The Burma Road

An exclusive interview with Brigadier General David Oliver Abel, the strongman of Myanmar’s military government

The Jerusalem Post

By Dan Ben-Canaan, Yangon, Myanmar 2001

“YOU ASKED FOR A private session,” says Brigadier General David Oliver Abel, the strongman of Myanmar’s military government. “So let’s have it.” And with that, Abel firmly motions a considerable entourage of deputies, advisers and aides from his Victorian-style office, on the second floor of the red-brick colonial-style complex that also houses the headquarters of the prime minister, and begins a rare interview that focuses, somewhat disturbingly, on the many parallels he perceives between his country, with its notorious human rights record, and Israel.

Although he has never visited the Jewish state, Abel, it rapidly becomes clear, considers himself something of an expert in its affairs, not least because, while his official biography lists his religion as Roman Catholic, his mother was born Jewish, and his father may well have been too.

“I would not walk around and say I was Jewish,” says the 66-year-old general, a short, dark-skinned man with gray hair and round bluish eyes behind his thick glasses. “But if asked, I say I have some Jewish blood.

“Sometime in her life [apparently after Abel was born], my mother became a Buddhist,” he goes on, with the smile and effort at friendliness that will characterize our entire conversation, “but her parents were Jewish. Some of my relatives are Yehezkels, some are Daniels and some are Jacob, or Jacobs. I have a lot of mixed blood in me, you see.”

Abel, who is married to Kaing Dhien Mu, a devout Baptist (they have raised eight adopted children), is quite specific that his father was “Indian, and a Catholic.” Curiously, his cousin, Dr. Esther Daniels-Philips, who immigrated to Israel in 1962 from Burma (as Mynamar was called until 1989), insists that this is not the case, and that Abel’s father was a Jewish. (Daniels-Philips, who worked until recently as deputy director of the National Institute of Pathology at Abu Kabir, on the southern edge of Tel Aviv, offers no further information, beyond the fact that Abel also has a brother who lives as a Jew in England.) It’s a common pattern.

Burma’s Jewish community, consisting of immigrants from Iraq and India, and clerks or colonial administrators, began arriving in the 19th century. In its heyday the country had as many as 2,000 Jews, settled in the main cities of Rangoon (now called Yangon) and Mandalay.

Most of them left in the 50s or 60s, and today there are only two Jewish families in Mandalay and six in Yangon - including Moses Samuels, who keeps a watchful eye on the 19th century Mashima Ha’yeshua synagogue, located in an area now populated by Burmese Muslims.

Whatever his precise origins, Abel says that he does not consider them either an asset or a liability to his career. “It’s what I do that counts, not my background or my blood,” he says.

And what he does is hold the grandiose title of “Minister for Overall Actions and Policies” in the Union of Myanmar, nominally No. 3 in the regime’s hierarchy, behind Than Shwe, head of the ruling State Peace and evelopment Council and the longtime former ruler General Ne Win, formally retired and a declining influence.

A United Nations special envoy, Razali Ismail of Malaysia, recently returned from Myanmar publicly expressing the hope that Shwe, Abel and their junta colleagues would hand over power to civilian rule within the next four years. Abel won’t be drawn on that.

“We are military men, and we are in government for a while, until a constitution is written,” he says. (Abel himself heads the committee carrying out the task.) “But Myanmar is fragile now, and we have to solve our internal and external problems first.”

MYANMAR’S COLONIAL HISTORY and its ethnic mix of 140 separate tribes and nationalities is a recipe for intrigue and political tension. Independent since 1948, the former British colony was immediately plunged into internal tribal conflict, its democratic government under U Nu was ousted in 1962 by Ne Win, and military rule has been the norm ever since. Ne Win stepped down in 1988, amid a mass nationwide, pro-democracy uprising; thousands were killed in the subsequent military crackdown. The junta permitted elections for a parliament in 1990, and said it would transfer power to the elected representatives. But after the National League for Democracy (NLD) won a huge majority of the parliamentary seats, the junta backtracked, and has detained dozens of parliamentary members-elect in so-called “guest-houses,” while also holding the NLD’s general secretary and 1991 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, under prolonged house arrest.

Abel acknowledges that there is “great Western pressure“ on Myanmar, because of its human rights abuses, which include restrictions on freedom of assembly and freedom of speech, arbitrary detention for political dissent, harsh prison conditions, no independent judiciary, religious controls that have included the coercive promotion of Buddhism, and the use of forced labor. It also restricts freedom of movement, and especially overseas travel, for women, outlaws internal human rights groups, and resists scrutiny from external watchdogs.

