“This is not how I like to operate,” he said. “I do not want to be sitting here giving lectures. I want to be out there. I need action!” It was a sentiment that was shared by many foreigners itching to get into the field. Organizations like Médicins Sans Frontières and Save the Children were sending out teams of local staff but, because of the government’s restrictions on the movement of foreigners, the more experienced international staff had to stay in Rangoon coordinating efforts from a distance. As one aid worker I talked to aptly put it, they had been forced into conducting an emergency operation by remote control.
Unable to get to the places where they were needed, I saw aid workers killing time around the city. When I went to meet a friend at Monsoon, one of a handful of fancy restaurants in Rangoon, the place was packed. Monsoon is an elegant luncheon spot set in a row of renovated shop-houses. Black ceiling fans swirl the cool air-conditioned air, and the menu serves up Asian favorites made palatable for the Western tongue, from
pad thai
to
nasi goreng
. At one table a group of Red Cross workers, wearing the fire-engine-red vests that identify them in the field, lingered over a lunch of many courses. At another table I recognized some UN staff clinking beer glasses. It was not exactly where I had expected to see aid workers during an emergency operation. But this, clearly, was not your average emergency.
Even before Cyclone Nargis, the UN and NGOs operated under tight constraints in Burma. In addition to curtailed movement, there were limitations on what kind of programs could be conducted, and the authorities insisted on vetting and monitoring all proposed activities. In recent years there had been clashes between the regime and various aid organizations. In 2005, the regime decided to appoint its own representatives to observe International Committee of the Red Cross meetings with Burmese prisoners. As the ICRC upholds a policy of total confidentiality during its discussions with inmates, it has therefore been prevented from monitoring Burmese prisons since the end of 2005. In the same year, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria pulled out after promising more than US$98 million for disease control; the fund stated that its ability to manage programs was compromised by the ever-tightening travel restraints on international aid workers.
When viewed in light of the country’s extreme poverty, these controversies were tragic. UN reports show that more than 30 percent of children under the age of five are malnourished, and that Burma is the only country in the world where the vitamin deficiency beriberi still kills infants. The government’s will and ability to provide social services has been severely denuded over decades of military rule, and it has the lowest government health spending worldwide, with a meager 0.3 percent of the gross domestic product reportedly allocated to public health care.
Yet, due largely to the difficulty of working with the dictatorship, Burma receives far less international assistance than other countries in the region. The United Nations Development Programme recorded that people in Burma received just under US$3 worth of aid per year per capita—a shockingly low amount, especially when compared to the $38 per person received in Cambodia and $49 in neighboring Laos.
Aid workers responding to Cyclone Nargis who were not among the few international NGOs registered with and approved by the Burmese government had to keep a low profile and cover their tracks. At a hotel business center, I listened to a Western man talking on a long-distance telephone line about how many blankets and tents he had been able to send down to “the special place.” Though he had obviously been organizing aid deliveries, he never used the words “cyclone” or “delta” and must have been concerned that the phone line was being tapped.
Back at the school, the nervous energy spinning around the yard had been ratcheted up a few more notches. Rumors were spreading that the regime’s restrictions on the movement of foreigners would soon be extended to Burmese people as well. Already there were reports of trucks being stopped and soldiers at checkpoints taking down the ID numbers of anyone going to the delta. Though they had no assurance that vehicles carrying aid would even be allowed to leave the city, the students carried on loading food and supplies onto trucks as fast as they could.
THERE WERE NO
soldiers on the streets of Rangoon; I often wondered where they had gone. With between four to five hundred thousand troops, the regime has a huge source of able-bodied men at its disposal; why were they not more visible in the city clearing roads, restoring phone lines and electrical wires, or unclogging sewage pipes?
The first soldiers I saw involved in the postcyclone mop-up were a ragtag band wandering around the smart Golden Valley neighborhood where houses set in large gardens are laid out along winding lanes. The area used to be shaded by trees, but the cyclone had stripped away the greenery and left the homes bare and exposed. The air smelled of freshly hewn wood and rotting vegetation, like a damp forest floor.
