Burma’s Spring: Real lives in turbulent times (12 page)

From his study of Burma’s recent history, Owen was aware that the education system, like every other sector of society, had been in decay. ‘Fifty years ago, if you were an outstanding student, you would go to Rangoon University, one of the best in South-east Asia, and get a first-rate education. Now we have to send our best students to study in Singapore. We are left behind.’ His unfolding education had also made him reflect on the parochialism of life back home. ‘In my village the atmosphere is very small. They don’t really know about the outside world. They only think about the living, the surviving,’ he said. ‘They go to the forest at five in the morning to cut wood, then come back at 11.30 and have lunch. At one o’clock they go back to the forest to cut wood, then they come back and cook dinner and watch a Korean soap opera on one TV for the whole village. At seven o’clock they go to bed; the whole family lies down together. That is their life.’ Each year, the forest had retreated further and further from the village. The woodcutters were the architects of a local
environmental disaster, but lacked the intellectual means to fathom it. Looking back from Mandalay, Owen could see things clearly. His anger towards the military government grew, for its neglect of its subjugated rural citizens. But, characteristically for such an energetic, ambitious young man, Owen decided to channel his anger into action.

In 2006, when he was just eighteen, and still ploughing through middle-school grades, Owen hatched a plan to establish a primary school in his home village, so no child would grow up uneducated as he did. He discussed his idea with an Italian visitor who came to Phaung Daw Oo. The tourist was sympathetic, and donated $300 to the cause, and with that Owen bought the bamboo and wood necessary to build a classroom and a latrine. Volunteers from the village helped to build the structure, attached to the village monastery. Owen persuaded four friends who had finished high school to be the teachers, promising them small salaries that he had no idea how he would pay. Mahasala Monastic Elementary School opened the following year, at the end of the hot season. Eighty-three children – who until that day had roamed the forest unsupervised – eagerly enrolled.

With just one classroom for all six elementary grades, when one class started, another had to stop. The roof leaked and the long-drop latrine collapsed in the rainy season. Owen was constantly trying to raise funds, to pay the teachers’ salaries of thirty dollars a month, to build a new classroom and even some cement toilets. He told every visitor to the monastery about his school, showing them the small photo album he had compiled. He managed to attract interest, and funds, from the British embassy in Rangoon as well as some hefty sums from exiled Burmese and private donors in Canada, Germany and Spain. Owen, who could have been leading the carefree life of any young student, now had the very adult responsibilities of
managing money, paying employees, setting the curriculum and planning the future of an ever-expanding school. Why did he do it? ‘I knew that in my village there was no future for kids like me. We are Buddhist so we have to help each other,’ he said simply. ‘Building the school was not my choice.’

*

Grounded in a philosophy of enlightenment, nonviolence and rebirth, Buddhism traditionally embraces peace, clarity and wisdom — attributes of the Buddha who lived some 2,500 years ago. However, throughout Burma’s history, this has not precluded a strong role in politics for the
sangha
. Successive governments have sought validation from the Buddhist clergy, making generous donations for the construction of temples and pagodas. But the monks are known better for their subversive role. Sheathed in their iconic robes, they have been at the forefront of Burma’s struggle for democracy and, before that, independence.

During the uprisings of recent decades, monks were centre stage, both in 1988 when they supported strikes and demonstrations and in 2007, when they led peaceful protests across the country. Burma’s generals, recognising the monks’ power, tried to appease them by giving lavishly to individual clergy, donating to monasteries and spending millions of dollars restoring Buddhist temples. They cultivated a faction of loyal monks to whom they could offer alms, a practice necessary to safeguard their authority. But many in the
sangha
resented the association. In 1999, the generals regilded the spire of the Shwedagon pagoda with more than fifty tons of gold and thousands of diamonds. An earthquake shook Rangoon during the reconstruction, which senior monks interpreted as a sign of divine displeasure with the regime.

In the Saffron Uprising of 2007, Owen joined the monks marching in Mandalay to call for democracy. ‘The demonstrations of ’88 started on the day I
arrived on the planet. By the time of the next demonstration I was already fully grown. But nothing had changed.’ Owen’s teacher had a computer. They typed up posters to organise the city’s monks, telling them when and where to meet to start the demonstrations. ‘We told our fellow monks it was their duty to join us.’ Every morning at about nine, the monks would start their march, the numbers swelling each day from thousands to tens of thousands. The army blocked the roads with barbed wire; Mandalay’s mayor came to talk to beg the young clergy not to demonstrate, he said he had orders to shoot if necessary. But in cities across Burma, the monks continued to march, becoming recognised around the world as a symbol of peaceful resistance. Some appeared on the streets with their alms bowls turned upside down, signalling that they would refuse the military’s merit-making offerings, an act tantamount to ex-communication. The uprising ended when troops shot dead protestors, disrobed and imprisoned monks, and shut down dozens of monasteries.

