Despite sustaining serious head injuries, this monk did not dare seek medical treatment – he had heard that monks who went to hospital were arrested. He went into hiding instead, and his friends tended his wounds with lime, using his saffron robes as bandages. On 28 September, he went to the Sule Pagoda, where he witnessed soldiers shooting people, and he hid in a public toilet, still in pain from his injuries, for much of the night. The next day people helped him move to another hiding place, where he stayed until 10 October when he returned to his monastery. He was arrested on 7 November, but escaped to Mon State, and then travelled through Karen State to Thailand. He grew long hair, a moustache and disguised himself as an insane person, dressed in a dirty old saffron robe. His disguise worked, officials thought he was a lunatic and let him pass by.35
Ashin Thi La Na Da escaped to Thanbyuzayat in Mon State, by car. He was still dressed in his robes, but at every checkpoint, when asked for his name, identity number and destination, he gave false information. He then got word from his abbot that intelligence agents had come to his monastery at Mekhin, Rangoon, at least four times, and was urged to move to a safer place. ‘I went to Apunt Township, Mon State, where I waited to leave for the border,’ he recalled. ‘One of my former laymen came by private car, and so on 5 November we went to Kawkareik, close to the border, where we spent one night. The next day, because I knew I could easily be noticed at checkpoints, I paid 8,000 kyats to a motorcyclist to take me around the checkpoints. It was early morning and very cold.’ At one point he passed a checkpoint manned by the DKBA, the pro-regime Buddhist Karen militia. ‘I thought that because they are Buddhists, there should not be a problem. But they checked everything, and found my diary in my bag. I talked my way out of it.’ However, despite talking his way out of trouble with the DKBA guards, he encountered a further problem. ‘I thought I would be released to leave, but they said no, no monks allowed across the border. They said I had to find another route.’ The next day he went through the border town of Myawaddy – and crossed into Thailand with no difficulty.
U Tiloka fled Rangoon when the army came to his monastery again on 29 September. He hid in a hut in a paddy field near his monastery, with six other monks, and then went into hiding in another location for thirteen days. On 13 October, he travelled to Toungup, in Arakan State, and checked into a hotel. But soon, two soldiers came to the hotel and searched him, asking if he was a demonstrator. ‘They asked why we left Rangoon,’ he recalled. ‘We told them we were not demonstrators, we had simply travelled to our home town on a visit.’ He then travelled to Sittwe, and by boat to Maungdaw, where he hid for a day in a nearby village. Surprisingly, all this time he had stayed in his monk’s robes, but on 27 October he changed clothes and crossed the border to Bangladesh.36
U Pyin Nyar Disa went into hiding in Rangoon for four days when the crackdown began, as it was impossible to leave the city. The authorities had his picture. However, on 1 October he managed to make it to Hlaingthaya Township, and from there he escaped to the Irrawaddy Division, and then on to Arakan State hiding among vegetables in a lorry. When he reached Toungup Township, he hid in the countryside for two months, until the authorities heard that he was there and began searching for him. NLD members in Toungup helped him to escape. ‘They rescued my life,’ he said. ‘Some people arranged to send me to Bangladesh in a timber smuggling boat, and on 24 February I arrived in Bangladesh.’37
Those who have fled Burma are in no doubt about the sentiment of the people towards the regime. ‘People in Burma are really angry,’ one monk told me just a month after he had escaped to Thailand. ‘The regime has suppressed them very brutally. Inside people’s minds they really want to do something to change this regime. Life is getting more difficult.’ Although the SPDC succeeded in crushing the protests, it has been weakened. ‘The people really hate them now. The regime is still physically strong. It has guns. But it has no legitimacy or moral authority.’38
Another monk looked into my eyes and said: ‘I came out of Burma because we need help and advice for the suffering people of Burma. I want to tell the world what is happening … People in other parts of the world are responsible to protect the people of Burma, in the interests of peace and stability. Please … try to increase pressure on the regime to resolve the situation peacefully. Please try to help the people who were injured.’39
The events of September 2007 shook Burma. They were the most dramatic protests in almost twenty years – but they were crushed in the same way as all the previous ones. The difference, however, was that with modern technology, the crackdown could not be hidden from the world. Scenes of the peaceful protests, and then the bloody crackdown, were captured on mobile phones, by undercover reporters and on video, and emailed or smuggled out of the country. Footage appeared almost immediately on major international television networks, even though most foreign reporters could not enter the country. Burmese journalists working for exiled Burmese media such as the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), the Irrawaddy magazine and Mizzima News played a vital role in bringing the news and images out of Burma. One Burmese journalist said: ‘One man has eyes but no legs and one has legs but no eyes. We need each other. Freedom of the press is our final goal, but in the meantime we have to do what we can.’
