A Savage Dreamland

by David Eimer

  My regular hotel in the north of Naypyidaw was always a ghost ship. If it hadn’t been for the neon sign bearing its name that was switched on after dark, any of the few passing motorists might have thought it abandoned, as some hotels in the city are. There were 130 rooms, with only a handful ever occupied. But the pool was the best I encountered in Burma. I could swim every day under a high blue sky, with just the dragonflies circling above my head for company.

  With so much of the city closed to foreigners, and anyone not in or connected to the Tatmadaw, the few casual visitors to Naypyidaw find it a frustrating, near-meaningless destination, a place designed principally for the comfort and security of Burma’s military and political elite. It says much about the junta’s arrogance and paranoia that it built a shiny new capital only to place large parts of it out of bounds to ordinary people.

  There is one place in Naypyidaw where the military is pleased to welcome visitors. The Defence Services Museum occupies 600 acres, including a man-made lake, on the city’s far north-eastern outskirts. Like Naypyidaw itself the museum stands as a testament to the ego of the Tatmadaw, a preening affirmation of the generals’ unshakeable belief in the army’s central and indispensable role in Burma since independence.

  Despite the museum’s size, finding it was a challenge. My motorcycle taxi driver hadn’t heard of it and it took forty-five minutes of puttering past a series of barracks, and directions from two military policemen drinking tea at a roadside stall, till we tracked it down. Sitting next door to a colossus of a stadium that was built for the 2013 Southeast Asian Games, an event that marked Burma’s return to the regional sporting fold after a long absence, the museum sees few people. Military attachés from Yangon are the most frequent callers, judging by the visitors’ book everyone has to sign.

  Planes and helicopters dating back to the 1940s were lined up on the vast forecourt leading to the museum proper, their flaps and elevators creaking in the wind. Most were American, British and Chinese models, including a Spitfire from the Second World War. One recent Burma legend is that crates of dismantled Spitfires, now worth millions of pounds each, are buried under the runways of Yangon’s airport after being abandoned by the British at the end of the war. But no one has ever found them.

  Three pavilions – one each for the army, navy and air force – are grouped around the lake. The army’s is by far the biggest, just as it dwarfs the navy and air force in terms of manpower. I was the only visitor and was shown around by a genial sergeant major named Kyaw Soe Hlaing. Short and smart in his pressed green fatigues and polished black shoes – many Tatmadaw soldiers wear flip-flops when not on operations – he was a veteran of twenty-six years. The museum was his final posting before retirement.

  Like almost everyone living in Naypyidaw, Kyaw Soe Hlaing is from somewhere else, in his case Yangon. ‘I go back for a weekend each month because my family are there. They didn’t want to move here,’ he said in a soft voice. There was no military bluster to Kyaw Soe Hlaing. ‘I joined up because I wanted a good job,’ he told me, before volunteering the information that he was a fan of Aung San Suu Kyi. ‘I think ninety per cent of ordinary soldiers support her,’ he said. It is their commanders who are less keen on her being Burma’s leader.

  Much of the army’s pavilion is given over to a comprehensive, but selective, history of Burma’s martial endeavours. Kyaw Soe Hlaing maintained a poker face while showing me the gallery devoted to the Anglo-Burmese Wars. He couldn’t resist a smile, though, as he pointed out the pictures of the men, including Daw Suu’s great-grandfather, who had led the guerrilla resistance to the British after their takeover of all Burma in 1886.

  Politics and soldiering have always been intertwined for the Tatmadaw and the museum reflects that relationship. Kyaw Soe Hlaing pushed his shoulders back, visibly proud, as we moved through the section on the years leading to independence. It is a treasure trove of exhibits that I thought should rightly have been on display in Naypyidaw’s much less impressive National Museum, given their huge significance in Burma’s history.

  Pamphlets and declarations produced by the student nationalists of the 1930s gave way to rare photos of the Thirty Comrades: Aung San and Ne Win sitting side by side, unsmiling in Japanese uniforms. Many of Aung San’s personal items were on display, too, including the H. G. Wells novels he liked to read, as well as books on socialist thought and the writings of China’s communist leaders.

  Framed side by side at the end of the gallery are the flag of the Union of Burma and the Union Jack that had travelled in opposite directions up and down the flagpole in Yangon on Independence Day. The old Burma banner is very different from the current one with its Rastafarian-style stripes of yellow, green and red. It is mostly red, with a blue canton and a large white star surrounded by five smaller ones, the flag of a more radical country. ‘The big star symbolises revolutionary spirit. The other five represent the biggest states in Burma,’ Kyaw Soe Hlaing said.

  He grew less forthcoming as we toured the final section which details the current conflicts in Burma. Now, there were no more English captions. ‘These are the internal wars, the battles against the communist party and the different ethnic groups,’ said Kyaw Soe Hlaing. I asked if he had taken part in them. ‘Yes. I was in Kayin State for twelve years fighting the Karen.’

  Back in 1949 the Karen were the first of the minorities to rise up against the Bamar. The subsequent war against them was cruel, even by the standards of the Tatmadaw, until a shaky ceasefire was signed in 2015. That extreme violence was a reaction to the Karen’s role in the Second World War, when they were Britain’s closest and most effective ally in the fight against the Japanese and the soldiers of Aung San’s Burma Independence Army.

  Today it is the battles with the various ethnic groups in Shan and Kachin states that are the most violent and seemingly insurmountable of Burma’s civil wars. Another conspiracy theory surrounding the establishment of Naypyidaw – one favoured by the minorities – is that the capital was moved closer to Shan State to make it easier for soldiers to travel there if needed. Four armies confront the Tatmadaw on the other side of the Shan Hills to the north and east of Naypyidaw, with three others armed and ready to do so. It was time to find out why they were still fighting.

