The Secretary (47 page)

Today’s Burma was a pariah state called Myanmar by the military junta that had ruled
the country since a coup in 1962. The ruling junta stood accused of the worst abuses—forced
labor, including of children, forcible relocations of ethnic populations, and using
rape as a war weapon. The country was mired in poverty, civil war, and corruption.
Uprisings by monks demanding more freedom for the country were violently put down,
whole monasteries emptied of their populations as the monks were sent to prison. Tough
sanctions imposed by the West were meant to choke the regime, but the strategy wasn’t
working and the people were only getting poorer.

In his inaugural address, Obama had called on America’s foes to unclench their fists.
Iran and North Korea weren’t sure they wanted to unclench anything and didn’t seem
to know how. But that year, surprising everyone, Burma’s junta made contact. During
her travels to Asia, Clinton had heard from her Indonesian counterpart that the sanctions
alone weren’t working and that the Burmese were trying to figure out how to move forward.
Indonesia could help bring Burma back into the fold of the international community.
She listened closely, registering the importance of what she was hearing. A regional
approach to solving a vexing problem appealed to the Obama administration. And unlike
Brazil and Turkey with Iran, Asian countries didn’t want to make friends with Burma
just for the sake of making friends, just for the sake of a deal. They were willing
to listen to Washington’s advice about how to navigate the process and Washington
was open to their approach. This could work.

Burma and the United States waltzed with each other all year, but the dance didn’t
really go anywhere. There were no diplomatic breakthroughs beyond one high-level meeting
at the UN between Burmese and U.S. officials. The country had its own groundwork to
do first, including parliamentary elections and the election of its first civilian
president in decades, a former general, Thein Sein. The strongest signal for change
came when the generals released from house arrest a woman as famous as Hillary—Aung
San Suu Kyi. In 1990, her party had won the elections, but the military ignored the
results and instead imprisoned her, sometimes in her own home, sometimes in a jail.
The way Burma’s generals treated Suu Kyi, a Nobel laureate, would become the barometer
of how close or fast the West was ready to engage with Burma. Obama had consulted
with Aung San Suu Kyi before sending Clinton to the country, and soon the two iconic
women would be face-to-face. First, however, Hillary would deploy her people-reading
skills to gauge whether Thein Sein and his colleagues were serious about change or
simply trying to con the world into lifting sanctions. Obama said he saw “flickers
of progress,” and Clinton was going to find out if they could be fanned into a real
flame.

Soon after takeoff, Clinton came to the back of the plane for a chat. It was such
a shame there wasn’t more time to travel around Burma, Clinton told us. She would
have wanted to visit Mandalay, the country’s former capital. Clinton had repeatedly
insisted she was stepping off the high-wire of politics at the end of her tenure at
the State Department. She said she felt cheated traveling the world for work with
no real time to experience the places she was visiting. She was still energized by
her trips, but this one was especially momentous. Copious briefing material produced
by the State Department had not been enough for her. She had asked for books and films,
poring over the history and politics of the country for a week before the trip.

After our taco salad lunch, Kurt Campbell, the assistant secretary of state for East
Asia and the Pacific, crossed the Line of Death to brief us about the visit and what
to expect. Kurt also spent his life on planes crisscrossing the region, building on
the work done by the secretary or preparing for her upcoming visits. America’s relationships
with its allies, in Asia or elsewhere, required constant tending. On the plane, everyone
was preoccupied with one central question—after years of maintaining a close, repressive
grip over the nation, why were the generals now finally unclenching their fist? No
one knew for sure.

Burma’s leaders were able to travel around Asia, unlike their North Korean friends,
whose travel was confined to China because of extensive travel bans. The Burmese attended
ASEAN summits, spoke with other leaders, and could see their country falling behind,
choked by sanctions, while the rest of Asia prospered. Burma had a large expatriate
population that fed news back into the country. Burma was cut off, but it was no North
Korea. So, unlike Arab leaders who had utterly rejected reforms, the Burmese leaders
appeared to have understood that if they could open up the country slowly, on their
terms, perhaps they could stay in power and reap the rewards, as well as avoid international
justice.

