurrection and civil war for the purpose of stability in the country. And so those sorts of things interested me and I tried to help Canberra understand that this is what Australia needs there. We're not looking at a short term thing for the future. We're looking at the longer term for the country, how to set the country on a path towards a longer term stability. And without that, it would be difficult to maintain the Burma that was envisaged when Atlee and Aung San negotiated Burmese independence and set up the constitution based on the Panglong agreement of 47.
- [66:33]
A
It's been commented that that 1990 election, that it was surprising that it was, it was in many ways a free and fair election. And the NLD had a landslide victory and that was announced. And there's been some, some examination as to what, why the military would allow that election to take place and then why they would announce those results. What are your thoughts on that process that happened a couple years later?
- [67:02]
B
Well, I don't think they had any understanding of what the election was likely to produce. They had convinced themselves of the validity of their own propaganda. So right up to the time of the election, the government media was full of stories about how popular the government was, how much love the people had for the socialist program. Not the socialist program because that was no longer part of it, but the political party that succeeded, the Socialist Program Party. And forgive me if I got this wrong, but I think it was called the National Unity Party and it was headed by all these retired generals and admirals and this and that. They thought that that party would, would get the votes, but it didn't. The Aung San SUU Kyi people got the votes. And that shocked the government. By the time they understood that, it was all out there in the public eye. Because the process that was set up published those results as they came. And the whole nature of the vote counting system was one that would produce that. The counting system essentially had it that at every polling booth there would be space available at the polling booth and through the counting of the votes at that polling booth, of the votes. So the polling booth structure was the layout of the polling booth was a room. And around the walls of the room there were boxes where people could mark their ballot paper. And then they came to the center of the room where there was a big box and they put their vote into that box. And the box stayed there all day until the voting closed. When the box was emptied onto the table and the votes were counted, every party that took part in the election for that constituency was able to have people there watching that happen. And when the votes were tallied, the scrutineers from these different parties signed the document, said this is the result from this polling booth. Then all those polling booth results were taken to the district office and then assembled together. And then for the constituency, they tallied the votes for the constituency and at each stage the scrutiny is were present and the numbers were available at each stage. And then those votes were taken to eventually to the capital, which was Rangoon at the time where they were tallied and the result was public. So all the way along the voting line the results were public. And there wasn't anything that anybody could do about that at the time because of the way it was set to happen. And I think that was a very good way of making sure that it would work properly. It took a couple of weeks and there was some criticism after the election that it took so long for the official results to come out, to which I said, it's not silly at all. This is the best way of assuring that the results will be a proper representation of what actually happened, booth by booth across the country. And it worked well. And that's why in 1990, the result that came out was what it was. The original plan for the election was that yes, it would be a secret ballot, but the way the secret ballot would be conducted would be that people would, would go to the voting location and they would be given a token. Then they would go into a fenced off area and they would put the token into the box of the party of their choice. And I said, no, they've got to write on a, on a paper, they've got to mark a piece of paper with the, with an X showing the party they support for that at that constituency. And the Minister for Education, who is an ex military man, told the government, told the military intelligence that there's no need for that. And anyway, the Burmese people wouldn't be able to do a thing as complicated as that. So the head of military intelligence at the time invited me to come and meet this Minister of Education and explain why I thought it would be okay to have them mark the ballot paper. And I came knowing what this minister was likely to be saying with some statistics, their own National Report to UNESCO on literacy. The, the National Report on Literacy to UNESCO said, said that 78% of the Burmese population was literate. And so I said, with all due respect to the country you're talking from joa, I said, they have higher literacy rate in Burma than they do in Tennessee. Head of Military intelligence laughed just like you did, and then turned to the Minister of education, said, what do you say to that? The Minister of education gulped and Kinyunt, the head of military intelligence, sent him away. And they adopted the process of doing, of marking ballot papers then and there. I said, it's not literacy. I said, it's not the whole story. Because the other thing is, even if people are not literate, they will know who the parties are. So what you need to have on the ballot paper alongside the candidates names a symbol representing their party. And that's where the peacock of the NLD came into being. For that purpose, it was out there on flags and things. But this. But for that official purpose, it became the officially recognized symbol of the party. I think that the thing that exercises me a little bit, and it comes from looking at the country in 86 and comparing it with the country that I'd left in 74 and thinking that a lot of the people who were there in seven in the early 70s were people who had been alive and around at the time when the British were still in control of the country or just after that. By 85, by 86 to 88, that number had diminished. People were dying or retiring or whatever. And now there are very few of them around. And those that are around at my age, they're 80 or more. And so the ability of people to go back through Burmese history and look at some of the things that we're discussing right now is diminished. I don't know that the people in control of the government now or who are in leadership positions in the opposition, if you can put it that way, have the same background as what I'm trying to describe. And when I go to Burmese events and I talk about the sorts of things that we're discussing now, people look at me, Burmese look at me with awe. They say, how do you know so much of our history? And I say, well, I'm just an innocent bystander, a simple country boy, but I do my best to watch and to see what I can. But the reality is that the education system doesn't promote their understanding of these sorts of things. In 74, there are lots of people around in. In anybody of my age, which at that time was in the, say, 30 or thereabouts or less. They were. They were people who had had education before NE Win shut down the education system in 1964, which is only 10 years earlier. Now there are very few people left who have had education from those earlier times. And so education's being restricted bit by bit by bit until now when it's, it's basically non existent now because of the collapse of the education system since mine took power. So I'm, I'm not so confident that the same conclusions would be drawn by people today.
