BOOK REVIEW: The Golden Land Ablaze (Coups, Insurgents and the State in Myanmar)

By Bertil Lintner. Hurst & Company, London, October 2024, 280 pages, soft cover, US$34.99

Myanmar may not be a failed state, but it has failed its citizens more than any state east of Afghanistan for most of the past 75 years. It is now at as low a point as at any time since independence in 1948 after having once been the most prosperous and educated country in Southeast Asia barring Singapore. Its current tragic conditions and the reasons therefore are explained in this book by Bertil Lintner, a journalist observer of Myanmar, mostly based next door in Chiang Mai, since the 1980s. While up to date on the resistance to the military coup makers of 2021 and the intricacies of its minorities’ conflicts with the government and relations with neighbors, notably China, Lintner’s The Golden Land Ablaze goes a long way to explain the forces that have brought it to its present condition.

Other states in the region, notably Indonesia and Thailand, have had military regimes. But none has proved as enduring and as incompetent as the Tatmadaw of Bamar (a name interchangeable with Myanmar). Its role began, as in Indonesia, with the struggle for independence from the British, then the Japanese who had taken over imperial rule from the British in 1942. As a better-organized force than political parties, the military played an important role in economic life from the early days of democratic independence under U Nu, who took over when independence leader Aung San was assassinated in 1947. But this democratic period, plagued as it was by ethnic dissension, saw the coup by military leader Ne Win, himself an early colleague of Aung San in the Burma Independence Army…