Conversations in Burma

I do have the blog post recording the end of my last visit to Rangoon mostly drafted, and I’ll post that eventually.  Right now, though, I wanted to share this.

 

I am in Rangoon again.  For work, this time.  That’s not what it says on my visa, but that’s what I’m doing, pretty openly – instead of furtively meeting with partners in cafes, I’m attending conferences in hotels, with agendas available at the door listing the speeches we’ll hear on land confiscation issues, on investment-related problems, on protesting against unsustainable development.

I am chatting with cab drivers about how cool it was when Obama met Aung San Suu Kyi.

I am standing, right now, at my hotel room window, and the sky just opened with a goddamned roar.  The rain is so hard that the air is white with mist, and since I’m overlooking an alley packed with corrugated-iron-roofed houses, the sound of it is like a jet engine.  Beyond the alley are skyscrapers of cream-coloured stone, warm lights spilling from the windows; off to my left are the dark outlines of palm trees and, beyond that, the massive golden stupa of Shwe Dagon Pagoda.  I’ve got the window open, my face half-tilted into the rain; it’s wonderful, as long as you don’t have to be out in it.

I really, really like Rangoon.  I like that it’s a big, grey, sprawling urban mess, but it’s got a unique character to it.  There’s no fashionable posturing, as in Bangkok, nor is there the feeling of anxiety that seems to attend it.  Everyone is in short-sleeved shirts and knotted cotton lungis, the women with flowers in their hair and yellow powder smeared over their cheeks, everyone’s strolling to and from work swinging their steel tiffin tins or leaning out of car doors to spit betel on the ground like they don’t give a damn, and everything is on Burma time.  In some ways, it feels like an archetypal Asian city – a maze of fruit and DVD stalls in front of each of the new Western shopping centres; bicycle rickshaws fighting it out with taxis; stray dogs everywhere – but to me, the clothes, the food, and the language all feel familiar now, after eighteen months working with Burma groups.  (And the food, oh, God – spicy, oily Arakan curries; sticky Shan noodles with spring onions and chili; parathas and chapatis courtesy of the Muslim vendors on every corner.  I love Thai food, but I love Burmese food even more.)  The differences is that in Chiang Mai, it’s all subdued, as my friends from Burma try to maintain their traditions while flying under the radar of the Thai folks around them, fitting in enough not to ruffle feathers.  Here, it’s out in the open and unapologetic.  I especially love seeing people I know from the border who’ve moved to Yangon.  I ran into one former colleague who’s switched out her pantsuits for a lungi, and started wearing powder, and jade amulets in place of Thai gold – but none of those changes compare to how happy she looks, how much more at ease in her skin.

And Rangoon is one of the few places I’ve been where, as a rare Westerner, I can walk the streets without being hassled.  Stared at, yes, but not hassled.  It’s such a relief.

Although on rare occasions, the staring is almost worse.

And on that note, I have to tell you this story because it’s really weird.

After dinner tonight (Shan noodles and a pile of light-as-air crispy wontons, aw yesss), I found a little shopping complex that was still open, and that had a supermarket.  This was lucky, because I wanted to get some rice mixes to take back, as well as something for the folks at the office.

Now, I want to make a couple of things totally clear.  First, there were other customers around when I went into the supermarket.  And second, I was in there maybe ten minutes – and I’d seen other people shopping about five minutes ago – when I started realizing that the employees were staring at me.

This isn’t exactly new in Rangoon, as I mentioned.  I figured they weren’t expecting a – I actually don’t even know what the Burmese equivalent of farang is, so let’s go with honky – in their store.  Or not expecting a honky to be buying dry noodle mixes and homemade palm sugar candy.  Or something.  So I ignored it.

An aisle later, I realised they weren’t just staring:  they were following me.

This was getting weirder and weirder, and I have to admit, I was curious about what would happen.  So I crossed the store.  They followed me, silently.  I went down a different aisle.  They all congregated at one end of it, in formation, like the Jets trying to corner a Shark in an alleyway.

I turned and looked at them.

They looked at me.

This went on for a bit.

Finally – finally! – one of them stepped forward.  “Miss, we close.”

Fair enough.  She gently took the few things I was buying out of my hands, and brought them smartly to the front of the store.

And then I saw it.  The entire staircase up to the next level of the shopping centre, as well as the whole balcony above it, were clogged with rank upon rank of young Burmese workers in matching uniforms.  At a conservative estimate, there were easily a hundred people.  All of them staring at me in dead silence.

