A Savage Dreamland

by David Eimer

  I had been to Chin before but only in the rainy season, when clouds descend low over the hills, creating a near-permanent white-out that can reduce visibility to a few metres. With most of Chin at well over a thousand metres above sea level, the locals shiver through the rains, which last longer there than anywhere else in the country. They don woolly hats, fleeces and even socks – a rare sight in Burma and still worn with flip-flops – and generally act as if they are in the Arctic. The endless drizzle reminded me of England in November.

  Travelling in Chin becomes a laborious process during the monsoon, as the dirt roads turn into a dark brown morass, studded with rocks flushed off the hillsides by the rains. The jammed jeeps and minivans serving as public transport lurch along at no more than ten miles an hour. Sometimes we all got out to push our vehicles to a point where the wheels could gain some traction. So bad are the roads that the Tatmadaw takes to patrolling on horseback during the rainy season.

  For Christmas I decided to go to northern Chin, the least-known area of the state. With no airport in Chin and no railway running even close, the gateway to the north is Kalaymyo, always abbreviated to Kalay, in neighbouring Sagaing Region. A low-rise town of mostly wooden houses, bisected by two main roads and surrounded by rice paddies, Kalay sprawls along a fertile valley, overlooked to its west by the foothills of the mountains that dominate Chin.

  The bus to Kalay departed Yangon at noon. All the other passengers were Chin people returning home for Christmas. In honour of its regular route the bus had a biblical name, ‘Solomon’, emblazoned across the top of the windscreen. The in-bus entertainment consisted of Christian music videos played on a loop and featuring an earnest Chin band fronted by a chubby girl who sang in a high, sweet voice. I couldn’t wait to get off when we pulled into Kalay twenty-odd hours later.

  Despite being in Sagaing Region, Kalay has a valid claim to being the true capital of Chinland, because its Chin population is more than double the 25,000 people who live in Hakha, the actual capital of Chin State. Hakha sits at almost 1,900 metres and is located on either side of a road that runs around the lower slopes of a mountain prone to devastating landslides in the rainy season.

  Thousands of residents were left homeless in 2015 after part of the mountain collapsed following torrential rain. So dangerous is Hakha’s location that geologists have recommended rebuilding the town in a more stable place. On my one visit at the tail end of the monsoon the sight and sound of rocks tumbling down the hillsides onto Hakha was all too frequent for my liking. I wasn’t surprised so many Chin have moved to Kalay. At least you can live there without the fear of being brained by a random boulder.

  Returning to Kalay after trips to Chin is always a pleasure, as dull and nondescript as the town is. It is a chance to be reacquainted with what in the West are regarded as the essentials of civilisation: showers, electricity, a mobile phone signal, ATMs, shops that stock more than only the most basic items, restaurants that don’t just offer noodles and rice. And while Kalay, like all towns in Burma, isn’t clean, in Chin you’re permanently dirty: either covered in mud in the rainy season or coated with fine yellow dust the rest of the time.

  Kalay offers more than just a measure of comfort and material pleasures to the Chin. Employment opportunities are as limited in Kalay as elsewhere in provincial Burma, but the Chin living there have the prospect of more than merely subsisting on a hill farm. Unknown numbers of Chin have left their homeland to work elsewhere in Burma, with far more overseas in India and Malaysia as migrant workers. ‘There’s no money in Chinland,’ a girl told me on the bus from Yangon.

  During the Second World War Kalay was a key staging post on the British retreat to India. The Japanese invaded Burma in January 1942, advancing swiftly from Thailand into Kayin State in the south-east. With them was the former student leader Aung San, now commanding the few hundred men of the newly formed Burma Independence Army. Aung San and other leading nationalists, including future junta leader Ne Win, had joined forces with Japan in their efforts to rid Burma of the British.

  Lacking the numbers to check the Japanese advance, the British forces fell back. A month after the invasion, civilians were told to evacuate Rangoon. ‘It is difficult for anyone who has not experienced this to realise what it meant,’ wrote Ritchie Gardiner, by now an army officer, in his memoir. ‘A previously prosperous and bustling city of some 600,000 people became empty at a stroke.’ The few remaining people were mostly criminals. The jails were emptied and law and order, always precarious in Burma, broke down completely.