The film Burma VJ tells the story of Burmese cameramen who risked their lives to capture the evidence. Several were caught and imprisoned, and the central character in Burma VJ, a young Burmese journalist with the pseudonym Joshua, had to flee Burma as the monks’ protests grew and after he had briefly been arrested. From his base in Thailand, he managed a team of cameramen inside the country. Having previously worked in print media, he is convinced of the power of film. ‘Television media is more powerful than print, because in television you can never lie,’ he told me when I met him in Bangkok. ‘In the press you can write anything you want, and the junta can write what they like in the State media, and people can define what is right and what is wrong, but you cannot prove that what you are writing is the truth. With television, it is different and that is why people paid more attention to the Saffron Revolution when they saw it on television around the world.’
For the domestic audience in Burma, however, print media and radio reach more people. While all domestic media is censored, the print sector has expanded beyond the regime’s mouthpiece publications, and there are now more than one hundred licensed journals. Major publications include 7-Day News, with a circulation of 60,000, the weekly magazine Newswatch, with a circulation of 35,000, monthly magazine Living Color, reaching 30,000 and smaller circulation journals such as the Voice, Modern Journal, Beauty Magazine, True News and Ecovision. According to one foreign expert involved in media training, journalists in Burma are unable to write freely, but they show remarkable ingenuity in finding indirect ways to cover controversial stories. For example, when Rangoon University closed many of its departments in the late 1980s, and failed to offer consistent tutoring or modern courses to students, a reporter wrote a story about the courses available in universities in Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia. ‘There was no need to say what an abysmal job Rangoon University was doing. It was self-evident.’ Other publications often run stories about the political crises in countries such as Zimbabwe or Pakistan, which may contain lessons for Burma. ‘We can’t criticise the government, but we can educate the people,’ says one Burmese journalist. All publications have to be reviewed by the censorship board, and the process can take up to a week. Every independent newspaper receives articles returned from the censors with red slashes through them. Despite this, says a foreign expert, ‘most of the independent media never fail to include a story even if they know for sure it will be censored. They just keep pushing.’ In the last few months of 2011, restrictions on the media eased considerably, newspapers were able to publish photographs of Aung San Suu Kyi on their front pages and cover her engagements, and speculation mounted that the censorship board might even be abolished. In October 2011 the head of the censorship
board went as far as to say that press censorship is incompatible with democracy, and called for greater media freedom.40
With television still limited in its reach and print media limited in its freedom, radio is still the most important media. ‘Radio cannot be replaced,’ says Joshua. ‘People can listen to it anywhere, as long as they have a battery, and so it is countrywide, even if there is no electricity.’ A Chin activist from the Saffron Revolution confirms this. Internet and satellite television access are still prohibitively expensive for most people in Burma, but even in rural villages people have radios.
During the Saffron Revolution, radio broadcasts into Burma from the exiled BBC, DVB, Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Asia (RFA) Burmese services ensured that people inside the country were kept informed. As a result the regime singled them out for attack. The New Light of Myanmar published a statement in large bold letters, accusing the exiled media of ‘airing [a] skyful of lies’. Described as ‘saboteurs’ and ‘killers in the airwaves’, they were warned to ‘watch your step’.
