Day Two (22 May 2014)

We didn’t know it then, but while I was on my way to Taunggyi from Tachilek, opposite Maesai, where I had put up last night, the Royal Thai Army had declared a coup d’état.

I remember chatting with a friendly military officer from the Burma Army who said the one thing that is different between the military takeover in the two countries is that in Thailand, it doesn’t affect the day-to-day bureaucratic functions of the government. “The bureaucratic machine in Thailand seems to be better established,” he remarked.

He also talked about the dividends of the ongoing peace process. “In the past, we used to have several checkpoints between Taunggyi and Tachilek (574km) and it would take 2-3 days to travel by car,” he said. “But now it took only two days from even Rangoon to reach Tachilek.”

Nevertheless, he conceded that the transition from absolute dictatorship to a constitutional government was not without problems. “The old system hasn’t gone completely and the new system is still groping its way in,” he commented, “which results in a sort of limbo. Crimes, especially the drug trade, have become somewhat out of hand.”

He pointed out that even the joint 4 country police patrols could not do much to curb the drug activities along the Mekhong. “With Naw Kham gone, the situation has become even worse,” he said.

Naw Kham, the Shan “Godfather” of the Mekong, was apprehended in Laos and sentenced to death in China last year, after the Chinese court found him guilty of killing 13 Chinese sailors on 5 October 2011.

Women’s Peace Forum had just concluded when I arrived in Taunggyi in the evening.
I was received by youth organizers of the constitutional workshop entitled “Local Government and Decentralization”, a joint venture of Euro Burma Office (EBO), Forum of Federations (FOF), Pyidaungsu Institute for Peace and Dialogue (PI) that I have the honor to head and the New Generation Shan State (NGSS).

They informed me that the workshop would be held at the Memorial Hall of St. Joseph’s Church near the No.3 High School, formerly St Anne’s, until the military government “nationalized” it around 1963-64.

The 3-day planned workshop, 25-27 May, would be followed by a selection of trainees for TOT (Training of Trainers) by the Canada-based FOF. The trained youth would then organize constitutional awareness workshops in their own localities.

It has, at least in the short run, nothing to do with the current calls for constitutional amendments or rewrite, I have informed the organizers.

“The problem with our people is that they don’t even know what a constitution is,” I recall a young CBO member telling me several years earlier. “It isn’t unusual to find farmers asking who’s bigger between the President and the Prime Minister.”

I finished the day by visiting my brother-in-law. This time he didn’t have any drinks to offer me, because his daughters had confiscated all the bottles and put them away, after he suffered a minor hemorrhage. Good for him — and me.