Burma’s Spring: Real lives in turbulent times (28 page)

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In Burma, change was continuing apace. When I met up again with Mu Mu in late 2013, the government had just awarded licences to two foreign telecommunications
companies, from Norway and Qatar, to operate mobile phone networks across the country. I may have seen many more people chatting on their cell phones in bustling Rangoon, but in digital technology Burma still stood out only for being at the bottom of the rankings, a position it held on so many measures. Less than 10 per cent of its sixty million people were connected by cell phone, one of the lowest rates of mobile usage anywhere in the world. That would change in the coming years: the mobile phone, that symbol of freedom and independence that Mu Mu treasured so dearly, would become affordably available to millions more Burmese – from the mountains of Chin state to the mangrove swamps of the Irrawaddy Delta. More and more Burmese would be connected not just to each other, but to the outside world, with broadband and smartphones raising aspirations and perhaps helping to cement the country’s transition – as the people discovered just how much they had missed out on, it could become more difficult for their leaders to renege on reforms. The lifting of Burma’s pariah status in the international arena had brought an opening of its physical connections too: airlines that had excluded military-ruled Burma from their flight schedules added new routes to Rangoon, linking the city for the first time to Qatar, Frankfurt, Hong Kong and Tokyo.

Reforms in the financial sector, seemingly far removed from the lives of ordinary Burmese, had the potential to make a significant impact. For decades the Burmese currency, the kyat, was fixed at an official rate at least a hundred times higher than its value on the black market. The system not only confused and perplexed foreign investors, it also allowed Burma’s military rulers to expropriate billions of dollars of revenue from state-owned enterprises, siphoning money into foreign bank accounts that actually belonged in the national budget. But in 2012, the currency was set at a market-based rate, its value against the US dollar determined each day by a
foreign exchange auction in Naypyidaw. Now there was effectively just one rate, whether you were exchanging dollars for kyat on a Rangoon street or in a state-run bank. But why would that matter to the millions of rural poor, the majority of Burma’s citizens, who had never held a dollar bill in their lives?

The reason was this: in the past, more than 40 per cent of budgeted revenues, from taxes or royalties from exports of gas and other raw materials, went ‘off budget’, according to an economist working at a Western embassy in Rangoon. The money was converted to kyats at the false, official rate, allowing chunks of the country’s wealth to be salted away into the private offshore bank accounts of the generals. This stole funds from the already meagre provision that the military government set aside for spending on health and education – estimated at best at 2.5 per cent of national income in each sector. The new economic reforms promised a bigger share of the budget earmarked for these sectors, albeit from a pitifully low base, while an end to the dual exchange rate would bolster the pot of funds from which that spending could be drawn. In short, this could mean more of the income from Burma’s abundant natural resources finally benefitting its impoverished people in the form of vaccination programmes, new health clinics, trained teachers and better-equipped schools.

On the Chinese border, in the town of Laiza, in the northern state of Kachin, Burma’s armed ethnic groups met in early November 2013 to discuss a national ceasefire accord. Some of those at the meeting compared it to the Panglong conference of 1947, the famous gathering in the Shan hills of ethnic leaders and General Aung San that led to an accord which was never implemented, a prelude to more than six decades of civil war. While a ceasefire was in place in Karen state, another truce, in the highlands of Kachin, had collapsed in 2011, reigniting a conflict between government soldiers and Kachin Independence Army rebels. The fighting had
uprooted more than a hundred thousand civilians from their homes, scattering them into dirty, crowded displacement camps, exposed to freezing winter temperatures. Just days before the talks, Burmese media reported attacks by Tatmadaw troops on Kachin villages. Nevertheless, the Laiza conference, a precursor to talks with government negotiators, was seen as an important first step towards cementing ceasefires in all ethnic areas, raising the prospect of guns falling silent across Burma for the first time since independence.