- [75:14]
A
So you're speaking about your, your experience and knowledge of Burma vis a vision those Burmese especially diaspora. I'm also curious, you know, you, because you've been there, you, you've been to Burma for so long and so many different iterations and you must have seen how it's talked about in activist circles and diplomatic circles and in with foreign policy in media and journalism. And so I'm, I'm curious looking, you know, your extensive involvement, understanding of Burma, whatever degree you gained it as a rural country boy from Australia, as you say, the, the narrative that gets told about Burma and the way that, that outsiders have come to understand it, where would you, where have you pushed back over the years and, and felt that there was, there were some consistent parts of the narrative that were leading to misunderstanding that you've always tried to fill in those gaps.
- [76:15]
B
I don't know that I've got a single answer to a question like that. I guess going back to a word that you used before, transactional. A lot of foreign policy decisions now are taken for transactional reasons. Those don't admit much discussion about the sorts of things that this interview has seen that I did. If you want to sell used cars to a country, you need to understand its ability to buy used used cars and what might help them buy your used cars over ones from a neighboring country or elsewhere. And so you don't look at the longer term for the country and what it might need to be. I think that governments like my own, which have decided to remove and remove the aid policy and aid programs from a system as a structure of their own and just bring them into the Foreign Ministry have not helped this at all. They've intensified the transactional character of foreign policy making. Whereas in the time that I was there we had the Australian aid bureau, ADAP, followed by the Development Assistance Agency. And they have, they were things that were able to look at an aid policy within its own parameters and you could set humanitarian goals as one of your primary objectives, etc. It's less easy to do that now. And so I don't think that we've got a well rounded approach to countries which gives the development assistance program a place in the formulation of foreign policy. And from that, something which basically obviates the need to go transactional in looking at what your national attitudes need to be. Lots of countries are in that position and the United States too. I think it's a great shame the decision that USAID would be abolished and incorporated into the State Department is just going to make it worse for the United States as well. But that's a worse a position which is already adopted by a lot of other Western countries, including Australia.
- [78:25]
A
So then moving ahead, I want to go to 2008, when cyclo Nargis devastated Myanmar's Irrawaddy Delta. It killed more than 130,000 people. The exact number will never know. There are millions displaced. But the junta initially blocked foreign aid and refused to grant visas to international responders. And this became a textbook case of politics overriding humanitarian need. At that time, you were working in Geneva then with the International Red Cross, tasked with building bridges between humanitarian organizations and government. Were you involved in the Red Cross response to Nargis? And what do you remember about that period where diplomacy and disaster were trying to be navigated at a moment when access, trust and speed were all in very short supply?
