Burma’s Spring: Real lives in turbulent times (2 page)

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The next morning, when the rain had cleared, I met up with an Irish colleague from Reuters who had flown in from her base in the Philippines, also undercover. We greeted each other by the hotel reception desk, pretending to be tourists nonplussed by the goings-on outside. Against the advice of the concierge, we took a taxi, saying we wanted to do a little sightseeing around town. We drove out of the hotel and turned right up a deserted Anawrahta Street. As we approached an intersection the driver slowed. We looked to the right, down 28th Street, to see a platoon of soldiers in dark green uniforms advancing towards us, rifles at the ready, their red neckerchiefs signalling that they were armed with live rounds. Our heads turned left to see around twenty protesters, some with bandanas tied around their faces, panicked and dispersing. The taxi driver sped on.

Around us, shops were shut and few city residents had ventured out. But the quiet on the streets was no indicator of peace. Throughout that day, there were bids by demonstrators to regroup all around Rangoon. The city now bristled with soldiers who swooped on each attempt at a gathering. Military policemen were stationed on every corner. Army trucks patrolled streets empty of cars and buses. We saw soldiers stop and search a group of young men walking around the city centre, ordering them to squat down while they checked their papers, a calculated humiliation.

I needed to talk to people, find out what they were thinking. After the taxi deposited us back at Traders, I went for a quick walk around the city centre. It seemed that no one would look at me. A bookseller stood in his shop doorway and watched the young soldiers stopping the passers-by.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked him.

‘In this country, we are all blind and deaf,’ he said. ‘People have learned to keep quiet.’

I went up to the glittering Shwedagon pagoda, thinking it would be a safe place from which to report. The gates were open, but Burma’s most sacred Buddhist site was now a military encampment. The monks had vanished; replaced by rifle-toting soldiers, lounging, smoking, uniforms unbuttoned in the heat. Their bare feet were their only concession to their holy surroundings. Two women, volunteer cleaners, were sweeping the marble floor. Wordlessly, they swept the dried grasses of their brooms past the soldiers’ feet, with angry sideways glances at the temple’s new guardians. The city was seething.

By night the crackdown continued, morphing into a hidden campaign of physical punishment and psychological terror no less horrifying than the shooting on the streets. The revolution was being systematically crushed. Under the cover of curfew, soldiers raided monasteries, beating and arresting monks. The thuggish paramilitary group Swan Ar Shin (Masters of Force) helped to round up thousands despite the efforts of civilian vigilante groups armed only with rocks and sticks to protect the clergy by blocking monastery gates. Rumours spread that the Government Technical Institute, a leafy college in Rangoon’s northern suburbs, had been converted into a prison camp for suspected dissidents. Civilian demonstrators were not exempt. Officers from the Military Intelligence Agency scrutinised their video footage and photos, and sought tip offs from their spies in the townships. Anyone who had taken part in the protests, and even those who had watched, applauded, or handed a cup of water to a marching monk, could expect a night-time knock at the door, to be hauled off to a cell.

My own fears grew that I would be uncovered as a reporter. It was no secret that Traders was crawling with journalists and, despite its comfort and reliable phone lines, it was not the place to stay. In the hotel bar at night, the drinkers – so obviously journalists in their photographers’ vests and desert boots and no doubt bursting with stories of near arrest and bullets dodged – sat alone with their beers, dolefully scooping palmfuls of peanuts into their mouths. I checked out and moved into an anonymous hotel across the road, only to be told the next day it was a ‘government place’ and I moved again. The regime had cut off the Internet to stop news circulating inside and to the outside world. Mobile phone access was strictly controlled – there was no roaming signal in Burma, my own phone was useless and a local SIM card cost thousands of dollars. I did my two-ways to Sky News on the hotel telephone, and painstakingly dictated long stories to the
Independent
. Each day I was out in different parts of the city. I was too visible; I was taking too many risks. There were clicks and interference on the phone line, and several times it cut dead. My paranoia grew. A knock on my hotel room door made my stomach lurch. Just the lady from housekeeping. Receptionists, taxi drivers, the people in the hotel coffee shop all began to look like regime spies to me. I was convinced they knew what I was up to and were ready to report me. Looking back, I’m sure I was wrong. The Burmese people had wanted the uprising to succeed. But they were too afraid to say so.

