Roger Cohen: The treacherous road ahead for Myanmar

MANDALAY, Myanmar - Rudyard Kipling never visited Mandalay but that did not stop him from writing a poem full of longing that was named after it. There are places like that - datelines to us journalists - that stir the imagination through the beauty of their names. Odessa, Sarajevo and Shiraz come to mind.

Kipling's soldier, back in dreary England, dreams of his “neater, sweeter maiden” on the road to Mandalay, and of “the sunshine an' the palm trees an' the tinkly temple bells.” Whispered in the wind he hears the refrain: “Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay.”

The poet's romance, of course, was Myanmar's long colonial suffering. It was from the Mandalay Palace that the British banished King Thibaw, the last Burmese monarch, to die in India. Later, for good measure, Allied bombing destroyed the palace during World War II. Today, behind a magnificent wall, the palace has been rebuilt. Busloads of tourists traipse around in the sultry heat gazing at a replica that is the repository of a fragile thing: Burmese national pride.

I didn't come to Mandalay for the dateline. Well, maybe I did, a little at least, being susceptible to the melancholy of loss. I spent some time wandering around the dusty streets gazing at stray dogs, boys playing badminton, unfinished apartment blocks, mats being beaten, androgynous helmeted young men in longyis and tie-dye T-shirts sitting on motor scooters, men filling sacks of sand, and women with a dozen bricks balanced on their heads. The town contrived to be bustling in a sleepy sort of way.

Thein Than Oo, when he arrived to meet me, was incandescent. A human rights lawyer of gleaming eye and bristling energy, he is unbowed after a long imprisonment by the Burmese military. When I asked him about the country's 2008 constitution that keeps the ministries of Defense, Home Affairs and Border Affairs under military control - and so assures that Myanmar's democratic transition is a half-baked thing - he shot back: “It is a good-for-nothing constitution. I want to abolish, eradicate and destroy it. We have dictatorship with a constitution.”

That's Aung San Suu Kyi's dilemma. Her National League for Democracy, known as NLD, won a landslide victory in 2015 elections, but because of constitutional stipulations designed to curb her, this triumph did not confer on her the title of president. Still, Thein Than Oo expressed disappointment in her for not standing up to the military, particularly when her friend Ko Ni, a lawyer and one of the country's most prominent Muslims, was assassinated outside the Yangon airport early this year.

Ko Ni had called for amendment of the 2008 constitution. As a legal adviser to the NLD, he was well placed to redraft it. “His killing sent a clear message: If you want to amend the constitution you sign your death warrant,” Thein Than Oo told me. “He was a mild man, he always said ‘amend' where I say ‘destroy' the constitution.”

The murder, still shrouded in mystery, has been linked to retired military officers.

Yet, at this critical moment for the reconciliation she seeks (being a Muslim made Ko Ni doubly vulnerable in a Buddhist-majority country), Suu Kyi chose not to attend his funeral. For weeks she did not speak out. This decision was a sign - a precursor to the reticence she has shown over the Burmese military's rampage that pushed more than 600,000 Rohingya, a Muslim minority in western Myanmar, into Bangladesh.

For Ko Ni, the NLD victory in 2015 was not the endgame. Burmese democracy remained to be built. He paid with his life. For the military it was the endgame: this much we give and no more. For Aung San Suu Kyi, it's not the endgame, either. Her restraint is a debatable but understandable exercise in political survival. Even Pope Francis, on his current visit to Myanmar, refuses to utter the word “Rohingya,” so combustible is the Burmese opening. He should have. The Rohingya exist. They have suffered atrocities.

A joke about life under decades of Burmese military rule told of a man who walked to a neighboring country to find a dentist. “Don't you have dentists in your country?” he was asked. “Yes, sure we do, but we're not allowed to open our mouths.”

Thein Than Oo is opening his, as are more of his compatriots. But change is slow. Nationalism often fills the vacuum curbed authoritarianism leaves. “Most of my compatriots are racist,” he told me. “The Burmese, or ethnic Bamar, are first-class citizens. Buddhism is superior and other religions subordinated.”

And what of Suu Kyi? Thein Than Oo smiled. “She is honest, decent and she believes in a federal democratic state. But as a politician, she is a middle-school student. Between the Tiger and the Lady, whom do you choose? There is no choice. She is our final hope. She is our lighthouse.”

I asked if he really believed that. “Not heartily, but I do. I half-believe it! We have no alternative.”

This is what I found on the road to Mandalay: a palace that is a simulacrum, a brave human rights lawyer, doubt allied to stubborn hope and a wounded nation seeking itself still almost 70 years after the British departed.

Roger Cohen is a columnist for the New York Times.