Despite all the hard work that had gone into diplomacy with Burma, no one on the plane
was claiming credit for the stirrings of change. It was too soon to claim success
anyway, but American officials were also aware of the many converging elements that
had made this moment possible. The hard work of other Asian countries and Burma’s
own will and intention had been key, but the real game changer for the Burmese had
been China. The Burmese were feeling used by their bigger neighbor. Chinese companies
were building hydroelectric projects in Burma and bringing in workers from China rather
than creating jobs for the Burmese. The Chinese were planning a huge dam on the Irrawaddy
River, a holy flow of water for the Burmese. The dam would greatly damage the river,
and the Chinese were planning to send 90 percent of the power generated back to China.
What kind of a friend was that?
the Burmese wondered. The generals wanted the United States to be a buffer, a balancer.

After a quick stop in South Korea for a conference about international aid, we flew
to Nay Pyi Taw, Burma’s new capital. The landing strip was narrow and unlit; we had
to be wheels down before nightfall. SAM could not be kept secure in Burma, so the
Ravens would spend the night guarding the plane in neighboring Thailand. Clinton walked
down the steps wearing an intense fuchsia jacket and black trousers. Men in white
shirts and dark
longyi
, the traditional Burmese wrapped skirt, greeted her on the tarmac. Clearly, Hillary
and her Burmese hosts had not read the memo.

A red billboard stood at one end of the tarmac, barely thirty feet away from the nose
of the plane. The country welcomed the prime minister of Belarus, who had just visited,
in big white letters. There were no banners welcoming Clinton—the generals didn’t
seem to want to get ahead of themselves or appear too eager in public—but this country
was clearly aspiring to keep better company than other dictatorships.

We had been promised white elephants and stunning, pastoral landscapes, but we got
water buffalos, startled farmers, and a road paved with concrete. For probably the
only time in our travels with the secretary, we all actually watched the country go
by our windows: no BlackBerries. We entered the town, which looked deserted, and pulled
up to our hotel, the Thingaha, a small resort of teak villas where we were the only
customers. Waitresses bearing trays of watermelon juice welcomed us, some overcome
by emotion when Hillary greeted them like long-lost friends.

Dusk fell as the waitresses set a long table on the terrace for drinks and snacks
with the secretary. Over the last three years, Hillary had grown to like and trust
the traveling press corps. Every now and then on the road, she joined us for drinks
or dinner and talked frankly about everything from the policy issues she was facing
to what films she had watched the evening before in her hotel room or gossip about
celebrities. The agreement was always that those conversations were private and their
content not to be shared. It allowed her to be herself, or as close to that as was
possible while still in the company of journalists. She often had a couple of drinks.
This evening it would be tea for the secretary—she was coming down with a cold and
needed to be fit for the next day. Her hair was up, her makeup removed for the evening,
her contact lenses replaced by her glasses. She was relaxed, comfortable, and funny,
holding court for over an hour.

*   *   *

The next morning we readied for our visit to the presidential palace in Nay Pyi Taw,
Abode of Kings, the country’s new capital, a brand-new city with twenty-lane-wide
streets. There was a street for hotels, one for restaurants, a section for government
buildings, another for housing of government employees. The modern ultra-planned city
was unlike anything else in the country. In the past, royals had moved the capital
around the country according to their whim; the British had set up in Mandalay, and
the capital then moved to Rangoon in 1948 after independence.

The generals who took over in 1962 grew increasingly isolated over the years and became
paranoid about an attack by the country they perceived as their enemy—the United States.
Rangoon was also becoming congested, so the generals started clearing hundreds of
square feet of tropical scrubland to make way for Asian-style buildings with a Soviet
bulkiness. They chose an area so remote that no one was even aware a new city was
being built, except for residents in a logging town two miles away, who were tipped
off when Chinese engineers suddenly began frequenting local cafés. The outside world,
watching on satellite imagery, wasn’t sure what the construction was all about.

