A Savage Dreamland

by David Eimer

  Between 1860 and 1930 there was a 600 per cent increase in the amount of land given over to rice farming in the Ayeyarwady Delta. But the cost of opening up fields was higher than most Burmese could pay and rice prices fluctuated. From the 1890s many farmers in the Delta found themselves in debt and reliant on high-interest loans from the Chettiars, Indian bankers and moneylenders from Madras who operated all over Southeast Asia.

  Soon, farms started passing into the hands of the Chettiars as they called in their debts. There were also Burmese and Chinese moneylenders, but the Chettiars were dominant and, by 1937, they owned a quarter of all the land in the Delta. Not only were the Burmese being excluded from government and employment in their country, now they no longer owned the land they lived on.

  Overseeing this mercenary capitalism were the British. ‘The British hold us down, while the Indians pick our pockets,’ went the local saying. Rangoon was governed by the Legislative Council, made up mainly of representatives of the most important trading houses, which acted more like the board of directors of a company than a city government. Business interests were always prioritised over the welfare of the Burmese.

  Out in the countryside the traditional system of governance by local leaders, whose authority had stemmed from the now discarded monarchy, was abandoned for direct rule by village headmen overseen by British officials. Monks, who played a crucial role as educators and arbiters of society, were largely ignored by the British, who were entirely secular colonists and had no interest in or understanding of Buddhism’s role in Burma. And the rural population was subjected to new laws and taxes that were completely foreign to them.

  Lounging in the Pegu, cocktails in hand, the members of the Legislative Council must have been happy as they watched Rangoon throw off its frontier-town look and assume its place alongside the other British possessions in Asia as a fully functioning trading hub. Burma was booming, with oil, minerals and teak in demand alongside rice and, by the 1920s, Rangoon had reached its colonial apotheosis, as luxury hotels, department stores, cinemas and nightclubs sprang up.

  Ritchie Gardiner took his place at the Pegu bar in the late 1930s. His efficiency had been noted and, after ten years in the Taungoo forests, he was promoted and assigned to Macgregor’s Rangoon office. He made a brief trip back to Scotland to get married before returning with his new wife to a position as an assistant director of the company. In 1937 he joined the Rangoon government as Macgregor’s representative on the Legislative Council.

  Gardiner was in some ways an atypical Pegu clubman. He spoke Burmese and maintained friendships with selected locals, including Ba Maw, a lawyer and politician who was jailed by the British and again by the generals in the junta era. He understood, too, that the metropolitan hothouse that was Rangoon did not reflect the reality of life in wider Burma. But Gardiner was no radical: he had a strong sense of duty and he knew his place within the colonial system. Unlike Orwell, his experiences in provincial Burma had not turned him into a fervent anti-imperialist.

  His photograph album from this period reveals how privileged life at the top table in Rangoon was: formal garden parties at the governor’s mansion, with guests in morning coats, long dresses, uniforms and extravagant hats, smiling servants clutching Gardiner’s young children on the manicured lawn of their house in Golden Valley, the table outside set for afternoon tea. Groups of men with clipped moustaches and in khaki drill shorts hold shotguns on shooting expeditions, or stand by the shore of Inya Lake waiting to board boats.

  Even now in Yangon, there are still echoes of the social life Gardiner and his contemporaries enjoyed. The bar at the sailing club on Inya Lake remains a popular spot with expats on Friday nights, the comparatively high prices keeping out most locals. And there is still a British club, part of the large compound that is the residence of the UK’s ambassador. Homesick Brits can sip English beer, or sit in the garden and watch a touring company put on an evening performance of Much Ado about Nothing, while fireflies dance above the heads of the actors.

  The Pegu was deliberately located halfway between the homes of the officials and most prosperous merchants in Golden Valley and the offices in downtown where they spent their days. Then as now, Golden Valley was Rangoon’s smartest neighbourhood. Straggling south down winding, tree-shrouded lanes that loop from the southern shoreline of Inya Lake towards the Shwedagon, Golden Valley feels almost rural in comparison to downtown.

