Everything Is Broken (27 page)

Read together, the letters tell the story of a people pushed to their limit. Parents cannot afford to send their children to school due to the unofficial bribes they have to pay for entrance fees and the inflated price of textbooks and uniforms. Patients at hospitals have to purchase overpriced medicines and sometimes even pay for the equipment necessary to treat their illnesses. People across the country are impoverished by random and illicit taxes charged by the township authorities for common amenities such as street lighting, which, as one letter writer made sure to point out, often don’t even work anyway.

People who can’t afford the exemption fees are forced by their township or neighborhood authorities to work on various projects. Townspeople in the Irrawaddy division had to build a new road, working long days to break rocks and lay tarmac. Not only did they have to contribute their time and labor free of charge, abandoning their usual places of work, they also had to pay for their own transport to and from the construction site and supply their own food for the day.

In Kachin State, in the north of Burma, forty-five farmers were seconded to a conservation forest to plant teak trees for the local authorities. Each farmer had to complete two acres—it cost them seven days’ hard labor during the harvesting season.

One teacher wrote about the final indignation to all this forced labor. When senior military personnel came to open a new road or bridge or school, people were herded into the local sports stadium at around 5:00 A.M. to welcome them. But the military VIPs always arrived late, sometimes not until 3:00 P.M., and the townspeople, who had already wasted their day waiting for people they didn’t want to see, all had to contribute to the cost of hosting the event.

The letters detail a wide variety of injustices, from forced labor and the confiscation of land to travel prohibitions and lack of political freedom, but the main concern voiced in the majority of the letters is about the rising cost of living. According to this incomplete poll, the biggest fear in Burma is,
How am I going to feed my family?
It was in August of the same year of the Open Heart Letter Campaign that the 88 Generation leaders organized the demonstrations against the fuel price hikes. Their attempts to point out that the government’s policy was having a direct and devastating effect on people’s ability to put food on the table landed most of them back in prison.

There is a silence that has settled over Burma; people can talk quietly about their everyday concerns, but as soon as they try to bring their complaints into the public sphere, they draw the ire of the regime. Occasionally, though, the silence becomes too much for an individual and he or she is driven to making a lone stand. These solitary protests do not happen often and, when they do, they are fleeting affairs, destined to be hurriedly swept off the street by police or plainclothes
Swan Ah Shin
thugs.

In July 2006, a former army sergeant stood in front of Rangoon city hall and called for an increase in pensions for war veterans.

In April 2007, an HIV-positive man handed out leaflets at a busy intersection in Rangoon, asking the government to offer treatment to people living with HIV.

A month later, a sixty-two-year-old woman walked up to city hall and demanded the release of Aung San Suu Kyi.

Each of these protesters knew they would be arrested and sent to prison, and yet they still decided to speak out. Ohn Than, the activist who went to the United States Embassy in Rangoon with a placard protesting the rise in fuel prices in August 2007, was later sentenced to life imprisonment under Section 124 (a) of the Penal Code. Section 124 (a) is the regime’s handy catch-all law that states:

To his credit, sixty-one-year-old Ohn Than reportedly went down fighting by announcing in the courtroom that his sentencing was illegal. His logic was based on the fact that he was being incorrectly charged. Section 124 (a) of the Penal Code punishes actions taken against a “government established by law”; the current government of Burma was
not
established by law and, as Ohn Than’s actions were therefore taken against a government that had been established illegally, he had in fact been acting in accordance with the law.

I have always been captivated by these solitary outbursts. What drives people to speak out when they know they will be arrested, and that their story will vanish with the next day’s news? Whenever I hear of a lone protester, I collect the news clippings and as much information as I can find on them. But there is never very much, as the trail of information is always quickly snuffed out by the authorities.

In 2008, two solo protesters went so far as to attempt suicide on the platform of the Shwedagon Pagoda. It was the first time in living memory that people had tried to kill themselves at Burma’s most sacred landmark. It was an act of absolute despair to end life at the spiritual heart of the nation, a focal point that so many millions look to for hope.

On the day of the full moon in mid-March 2008, Kyaw Zin Naing, a twenty-six-year-old man, stood on the platform of the Shwedagon Pagoda. Shouting words to the effect of, “Down with the military regime!” he doused his body with gasoline and set fire to himself. He was still alive when the flames had been extinguished by pagoda trustees and was taken to hospital where he was kept under armed guard while being treated for burns that covered more than 60 percent of his body. He died just over three weeks later. Though Kyaw Zin Naing had chosen a good day to make an impact—on the day of a full moon the pagoda is often crowded with worshippers—his act of self-immolation went mostly unheard-of beyond those who witnessed it. The news never made it past the censorship board in Burma and only a few brief articles appeared outside the country in the exile media.

Then, in September, around the time of the first anniversary of the monks’ protests the previous year, a lone monk stood beneath the Shwedagon Pagoda and slit his throat. The monk survived, but his story was suppressed almost instantly. Staff at Rangoon General Hospital, where the monk was taken for treatment, refused to divulge any details to local journalists. One journalist managed to get a pagoda trustee to speak off-the-record, and he was told that the monk had tried to kill himself because he had been having financial difficulties. But it was an unsatisfactory explanation given the timing of the suicide attempt and the fact that monks live for free in their monasteries and are supported by the community.