I had been in the neighborhood dropping off medicine and money for Rosalind Maung, a retired teacher of English literature who had helped me research George Orwell’s influence in Burma for my previous book. She was showing me the trees in her garden that had been uprooted or snapped by the storm (a mango tree planted by her grand-mother, two hefty tamarind trees she and her brothers had played under as children). The gang of soldiers came up to her property and began banging rhythmically on the iron gate. I looked through the grilles in the fence and saw that their uniforms were stained and tattered. One carried a rusting scythe and another gripped a wood-handled machete. Rosalind reluctantly walked over to the gate to speak with them. It transpired that they were mercenaries of a sort, going door-to-door offering their services for hire to chop logs and dispose of trees that had been felled by the cyclone. Rosalind declined the offer. As soon as the soldiers walked on and began rattling her neighbor’s gate, she went into her house and brought out a padlock that she used to lock her gate from the inside. You can never be too sure, she explained, when Burmese soldiers are wandering around the city carrying weapons and offering help.
According to the state media, soldiers and policemen were being deployed throughout Rangoon and the delta to clear up the storm damage. But only very occasionally was there any evidence of these activities and, even then, they were never very industrious or effective. I saw a team of policemen tasked with cleaning up a park who were doing little more than leaning against piles of logs, smoking and joking. Four of the policemen were asleep on the ground, their bodies limp beneath the diminished shade offered by one of the few trees still standing. I wondered why they seemed so unconcerned about being reprimanded for their inaction, but then I realized that they had no tools. The team of twenty or so men had only one ax to chop the fallen logs and branches of an entire park.
Not long after that I saw a truck filled with soldiers driving down Bogyoke Aung San Road, one of the main streets in downtown Rangoon. The street is where the city’s most famous market for dry goods is located. Built during British times, the market has a high, gracefully arched roof, and it is still encircled by cobblestone side streets. The goods on sale are considered high-end commodities; stalls sell jade, jewelry, fabrics, imported cosmetics, and velvet slippers. Across the street from the market there is a row of colonial shop-houses that must once have been a prestigious address in the city, but years of neglect have taken their toll. Mold has stained the stucco façades and fluted Corinthian columns, and the fretwork balconies of the upper stories are knotted with weeds. Farther along the street are two of the city’s most modern structures, Traders Hotel and Sakura Tower. With twenty-plus floors, these buildings are skyscrapers by Burmese standards, and they tower above everything else in downtown Rangoon.
The soldiers were packed onto an unroofed truck and looked at their surroundings as if they were seeing them for the first time. They had probably been transported from some distant provincial outpost to do manual labor, and this may well have been their first trip to the historic city that was once the capital of Burma. They seemed excited to be in the city, about to undertake a heroic task in the wake of disaster, and many of them hung over the sides of the truck waving at pedestrians. No one waved back. Indeed, the response was so stony it was as if there had been some prearranged agreement for all passersby to ignore the soldiers. As I watched the enthusiastic young men drive by, I felt strangely sorry for them.
In the immediate aftermath of the cyclone, it was not soldiers who people had seen in the streets. Instead, they saw their neighbors and monks from nearby monasteries as locals rallied together to repair their own communities. Civilians had done the best they could with household tools, piling up the debris and sawing larger trees into small pieces that could be lifted off the roads. No one in Rangoon had bothered to wait for soldiers; they knew better than to expect help from the regime.
At any rate, some of the soldiers may have been occupied with other tasks. One battalion had apparently been dispatched to the Shwedagon Pagoda. Considered to be the holiest site of Buddhist pilgrimage in Burma, the Shwedagon is usually open by four in the morning so that worshippers may climb the steps to the marble platform around the golden pagoda before dawn. In the days following the storm, however, the Shwedagon was closed to the public. The shopkeepers who sell religious wares—gilded Buddha images, laminated photographs of holy sites, fresh flowers, candles, incense—from stalls along the stairwells were prevented from entering. Soldiers stood guard at each of the four entry gates around the pagoda.