They had all been waiting for me.

I won’t lie to you, it was eerie.  I tried to defuse the moment – “Oh, you were all waiting for me, I am so sorry!” – but, in true ahnah fashion*, they wouldn’t acknowledge the apology because it would mean, in essence, admitting I’d done something wrong, which is impolite.  So they kept staring.  I was blushing so hard you could probably detect it from space by now.  The cashier, who was the only one who, by contrast, wouldn’t meet my eyes at all, rang me up, and then – I am not kidding – I led a procession of over a hundred Burmese workers into the streets of Rangoon.

Just never tell the Burmese authorities that happened, okay? ;) 

*Ahnah doesn’t have a direct English translation, but I’ve talked about the Thai version – kray jai – on my blog before.  It’s being so polite, and going so out of your way to avoid posing any difficulty for someone, that you sometimes end up making everything really uncomfortable.  It’s also part of what stands in the way of speaking up if you disagree or don’t understand something.  Ahnah is letting someone stand on your foot for an hour, even though you’re sure it’s not deliberate, because you, well, don’t like to mention it.

(Incidentally, they told me they close at 9, and I was feeling really guilty about holding them up – until I got back to my hotel, a ten minute walk away, and checked my phone.  9:08.  Wow.  Quick off the mark, much?)

One more story from my time here… and I was debating how to tell this, as I sometimes do when I’m relating conversations in writing.  To me, a lot of the charm of these stories isn’t just what someone says, but how they say it – and I don’t mean “charm” in a condescending way, like it’s “quaint”, but just that the pattern of someone’s speech, the phrases they use – and, yes, even the mistakes – are all part of the fabric of the story.  So I tend to render conversations word-for-word, as best I can, rather than correct people’s grammar.  But I’m afraid that comes across as mocking people for whom English isn’t their first language.  I’m not – God knows, anyone who’s heard me attempt to speak Thai has some idea how much awe I have for people who are fluent in more than one language, and I can still say exactly four things in Burmese, except that I can’t say two of them in polite company, and I’m not supposed to say the third one for security reasons, so I can say one thing in Burmese.  So a Burmese person who can carry on a conversation with me in English, however much we have to stumble through together?  Has my admiration and my gratitude.

With that in mind, I’m going to tell this story with the quotes I remember intact, so you get the actual flavour of the exchange.

I had the greatest conversation with my young cab driver coming from the convention back to my hotel today (in his really odd-smelling cab – sir, please choose either a metric tonne of jasmine garlands, or a Glade lemon airfreshener.  Pick your theme and run with it!  This is not a good opportunity for cultural fusion!).  He started out asking whether I was American, and on finding out I was, pronounced this “very good”; I asked him whether he was from Yangon, which he was, and he then added triumphantly, “I am taxi driver!”  Which I took to be kind of like when I was first learning Arabic, and kept informing people in a loud voice that I was a student and my house was in East London, even the ones I met through school or at my house. :)

Then we started talking about the traffic (the perennial topic of conversation for anyone stuck in a cab in Rangoon, which is about half the population at any given time), the sights, and all the new developments around Rangoon.  He told me there were two huge new shopping malls downtown:  “In Myanmar, verrrry big shopping mall!  You American, small shopping mall!” he grinned.  And then he described some of the luxury hotels, adding, “One night stay, three hundred dollar!”  He sucked in a pained breath, and laughed.  “In Myanmar, very good hotel!  You American, small hotel!”

And then, out of the blue, he turned to me (we were stuck in traffic, don’t worry) and said, “Obama!  Obama come to Myanmar, very good!  Clinton come, very good!  Meet Lady Aung San Suu Kyi, shake hands like this –“  He demonstrated on himself, pretzling his arms together.  “Ah, my friend!”  (Obama also ill-advisedly kissed Daw Aung San Suu Kyi on the cheek, but I was too embarrassed to bring that up. :))

“Obama speak English very good!” my driver chirped happily.  I was a little weirded out by this – did he think Obama wasn’t American-born?  Had the Republican habit of describing the president with careful disdain as “articulate” travelled this far?  But then he went on, and I realised what he was getting at.  “Clinton speak English very good!  Number Two, Lady Aung San Suu Kyi, also, English very good!”  He waved a hand contemptuously.  “Number One – Number One is soldier, is government, is Thein Sein – English no good.  No good!”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the change that has happened in Burma:  a man openly praising Aung San Suu Kyi and talking scornfully about the military government to the stranger in the back of his cab.  And he brought it up, which means that he probably has this conversation with most of the foreigners he drives.  Wow.  It’s not enough, yet, not by a long shot.  But it’s pretty striking, nonetheless.