*

Mu Mu looks tired. Talking about her life, and listening too, is draining. We allow ourselves to be distracted by something on CNN. I turn up the volume and we watch, amused, as a daredevil walks a tightrope across the Grand Canyon. We share some cashew nuts from the minibar. When the item finishes, I turn the TV down again and ask her warily about the future. I expect she has run out of dreams by now. But Mu Mu surprises me.

Mu Mu knows about the changes back in Burma. She knows about the ceasefire, she knows that fighting has stopped, for now at least, in the Karen hills. But most importantly to her, she knows that Burma is no longer run by men in uniform. ‘They say it is changing. I am happy that there are no soldiers in government. All my life there have been soldiers. We want to have a change.’ For Mu Mu, political reform in Burma is not an abstract concept. It is something that is happening to her. ‘We felt unlucky that we had to leave our country. We always wondered why it was like that for us. Now I can go back and live in my town, like other people do, live in the town where they were born.’

I look up from scribbling her words in my notebook. I’m amazed. Did she really just say that? Mu Mu continues, her voice strong; she is making a speech, a statement of intent. She may not know it, but her words echo Aung San Suu Kyi’s rallying cries for a collective effort. ‘Now I can go back to my country,’ Mu Mu says. ‘I want to do something good in my life. I want to join in. We need to change our way of thinking, not just think about ourselves. If we care about each other our country can go up. This is our opportunity.’

Later, in darkness, I walk Mu Mu down the street to the skytrain station. We pass a glass-fronted foot massage parlour – the customers in candlelit semi-slumber, their lower legs wrapped in towels, as strong fingers ease the aches and knots of weary city limbs – this is a typical Bangkok neighbourhood. We head down Sukhumvit Soi 53 and past, coincidentally, the very spot where Mu Mu was disgorged from a pickup truck thirteen years earlier, an adolescent migrant who had already discounted the possibility of a future in her homeland. We turn into the echoing cacophony of Sukhumvit Road, beneath the elevated concrete of the skytrain station. In front of the neon-lit 7-Eleven, we hug goodbye. From the pavement, I watch as the escalator carries Mu Mu smoothly up to the platform. Walking back, in the warm night, I consider what she has told me. Although Burma’s opening had often been described as a transformation from the top, real change, I think, can only come from the bottom, from people like Mu Mu, through their commitment and courage. The people of Burma are responsible for their own future, and a peaceful transition can only come if voices like Mu Mu’s can drown out the clamour of suspicion and discord. ‘We have been unhappy too long,’ she had told me. ‘Now it is in our hands. We people need to make the change.’

Afterword

Win Tin, the brave and principled journalist, politician and former prisoner, died of kidney failure in Rangoon General Hospital on 21 April 2014, aged eighty-four, just before this book went to print.

Radical, irrepressible and mischievous to the last, he asked visitors to his hospital bed to sneak in paper and pens – against the express orders of his doctors – so that he could continue to write his political articles, poems and letters.

Following his release from Insein Prison in September 2008, Win Tin’s home had been a little two-roomed cabin given to him by his close friend Ohn Tun. There his only valued possessions, his books, were stacked high on shelves above his writing desk. He owned a narrow bed, and one luxury: a television with a satellite link-up that allowed him to watch Champions League football.

Life had become more comfortable, but Win Tin never saw himself as free. To his dying day he wore blue – the colour of his prison uniform – in a show of solidarity with Burma’s thousands of other political prisoners. ‘While there are others still in prison, we are not free,’ he had told me. ‘Burma is one big, open-air prison.’ After 2011, under the presidency of Thein Sein, most of Burma’s prisoners of conscience were released. But by the time of Win Tin’s death, more than thirty still remained behind bars, including fellow journalist Zaw Phay, and Win Tin never saw a justification to change the colour of his clothes.

