Burma’s Spring: Real lives in turbulent times (25 page)

Once above scrutiny and criticism, Aung San Suu Kyi had been accused by some of her supporters of aloofness and reluctance to delegate. While her party had enjoyed runaway success in the 2012 by-election, some of its younger members were frustrated by their leader’s lack of interest in technology and failure to modernise the party in preparation to fight the 2015 general election, a vote that could propel their once downtrodden movement into government for the first time. Even her stance on more fundamental issues rankled her supporters. As a general’s daughter, Suu Kyi made a habit of voicing her fondness for the Burmese army, a sentiment that some of her fellow former political prisoners, slower to forgive their military jailers, found perplexing. Human rights campaigners, traditionally her devoted allies, were exasperated by her inexplicably muted comments on religious intolerance and the persecution of minorities.

Many of Suu Kyi’s once adoring followers may have found her behaviour baffling, but she was treading a delicate line. The Nobel peace laureate was Burma’s most popular politician, but according to the country’s constitution could not become its president. The 2008 charter, imposed in a farcical referendum held in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis, barred from the presidency anyone with a foreign spouse or children. As the widow of British scholar Michael Aris, and the mother of two sons
who held British passports, Suu Kyi could have been forgiven for believing this clause in the constitution specifically targeted her. Amending the constitution required the support of some of the same generals with whom she had fought for so long. The document guaranteed military appointees a quarter of seats in parliament, and, ensuring the army’s continued power, stipulated that the votes of more than three-quarters of parliamentarians were needed to amend the constitution. It could hardly be described as a charter for democracy. Suu Kyi, while famous for her principled, uncompromising resistance to injustice, liked to emphasise that she was a politician, not an icon. ‘Icons don’t actually do anything,’ she had told me. Out of detention, she was in the tougher, real world of politics. Reforming the constitution, clearing a path to the presidency, and breaking the military’s long grip on power in Burma was a prize for which it seemed she had decided compromise might be necessary.

*

The mood at Shwedagon pagoda serves as a useful barometer in unpredictable times. Bearing witness silently above the city, the golden bell-shaped stupa holds an indefinable authority. The pagoda, each day lovingly regilded with leaves of gold, is some five hundred years old in its existing form, and archaeologists believe it shelters yet more ancient structures. Some things are constant – the streams of quiet pilgrims, lotus flowers in hand, fervently praying. Some things are not. The first time I visited, the day after the violent crackdown on the Saffron Uprising, it was gun-toting soldiers, not red-robed monks, who sat in the shade of its jewel-encrusted shrines. But today, old and young, rich and poor are here. It is the place to go to take the pulse of the nation.

I arrived at the eastern gate at close to dusk, signed in (for the first time using my own name), paid my foreigner’s fee, removed my shoes and ascended the covered
staircase to the shrine, lined either side with stalls selling little brass bells, papier-mâché animals, jade bangles and painted silk parasols. I chatted to one of the tour guides on my way up. Visitor numbers had doubled, tripled in the last year, he told me, now there was no low season, even in the monsoon rains. A family skipped up the stairs past me, two young children chasing each other and laughing, holding paper flowers on sticks as they tried to take the steps two at a time.

I circumambulated the stupa in a clockwise direction, the marble floor warm under my feet. Children playfully gonged the giant brass bells with heavy wooden clubs. Worshippers poured water over the heads of small Buddha statues representing the day of the week on which they were born, and adorned them with strings of jasmine. In front of each shrine men and women knelt alone, genuflecting, absorbed in prayer. Halfway round, I saw a new ATM machine in the blue, white and red colours of the bank, plonked incongruously next to a mosaiced shrine. I used to bring months of money into the country in crisp, hundred-dollar bills; now, if I ran short, extra kyats were waiting to be disgorged right here inside the temple. Grey clouds gathered above us, a dramatic, swirling backdrop to the gleaming stupa. Smoky infernos of slim white candles burned as daylight started to fade. I descended the staircase back to the gate. To the side, next to a small fishpond, was a marble-floored area with a plastic picnic table and chairs. Two monks were sitting cross-legged on the floor, each with a bare shoulder hunched over as they read. On the chairs sat two men and an elderly woman, feet bare, her grey hair pinned back, in intense concentration as she read from the newspaper in front of her.

