Everything Is Broken (17 page)

The flow of information coming out of Burma was stopped abruptly as the authorities shut down the Internet and blocked phone lines and cell phone signals. With few new images or timely reports emerging from Burma, the events of September dropped from international headlines. For most of the outside world, the story ended there. The faceoff between the military and the monastic order had resulted in the forces of evil vanquishing the forces of good. The men with guns did not hear, or did not care to hear, the plea for peace within the
Metta Sutta
that had been chanted on the city’s streets.

 

 

 

WELCOME TO MY
wonderful country, where nothing has just happened,” said my friend Ko Ye when I arrived in Rangoon a few days after the crackdown began. Ko Ye was often my first point of contact on landing in Burma. As a publisher, he was in daily contact with local journalists and writers. Though he collected most of his information by word of mouth, he always seemed to be ahead of the wire services when it came to news of what was, or was not, happening inside the country. I rang him shortly after checking into a hotel and he immediately chastised me for being late.

I certainly hadn’t planned to arrive during a crackdown. When I applied for a visa to Burma, the monks were still out in full force, and I had half imagined I might be swept away on the cusp of a revolution. Instead, by the time I arrived, the regime had regained control. As the junta’s foreign minister told the United Nations General Assembly at the time: “Normalcy has now returned to Myanmar [Burma].”

Rangoon did look astonishingly normal after the grim scenes of the previous week. There were hardly any soldiers in the streets, and the downtown area was lively with traffic and streetside commerce. In the tea shops, groups of men sat on low wooden stools with their
longyi
tucked around their knees, smoking cheroots and chatting. Market stalls on the pavements sold the usual array of goods: pirated DVDs of Korean soap operas and
Mr. Bean
episodes; cheap Chinese sandals; charcoal-baked poppy seed cakes wrapped in newspaper. Even away from the hustle and bustle of the city center, life seemed to be going on as normal. At dusk on the day I arrived, I watched local residents stroll along the forested banks of Kandawgyi Lake as a languid sunset transformed the still waters into a molten pool of gold and pink.

The appearance of normality was, of course, deceptive. Thousands of people were still being held in the makeshift detention centers, and the authorities were hunting down not just protest organizers and ringleaders, but also anyone who had been seen taking photographs or filming during the demonstrations. They were reportedly trawling through footage used by international news organizations alongside that filmed by their own intelligence personnel in order to identify culpable individuals. Stills from the footage were circulated around township offices to be cross-checked against local registration lists and ID photographs and matched up with names and addresses. Detainees were also being interrogated to establish links between protesters. Telephone numbers from confiscated cell phones were traced. Seized digital cameras were searched for incriminating images. In their efforts to chase up all these leads, the authorities were ransacking offices and scouring private homes. It was as if they were cleaning up a massive crime scene by attempting to erase any evidence and eliminate all possible witnesses.

It took me a while to notice that there was one very significant difference in the city; I didn’t notice it at first because it was an absence. Buddhist monks are usually a common sight throughout Burma. At dawn, they walk through the streets in single file to collect alms. During the day they can be seen moving between the city’s many monastic compounds. But by the end of September that year, there were hardly any monks on the streets of Rangoon. The few I did see were mostly elderly monks walking alone or grubby boy novices out collecting spare change. While many monks were locked away in the detention camps, it was thought that many others were hiding in safe houses or had fled to the Thailand-Burma border to seek asylum or shelter amid the refugee camps there. The rest had probably gone home; during the raids, monks were forcibly disrobed and told to return to their home villages—a tactic aimed at dispersing the monastic community and preventing it from reassembling in large numbers.

Burmese journalists in Rangoon were busy trying to verify the whereabouts of the monks. They had to do it stealthily, talking to trusted contacts who lived near monasteries and might be able to provide snippets of information. When I unfolded a map of Rangoon in front of Nya Na, a journalist who worked in the city secretly sending information to international media outside Burma, began circling monasteries with a red pen. He pointed out Ngwe Kya Yan monastery in the north of the city and told me it had been emptied of monks after a nighttime raid by the army. The following day local residents found the monastery littered with broken glass and spent bullet casings. They saw blood pooled on the floor and splattered across the walls. As many as one hundred monks had been arrested; the rest were thought to have fled. Patiently, Nya Na worked his way across my map, scrawling heavy red rings around each monastery that had been raided and was now devoid of monks.

