A Savage Dreamland

by David Eimer

  By the 1950s the shanties were seen as disfiguring Yangon’s aesthetic and 165,000 squatters were summarily moved to new townships in the east and north of the city by the army. In 1989 more squatters were ousted from Yangon, punishment for their support of the pro-democracy protests of the previous year. A decade later, the junta started offering free homes to shanty dwellers willing to relocate to villages in northern Rakhine State, an effort to boost Buddhist numbers in a region where Rohingya Muslims made up the majority of the population.

  Now, it is the NLD who want the shanties gone, viewing them as incubators for both crime and discontent with the government. Ambitious plans have been announced to create eight extra townships in Yangon to cope with the expected influx of people from rural areas over the next two decades, although there is no guarantee that they will be provided with affordable homes. It is a development which, if it happens, will result in Yangon expanding even further west, almost to the point where the Delta begins.

  Some of the squatters have been radicalised by their experiences of living and working in Hlaing Tharyar. The area has become the centre of Burma’s fledgling trade union movement. Banned, unsurprisingly, by the generals, unions only became legal in Burma in 2012. Hlaing Tharyar is now the site of frequent demonstrations, sometimes of ten thousand people or more, protesting against poor conditions, unpaid overtime and the arbitrary sacking of workers.

  Most of the factories prefer to employ women aged between eighteen and twenty-five, partly because they used to be able to pay them less than men. These days, though, the workers are represented by shop stewards, who are typically women of the same age who left school in their early teens and moved to Yangon from the Delta or other rural regions. Men in the area tend to look for jobs on building sites, road construction crews, or as porters in the giant fish market Thida and I passed on the way to Hlaing Tharyar.

  U Hla Myint is sixty, an old man in Burma where the life expectancy for males is just sixty-four. Unfit for hard physical labour, his youngest daughter supports him and his wife by working in one of the garment factories, despite being only sixteen, two years below the legal age for such work. She earns 4,800 kyat a day (£2.70), the official minimum daily wage in Burma. ‘I rented an identity card from an eighteen-year-old neighbour so she could show it to the factory to get the job. I don’t think the factory cares and we need the money,’ said U Hla Myint.

  Security guards man the gates of the factories and their owners don’t welcome curious foreign visitors, so I had no chance of getting inside one of them. But Thida knew a woman in the area who ran a small independent garment workshop. Hundreds of such sweatshops supplement the factories in Hlaing Tharyar. On the other side of the highway to the factory zone, it consisted of two semi-open-air, one-storey buildings housing thirty-odd women operating sewing machines, cutting fabric or pressing the finished clothes.

  ‘We make whatever the customers want: htamein, longyi, shirts, dresses, all for the local market,’ said the owner, a brisk woman in her fifties with dandruff-flecked short hair. ‘But it’s hard. Sometimes, it’s a struggle to pay the salaries. The workers want higher pay, but they don’t want to work hard. Often, we have a set delivery date from the customers and if we don’t make it, we don’t get paid all the money. The young people are lazy.’

  Retaining workers is becoming increasingly difficult in Hlaing Tharyar. ‘There are so many workshops and factories now, so the workers move around all the time looking for more money,’ said the boss. ‘Girls who can sew get 120,000 kyat [£63] per month, other workers get 70,000–80,000 kyat [£37–£42]. They work eight in the morning to six at night, six days a week. The girls have to be eighteen and I check their identity cards. But often they say they don’t have one or that they’ve lost it. So many excuses.’

  Looking around the workshop it was clear that while the women at the sewing machines were over eighteen, many of the others weren’t even close to that age. Thida and I approached three girls sitting at a table piled high with cheap-looking cotton dresses. I said ‘Hello’ and they started giggling, a sure sign in Burma that they were embarrassed. ‘They probably haven’t spoken to a foreigner before,’ said Thida.

  Khine Hmin Wai was the youngest, just thirteen. She sat cross-legged on a plastic stool in pyjama bottoms and a grimy white t-shirt, her long hair plaited down her back and thanaka on her cheeks, cutting loose threads off the clothes and sometimes sewing on buttons. ‘It’s an easy job and not tiring,’ she said. I asked her if she’d rather be at school but Khine Hmin Wai was happier working. ‘I didn’t like school. I went until I was eight. I don’t miss it. My parents couldn’t afford for me to go anyway, they needed me to work. But I can read and write.’

