Burma’s Spring: Real lives in turbulent times (10 page)

DVB’s work depended on a secret network of journalists inside Burma who would gather stories and smuggle out footage either on thumb drives or discs, or more riskily via the Internet, for the news to be beamed back from Oslo in a daily, two-hour package of current affairs programmes and documentaries. The technologically backward regime seemed to find it impossible to block these broadcasts. One muggy evening, on the terrace of a smart café next to Bogyoke Aung San Market, I met Thida, a DVB ‘VJ’ or video journalist. I should have felt a bond with this woman, a fellow undercover journalist. But as she explained her work, I realised that our professional lives had little in common. My journalistic forays were sporadic; sometimes weeks would go by without me reporting a thing. I took on jobs writing and editing reports for the United Nations and international NGOs. While these dormant periods in my journalistic life were certainly good for my cover, they also showed that I had nothing like the same commitment – and took nothing like the same risks – as some of the brave Burmese journalists I met.

Twenty-eight-year-old Thida wouldn’t tell me her real name, which wasn’t surprising given that two of her colleagues had recently been arrested. With her precious hand-held video camera in a patent leather bag, Thida darted around the country, gathering footage and interviews to send back to Oslo. Sometimes, she tried to pass herself off as a businesswoman or tourist, filming in secret. Sometimes, with people she felt she could trust, she told the truth.

‘It’s dangerous for them as well as for me,’ Thida said. ‘People are scared of getting into trouble. So I film them from behind, or just a silhouette, so they know they won’t be identified.’ She risked arrest at any time. ‘Last week, I was carrying my camera and some soldiers came towards me. I panicked, and dumped my camera under a bush. Many times I’ve had to do that sort of thing,’ she said.

DVB’s video journalists made their name during the 2007 uprising. Their work filming the demonstrations by Buddhist monks and the army’s violent crackdown was made famous by the Oscar-nominated feature film
Burma VJ
, and gave the regime its worst publicity for decades. To prevent the same thing happening again, the authorities passed a new law banning filming without government permission, and those who defied it and were caught were locked up for long terms. One of the cameramen who shot the film, known publicly as ‘T’, had been arrested in a Rangoon Internet café a few months earlier. A military court had just sentenced him to thirteen years in prison for violating Burma’s Electronics Act and working illegally for a foreign media organisation. Another of Thida’s colleagues, twenty-five-year-old camerawoman Hla Hla Win, had been sentenced to twenty years for transmitting news critical of the government. According to the Burma Media Association, which was based in neighbouring Thailand, at least fourteen reporters were arrested in Burma in 2009.

Like all of the Burmese dissidents I met during that time, Thida was completely single-minded. There was no room left for anything else in her life. ‘My mother wants me to stop this job,’ she told me. ‘But I am a journalist and I love journalism. I want to get my stories out.’

The exiled media was gearing up for the 2010 elections, the first to be held in Burma since the 1990 poll that Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy
had won by a landslide, but the outcome of which the junta had ignored. The elections promised a new parliament, and a government run by civilians. It was the role of DVB and other news organisations to inject a dose of realism: in the 2008 constitution, the military had put in place strong safeguards to protect their power, including reserving one quarter of seats in the two houses of parliament for military appointees. Many of those running for seats as civilians would simply hang up their army uniforms, political observers said. The NLD had dismissed the constitution as illegitimate and had decided to boycott the vote. No one was expecting much to change.

Thida left abruptly to catch an overnight bus to Mandalay. I put away my notebook and looked across the table at Zayar, who had set up the interview and had come to translate for me. He sipped on a soda with mint leaves and ice. Two elaborate Burmese puppets, with white porcelain faces and red painted lips, were strung up on either side of the café door, staring at us. From the far side of the wooden balustrade that marked off the terrace, street children selling out-of-date copies of
Time
magazine and the
International Herald Tribune
were trying to attract our attention. I wondered whether Zayar also smuggled out his reports. It was a fair bet that he did, but at that point he didn’t want to talk about it.