Introduction

On the wall of my great-aunt Angela’s dark, heavily furnished sitting room in the Scottish town of Peebles hung a silk tapestry depicting St George, styled as a classical Burmese warrior, spearing a mythical dragon. She had sewn it herself, beginning the task beneath a whirring ceiling fan in her home in Rangoon during the Second World War. Growing up, I was told the story of the tapestry many times by different family members. At the outbreak of the war, Angela and my great-uncle Douglas were a young married couple living in colonial Burma, members of a large Scottish expatriate community oiling the wheels of imperial enterprise. My great-uncle was a solicitor, with an office on what was then Phayre Street, a short stroll from Rangoon’s port.

Their life, as I imagine it now, was doubtless very comfortable; home would have been a picturesque, whitewashed villa with a manicured lawn. They would have engaged a full retinue of staff, leaving Angela plenty of time for her consuming hobbies – needlepoint and bridge. At weekends they may have enjoyed the horse races or boating on the lake, and evening entertainment (both were keen whisky drinkers) would have centred around the European clubs, perhaps the Pegu or the Gymkhana. What’s certain is that their Rangoon life would have been much brighter than the dreary existence they might have expected had they remained in Depression-era Scotland.

Their colonial idyll came to an abrupt end, however. The invasion of Japanese forces in early 1942 forced Angela and Douglas, along with tens of thousands of other European and Indian expatriates in Burma, to flee with just the clothes on their backs (or, in Aunt Angela’s case, with the clothes on her back plus her unfinished, six-by-
four-foot tapestry). As the Japanese advanced westwards towards Rangoon, she and her husband escaped north to Mandalay. From there, by bullock cart and on foot, they embarked on a five-hundred-mile trek through rainforest infested with leeches, across turbulent rivers and along treacherous mountain passes in a desperate attempt to reach safety in India.

More than four thousand people died in the exodus, succumbing to malaria, typhoid, starvation and exhaustion. But my uncle and aunt were among the fortunate ones. On 23 April 1942, wartime records show they crossed the border to India, and later registered as refugees in Calcutta. The survival of the young couple and the unfinished tapestry against such great odds became the stuff of family legend. Back home in Scotland, Angela completed the elaborate work, this time at the fireside, expertly repairing the damage the tapestry had sustained during a Japanese air raid on their retreating convoy. It was whispered that the shrapnel injuries she had suffered in the bombardment were the reason the couple remained childless, and Angela’s tapestry was passed down to my sister, an heirloom affectionately regarded as a symbol of courage and resilience.

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Burma seeped into my consciousness from an early age, but only as a backdrop to the heroic wartime feats of my ageing relatives. I heard much more about the manner of their departure from Burma than the place they had left behind. They would have lived in the shadow of the magnificent Shwedagon pagoda, toured the thousand-year-old temples of Pagan, cooled off in the hill station of Maymyo, but this was never discussed. I had no clear image of Burma other than of somewhere dangerous and inhospitable. Backpacking in Thailand in the 1990s, a trek through the jungles of the Golden Triangle brought us a hillside away from the Burmese border. Looking east,
as the sun sunk behind us, I observed how the thick forest of Burma’s Shan state rose and fell to the dimming horizon, but without particular curiosity. It was a closed country, we were told, and we asked few questions. Of course I had read about Aung San Suu Kyi, the graceful wife of an Oxford don, imprisoned in her Rangoon home for standing up to Burma’s military leaders. But when I started my career as a journalist, my job took me in other directions: to the Reuters bureau in East Africa, then the Caucasus, Afghanistan and Iraq. It wasn’t until early in 2004, back in London from Baghdad, that Burma flickered on my radar once more.

In a noisy Moroccan restaurant in Clapham, my husband Dan was introducing me to a Canadian couple he had met in Angola. Like Dan, Andrew and Kelly worked for international aid agencies, and had spent the previous decade criss-crossing Africa, with postings from Addis Ababa to Ouagadougou. Now they had a young daughter, were expecting their second child, and were about to leave on their next assignment.

