Everything Is Broken (14 page)

The Defense Services Museum was a window to how the regime views itself and its place in Burmese history. While the rest of the world sees a military run amok, the
Tatmadaw
believes it has repeatedly rescued the country from the brink of disaster. During my museum visit, I put together a simplified synopsis of the
Tatmadaw
’s take on history:

This perspective is further heightened by the fact that many soldiers have sacrificed their lives fighting for the
Tatmadaw
, and most of today’s leaders, including Than Shwe, had comrades who were killed in action. One of the special envoys of the United Nations, Razali Ismail, who met Than Shwe a number of times, was once quoted in the
New York Times
as saying of the senior general, “He believes he’s a true nationalist. The first time I met him he said: ‘People think we are doing this for power. No, this is for the sake of the nation. I have fought for the country. I have scars on my body’—he pointed to himself—‘bullet wounds.’ ”

On anniversaries of significant dates, the state media publishes poems and overwrought articles in praise of its heroes in green. The following is a sample from one Independence Day edition of the
New Light of Myanmar
:

On the ground floor of the Defense Services Museum, I wandered into the large room devoted to the
Tatmadaw
armory. As I walked among land mines and grenades laid out in tidy rows, the soldier who was manning the exhibit walked slowly and deliberately behind me, seeming to mirror my footsteps with his heavy, boot-clad feet. Determined not to be intimidated, I pushed on past a row of rocket launchers until I came to a large tank and found that I had reached a dead end. When I stopped walking, the sound of the soldier’s boots came to an ominous standstill. I studied the rocket launchers for a moment or two, and then, from somewhere in the darkness behind me, I heard a soft click. I spun around to find that the soldier had switched on the lights in a glass display box. The lights illuminated a collection of miniature model tanks, each one just about the right size for a Ken or Barbie doll. The soldier beamed at me, a proud and friendly smile, and I pretended to admire the tiny tanks for a polite while before leaving. When I left the room, I heard the same clicking noise as he turned the lights out on the display.

 

 

 

TALES OF FEARSOME
warrior kings are the stuff of popular legend in Burma. Books, poetry, and theatrical performances tell of the patriotism and martial achievements of the noble men who ruled the country until the late nineteenth century. Though the kings are often lauded for their valor and wisdom, they exercised absolute control over their subjects. They were considered to be the rightful owners of everything contained within the kingdom, from the fish swimming in the waters to all the human beings and other animals walking upon the land. Known as Lords of Life and Death, it was forbidden for commoners even to look upon these deified rulers.

The omnipotence of the Burmese kings came to an abrupt end in 1885, when the British completed their colonial conquest of Burma by taking over the capital of Mandalay and dismantling a tradition of royal rule that had been in place for almost a thousand years. Within just one day of the British takeover, King Thibaw and his family had been bundled into two bullock carts and driven to the port, where they were put aboard a ship and exiled to India. It was an ignominious end for Burma’s proud royal dynasties. In British-ruled India, the government placed Thibaw under effective house arrest in the town of Ratnagiri, where he lived out the rest of his years on a meager British allowance. When Thibaw died in 1916, his family did not have enough money to bury him. Unlike previous kings, who had extensive funeral rites appropriate for sending off a semi-divine being, the last king of Burma was buried in a casket in the yard of his house, and his remains were later moved by the local authorities to a nondescript setting in the nearby forest.

The institution of monarchy is now in the distant past, but the memory of it lives on. It is commonly thought that Than Shwe believes himself to be the reincarnation of a Burmese monarch. Though there is no general consensus on which king has manifested himself in the portly form of the senior general, some say Than Shwe thinks he is the brave king Kyansittha from the eleventh century. Others say he claims to be Bodawpaya, the eighteenth-century monarch who had 53 wives and 120 children, and who ruled over Burma at the peak of its strength; during his reign, the Burmese army conquered the territory of Arakan, bringing on the country’s first clashes with British colonial forces in India. It is said that visitors to Than Shwe’s home must crawl on the floor, kneeling before him like humble subjects, and that his family members speak to one another in the royal dialect once reserved exclusively for the king and his court.

Throughout their rule, Than Shwe and other members of the junta have appropriated the behavior of monarchs. In 1994, just a few years after he had taken over the reins, and with the divisive memory of the bloodshed of 1988 still fresh in everyone’s minds, the generals arranged for a sacred tooth relic of the Buddha to be brought to Burma from China for a six-week tour of the country. When the tooth relic arrived at Rangoon airport, an elephant-drawn carriage transported it through the city. More than five thousand people, including actors dressed as celestial beings, were involved in the parade, and many thousands more lined the streets to watch. The generals were assuming the religious duties of past kings—some of whom had tried to bring tooth relics to Burma. It was a popular move; in Mandalay alone, over 775,000 people went to pay homage to the relic.

The generals and their wives have taken on plenty of other regal airs and graces. They regularly hoist the
hti
, the crownlike finial, on significant pagodas, including the Shwedagon. They have also claimed ownership of all white elephants found within Burma. White elephants discovered in the wild were traditionally brought to the palace and offered to the king. The discovery of a white elephant was considered a good omen that only occurred during the time of a devout and just ruler. During the reign of Than Shwe, at least three white elephants have emerged from the jungles of Burma to be dressed in golden capes and embroidered harnesses, so that they can play their role as sacred beasts in choreographed episodes of mock-royal theater.

I once met King Thibaw’s eldest grandson, who was living a relatively humble existence in a colonial cottage in the former British hill station of Maymyo. He told me how the monarchy and memories of it still had a hold on the Burmese psyche. The previous regime, under General Ne Win, had occasionally made use of him, he said, rolling him out as a sort of royal talisman. In the villages, women knelt down and drew their waist-length hair over their heads to form a carpet for the rightful heir to the Burmese throne to walk upon. For a society robbed of its traditional ruling hierarchy, it is potent symbolism to evoke the time of kings.