- [79:15]
B
Well, I guess because I'd been there in the country and I knew a lot of people, and by the 1990s and 2000s, I still. A lot of those people that I knew were still around, I was able to say to the International Red Cross, and this is the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, not to be confused with the icrc, the International Committee of the Red Cross. The latter, the ICRC is much better known and is the one which, as you probably know, is responsible for work in conflict zones. The Federation of Societies is more about what happens a day. Well, in terms of emergencies at the national disaster, natural disaster level. So Nargis is a natural disaster. It doesn't have to do with conflict. It might be a disaster that affects conflict zones. And that was true in Myanmar. But the overall response to the natural disaster needed to be handled by the Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, not by the icrc. So I was with the Federation. I said, this is at a time when basically Myanmar was sanctioned by lots of countries because of the military regime and the things that they were that in the case of a natural disaster, it's necessary for a way to be found for the humanitarian assistance to flow according to the precepts laid down internationally for handling natural disaster and meeting the needs of individuals and communities affected by that natural disaster, therefore what we need to do, and this is complicated I'm afraid Joe, but natural national societies, national Red Cross societies like the Myanmar Red Cross are by law, international law and domestic law required to abide by the fundamental principles of the Red Cross movement which are humanity, impartiality, neutrality, independence. That's for the purpose of this exercise. And that being the case, what we need to do is to work out how the national society also operating by law as the auxiliary to the public authorities, not government, public authorities in the humanitarian field. How can the Myanmar Red Cross exercise its responsibilities as the auxiliary to the public authorities for the benefit of the people of the country following the natural disaster? And what I thought should happen was that the Myanmar Red Cross, now that Myanmar was a member of asean, should meet the ASEAN national societies. So Thailand in particular, but also the others from the neighboring countries and work out a way that the ASEAN societies could tell their governments how their governments needed to react to to this natural disaster that happened. The Myanmar Red Cross did a wonderful job of that. The president of the Myanmar Red Cross at the time was a doctor who was the first president of the national society who was not from the military since Ne Win had taken power 25 years earlier. Huh? 35 years earlier, whatever it is, this guy knew his work very well and understood very well what it meant to be a civilian. In this case, he met the president of the country, General Than Sein Thansane agreed that the Myanmar Red Cross should be able to function as an auxiliary to the public authorities, not as a part of government itself. And the president of the society then met the other aseans and they agreed with on the way they should work. And that became the base from which all the other assistance programs were run. And the government of the day, the military government, accepted that the Myanmar Red Cross was the body that knew best how to meet the people and reach their needs. And there it went from there. And I played a small part in helping that to happen.
- [83:26]
A
I also want to contrast what was happening with Nargis with your previous iterations in in Myanmar and in Myanmar context because for many, Nargis revealed just how little had changed since 88. The same military reflex to close off the country, prioritize control over saving lives. And given what you witnessed decades earlier with the 88 uprising, did Nargis feel anything like deja vu to you? Or did it show you something different about how the regime calculated pressure and legitimacy? And how did your experience in 88 shape the way that you approach getting aid into the country in 08.
- [84:07]
B
Well, what I knew from 88 was knowledge obtained through not a natural disaster, but a man made disaster of catastrophic proportions. And it's not the same thing. And the Myanmar Red Cross didn't have any, wasn't visible in 88. But I thought that the, the Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies had a responsibility of its own to build the capacity of the Myanmar Red Cross to handle the natural disaster situation or to be the, the link point from which others did their handling.
- [84:47]
A
So after decades of diplomatic and humanitarian work, you helped to found the Australia Myanmar Institute. Ami. This was when Myanmar was tentatively opening up and re engaging in the world. And under your direction, AMI became a space for scholarship, dialogue and exchange, not just with policy, but people to people relations. And so I'm curious what the original vision was for the Australia Myanmar Institute when you helped establish it and what role you hoped it would play in the broader relationship between Australia and Myanmar. And did you see it as kind of a soft diplomacy, a way of continuing the work that often official channels couldn't or wouldn't do?