  From Bogale, the same township as U Hla Myint, her family had come to Hlaing Tharyar four years ago. ‘We didn’t have our own farm. My parents worked on other people’s farms, or on construction sites. Now, me, my sister and brother work to support them. My sister is a sewer here and my brother works at the big market. I like Yangon more than Bogale. There are no jobs in Bogale.’

  Yadana Lwin, whose pale oval face and delicate features made her stand out from the other girls, looked as young as Khine Hmin Wai but said she was sixteen. Her father worked at the market, too. She had been born in Hlaing Tharyar and it was the only place she had ever known. ‘I want to be a dressmaker like my older sister,’ she said.

  May Thin Zar was from a village near Pathein, the largest town in the Delta. Her family had moved to Hlaing Tharyar when she was nine. She was fifteen now, darker and livelier than the others with her thick hair in a pink bow. Had the boss asked to see her identity card before hiring her? ‘No,’ she replied. ‘I don’t have one anyway. I’d have to go back to my village to get one and I’d miss work. I’d have to pay for it too. It cost my sister 50,000 kyat [£26.50] when she applied for one.’

  She had been employed in a nearby food market before coming to the workshop. ‘My job was to put salads into bags. It was boring. Here, I can learn how to sew,’ she said. Alone out of the three May Thin Zar missed education and had ambitions beyond Hlaing Tharyar’s factories and workshops. ‘I’d like to have stayed at school, but my parents couldn’t afford it. I want to be a policewoman. I like the idea of catching thieves,’ she said with a cheeky grin.

  All three lived close to the workshop and we accompanied Yadana Lwin as she returned to her home during the lunch break. I wondered what she normally ate each day. ‘Bread in the morning and a fish curry at lunchtime. I don’t have rice or meat in the evening. Maybe some instant noodles,’ she told me, as we turned onto a narrow dust track lined on both sides with shanties and strewn with discarded food packaging and plastic bags. I thought we should buy her lunch. ‘Where?’ said Thida. ‘There are no restaurants here.’

  Halfway down the track Yadana Lwin stopped outside two one-room bamboo shacks. ‘Ten of us live here, my uncle and his children too,’ she said. Her mother was sitting under an awning at the front of one of the huts, cooking cubes of tofu which she sold in batches for a few hundred kyat. Inside the hut, men were playing cards and drinking local whisky. Yadana Lwin’s mum had the same oval face as her daughter, but her teeth were stained red from betel nut and she looked older than her age of thirty-six. ‘I’ve been here twenty years,’ she said.

  Prior to that, the family lived in a shanty settlement in Sanchaung, a now fashionable area north-west of Yangon’s downtown. ‘The government wanted to build a bridge, so we had to move. We lived in a house across from this one at first. That’s where my daughter was born.’ Now there were rumours that all the shacks in the area would be demolished to make space for more factories. ‘We’ll find out soon,’ she said. I asked her what she would do if they had to leave. ‘I don’t know,’ she replied, and went back to frying tofu.

  5

  Crime and Punishment

  The main cell at Hlaing Tharyar’s police station was like something out of a western. Thick metal bars stretched vertically a
cross a wide corridor, a gate in the middle, secured with a heavy chain and padlock, providing access. Behind the bars were around thirty men in t-shirts, singlets and longyi squatting on the floor or sitting against the concrete walls at the back and sides of the cell. Some were obviously drunk.

  ‘Lots of visitors today,’ joked the policeman guarding the gate. ‘They’re mostly in for fighting.’ Given the archaic nature of his lock-up, I thought he should have a cowboy hat on his head and a sheriff’s star on his chest. Instead, he was in the grey shirt and blue trousers that is the uniform of Burma’s police. Nor did he have a revolver strapped to one of his legs. ‘We rarely have to carry or use our guns. Hardly any of the criminals here have them. If they use a weapon, it’s almost always a knife,’ he told me.