This was another of Rangoon’s new phenomena. Shwedagon used to be a place of whispers, where monks would latch on to foreigners as they toured the pagoda, with the excuse of wanting to practise their English, answering furtively delivered questions
about life in Burma and making their own inquiries about life in the West. They were often naïve, insubstantial exchanges, but the monks were eager for knowledge and tourists relished these unscripted encounters with ‘real people’. Inside Burma, information was suppressed – restricted to the heavily censored, often mendacious output sanctioned by the state.

By this September evening, all censorship before publication had been lifted. An array of privately owned, newly licensed daily newspapers were available to all those who could afford to buy them. To encourage the sharing of information, the trustees of Shwedagon had established a small newspaper library at the foot of the pagoda, which they called ‘Twilight Reading’. Dozens of papers and journals were delivered each evening, with an archive going back several months. Worshippers would descend the steps after evening prayers to read the day’s news. The library was set above a bus interchange; other visitors were commuters who would spend an hour or so leafing through the newsprint, sitting out the rush hour before heading home. It was a simple concept, but for the readers, quietly absorbing each unexpurgated article, it was an undreamed-of freedom.

*

Breathlessly dubbed ‘Asia’s last frontier’, Burma was experiencing something of a gold rush. Following Barack Obama’s visit in November 2012, US and European Union sanctions on Burma were relaxed. Investors were rushing in to grab their share of this almost virgin market of sixty million people. ‘There is a feeling that this is the last great adventure there may be in South-east Asia,’ the chief executive of an Asian real-estate firm told the Bloomberg news agency. On cream leather couches in the lobby of the Park Royal, a modern, five-star business hotel (where once vacant rooms were now booked up six months ahead), clutches of foreign executives, coffees or
beers in front of them, tapped on their smartphones and laptops. A Canadian friend of mine, an NGO worker in his mid-twenties, was walking through the foyer one morning on the way to the conference room on the far side. ‘I was stopped three times: Are you Brad? Are you Jeff? Are you Nick? It was crazy. They’re all looking for their fixers.’

My Burmese Facebook friends faithfully documented each new piece of evidence that proved Burma was joining the global economy. They posted photos of themselves swigging the first legally imported Coca-Colas, making peace signs outside Burma’s first KFC restaurant, posing in an electronics store next to a boxed, cellophane-wrapped Samsung Galaxy S3. When I was living in Rangoon, there was a billboard featuring a young couple in fluffy white bathrobes snuggled in front of a MacBook Pro. I did a double take when I first saw it – there were no international brands in Burma – until I realised it was actually an advertisement for coffee powder. Now the international brands were here, a new one landing every week.

The surge in investment interest was putting pressure on the city’s real-estate market. A desperate shortage of office space, hotel rooms and executive housing had pushed rents in parts of downtown Rangoon up to $100 per square foot, higher than many properties in Manhattan. The city was enjoying – or enduring – a construction boom. At every turn there seemed to be a new gap in the cityscape, like the one I had seen as I drove in from the airport. Downtown plots were boarded off, foundations dug, new high-rises set to sprout. Plans were laid for luxury hotels, shiny shopping malls and towering office blocks. The same Facebook friends who posted photos of the latest consumer brands shared their concerns about the pace of redevelopment. They knew the military government’s long neglect of Rangoon had not only brought the misery of blackouts, potholed streets, uncollected rubbish and overloaded buses; it
had also preserved the city’s historic charm, a wealth of eclectic architecture without parallel in South-east Asia. For every Facebook photo of a new gadget, there was an affectionate picture of a peeling, pale green Victorian-era tenement block with laundry strung up on fretwork balconies, the spires of St Mary’s Cathedral from an office window, a field of patched-up corrugated iron roofs with the turreted Secretariat in the background, and dozing trishaw drivers in front of the lilac City Hall. In this wild-west landscape of rapid change, Rangoon’s stately, mildewed heart – the grand backdrop to coups, assassinations and protests, and home to the messy intimacies of city life – was under threat.

