What do you know about Burma? And does attention matter?

Not a quiz here, no test on Pagan Min, just a view that what we attend to skews public policy

How much do you know about Burma - or Myanmar as it is usually called these days (the two words are essentially the same word by the way in the same way that Kolkata and Calcutta are the same word)? Not its history, although that’s quite important if you want to understand Britain and British India, but what’s happening in Burma today.

Would you be shocked if I were to tell you that there are over a million refugees from ethnic and sectarian violence in Burma scattered across South East Asia and that in the last year thousands of people have been killed by the leftist junta, over half a million are internally displaced, and there are at least six different insurgent groups fighting the regime?

The last time Burma was in the headline news was back in 2021 when Aung San Suu Kyi and her allies were removed from power by the military (they’d done a sort of devil’s pact with the military after the 2020 elections). Of course Aung San Suu Kyi is media-friendly in western terms - Oxford educated, married to an Englishman, worked for the UN and won the Nobel Peace Prize - so her ousting was big news here. Like her father Aung Sang (or Father of the Nation as even the current regime describes him), Aung San Suu Kyi is a Burman nationalist. Aung San served as a minister in the Japanese wartime puppet government and his post-independence government was, just as is the current regime, a Burman nationalist government.

You’ll have noticed I’ve used a different word here - Burman rather than Burmese - because that is at the heart of Burma’s problems. The country is dominated by people, like Aung San Suu Kyi and her parents as well as leaders of the military like Ne Win whose 1962 coup set up the long-term military government. Plus, of course U Thant, once general secretary of the United Nations. Because Burman Buddhists dominate all parts of government in Burma, ethnic and religious minorities are treated with suspicion, even outright hostility. Near all of those million refugees are from Christian and Muslim minorities, mostly from ethnic groups such as Chin, Karen, Shan and Rohingya

I follow an English language news site, Irrawaddy, that reports on the country - it is filled with disturbing photographs and reports saying things like:

“Myanmar's regime has killed over 80 civilians and torched nearly 3,500 buildings in Sagaing Region’s Taze Township since the 2021 coup, while junta arson attacks have left 15,630 people homeless.”

While big news sites from Europe and the USA do cover Burma, should we ask why with this collapsing society, floods of refugees and a murderous government, we don't hear more about the place? Maybe because, while a handful of Rohingya ended up in places like Bradford, most of the refugee problem is contained within South East Asia, there’s less pressure for the media to pay attention to the problems - they are Thailand, Malaysia and Bangladesh’s problems.

I pay a sort of attention because my first degree was in South East Asian Studies. I have kept an interest in the region and especially how Monkut kept Siam independent but Mindon and Pagan Min failed to achieve the same for Burma. After all, pre-colonial Burma was a successful colonial power in South East Asia and economically and militarily more powerful than Siam. Those ethnic minorities in Burma were vassals (as were the Muslim kingdoms of Northern Malaya) of those Burman kings in Mandalay.

But much though all this is fascinating (and for people in Burma, terrifying and horrific), it raises a question about attention that matters. The actions of people setting policy, deciding strategies for government action, and planning media schedules, are defined by the things those chattering around them talk about. So Aung San Suu Kyi’s Oxford education and British husband matters because people in government and media feel they know “her” not just “of her”. The military leaders of Burma don’t have this advantage, they went to college in China if they went anywhere outside Burma.

This effect has its impact beyond our lack of concern about troubles in a foreign place on the other side of the world. We bother about Eritreans, Yemeni and Albanians when they arrive in inflatable dinghies on the Kent coast, but do we give enough attention to the reasons why they are taking the risks to make that journey? Do you know much about Tigray, Eritrea and Ethiopia, about why there is a refugee crisis? And whether there are things we might pressure the government about that might help mitigate the problem?

We can see this playing out even domestically, the Sarah Everard vigils in London where a reflection of how women in London felt “it could have been me”, their attention was rightly grabbed in a way that the rape and abuse of teenagers in the care of Rotherham Council didn’t. As ever this is another aspect of Kipling's small hearts, it isn’t that we don’t care about working class girls in Rotherham or Telford but that we care a damned sight more about violence against people like us in a place near where we live.

Mostly this doesn’t matter, we can rest comfortably in the knowledge that our government employs people who are interested in Burma, and that they’ll tell decision-makers about the situation. The problem comes in the planning and execution of policies not in the reaction to those events that plagued Harold Macmillan. This isn’t just the “something must be done” media story that we see so often in response to an unusual or extreme event, but also the attention that people who do the policy leg-work give. Are the young, middle-class, London-resident people in Downing Street (or for that matter the Labour Party leader’s office) considering things beyond their “Attention Bubble”?

I recall an exchange on Twitter, I forget with whom but this doesn’t matter, about what was the most important large country in the world we know very little about. The suggestion given was a good one - Nigeria (with a population of over 200 million now Africa’s biggest country). I responded saying Indonesia (population 280 million). We could have pointed to other places - Brazil, Egypt, even Burma - but the central thrust remains. Britain, far from being a buccaneering international trader, is instead very comfortable with an economic focus on Europe and a political focus on America.

This attention deficit matters in the context of what we now call levelling-up (which apropos of nothing much is a gross and condescending term), pointing out that what I called London Sorts have a policy blind spot brought about by a lack of attention to the reality of England’s north country:

“'Levelling up' is as much about attention as it is about money. The lack of attention results in the sort of simplistic solutions listed by James Forsythe. Plus the continuing view that what London Sorts think is right for London must, obviously, be right for Tow Law and West Bromwich. So we get a (London-based of course) new quango to make sure councils are spending money on cycling schemes and not on maybe more useful things like better bus services. We get London Sorts telling us we should be building five-story Maida Vale mansion blocks everywhere because they like the vibe of that street scene, when the actual people who want a home prefer a three-bed semi with car parking and a garden.”

This may all seem far removed from us not knowing anything about ongoing civil war in Burma, but we should remember that when the situation in Burma involved “one of us” (Oxford-educated, married to a Brit) being held under house arrest, the media gave it good coverage reporting unquestioningly about her plight, we gave the situation attention. Maybe we will again as she is back in prison following conviction on corruption charges. But whatever is the case with Burma, we should maybe ask ourselves whether the direction of our attention results in sub-optimal policies across the spectrum of government. 

Is our attention too focused on Europe and the USA? Does the “lived experience” of policy wonks skew policy choices towards what makes their lives better rather than considering the lives of others with a very different life? Does our failure to talk about Burma, Nigeria, Indonesia or Ethiopia result in misplaced foreign policy perspectives? Since 2008 the UN reports about 6,000 Palestinian fatalities, barely a 1,000 since 2015. In the 18 months since the 2021 coup in Burma, over 23,000 people have been killed by the regime. Yet compare the coverage of Israel/Palestine with the coverage of Burma. It matters that a UK political party has a policy on Palestine, nobody cares if it has a policy on anywhere in South East Asia.

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