  Behind high walls are the relics of the colonial era: teak and brick houses with gothic-style turrets, or mock-Tudor facings, and long balconies. Some are still private homes, others are government or United Nations offices, embassies and company headquarters. Almost all are surrounded by sizeable, well-tended gardens which explode in reds and yellows when the flowers bloom and are guarded by palm, mango and rain trees.

  Other houses are less aesthetically pleasing. They are painted white or bright pastel colours, with the grandest employing much marble and glass, and are fronted by columns in faux-Palladian fashion. These are the latest additions to Golden Valley, dating from the 1980s onwards, and built in the same unabashedly opulent style that characterises the homes of the newly rich across Southeast Asia and China.

  Golden Valley is just as rarefied as it was in colonial times, even if Yangon’s current elite no longer congregate in places like the Pegu. Instead, they meet in restaurants, or bars and nightclubs where western dance music is the soundtrack and ordering a bottle of whisky is a prerequisite of entry. But it is a society as clubbish as the one epitomised by the Pegu.

  Like almost everywhere in Asia, Burma is a country where connections are everything. A lucky few buck the trend occasionally and succeed without them, but when they do they are quickly absorbed into the circles where senior members of the Tatmadaw mix with the cronies – the businessmen who prospered under the junta – and politicians, their relationships cemented by marriages between their families.

  One night, Ar Kar explained to me how those personal and professional ties are the most important asset in Burma. ‘I grew up in a bubble,’ he said. ‘My whole family lived in one compound in Golden Valley and that is very different from the other areas of Yangon. It wasn’t about how rich you were, it was about how connected you were to the military and the government.’

  We were having dinner at the House of Memories, one of Ar Kar’s favourite Golden Valley spots. Over a hundred years old, the building is a kitsch blend of British architectural styles: part Scottish shooting lodge, part Surrey suburban mansion. Before it was a restaurant it served as the Second World War headquarters of the Burma Independence Army, the forerunner of the Tatmadaw, founded by Aung San, the father of Aung San Suu Kyi.

  Ar Kar was a friend of a friend, a broad-faced, solidly built, sentimental character in his mid-thirties, prone to crooning old Burmese love songs with the House of Memories resident pianist after a few drinks. He was honest, too, the only Yangonite I ever met who admitted to voting for the USDP, the party of the former junta, in the 2015 election won so convincingly by Daw Suu and the NLD. ‘Our MP is a friend of the family, and I think he did a good job for the constituency,’ said Ar Kar apologetically.

  During the 1980s his grandfather had been a senior government minister, until he was fired in the fallout from the 1988 pro-democracy protests as the junta remodelled itself in an unconvincing attempt to mollify its opponents. ‘I still remember when he lost his job, and the BMW and the driver had to go back to the government because it was their car,’ recalled Ar Kar. ‘My grandmother told my parents we would have to economise and that she was going to sell the VCR. Man, I hated that. I couldn’t watch cartoons anymore.’

  At that time the regime was a relatively austere beast, still doggedly pursuing what the junta called ‘The Burmese Way to Socialism’. Ar Kar insisted that his grandfather had been ‘straight’, and had not benefited financially from his ministerial position. But just as the British coveted Burma’s abundant mineral deposits, so many members of the junta, with the conniv
ance of the cronies, would prove equally adept at enriching themselves at the expense of the rest of the country.

  From the 1950s the Tatmadaw began to involve itself in commercial enterprises, starting with the purchase of the Rowe & Co. department store, the then Yangon equivalent of Harrods or Bloomingdale’s. But frontmen were still needed for the businesses and the cronies, often the relatives of senior army officers, performed that role. ‘People started cashing in on their connections after 1988. Maybe the heads of the junta were planning ahead for their retirement,’ said Ar Kar, a resigned smile on his face. Few people in Burma are surprised or shocked by the capacity of the country’s elite for corruption.

  When Than Shwe, a devious and intensely secretive general, took over as Burma’s leader in 1992, the graft reached new heights. ‘It was in the 1990s that shopping malls and condominiums started to appear in Yangon and Mandalay. Most of them were financed by illegal money,’ said Ar Kar. Than Shwe is still notorious in Burma for staging a supremely lavish wedding for his daughter in 2006. A leaked video of the ceremony revealed a bride bedecked in a diamond-encrusted necklace, while the value of the gifts she and her husband received was said to total £26 million.