With the help of an astrologer, the generals chose an auspicious date and time to
move to Nay Pyi Taw, and on a Friday in November 2005, they announced that Myanmar
had a new capital. Two days later, whole government ministries started moving up to
Nay Pyi Taw, a ten-hour drive from Rangoon. Burma’s rulers and its bureaucracy were
retreating inland. Six years later, they let the “enemy” into their bosom.

*   *   *

Our motorcade, usually an overwhelming sight in any city, could do nothing to fill
the twenty-lane highway in the government zone of the city. The annoyance of having
a foreign dignitary closing off streets meant nothing in this oversized ghost town
that appeared completely depopulated. After we drove past a few cars and motorcycles
near our hotel, there was not a vehicle or a person in sight anymore as we approached
the presidential palace. We entered the compound through the golden gates, across
a bridge over what looked like a moat, and pulled up outside the palace—a massive
marble building that could have been the work of Donald Trump.

The man awaiting Clinton had been a general and a prime minister for the junta when
the country was still ruled by the fearsome General Than Shwe, who had kept Aung San
Suu Kyi and thousands of others in prison. As part of Burma’s efforts to present a
softer face to the outside world, Thein Sein had resigned from the army in 2010 to
run in the elections as a civilian. He was now president. The country was nominally
governed by civilians, but the generals were still the bosses.

Thein Sein was a blushing, somewhat shy host. It was unexpected behavior from a former
junta leader. Admittedly, he’d mostly been a bureaucrat and not a field commander,
but the diminutive, bespectacled man in a traditional blue silk
longyi
seemed overwhelmed by the size of his own palace. He was waiting for his guest, the
first American official to ever visit the city, in a room the size of a football field
with a crystal chandelier so large it was menacing. Clinton, in a turquoise pantsuit
and matching necklace, walked in with barely a smile on her face. There was no coddling
to be done here.

“Your Excellency’s visit will be a historic milestone,” said Thein Sein.

“I am here today because President Obama and myself are encouraged by the steps that
you have taken to provide for your people,” said Clinton.

The two leaders shook hands for the cameras and then sat on large gold thrones against
a red and gold backdrop framed by a gold curtain. The press was ushered out. The chairs
were too far apart for a quiet conversation, and four microphones were set on the
table between the two thrones for the officials and their translators. Their staff,
sitting on chairs along the walls, separated from each other by a sea of a carpet,
could barely participate in the discussion. For forty-five minutes, Thein Sein explained
why he was serious about reform and all the steps his government was planning to take
to make it happen. His list matched each of America’s concerns—Clinton was not here
to start a dialogue in the dark, and the Burmese knew what she expected to hear. American
officials had prepared the visit with numerous trips to Burma. The recitation of America’s
own demands could have been a clever ploy, but Thein Sein was also open about the
difficulties he was facing from within his government—not everybody believed in reform,
and he had some convincing to do around him. His unexpected candor made his promises
of reform sound more sincere.

Clinton went through her presentation, outlining the requirements to keep the dialogue
going and for the relationship between the two countries to be normalized. There was
a long way to go but the United States was willing to match every gesture the Burmese
undertook with a reward. From releasing prisoners to allowing Aung San Suu Kyi to
run for parliament, the list was extensive. In return, the Burmese could host an American
ambassador and sanctions could be eased. One day, American companies would be allowed
to invest in Burma. Trade could flourish.

The talks ended, it was time for lunch. The president’s wife, Khin Khin Win, had appeared,
and the two delegations walked over the marble floors, below more chandeliers, toward
the dining hall. Hillary and Khin Khin Win, who were the same age, quickly connected.
The Burmese woman told Hillary she was relieved the visit had finally come to pass
because her husband had been nervous and lost much sleep in the preceding weeks, so
anxious had he been for everything to work out perfectly. He wanted to make a good
impression on the American secretary of state. His country’s future depended on it.
His future depended on it.