- [85:31]
B
This has to be related to the, the layout of Australian relationships in the Southeast Asian region. There were at that time institutes set up between Australia, Vietnam, Australia, Singapore, Australia, Malaysia, Thailand, etc. But not for Myanmar. And I came back from Geneva in 2010 to live in Melbourne. I saw that there was still nothing that related Australia to Myanmar at that level of an institute that bound universities to each other, that enabled that form of sharing to take place between universities and other institutions in Australia and Myanmar. And I felt there needed to be something for Myanmar. And I muttered about that to a few people and found there wasn't much interest. But then I found myself invited by Melbourne University to do a talk to the political science faculty about Myanmar, about Burma. They said, to which I said, I won't talk about Burma, but I will talk about Myanmar. And they said, oh well, you know the politics of this. We've decided that the country should be known as Burma. I said well, you're welcome to make that decision if you like, but their name is Myanmar. That's what they call themselves. And it's not up to Melbourne University or anybody else in Australia to tell the country what its name is. They name their own country and they've named it Myanmar. And they took that name in 1989, 90 and that's. It's been around for a long time now. It's now 2010. Oh, they said, well, well, well. And they sort of prevaricated and I said, I'm willing to talk about Myanmar Burma or Burma Myanmar, but not about just Burma. And they thought about that for a while and they agreed to do it. But they said, we have advice from the government that the name of the country should be Burma. I said, on what basis? When I was there as ambassador, the country changed its name to Myanmar. And the then foreign minister decided that Myanmar would be its name for Australian purposes. And Australian ambassadors still go there now accredited to the Union of Myanmar, not Burma. That's the official accreditation given by the Australian government. And there was a bit more fiddling around and eventually they agreed that I could speak about Burma, Myanmar. And so I decided after doing that talk that I should work, I should return to the subject of some kind of institute and working with somebody else who knows about these things too, set it up. And so a colleague, a friend in Deakin University and I set up the institute in 2013 at a meeting we had in Melbourne, which was sponsored by the Lord Mayor of Melbourne and had lots of people from politics and business and academia and people from Burma as well, all taking part in a big meeting. And then we had another meeting in, in Rangoon in 2013, later in 2013. And we set it up and decided that we would relate the institution, its purposes to helping Myanmar achieve the objectives it had set for itself within the Millennium Development Goals, as they then were in the US and then translating that into current language into the Sustainable Development Goals. And if we worked according to the objectives in the Sustainable Development Goals, it would be relatively easy for us to determine what we could do and what we would not do. So we would not be, for example, a human rights organization. But obviously you can't achieve sustainable development unless you have proper regard for human rights. But it's the way you order your priorities within those countries of discussions. And so we set up the institute. We looked at doing it as in the same way as the other institutes that I mentioned before and then found that Foreign affairs, after the merger of the Aid Bureau into the Department of Foreign affairs and Trade, they were going to merge all those institutes together into a kind of an ASAN wide Institute, which would have chapters or something. And I thought that wasn't the right way. We need, we need to take an attitude to the particularity of Myanmar. And as we weren't doing it with government assistance or money, we were free to set up whatever we wanted to. And we set it up as an institute in which all the universities in Australia could become a member if they wanted to and pay A relatively small subscription fee. And non government organizations and companies could also join on a different feedback fee level. And it would be an inexpensive thing to run because all it would do would be to have meetings and do some bureaucratic support things and to hold conferences. And I thought that, okay, the conferences should be related to the Sustainable Development Goals. The goals run from 2016 to 2030. So we should measure the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals along the route to the year 2030. And that would mean having a major conference about it every two and a half years, a big conference, a major conference every five years. And that's where we got to by 2020. Then came the military takeover and these conferences have fallen away. But we need to find a way to restore the conferences held in Myanmar, I might add, so that we can continue that work. But it's hard to do it at a time when the universities themselves are unable to be in good contact with each other or useful contact and when the population can't travel. So we've tended to do our work by organizing seminars on subjects that relate to the SDGs in one way or another, which are held online and which people in Myanmar can join through Zoom or in other parts of the world. So when we have these every month, we have people from the European Union, we've got a guy from Brazil, there are several people from the us, Japan, Honolulu, of course, Thailand, India and the neighboring countries now. And then people from China all join our Zoom seminars on one thing or another connected with the SDGs in Myanmar. And I hope it continues. It's not expensive. After all, time on Zoom doesn't cost a lot of money and there's not much organizational work in terms of, other than providing a link that people can get to and then organizing things to happen. So you just need somebody to do strong institutional support at this end, at the Australian end, and then work with your team, who are the other members of our board, to bring the event to life. And bit by bit, the Institute has come to be seen by the media and others in Australia as being a primary resource that they can access for information about Myanmar and things, things that happen there, of the non conflict type.
