BURMA
Hijacking A Plane, Fleeing With A TV Station – BOOK REVIEW
"Resisting Military Rule in Burma (1988-2024)" by Nandita Haksar and Soe Myint
A Burmese student activist hijacks a plane from Thailand to India to tell the world about the brutal military suppression in Myanmar, then survives a tough court battle in a unknown country to start an online portal operating from a single laptop using a public phone booth, finally returns to Myanmar after two decades in exile in India to establish a top media group with websites, newspapers, a magazine and TV and is then again driven to exile in Thailand after a fresh military takeover in Myanmar leads to a ban on his media group.
Back-to-Square-One is the story of Soe Myint and his Mizzima Media group, so well brought out in the autobiographical account, “Resisting Military Rule in Burma (1988-2024)”.
Published by Aakar in India, this is not just the story of a student hijacker turned media personality, but the tragic story of an entire generation bloodied and scarred in the fight for democracy in Myanmar.
Truth Stranger Than Fiction
The Burmese editor’s autobiographical account, written with co-author Nandita Haksar, in the backdrop of nearly four decades of popular resistance to military rule amidst a brief tenure of limited democracy, is truth stranger than fiction.
The sharp swings between hope and despair, triumph and defeat, between joy and tragedy, makes it not only a compulsive read but also provides enough drama for a possible Netflix series or a Hollywood/Bollywood blockbuster.
No happy ending though if you are looking for one, because Soe Myint is back again to where he was in 1990 — in the jungles on the Myanmar-Thailand border in exile. The democracy his generation craved for, and gave their youth fighting for, is still not round the corner. The Myanmar military junta is still in charge, though they have lost control over large parts of the country to armed pro-democracy groups and ethnic rebel militias. And Myint continues to run his media operations, albeit on a limited scale, hoping for a change.
Myint is not the archetypal film hero, but a short dimunitive Burmese man now in his late-fifties, who failed the army recruitment test in youth because he was found underweight despite filling his pockets with lots of metal coins. But if one is looking for a real life hero of a never-say-variety, here is one who continues to run his media group from the mosquito-infested jungles, challenging Myanmar’s military rulers with exposures they detest.
Unique Association
Haksar, a top-flight Indian lawyer and leading human rights activist, is “Aunty” to Soe Myint, having defended the one-time Burmese student activist for hijacking a Thai Airways passenger aircraft to Calcutta in 1990 to ‘draw global attention to the brutal military suppression in Myanmar.’ Haksar has a long record of fighting human rights abuses in India’s conflict zones like Kashmir and Northeast, but she has also defended many Burmese refugees in India. Her father, the late P N Haksar was principal secretary to late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
Myint, aspiring for a career in diplomacy as a student of international relations in Rangoon (Yangon) university, before getting caught up in the momentous anti-military student uprising of August 1988, survived a thirteen-year legal battle in India. Haksar not only ensured his accquital from hijacking charges but connected him to many Indian influentials who strongly sympathised with Myanmar’s fight for democracy. Myint’s story is also one about India-Myanmar friendship, of solidarity between common people who wish well for their neighbours. From lawyers in Calcutta who garland Soe Myint on his accquital to journalists who cover his court battles to bureaucrats in Prasar Bharati who sign a content sharing deal with Mizzima after it relocates to Myanmar — Myint’s India connection is rooted both in history and the present.
Two chapters in this book specially makes for compulsive reading — the one about Soe Myint’s hijacking the Thai Airways passenger aircraft to Calcutta and the one at the end about his escape from Yangon with his television studio equipment to a border region in a bus, hoodwinking military checkpoints.
This writer has known Soe Myint since his days in India and has been involved in training his Mizzima journalists both in India and after he returned to set up shop in Yangon. For a while, his Calcutta office operated out of an apartment owned by the writer. Soe has battled huge challenges braving serious illness, his family life has gone haywire, but he has never given up.
Soe is still fighting in the hope that his beloved Myanmar will one day return to federal democracy where all communities living in the country would be bound by a sense of shared destiny.
Subir Bhaumik
Subir Bhaumik is a former BBC and Reuters correspondent and author of books on South Asian conflicts.
No comments:
Post a Comment