Burma’s Spring: Real lives in turbulent times (4 page)

*

They arrived at midnight. There was silence on the deck, silence on shore. From the helm the captain switched on a powerful searchlight and directed it towards the land. Everyone on deck stared outwards. Dead quiet. Then a woman stepped into the beam,
elderly, scrawny, bare-shouldered, a sarong knotted at her chest. She stared into the light, at the ship she couldn’t see. ‘Our island looks like a graveyard!’ she cried. The light was cut. In darkness, no one dared leave the ship. For another five hours, the passengers crouched on deck, in intermittent slumber. Then the blackness turned to faint violet as the sun began to rise from the ocean behind, gradually bathing the destruction in front of them in a golden glow. Felled trees, shattered timber-framed houses, the angular outlines of dislocated objects were smothered in a coating of brownish-black mud. Two broken, wooden fishing boats were perched on high ground at the back of what would have been the beach. The woman had gone; there was not a single sign of life.

Cyclone Nargis was a Category Four tropical storm that raged in from the Bay of Bengal and hit the south-western tip of the Irrawaddy Delta on the evening of 2 May. Its ferocious winds roared through rural villages, flattening the delta’s bamboo and thatch structures built on stilts above the networks of silty brown waterways. The power of the cyclone drove walls of seawater up the tidal rivers that drain the Irrawaddy into the Indian Ocean. Thousands of people were swept away in the surge water, their infants snatched from their grasp. Along the coast, the only people who survived were those who were able to cling to trees or pieces of floating debris, sometimes for ten hours or more. When the waters receded, they found their clothes had been ripped from their bodies; some had burn-like injuries from the force of the rain, cuts and broken bones. As stunned survivors staggered around like drunkards, looking for scraps of clothes to cover themselves, bodies slipped from trees and thudded to the ground. It was weeks before the number of dead was calculated.

On the shore of Hainggyi Island, the jetties had been smashed and swept out to sea. The ship hands threw wooden gangplanks on to the sludge to help the passengers
disembark – soldiers first, with bags of rice to be delivered to what remained of the naval camp. With six bottles of water in his rucksack, Zayar clambered after them, removing his flip-flops and rolling up his jeans. The group gazed around at a disorienting landscape where everything was in the wrong place. Coconut trees were uprooted; big tamarind trees, their trunks the width of four people, had been snapped like matchsticks. Upturned fishing boats had been tossed into the island’s interior, one thrown on top of one of the few standing buildings – a wood and brick Buddhist monastery. The tangled roots of mangroves sat on the surface like nests of snakes, as if eased up by a giant pitchfork. The air heated quickly with the sun, and a sweet, putrid smell seethed from the mud-covered ground. Rice fields were flooded with reddish-brown water, receding in the heat to reveal the twisted limbs of bodies dumped by the storm surge. All the island’s woven rattan houses had been obliterated. Survivors were few. Having received warnings about the magnitude of the storm by shortwave radio, naval camp personnel had managed to retreat to a school – a concrete building and the sturdiest on the island. The school lost its roof but mostly survived the battering, sheltering the naval unit, some special branch officers and their families, and a few dozen other fortunate islanders.

The lieutenant colonel was a very fat man and, as Zayar recalled, very relaxed after the ordeal of the previous night. Even in the wake of a disaster, Zayar knew he had to abide by the rules, and he had come to ask the most senior officer on the island for permission to report. He was conjuring up strategies to counter the blanket ‘no’ he was expecting. The lieutenant colonel, in a dark green uniform, a leather belt buckled high around his tummy, was sitting on a folding chair at one end of a trestle table in what had now become Hainggyi Island’s makeshift command centre. His radio was on the table in front of him, alongside parcels of the mild stimulant betel nut, wrapped in
its green leaves. The betel juices had stained black outlines on the soldier’s teeth, and he intermittently leaned to the side to spit blood-red juices on to the floor. He laughed when Zayar made his request, and told him there was nothing to see. ‘But there is only one boat, and it doesn’t leave till evening,’ Zayar said, evenly. ‘Maybe I can spend my time looking around, to see what has happened, to see if any help is possible.’ The commander leaned back in his chair and sneered. He clicked his fingers and summoned a special branch officer whose motorbike had miraculously survived the storm. ‘He will take you,’ he told Zayar.

