Day Two-Four. Tuesday-Thursday, 11-13 October 2016

 Money sings. And I love music.

Charlton Heston, Secret of the Incas (1954)

I hesitate to write about the workshop I attend during the next three days. It is about business development how the signatory EAOs can join hands together for a joint venture.

Maybe I know a little bit about money-making more than I pretend to, which is not much. If I’m writing trash on politics and military, subjects I’m more at home with, I’m sure to write baloney about business, a topic as strange as “Arnold Schwarzenegger doing ballet,” as one guy with a lively imagination once said.

Anyway this is how the workshop goes. First there are inputs by the EAO representatives:

• We had voted for the NLD, but 6 months after it became government, little has changed. We applied for the construction of the roads in our areas. Naypyitaw said yes, but when we got to the state government, they said no. It would be the one to build the roads, with us supplying sand, rocks and such.
• During the unpopular U Thein Sein’s administration, it had assisted us in terms of rice and medicine. In contrast, after the immensely popular government came to power, we are getting nothing.
• People advise us we need to do SME (Small and Medium Enterprises), but we are in a bitter struggle for survival, let alone doing SME.
• We had invited IDPs to the border to grow corn. But after harvest, investors across the border pushed the prices down. Maybe we need to have a corn factory to support our people.
• Big projects come to our areas, pay tax to us, run their businesses and go back. What they should do is having us as shareholders.
• People like to say the nation’s businesses are being monopolized by 3 conglomerates: Tatmadaw, Cronies and Peace groups. They have mistakenly put us in the same category as those that had concluded ceasefire between 1989-2000. Meanwhile, the present government seems to think that this appeasement policy to the EAOs is wrong. It had only helped enrich the EAOs and make them stiff-necked about signing the NCA. The result is we (signatories) are only getting the name, but not the game.
• Some have urged us to do real business and to apply for tender, understanding little that we are not in a situation to compete with professional firms with huge funds.
• Before the ceasefire, it was easier to raise funds. The problem started after signing it.

To these grievances, experts that include both thriving and striving business people have the following suggestions (I may have missed several others):

• Set up consortiums which are designed to help people and give them jobs. Apply for loans afterward.
• Not to rely only on growing oranges. But also develop projects to have them value added, such as making juices.
• One Stop Services (OSS) for tourism projects
• Border Area Management Service, such as against human trafficking and drug trafficking, and for migrant management, food security etc
• The US is removing sanctions against the country. Big changes are going to take place in the next few years especially after the enactment of the new investment law. And the EAOs need to move fast.

One of them explains to us how the new law (which is to be signed into law by the President on 18 October) will benefit us. (Articles that come out later don’t seem to carry much faith in it though).

What interests me however are two books recommended by them:

• One is Why nations fail (2012) by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, who counsel that economic prosperity depends on the inclusiveness of economic and political institutions. That, in contrast, “extractive” institutions that permit the elite to rule over and exploit others do not prosper.

(I’m not sure if I understand what I’ve jotted down here. But I’m planning to read the book, or its summary, when and if I have time.)

• The other is Sun Zi’s The Art of War, which one of them urges us to read. “It is applicable not only to war, but also to business too,” says the lady expert. Well, this isn’t exactly news, because I’ve seen books in bookstores about how the Chinese sage’s martial teaching could be applied to business. But she’s the first person I’ve come across who’s actually vouching for it. I just hope I have time to read it.

(I remember another lady introducing us to CSR-Corporate Social Responsibility: a company’s initiative to take responsibility for its effects on social and environmental well being.)

At the end of the last day, we are hit by news from Thailand: The king passed away at 15:52 Thai time, which is half an hour ahead of Burmese standard time.

So the guy who had, against all odds, singlehandedly unified this squabbling country is gone. He was truly a worthy successor to his predecessors, especially Rama IV and Rama V. I hope Rama X follows in the same footsteps.

After all, Thailand, both for myself and many others, has so long been a home away from home. And this home, we mustn’t forget, had been provided, partly if not totally, by him.

I just hope the two homes, one, where you were born and brought up and the other, where you have spent so much of your life, don’t come into conflict with each other.

Just one more thing to add before I wind up today’s log.

A Burmese friend, after listening to news about King Bhumibol’s death, remarks:

“In Thailand, the one person loved by all and sundry is dead. But here in Burma, the one person hated by all and sundry is still alive. Strange is the way of the world, isn’t it?”

Later, back in my room, I remember that I had forgotten to ask him who this “hated” person he meant was.

Day Five. Friday, 14 October 2016

She stood in the storm

And when the wind did not blow her way,

She adjusted the sails.

QuotesGram

Today I spend most of the morning trying to make sense of what I had heard from the 3-day workshop on business.

The outcome of the workshop were two-fold:

• The signatories agree in principle to work together in business, as well as in politics
• Another follow-up workshop will be held in November.

One suggestion is to invite someone to talk about “Business for Peace”: How to do business while advancing peace.

There is little I can tell you about this movement but that it promotes implementation of UN Global Compact Ten Principles in “high-risk and conflict-affected areas,” such as:

• Support and respect for human rights
• Elimination of forced labor
• Abolition of child labor
• Promotion of environmental responsibility
• Combating corruption

I spend the best part of the day visiting the cultural museum. It is there that I’m told preservation, or more accurately “preventive conservation,” of the Yawnghwe Palace artifacts by foreign specialists will cost about $1 million. But also that there are Burmese experts who can do it by one third, or in any case, less than half, of it.

At 15:00, I’m off to Mingladon. At 16:00, I’m there. By 18:00, we are already checked in at Naypyitaw’s Horizon Lake View Hotel owned by Steven Law aka Tun Myint Naing, who, along with several others, was removed from the US Treasury’s blacklist on 7 October.

“Horizon, like Green Hill in Rangoon, has become sort of a haven for us rebels,” one of the EAO negotiators remarks as our bus turns into its driveway.