- [92:46]
A
I, I want to ask about a particular moment in Myanmar's recent history where many Myanmar related institutions had to figure out how to respond to something where there wasn't clear, completely clear information at the time that it was happening and yet we knew something terrible was happening and it was even less clear what can be done to influence it, to, to, to be able to save those Lives that were in harm's way. And that's of course the 2017 Rohingya crisis, which was one of the most visible and horrific chapters in Myanmar's modern history, which is certainly saying a lot. Unfortunately, we saw ethnic cleansing on a massive scale, widely reported and condemned. And when the skill of violence against the Rohingya really did become undeniable, with villages burned, hundreds of thousands of fleeing, how did AMI decide what to do and how to respond? Because as someone leading a Myanmar facing institute with connections on both sides, were you at all torn between calling it out or wanting to keep channels open? And what did those conversations look like? You both internally in the network as
- [93:56]
B
well as public facing, AMI hasn't normally taken positions on anything in particular other than to provide facts from which people can make their own conclusions. So we have had from time to time, monthly seminar on Rohingya related issues and we've had speakers who include Rohingya people. There's quite a significant Rohingya diaspora in Australia. And the other thing is of course that the position of the National Unity government, the main opposition to the military in power, has taken quite open positions relating to the Rohingya they believe that they should stand up for. They should recognize that there have been gross violations of human rights, including ethnic cleansing and even genocide committed by the military, and that they need to protect the rights of everybody who's entitled to be considered to be a Burmese citizen or a Myanmar citizen. We have done some work here to build the connections between the Burma majority in the diaspora and the Rohingya minority. But, but still is significant. So they, they come together at our events, we go to their events, I go to their events. But they tend not to go to each other's events still. And I don't know how quickly that will change. Not when I don't go to their own events, I also go to the events that are run by the Shin, the Chin, the Shans, the Kareni and those people. And they tend to be often, not always, but often relatively local events. So they're held in a, in a district where the larger part of the Burmese diaspora is, for example, Qin. And so you get Chin people there, you get a couple of other people there as well, but largely Chin. So the, the, the difficulty with the Burmese diaspora is despite everything that's happened in the, all the years since independence, these ethnic groupings tend to be still relatively alone. This doesn't give me a lot of confidence about the country's future as the multicultural identity that I once hoped we would See, but it's the only way to go at the moment. And I don't think anybody is keen to see the country break up into its ethnic constituent parts. So we do contemplate also on issues like federalism. And so we've had a number of seminars and the most recent one was also about federalism and community based federalism. So how do you look at communities and incorporate them into the federal structure of the country for the future? That includes a discussion then about federalism in the sense that in some federations, states are designed by mapmakers sitting a long way away who draw angles on a map. So if you look at the United States and look at the state of Indiana, you don't see very much that is Indiana except for a rectangle on a map. There aren't any rivers or mountain ranges or any of those sorts of things. Colorado at least has a little bit of distinction in that sense, but not many American states do. In Australia, the states have largely map drawn as well by people sitting somewhere else. But in Myanmar there are ethnicities which are determined by boundaries, like mountains, like rivers, like some sort of geographic formation that makes a difference to the way that things should look for the future. And that has meant that there are states which are relatively coherent states, ethnic states like the Mon State, like the various Shan states. But then this overlooks some other factors that are relevant to the consideration of Myanmar's future. A lot of people don't realize that the Shan State as it is now is actually the agglomeration of a lot of principalities which had their own prince or Sorbo. In the years gone by. Back in the heyday of the Shan states, plural, there were 99 different states, each with their own sorbo. Of those 99, 30 are in today's Myanmar, 60 are in China and nine are in Thailand and Laos. What I think is important, and I try to impress this on people in Canberra and elsewhere, is that when someone thinks about China and Myanmar, it's not all about trade and getting routes to the Bay of Bengal and those things, although they are definitely important. It's also about the fact, the hard fact that 60 of the original Shan states are in today's China. They're separated from each other by a borderline drawn by the British and the Chinese emperor. When the, when that border was created between the countries, it could have been very different looking country if they'd taken a different attitude to these, these Shan states. Some of the Shan states, including some of the ones in China, are very small indeed. There's a town called Sipsong Banar in Yunnan which I've been to, which is called Sipsong Banar, which means essentially taken from the Thai 12 districts, there were 12 Shan states, each with their capital. In this town, these Sorbas all lived next to each other and they all had their own territory radiating out from that town. So some are very small and some are very large. The state of Chang Tung in southeastern Myanmar, southeastern Shan State along the Thai border is very big. But nevertheless, all these Shan states are there in both countries. If Burmese democracy were to take a very open democratic freedom of speech, full human rights position in the world, that would be alarming for some people in China who might wonder what might happen as the families move across the border to each other all the time. What would that do to infect, affect the way China thinks, the way that part of Yunnan thinks about the rights of the Shang people. So there is an interest in China in maintaining forms of autocratic rule in Myanmar, but autocracy at a level which doesn't stop economic growth and which enables the Chinese to pursue their own ambitions in the economy in Myanmar and get their access to the Bay of Bengal. It's very complicated.