In Naypyidaw, three gigantic statues of legendary monarchs stand guard over the new capital. The three kings were chosen for a reason: Each one was the founder of a new dynasty, and each was credited with being an able unifier of Burma’s divided territories. King Anawrahta founded the first Burmese kingdom, with Pagan as its citadel in the eleventh century. King Bayintnaung started the second Burmese Empire in the sixteenth century and expanded the realm of his territory to such an extent that his reign was described by one historian as “the greatest explosion of human energy ever seen in Burma.” King Alaungpaya, who ruled during the eighteenth century and launched the final Konbaung dynasty, was believed to have supernatural powers. He could fling his sword across great distances to sever a man’s head. Vultures perched on the homes of his enemies, while around his own palace there fluttered a rainbow array of butterflies and dazzling birds of paradise.

Though the statues are located in an area that is off-limits to the public, they are often seen in photographs and footage shown by state media. They tower like giants over the Naypyidaw parade ground, each carrying a colossal dagger, sword, or spear. Some twenty thousand troops marched in unison beneath the stony gaze of this majestic triumvirate when Armed Forces Day, the annual holiday that commemorates the formation of the
Tatmadaw
, was held in Naypyidaw for the first time in 2006. In his speech on that day, Than Shwe hinted at the idea of a military dynasty when he said, “Our
Tatmadaw
should be a worthy heir to the traditions of the capable
Tatmadaws
established by noble kings Anawrahta, Bayintnaung, and Alaungpaya.”

If Than Shwe is enacting his karmic role as king or consciously employing regal attributes to justify his rule, then the founding of a new capital is in keeping with Burma’s historical trajectory. Burmese kings often moved their citadels to new locations, and the landscape is littered with abandoned capitals. Seen in this context, it is not so difficult to understand why Than Shwe might have wanted to leave Rangoon. The city was the only capital of Burma that was not founded by a Burmese ruler. Since the British seized Rangoon during the second Anglo-Burmese War in 1852 and later made it the capital of British Burma, it has been a reminder of defeat. It is a city built by invaders, men who were of a different ethnic and religious background. Even today, the legacy of British architecture and engineers is still visible; before the move to Naypyidaw, most government offices were housed in once grand Victorian-style buildings, with colonnades and cupola roofs constructed in the image of London.

In his new capital, Than Shwe likes to receive visitors in front of a mural of Pagan, the center of the first Burmese Empire. Bordered with gold and mother-of-pearl inlay, the floor-to-ceiling mural depicts Pagan’s pagodas glittering golden and resplendent in a forested prelapsarian landscape. This idyllic vista forms a backdrop to the senior general as he holds court on his thronelike chair and discusses affairs of state with the very few guests who are welcome at his citadel.

When I first visited Pagan some fifteen years ago, I was moved by the emotive allure of these crumbling ruins. I filled my diary with embarrassingly elaborate descriptions about the nearly three thousand monuments built between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. I composed lengthy essays on the black-green moss that had spread like bruises across the aged bricks, the way the pagodas cast rose-red shadows in the late afternoon light, and the particular silence that can be found in the weed-strewn courtyards of Pagan’s empty monasteries.

But Pagan as I saw it then no longer exists. In the early 1990s, Than Shwe’s government began an extensive “beautification” program to restore the ruins. I returned to Pagan in 2006, when the restoration was nearly complete. Tumbledown mounds had been transformed into brand-new temples built in a simulation of the Pagan style. Almost every pagoda had been topped off with a new pinnacle. Rust-orange pagodas built of brick boasted pale cement cones that sat on top of the old monuments as incongruously as dollops of fresh cream. The broken dome of the Dhammayazika, formerly a neglected and overgrown pagoda, had been totally re-created, gilded and crowned with a new
hti
. The whispering cornfields that once surrounded it had become manicured parkland with paved walkways and pink bougainvillea.

Leaving aesthetic incongruities aside, archaeologists and art historians around the world have bemoaned the lack of historical authenticity. As there are no surviving plans for Pagan’s buildings, the shape and decoration of the upper parts of the monuments are based on pure speculation. “Sadly, it has to be said that the recent work done in Pagan has not been very accurate,” a Burmese archaeologist working at Pagan told me. “In many cases, we cannot call it restoration or renovation. We have to call it what it is: rebuilding.”

The archaeologist explained to me how the ruins were rebuilt: “We simply look at the base mound. Is it round, square, or pentagonal? Based on this information, we construct one of three models.” With a total of 2,834 recorded monuments, the sheer variety of buildings at Pagan was once staggering. As the ruins are remodeled in similar formats, this diversity has been turned into uniformity. These heavy-handed restoration efforts have effectively disqualified Pagan as a potential UNESCO World Heritage site, and the Burmese historian Than Tun succinctly dubbed the methods used as “blitzkrieg archaeology.”

Efforts to resurrect the glory of the past did not stop there. The regime has also reconstructed the palaces of the country’s long-dead kings. Mandalay palace, the seat of the last Burmese monarch that was destroyed during bombing raids in World War II, has been rebuilt. As have palaces for each of the three kings whose statues loom above Naypyidaw. The regime claims that King Anawrahta’s palace in Pagan is a simulacrum constructed in accordance with archaeological findings, but the archaeologist I spoke with there said that the immense and gaudy structure was a figment of historical imagination—the minister of culture simply chose the biggest and most grandiose design from a selection shown to him by architects.