Zayar spent seven hours on the ghostly island, picking through debris and mud; the motorbike was of little use. Stunned survivors, half-naked, begged him for water. Wells and fresh water ponds had been inundated with salt water, and everyone was suffering a terrible thirst. Survivors drank coconut milk to stay alive, eating coconut flesh and grains of wet rice retrieved from the receding surge water. There were countless tales of families decimated, just one or two survivors left. The storm waters had carried most of the bodies out into the now calm, lapping Indian Ocean. The heat grew intense. As Zayar clambered over the debris, a nail pierced his rubber sandal, cutting the sole of his foot.

The scene Zayar witnessed on Hainggyi Island was being played out in hundreds of villages across the Irrawaddy Delta. This was a disaster of epic proportions: tens of thousands had died, and hundreds of thousands of people were in need of urgent assistance. Children, dumbstruck by fear and trauma, wandered alone. Young women cowered in the undergrowth among dead bodies, calling out for scraps of clothes to be passed to them so they could stagger out. The injured and elderly cried out for water. But Burma’s military government, already infamous for its heartless treatment of its citizens, responded to the disaster with callousness of a new
magnitude. Or, more accurately, did not respond. There was no coordinated relief operation in the delta. The generals turned down offers of assistance from foreign governments, denied clearance to aid flights, and even turned back the planes packed with relief materials and aid workers that did manage to land at Rangoon airport. Astoundingly, a referendum to vote on the junta’s newly drawn-up constitution went ahead as scheduled on 10 May, eight days after the cyclone, in all but the worst-affected areas. It took Senior General Than Shwe a further week to emerge from the country’s brand new, unscathed capital Naypyidaw to visit the disaster zone, and then only to inspect nervous ‘survivors’ at a pristine Potemkin refugee camp which had been hastily constructed for his benefit.

With little or no help from Burma’s government (or its half-million-strong standing army, the Tatmadaw), the first tasks of survival were organised by the survivors themselves. Communities – what remained of them – spontaneously formed action groups, led by monks or teachers, to bury bodies, clear debris, care for children and share out what few resources they could scavenge. In Rangoon and Pathein, residents started to organise their own aid convoys, loading water, food, medicines and tarpaulins into cars and trucks and driving down to the delta. To the Burmese people, this self-sufficiency was nothing new – it was how they had operated for half a century. During years of corrupt and inept military governance, the people of Burma had devised their own coping mechanisms. ‘I’ve come to the conclusion that when something bad is happening to a society, it binds the people together,’ the head of a Burmese community organisation told me. ‘They want to help each other. People can’t rely on the government, so we have to make our own safety net.’ And so it was. After Burma’s biggest catastrophe in more than a century, the humanitarian workers were the survivors themselves.

After some weeks, however, there was progress. In an agreement brokered by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Than Shwe agreed to allow aid agencies into the delta. The Senior General was under diplomatic pressure from Burma’s South-east Asian neighbours, and seemed to have been shocked into action by the Chinese government’s swift response to the massive Sichuan earthquake that struck central China ten days after Nargis. In contrast to Than Shwe and his leisurely approach, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao was on a plane to the earthquake zone ninety minutes after it had struck. China dispatched emergency medical teams, mobilised tens of thousands of troops to assist in the recovery operation, and soon declared three days of mourning. On 20 May, eighteen days after the cataclysmic storm, Burma declared its own mourning period of three days – for the dead whose numbers would eventually be estimated at 138,000. But the regime’s efforts were little, and late. Its dereliction of duty would not be forgotten, and many Burma watchers believed that the leadership’s signal failure to deal with the disaster helped to contribute to the demise of military rule – at least in this, its most autocratic, merciless incarnation.

*

The long, low moo of the ship’s horn sounded across the island just before 2 p.m. Zayar, on the back of the special branch officer’s motorbike, bumped around obstacles back to the beach. He was in pain from the cut in his foot, and had started to run a fever. He had given away all his water and dried food and grabbed a coconut as sustenance for the journey home. The barge cast off for the slow voyage back upstream to Pathein. There was silence on board, as the bloated carcasses of humans, pigs and dogs drifted by in the murky water. When darkness fell it was a dense, starless night, and Zayar could see no more of the deathly landscape. He sat
motionless on the deck, listening for the faint tinkling of bells as other ships signalled their approach. In his head he concocted his article, his first, terrible scoop.