It was immensely disturbing, Nya Na said, to be charting the disappearance of monks. The monastery in his own neighborhood had been emptied and was now home to just a handful of young novices who were too nervous to speak to anyone in the community. Every day of their lives, for as long as Nya Na and his parents could remember, the members of their household had woken at dawn to place food into alms bowls carried by passing monks. Without this fundamental daily ritual, the shape and meaning of their days were lost, and they worried for the monks. How would they survive without donations, Nya Na’s family wondered:
If we are not feeding them, how are they getting food?

It was, at that point in time, impossible to know anything for sure about the fate of the monks and other protesters who had been detained. Wa Wa Myint, my doctor friend, had been trying to find out about injured protesters through her medical network, but the authorities were going to considerable lengths to cover their tracks. She learned that hospitals and private clinics were prohibited from admitting any injured people during the crackdown. Soldiers had picked up the wounded off the streets and taken them to the government-run Rangoon General Hospital. There, additional soldiers had been placed at the gates and at the entrance to the trauma wards. The few doctors and nurses on duty in the guarded wards had been strictly vetted and were afraid to leak any information in case the authorities found them out. Wa Wa Myint said that many wounded people were treating themselves at home and believed that those with serious injuries were dying because they could not seek medical assistance for fear of arrest.

Wherever I went in Rangoon, I took to trying to spot the security forces who were hidden around the city, ready for instant mobilization. As I picked my way past fruit sellers who sat behind small mountains of lime, papaya, and watermelon on one of the crowded streets near the Sule Pagoda, I glimpsed a platoon of alert soldiers tucked away inside a disused shop-house. When I peered through the wire mesh that covers the windows of city hall, I could just make out a long row of olive-green canvas bags, red scarves, and bamboo truncheons—evidence that troops were stationed inside. I also saw truckloads of riot police sequestered in a derelict British railway building and in the leafy compound of an abandoned government ministry.

The nightly curfew was in place from 10:00 P.M. to 4:00 A.M., and the downtown streets, usually laid out each evening with pavement tea shops and beer stalls, began to empty around 9:00 P.M. as people hurried home.

Confined to my hotel room, I made a habit of turning off the lights and sitting by the window. At first there was nothing to see, and I sat and listened to the amplified sounds of Rangoon under curfew. When bats swooped out from the belfry of an old church tower next to my hotel, I could hear the leaves rustling as they settled into the branches of a nearby banyan tree. Rats scuttled around a pile of garbage on the ground, six stories below. A bottle was knocked over and its bell-like ring echoed along the deserted street. Then, I heard a deep rumbling noise that I couldn’t identify. Suddenly, an army truck appeared out of the darkness. The truck was followed by two police vans that were headed downtown. As they passed beneath my hotel window, the sound of their engines was deafeningly loud in the otherwise silent city.

Later, after I had fallen asleep, I was woken by the noise of the truck and vans driving back in the opposite direction and realized that they must have been returning from a nighttime raid in the downtown area. After that I took to waiting for them, and each night I watched the sinister cavalcades drive back and forth beneath my hotel window. Sometimes, just before they passed, the city’s stray dogs would become jittery and start to howl at one another like wolves.

In the mornings, I was always somewhat astonished to see that the scenes of everyday normality were back in place.

When news emerged that some of the detainees were being released, a friend told me about Soe Thiha, a twenty-two-year-old man he knew who had spent a week in the detention center set up at the Government Technical Institute. Soe Thiha had not participated in the protests and had only followed along out of curiosity, but the soldiers had arrested him anyway. He was held in a large room with around one hundred men and women. They were given no food or water for the first twenty-four hours and were kept in total darkness. As the detainees were not allowed access to toilet facilities, and the roof was leaking due to the rains, Soe Thiha had to sleep on a filthy and wet cement floor. Some of his fellow inmates had bad wounds from being beaten during the crackdown or interrogations and, on the third day, he woke up to discover that three people had died in the night and that their corpses were still lying in the room.

