Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew: Dumb Myanmar Generals 

Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Extracts about Dumb Myanmar Generals 

from the interview with Lee Kuan Yew

by Tom Plate and Jeffrey Cole

. . . Otherwise, how do you get all these pictures of the monks in Myanmar or Yangon or Mandalay coming out? It’s all on cell-phones. Now, there are areas which are blocked out now. They are blacked out, sure, but they are still coming out because you’ve got a 3G phone and I am quite sure Reuters or whatever news agency must have given their correspondents and stringers, saying, here, use this. You take it and you use this and you get it through. Otherwise, how can you get it through because the government is already blocking out [communication]. Many of the areas are now non-functioning, you can’t use the cell-phone. But images are still coming through. I just saw something this morning. So?

Q: Can I go back to your comment about Myanmar and the video that’s getting out from the hand-helds, where, unlike Tiananmen in 1989, you cannot just pull the plug on all visuals. With regard to Myanmar — and I realize anyone’s guess is as good as anyone else’s — but did you see that it’s plausible to ask China, as it did at the Six-Party Talks, in some way to work skillfully and work behind the scenes to assume a role in moving Myanmar forward out of the Middle Ages and maybe into the real world?

Lee: I’m not sure the Chinese have got that power. And in Myanmar, these are rather dumb generals when it comes to the economy.

Q: They are!

Lee: How they can so mismanage the economy and reach this stage when the country has so many natural resources?

Q: It’s a gift!

Lee: It’s stupid. So I’m not sure. The Chinese, they’ve tried, and, in fact, we have tried to talk them out of isolation. I tried through a general called Khin Nyunt. He’s the most intelligent of the lot. I sold him the idea, or at least he bought the idea, that the way for them to go forward was to get out of uniform and do it like Suharto, form a party – Golkar — and then take over as a civilian party. But halfway through, Suharto fell. So, it ended up as the wrong advice, they back-tracked. Then they chucked Kyin Nyunt out.

Lee: Meanwhile, I had advised several of our hoteliers to set up hotels there. They have sunk in millions of dollars there and now, their hotels are empty. But, you know, you’ve got really economically dumb people in charge. Why they believe they can keep their country cut off from the world like this indefinitely, I cannot understand.

And you know, you need medicines – they smuggle in from Thailand. It doesn’t make sense.

We will see how it is, but whatever it is, I do not believe that they can survive indefinitely.

Look, the day they decided to close down the government in Yangon and go into this Pyinmana, or whatever the place is called where there’s nothing and they are putting up expensive buildings for themselves and a golf course —

and the top general had a lavish wedding for his daughter which was then out on YouTube — the daughter was like a Christmas tree! Flaunting these excesses must push a hungry and impoverished people to revolt. But what will happen, I don’t know because the army has got to be part of the solution. If the army is dissolved, the country has got nothing to govern itself because they have dismantled all administrative instruments. 

Full Transcript: Tom Plate and Jeffrey Cole interview Lee Kuan Yew