  A few miles past the factory zone, set back from the main road that leads to the Delta, the Hlaing Tharyar police station is a typical Burmese government building. It is ramshackle and run-down, with pale green paint peeling off its walls, dirty white-tiled floors – concrete in the three cells – plastic chairs for staff and visitors and a distinct lack of modern technology. I spied only a couple of computers but an awful lot of paperwork.

  Files were stacked a foot high on U Thein Naing’s desk. ‘There’s no time to be bored in Hlaing Tharyar,’ he said cheerfully. ‘This is the busiest police station in Yangon. We have the most crime because the area is very crowded: there are too many people here, most of them from the Delta. We need more police really.’ About 230 officers patrol an area that is home to 700,000 people, based out of the station we were in and twelve smaller outposts spread around the township.

  I was here to discover if the media’s portrayal of Hlaing Tharyar as the unofficial headquarters of the Yangon underworld is true. For the newspapers, the shanty settlements are the gang-infested haunts of delinquents who terrorise their neighbours and roam far and wide across the city robbing, raping and murdering as they go. In that narrative it is the squatters, rather than native Yangonites, who are responsible for the crime wave that many locals believe Yangon has been experiencing ever since the junta stepped down.

  My initial request to accompany the police for a day and a night as they patrolled the township had been refused. I was told that my safety could not be guaranteed. And I was a foreigner. But U Thein Naing, the senior detective on the Hlaing Tharyar force, had agreed to meet me to discuss the policing and crime issues he and his fellow officers faced.

  Gap-toothed, with a lined face, close-cropped greying hair and glasses perched on the end of his nose, U Thein Naing’s plain-clothes outfit consisted of a white shirt and black trousers. He has been a policeman for thirty-five of his fifty-five years, stationed first in Mandalay before being posted to Yangon ten years ago. With her instinctive distrust of male authority, Thida was immediately suspicious of him. ‘He drinks. Look at his hands shaking,’ she muttered.

  Boozer or not, I thought U Thein Naing was genial enough for a big-city copper. He sprang his first surprise by telling me that detectives aren’t allowed to detain criminals in Burma. ‘You have to be in uniform to arrest people, so we can only do surveillance.’ Like most law enforcement in Asia, though, the police in Burma are essentially a reactive force: crimes happen and then they try and solve them. Far less time is spent preventing illegal activity from occurring in the first place.

  Much crime in Asia is prompted by drug abuse, but not in Hlaing Tharyar. ‘People here can’t really afford to buy drugs. Some people take “WY” but heroin is very rare,’ said U Thein Naing. ‘WY’ is the local name for yaba, a cheap methamphetamine pill found all across Asia, but manufactured mostly in the frontier areas of Shan State in eastern Burma. The initials ‘WY’, said to stand for ‘World’s Yours’, are sometimes stamped on the pills.

  Instead, it is gambling that is the cause of most wrongdoing in Hlaing Tharyar. ‘Gambling, whether cards, dice or betting on the lottery numbers, is the big issue. People gamble and lose money and then they either have to borrow or steal money to live. That’s when the problems start,’ said U Thein Naing. ‘There are secret gambling clubs all over the shanty areas. If you see any, let me know.’

  U Thein Naing was unusually frank for a Burmese official in asserting that it is poverty which is at the root of almost all common crime in the township. ‘The people are poor and worried about money all the time. They drink, get angry and confused and fights happen, even if there is no real reason for them. People get very angry here. They’re under so much pressure, always wondering if they have enough money to feed their families. We detain them only if the fight involves weapons or someone gets badly hurt.’

  Khin Zaw Lwin, a 25-year-old market porter, had already told me how the shanty settlements become more menacing at night, when the female factory workers scurry back to the relative safety of their shacks and the men wind down with alcohol after a day spent labouring. ‘There’s a lot of drinking and a lot of fighting,’ he said. ‘Mostly we drink local spirit because it’s cheaper than beer or whisky. A small bottle costs 400 kyat [20p].’

  More serious offences occur as well. ‘We get quite a lot of murders. There’s been a couple this month, as well as a few rapes,’ said U Thein Naing in the offhand, dispassionate tone of the veteran policeman. There were around 200 murders and 270 rapes in Yangon in 2017, although sexual violence remains hugely under-reported in Burma, a consequence largely of the stigma associated with being a victim of it.

