Damned if you do: A memoir of an undiplomatic diplomat

This is a memoir written by an author perceived as a "difficult woman" pressured to leave the World Bank quietly for making hard but compelling choices in dealing with conflict ridden Myanmar. The book is about how Ellen Goldstein navigated her three years tenure from June 2017 onwards as the country director of the WB in Myanmar. A tenure that brought the end of Ellen's 35 years of dedicated service to the WB. A tenure when Myanmar slipped back from a nascent democracy to a brutal autocracy spearheaded on the civilian side by none other than the winner of Nobel Peace Prize and an icon of human rights Aung San Suu Kyi, known as The Lady.

The book has a broad compass with the role of the WB in dealing with all the repercussions of the Rohingya crisis at the center. The style of her writing is a mixture of ambition, discipline and meticulousness. She exhibits an extraordinary stamina for detail. In narrating how she performed her role as the face of the WB in Myanmar, Ellen connects with the reader on a variety of subjects. A self-described "undiplomatic diplomat", a child raised on Holocaust history, she speaks her mind on how she grew up, what made her relate to the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingyas, how she thought she failed as a mother, her moments of fallibility, her disappointments with the erosion of democratic values in America and how geopolitics is prioritised over human rights by the very nations and institutions who pride themselves as human rights advocates and protectors.

A Samaritan's dilemma of a different kind

The novelty of the book is evident from its very organisation. It has 66, yes sixty-six, chapters plus an epilogue totaling 354 pages. Every chapter is crisp and petite with a catchy title and no subsections. They are like separate file tabs, each storing methodically sequenced memories of her stormy assignment in Myanmar. The military junta -- called Tatmadaw -- raged against the Rohingyas two months after Ellen joined amidst great expectations of a resurgent democracy and development in a country isolated from the rest of the world since 1962.

"Excitement was so high and expectations so elevated that Myanmar became the fastest-growing World Bank program in the world", notes Ellen. She was the first WB director in Myanmar, an upgrade to the WB presence reflecting the importance attached to Myanmar's progress in political and economic transition.

It will not be an overstatement to describe Ellen as the ambassador of the Samaritan's dilemma of a kind James Buchanan -- who coined the idea -- never imagined. This is not a story of fomenting aid dependence. Nor is it a story about triage. It is a story of not knowing how to aid.

You want to do good because that is what international bureaucrats are paid to do. But you are caught between your principal who do not necessarily see what you see as a foot soldier and a client mercilessly annihilating a section of the downtrodden. The intent to do good is challenged by the lack of a bridge to cross over the water muddled by these forces.

Ellen provides a lucid personal account of how she dedicated herself to build that illusive bridge between the WB wallet and the vast number of poor including the remaining Rohingyas who are not even recognised as an ethnic minority. "The government, ethnic Rakhine people, and most of the Myanmar public call them Bengalis. This is pejorative, like using the N-word to discuss race in America", observes Ellen.

In finding ways to help Myanmar stay on an inclusive development path, Ellen had to "jump" off the cliff before she was "pushed". She literally lost her job because she refused to play by the bureaucratic playbook in which the optics count more than the real thing. She held her ground until the ground morphed into quick sands. Largely because she was unable to act above and beyond her pay grade to move the needle on the human rights situation at a time when the international community at the top failed to coalesce with The Lady.

From hero to zero

Ellen could have been disillusioned more considering where The Lady came from. Suu Kyi was "denied her family, denied a normal life, yet she never wavered from her devotion to the cause of democracy for her people." She embodied everything the development community strived to do in Myanmar. Yet the civilian government she led abetted military coverup and denial while propagating false narratives. Even the limited power the military granted her was not used to promote democracy and protect human rights. She stooped to the lowest of the low in her testimony to the International Court of Justice dismissing the incontrovertible evidence on the crimes committed in Rakhine, expressing no sympathy for the plight of the Rohingya and defending the actions of the Tatmadaw who kept her under house arrest for decades.

Ironically, the Myanmar public did not see Suu Kyi as the villain. Thousands in the streets lined to cheer her ICJ testimony when she returned from Hague almost like a hagiographic character in a novel. "In their telling, Aung San Suu Kyi is a brilliant political strategist playing the long game for the good of a truly democratic Myanmar. She is a grateful and diminutive figure with a backbone of steel trading today's indignities on the global stage for tomorrow's democratic victory at home," observes Ellen. She sleepwalked herself into a situation where the sycophants did not want her to know the real situation assuming she wanted to know.

Yet at the end of the day what did Suu Kyi get? "Her Faustian bargain with the Tatmadaw has been brought full circle. They brought her to power, and they took it away when their own power was threatened." Ellen goes on to ask, "Why did we ever think it would be different?" May I add why did Suu Kyi ever think it would be different? She was destined to be at the short side of what she might have perceived as her prescient, long game when she made excuses "that stand in the way of truth and accountability."

Soul searching reflections

The aid organisations faced a conundrum. They had to step out of the box, but their feet were frozen in risk averse domain. Even where the intent was above reproach, they struggled to figure out how to help without doing harm. The civilian and military in the government being accustomed to operating in isolation obliterated the firepower of sanctions. It crippled the WB influence because it has no other but only financial tool. It used the tool, nonetheless. From WB alone the "Rohingya crisis cost Myanmar well over a billion dollars in foregone assistance", reports Ellen.

The potency of the UN's political clout was not only limited by divided views amongst the veto powers in the Security Council but also by transactional motives. Ellen's following metaphor encapsulates the dynamic: "The relationship between Myanmar and the United Nations is like an old married couple. They bicker constantly yet are deeply dependent on one another."

The geopolitics could not have been more complex. "The US administration avoided declaring genocide to ensure we could all stay engaged. The Chinese wanted us to promote stability in Rakhine and Myanmar as a whole. The Japanese favored positive encouragement to prevent a turn toward China." The Australians and the Europeans wanted progress towards democracy and global integration. The Saudis and other Muslim majority countries wanted protecting the Rohingya and other Muslim minorities. The ASEAN members of Southeast Asia wanted partnering with the WB to influence the Myanmar government.

A tall and conflicting agenda in a country where the Ministry of Foreign Affairs functions as a Ministry "to ward of foreigners, not a ministry to implement foreign policy." Military propaganda in five decades inculcated the belief "that outsiders are intent on destroying an independent Myanmar," a belief shared not just by the common people but also Suu Kyi.

Ellen quotes from her conversation with Ben Rhodes, former US President Obama's Deputy National Security Adviser: "Suu Kyi's fall from grace offers a lesson about resting all our hopes in one individual -- the weight of a country is too heavy to place on one person's shoulders... It speaks to a failure of many of us in the West, who are guilty of sometimes viewing political dilemmas in complicated countries as simple morality plays with a single star at the center." Amen!

The UN agencies continued to prioritise development goals, humanitarian access and quiet diplomacy. This failed. But they wouldn't admit it. Instead, they would find scapegoats among workers on the ground, current and just past. Advocating to do the right things is far easier than making it happen "in an environment where neither the government nor public opinion favors it." Ellen's predicament was no different. The WB did change its assistance strategy to incorporate inclusion and peace as filters while stopping budget support that could be seen as supporting the military. She risked death by a thousand cuts in trying to stay engaged.

At the end, Ellen herself was disengaged. Read the book to find out how and why. Damned if you do indeed. Ellen learnt it the hard way. Her memoir is a "story of trying to do good and do right in complex moral circumstances." The jury is still out on how much difference her legacy has or will make to directly help remaining Rohingya and facilitate the return of the million plus in Bangladesh.