ရတနာနတ္မယ္

က်ေနာ္ဒီေန ့ စိတ္ေပါက္ေပါက္နဲ့ အင္တာနက္မွာ စာေတြေရွာက္ဖတ္ရင္း စိတ္ဝင္းစားစရာ အေ႒ကာင္းေလး တစ္
ခုသြားေတြတယ္၊ အဲဒါကတာ့ တစ္ခ်ိန္တုန္းက ျမန္မာျပည္မွာ ေခတ္စာခဲ့ဘူးတဲ နာမည္တစ္ခု၊ အာဏာရွင္႒ကီး ဦးေနဝင္း လက္ထပ္ခဲ့တဲ့ ရတနာနတ္မယ္ ဆိုတဲ့ မိန္းမတစ္ေယာက္ အေ႒ကာင္းေရးထားတဲ့ စာကိုေတြ ့ရလို က်ေနာ္ပိုစ့္မွာထည့္လိုက္ျခင္းျဖစ္တယ္။ စိတ္ဝင္စားရင္ ဖတ္႒ကည့္လိုက္ပါ။











http://www.griffithreview.com/current-edition/240-reportage/821.html

Between two worlds

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 27: Food Chain
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by Hamish McDonald

IN ITALY, JUNE Rose and Mario divorced, and she was raising their two boys, Michael and Maurice, when she learned that Ma Lat was gravely ill after a stroke. By then, Burma had become isolated after the army chief, General Ne Win, seized power in 1962 and stepped up the ongoing wars against the many domestic insurgents.

‘I couldn't get a visa, so I sent Ne Win a telegram – I'd known him for years; I was a very good friend of his wife, Katie; we'd always sort of kept in touch,' she said. ‘So I cabled him: "Mummy critical. Rome embassy incapable of giving me a visa. Please help." The embassy called and said I didn't even have to go to them: they'd meet me at the airport. But in the meantime I got a cable saying mother had died. So I didn't go back. I wrote and thanked him. I would have done anything to see my mother, but to go and collect her ashes...

‘A year later he came to Europe. And we met. I thanked him for
what he'd done. I discovered that Katie had died. And that was how our connection started. He asked what I was doing here. I mentioned my children, my divorce. He said I should go back to Burma. To do what? This thing went backwards and forwards, and on another trip he proposed. I hadn't been back to Burma; all this happened here.' She went to Rangoon in 1978, and they were married. ‘It was not one of those lavish things.'

In her mind, June Rose says, was the idea of doing some good for the country. But she admits failure, though she won't talk about any of the conversations or issues she had with Ne Win. She suggests that he was barely in control of his regime by that point.

‘Had I been able to do anything, had it served a purpose, had something been able to be done – but I realise I saw too many things,' she says. ‘He was being taken for a ride by his people. We're not talking about manipulation, but being put in a position where you don't know everything. You think you know everything, but a dictatorship in a country like Burma, as long as it is, with all the different tribes – each command is a watertight compartment.'

Ne Win never felt he was out of the loop. ‘Oh, they weren't that stupid. Neither was the media, which needed a scapegoat. He was always the éminence gris. He was always the one who was manipulating everybody. It was too convenient,' she said.

The marriage ended after just five months. June Rose won't go into the cause of the final rupture. Gutman says the rumour is that Ne Win was entertaining one of his wartime Japanese mentors, who was by then working for a trading company, when June Rose mentioned the worsening state of Burma's economy. June Rose laughs at another popular rumour, that Ne Win suspected she was a western spy.

She does confirm that it ended when Ne Win threw an ashtray at her. ‘It was one of those things that happened. Rage. Anger. I know why, but on the other hand I don't. It's something that is too questionable. The fact remains that yes, there was a physical attack, but even that is not simple,' she says. ‘Okay, so he did fling the bloody ashtray. I can't deny it, because there were servants and obviously it is the servants who are talking today...There was an ashtray, but it didn't hit me between the eyes and I'm still alive. But it's not the ashtray. It is the last drop in the glass, the last straw.'

June Rose left the next day, seen off by Ne Win's daughter, Sanda (now jailed for corruption by Ne Win's successors), and a guard of honour as she flew out in what was then Burma's only passenger plane certified for international routes. Word of the marriage breakdown had not spread. Ne Win had gone up country. She felt lucky to get out.

'I LEFT BURMA with a definite feeling of failure,' June Rose says now. ‘Because I had failed my people. Because they did put their trust in me when I arrived. And this was one of the things that was not liked. But I would rather I left as a failure than to be connected with the ruling people. Those who had trusted in me, those who believed in me can say she left, but she left rather than not be able to do anything. In Italian, they say un peccato di orgoglio; in English, a sin of pride. Because I thought I could do something which others had not done. And that's a very bad sin.'

June Rose has written an engaging essay about her family and upbringing, but says she won't write about her time with the dictator. ‘To say something, to write a book, one would have to have a very good knowledge of Burmese history, culture, and a super-excellent knowledge of the construction of a military dictatorship,' she said. ‘You can't put all that in a book. You'd bore people to death.'

Gutman says that there was talk among diplomats of the time that June Rose had indeed written, or was about to write, a book titled ‘One Hundred Days with Ne Win' but was persuaded not to publish by a sizable settlement with Rangoon. In Florence there is comfort, but no sign of wealth.