On the 60th anniversary of Burma’s independence, the country is colonized from within by its military rulers. Dinyar Godrej travels to its former capital, Rangoon, to catch what’s in the air.
I’m riding a ghost plane. Apart from the roar of engines, there is an uneasy silence. No holidaymakers of the raucous variety. Just the occasional short, murmured exchange. An elderly Burmese man is fumbling with his immigration form. He turns it over and over in his hands, half the questions unanswered. Next to me a nervous young man cranes his neck, peering out of the window. Eventually he initiates some chit-chat, volunteering that he is returning from London, where he had been staying with relatives. I’m itching to ask how he feels, but I bite my tongue. I’ve been infected by the self-censorship that governs all conversations with strangers in Burma. ‘You never know who is your friend, who is your enemy,’ a local tells me later.
As we touch down, a foreigner abandons her half-read copy of Newsweek. The list of things not to carry into Burma is extensive. I’ve purged my luggage and left all my contact information lurking in an email to myself.
The two women at the immigration desk scribble down details in pencil (no computer in sight) and whisk me through. Following the vicious suppression of street protests in September 2007, tourists are scarce. Numbers were already down due to a long-running boycott urged by the country’s most famous prisoner, the Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi.
Feeding the regime
Since 1962 Burma’s people have been under the heel of a military dictatorship. Business is dominated by military-owned conglomerates and entrepreneurs paying their dues, so buying almost anything here feeds the regime. Chances are that the roads one uses in popular tourist destinations, or the golf courses the rich set might tee off on, were built by forced labour. Pagodas visited or ferries boarded incur a dollar fee that goes straight into the junta’s coffers. One cannot visit this country without in some way contributing to the junta. Large parts of it are off-limits to tourists. These are also the places where rape, murder and pillage have reduced entire communities to refugees. Many Burmese in exile tell me the only way to justify a trip is if the solidarity you can show to the people will outweigh the damage you will do with your dollar.
All this makes me uncomfortable. Posing as a tourist, while hoping to get a sense of the place as a journalist, makes me even more so. It’s not easy being what you aren’t.
Every traveller to Burma is told never, ever to initiate a political conversation; let them do the talking. But politics is everywhere. The beaming staff at the reception desk of my guesthouse ask me why I am staying for such a short period. I say I would have loved to stay longer, but because there’s so little good news from Burma in the West I couldn’t persuade friends and family. Tight-lipped silence ensues and I scurry to my room with all the shame of someone who has farted in a lift.
Next morning I walk up Mahabandoola Road on my way to Sule pagoda. This is the wide thoroughfare where thousands gathered in September 2007, emboldened by the protest of the monks. Today it is calm. Monks I speak with later tell me how they were hunted through the city streets when the crackdown began, how they were taken in by sympathetic citizens who gave them ordinary clothes and smuggled them out of Rangoon, walking in groups around them. They tell of their fellow clergy rounded up, stripped naked and beaten, the families of other leaders arrested in order to smoke out those in hiding.
An emptying drain
The protests had begun for economic reasons, but economics is politics in Burma. The military regime is fabulously inept at handling the country’s finances. It used to be called the State Law and Order Restoration Council or SLORC – like the sucking sound of an emptying drain – but now goes under the moniker of the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), on the advice of a US PR consultancy. After a disastrous isolationist period supposedly following the ‘Burmese way to Socialism’, it now aspires to the authoritarian capitalism of its neighbour, China. But without the infrastructure or the business acumen of China, it is presiding over a grand sale of the country’s assets, with the top military brass amassing fortunes. Transparency International has dubbed the country, jointly with Somalia, the world’s most corrupt. On top of the heap is the ruthless Senior General Than Shwe, whose daughter’s wedding in 2006 cost an alleged $50 million. Meanwhile, an estimated five million Burmese face chronic hunger – in a country which used to be known as the rice bowl of Asia. About half of all children don’t enrol in school any more; healthcare is among the worst in the world.
Read more Feeding the regime
Since 1962 Burma’s people have been under the heel of a military dictatorship. Business is dominated by military-owned conglomerates and entrepreneurs paying their dues, so buying almost anything here feeds the regime. Chances are that the roads one uses in popular tourist destinations, or the golf courses the rich set might tee off on, were built by forced labour. Pagodas visited or ferries boarded incur a dollar fee that goes straight into the junta’s coffers. One cannot visit this country without in some way contributing to the junta. Large parts of it are off-limits to tourists. These are also the places where rape, murder and pillage have reduced entire communities to refugees. Many Burmese in exile tell me the only way to justify a trip is if the solidarity you can show to the people will outweigh the damage you will do with your dollar.
All this makes me uncomfortable. Posing as a tourist, while hoping to get a sense of the place as a journalist, makes me even more so. It’s not easy being what you aren’t.
Every traveller to Burma is told never, ever to initiate a political conversation; let them do the talking. But politics is everywhere. The beaming staff at the reception desk of my guesthouse ask me why I am staying for such a short period. I say I would have loved to stay longer, but because there’s so little good news from Burma in the West I couldn’t persuade friends and family. Tight-lipped silence ensues and I scurry to my room with all the shame of someone who has farted in a lift.
Next morning I walk up Mahabandoola Road on my way to Sule pagoda. This is the wide thoroughfare where thousands gathered in September 2007, emboldened by the protest of the monks. Today it is calm. Monks I speak with later tell me how they were hunted through the city streets when the crackdown began, how they were taken in by sympathetic citizens who gave them ordinary clothes and smuggled them out of Rangoon, walking in groups around them. They tell of their fellow clergy rounded up, stripped naked and beaten, the families of other leaders arrested in order to smoke out those in hiding.
An emptying drain
The protests had begun for economic reasons, but economics is politics in Burma. The military regime is fabulously inept at handling the country’s finances. It used to be called the State Law and Order Restoration Council or SLORC – like the sucking sound of an emptying drain – but now goes under the moniker of the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), on the advice of a US PR consultancy. After a disastrous isolationist period supposedly following the ‘Burmese way to Socialism’, it now aspires to the authoritarian capitalism of its neighbour, China. But without the infrastructure or the business acumen of China, it is presiding over a grand sale of the country’s assets, with the top military brass amassing fortunes. Transparency International has dubbed the country, jointly with Somalia, the world’s most corrupt. On top of the heap is the ruthless Senior General Than Shwe, whose daughter’s wedding in 2006 cost an alleged $50 million. Meanwhile, an estimated five million Burmese face chronic hunger – in a country which used to be known as the rice bowl of Asia. About half of all children don’t enrol in school any more; healthcare is among the worst in the world.
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