Forty-eight hours later, his bus had reached Hlaing Thar Yar terminal on the western edge of Rangoon. The city was in total darkness. Tree trunks and lampposts lay across the streets. When Zayar managed to flag down a taxi, the driver charged him triple the usual fare to his home. ‘It was only then that I realised the cyclone had hit Rangoon,’ Zayar said. ‘In all that time I didn’t even consider it.’ The driver dropped him near the port. ‘This was the place I had lived all my life, but I didn’t recognise anything. The trees were gone. There was no electricity at all.’

Eventually, he found the small lane that led to his quarters. He stumbled through the mud and debris, feeling his way with his hands along the brick wall. The cut in his foot stung. He found his room – a tree had crashed into its tiled roof. He was standing in ankle-deep water. He tried to open the door; it was jammed. ‘I shouted in the dark: “Where is my family?” Suddenly I was scared.’ He heard a soft cry from his neighbour’s house. His wife. ‘I found her with the neighbour, sitting on the bed with our baby. “Where have you been?” she whispered.’ Zayar sat with her for a while, holding her hand, but his mind was elsewhere. He asked his neighbour for three candles and some paper. He cleared a space on the floor and sat down, cross-legged, to write his story. He wrote and wrote and fell asleep without finishing. In the morning, he picked up his papers and took them to the office and typed up his story. His editor read over his shoulder, making a few suggestions. The other journalists were working on their reports of the situation in Rangoon, but it was clear that it would be Zayar’s story on the front page.
Modern Weekly
’s deadline was at noon, to give time for the articles to be read by the censor. Miraculously, Zayar’s was passed, with just a few deletions, and was published the next day. His home was flooded, his belongings
destroyed, and his wife Aye Aye was in silent trauma. But Zayar, the junior reporter, had produced one of the first reports of the disaster in the delta.

TWO

Border Crossings

We were packing, and down to those drawers that are always left till last: the ones containing old mobile phone chargers, unidentified keys, business cards, paper clips and bits of Blu-Tack. We had been in this Bangkok house for less than three years, but still the stuff had built up. There were boxes for things we were taking, boxes for things we were giving away, and the black bin bags were supposed to be for things we were throwing out. Not much was making it to the throw-out pile. Every time I tried to put something in a bin bag, Mu Mu would grab it from me. ‘No, I can use it!’ she said of a nearly finished bottle of shampoo or a child’s T-shirt stained beyond hope. The kitchen table was piling up with rejected belongings – a broken hairdryer, a carved wooden candle holder and half a bag of self-raising flour – that the husband of Mu Mu’s friend Mie was going to pick up later in a rented tuk-tuk.

It was an odd situation. Mu Mu, our Burmese nanny who had worked for us since we arrived in Thailand, was helping us pack and leave, and we were dreading saying goodbye to her. As much as we wanted to take her with us, she had told us she couldn’t come. The trouble was, this new country we were moving to was Mu Mu’s home. And she didn’t want to go back. It was June 2008, a few weeks after the cyclone. Aid agencies were now thinking about the long-term rehabilitation of the devastated Irrawaddy Delta, and my husband had been offered the opportunity to move to Rangoon to help run his aid organisation’s recovery programme. I had only caught a brief glimpse of Burma on my reporting trip a year before. It still felt exotic, remote and untouchable. Now I had the chance to live there.

We liked to think of Mu Mu as one of the family, but this move highlighted the gaping differences between us. We had choices, she didn’t. For us it was an adventure, a few years in a tropical backwater, in a city we already knew was quieter and more pleasant than Bangkok. We knew expats who lived on the lake in Rangoon and would sit out on their terraces with evening drinks to watch orange and purple streaks of sunset reflected in the water. For holidays, we could enjoy the temples at Pagan, the beaches at Ngapali, the floating markets of Inle Lake. And when we felt like it, we could go home. For Mu Mu it wasn’t so simple. I already knew her story, with its hardship and heartbreak, and I could understand why a posting in Rangoon might not hold quite the same appeal for her.