Aung San Suu Kyi is popular, he told me:  “Yangon, Lady Aung San Suu Kyi!  Mandalay, Lady Aung San Suu Kyi!  Inle, Lady Aung San Suu Kyi!”  He also credited her with doing more to help the people in practical ways than the government is willing to do.  The soldiers gave $150 to improve the roads, he told me; Lady Aung San Suu Kyi gave $300.  “Very good!”

I almost wish we hadn’t reached my hotel so quickly; I wanted to listen to more of this.  Hell, I was getting as much out of one conversation as out of weeks reading the Burma papers.  This wasn’t the first startlingly open political conversation I’d had in Burma – you might remember me talking about my guide on my last trip, and how he’d tell me in a low voice about people’s opposition to the mega-development projects – but he was a friend of a friend, and he didn’t really start talking until we were safely out of Rangoon.  This guy didn’t know me from Adam.

Things really are changing:  some for the better, some for the worse (I just got news of another anti-Muslim riot, this time in Lashio).  It’s a remarkable time.

Very good.

Burma, Islam, and Setting the Stage for Ethnic Cleansing

As I’ve said before, I don’t post about Burma issues often.  This is going to be one of those times.

You may know about the violence against Muslims going on in Burma right now.  Long story short, this really kicked off about a year ago, when a Buddhist woman was raped and murdered by three Muslim men in Arakan (or Rakine) State, one of Burma’s ethnic states.  (Lemme pour you a quick shot of context if you don’t know what I mean by “ethnic states”:  about a third of Burma’s population is made up of indigenous tribes; many of these groups live primarily in specific areas, like the Arakanese in Arakan State.  The ethnic states are officially under the rule of the central government; each state has its own administrative structure, but state officials are appointed by the central government and are ethnically Burman, the country’s majority.  However, armed groups in many of the ethnic states have been at war with the central government for decades.  Currently, ceasefires exist between government troops and ethnic armed groups in all the states that were at war, except for Kachin State, though clashes continue even in ceasefire areas.)  Anyway – days later, even though the perpetrators had been arrested, a Buddhist mob attacked a bus and lynched ten Muslim passengers who’d had nothing to do with the crime.  The situation escalated, leading to a state of emergency being declared in Arakan State, with curfews and areas being locked down by government troops.

Since then, the violence has risen and fallen.  It spiked in November, but quieted down in the new year – until the current wave of attacks, which really got going in March.  The violence has now spread beyond Arakan State and into central Burma, with Muslims being targeted in Mandalay and even in Burma’s first city and former capital, Rangoon (Yangon).  According to a recent article in the independent Burma paper Mizzima, the 2012 violence left 140 dead in Arakan State alone, and displaced at least 100,000 people (other sources say as many as 140,000).  Another 43 people have been killed in central Burma since March, where attacks have also destroyed over 1,200 homes, 77 shops, and a staggering 37 mosques.

Where is all this coming from?  Well, tensions between Muslims and Buddhists in Burma have existed for a long time.  The article I linked to above gives a fuller picture, but there have been Muslim communities in Burma for centuries now.  As was the case in many countries, the British colonial administration favoured a particular minority – here, it was Muslims, specifically Indian Muslims – and this generated resentment among the Buddhist majority.  Anti-Muslim riots in the 1930s were a way of expressing anger at the British regime, as well as at Muslim communities.  Since the military takeover of Burma in 1962, discrimination against Muslims has only become more entrenched.

In Arakan State specifically, there’s a large Rohingya population – Muslims of Bangladeshi descent, who have been established in Arakan State for generations.  The Rohingyas consider themselves to be one of Burma’s ethnic groups.  The Buddhist Arakanese, on the other hand, still see them as interlopers – to the point where I’ve seen Arakanese activists go apeshit at the mere mention of the R-word, because they equate using the term “Rohingya” with “siding with the enemy” by admitting that “Rohingya” is a real thing.  (A lot of Arakanese just refer to them as “Muslims” or “Bangladeshis”.)  Rohingyas have been excluded from citizenship, employment, housing – you name it.  It’s not about religion, every Arakanese person I’ve met hastens to reassure me.  It’s about nationality, culture.  They simply don’t belong.