  Crony and Tatmadaw-backed businesses are still involved in everything from airlines and banks to construction and insurance companies, real estate and TV stations. The army owns around two million acres of land, too. But some of the illicit cash surging into Yangon and Mandalay came from the borderlands, where heroin and methamphetamines are produced in the Golden Triangle and Burma’s jade deposits, the largest in the world, are mined.

  Jade and illegal narcotics are by far Burma’s most profitable industries, worth a combined £40-odd billion annually, according to NGOs and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Keen to benefit from the drug and jade trade, too, the generals laundered the profits in return for a cut. After 1988 private businessmen were offered an amnesty. As long as they paid a 25 per cent ‘tax’ on their assets, no matter how they were gained, they could invest in legitimate businesses, especially property.

  Just as the generals have escaped punishment for their crimes, so none of the cronies have been held to account for helping to prop up the junta financially and joining with it in exploiting Burma’s resources for their own gain. Some were subject to international sanctions, but those were swiftly lifted in the euphoria that followed the 2015 election.

  Nor is there much appetite in Burma to see them hauled up in court. ‘There’s a different level of hatred for the cronies than there is for the generals,’ explained Ar Kar. ‘It’s a basic Buddhist tenet that if you’re making money, you must have done something good. It’s a reward for what you have done in your past lives. So on that level the cronies are not entirely hated, even if they are not exactly role models.’

  Members of the Pegu would have been surprised at the entrepreneurial skills of the cronies. It was a British axiom that the Burmese were too lazy to compete for jobs with the Indian immigrants and too easy-going to have a chance in business against the Chinese. That view persisted until the end of the colonial era. In the 1940s Sir Arthur Bruce, an adviser to the then governor, spoke for many officials when he said ‘The Burman was a happy-go-lucky sort of chap, the Irishman of the east, free with his smiles.’

  Ne Win, the architect of the 1962 coup, would use similar arguments to justify military rule twenty years later. Ne Win claimed that democracy couldn’t work in Burma, that people weren’t prepared to work hard enough and needed to learn discipline. The generals were already imitating the way the British had squashed rebellions. Later, they would prove just as determined to line their pockets as the colonists had been. Now, they were even endorsing the British stereotype of their own people.

  Opposition to Ne Win’s coup started almost immediately, just as resistance to the British takeover of Burma began as soon as King Thibaw was bundled onto a boat to India. In a neat twist of history it would begin on the campus of Rangoon University, a few minutes’ journey from Golden Valley, where Ne Win himself had studied in the 1930s and the campaign for Burma’s independence had taken shape.

  As for the Pegu Club, that has become just another money-making scheme for the Tatmadaw. On my last visit, there were security guards at the gate and I was turned away. Puzzled, I walked around the corner to find Tun Tun, the son of a retired soldier who I’d first met living in the Pegu with the rest of his family. As usual, he was manning his betel-nut stand, where he wraps the narcotic in leaves and lime from six in the morning to ten at night, seven days a week.

  ‘You can’t go in,’ Tun Tun told me. ‘The club has been leased by a Japanese company. They want to make it into a hotel. All the families had to move out. We’re living near the airport now.’ I thought there was a certain symmetry to the Pegu being Japanese-run once more, just as it had been in the Second World War. But Tun Tun didn’t see it that way. ‘I miss living here,’ he said. ‘It was my home for fourteen years.’

  3

  Rangoon Revolutionaries

  Yangon University was hushed to the point that the birds in the giant Ceylon ironwood trees dotted around the tidy lawns of the campus were making more noise than the few humans visible. Undergraduates had been banned from attending the university in 1996 after a series of demonstrations against the junta. It was yet another display of the university’s appetite for protest, a militant tendency which dates back to 1920 when the institution was founded as Rangoon University.

  Now only a few hundred postgraduates were allowed to study at Burma’s premier university, once regarded as the best in Southeast Asia. Even so, I found it bewildering that such a proudly seditious seat of learning could be so sleepy, especially given what was happening outside the campus. This was March 2012, sixteen months after Aung San Suu Kyi had been released from house arrest. By-elections were due and she and other members of the NLD were being permitted to stand for parliament for the first time since 1990.

