Myanmar, or Burma as it used to be known before its generals decided on a change of name, has lately been in the news. The Rohingya issue goes on giving it a bad name. That does not seem to have embarrassed its leaders, especially its democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi, at all. But again, one cannot be sure that the country's military has truly become subservient to Myanmar's elected politicians. That is a general problem with fledgling democracies. Soldiers who have wielded absolute power once are not willing to go quietly into the sunset. Some years ago, Barack Obama, at the time President of the United States, made a ground-breaking visit to Myanmar. That brought back, at a personal level for me, certain memories about the country. We were in school then, too young to understand the world or geopolitics. All we knew, back in 1962, was that General Ne Win, the army chief, had taken control of the country and had deposed the civilian government of U Nu. In those days, Myanmar was known as Burma; and for all of us in what used to be undivided Pakistan, Ne Win became a familiar figure through his frequent visits to the country. He was always being welcomed at Chaklala airport in Rawalpindi by President Ayub Khan. For us, still in school, watching the images of foreign dignitaries arrive in and depart from Pakistan was a thrilling affair. Personally, I made it my particular hobby to cut out the pictures of these important visitors from the newspapers and paste them in what came to be known as my album. When we think back on the 1960s, it is with a combination of awe and shock. Ne Win, always in dark glasses, gave little hint that he was a dictator. But, then again, how were we, as children, to understand what the term 'dictator' meant? Which reminds me: on the day President Kennedy was shot in Dallas, the principal of the missionary school we went to called us together after recess and told us we would be sent home immediately. We asked him why. And he told us the President of the United States had been assassinated. We shouted 'hooray' and whooped for joy. We thought something good had happened to the President (and we didn't know his name). The principal ordered us, harshly, to be quiet. The President had been murdered. Now, if that were the case, why did he have to use a word, 'assassination', whose meaning we did not know at all? Going back to Burma, in 1962 I did a lot of flipping through the newspapers, Dawn and the Pakistan Times, my father read regularly. It was through such activity that I was made aware of something called the Cuban missile crisis, that America and the Soviet Union were giving each other dirty looks. It was a thrill to know what the abbreviation 'USSR' stood for. When I told my father that it meant Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, he looked very happy. But on the day I told my mother, in 1964, that Robert Kennedy and his wife Ethel had arrived in Cairo for a visit with all their (then) ten children in tow, my father pulled me up by the ears and warned me never to lie about news or embellish it in any way. I had, you see, added the children bit to the story. My father found nothing in the newspaper that could substantiate my claim. I have not forgotten that lesson, now that journalism is part of my life. It was in 1962 that I first became acquainted with the name U Thant. He was Secretary General of the United Nations and came from Burma. I am not too sure, but I was told by my elders that secretaries-general of the UN had to be individuals from neutral countries and Burma was then a neutral country. Ne Win and U Thant became, therefore, two incongruous symbols of Burma for me. And U Thant only whipped up in me a desire to know of his predecessors. And soon I was committing the names Trygve Lie and Dag Hammarskjoeld to memory. It would be years before I knew of the mystic that was Hammarskjoeld. In those days, there was much talk of a place called Katanga, of a thuggish Moise Tshombe disrupting politics in a free but chaotic Congo. I only came to know of Patrice Lumumba sometime later, though I had little idea of his place in history and the manner in which he had died.
Just as Burma became part of my consciousness in the early 1960s, towards the middle of the decade it was China that took my fancy. Chou En-lai (that was how his name was spelt at the time) undertook, in 1964, an extensive tour of Africa, much of which was gradually becoming independent. As I recall, it was a fairly longish trip. And in that same year, images of a beaming Gamal Abdel Nasser, president of Egypt (then called the United Arab Republic), and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev beaming as they inaugurated the Aswan Dam appeared in the newspapers. It was also the year when Khrushchev would be ousted from power by three men -- Leonid Brezhnev, Alexei Kosygin and Nikolai Podgorny. For a number of days after the coup in Moscow, earlier images I had seen of Khrushchev and Brezhnev together kept coming back. Brezhnev seemed to be very loyal to Khrushchev. I wondered where Khrushchev was after he had been removed. Such are the associations, at least some of them, that people my memories. Everyone has such nostalgia welling up somewhere deep in the consciousness at times, I am sure. Our school teachers took us to see the movie Summer Holiday in summer 1963. We loved Cliff Richard and his songs and secretly wondered if we could someday be as famous as he was. I listened to songs on the radio but for the life of me could not figure out how such people as Talat Mahmood and Mohammad Rafi and Lata Mangeshkar could squeeze themselves into being midgets, enter our radio set and sing those beautiful songs. I even tried taking a whole radio apart to get at the 'truth'. Memories are forever a nest somewhere in the heart. Obama was born in 1961. It was the year when, perched on my cousin's shoulder, I had a glimpse of Queen Elizabeth II when she came to Dhaka. More than three decades later, on a grey winter's day in London, it was a privilege speaking to her at Buckingham Palace.
When we think back on the 1960s, it is with a combination of awe and
shock. Ne Win, always in dark glasses, gave little hint that he was a dictator. But, then again, how were we, as children, to understand what the term 'dictator' meant?
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Associate Editor, The Daily Observer