It seems, ironically enough, that the loosening of government control over the past few years was one factor that helped take the lid off roiling tensions between Arakanese Buddhists and Rohingyas – and the lifting of some censorship laws may have fed into it.  During the riots in November and December of last year, rumours both true and false about the attacks were flying on now freely available social networking sites.  Instant communication can be a powerful tool… but the same technology that allowed protestors in Egypt to organise and to get word of their struggles out to the world can also allow an unverified story about Muslims burning Buddhists’ homes to reach thousands of already pissed-off Buddhists in seconds.

But the current wave of attacks, according to reports, seems to be more organized.  It’s heavily linked to the 969 movement, a (terrifyingly) widespread and grassroots movement led by radical Buddhist monks.  (Yes, I’m going to pause for a second to let the idea of “radical Buddhist monks” sink in.  Trust me, I had the same mental image of a Buddhist monk before I started working out here – we in the West tend to picture lotus blossoms and the Dalai Lama and movies about flaky white people discovering inner peace – but Buddhism is no more immune than any other essentially peace-loving religion from developing radicalised clergy.)

Now, I’m going to tell you a little bit about why this movement scares me so much.  I realised when I was reading some of the 969 propaganda out there (some of which is collected here by Burma Campaign UK) that it sounded awfully familiar.  In fact, it was eerily reminiscent of researching my Master’s dissertation.

You know, the one on genocide.

You might think I’m exaggerating, but regardless of the scale of the violence – and in this case, it’s increasing – the same techniques used to dehumanise a minority group in areas where ethnic cleansing later took place are being used here.  

• We’ve got fostering suspicion that the minority community is actually the group plotting (I’ve edited out an offensive term for Muslims here):
  
  “According to the above situation, Muslims in Marhtila are wearing their mosque clothes and going around in the town more than before. In that group, there are some stranger [Muslims] who we haven’t seen before. Although it is not [Muslims’] Eid period, they have been attending meetings at mosque. Using money Saudi allocated to mosques, they have been buying land, farm and houses both in and out of the town with incredible amount of money under the Burmese names. Two Burmese women from North Pyi Tharyar were married off to two [Muslims] under the responsibility of a mosque. Moreover, [Muslims] are urging each other that only Halal branded kids’ products such as snacks, fizzy drinks and tea are edible for [Muslims]…”
  
  (The scary thing here being that this was released by the “Township Monks’ Chairman in Meiktila, where the current wave of anti-Muslim violence began.)
  
• We’ve got severe policing of the majority group to weed out “sympathisers”, and especially to smack down women from the majority group who might contemplate sleeping with men from the minority group:
  
  4 rules from Alliance to Protect Buddhism Group (Thar Tha Nar in Burmese):
  
  1.Traditionally Buddhist owned houses, compounds and farms are not to be sold, rented or pawned to Muslims. 
  2.Buddhist women are not to marry Muslim men.
  3.Buddhists are to buy goods only from Buddhists’ shops.
  4.Buddhists are not to use their Burmese names to buy property, build or rent property for Muslims.
  
  If one of the above rules has been broken, serious effective penalty would be given.
  
• We’ve got appeals to history or to events in other places where the minority group were the aggressors, in an attempt to make it seem like they’re the aggressors in this instance:
  
  To wipe out our religion and nationality, bad Muslims are using several strategies such as using business and humanitarian sectors as leverage. Using such strategies, they have won over Indonesia, Malaysia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh where Buddhism was once well practiced. In India in AD 11 (Buddhist year 1700), they brutally burned and destroyed recordings of Buddha teaching, killed over a hundred thousand of monks and put out rewards to kill monks who escaped.
  