  By March it was clear that Rangoon could not be defended. Anything of potential value to the Japanese – the port and oil refineries – was blown up and the British left. It was the effective end of their rule in Burma. Gardiner was one of the last men out, clambering aboard a boat bound for Calcutta at midnight on 8 March. As they sailed downriver he witnessed the destruction of the city’s infrastructure. Later, he struggled to find the words to describe the sight of the Rangoon riverside ablaze, the giant clouds of smoke billowing northwards across the rest of the city.

  ‘Large parts of the residential and to a smaller extent the industrial areas had already been burnt, either in the bombings or by arson. But that was nothing to the demolition of the wharves and the refineries,’ wrote Gardiner. ‘The Burmah Oil Company’s tanks were said to contain 18,000,000 gallons and there were others beside that, so perhaps the size of the fires can be imagined. The smoke and fires from the oil was almost unbelievable.’

  Gardiner was fortunate to be on a boat. The bulk of the British forces retreated north-west and attempted to hold the oil fields at Yenangyaung, south of Mandalay. Outflanked by the Japanese, a headlong overland flight to India began. Trailing behind the soldiers were over half a million refugees, mostly Indians who feared both the Japanese and mistreatment from the Burmese now that they were free of the British.

  Up to 50,000 civilians are thought to have died fleeing either to Manipur State in India via Kalay, or across the high mountain passes of the North East Frontier in Kachin State to Assam. The dirt tracks were a clogged mass of the sick, wounded and dying, with bodies littering the route as people dropped dead. Many more died of disease or from the effects of the journey once they reached India.

  There are no reminders of the Second World War in Kalay now. The only place that looks like a bomb site is the bus station, a rocky, cracked forecourt surrounded by distressed tea shops and cement-walled ticket offices that lack doors. They look as if someone started building them, only to give up halfway through the job. I was there soon after dawn, when most transport to Chin departs, and nabbed a seat in a minivan going to Tedim, where I intended to spend Christmas.

  We headed west along one of Kalay’s two main roads for a few miles, before stopping at a police checkpoint. After a cursory inspection we rattled across a small bridge, turned left and then we were in Chin State. Almost immediately the road narrowed, so that the trucks coming in the opposite direction were squeezing past us, and began to ascend the hills in tight bends. From now on, the road would run straight or flat for no more than twenty or thirty metres at a stretch.

  Soon after we started the climb the driver pulled over. He turned to face us, held out his hands palms up and said, ‘Let’s pray’. A passenger recited the Lord’s Prayer, before everyone said, ‘Amen’. All bus journeys in Chin State start with an invocation for safe passage, and when you first see the near-vertical drops of hundreds of metres on one side of the road, the uprooted trees and telegraph poles leaning at forty-five-degree angles after being struck by landslides, you understand why.

  Hamlets of houses built out of wooden planks occupied the left-hand side of the road, with the rear of the homes hanging over the cliff edge, supported by skinny stilts. In Chin it is safer to site your home over a sheer drop than to place it directly under the turbulent mountains. Every so often we ran through more substantial villages with the odd tea shop and general store, where the hillside had been partially
excavated, allowing for houses to line both sides of the road.

  God was everywhere. Just as Buddhists maintain a shrine outside or in their homes, shops and places of work, so in Chin State the image of Jesus is painted on houses, or his name invoked in slogans, ‘Jesus Love Me’, ‘In God We Trust’, ‘Hosanna’, daubed on their walls. Rough wooden crosses were planted to the side of homes. Sometimes there was a reference to a biblical text written on a door. ‘Exodus 9:26’ – ‘Only in the land of Goshen, where the children of Israel were, was there no hail’ – was popular and very appropriate given the risk of falling rocks.

  Other houses had a nameplate above the door inscribed with their denomination or congregation, a handy way of avoiding the attention of any passing missionaries. Many people, both the passengers around me and those in the hamlets, wore t-shirts or hoodies proclaiming their church and their love of God. Conspicuous by their absence were the monasteries and golden pagodas found in the villages and towns far below, as well as the packs of stray dogs. We had left Buddhist Burma behind and entered a Christian hill country.

