Living Silence: Burma Under Military Rule (Book Review‪)‬

Living Silence: Burma under Military Rule. By Christina Fink. London and New York: Zed Books; Bangkok: White Lotus; and Dhaka: University Press, 2001. 16 illus., xv, 286 pp. In the field of area studies, Burma/Myanmar studies occupies a small niche carved out by a pioneering generation of scholars whose "watch" dated back to the 1950s when the fledgeling state was regarded by many observers as a promising example of economic growth and democratic rule. A small group of second-generation Myanmar watchers emerged in the 1970s though very few book-length works were published during Myanmar's twenty-six-year socialist era. The collapse of the one-party socialist regime in September 1988 in a whirlwind of protest and demonstrations followed by a military coup led to a renewed interest in Myanmar and spawned a new generation of Myanmar specialists and an upsurge of writings on the country; many of them partisan and strongly opinionated. (1) Christina Fink represents this generation who brought a fresh, oftentimes contentious, perspective to the field long dominated by the orthodoxy of the greying old "Burma hands". (2) The majority of the books and articles on Myanmar published in the last dozen years, after the military regime refused to honour the results of the 1990 general election were highly critical of the regime and its policies. Fink's book is no exception. The fact that the author's sympathies lie with the loosely structured movement for liberal democracy in "Burma" is further attested by the glowing comments, displayed on the back cover, from three leading proponents of the movement: Aung San Suu Kyi (icon of the movement), Josef Silverstein (representing academia), and John Pilger (representing the Western media). Nonetheless, this study is not just another piece of regime-bashing polemic. It is a well-documented study of a subset of a polity struggling to come to terms with a military regime that conflates regime security with national security, harbours deep suspicion against pluralism and holds in contempt what it perceives as "party politics".