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Burmese: 'We are still angry, but we bury'
The Guardian - September 26, 2008
Imogen Wall, Bagan, Burma – Around the ancient and celebrated temples of Bagan, a tour guide blandly dispenses historical nuggets to tourists, his fury hidden beneath a bright smile. Myint Win, a novice monk, is taking a break from his monastery to earn some money in the town whose temples make it one of the country's premier tourist destinations.
But times are hard. The protests against the Burmese regime that began a year ago renewed awareness of the tourism boycott of the country, and only the determined make it here these days. In Bagan, few hostels have more than one guest, tour guides say they haven't had a client in months and at the most celebrated temples there is a frantic edge to the hawkers as they plead for custom from the occasional visitor.
The irony is not lost on Myint. "Protesting not good for business," he says with a wry smile.
In Mandalay, the tourists have vanished. The nightly performance of the Moustache Brothers, Burma's best-known comedians and renowned opponents of the regime, is struggling. Allowed to play only to foreigners, their audiences have dwindled. "Some nights we cancel," says Lu Maw, one of the brothers. "We can't perform with no audience."
In the capital, Rangoon, a year after the protests the streets project an eerie impression of normality. Brief chats with those who will risk speaking to a foreigner reveal the fear that conditions everyone's lives. Eyes flick round cafes and voices are lowered before any opinion is expressed. Conversations in taxis or on rickshaws – anywhere an informer might be listening in – are studiously avoided.
Today, Burma is back to the Orwellian paranoia that has passed for normality here for years, where anger and dissent must be hidden and the daily image of contentment maintained to ensure survival. The regime has tightened its grip, Human Rights Watch reported this week, with the continued arrest and detention of political activists.
Myint, the 29-year-old novice monk, first heard about the protests over rising fuel prices at the end of August 2007. Within days, demonstrations had spread across the country to become the largest Burma had seen in decades. A monk in Rangoon phoned Myint. "He said, you have to help us," recalls the novice.
And so Myint began to march. In the high plains of Bagan, the sun blazed down on the bareheaded protesters. Walking with thousands of other young, angry men, Myint remembers the glare of the light and his bare feet burning on the hot tarmac. "The people lined the streets to protect us," he says. "They made sure they were between us and the military and they gave us water. I wasn't afraid because I knew what we were doing was right."
Then the shooting began. Violating a core principle many believed even the junta must hold sacred, the authorities turned their guns on the monks. The images flooded out: soldiers shooting at unarmed, barefoot protesters, amateur footage smuggled across borders, illicit photos shot on mobile phones flashing around the world. The world reacted with shock; the junta's response was to shut down access to the internet and carry on.
There was no shooting in Bagan, but Myint and his colleagues watched satellite pictures of events in Yangon with mounting horror. "We watched the other marches – and then the violence. Everyone was shocked. The head of my monastery made the decision to stop the protests."
Elsewhere, the crackdown was biting hard. Up in Mandalay, as tens of thousands took to the streets of Burma's religious heartland, two middle-aged men watched the monks go by. The authorities knew exactly who they were: Moustache Brothers Par Par Lay and Lu Maw. Three days later they came for Par Par.
"To be honest we had been expecting them. They came at night – as usual – and said they wanted to ask questions," says Lu Maw. "They held him for just over 30 days." "They kept asking who was organising the protests," adds Par Par. "But I actually wasn't involved this time round, so I couldn't tell them anything."
By the time the protests had finally been extinguished, more than 4,000 people had been detained, according to Bo Kyi, of the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, an organisation in Thailand that helps political prisoners inside Burma. Many were tortured; monks were forced to disrobe, beaten and some placed in solitary confinement. An unknown number were killed.
Those who escaped jail were cowed, and the protest movement evaporated as quickly as it had sprung up. The Burmese people who had dared to hope for real change retreated as the regime reasserted its grip.
Four months ago came another devastating blow. In the early hours of May 3, Aung Thin was woken in the small, wooden house she shared with five other family members in her village deep in the Irrawaddy delta by the howl of the wind, then water pouring in. As the water rose, the family scrambled on to the roof.
"We managed to climb into a banyan tree next to our house," she says. "Then the roof began to float and became trapped in the trees. So we climbed back on to it, like a raft. We could see children in the water. My father tried to pull them out but the current was too strong." There they clung for hours until day broke and cyclone Nargis, the worst storm to hit the delta in generations, finally passed.
Aung tells her story outside the flimsy frame of the new, temporary house her family has built. They were lucky: the storm claimed an estimated 130,000 lives.
Their problems are far from over. Four months on, they have a new fear: starvation. The storm swept away not just their harvest but their precious store of rice seeds, ploughing equipment and livestock. It dumped salt water in the paddy fields, rendering them infertile. "We need to plant," says the village chief. "We have got rid of the salt from fields. We've enough rice to live on for the moment – just," he says. "But we have to plant."
The needs could not be more evident, yet the response continues to lag. Money is short; the UN appeal has so far raised less than half of the money needed – $196m of $481m. The critical agriculture sector is just 14% funded.
Most cyclone survivors rely on the only support on which they can count: each other. Within days of the cyclone, Myint's fellow monks stepped in to coordinate the delivery of donations across the delta. In Mandalay, Par Par Lay organised donations from the local theatrical scene and drove them in a procession led by a float down to Rangoon. According to the UN, in the first six weeks of the response alone the Burmese people raised a staggering $11m worth of aid. "In the weeks afterwards, everyone was asking why there hadn't been more secondary deaths," says one aid worker in Rangoon. "The answer is simple: the local response was – and continues to be – incredible."
What happens next? The outlook is grim. There are widespread fears that the failure of the rice harvest will drive up prices of Burma's staple food, and the global credit crunch is biting hard. Black market costs of essentials such as fuel have gone up. Aung San Suu Kyi's house arrest shows no sign of ending. The initial protests may have been triggered by such hardships, but the chances of this happening again are remote. Anger at the inadequacy of the government response to Nargis has deepened the hatred of the junta, but it has not lessened the fear.
"We are still angry," says Myint. "But we bury it here" - and he thumps his heart. Myint says the monks are divided: some want more protests, others do not. There has been talk of an armed uprising and a desire for guns, but few see this as a real possibility. "The monks will never take up arms," says Myint. "Ordinary people, yes. But not the monks."
A year on, would Myint protest again? It takes him a long time to answer this question as he leans against the warm stones of the ancient temple and looks out across the Bagan plain. In the peaceful light of the late afternoon sun, it is hard to remember the awful realities away from this serene temple plain: the hunger that clutches at Aung and many thousands like her, the suffering of the hundreds still held in Insein and the sheer courage of Par Par Lay, who survived years of hard labour and still will not be silenced.
"I would," he says finally, "but we have no power, only our prayers and our mouths. The government has guns. We must wait and hope. One day, our time will come."
[Names have been changed for this article.]
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