The story was just another Rangoon rumor, impossible to verify, but most people were convinced it was true and speculated that it must have had something to do with the jewels. At the very top of every pagoda in Burma is a conical structure known as a
hti
, or umbrella. The
hti
is traditionally draped with gems and serves as a crown for the pagoda structure. At nearly seventeen feet high, the
hti
at the top of the Shwedagon is an elaborate construction of multiple tiers, plated with gold and silver and hung with donations of personal jewelry. The structure reportedly holds some 83,850 pieces of jewelry. Among the treasures are rings embedded with clusters of sapphires and diamonds, ruby-studded earrings encased in precious metals, and prayers minutely etched in antique Pali script onto paper-thin sheets of gold. At the very pinnacle of the
hti
is a golden globe encrusted with 4,351 diamonds and topped by a single 76-carat diamond the size of a mandarin orange. It is an ostentatious and seemingly careless display of devotion; imagine the crown jewels of England strung together, hoisted up the steeple of Westminster Abbey, and allowed to twirl in the breeze above London.
Gazing up at the Shwedagon, it looked—amazingly—as if the
hti
had not been affected by Cyclone Nargis. Perhaps to quell suspicions, the
New Light of Myanmar
even ran an article describing how a survey team used Japanese technology to ensure that the
hti
had not been tilted and remained intact. But the shopkeepers who work in the stairwells of the pagoda said that many jewels had been shaken loose by the cyclone and that emeralds, rubies, diamonds, and sapphires were scattered across the gardens like fallen fruit.
Along with the general public, the ruling generals had also donated valuables for the
hti
. There is immense spiritual and symbolic significance in placing personal items at the highest point of the country’s most revered Buddhist site. The jewels are valuable in monetary as well as spiritual terms, and so it was said that the generals ordered their soldiers to retrieve the missing treasures. The soldiers were put in three-man teams, each composed of men from different battalions so that they would not be tempted to pocket any of their findings, as they would not know if they could trust their team members not to report them.
It was a sad but not implausible answer to the question of the soldiers’ whereabouts. While Rangoon struggled to overcome the battering it had received from Cyclone Nargis, and unimaginable miseries were unfolding in the delta, some of those soldiers had been sent to collect gems for the generals in the gardens of the Shwedagon Pagoda.
TWO
O
ver a fortnight had passed by the time the country’s leader, Senior General Than Shwe, publicly acknowledged that a massive natural disaster had taken place in Burma. Than Shwe had sent felicitations to Israel for Independence Day and to King Harald V on Norway’s National Day. He had also remembered to convey a message of congratulations to the newly appointed Russian president, yet he had had no words for his own countrymen during this time of crisis. He and his wife had cast their votes in public on the morning of the referendum, which was held as scheduled on May 10 in parts of the country not affected by the cyclone. But it was not until May 18, sixteen days after Cyclone Nargis, that Than Shwe found time to inspect the emergency operation.
Than Shwe is a famously reclusive leader. He is never interviewed by journalists and rarely appears in public. Even the sound of his voice is unknown to most people, as recordings are prohibited; if he makes a speech at a live gathering, it will later appear in written form in the newspapers or recited verbatim by a news anchor on television. But even these speeches are few and far between, and on the rare occasion when the senior general deigns to appear in public, the event is a carefully scripted affair.
Than Shwe’s first appearance after Nargis began with an awkard posing at a relief camp in Dagon on the outskirts of Rangoon. The pictures were on the front page of the
New Light of Myanmar
the next day. Donations had been arranged in front of him like offerings at a pagoda; there were neatly stacked cooking pots, biscuits from China, bottles of orange soda, and platters of fresh fruit. Than Shwe walked along a row of blue tents, each one shaped like a house, complete with mock framed windows. The inhabitants of each tent stood to attention at the doorway, holding their hands together in front of their chests in a respectful position of prayer. “Senior General Than Shwe comforts storm victims,” claimed the captions, but Than Shwe clearly hadn’t memorized his lines or concentrated during the rehearsals, because his efforts at providing comfort looked most unconvincing. In one scene, a retinue of uniformed generals stood behind him looking on as he stretched out a stiff hand toward a baby. Most of the survivors appeared immobilized in his presence and stared straight ahead, as if they had been turned to stone.