The joke's on Myanmar now

Chris McGreal
NZ Herald
January 19, 2008

From their shop front theatre in Mandalay, the Moustache Brothers tell bad jokes in barely comprehensible English about Myanmar's backward-looking generals and, every few years, they get flung into jail for it.

There are three in the troupe - actually two brothers and their cousin - and each evening they wait for the tourists to turn up and justify their performance of slapstick, dance and strangled humour about the Army looking after itself while the rest of Myanmar goes to the dogs.

It's not the money they need the tourists for, although that undoubtedly helps in a country where most people spend most of their cash just on feeding their families. But in the peculiar world inhabited by Myanmar's military leadership, jokes against the Government are just about acceptable provided they are told to foreigners.

The Moustache Brothers have been part of the tourist trail since two of its members, Par Par Lay and Lu Zaw, were released from seven years in labour camps for bringing humour to what everyone in Myanmar knows: the system is so riddled with corruption you cannot tell the difference between a thief and a government worker.

The Moustache Brothers have reached an uneasy truce with the regime (Lay was detained for a month after the pro-democracy demonstrations in September) that permits them to perform, provided it's in English, only in their own theatre and for tourists.

This has left the troupe in agreement with the junta on one thing at least: that a tourist boycott of Myanmar is a mistake. The military wants foreigners to keep coming because they provide a kind of legitimacy as well as hard currency. That is a good reason not to go. But ordinary Burmese say tourism provides many with the means to feed their families.

Some money will fall into the state's hands but, as a reporter pretending to be a tourist - the only way a journalist can get into Myanmar - it was easy enough to direct where most of the cash goes by avoiding corporate hotels, eating in smaller restaurants and buying from family-owned shops.

Tourists are witnesses to the state of the monasteries after the regime purged them of monks to break the pro-democracy protests. The monks who remain are often willing to talk discreetly about the assaults on them and their supporters.

It's not clear-cut, though. The sports and cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa stung many whites because it said that, however much they saw themselves as an outpost of European civilisation, most of Europe did not agree with them.

But popular boycotts of countries such as Myanmar or Zimbabwe have less impact than hitting a regime where it really hurts. Zimbabwe's ruling elite can no longer go shopping in Europe and they have been forced to pull their children out of British boarding schools and American universities. Their companies are blacklisted. That hurts.

Britain can afford to take the moral high ground on Myanmar because it has no weapons deals at stake or oil interests to protect. Which is why we do not hear much from France on the subject: Myanmar is the home of the Total oil company, which hands over hundreds of millions of dollars a year to the regime.

The Moustache Brothers can give you chapter and verse on this. If you want to help Myanmar, they say, come and visit. Just don't fill your car up with Total petrol on the way from the airport.

- OBSERVER