The Iron Road: A Stand for Truth and Democracy in Burma

By James Mawdsley

Book Overview

A startling account of an evil regime and one young man's efforts to defy it. Twenty-eight-year-old James Mawdsley spent much of the past four years in grim Burmese prisons. The Iron Road is his story, and the story of the regime that jailed him, the way it jails, tortures, and kills hundreds of Burmese each day. Mawdsley was working in New Zealand when he learned about the struggle of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese Nobel laureate who is under house arrest. Outraged, he went to Burma, staged a one-man protest, and was jailed. There his own amazing story begins. He is tortured, interrogated, released, jailed again. He turns his incarceration into a contest of wits -- going on a hunger strike, toasting the year 2000 with a cigar and "prison champagne," and requesting "1 packet of freedom, 1 bunch human rights, and 2 bottles of democracy." At the same time, he asks himself: What leads those of us in peaceful democracies to ignore others' suffering, just because it is happening "over there," to "them"? James Mawdsley is a hero in a generation said to lack heroism. The Iron Road -- named for a torture in which skin is scraped from bone with a piece of iron -- is an urgent call for an end to human rights abuses in Burma and is a keen analysis of the totalitarian mind-set. And it is the story, at once moving and terrifying, of how one person can further the cause of justice through sheer will and determination.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0865476373
• ISBN13: 9780865476370
• Release Date: August 2002
• Publisher: North Point Press
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 1.3" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

There Are Giants Among Us

James Mawdsley is a brave man. He has single-handedly taken on the Big Brotheresque regime of Burma with a considerable degree of success, involving the governments of various Western countries and organizations such as the Vatican and the UN. Having camped with disenfranchised minorities on the Burmese border, Mawdsley decides to go into Burma where he briefly distributes pro-democracy pamphlets and plays freedom songs before being arrested. The fact that he is western prevents him from being immediately beaten down, executed, or horribly tortured. He is roughed up, and subjected to some torture, but the regime never comes close to breaking him, and in fact only strengthens his will. Each time he was released, Mawdsley regained his health and went back into Burma, despite the fact that he had been tortured on the previous trip. Receiving help from a network of people beforehand, he ultimately went in alone so he wouldn't endanger anyone else. James' remarkable story is a diary of months in prison, his longing for food, the small tricks he learned to pass the time, and the solidarity that was felt between the other prisoners and even the guards. When he commented to a guard that he was under a seventeen year sentence, the guard shrugged and replied to Mawdsley, "I am here for thirty years." Though sometimes drifting into preaching, the book is focused and contains some excellent quotations from those who have similarly experienced totalitarianism, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. "The Iron Road" is an eye-opening glimpse of the power of one determined individual to change the world.

taut and well written autobiography

In 1988 though her democratic political party won the national elections in a romp, the military refused to let go of power and instead placed Daw Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest, killed many of her supporters, and drove others into exile. When British citizen James Mawdsley learned about the incarceration of the Burmese Nobel Laureate, he became outraged. Mawdsley became a one-man band staging protests and distributing antigovernment paraphernalia and is finally arrested and sentenced for seventeen years for various crimes that will shock western sensitivities to learn the felonis he committed.Mr. Mawdsley tells his story on why he chose an activist path to shake up more then just the Burmese government, but to wake up the western democracies. Most readers will have dual feelings about the author, as his fanatic behavior seems suicidal yet courageous making him a fascinating character. The autobiography is taut and well written, gripping the audience from start to finish and deserves a large readership as the lesson learned is don't sit passively by whining, take action even small steps matter.Harriet Klausner