*

The prospect of unbridled, greedy development was not the only dark side to Burma’s reforms. Something else was new in Rangoon. Everywhere I went, I noticed a new symbol. Postcard
-
sized stickers were pasted in shop windows, on noodle wagons and teashop tables. The stickers looked innocuous enough – a patchwork of pastel stripes, overlain with a yellow chakra wheel and ‘969’ written in Burmese numerals. I soon discovered that ‘969’ was a Buddhist nationalist movement which had appeared following the reforms of 2011 and rapidly gained the support of many of Burma’s majority Buddhists. The 969 movement’s populist, conspiratorial message, depicting a Buddhist society under attack, was disseminated quickly by social media, pamphlets and DVDs, finding an eager constituency among those with an appetite for blame and fuelling anti-Muslim rhetoric. The loosening of authoritarian control can always, it seems, give rise to unexpected consequences. In Burma, new freedoms had rekindled old animosities and prejudices that military rule had appeared to keep in check.

FIFTEEN

969

It was Maung Maung Myint who organised his high school reunion, keen to revive memories of happy days at Thingangyun State High School No 3. From the class of 1971, some had done well in life, among them lawyers, an airline pilot and a lieutenant general. Maung Maung Myint, a youthful-looking fifty-eight-year-old, proudly handed me a glossy photograph of their recent reunion, the alumni seated on the floor of the meeting hall he had chosen, those deemed most successful at the front, the former classmates creased up with laughter from a joke that had just been told. The photograph showed Maung Maung Myint sitting cross-legged on the carpet in the centre of the front row. He had shining black eyes and the widest smile of all.

Maung Maung Myint’s grandparents had arrived in cosmopolitan, British-ruled Rangoon in the 1920s, a young Muslim couple from Chittagong in the Raj’s Eastern Bengal province, chasing dreams and opportunities in the thriving port city with its imposing buildings, tree-lined boulevards and smooth-running network of electric streetcars. They were part of a massive, early twentieth-century wave of immigration to Burma from all across British India – both Hindus and Muslims from Madras to Karachi. Many came to serve in the colonial administration, and with them came doctors, merchants, moneylenders and street sweepers.

Dominating Rangoon’s skyline was Shwedagon pagoda, the sacred emblem of Burma’s majority faith, Buddhism. But the newly-weds from Bengal did not feel excluded – they had arrived in a city with every major religion represented: Catholic
and Anglican cathedrals, a synagogue on 26th Street, Hindu temples, and a good collection of mosques. They felt comfortable strolling along the shaded, swept pavements of the downtown streets where they would rub shoulders with Buddhist monks, Scottish solicitors and Greek traders. On the waterfront promenade on Strand Road they would sit on a bench, she in a bright headscarf, he in a
longyi
and collarless white shirt, to watch the steam ships dock, liners en route to London or Shanghai.

Maung Maung Myint’s grandfather began to pray at the Bengali Sunni Jameh mosque, built in 1862 on the north side of the traffic circle that also housed the ancient Sule Pagoda, a busy Buddhist temple. Across the road, in front of the redbrick High Court, a twin-spired Baptist church was under construction, funded by donations from American ministries. As Indian migrants continued to arrive, seeking their fortunes in the frontier-land of Burma, the mosque’s congregation grew rapidly. With guidance from his fellow worshippers, the young Bengali set about establishing a small enterprise, an import–export business for beans and pulses. With their first child on the way, the couple found a small apartment to rent in a newly built, freshly painted tenement block on 30th Street. Rangoon, a jewel of the British Empire, was a bustling, optimistic place, and Maung Maung Myint’s grandparents felt part of its future already.

*

Half a century later, their grandson was the only Muslim in his class at high school in a northern Rangoon suburb. His parents, born in Rangoon, had given their children Burmese names, but never tried to hide or downplay their Islamic faith. Maung Maung Myint was a popular pupil, known not only in his class but by everyone in the school. He didn’t mind being the outsider, the odd one out, he said, his friends always
made it easy for him. ‘My school days were the best days,’ he smiled, giving the impression of someone for whom nothing that followed ever matched the camaraderie of his teenage years. Did he feel different from his friends? ‘Buddhists and Muslims had a very good relationship. There was no problem between us. At Eid, my Buddhist friends would bring me food as a gift. At
Thingyan
(Burmese New Year) we would celebrate together. And today, among my friends, things are still the same.’