  I had flown in from a still cold Beijing to cover the story. Yangon was oppressively hot and its residents appeared to be both dazed and on edge. It was as if people couldn’t believe what was happening and were wondering if it was just another performance, a yokhte pwe, or puppet show, being put on for the benefit of the outside world.

  When I told the taxi driver who dropped me at the university that I was here in search of Min Ko Naing, he reached into his wallet and handed me an old banknote for one kyat, pronounced ‘chat’, the Burmese currency. It was a pre-1988 note, no longer legal tender, issued by the former People’s Bank of Burma. Staring out from the centre of it was the face of Aung San: Aung San Suu Kyi’s father and a near-deity in Burma for spearheading the drive for independence in the 1930s and 1940s. ‘Keep it. It is good luck,’ said the driver.

  It was an entirely appropriate gift. Min Ko Naing had been one of the leaders of the 1988 pro-democracy uprising, which was inspired by anger over Burma’s dire financial situation. He had also facilitated Aung San Suu Kyi’s entry into politics, introducing her to a crowd of half a million people gathered at the Shwedagon at the height of the protests. And one of the many consequences of the turmoil of 1988, and the threat it had posed to the generals, was that Burma’s banknotes were redesigned and Aung San’s image removed from the currency.

  Born in Mon State in southern Burma in 1962, the year of the coup that marked the start of the junta era, Min Ko Naing was originally named Paw Oo Tun, after a famed Burmese scholar and royal adviser from the twelfth century ce. But by the time of the 1988 demonstrations he had adopted his much more ominous new name, which means the ‘slayer or conqueror of kings’.

  He had entered Yangon University in 1985 as a first-year zoology student. At that time it was known as Rangoon Arts and Science University, always abbreviated to ‘RASU’ by its alumni and pronounced ‘ra-su’. Three years later Min Ko Naing was the best known of the student protestors, leading rallies of thousands of people both on the RASU campus and the streets of Yangon.

&nb
sp; His activism was a direct result of decades of economic illiteracy by the junta as much as it was about the desire for democracy. In 1988 resources-rich Burma was near-bankrupt and had just been downgraded by the United Nations to ‘Least Developed Nation’ status. The kyat had been devalued twice in three years, wiping out precious savings used, among other things, to pay university tuition fees. With the kyat almost useless, rice became a substitute currency and food and commodity prices soared.

  Discontent spread, as underground dissident groups formed across the country. But the anger over military rule was most obvious on the campuses of Yangon’s universities. The generals reacted by closing the colleges. Protests continued, though, until on 8 August 1988, a date chosen for its auspicious ‘8888’ number sequence, a general strike paralysed Burma, as schools, factories, farms and government offices all stopped working.

  Just over two weeks later, Min Ko Naing introduced Aung San Suu Kyi to a huge audience in front of the Shwedagon. It was her political debut, and it is hard to imagine a more spectacular or dramatic one. In her speech, she described the 1988 uprising as ‘the second struggle for independence’. Daw Suu didn’t explicitly name the Tatmadaw, but it was clear to everyone that she was comparing the generals to the British colonists of forty years before.

  Choosing Aung San Suu Kyi to address such a large crowd was both an obvious and inspired decision. Her father, Aung San, is a bigger name in Burma than she is. From the late 1930s he led the campaign to get the British out of Burma, and was de facto prime minister when he was assassinated six months before the country became independent. He founded the Tatmadaw, too, and pictures and statues of him are everywhere.

  Aung San was a difficult man. One memoir describes him as ‘an impenetrably private and taciturn person’. He could be curt and rude. In January 1946 he was addressing his own rally at the Shwedagon when the microphone failed. Aung San turned to the monks sitting behind him and shouted, ‘Sauk than ma kya bu’, or ‘Fucking useless’. He wasn’t shy about berating his fellow Burmese for being complacent and idle, warning them that they needed to work harder than ever to rebuild their country after the ravages of the Second World War.