by David Eimer
For Thida, who was coming along to translate, it was a route she knew well. The road to Hlaing Tharyar carries on to the Ayeyarwady Delta, where Thida lived until she was fourteen. Our taxi driver, a native Yangonite, was less impressed at having to haul us out to the city’s western extremities. He wasn’t shy about offering his jaundiced opinion of our destination. ‘It’s not just Yangon people who think Hlaing Tharyar is a bad area,’ he said. ‘People all around the country know it because so many people from different regions have come there to live.’
Finding a ride to the township is difficult at night. Enough taxi drivers have been robbed by their fares on evening trips to Hlaing Tharyar to make them wary about travelling there after dark. Just as Golden Valley is associated with wealth, so Hlaing Tharyar is a byword for crime and deprivation. The most populous township in Burma, and one of the largest, it is also home to the biggest shanty town in the country. Its residents are routinely blamed by the media and other Yangonites for the rise in crime across the city in recent years.
Around half of the 700,000-odd people in Hlaing Tharyar live in the shanties, known as kwetthis in Burmese, literally a new lot of land, without electricity or running water. Most are relatively recent arrivals to Yangon – ‘squatters’ in the parlance of officials. They are drawn to the fringes of the big city by the prospect of jobs in the many garment and light industry factories that have opened in Hlaing Tharyar since the junta ended its rule.
As we crossed the bridge, pickup trucks and buses were heading in the opposite direction with their cargoes of people from Hlaing Tharyar bound for work elsewhere in Yangon. On the other side of the river we bounced along a potholed road lined with scrubby trees, passing a large Tatmadaw base – one of a number that strategically encircle Yangon – and FMI City, an incongruous gated compound of smart houses. They are the homes of businessmen from South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and China, the owners and operators of some of Hlaing Tharyar’s 650 or so factories.
Only then did the first shanties come into view. A line of flimsy bamboo huts, some roofed with tarpaulins, straggled along the left-hand side of the road, resting on spindly stilts over pools of stagnant water that had collected in the deep ditch that marked the boundary of the highway. Looming above the huts in the near distance were the factories, a cluster of grey and blue box-like buildings running back as far as the eye can see, surrounded by high concrete walls topped with barbed wire.
Hlaing Tharyar’s setting seemed almost feudal once we turned off the main road onto the broken-up lanes that intersect the industrial zone. The factories and their walls came together to form a giant commercial castle, while the shanty homes that sat on every available inch of land around them were the equivalent of a village taking root in the lee of a medieval fortress, hoping for protection in times of trouble. The shanty dwellers weren’t paying a tithe, or tilling the land of their masters; they manned assembly lines and sewing machines instead.
Abandoning the taxi, we set off on foot. Trishaw drivers touting for customers outside a tented tea shop pointed us in the direction of the lane where the woman we were planning to meet lived. Hlaing Tharyar is hardly on the Yangon tourist trail and sees few foreigners, but as usual it was Thida who drew the most stares as we passed young women walking arm in arm in crocodile formation, their tiffin boxes containing their lunch in one hand, on their way to work.
Short, snub-nosed and dark-skinned, Thida looks like many women from the Ayeyarwady Delta, a region of rice farmers and fishing folk who spend their days working under a harsh sun. But Thida has rejected traditional Burmese female garb in the belief that the tight-fitting htamein is a male conspiracy designed to keep women subservient. ‘When I wear a htamein I feel like I am in hell,’ she told me at one of our first meetings. ‘You can’t even run in them. A boy can tuck up his longyi and run, but a girl can’t do that.’
Instead, Thida wears western clothes, jeans or dresses that daringly for Burma rise above her knees, which show off her slim figure to its best advantage. She scorns the ponytail favoured by most Burmese women in favour of styled hair that curls around her neck, while a long fringe obscures her forehead. And rather than the thanaka that every second woman in Burma smears across their cheeks, Thida caps off her look with frequently applied tabasco-red lipstick.