  Nationwide, the number of murders has increased by over 40 per cent since the junta stepped down. With the notable exception of the Philippines, Burma’s homicide rate per capita is higher than most other countries in Southeast Asia, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. And those statistics do not include the casualties of the country’s continuing civil wars.

  Present-day figures, though, pale into insignificance compared to the murder rate in the colonial era and the period immediately after independence. Once the British took control, the constraints of traditional Burmese society began to loosen as the centuries-old system of indirect rule by local authority figures was replaced abruptly by direct rule from foreigners and their subordinates. Arbitration as a means of settling disputes was replaced by an alien legal system. The bonds tying people to the already vague idea of the state in Burma frayed quickly.

  Most grew poorer, too, as new taxes were introduced and people in the Delta lost their land. Many people in lower Burma ended up living in rural slums not dissimilar to the shanty settlements of Hlaing Tharyar. Nor were there jobs for the locals in Yangon and the other cities, as Indian and Chinese immigrants dominated the urban labour market.

  What resulted was a rapid rise in crime. Between 1886 and 1930, the already high murder rate more than doubled and robbery rates tripled. When Ritchie Gardiner arrived in Taungoo in 1926 he was astonished to be told that Burma had the highest murder rate per capita in the world. In one district of lower Burma alone, home to half a million people, there were eighty-seven murders in 1927, the same number as there were in Chicago that year, a city of over two million people at the time and in the grip of an Al Capone-inspired gang war.

  Dacoity was an especial problem. ‘Dacoit’ is a Hindi word meaning a member of an armed gang of robbers. Such bands were present in Burma long before the British arrived. The teak stockade that surrounded Yangon in King Alaungpaya’s time was there to keep out villains as much as tigers. Vincentius Sangermano, an Italian Catholic priest who lived in Yangon between 1783 and 1808, wrote of how, ‘Our ears are constantly assailed with the intelligence of robberies and murders.’

  During the colonial period, though, dacoity was endemic in Burma. The robbery rate was almost four times higher than India’s, and any armed band of five or more people was automatically classified as a dacoit gang. Often shot on the spot when captured, dacoits were subject to harsher penalties than individual armed robbers. But that didn’t dissuade them. Armed with the dah, the Burmese equivalent of the machete, spears and the odd home-ma
de or stolen gun, dacoits were still plaguing rural Burma long after the Second World War.

  In part their presence reflected how little real control the British exerted beyond Yangon, Mandalay and the major towns, for all the new laws they introduced. Colonial rule over all Burma lasted for sixty-two years, only three years longer than the time it had taken to conquer the country. But huge swathes of Burma, in the east, west and north especially, were governed by a smattering of officials whose main preoccupation was collecting taxes. Even in lower Burma, the lack of adequate roads made governance difficult.

  Many Burmese had their first encounter with the colonial state in a police station, as Britain responded to the country becoming the crime capital of their empire by locking up the locals. Insein Prison, the largest jail in the empire, was built in the far north of Yangon. Like almost all of the prisons constructed in the colonial era, Insein, pronounced ‘insane’, is still in use today: criminals convicted in Hlaing Tharyar are sent there. It has always housed political prisoners as well. Aung San Suu Kyi was jailed there on three separate occasions.

  Sixteen thousand inmates were occupying Burma’s jails by 1910. Yet the crime wave continued and the prison population kept on increasing. By the time George Orwell was posted to Insein Township in 1925 as an assistant district superintendent the British were imprisoning 20,000 Burmese annually. Ritchie Gardiner’s memoir describes the frequent sight of shackled prisoners from Taungoo’s jail being employed as labourers in the town.

  Floggings were increasingly used in an attempt to deter crime, too. The 1909 Whipping Act allowed for thirty to fifty strokes to be laid on the backs of the unfortunate recipients. The law was only repealed by Burma’s parliament in 2014. Executions became more common as well. There were 113 hangings in 1923. Four years later, the number had jumped to 191. Orwell’s 1931 essay ‘A Hanging’ offers a vivid description of an execution he witnessed, with the shaken officials downing whisky at eight in the morning to steady their nerves after it was over.