Word: burma
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When James Mawdsley was 20 years old and tormented by the injustice of the world, he tried to kill himself. Not long after he recovered, his considerable sympathies were captured by the plight of Burma. He decided that he would go there with the purpose of getting the country's ruling military junta to throw him in prison. As a protest, the gambit was somewhat flawed. The junta was happy to jail him, but they kept letting him out. Every time Mawdsley was deported, he would return, like a self-appointed Daniel in the lion...
...Mawdsley's self-important tendencies can make him a target for mockery, and his admirable if maddening memoir The Iron Road is, at times, a bull's-eye. In Burma, a nation where so many suffer, the 29-year-old Briton's willing decision to add his pain to the mix can seem self-indulgent and quixotic. And yet, ultimately, Mawdsley comes across, like Don Quixote, as sympathetic, even a touch heroic. His heart is in the right place, even if the rest of him never seems...
...Mawdsley's involvement with Burma begins like that of any gap-year activist. In 1996, inspired by opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi's book Freedom from Fear, he hooks up with a refugee group in Burma, where he teaches English. Soon he hungers for a direct confrontation with the regime. After his one-man protest in Rangoon is broken up (it consists of Mawdsley locking himself to a gate and shouting democratic slogans while blasting the film soundtrack to The Mission), he decides that he will return with the intent of going to prison. He shrugs off conventional activism...
...Mawdsley's first lengthy prison experience is intense, and it brings out the best in writing that is otherwise bland. He is arrested after sneaking back into Burma in 1998, and when he withholds his identity from police, they torture him. It's nothing that would make Amnesty International's Hall of Fame, but it is terrifying, and Mawdsley makes you feel it. Worst might be the "iron road," where a metal rod is rolled up and down the victim's shins until the skin is stripped to the bone. The terror almost leads him to abandon his mission...
Justice can be elusive in Burma, but when it comes, it comes with a vengeance. On Sept. 26, a Rangoon court found four members of the family of former Burma dictator Ne Win guilty of treason for plotting to overthrow the country's ruling military junta. The sentence: death by hanging for Aye Zaw Win, Ne Win's 54-year-old son-in-law, and grandsons Aye Ne Win, 25; Kyaw Ne Win, 23; and Zwe Ne Win, 21. Few tears were shed over the convicted. During his 26 years of dictatorship, Ne Win isolated Burma...