Thida’s rebellious nature extends to her private and spiritual life. She married her first boyfriend secretly at eighteen, and then divorced him after graduating from university, again without telling her parents. Thida is dismissive of some of Buddhism’s most treasured tenets, too. ‘Reincarnation is bad for people, it makes them selfish,’ she insisted. ‘They do good works only because they think they have to so that their next life isn’t a bad one.’ Despite her mother urging her to spend more time at the temple, or risk returning as an insect in her next existence, Thida remains a reluctant Buddhist.
Beginning her day at 5 a.m. by speed-walking for miles through Yangon’s darkened streets, Thida spends the daylight hours teaching English to the offspring of Yangon’s new middle classes, whose parents are already planning to send them to college overseas. It is a successful business, and I was lucky that she enjoyed the opportunity to escape her spoiled charges every so often and do some translating for me.
I was anticipating also that Thida’s roots in Mawlamyinegyun, a town in the far south of the Ayeyarwady Delta, would be an asset in Hlaing Tharyar, because the majority of the shanty residents hail originally from the Delta. Soused by the Ayeyarwady River and its many tributaries and flanked by the Andaman Sea to the south and the Bay of Bengal in the west, the Delta is supremely fertile: the reason why so many people from the more arid lands of upper Burma migrated there in the colonial era to open up rice farms.
Today, the Delta has an official population of over six million, making it the most populated region of Burma, even if Yangon has more residents now. It remains the principal rice-growing area, with around 600,000 hectares given over to the cultivation of the country’s staple crop. The Delta is also Burma’s main source of fish and marine products. People across lower Burma are addicted to ngapi, a fermented fish or shrimp paste that features as a condiment for any meal, or can be used in soups and salads, and the Delta is its spiritual home.
Burma was the world’s largest rice exporter before the Second World War, but decades of economic decline and mismanagement since then has made rice farming far less profitable. Now it is Burma’s neighbours, India and Thailand, who dominate the global rice trade and even Italy sells more rice overseas than Burma does. Commercial fish farms have swallowed up smallholdings, too, so there is far less land for people to work.
Compounding that fall in fortune was the devastating impact of Cyclone Nargis on the Delta, the worst natural disaster in Burma’s recorded history. Nargis is the Urdu word for a daffodil, but there was nothing spring-like about the weather that Nargis brought when it made landfall in the Delta on 2 May 2008. Generating wind speeds of 135 miles an hour as it spiralled across the Bay of Bengal, Nargis sent two-storey-high storm surges rolling thirty miles inland across the rice paddies.
There were no hills to escape to for the millions in Nargis’s path; the Delta is the lowest lying region in all Burma. The towns and villages closest to the coast and on the banks of the waterways that cut through the Delta suffered the worst, with vast numbers of people swept away in flash floods. Screaming winds splintered wooden homes and sent rusty metal roofs slicing through the air, causing hideous injuries to anyone in their way. Most of those who survived did so by clinging for hours on end to trees bent almost double in the wind, their clothes ripped from their bodies.
No one knows how many people died as a result of Nargis, one of the deadliest cyclones of all time. The official toll of 138,000 dead and missing is widely believed to be an underestimate, with some sources alleging a figure three times higher. But everyone in Burma remembers the response, or lack of it, from the generals. Nargis caused more destruction to the Delta than it suffered
in the Second World War, with almost all buildings in the region damaged or destroyed. Yet film footage recorded clandestinely in the worst-hit areas days after the cyclone shows hardly a soldier or government official in sight.
Worse still, and in a move unprecedented in the history of global disasters, the junta refused all offers of international help at first, whether from individual countries or the United Nations and aid agencies. Planes loaded with relief supplies sat backed up on the runways of Bangkok, Dhaka and Dubai for almost a week waiting for permission to land in Yangon. Ships from navies around the world floated fruitlessly off the coast of the Delta, unable to send in helicopters with desperately needed medical teams.