Aside from the monk’s attempted suicide, the September anniversary was marked by only a few incidents that were all of little consequence. A bomb exploded near the Sule Pagoda in downtown Rangoon. It was not a big explosion and nobody was killed. Speculation was that the regime itself had planted the bomb to distract public attention from the anniversary and provide an excuse for an increased security presence on the streets; it was just another in a sporadic line of small explosions that no one ever claimed responsibility for. One night, truckloads of riot police surrounded the Botahtaung Pagoda, a rallying point during the marches the previous year. They conducted a series of crowd-control exercises among themselves, going through choreographed sequences in which they pinned each other to the ground. There was no reason for them to be there and it must have been simply a show of force, a kind of
haka
perhaps. The rest of September went by in relative silence.

It had been the same a month earlier, in August 2008, the twenty-year anniversary of the 1988 uprising. The Burmese calendar showed that there would be an unusual astrological phenomenon in August 2008, as two new moons, or “black moons” as they are also known, would occur in a single month—one on the first day of the month and one on the last day. Astrologers pointed out that the last time this configuration was in place, over a century earlier, it had ushered in an era of catastrophic change for the country; it was 1885, and the king of Burma was forced from his throne by the British army. Fortune-tellers traded in doomsday predictions, and people spoke with nervous excitement about the calamity that awaited in August, but the anticipation was wasted, as nothing happened and the month passed without incident.

By maintaining an effective gag order on all public forums, the regime ensures that there is no space for any collective remembrance. Only the regime’s version of the truth remains to be seen and read. As a result, recent historical events—no matter how earth-shattering or all-consuming—are remembered only in private. Because people cannot compare their experiences easily or openly, past events become distorted and intensely personal. In isolation, these memories evolve into the kind of twisted secrets that can end up breaking people.

I saw this after the marches of September 2007, when people began shutting off and shifting into hibernation mode while the regime searched through the population for witnesses and reconstructed the course of events by arresting people or silencing them. During the trips I made to Burma afterward, I began to see in my friends a weariness that I hadn’t seen before, a kind of deep-seated fatigue that lay behind the jovial banter and tea shop debates. Many of them had gone out in the streets to join the protests in September. Many had taken great risks to get information and photographs out of the country. A Rangoon resident told me he had used up his last reserves of hope. “We had so much hope then,” he said. “My whole family was out on the streets, but it came to nothing, and now I wonder why we even bothered.”

Events happen in Burma, and then they are systematically
un
happened. Ko Ye, my publisher friend in Rangoon, had pointed out the depressing sequence to me when we chatted in September: Life goes on, economic conditions become untenable, the people rise up (individually or together), and the army cracks down. It is a relentless, unforgiving, and utterly exhausting cycle.

It was around the first anniversary of September 2007 that I paid a visit to the Taukkyan War Cemetery just north of Rangoon. Funded and managed by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, the cemetery contains the remains of members of the Allied forces who died during the Burma campaign of World War II. I had been before, but this particular trip was on one of those rare and glorious Rangoon afternoons that break through the dinginess of the monsoon season with the clear blue skies and crisp air of an English summer’s day, and I spent an entire afternoon walking among the graves.

The War Graves Commission held that the dead should be commemorated by name, and that no distinction should be made on account of military or civil rank, race, or creed. As a result, all 6,374 graves looked identical. They were laid in symmetrical lines across a vast manicured lawn intersected by pebbled pathways and neatly trimmed bushes. Each marker bore a plaque inscribed with the name, rank, regiment, and service number of the deceased. At the center of the gravestones stood a long, open colonnade in the form of a mausoleum that was constructed as a memorial to the 26,857 members of the commonwealth forces who died in Burma during the war but whose remains were never found and who have no known grave. It is a haunting and humbling commemoration of all the sacrifice and loss of life.

While I was at the cemetery, I made sure to seek out a grave I had discovered on a previous visit. It took me a while to locate it amid the thousands of uniform headstones, but eventually I came across the grave of J. J. Curley, corporal of the Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment, who had been killed in 1944 at the age of twenty-nine. There was nothing remarkable about the grave itself; it was like all the others, a small block with a plaque stating his name and rank. It was the inscription that I wanted to see. It was just one sentence, but its sentiment summed up the entire place and put the overwhelming number of casualties into dreadful perspective:

The line was most probably chosen by the corporal’s wife or girlfriend back in England, and I have long wondered whether she was ever able to go to Burma and see his final resting place.

As long as the generals remain in control, there will be no memorial to the martyrs of 1988 or 2007, or to the lone protester who went up in flames at the Shwedagon Pagoda. It is even unlikely that the victims of Cyclone Nargis will be honored with a memorial. To my mind, this is one of the great tragedies of life in Burma: that recent historical events—both large and small—cannot be honestly and openly acknowledged, debated, or even remembered within the country. Instead, the exact opposite takes place, and Burma’s history is swallowed up by a strictly enforced collective forgetting.

 

 

 

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY
Burmese monk Thingaza Sayadaw liked to collect and create stories that he could use to teach people various wisdoms and essential truths. Though composed and preached over a century ago, these stories are still relevant today. There is one that explores the nature of reality called “The Abbot Is Frying Eggs.” It is similar, in some ways, to the European fairy tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” In the European tale, a young boy is the only one among the crowds who dares to speak out about the fact that the emperor has no clothes on. The Burmese take on the tale, however, has a melancholy slant; the person playing the equivalent role of the brave boy, and he soon learns to stop his pesky truth-telling ways.

“The Abbot Is Frying Eggs” features a merchant who has accumulated great wealth. He and his wife have more than enough to live off of, and they have decided to devote themselves to making merit. The retired merchant builds a monastery and invites a respected abbot and a retinue of young monks to take up residence there. In order to live a worthy life in accordance with Buddhist principles, the merchant and his wife become vegetarians, vowing that they will refrain from killing all living beings.