In 2007, the reputation of the Burmese monkhood, a cherished and peace-loving institution, was at its height, just as the standing of the military government was at an all-time low. But over the coming years, that was to change; the accepted picture of good versus evil would start to blur as elements of the Buddhist clergy in Burma became associated with extremist, anti-Muslim ideology.

*

We climb up to the third floor of the teaching block, to an unused classroom with desks daubed with Tippex graffiti pushed into one corner and wooden chairs piled up on top of them. We are escaping the inquisitive attention of the young novices who crowd around us as I try to learn more about Owen’s life, repeating every question I ask, enjoying the feel of English words in their mouths. ‘So, how many students do you have now?’ I ask him. ‘So, how many students do you have now?’ parrot the
young monks, their tone more reverent than cheeky. ‘And what will you do when you finish school?’ The boys chant their echo. Owen shoos them off with a sharp admonishment and they scamper away, making no sound in their bare feet. We go into the building and up the flights of concrete steps. A crackly Justin Bieber song floats up the stairwell. Through a cracked window we look out over the rooftops and palm fronds of Mandalay’s skyline in the coppery evening light, the ridge of the Shan hills on the eastern horizon.

Owen has just matriculated from high school, passing his Standard 10 examinations with strong grades. He is eager to improve himself in a bigger world. He has applied to university, to major in English. He has recently returned from an exploration of north-eastern Burma, towards the Chinese border, which he made on a borrowed motorbike. There he visited the ruby mines of the Mogok valley, and spoke to farmers from the Shan and Lisu ethnic groups whose land had been confiscated to make way for mining. Like every new piece of knowledge about the workings of the Burmese economy, it has fuelled his feelings of injustice. I ask him whether he will remain as a monk. He hasn’t decided yet. ‘I want to become president, or a great monk to help my country. One of those. I’m not sure. I really want to be the president and if I want to be the president then I can’t be a monk.’ If you become president what will your policies be; what do you want to achieve? Owen’s campaign message is simple. ‘I want to open a lot of schools in this country,’ he says. ‘That’s what I will do when I am president. Each week I will open a school, and I won’t stop until everyone has an education for free.’

SEVEN

A Bamboo City

A quick pencil sketch of Burma’s ethnic topography situates the dominant Burman group on the broad central plain and the fertile delta, with the minority Shan, Mon, Karen, Karenni, Chin, Kachin and Arakanese groups scattered in the hills to the east, north and west. Burma boasts a startling human diversity, home to an officially estimated 135 ethnic groups. Migration to the cities, to more fertile lands and mining regions has complicated this back-of-an-envelope depiction, but in general, the same ethnic delineations that British colonialists found in the nineteenth century still exist today.

Historically, many of these mountain communities enjoyed a measure of self-rule, or were even untouched by Burman authority completely. Before the British imperialists agreed to grant Burma independence, they insisted that the political status of non-Burman groups of the borderlands be resolved. In February 1947, General Aung San, the architect of Burma’s independence, brought together ethnic leaders in the small town of Panglong in the breezy Shan hills, with the aim of devising a political structure acceptable to both Burmans and minority nationalities. Although the Karen leaders boycotted the conference, the agreement that the Chin, Kachin and Shan signed with Aung San guaranteed ethnic minorities equal rights and a degree of autonomy within a federal system. But the general was assassinated later that year, and the Panglong Accord was never implemented. In fact, following independence in 1948, Burma’s new rulers sought to rein in more political and economic power to the centre, efforts which the people of the periphery resisted with an explosion of armed
struggles – collectively waging what has become the world’s longest-running civil war.