Those aircraft carriers and destroyers congregating in the Andaman Sea probably played a large part in causing the regime to act as if nothing had happened, despite the generals being warned in advance by the Indian government that Nargis was a nightmare heading their way. Than Shwe, the then leader of the junta, is thought to have believed that the foreign ships were there not to provide assistance to the people of the Delta, but to invade Burma and end the decades of military misrule.
It was just eight months since the 2007 Saffron Revolution protests, so the junta was already on edge. But while the generals closed their eyes to the survivors huddling naked in the open without food, water, shelter or medical help, ordinary people started to organise makeshift convoys to the Delta with whatever supplies they could muster. Accompanying them were a few intrepid film-makers who risked imprisonment for making and distributing samizdat DVDs, which revealed how Nargis’s survivors had been abandoned by the authorities.
If leaving the residents of the Delta to starve wasn’t bad enough, the regime also refused to let their plight delay a nationwide referendum on its planned amendments to the constitution. Eight days after Nargis hit, the referendum went ahead. Some survivors were turfed out of the schools they were sheltering in so they could be used as polling stations. Others were threatened with being forcibly returned to their devastated villages if they voted against approving the revised constitution.
Widespread voter fraud occurred across the country, with officials paying people to vote yes, or making them endorse already completed ballot forms. Many people were simply too scared, or in such a state of shock post-Nargis, to vote no. But some did refuse to back the new constitution. ‘A lot of people who voted in Yangon drew dead people on the ballot papers, or defaced them with swear words,’ one of the film-makers who travelled to the Delta after Nargis told me.
That made no difference to the result, which was a foregone conclusion anyway. Twenty days after Nargis, the junta announced that the revised constitution had been approved by over 90 per cent of Burma’s voters. The new amendments included a clause barring anyone married to a foreigner or with foreign children from the presidency, and one reserving a quarter of all seats in parliament for Tatmadaw officers. The generals had got their way. Aung San Suu Kyi would never be president and the military would hold the balance of political power for the foreseeable future.
Nargis and its aftermath is the single most shameful episode in the junta’s inglorious history. It was a stunning display of ruthlessness and incompetence, a governance model that the generals made their own and one which, sadly, Aung San Suu Kyi’s administration has yet to disown. Above all, it revealed to everyone in Burma just how little their rulers cared about them, if they didn’t know it already.
Not even the Chinese Communist Party, the only real allies of the regime and hardly advocates of liberal democracy, could condone the junta’s response to Nargis. Indeed, ten days after the cyclone slammed into the Delta, China demonstrated how a government should respond to a natural disaster, after a powerful earthquake struck a mountainous region of Sichuan Province in western China.
More than 69,000 people died, 370,000-plus were injured and almost five million left homeless. Ninety minutes after the ’quake, China’s prime minister was on a plane to the affected area. Four days later I reached Beichuan, a city close to the earthquake’s epicentre that had been home to 160,000 people, to report on the relief operation. I was staggered by the sheer scale of the catastrophe. Beichuan looked as if it had been subjected to a vengeful fury straight out of the Old Testament.
Boulders the size of houses had crashed down from the surrounding hillsides, punching giant holes in buildings, roads and bridges and flattening cars. Most of Beichuan had been reduced to a heap of twisted metal and crushed masonry under which lay the bodies of its former residents. The sickly sweet smell of death was so pervasive it had desensitised the noses of the sniffer dogs working with the rescue teams, rendering the animals useless.
Already, though, there were 130,000 troops toiling in the earthquake zone and the Chinese were welcoming help from across the world. There was the deeply strange sight of United States Air Force transport planes parked at Chengdu’s airport. And the government had relaxed its usual restrictions on the foreign media, so I found myself standing twenty metres away from China’s then president, Hu Jintao, as he toured Beichuan.
At the same time in Burma, two weeks after Nargis’s apocalyptic arrival, Than Shwe acknowledged finally the enormity of the cyclone’s impact. The generals started allowing aid into the country, but it had to be handed over to the Tatmadaw for distribution. They stole some of it for themselves. Those Nargis victims who did receive overseas relief supplies were told they were a gift from the junta. If it hadn’t been for China setting such an immediate example of how to react to a natural calamity, it’s possible that no foreign aid would ever have reached the Delta.
