Burma has been rendered in journalism, activism and art as a country of plain dichotomies: good vs. evil, liberty vs. suppression, the saintly Aung San Suu Kyi vs. the brutal monolith of the military junta. By its very premise, Burma Soldier, which airs this evening on HBO, muddies this picture.
The documentary’s subject, Myo Myint, is a former soldier who gave his adolescent years to the regime but came in adulthood to join the democratic opposition against it. Says Nic Dunlop, writer-photographer and a co-director of the film with Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern: “Myo Myint’s story is extraordinary because it incorporates victim and perpetrator in a single narrative.” Extraordinary, yes, and yet this project’s greatest strength is its willingness to consider that the lowest ranks of the Burmese army are rife with men as petrified and cynical of the regime as the people they terrorize in its name.
Much of Burma Soldier consists of an unsettling monologue, filmed almost entirely at a refugee camp of grassy huts on the Thai-Burma border. From there, Myo Myint waits to be granted asylum, like his siblings were a decade ago, in the U.S. He came to the army, he tells us, as most Burmese soldiers: teenaged, apolitical and looking for employment and esteem. “Then I didn’t know the difference between people showing respect and people acting out of fear,” he says. He revisits the details of atrocities committed by fellow service members and to which he was a reluctant witness — the raping of ethnic-minority women, the torching of their villages — in quiet and deliberate tones. The interviews were shot in the less than two weeks before Myo Myint boarded a plane for America, but his narrative has nothing of this urgency.
, Myo Myint is working still to give Burmese an account of their own history that hasn’t been written by the ruling elite. And that includes his current neighbors. For while he has gladly found the plentiful and uncensored stacks of an American library, many of the Burmese in Fort Wayne cannot read English. He acts, among other things, as a translator and interpreter for incoming refugees and has his hands in both a local Burmese-language magazine and weekly Burmese-language TV program. “I have no right to directly participate in Burma’s politics,” says Myo Myint, who took with him to the U.S. a plastic bag of Burmese soil. “So this is my politics: struggling to help my people, my nation.” It is a striking patriotism for a man who is not allowed to go home.
See pictures of Aung San Suu Kyi.
Read “Was Burma’s Opening of Parliament Significant?”