There was no gentle decline for Win Tin, no reflective autumn years for him. From the moment he left jail he was working again, delighted to be still alive and able
to continue his life’s mission: to expel the military from Burmese political life. After his death, I listened to the recordings I had made of our interviews, to the careful accounts he gave of his life, in his croaky, eager voice. ‘When I was in prison I worried that I might not be very useful when I came out, I thought I would be senile. But then I realised I had to take part,’ he had told me at our first meeting at the top of Sakura Tower. ‘So from the very first minute I got out of the car that brought me from jail, I had to start to give my opinions. I decided I should express myself honestly and clearly.’

Win Tin lived to see the release from house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi, and on their reunion had to wipe away tears, a rare display of emotion from a man who had endured so much. He witnessed the beginnings of a reform process under President Thein Sein, the first steps, perhaps, towards Win Tin’s vision of a democratic future for Burma. It was more progress than many had dared hope for, but was certainly not enough for Win Tin. He remained at the radical end of the NLD, and regarded his party’s relationship with Thein Sein as far too conciliatory. Win Tin always spoke truth to power; he had no compunction about questioning the political tactics of his leader Suu Kyi. He voiced reservations about her decision to enter parliament – joining, as he saw it, a corrupt political system based on an illegitimate constitution. But as a friend and confidant, he was steadfastly loyal.

For the younger generation of democracy activists, many of them born when he was in jail, Win Tin was an inspiration. In the overflowing chaos of the NLD’s offices, he would listen to them, gently advise them, lend them books and papers. He was also keen to learn from them, fascinated by technology and new ways to communicate his party’s message. ‘Now we are determined to work harder to achieve
democracy,’ NLD youth member Khin Lay told the opposition news channel DVB after Win Tin’s death. ‘It was something he never got the chance to see.’

On the day of Win Tin’s funeral in Rangoon, I was shocked to see on my Facebook feed a photograph of him lying in a glass-topped coffin. It was difficult image to look at, but also comforting to see the love and care with which he had been prepared for burial. Win Tin lay on a bed of hundreds of jasmine flowers, wearing a crisply pressed blue shirt,
longyi
and his trademark black-rimmed glasses. The mourners, of course, wore blue.

‘Win Tin was a truly an honest man. He courageously stood against injustice. He never gave up or allowed those who incarcerated him to be victorious,’ the poet and songwriter Ko Ye Lwin said at his graveside. ‘He was the undefeated.’

Acknowledgements

Above all, my sincere thanks go to all the people who trusted me to tell their stories in this book, for their bravery in talking openly in a country where half a century of repressive rule has left a legacy of fear and suspicion.

I’m very grateful to Myint Kyaw, Eaint Khaine Oo, Zayar Hlaing, Han Thar and Aung Kyaw Myint who all helped to arrange and translate interviews for me and gave me invaluable guidance and friendship during my years in Burma.

In Rangoon I’d also like to thank Gabrielle Paluch, Sann Oo, Hay Soe, Honey Cho, Susanne Kempel, Daniel Gelfer, Thant Myint-U, Bron and Tamas Wells, Thiha Maung Maung, Ruth Bradley-Jones, Maung Maung Lwin, Andrew Kirkwood and Kelly Macdonald.

Some of the material in this book comes from my reporting for the
Independent
, where Andy Buncombe and Archie Bland were fantastically supportive.

Andrew Gray, Martin Smith, Peter Popham, Ben Rogers, Helen Bendon, Sean Turnell, Thin Lei Win, Katie Nguyen, Lin Noueihed and Daniel Simpson all gave great advice and encouragement along the way.

Thank you to Adam Manolson, Chanm Nyein Zaw and Celia Russell for carefully reading the manuscript and spotting my many mistakes. Many thanks also to Anthony Spratt for drawing a beautiful map.

I am extremely grateful to Andrew Lownie for his faith in my book and tireless support. Thanks to my brilliant editors Emily Sweet and Justine Taylor for their insight and attention to detail and to David Haviland for bringing it all together.

Finally, special thanks to the Russell and Collison families, especially Dan, Ruby and Mattie Collison.