The use of names in Burma has been politically contentious over the years. In 1989 the governing junta changed the country’s name to Myanmar, a move opposed by democracy advocates who stuck with Burma. Today, foreign governments are divided over which name to use – Britain and the United States still officially refer to Burma, but many countries have shifted to the use of Myanmar.

As ‘Burma’ and ‘Rangoon’ may be more familiar to readers outside the country than ‘Myanmar’ and ‘Yangon’, I have mostly used the old colonial names, although not entirely consistently.

Map of Burma

The Saffron Revolution

S
tanding up, with the phone to my ear, I was stealing sideways glances at my reflection in the window, trying to work out how pregnant I really looked. Outside, tropical darkness had fallen on another Bangkok day, and the lights inside meant the floor-to-ceiling windows reflected back the scene in our living room. My nearly two-year-old daughter, bathed and warm-skinned, was in her pyjamas, engrossed in a self-invented game. I was on the phone, pacing, talking to editors in Singapore and London, trying to sort out a ‘string’ to go to Burma. I had a visa, I even had an air ticket, but I needed to feel that someone was actually
sending
me, that the story was big and important enough to justify missing my daughter’s birthday the following day and a hospital appointment to check the progress of my pregnancy, now in its sixth month.

Of course, I questioned whether it was a good idea at all, especially when the Reuters editor in Singapore said I couldn’t report for them because I was pregnant and uninsured. But these are peaceful demonstrations, I thought, I’ll be fine. I kept dialling the numbers.
The Times
were sending their staff correspondent, he had just picked up his visa; the
Guardian
, no, but the
Independent
, yes, and Sky News too. I was going. The next morning, I took my daughter to her nursery with a supermarket-bought chocolate cake and two birthday candles, gave her a squeeze and jumped in a cab to the airport.

It was September 2007, nearing the end of the monsoon season. Burma, geographically right next door to Thailand but in every other sense a world away, was locked under military rule. The Asian economic miracle had swept over its skies leaving it untouched by late twentieth-century development. In August, the ruling
junta, the intimidatingly named State Peace and Development Council, had removed subsidies on energy and fuel, causing a spike in food and transport costs and instant hardship for Burmese people already living on the margins of survival. Overnight, workers found they could not afford the bus fare into town; families did not have enough to buy rice and cooking oil. The first anti-government protests in a decade broke out in towns and cities across the country and were dealt with by the military with its usual method of detentions and beatings. Defiant, the people marched on, and by early September the country’s Buddhist monks had joined them. Their numbers swelled, until rivers of cinnamon-robed monks flowed each day through the cities of Rangoon, Mandalay, Moulmein and Pakokku. They marched in bare feet or in their tattered black-velvet flip-flops. In nearly half a century of military rule there had been uprisings before, all put down with force. But the participation of the monks, revered and untouchable in Burmese society, created a challenging new predicament for the generals. They couldn’t shoot, surely? Could Burma be on the brink of change?

On Thursday 27 September, when the monks had been marching for two weeks, I landed at Rangoon’s international terminal and turned my watch back half an hour to Burma’s idiosyncratic time zone. There were other journalists on the plane, I was sure of that, their noses in their Lonely Planet guidebooks, their cameras a little too highly specced to belong to a backpacker. Foreign reporters were banned from Burma, and we had filled out our landing cards with what seemed to be likely occupations – teacher, student, aid worker. We stood in the immigration queue, affecting nonchalance, tilting our heads up as if fascinated by the ceiling, before surreptitiously casting looks left and right. We shuffled wordlessly up the passport queue. My turn came and I stepped up to the counter to meet my first Burmese government official, a young, apple-cheeked female immigration officer, her hair
pulled back in a bun fixed with a pink net. Most of the passport staff were women, in a uniform of short-sleeved white shirts with epaulettes, black A-line skirts, black socks that reached halfway up the calf and black court shoes with a sensible, two-inch heel. I was already of the firm belief that this woman was a bad person, a lackey of an evil regime. But then I couldn’t help but be disarmed by her sweet manner and what seemed to be unworldly curiosity, rather than suspicious scrutiny, in her examination of my passport. It was the first hint that things would not be as I expected in Burma; the same contradiction between perception and reality would strike many times during the years I would spend there.

Out into the heat of the taxi scrum, I took a deep breath of damp Rangoon air, its scent a fusion of diesel and cardamom. I negotiated a fare and we sped past groaning buses, vegetable carts, karaoke bars and noodle stalls to the first of four hotels I would stay in that week. My driver was quiet, and I was too paranoid to ask questions. I had read about the government’s network of informants and my guard was up. Around me life seemed normal, but I was expectant, excited by what I was going to find, already taking mental notes for the story I would file at the end of the day. I checked in, deposited my bag in my room and made a phone call to a Canadian friend, the head of an international aid agency in Rangoon. Up to now, the marchers had gathered around the golden Shwedagon pagoda, the focus of protests since the days of British rule. But word had it that today protesters were heading downtown to Sule, the city’s smaller temple, another traditional rallying point for students and monks.