British photographer and activist James Mackay visited Burma in December 2007, less than three months after the Saffron Revolution. ‘I was the only Westerner on the plane,’ he said. The sense of fear among people when they saw him was tangible. ‘People didn’t want to look at me, for fear. People had a look of “Why are you here? What are you doing?”’ Mackay visited many of the monasteries which had been raided, including Ngwe Kyar Yan, Moe Kaung and even Maggin monasteries, each time having to evade the military. Even in December, the raids were continuing. ‘I went to Nan Oo monastery, in Upper Pazundaung, which had been raided the night before I went there. I got right outside, then people came up to me and said “No, please go – military”.’ In Pakokku, Mackay spoke to a young monk who had been tied to a lamp post on 5 September, during those crucial events which sparked the larger movement. ‘When they arrested me, they tied me up,’ he confirmed. Mackay voiced frustration that foreign media was not more intrepid. ‘Why don’t other journalists come to these places? Why do they just walk down the main street in Rangoon to Sule Pagoda?’
One man estimates that over one hundred people, and at least fifty monks, were killed in the crackdown. Others would put the figure higher. ‘Some of my friends were detained and beaten. Many monks have been tortured,’ he told me. ‘There are so many human rights abuses. We cannot stay silent any longer. Our country has so many natural resources but the regime only spends money on themselves. We knew the dangers involved in protesting – but we had to act.’41
10
Cyclone Nargis
‘We can no longer plead ignorance, we can not evade it; it is now an object placed before us, we can not pass it; we may spurn it, we may kick it out of our way, but we can not turn aside so as to avoid seeing it.’
William Wilberforce
I WAS IN Thailand when the storm hit. Eight months after the Saffron Revolution, Burma was struck by the worst natural disaster in living memory. On 2 May 2008 Cyclone Nargis ripped through the Irrawaddy Delta, Rangoon and other parts of southern Burma, leaving complete and utter devastation in its wake. Altogether, it is believed that at least 140,000 lives were lost, and at least 2.5 million people were displaced. More than 3.5 million people were directly affected by the storm.
I had been visiting Karen and Karenni refugees on the Thailand–Burma border, and particularly leaders of the KNU for the first time since Padoh Mahn Sha’s assassination three months previously. I was due to travel to Kachin State on the China–Burma border, but I got word that the visit was cancelled. When the cyclone struck I was having a few days’ break in southern Thailand, and immediately my phone was buzzing and I was inundated with enquiries: was I OK, had I been affected, would I give a comment to the media? I was fine, and I headed back to Bangkok as quickly as I could.
One night, two or three days after the cyclone as the world was starting to become aware of the scale of the catastrophe, I received a telephone call from the BBC. Their ignorance about the geography of Burma illustrates the scale of the challenge for campaigners for Burma – they had heard I was in the region and thought I could report from the ground. I explained that I was not in the areas affected by the cyclone, but I added, hastily in case they hung up, that I was in touch with people who were in the Irrawaddy Delta and that I had, just an hour before, received some photographs of victims of the disaster. ‘Send them through,’ the researcher said. Immediately, I forwarded them.
A little later, the phone rang again. ‘They are too gruesome to show on national television,’ the woman told me. The pictures were of dead bodies, lined up beside a river. They were not pretty to look at, but neither were they full of blood and gore. With all the courteous calmness combined with forthrightness I could muster I said: ‘Look, firstly people have risked their lives to take these photographs. They would be killed or at the very least jailed for life if the authorities in Burma knew they had taken these pictures. Secondly, they risked everything to smuggle them out of Burma. Thirdly, I have seen far more gruesome pictures in Hollywood movies and British soap operas. These are factual photographs documenting people who have died as a result of the cyclone, and the regime’s neglect. We owe it to them to run them.’ She said she would see what she could do, and I went to bed, shaking my fist at the world.