  Beneath us Kalay was fading in the haze – the dust that swirls in the Chin State air whenever it isn’t raining – becoming an indeterminate huddle of trees interspersed with a few flashes of white indicating concrete buildings. Ahead, the road curved incessantly as it traversed the mountainsides, winding ever higher, the vehicles in the far distance looking as small as a child’s toy cars.

  Two hours’ driving brought us to a simple crossroads. Another few hours forward was Falam and then beyond it Hakha. Falam had been the administrative headquarters of Chin State in the colonial period, when the region was known as the Chin Hills. Along with the rest of the borderlands – the areas now occupied by Shan, Kachin, Kayin States and parts of Rakhine State and Sagaing Region – Chin was governed separately from the rest of the country by the Burma Frontier Service.

  It was a practical decision for the British, but one which has proved to be disastrous for the subsequent relationship between the Bamar, the mostly Buddhist majority ethnic group, and the minorities. The colonial civil servants reasoned that as the frontier areas were so remote, it would be costly and inefficient to oversee them in the same way as the rest of the country. They did not foresee that the result would be to make ethnicity the key political issue in the future independent Burma.

  Inland Burma experienced direct rule by foreigners, with the monarchy discarded and a new governance model imposed on the Bamar. But once the borderlands were pacified, a process that took decades in some places, the British formed alliances with the clan chiefs and hereditary rulers. In return for keeping a diminished form of their authority they could collect the new taxes and maintain the peace, thus allowing the British to staff the frontier areas with a skeleton crew of officials and avoid the expense of policing them.

  Bamar resentment over the way the minorities were experiencing a milder form of colonialism began to be voiced from the 1920s onwards, as the nationalist cause gathered pace in Yangon and lower Burma. Adding to their ire was the fact that while the Bamar were mostly barred from joining the army of the colonial state, the Chin, Kachin, Shan and Karen were all recruited to the Burma Rifles, the regiment raised to fight alongside the British in the First and Second World Wars. In the eyes of many Bamar, the minorities were traitors for signing up with the colonial oppressors.

  Being ruled separately meant that the peoples of the borderlands missed out on the economic and political developments occurring elsewhere in Burma. The Chin Hills in particular were barely touched by progress. Crucially, too, the minorities anticipated that their reward for fighting with the British against the Japanese and Aung San and his Bamar army would be self-rule for their areas after independence. The British government in London, however, didn’t seriously consider that possibility, even if some British officials and soldiers who had served in Burma believed that the minorities had earned the right to autonomy.

  Those fault lines between the Bamar and the other ethnic groups have never been bridged. In February 1947 Aung San met the leaders of the Chin, Kachin and Shan peoples at the now notorious Panglong Conference in Shan State. He persuaded them to join the future Union of Burma by acknowledging their right to self-determination over their regions, as well as the principle of a separate state for Kachin.

  February 12th, the date of the agreement, is still celebrated in Burma as Union Day, although few of the ethnic minorities join the party. When Burma became independent in January 1948, by which time Aung San had been assassinated, the Chin, Shan and Kachin didn’t get their own self-governing states. Within months, the Karen minority was fighting the Tatmadaw and the civil wars that continue today had begun.

  Along with most of the major ethnic groups, the Chin formed their own armed movement, the Chin Independence Army, to fight for self-rule. It was succeeded by the Chin National Army, the military wing of the Chin National Front, one of a number of Chin political organisations dedicated to achieving autonomy for Chinland within a genuine federal union.

  Never as active as the ethnic armies in Shan and Kachin states, and always smaller, the Chin militia broke ranks in 2012 and signed an official ceasefire with the Tatmadaw after more than a decade when no fighting took place. The Chin haven’t forgotten that they were promised self-rule, but most are no longer prepared to wage war to get it.

