Traveling Myanmar:
Secret Police, Colorful Cultures, Struggling People
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Myanmar July 2008 "How can I get into Mr. Bush's Jail?" asked Jason, a talented and serious 29 year old University educated trail guide. I had hired Jason to lead me on a trek to some ethnic villages in the beautiful, cool hills surrounding the small central Myanmar city of Kalaw.
"Come Again" I asked. "What do you mean when you say "Mr. Bush's Jail"?
"The one in Guatemala", he replied.
Completely mystified for a moment or two, I realized he was referring to Guantanamo. "You mean Guantanamo Prison in Cuba, where the US locks up captured terrorists?" I asked.
"Yes, that is the one," Jason replied. He then went on to say, half seriously I believe, that it was the dream of him and his wife to be able to get put into Guantanamo along with his young son.
"Why do you want to go to that prison?" I asked incredulously.
Still referring to it as Mr. Bush's Jail, Jason explained that living there would be a much better and easier life than in his home country, Myanmar. "I and my family would be given 3 meals a day, every day. I would have a clean and warm place to live on a nice island." (Jason lives in a rather cool spot). Continuing, Jason said that since there was nothing to look forward to in Myanmar as long as the current government was in power, he and his wife had been trying to think up a scheme that would lead them to being put into Guantanamo. He asked me for suggestions on what to do. Trying to be serious, I told him that his best bet was to pretend to be a Muslim fanatic and go to Afghanistan and get caught by American troops. Or, perhaps he could just go somewhere out of Myanmar with his family and make threats against the US and do so from an area where he can be tracked down and captured easily.
I had been in Myanmar for a week at that point, and had run into a number of young people who had little hope for themselves in Myanmar and who saw their best prospects outside the country. As Jason and I continued to trek up and down rolling hills through verdantly green and lush wet highland jungle, with colorful wildflowers cheerfully popping out of the foliage here and there, a variety of colorful birds flying about and calling to each other in the near distance, and periodically passing small plots of tended taro, grain, orange and tea trees, he discussed the difficulties of life in Myanmar and the lack of hope as long as the current military junta was in power. Even though we were in deep forest, on a trail far from town, he was fairly reserved and worried about being overheard by someone. "They can hear us using satellites", he knowingly and quietly informed me. When I mentioned that this was not (yet) possible, and that there was no way that anybody could be hearing us at that moment, he pointed out that satellite cameras could see things from the sky as detailed as a license plate on a car and as small as a pen. That is true, I agreed, but different than being able to listen to conversations on the ground from space, I countered. With some hesitation, he began to relax and not worry about satellites being able to hear us talking.
During our trek, the various difficulties of life in Myanmar that Jason elaborated upon included the rampant corruption of the clique of elites associated with the government, the extremely low wages for most working people, the inability to have good opportunities unless you knew the "right" person, the lack of freedoms in general such as speech, journalism and media, the effective suppression of any opposition political parties, and the pressing problem at the moment which was the lack of tourists that made it difficult for people in his line of work to get by. At one point Jason asked me what I did in the US. I told him that I had created, and then managed, a software based service for a major bank. This led him to ask me how much I knew about computer and network security, and if I could tell him what kind of dangers he might have of an email he sent being intercepted by his government. I told him that this was outside my area of expertise. He explained that he had a great desire to send a message to a journalist outside of Myanmar, in which he wanted to share with the outside world his views, opinions and observations of the terrible government he lived under. Perhaps the message could be sent in an encrypted form we hypothesized, using one of the government blocked email services like Yahoo. Pressing me for my opinion on how to do his desired task, I said that he should consult with one of the talented young IT guys at an internet cafeé. After all, these guys had figured out ways to get around the government censors and were accessing blocked sites. I cautioned him though, to make sure he was consulting someone who was really an expert—his very life and liberty could be at stake if the government intercepted what could be considered a subversive email. I further cautioned that nothing I was discussing with him carried real expert authority since I did not have a proper background in the technical issues he was querying.
As we were having this discussion, we at one point came upon what looked like a shrine to a tree at an apex in the trail. The shrine consisted of a simple little wooden table on top of which was a vase of flowers and two shallow teacups. Interrupting our chat, I asked Jason if the shrine was someone's grave. No, the shrine was to the Spirits of the Forest, Jason informed me. Many of the local villagers believed that each of many aspects of nature had its own spirit. There were 37 spirits altogether, Jason continued. Some examples included Spirits of the Water, Fire, Ground, Banyan Tree (a holy tree in Buddhism), and Air.
After this brief diversion into Dark Age Superstition, we returned to our discussion of 21st Century Totalitarianism and email and internet censorship, as we pressed onto the next village.
The next day, Jason invited me to his small house on the outskirts of the cool hilly city of Kalaw for lunch and to meet his wife. During our lunch we watched an illegally pirated BBC News Broadcast on his television. Jason, with his wife adding her affirmation, once again brought up their hopes to go to Mr. Bush's Jail. Later while walking back to my hotel after my visit to his home, I still was not 100% sure that Jason was in fact really just joking about his Guantanamo ambitions.