When I awoke the next morning there was a voicemail from the BBC producer, telling me that the photographs which I had sent had been the top story on the Ten O’Clock News and a major feature on Newsnight. ‘The head of news at the BBC congratulated us for obtaining such amazing pictures,’ the person said. ‘We know that the people who really deserve congratulations are the brave Burmese people who took these photographs and got them out. Please will you pass on our congratulations to them.’ My anger at the world turned into a profound gratitude. Thank God. Sometimes, what we do is worthwhile.
But important though those photographs were, they did not save lives. The most shocking aspect of Cyclone Nargis was not the natural disaster, for earthquakes, volcanoes, famines and storms are not unusual, but rather the regime’s astoundingly apathetic response. As apocalyptic images emerged from Burma, the regime decided to take a three-day public holiday, and closed its embassies around the world. Within one week of the cyclone, at least 100,000 people had died, and 1.5 million people were left homeless. Around 40 per cent of them were children. The UN described the situation as ‘a major catastrophe’, and these figures almost doubled after a few weeks.
Despite receiving many warnings of the impending cyclone from the Indian meteorological agency, the authorities did little to forewarn or protect the people.1 One man told a visiting Roman Catholic Cardinal from Scotland in January 2009 that he heard a radio warning at 3 p.m. on 2 May, four hours before the waters began to rise.2 Many other people, however, had no warning. ‘At 1 a.m., the waters were so high there was no place to cling to, and at 4 a.m. as dawn broke the next morning, I looked for my family but there was nothing left where I had lived!’ a witness said. Another person recalled: ‘As the waters rose, I expected to die … I was thrown into the sea and out onto an island. I tried to go back to my own place – it took four days. I got to my own village, and I tried to find at least one member of my family, but eight of them had died. I lost all and did not even recognise the body of any one of them. I have no hope left.’ A third person described how he had sought shelter in the church after his house was destroyed by a falling tree, but then the church collapsed. ‘I floated away but managed to climb onto a tree. I stayed in the water for the whole night … I later found that both my parents had died along with all of my family. Only my brother and I are left out of eight. There were dead bodies all around.’3
When more than twenty-four countries pledged over US$40 million in aid within days of the disaster, the regime initially refused offers of help. It then agreed to accept aid, but refused access to international aid workers. Only the combined pressure of the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, China, India and
ASEAN, driven largely by the United Kingdom, the United States, France and Australia behind the scenes, as well as the presence of French, British and American naval ships off Burma’s coast, caused the regime to concede access for aid workers. Reports persisted, however, that aid only trickled through to those who needed it, and much was diverted by the regime, to be used for its own purposes.
Stories abound of relief supplies donated by international agencies appearing with labels over the agencies’ name and the names of particular Generals displayed instead, a cruel attempt by the regime to use the aid for propaganda purposes. Several relief workers have confirmed this to me. In addition, supplies were stolen for the regime’s own use. ‘Nutrient biscuits provided by overseas donors were taken by the regime and used for their soldiers. They gave the people poor quality biscuits instead,’ said one Burmese aid worker. One Burmese who became involved in the relief effort claims that the wives of several Generals went to the airport to welcome the arrival of UN containers. ‘A major general’s wife chose one container and said “This is mine.” It contained biscuits and other food supplies. She got into a fight with some other Generals’ wives over who could have the container.’4
A former Tatmadaw soldier has confirmed that aid was taken and sold in the markets. ‘I went to some of the markets run by the military and authorities and saw supplies that had been donated being sold there,’ he told the Emergency Assistance Team (EAT), a grassroots organisation established to provide relief to the victims of the cyclone. ‘These materials were supposed to go to the victims. I knew what materials were being donated so I could recognise them in the market.’ These included noodles, coffee mix and soap. ‘The money from selling these things would go to the shop owner, but they are all part of the military. The shopkeepers are all families of the military.’5 Yet another eyewitness claimed:
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