  My minivan didn’t carry on towards Falam and Hakha. We turned right, for Tedim, the largest town in the north and the second biggest settlement in Chin State. Now, the sheer drop was on the right-hand side of the road and stretching away as far as the eye could see were ravines, their hunchbacked hillsides a mass of forest in different shades of dark green, plunging down to a meandering, steel-grey river. Desultory clouds hung above the hills in a radiant blue sky, creating a natural palette of primary colours.

  Apart from a few sand-coloured scars running horizontally across the hills, indicating tracks wide enough only for a motorbike to travel them, the landscape looked as if it had never seen any humans. Closer to Kalay, just a few trees survive on the slate-rock hills, the rest either harvested or destroyed in landslides. But while logging is increasing throughout Chin, and the locals consume a lot of wood for cooking and construction, the lack of roads ensures the forests are still far more plentiful than almost anywhere else in Burma.

  When we stopped for a break it was only a few metres’ scramble down shifting soil to pine trees and ferns, amidst which pale red orchids grew. I knew that barking deer, boars, wild goats and jungle cats were somewhere nearby in the forests, still hunted by the locals, while above me, circling in the near distance, was a hawk, its eyes scanning the ground as it searched for prey.

  Five hours after leaving Kalay the road dipped and we descended into Tedim. Like every other settlement of any size in Chin its shops and open-air market run along the ridgetop road, while wooden houses raised up above the yellow earth on stilts and roofed with corrugated iron are dotted down the hillside on one side, or amble up it on the other. White and pink cherry blossom blooms around the homes, which are accessed by steep dirt paths, and clumps of banana, bamboo and pine trees form natural barriers between them.

  Off in the middle distance, beyond further galleries of green gorges that rose and fell in uneven order, was Kennedy Peak, named after its surveyor and the second highest mountain in Chin State. Towering a thousand metres above Tedim, itself over 1,700 metres above sea level, and covered in tightly packed pine trees, Kennedy Peak was the scene of a vicious battle in October 1944. Japanese troops dug in on its slopes were wiped out by British and Indian soldiers, who had returned to Burma along the same route they had retreated down two years before.

  From 1943 the area around Tedim became a war zone. A year later the Japanese were being chased out of Chin State to inland Burma. With Chinese and American soldiers invading from Yunnan in China, the Japanese were pushed back to Rangoon, until they were forced to abandon it in May 1945, a little over three years after the Bri
tish had evacuated the city. By then Aung San’s soldiers had switched sides, joining the Allied armies after it became clear that Japan would not grant Burma any form of real independence.

  Hidden in the forests on Kennedy Peak are a few relics of the fighting. Fort White, a colonial outpost, was taken over by the Japanese and then flattened by bombing, although the faint outlines of the building can still be seen and the odd tank and shell case remains. But almost all the detritus of the war has been scavenged and sold for scrap and there is no memorial. For the Chin the fort is an unwelcome memory of how they were subjugated by the British, no matter that some of them fought here against the Japanese, too.

  At the guest house in Tedim there were box-like rooms, separated from each other by thin wooden partitions, with ill-fitting windows and a bed and a chair for furniture. It was typical Chin State accommodation and I knew I was in for some cold nights. Hot water for washing had to be heated in a giant, blackened kettle and, as usual in Chin, there was electricity only between six and ten in the evening and on alternate days. ‘But I think we’ll get power on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day,’ said the guest-house owner. ‘It’s a special time.’

  Out on the main street, which slopes sharply from south to north before ascending again on the outskirts of town, the festive spirit was apparent. Trucks with people standing in the back wearing Santa hats clattered past, kicking up the dust, their speakers blaring out ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’ and other carols, as well as an assortment of seasonal hits. Wham!’s ‘Last Christmas’ was a favourite, and there was even a Spanish entry with the song ‘Feliz Navidad’.

  Walking uphill, the houses of God were all around me. In Chin State the churches of the major congregations are always the most substantial buildings in any town. But there are much smaller house churches scattered throughout Tedim, too. They have names like ‘Jehovah Shalom’ and ‘Messianic Brotherhood Fellowship’. Some have no more than fifty members, led by a single, charismatic preacher. The early missionaries attracted a similar cult-like following, just as the Chin were in thrall to village shamans until most of them abandoned animism for Christianity.