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Powerless of the Power, When One Dares To Defy

By Saneitha Nagani

The Webster s Dictionary defines the word power as ability to do or act . In French theword pouvoir is to be able to . So, in spite of all the trimmings and attributes of power in their

hands sometimes they might not be able to use that ability. In that case, they are deem powerless .

Many would have one way or another come across the writings of the former playwright andPresident of the Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic after the partition of Slovakia in July 1992)Vaclav Harvel s in his book, The Power of the Powerless. But I doubt that they would have seen it inanother way like I do in my piece Powerless of the Power . That is why Dr Gene Sharpe said in his

book, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, that, To undermine and remove tyranny throughnonviolent conflict, one must move beyond the conceptual bounds of the monolithic powerstructure to identify and assess the actual distribution of power in all of its forms.

In order to rid ourselves of tyrannical rule, such as the military dictatorships of whatever shape or

form, the first thing the Burmese people need to overcome is to change their concept of power namely, their understanding of the nature and sources of power. In fact, they might accept SeniorGeneral Than Shwe (before him General Ne Win ) as the person at the apex of the solid, monolithicpower structure and it is also up to that person to determine how this power is to be exercised. Not

just once but more than twice the people, knowingly or unknowingly, have shown that they are notpowerless as they assumed themselves to be. They have toppled the Socialist Government in 1988and then again shocked the military regime that came into power by a totally different outcome of the 1990 elections from what the regime have pre-determined. They were powerless then andagain. They will be powerless too if and only when we dare ourselves to defy them.

Whenever I came across the situation of an asymmetric conflict it reminded me of the very small

bird and the rogue elephant. The story was that once a couple of small birds had their nest andchicks on the grasslands on the path where a herd of elephants passed. The leaders of the herdbeing sympathetic to the birds stood on the nest while the other elephants herd passed by. Then hetold the birds family that there was one rogue elephant which he could not control so they wouldhave to plea with him by themselves. When the rogue elephant came, they pleaded with him butbeing a rogue animal he trampled of the nest and all the chicks. He used his might to do what hethinks is right.

The birds were small but they were not powerless. They have friends who would help them in theirquest for vengeance. The crow pluck out the eyes of the elephant making him blind; the blowfly laideggs in the wounds got infected and soon got maggots in them; when the blinded elephant was

helpless and thirsty the frog stood at the edge of the cliff to lure him to the fall of his death. Themoral of the story is that strength alone does not make you powerful. In our case, the might of themilitary alone cannot make Than Shwe and his bunch of thugs get away with anything they want,and not without consequences.

People should never be afraid of their governments. It is the government that has to be afraid of thepeople. Without the collaboration of the people, the government simply cannot function. As DrGene Sharpe said, .. skills and knowledge of the people permit governments, at all levels, to

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function. Without such contributions, a government collapses. He also added that, While it isentirely appropriate to render unto C aesar that which is C aesar s , the debate must first be heldover what exactly belongs to him.

Does the resources of the nation, such as gas and oil, his? Does he and he alone has the right toallow China to build a dam at the source of the river Irrawaddy and to kill off the very economic life-life of our country for the sole benefit of the Chinese in Yunnan province? Before we answer thesequestions we have to bear in our minds the maxim that, citizens of sheep beget governments of wolves. Ultimately it is up to us to decide what is his and what is not. Not just because of thenational army, who lost its heritage to become a syndicate of criminals acting like maggots comingout of your own flesh, protecting a handful of corrupt generals can coerced everyone of us intosubmission. It is a duty of everyone of us to stand up and be counted. It can neither be left on Daw

Aung San Suu Kyi , nor the National League for Democracy (NLD) to bring about change and thelegitimacy to the government.