Precious little was distributed in the end. A month after Nargis, the United Nations estimated that only around half of the almost 2.5 million people affected had received any aid or help, and that assistance was classified as ‘basic’. With their homes gone many survivors had nothing left to stay in the Delta for, and they started moving to Yangon and Hlaing Tharyar.
My contact in the township was one of the Nargis refugees. Htay Htay Myint lost her six-year-old son when the cyclone destroyed her village. ‘He was taken away in the flood,’ she told me as she squatted on her heels, washing up dishes. Like many Nargis victims, his body was never found and was probably swept out to the Andaman Sea, or else he decomposed in some unknown rice paddy or inlet alongside countless others.
His mother had little time or energy to mourn him properly. ‘My house collapsed and all my possessions were lost,’ she said in a flat, emotionless tone. ‘We had to stay in a monastery after that. The government gave us money for rice, but nothing to rebuild my house. We didn’t own land anyway, so my husband and I and our eldest son decided to come here.’
Her home, when Thida and I finally found it, is a one-room shack. Almost all the shanty dwellings are a similar size, and some house large families. Htay Htay Myint and her husband sleep on mats on the floor, cook outside on a wood fire and have to pay 100 kyat (5p) for every bucket of water they use. Such living conditions are standard for many people in rural areas across Burma, but this was Yangon, by far the most prosperous place in the country.
Diminutive with an amiable, determined face, Htay Htay Myint is forty and house-proud. Her shack was spotless: its wooden floor overlaid with a dusted plastic covering which we sat on, clothes hanging from nails and cooking utensils stacked neatly in a corner. Halfway up one of the walls was a small altar with flowers, incense and a picture of the Gautama Buddha.
Every day she takes it in turns with her husband to man a roadside stall selling cold drinks. ‘We make 3,000–4,000 kyat [£1.50–£2] a day at best. On a bad day it’s just 1,500 kyat [75p],’ said Htay Htay Myint. It is enough for them to eat, but not to pay the 40,000 kyat (£20) a month rent for their home. The days of squatters being able to put up their own huts in Hlaing Tharyar are long gone. Yangon’s council is much more rigorous about banning new shacks from being built, so some of the first arrivals to the area have become landlords, renting out the places they constru
cted years ago.
Having lived in a number of different shanties during their time in Hlaing Tharyar, Htay Htay Myint and her husband rely now on their surviving son and his wife to remit the rent each month. They left Hlaing Tharyar to work in a fish-canning factory in Thailand. ‘I don’t think it is fair that we have to pay so much to live here, but we have no choice,’ said Htay Htay Myint. Rents have risen everywhere in Yangon since the NLD’s 2015 election victory, even in the slums, an unwelcome democracy dividend.
Like every squatter, she and her husband face the prospect of being evicted without notice: ‘The government says our houses are all illegal and that this is their land. If they want to evict us, they can do it any time.’ U Hla Myint, Htay Htay Myint’s neighbour and no relation, can testify to that. ‘Our first house here was demolished by the government. They didn’t give us any warning, so we came to this street two years ago,’ he said.
A former fisherman from Bogale Township in the Delta, his arms covered in faded Buddhist tattoos, U Hla Myint had heard our conversation with Htay Htay Myint and walked into her home to join us. With the shanties separated from each other by thin bamboo walls, and often lacking front doors, there is no privacy in Hlaing Tharyar. Bogale was one of the areas worst hit by Nargis, but U Hla Myint and his family survived, only to lose their fishing grounds a year later when the local government sold them to a private company.
Even before Nargis and the economic decline of the Delta, shanty towns were nothing new in Yangon. Nor are they confined just to Hlaing Tharyar: smaller shanty settlements can be found elsewhere in the city, too. But these communities of displaced rural people have always been feared by whoever has governed Yangon, so there are constant efforts to eradicate them. It is a process that began during the colonial era. Then, the shanty towns were regarded by the British as potential recruiting grounds for Burma’s nationalists.