‘Myanmar,’ said Kelly over the dishes of tagine, leaning in over her pregnant belly.

‘Where?’

‘MEE-AN-MA,’ she enunciated.

Oh yes, I had heard of that. Myanmar was the name the military government had given Burma. I felt mildly alarmed. Was a pariah, army-ruled state really the right place to take a family? But Andrew and Kelly had been assured that the Rangoon (or Yangon as it was now known) was far safer than any of the African cities in which they had lived, and with few Western brands (sanctions had ensured that) and little modern development, it retained the leafy charm of bygone Asia. Rangoon, I would later discover, enchanted its small expatriate community of diplomats and aid workers
who cheerfully sacrificed the conveniences of a working banking system and reliable Internet for the blessings of gentle Burmese hospitality. Far from a hardship posting, it was a city that was hard to leave, with many extending their stay years beyond the time envisaged in their original contracts.

This was a new perspective on Burma, but still, I couldn’t imagine the country would be for me. Its ruling generals were notoriously paranoid and xenophobic, and all internal media was heavily censored. Burmese journalists who had overstepped the mark were among the more than two thousand political prisoners languishing in jail. Foreign journalists were banned from reporting, although occasionally they were invited as groups on organised trips during which they would be under the constant watch of government minders. I couldn’t work freely in Burma, and however appealing our friends made it sound, I suppose I had discounted it as a place where I could ever live.

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A few years later and I was closer, living in neighbouring Thailand. Dan’s job had taken us there, and we had a small child in tow. With this new proximity, I became intrigued about what lay across the border: Burma was just an hour’s flight away, barely reported and apparently in deep slumber next to its booming neighbours. ‘Nothing’s ever going to happen there,’ a veteran Bangkok-based journalist told me, fed up of waiting for the moment of change that had been periodically predicted since a failed 1988 uprising. I was keen to see for myself, and started to research a few feature stories that I might pursue if I travelled there undercover. One morning, in August 2007, I took my passport down to the Embassy of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar on a quiet Bangkok backstreet and applied for a visa, just to be prepared. I returned three days later and collected my passport with its blurry, purple-inked visa
stamp. By luck, it was perfect journalistic timing: within weeks the Buddhist monks were on the march – the start of the Saffron Uprising. The embassy swiftly clamped down on visas. While frustrated foreign correspondents saw their applications flatly refused, I found myself on my way to Burma for the first time.

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My second arrival in Burma, like the first, was in circumstances I could not have anticipated. A few months after the uprising and its brutal dismissal, Burma returned to the international news headlines. In May 2008, Cyclone Nargis struck the Irrawaddy Delta, whose inhabitants were tragically unprepared to withstand a storm of such magnitude. The recovery operation was on a huge scale, and would continue for several years. Dan was offered a position running his organisation’s relief and rehabilitation programme in the delta, to be based in Rangoon. It was an important opportunity for him, and I didn’t take much persuading. Now that we had two young daughters, the lure of the big news story had subsided. Burma had an enigmatic attraction, and I was ready for something new.

In Burma I had a dual identity. Ostensibly, I was a typical ‘trailing spouse’, happy for the opportunity to spend time with my children in an exotic location. Our house was right next to the Australian diplomatic club, with a tennis court, navy-tiled swimming pool and weekend barbecues. But I also wanted to report, however challenging it would be. I thought of myself as a seasoned journalist, able to deliver from the toughest of environments. In the pursuit of news stories I had trekked across the baking scrubland of Southern Sudan, crossed the Hindu Kush on horseback and camped out in the Iraqi desert. The quiet backwater of Burma, I reasoned, should not pose too many problems.

I settled on my pseudonym, Phoebe Kennedy, a combination of the names of my niece and my grandmother. I found this degree of separation instantly liberating, Phoebe was to have all the adventures while the real me maintained her cover. I created numerous secret email accounts and identified the safest places from which to file my stories. Compared to other foreign reporters, who struggled to secure even short-term visas, I was in a wonderfully privileged situation in a notoriously inaccessible country.