I do not write about things in which I myself have no experience. No one is powerless; there issomething one can do to show his or her defiance when it comes to injustice. I remember a directorfrom the administrative department who reminded me that my defiance against my superiors wouldbe like me hitting the brick wall with my head and I will be the one who gets hurt in the end. Even itmay be so, my idea of defying unjust authorities is not just because I am courageous or anything butit is because of my sense of responsibility . Even if the pain I suffered outweigh my gain the very

thought that I did not give him a carte blanche for him to do as he please gave me satisfaction. Iwas taught from an early age that I have to be responsible for what I did good or bad. I must notallow myself to be judged by anybody but myself. Sure there are those, maybe even in the majority,who are like what Vaclav Harvel said in his book as, .. people who are loath to spend their days inceaseless conflict with authority, especially when it can only end in the defeat of the isolatedindividual. So why not do what is required of you? It costs you nothing, and in time you cease to

bother about it. It is not worth a moment s thought. One time or another we also may have beenthose kinds of people and for some like the former diplomat who defected in Washington, it tookhim more than thirty years to come to his senses. At least he came to his senses and that is good.

My colleagues and I (all together there were twenty four of us we called ourselves Dirty TwoDozen ) were among the graduates who staged a boycott and refused to attend our respectiveshifts, leaving our place of work at the fertilizer factory in Kyunchaung across Pagan in centralBurma then went to the corporation headquarters in Rangoon to find out for ourselves what kind of future we would have after the completion of our provisional period. I like many others startedthere as a graduate apprentice with the salary of Kyats 125 a month. We have had neitherprospects of fixed tenure nor any certainty of what we will become of us after that provisional

period. We made the enquiries with the personnel section and we got no answers. Before that, rightfrom the beginning we put up with all the inconveniences during to factory s commissioning period

riding in the back of a truck for a twenty-four hour shift each day with no seat to sit on and no roof on our heads to protect us from the scorching heat of the sun in the semi arid weather of Burma.We, in all sincererity, put the factory ahead of our own convenience. Colonel Maung Cho was thenthe deputy minister for Ministry of Industry II and at the very beginning of the meeting we had withhim he threatened us with severe consequences for leaving our post without permission. We provedhim wrong with our application for personal leave we lodged at the personnel section the day we

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left for Rangoon. He then admitted that as an armament designer he was trained to have no hearts .We did not flinch and stood our ground and we won. As a reward for our defiance we got aconcession from the corporation for the factory to install some basic amenities for all employees,including those in the lowest rank who have no say in anything at all.

Before I make my decision to defect in 1988 I was like many others who were like people mentionedby Harvel in his essay, Living in Truth, that, If every day a man takes orders in silence from anincompetent superior, if every day he solemnly performs ritual acts which he privately findsridiculous, if he unhesitatingly gives answers to questionnaires which are contrary to his realopinions and is prepared to deny his own self in public, if he sees no difficulty in feigning sympathyor even affection where, in fact, he feels only indifference or aversion, it still does not mean that hehas entirely lost the use of one of the basic human senses, namely, the sense of humiliation. Thisreminded me of an incident where a local-engaged staff from the embassy told me that wheneverthe Burmese staff were talking to the ambassador all they heard from them was hokeke, hokekelike a gecko. How apt he was with his example, some of us even gave a nod to accompanied thesound hokeke .

For people like Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and many others like her - Min Ko Naing , Ko Ko Gyi and so on neither a nod to everything they said nor a hokeke to whatever they demanded thus becomingto be branded as dissidents . Like Harvel said, You do not become a dissident just because youdecide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of

responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of theexisting structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do yourwork well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society. Some of us may choose to be ones asthose who have what Harvel called those in silent disagreement . But there are those like Daw Suu who spoke out what many can merely think. They are the isolated minority who speak out and thinkdifferently from the rest.

Daw Suu said in her Reith Lecture for the BBC that, according to Harvel ..the basic job of a dissidentmovement was to serve the truth that is to serve the real aims in life and that this endeavourshould developed into a defence of the individual and his or her right to free and truthful life. That isa defence of human rights and a struggle to see the laws respected. Daw Suu also said in herconversations with Alan Clements that, A lot of people who commit injustices don t see what theydon t want to see. They re blind to the injustice of their own actions. They only see what justifiesthem in doing what they have done, refusing to see what reflects badly on them. It s the story of SLORC... not daring to face the complete picture, that people are fed up with the situation, they aretired of poverty, corruption, aimlessness and stupidity. But authorities don t want to see thetruth. We all have to stand up and say, Enough! END