• We’ve even got Protocols of the Elders of Zion-style fake documents (in this case, with bonus THEY’RE STEALIN’ OUR WIMMIN! hysteria) – this is the supposed text of a “secret” Muslim document, as printed in a 969 pamphlet:
  
  Oh dear Islamists, for all of us Myanmar have become a poison. That is why we need to be united and take any possible ground we can. Even if we have to get out of this country, we will have to leave our blood behind in this country. Buddhist Burmese and ethnic Myanmar women are like prostitutes and we are able to get them anytime with money. For us, it is the best time to be active so we have to manipulate and get those Buddhist Burmese and ethnic Myanmar women by winning their hearts, using our money or businesses. The most important thing is to leave our blood and genes with them. For your hard work, we will be awarding 500 kyats if you can implant your blood inside Buddhist Burmese women. If you can implant into 4 Buddhist Burmese women, mosque will support 1,000 kyats every month. 2,000 kyats will be awarded, if they are graduated Buddhist Burmese women, and 50,000 will be awarded, if they are daughters of brigadiers… You can only distribute this letter to Muslims who promise not to share or talk about this with other religions.

Help doesn’t seem to be coming, from any direction.  Many reports claim that Burma’s security forces are either standing by and letting the violence happen, or actively collaborating, so that things will get bad enough to justify a military crackdown – helping to re-establish the army’s control and providing an excuse for the government to backslide on democratic reforms.  The opposition isn’t exactly leaping to Burma Muslims’ aid, either:  Aung San Suu Kyi can barely bring herself to discuss the “Rohingya problem” in public.  Ethnic Arakanese activism groups certainly aren’t helping.  Bangladesh has long refused to acknowledge any obligation or connection to Rohingya communities, and is now refusing to take in displaced Rohingyas (who are largely stuck in refugee and IDP camps in Burma and other neighbouring countries).  And while there’s been some hand-wringing among the governments of the world, none seem to be ready to hold Burma to account for finding a better solution.

Meanwhile, the violence has touched off understandable anger among Muslims elsewhere; right now, there are protests going on outside the Burmese embassy in Jakarta.  More worryingly, there have also been calls from radical Muslim leaders to violently oppose the Burmese regime on behalf of the Rohingya.  Recently, there was anattempt to bomb the embassy in Jakarta, which is likely to further fuel radical Buddhists’ belief that the Muslims in Burma are somehow “in league” with Muslims around the world.

You want to know what the icing on the cake of civil meltdown is?  A cyclone is projected to hit Arakan State this week – and over a hundred thousand displaced people, holed up in flimsy tents, are sitting in its path.  Unless the government is able to get its act together and prioritise the safety of its Muslim citizens, the toll could be devastating.

Oh, God, Could It Be The Weather?

I was talking a while back with an English friend of mine about the book Watching the English, and how it describes the British obsession with talking about the weather.  According to the book (and backed up by my own experience, once the book helped me crack this oh-so-crucial aspect of socialising in the UK), it’s not enough to simply discuss the weather; you have to discuss the weather correctly.  In the UK, what that means is that you have to agree about the weather.  If someone comments that the rain is dreadful, the right response is, “Oh, yes, it’s awful; it’s not going to be fun trying to get home in that!”  Americans, on the other hand, when speaking about the weather (and a lot of other things), tend to default to trying to one-up each other.  “You call that rain?  You should have seen the nor’easters we used to get when I was living in Boston!”

Since I’ve moved to Thailand, I’ve noticed that the way I discuss the weather has changed again.  Not so much when I talk about it with Thai people, since there’s a strong cultural impetus against disagreeing with someone, so “agree about the weather” pretty much still holds.  “Wanii ron, na kha?”  “Ron, kha!” – “It’s hot today, isn’t it?”  “Yeah, it’s hot!”

No, what’s changed is the way I talk about the weather with folks back home, wherever I consider “home” to be.  Because Americans and Europeans have one thing in common:  when we talk about the weather, we tend to talk about extremes.  “What’s the weather like there?  Because here, it got down to minus ten/it hit over a hundred/we got two feet of snow!

When people ask me what the weather’s like in Thailand, though, extremes are normal.  Hey, it hit over a hundred today!  Just like every day this month.  Instead, what’s notable are the increasing irregularities in what’s supposed to be a very defined cycle of seasons.  There’s hot season, monsoon season, and cold season, and while there can be some overlap at the edges, the majority of each season is usually pretty absolute.

That’s how I end up having conversations like this:

“What’s the weather like there?”

“Oh, it’s scorching!  It’s in the eighties.  What about you?”

“… Um, kind of hotter than that, yeah.  But listen to this:  it rained yesterday.”

“Oh.  Uh, yeah, that sucks.  All day?”

“For like TEN WHOLE MINUTES!”

“…”

“But it’s APRIL!”