FIVE

The King’s Grandson

Getting accustomed to the hotel bicycle, I gently freewheeled down the gravelly driveway, admiring the hollyhocks and gladioli that bordered the sweeping front lawn. Between the two stone gateposts at the foot of the hill, I came to a squeaky halt, wobbled slightly and planted a foot on the ground to check for traffic. I pedalled off slowly to the right, trying to operate the seized-up gears. A gentle breeze ruffled the waters of the ornamental lake on my left, and beyond that, a line of Japanese red maples and mulberry trees rustled on the edge of the botanical gardens. The stacked roofs of a wooden, Chinese-style pagoda peeked out above the treetops. The air smelt earthy and fresh. It was the first of several occasions during my short stay in Maymyo that I would have to remind myself that I was still in Burma.

Since arriving in Rangoon – a port city that for nine months of the year is insufferably hot and wet or insufferably hot and dry – I had been tempted to visit Maymyo, the hill-station built by British colonialists to escape the fiercest of the summer months. From March to May, British officers, civil servants and their wives would decamp en masse from Rangoon to take up residence in the small town, laid out in the manner of a Surrey village, with mock-Tudor houses and pretty stone cottages. Sitting 3,500 feet above the city of Mandalay, it was comfortable and breezy, and surrounded by fields of flowers, coffee bushes and strawberries. It all sounded very enticing, but until the hot season of 2010 I hadn’t found the excuse to visit.

A few weeks earlier, while on a visa-run to Bangkok (a manoeuvre that involved skipping out of the country for a few days), I had been sitting with the
Burmese historian Thant Myint-U over Starbucks iced lattes in a glass-walled shopping mall. The grandson of 1960s UN Secretary-General U Thant, the younger Thant was also a former UN diplomat as well as a historian and author. He knew Burma intimately, but, having grown up abroad, he also enjoyed an outsider’s perspective. In Rangoon’s information vacuum, I sometimes felt more isolated and ignorant of what was going on in Burma when I was there than when I was outside the country. The secrecy and inevitable self-censorship would warp my news judgement. While I can see in retrospect that interesting stories were dripping from the walls, in Rangoon’s airless atmosphere I was often stuck for new ideas. ‘Why don’t you go and visit Thibaw’s grandson?’ Thant suggested. ‘He lives up in Maymyo, I’m sure you can find him.’

Thibaw was the last king of Burma, ousted by the British when they annexed Upper Burma in 1885 and abolished Mandalay’s Court of Ava. King Thibaw was a weak monarch, but thanks in part to the ruthless urges of his wife Queen Supayalat (who also happened to be his half sister), his brief reign was marked by brutal purges. Dozens of members of the extended royal family were imprisoned and later massacred – some, reputedly, were trampled under the feet of elephants. The new British rulers incorporated Burma into the Indian empire and banished Thibaw, Supayalat and their four daughters to the Indian coastal town of Ratnagiri, where they lived in comfortable yet diminished circumstances in a house on the Arabian Sea. In 1919, three years after Thibaw’s death, Supayalat and her two unmarried younger daughters were allowed to return to Burma.

*

Eighty-five-year-old Taw Paya, the sole surviving grandson of Thibaw and heir to the Konbaung throne, was living quietly in Maymyo. My guidebook had described the
town’s Home Counties feel and its colonial houses, most famously ‘Candercraig’, the 1920s turreted house which had served as the British officers’ club and was now a government-run hotel. As it was
de rigueur
to avoid such state-run places, to avoid paying into the regime’s coffers, I had chosen a smaller place in front of the lake, a fine red-brick house with mullioned windows, which would have once been home to a British civil servant and his family. I had been looking forward to my break from the city, but my romantic visions of a colonial nostalgia trip were soon doused when I entered the hotel’s dingy formal dining room for breakfast. Any residual Raj-like charm had been extinguished by a boxed-in fireplace, brown nylon curtains and a garish lino floor. The square, teakwood tables were smothered with layers of yellow varnish. My breakfast too was disappointing, but perhaps not far from the colonial reality – a greying hardboiled egg, cold white toast with lurid yellow margarine, and sweet instant coffee.

*

I cycled on past roadside nurseries selling colourful bedding plants. On a gentle rise, I was overtaken by a painted horse cart, driven by a man in a woolly jumper. At the next junction, empty of traffic, I took a right turn into Circular Road, into the heart of the colonial suburbs. Many of the mock-Tudor mansions were deserted, with signs of life concentrated around wooden shacks in the gardens, smoke rising from chimneys, laundry strung up, and bicycles, water drums and gas canisters parked outside. Territorial dogs charged down the overgrown lawns as I cycled past each generously appointed plot, snarling and growling around my ankles.