- [100:56]
A
It sure is, yeah. And, and that's why we have these conversations. And as we close, I'd like to ask you, you've had this extraordinary advantage over Myanmar's modern history. You were there in 72 to 74, 86, 88 and beyond. Of course, you know, Saffron Revolution and, and the, and Nargis I'm sure you were closely following, had friends that were involved. And then we are now at 2021 and post 21, the military coup and the resistance. And so it would be especially pertinent to ask you, looking at 20, the 21 coup in the last five years since, what feels different to you about this moment and what hasn't changed at all? Do you feel like you're watching the same story in New Clothes, or do you feel that something has fundamentally shifted in how Myanmar resists and reimagines itself?
- [101:58]
B
I don't know that I know the answer to that question yet, but I think about it quite often. I think, for example, that when Ney Win took power in 1962, he did so, in my view, because he thought that the country was in serious trouble. And that serious trouble was evident in 1958 when it was asked by prime minister who knew to run the government for two years and then to have elections. And then the elections were held. Unu Won Those elections, Ne Win stepped back. Unu became prime minister. And then the country moved onwards towards a key date in the Panglong agreement in the 1947 Constitution, within which the ethnic states or some of them would have an entitlement to decide whether they want to. To remain inside the Union of Burma. Nwin feared that some of them, in particular the Shands, were likely to want to move out of the Union of Burma. And he wasn't going to let that happen. And he thought that Uno was a weak prime minister. The state of parliamentary democracy was dreadful in the country. And I'm sure all those things are true as well. And so Ne Win stepped in and he had an ambition of restoring the Union of Burma as it had been designed in the constitution. That's in 62. Within two years, his government had been. He and his government had been overwhelmed by the ideology that was supplied by others that created the Burmese way to socialism. And so that motored on into the Socialist Republic. Ne Win is still there. And Ne Win had an objective for the country. Ne Win's government collapsed in 88. The successor military government there was the two small ones that I mentioned was General Hsinguin and Dr. Mauang. Then the military took power again. General Song Wang and General Than Shui became the leaders. And they maintained the original ambition of having a united government that would pursue the interests of the people of Burma, as it was called at first. And they set up the State Law and Order Restoration Council. So it was an objective of the restoration of law and order. And there were people in the country at the time who believed that the country had fallen apart in such a rabid way. And General Sanguine is responsible partly for that, that there was some value in restoring law and order and then getting on with the job of running a country. Someone elongated the exercise grotesquely and made a lot of people unhappy. And when Than Shui then decided that the thing to do would be to have the new constitution, which was done in 2008, and the country would then restore, with its law and order restored and peace and development on the way, they would be able to go ahead and do something. And so the new constitution was done. The elections were held in 2010. Than shui hand picked as the new president, Thein Sein, which happened, and the new head of the military, Minang Lang, which happened. Than Shui saw them, I think, to some extent as balancing each other and that all would be well. All was not well because the system also required free and fair elections. And we talked about that before. So the election was held in 2015. Aung San Suu Kyi's party won those elections. And that's when things started to go backwards. Because Minang Lang felt, and he was younger, of course, than Thein Sein, that he was the one who should succeed Thein Sein as president, not or any of her acolytes. And we are now at a point with Minang lying in charge of the military government, shaping himself up to be the logical successor as the civilian president, so that after the next elections, he can retire from the military, be elected president by the parliament, and then carry on from there. But he is then, unlike Ne Win in 62, unlike Than Shui in 88, he's a man without an agenda. And I think that's where, that's the question we all have to confront ourselves with, is what's Minong Lang's agenda going to be? And the others equally interested in that, of course, are China and to some extent also Russia. But Thailand, the immediate neighbors, this, all this leaves out of discussion the Rohingya, who all of the ones that I've done just described would regard as terribly worrying, catastrophic, but irrelevant.