To secure his release, Soe Thiha’s parents signed a form promising that he would not take part in any political activities. He arrived home in a pitiful state. His back was covered with oozing welts from the regular beatings he received during his interrogations. He had also become afraid of the dark and insisted on sleeping with the lights on in his bedroom. Soe Thiha’s parents were enraged by what had been done to their son, and I was told they might be willing to speak to me about it.

We went to their home one afternoon and were greeted at the door by Soe Thiha’s mother. She offered me a seat on a faux leather settee in the front room and went to the kitchen to prepare coffee. It was a typical Rangoon apartment, low-ceilinged and cluttered with family artifacts—graduation and wedding photographs, school sporting trophies, and examination certificates. Coffee was served on a flowery melamine tray, and Soe Thiha’s mother and father sat down opposite me. We exchanged a few pleasantries, and then his mother disappeared back into the kitchen. A few moments later, her husband got up and excused himself.

We waited awkwardly for them to return, but they never did. After a while, a voice called out to us from the kitchen, “Sit! Sit! Stay, and enjoy your coffee.” We sat and tried to enjoy our coffee, but it eventually became clear that they were not prepared to risk speaking with me, and that it was time for us to leave.

Beneath the veneer of normality, the city was seething with untold stories. Like those indefinable movements you catch out of the corner of your eye, they seemed to tremble and sputter just beyond reach. While sitting in a taxi driving near the eastern gate of the Shwedagon Pagoda, a neighborhood that had been a rallying spot during the demonstrations, I caught sight of an army truck parked in the gateway of a decrepit red-brick apartment block. I glanced up at the building and saw a soldier standing at the third-floor entrance to one of the apartments. There was a woman standing beside him, and the door to the apartment was open. They were both watching whatever was taking place inside. With a sudden jerky movement, the woman collapsed at the soldier’s feet. From a distance, I couldn’t tell whether she was fainting or falling on her knees to plead with him. Then the taxi I was in rounded a corner and the scene disappeared from view.

 

 

 

MONKS IN MANDALAY
were said to be holding out against the soldiers. Whenever soldiers approached the monasteries there, the temple bells were rung and monks would mass together to form a barricade and prevent them from entering. At one monastery, where soldiers made placatory offerings of food to the monks, the supplies had been rejected and thrown back over the monastery walls. Sacks of rice and dry noodles had piled up on the street outside the compound.

There was good reason to believe that the monks of Mandalay might be able to stave off the men with guns. The city is home to some forty thousand monks. Mandalay’s monasteries are vast complexes, with the biggest establishments, such as Ma Soe Yein, housing up to eight thousand. The city was also the site of the last major overturning of the alms bowl in 1990. Then, when monks had congregated on August 8 to remember the 1988 uprising, soldiers had attacked the crowd, wounding some monks and provoking them to instate a religious boycott against the military. During the subsequent crackdown scores of monks were arrested, and orders were issued to dissolve all independent Buddhist organizations and outline the correct behavior for monks. Since then, individual members of the regime had made frequent public displays of piety to demonstrate that they were in fact decent and respectful Buddhists. The result was an unspoken truce between the generals and the
Sangha
that would remain in place as long as the religious community stayed within the bounds of the new orders and did not become involved with nonreligious matters.

It is not the traditional role of monks to take on political issues, but throughout Burma’s history they have intervened on behalf of the population. When monks marched in Pakokku in September 2007, they pledged an oath in poetic form that explains their reasons. The poem, written in Pali, expresses solidarity for the laypeople from whom monks receive the support they need to survive, and it states that it is their duty to repay this kindness by cautioning those who have taken excessive actions. It ends with the following declaration: