Fascinating Myanmar’s and ‘The Lady’

YANGON – Muyanmar’s road to rejoining the international community and terminating its isolationist policies is going to be bumpy, far from the paved highways of economically dynamic societies.

Liberalizing Myanmar’s still highly-regulated economy with government for example dictating and assigning import quotas will be a tedious process requiring massive foreign aid and investment, substantive political reform, a more open society, among other things, to uplift the lives of Myanmar’s 60 million people.

Reforms are however being instituted, albeit in a slow and deliberate manner, among the first of which is the release of democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi from 16 years of house arrest in her high-walled home in University Ave, some 20 minutes from Yangon’s busy Tule Pagoda area.

In all those years of imprisonment, the courageous Aung San Suu Kyi became a symbol of democracy and bestowed by the simple title of “The Lady”.  Her struggles were depicted, not too accurately, some say in the movie with the same title. 

The title is but one of many ways even ordinary Burmese revere the 66-year old widow who could be the country’s next President if Myanmar’s Constitution is amended to remove those provisions that prohibit her from running for the country’s top political position.

Failing to even get a glimpse of “The Lady” we did the next best thing:  go to her home in the company of our colleagues assisting in the writing of 19 cases of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in ASEAN and Japan. There we had our pictures taken and tried to imagine how she survived all those years of suffering. But upon her release, “The Lady” said, she “didn’t hate the people who made her suffer but their acts.”

Despite the birth pains of moving towards a liberal democracy, life goes on in Yangon with people now openly talking about politics, “The Lady” and other politically-sensitive topics. It is to the credit of the present rulers of Myanmar that they have found ways to get off the tiger, so to speak, without being devoured by the tiger. A lot of this has to do with the international attention that has come Myanmar’s way and the presence of foreigners that has, by the way, made hotel rooms scarce.

The practice of sport is one mark of normalcy, notably golf at Pun Hlaing a 660-acre golf and housing development of brothers Serge and Martin Pun in partnership with the government (30 percent interest in the 220-acre or about 100 hectares 18-hole golf course 40 minutes from downtown Yangon). That’s of course without traffic, the heaviness of which is starting to approximate that of Manila and probably even Bangkok.

Pun Hlaing was designed by golf legend Gary Player who took advantage of the wide expanse and waterways to create a challenging course.  The course is flat and fairways are wider than most courses in the Philippines, like Wack Wack but landing in the rough is a daunting challenge. 

One outstanding feature of the course (in fact of Myanmar) is the diversity of bird species that prompted Martin to state that perhaps Pun Laing should also be called Wack Wack since there are so many birds crying “uwak”.

The club is said to be the top among the eight or nine courses in Yangon. It’s inside a housing development of the Puns. The family builds and sells houses (with floor area of around 220 square meters sitting in lots of about 700 square meters. The houses have uniform design and have the traditional porch or balcony common in homes and buildings in Yangon, even if there is no breath-taking view.

Owning a home in the gated community is a requirement for membership in Pun Hlaing. One crosses subdivision roads in the course of moving from one green to the next tee mound (much like what one does in say, Southwoods). There are no more than 400 members of various classifications, 80 of which are for the diplomatic corps.

It’s not all commerce for Martin Pun. Having achieved success through sheer business acumen, he has turned to philanthropy, running the affairs of his foundation to combat HIV-AIDS with the help of some 220 staff members in Myanmar and other parts of the world.

The SEA Games will be hosted by Myanmar in December 2013 as part of its on-going debut in the international community after successfully hosting the Asian World Economic Forum. Billboards are up in strategic places in Yangon announcing the Games to be held in the new capital, Naypyitaw.

On the matter of sending a token delegation as a sign of protest, it might be good for sports leaders to appreciate the bigger picture of sports as a diplomatic tool. I’m almost certain our foreign affairs officials and even the highest leadership may say a thing or two about how we express our displeasure at the sports strategy of a here to fore isolated country trying to gain acceptance in the international community.