Beginning in the 1960s, the military government implemented a policy known as the Four Cuts, with the aim of eliminating all forms of support to insurgent forces by cutting their access to food, intelligence, money and recruits. Campaigns by the Burmese army, the Tatmadaw, particularly in the Karen and Kachin hills, killed tens of thousands of people and forced many more to flee their land. By the mid-1990s, the regime had negotiated ceasefire deals with seventeen resistance groups across Burma, but the guerrilla soldiers of the Karen National Union (KNU) refused any compromise, and continued to fight. The relationship between the Karen, of Mongolian descent, and the ethnic Burmans, distantly related to the Tibetans and Chinese, has an acrimonious history. The Karens enjoyed preferential treatment under colonial rule and sided with the British during the Second World War, while the Burmans welcomed invading Japanese forces as their liberators. Burman and Karen villagers massacred each other in tit-for-tat attacks. By the end of the war, Burman allegiance had switched to the Allies, but both British colonial policies and the bloodletting of the war left a legacy of mistrust between Burmans and the Karen, who continued to fight for their own independent homeland. In 1949, a KNU uprising against the Burman-led government saw Karen troops seize control of several cities in central Burma and even the northern suburbs of Rangoon, before being driven back to their eastern mountain strongholds from where they continued their decades-long struggle.

*

Mu Mu, a Karen from the eastern hills, was not happy down in the Burmese lowlands. While my experience of Rangoon’s teashops and markets was of polite attention and
kindnesses, Mu Mu encountered rudeness and slights. Her high cheekbones, her fine, straight nose, her accent marked her out as a hill person in the city. She told me how she asked a shopkeeper for directions and was ignored, how a hairdresser was rude to her, cab drivers refused to pick her up. In Bangkok she had friends, a community and her faithful mobile phone. Rangoon was technically home, but an alien place. Although she could eat her favourite childhood breakfast of rice and steamed beans, she saw no charm, as we did, in the city’s crumbling buildings, its Second World War buses, its pedicabs and wooden monasteries. After Bangkok, Rangoon was backward. A SIM card for a mobile phone, available for three dollars in every 7-Eleven in Thailand, still cost thousands of dollars in Burma. Instead of the sky train and smooth, air-conditioned taxis, there were heaving, overloaded pickup trucks. Mu Mu was nervous, too; we were never to mention her life in Bangkok or her friends in the refugee camps. She kept her distance from the other nannies who looked after our children’s friends, and rarely shared stories about her past. She spent her weekends in the Internet cafés of Yankin shopping mall, talking by Skype to her friends in Thailand. She was lonely.

Her decision to leave came after such a call from her childhood friend Wan in the Mae La refugee camp, just inside Thailand near the border town of Mae Sot. Wan, like thousands of other young people in the camp, was hoping to make it to a ‘third country’ – America, Canada, Australia or Norway – through the United Nations resettlement programme that had already found Mu Mu’s former boyfriend Saw Myo a new home in Vancouver. Camp dwellers were given little solid information, but rumours spread quickly and there were regular bouts of excitement and expectation when signs of heightened activity by UN staff were spotted. The hopeful migrants decided that this was at last the moment when they would set out to a new land, to
start a new life. The telephone trees would swing into action to disseminate the news; mobile phones would buzz in homes across Bangkok to alert those who had signed up in the camps but slipped away to earn money in the city, leaving trusted friends and relatives behind to inform them of any signs that bureaucratic wheels were turning. Mu Mu got the same message. ‘Come now, something is really happening this time!’ Wan told her. It was another big decision for Mu Mu, but an opportunity she could not pass up. She packed her two small suitcases and thought about America. A new life and a new beginning.

*

Mu Mu thought she knew what to expect – she had already spent three weeks in a camp when she had chased after Saw Myo. But in her heartbroken state she had taken little of it in, now she saw things with fresh eyes. Mae La was home to 45,000 people, the population of a small city, but a ban on any permanent construction meant the sprawling settlement was built entirely from wood, bamboo and thatch. Single-roomed shanties, woven from flimsy bamboo strips and perched on stilts to protect them from the muddy torrents of the wet season, were set along unpaved, rutted trails that ran up and down hillsides now denuded of trees. Women cooked on charcoal burners, squatting by them and fanning away smoke that drifted up to cling to damp laundry strung up between houses. Circles of boys were playing
chin lone
, keeping the wicker balls aloft with their heads, knees and feet, mud spattered up their bare shins. On one corner, under a shelter made of blue plastic sheeting, a group of men gathered around a television screen, watching Italian league football. Two women sat on their stoop, one unhurriedly rummaging through the other’s hair in search of ticks. The camp smelt of ash and sewage. Mu Mu looked about her, struck by the engulfing sense of inertia. Everyone here was marking time.