- [106:50]
A
So you've had this long and varied career. You've had postings across continents, senior roles in diplomacy and humanitarian organizations, experiences that could have and did pull your attention in any number of directions. And yet through it all, and I think this is true of a lot of people, Burma stayed with you. From your postings, previous postings and diplomacy, humanitarian work, founding of Australia Myanmar Institute, and then the engagement in this latest coup, you've kept coming back to Burma. And so I'm curious why you think that is. What, what was it a moment or a person or a sense of unfinished business that made Burma not just another chapter in the career, but something that you've really strived to carry with you ever since.
- [107:35]
B
Well, I have been asked this question before, and I've given a simplistic answer, and I don't have a better one. Anyone who's been to the country, and you are no doubt that kind of person too, after all, why are you doing all these exercises now after you've finished your life in the country? I think that when you go there, something happens. You get infected. Maybe it's the water, maybe you get bitten by a mosquito, maybe something. You get infected by the country and it stays with you forever. And in my experience as a diplomat, your first posting is often the most important posting of your life. It's the one that sets you on a path of living away from your own country. And with that you learn to do things differently. My first posting was Vienna in Austria, and I went directly from Vienna to Rangoon in 1972. And so in a sense, it was part of my first installment in life outside Australia. And both countries have played a part in setting the way I do things. Vienna is a rather special case and it doesn't infect you in the same way as Rangoon does in Burma, but I felt that infection and it stayed with me forever after that. So after I Left, left in 74, I always wanted to go back. And so when I was able to go back in 86 as ambassador, I was very happy with that possibility. After I left in 89 and I went to Washington to do some particular work there, I still had that interest in the country. And I knew the man who was to go as the American ambassador to Burma in 1989. In 1990, it didn't happen in the end because of the rupturing of relations between the military regime and the United States. But we've stayed friends ever since, he and I, even though he's now 97 or 8 or something now, but we still stay close to each other and we still share. Even though he never actually lived there as an ambassador, he went there from time to time as a visitor, and he is, because of those visits, he's become infected, infected himself. So all of us do that. And you too, I think Joe would be the same kind of suffering from the same sort of infection. And when I came out there and went to out of foreign policy and went to the Red Cross, I maintained my interest in Myanmar. So when the opportunity to do something with Cyclone Nagus came, I took it as if it was natural, just part of my ordinary life story. Then I left in 2010, came back to Australia. I never gave up the interest in Myanmar and I've maintained it since. And I'm still doing things. And so as we get towards the end of the year, the Burmese diaspora in Melbourne and I guess the same elsewhere, I don't know what sort of diaspora you have in Colorado, but the Burmese diaspora here has all kinds of events about the end of the year, the New Year, Independence Day on the 4th of January, blah, blah, onwards, I'm going to be a speaker at a whole lot of events because I get along well with the Burmese people. They think that I can speak usefully at their events, and I will.
- [110:57]
A
So the last question I'd like to ask you, and I appreciate how much generous time you've been spending with us. You've spent these years connected to Myanmar, in and out of official roles, behind the scenes, sometimes in intensely human, unscripted moments. But beyond these headlines in history books, I wonder if there's a moment that's never really left you and it stayed with you. Not necessarily dramatic or public. Maybe something quiet or personal or even mundane. Could be a conversation or a detail, a gesture that somehow captured the spirit of the place or people in a way that nothing else quite has. And so I'd like to prompt you if there's a moment like that for you, something you, you. You might not often be prompted to talk about, but that's really etched in your memory when you think of Burma and has shaped the way and how you've carried the story with you all these years.
- [111:45]
B
Oh, I'd have to sort out the filing cabinet that's in my mind and try and work out which ones I'd pull out. But for the purposes of this discussion right now, the thing that I've already mentioned, the advice I got from the very senior man close to Ne Win, that the government is safe for so long as we can feed the people, is one that probably etches itself within me more strongly than most because that was also a reaffirmation of an understanding that I'd had anyway, that you have to look at the interests and wishes of the people of a country in order to understand what its government is all about and what its lifespan is. I try to apply that thinking right now from here, looking at the United States today, and I think it's equally true today.
- [112:53]
A
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