To all of this, Abel says merely that, “Everyone knows that Myanmar is fighting to establish a new civil order, and that we had to stop the chaos that was here, a political problem that had to be solved.”

When he mentions Aung San Suu Kyi, it is not, initially, in the context of her embodiment of the pro-democracy movement. Rather, he notes that “Her father [General Aung San] was the architect of the independence of Myanmar” — as the leader of the Burmese World War II uprising against the Japanese, who had forced out the British. “He was assassinated right there in the next room,” says Abel — in 1947, by a young, pro-Japanese Burmese man.

The junta has been holding political contacts with Aung San Suu Kyi for the past nine months, with both sides honoring a commitment to keep their content confidential, but Abel damns her as a “traitor” to her own people, a tool of the subversive West and, most cutting of all, as undermiming her father’s legacy. “What she is doing today is contrary to what he has done. What does she want?,” he asks rhetorically. “She declares publicly that there should be no foreign investments, and no tourism into Myanmar. She calls for a boycott and sanctions of Myanmar.” In short, he fumes, she wants Myanmar to “get down on her knees” to the West. “Why should we do that?“

In recent weeks, the military government has allowed some 20 of the NLD’s 40 party offices in the Yangon region to re-open, and freed eight of the dozens of detained MPs from their “guest houses.” Some analysts have suggested that this may mark the start of a genuine warming of relations between the generals and the pro-democracy movement, and a harbinger of potential political breakthrough. Abel, however, hardly speaks in that vein.

The West, he says, warming to his theme, “wants to impose its will on us. They say: ‘You must have a democracy like us.’ But democracy is not a blue-print. We have a democracy, but it is a Myanmar democracy. You have an Israeli democracy, which is not an American democracy. It is a Myanmar democracy because we have our own social structures, and our culture which goes back thousands of years.”

He tries to justify the government’s action in keeping most of Myanmar’s institutes of higher education closed — even primary and secondary schools were shut down between 1996 and 1997, and any access to substantive higher education today remains conditional on joining the army — in the context of his notion of a special democracy for Myanmar. “We are going back to an open market system. So we had to rewrite all the curriculum as such. That was the main reason for having the universities closed. We must have the curriculum aligned with the new democratic free-market society. And that has to be all rewritten. It is not easy.”

ABEL LIKES TO SEE PARALLELS between Myanmar and Israel, where he says he would love to visit. “I have 10 invitations already, he says. “That is my last wish, to go the Holy Land.

“You are strategically situated in a region full of bigger countries with their own interests, just as we are. And you believe in the right of your people to live in their own country, without being subject to any outside power or threat.”

Just as in Myanmar, he asserts, “if you are a citizen, you have your rights, but you also have your obligations. You can have freedom of speech, but that speech must not cause security risk. You must not cause upheavals and disturbances.”

Best of all, though, he enthuses, is that “most of the Israeli politicians are military men. Mr. Rabin and Mr. Barak were Commanders in Chief of your army and then they became prime ministers. Mr. Sharon is a Major General. It is true that they took off their uniforms. (Abel is resplendent in well-ironed green military dress.) I can do that too. But you don’t cover a tiger with a leopard skin, and say that the tiger is a leopard.” Why should military men be excluded from government, he asks, ignoring the distinction between his Israeli examples, who shed their unforms before seeking political power, and his own case. “Is there such a rule in Israel? Everyone in Israel is a soldier. Everyone has served in the army. So, no one in Israel should run for elections because of that?”

The then-Burma was one of the first countries to recognize the new Jewish state, and prime minister U Nu reportedly taught David Ben-Gurion yoga exercises and how to stand on his head. Nowadays, Abel declares, his government is “a firm believer in neutrality. We have an Israeli embassy and an Egyptian embassy here.”

For the future, he says, he’d like Israel to provide his country with “modern agricultural and scientific help” as well as “investment and trade”; the generals have recently been trying to end Myanmar’s economic isolation and boost foreign investment, while still retaining their military grip. In similar vein, he says he’d like Israel to send tourists to Myanmar — a country overflowing with temples and pagodas, with a reputation for precious stones and jade, and a largely unspoiled natural environment of forests, streams and exquisite fuana and flora.

“Of course it is safe to tourists,” he insists (most tourism experts say the same, but note Aung San Suu Kyi’s boycott calls and her observation that income from tourism props up the generals’ rule). And he offers another of his Israel parallels: “It is the same thing in your country. I know about the problems in the West Bank. But if I ask you, ‘Is it safe to come to Israel?,’ what would you say? Of course you will say that it is safe. On the same line, I would say that it is safe to come to Myanmar. I say [to Israelis], Come and see for yourself... Spread the gospel.”

The Jerusalem Report Magazine June 2001