I walked out of the air-conditioned lobby and the uniformed doorman clapped to call a taxi from the rank. It was another typical Rangoon cab, a battered Toyota saloon from the early 1980s with a bouncing back seat of broken springs and doors stripped down to the metal chassis. I asked to go downtown. The driver, whose seat
had been replaced by a metal-framed deck chair upholstered with plastic straps and bolted down to the original moorings, was relaxed and chatty in his broken English. But as we turned the corner on to Bogyoke Aung San Street, in front of the famous Scott Market, we felt the atmosphere change with a thump. People were running towards us, fear and panic written on their faces. Drivers were screeching their cars round and speeding back on the wrong side of the street. My driver started to turn too, and, making an instinctive decision not to retreat, I thrust a crumpled banknote into his hand and jumped out into the confusion of the street.

Stallholders were hurriedly bundling away their vegetables, DVDs and rails of children’s clothes. Metal shutters clattered down on shop fronts. Two boys, barefooted postcard-sellers aged no more than nine or ten, ran up to me, still clutching their images of tourist scenes. ‘Madam, it is dangerous for you!’ My heart was drumming, I could taste the danger, but I hadn’t yet worked out what it was. With no concern for their own safety, the boys began to lead me over a footbridge towards the towering Traders Hotel. We scurried down the steps and along the broken pavement. Rounding the corner to Rangoon’s main avenue, with the gleaming Sule at the far end, we met a cloud of smoke. People were running towards us, and I could see the khaki uniforms of soldiers further down the street. A group of panicked youths sped past carrying a man in a bloodstained shirt, his face knotted in pain. They each held one of his limbs, and his wounded body bounced around as they scrambled towards the junction. The crackle of gunfire came then, the sound unmistakable. The boys ran off and I squeezed myself through the metal barricades that had been hastily erected around Traders, ignoring the pleas of the security guard who tried to stop me getting to the hotel door.

The manager, in a fitted white blouse and black pencil skirt, was in the doorway keeping guard, her eyes narrow, her hair scraped back in an immaculate chignon.

‘Are you a guest?’ she asked, her voice clipped and hostile.

‘Yes, well no, but look, I’m pregnant, please, I need to come in.’

‘Guests only,’ she insisted.

‘Please,’ I begged.

‘Well, you can come through but we will escort you out of the back door.’

‘That doesn’t help me,’ I said.

‘Guests only.’

‘Well, can I book a room?’

‘It’s 150 dollars plus tax.’ She looked triumphant.

‘Fine,’ I said.

At the front desk I asked for a room overlooking the street, not caring now if they suspected me to be a journalist. ‘Any luggage?’ said the receptionist. ‘No.’ In silence, the concierge took me up in the lift. He opened the door to my eighth-floor room and showed me the air conditioner, the minibar and the complimentary fruit basket. The window stretched across the width of the room. I had a grandstand view of the terror below.

Protesters were fleeing en masse from the pagoda and soldiers followed them, advancing in strict formation. From eight floors up, I could hear the rhythmic
stamping of their boots on the hot tarmac. The demonstrators that day were not monks, but mostly young men in T-shirts and sarong-style Burmese
longyis
. I heard later that the junta had launched pre-dawn raids on Buddhist monasteries, leaving bloodstains on the floors after they beat up and dragged away hundreds of monks. In the monks’ absence, the soldiers were free to start shooting. The young men on the streets looked terrified, but also filled with rage. They first ran from the advancing army, then stopped, hesitant. Some turned back towards the soldiers as if considering a final charge, then, defeated, picked up rocks and threw them frustratedly, pointlessly, at a traffic police shelter on the corner.

I left my room to go to a north-facing window at the end of the corridor. There were three of us there: with me were a bellboy who had abandoned his post, and a middle-aged Western man who I assumed to be another journalist. We watched an unmarked van crawl along in front of the hotel. A loudhailer mounted on top blared instructions. ‘
Clear the area or we will take extreme action!
’ His eyes still fixed on the street, the bellboy became our translator. The protesters reached an intersection where they grouped together and began chanting, ‘
Give us freedom! Give us freedom!
’ A strange, primal roar went up – a last show of defiance. Anxious to keep our cover, the other reporter and I made no attempt at introductions. From the window we could see that the protesters were trying to regroup at the railway station. More people were arriving, piling out of minibuses and trucks. Their unity made them stronger, but by then they knew that they were stepping into the line of fire. By the time of the curfew that night, state media reported a death toll of nine, including a Japanese news photographer who was shot dead by soldiers near the Sule pagoda. In fact, far more were killed; opposition groups later put the toll at 138. The shooting sprees were going on all over the city, away from the lenses of the international press.

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