I knew Taw Paya lived on Forest Road near the Chinese temple, a bright yellow building with upturned eaves which came into view on my next turn. Loud rock music blared from speakers turned to face the street outside a newly built, open-
fronted restaurant next door. Opposite was a large, Edwardian brick house, with a well-tended front garden bounded by a high wall. I rang the bell at the gate and the gardener who had been watering the flowerbeds dropped his hose and dashed over to let me in. I wheeled my bike up the driveway and parked it under the pansy-filled hanging baskets while the gardener called through the front door.

Two women came to meet me and, giggling, led me into the dark front room with its large fireplace and heavy wooden furniture. Through a curtained doorway, I could see through to the sunlight of the back garden and another woman crouching down and washing clothes in a wide plastic basin. We all sat, and I enquired about Taw Paya in my poor Burmese. They nodded and we waited. The washerwoman brought in some cold water in a glass jug with a crocheted doily on top. We waited for about half an hour more, until a man arrived, too young to be Taw Paya, and shook my hand. I attempted more questions. He left the room and after some minutes came back with a delicate, yellowed piece of paper, with looping Burmese writing. Could I be holding an ancient royal relic? I wasn’t really sure what I was looking at, or who these people were, and I was starting to worry that I might be too late to meet Taw Paya. Were these his relatives, had he died? We engaged in another jumbled conversation. Finally, I understood. Taw Paya had moved house.

The young gardener hitched up his
longyi
and mounted his bike. I followed him up to Maymyo’s main highway – a section of the famed Burma Road connecting Mandalay to China. We cycled north as heavy lorries and motorbikes overladen with Chinese rice cookers, kettles and electric fans whooshed past. Half a mile along, we turned off past a sports pitch into a more modern 1970s suburb, which, apart from the potholed, rubbly streets, was still very English in feel, the red-brick villas replaced by white dormer bungalows. We stopped outside a sliding metal gate and knocked.
Finally I had found the king’s grandson, in his own granny bungalow with PVC windows and net curtains.

*

‘Is that a gift?’ he asked, tossing the box of biscuits on to the coffee table, very unimpressed. Like Maymyo’s cool, fresh air, Taw Paya’s forthright manner was a welcome novelty. His blue blood, combined with his advanced years, allowed him the privilege of speaking his mind, even when it came to talking about Burma’s military rulers, a subject usually out of bounds for most Burmese people. Sitting in an armchair in a blue and black checked shirt and a sarong knotted high over his belly, he scoffed at the airs adopted by Burma’s new elite. He spoke in quaint, clipped English, learned in mission schools in the 1930s. ‘Those chaps, really, they are the ones who think they are royalty,’ he said. ‘They love big shows of wealth and power. But the people hate it. Ninety per cent of the people are poor. But they daren’t say anything. This is a police state.’ He looked a tiny bit worried. ‘Where is this article going to be published? Will it be put on the Internet?’

When Taw Paya was growing up, the family lived on a modest but comfortable pension paid by the colonial administration. The king’s daughters received 2,200 rupees per month, and his grandchildren 600 per month, enough to live simply and to pay for school fees. The British were concerned that the family could stir up nationalist fervour, and their movements were severely restricted. The young prince was educated in Rangoon and the southern port of Moulmein, and wasn’t allowed to travel to the royal seat of Mandalay for inter-school football matches. The injustices still rankled. ‘Mother died when I was twelve. The government did not allow me to visit our father. The British made sure we were all separated. National feeling was very strong in those days.’

At independence in 1948, the family lost their pension and for a few years, during the civil war that followed the end of the colonial era, they struggled. The gems and silverware that Thibaw and Supayalat had smuggled into exile in India had long been sold off or filched by British officers. The family had nothing but a few old black-and-white photographs to remind them of their royal heritage, now arranged neatly in frames on shelves behind where Taw Paya was sitting. In 1950, he and his surviving brother (communist insurgents had assassinated his elder brother shortly after independence) founded an import–export company, the Thibaw Commercial Syndicate, and in 1952 won a major tender to supply rice to India, a turning point that put the former royals within reach of middle-class prosperity. But it was not to last. In 1963, the firm, like all private companies in Burma, was nationalised by the new military government of General Ne Win.