  14

  The Ta’ang Tea Party

  Drowsy in the late afternoon, I sprawled out on the sun-bleached grass. Above me was a cerulean sky while nearby were the stilted huts of the village, corn and chili drying outside, babies crying inside. Women squatted on the wooden porches preparing food and talking, while their children played beneath them, scattering the dogs and chickens poking around the yellow earth of the Shan plateau.

  Beyond the homes were crude shelters made of bamboo lashed together and covered in palm and banana fronds, spaced apart from each other and just big enough for two men to lie side by side in them. The equipment of their occupants stayed outside: AK47 rifles and RPG launchers stacked together, machine guns resting on their tripods, newly washed uniforms, boots airing, webbing dangling from tree branches, the pouches stuffed full of magazines and water bottles.

  Ponies clip-clopped past, the wooden panniers across their backs loaded with supplies, rousing me from my stupor. Then Major Robert was standing over me. ‘We’ll be sleeping in the forest tonight,’ he said, pointing towards the ridge that was out of sight on the hill behind us. ‘You OK with that?’ For the soldiers of the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA), the ‘forest’ is a euphemism for any place that isn’t a village or a town.

  Within minutes the pastoral scene had given way to the hustle of a military unit preparing to move. Weapons and kit were gathered and slung across shoulders, backs and waists and then we were off, climbing uphill fast in single file. It was a sweaty twenty-minute march to the ridgeline. ‘Sometimes the Tatmadaw attack at night. It will be bad for the villagers if we have to fight in the village and this is a better defensive position. But the phone reception is good up here,’ said Major Robert.r />
  As if to prove it, he extracted one of his mobile phones from a pocket and called his wife. She was seventy miles away in Mantong, one of the two principal towns in the Palaung Self-Administered Zone, the homeland of the 600,000-odd Palaung people who live in northern Shan State and across the nearby borders with China and Thailand. The TNLA are their army, a force of around 3,500 soldiers who are the current heirs of various Ta’ang militias that began fighting the Tatmadaw in 1966. ‘We call ourselves Ta’ang,’ Major Robert had told me earlier. ‘Palaung is the name the Burmese gave us.’

  Sinking swiftly beneath the horizon, the sun bequeathed a layer of red light that settled above the green hills that slalomed towards the frontier with Yunnan Province and China, until the encroaching darkness snuffed it out. Some of the soldiers were hacking at bamboo with machetes and gathering leaves, preparing the shelters we would sleep in; others were taking up sentry positions along the ridge. The first mosquitos whined past my ears and I stared suspiciously at the long grass we stood in, wondering about snakes.

  Major Robert mistook my frown for a different sort of fear. ‘Don’t worry about the Tatmadaw attacking us tonight,’ he said. ‘They know we have lots of soldiers here and that we’ll fight if they come. And we’re at the top here. We can see all around and anyone coming up.’ I explained I was more concerned about the prospect of serpents joining our bivouac and Major Robert laughed. ‘Yes, there are snakes here. Watch out.’

  It grew cold once the sun disappeared, the wind gusting across the ridge, riffling through the trees. I retreated to the shelter that had been prepared for Major Robert and two other officers and which I was sharing for the night. Roofed and walled with banana leaves, piles of grass had been thrown in and covered with groundsheets for our beds. It was comfortable enough once the fire got going, even if there was no chimney, sparks hurtling towards the leafy ceiling, smoke swirling around us.

  Lights were allowed and chickens were being roasted outside. Random faces gleamed in the dark, lit up by the phones held close to them, and cigarette tips glowed. The walkie-talkies of the officers hissed intermittently, while Major Robert checked Facebook for the latest updates on the fighting across Shan State. He had already shown me phone footage of the unit in action, RPGs fired at a hillside position held by Tatmadaw troops, the grenades rushing towards them in dreadful haste, as well as a clip of a helicopter gunship fluttering above TNLA soldiers and launching rockets.

  Some of the chicken found its way to our shelter, the meat crudely hacked up and a lemon drizzled over it, tasting delicious. Chunks of orange and apple came, too, along with a water bottle filled with the local hooch, a clear, rice-based spirit. ‘It’s like an extra blanket. It keeps out the cold,’ joked the second-in-command, who maintained a near-permanent grin on his face that revealed jagged, protruding teeth.

  Far below us was Namtu, the nearest town, a ninety-minute drive by motorbike. But we were in a different world on the hilltop, one that was very distant from the Burma I had been in just a few days before, a place where the only hint of the state is the Tatmadaw garrison in Namtu. For the minorities who populate Shan the military is often the sole representative of the government they encounter, an imperial garrison force as unwelcome as the British officials and soldiers who occupied inland Burma during the colonial period.

  ‘I became a soldier because the Tatmadaw came to our area and they discriminated against us. The military work with the Chinese and other ethnic groups and they close the local economy to us,’ said Major Robert. Taller and broader than most Ta’ang men, with dark slashes under heavy, sleep-deprived eyes, he joined up twelve years ago. He has been living and fighting in the ‘forest’ ever since, seeing his wife and two children during brief periods of leave.

  Distinct from the other officers and men in their camouflage, Major Robert wore a dark green uniform, with a peaked forage cap, that indicated his status somewhere between a political commissar and a staff officer. Like the officers who fulfil the same function in China’s armed forces, Major Robert was principally responsible for the ideological education of the soldiers. As such, he wields as much power as the technically more senior battalion and brigade commanders and takes part in planning missions. He was looking after me, too, thanks to his fluent English.

  For the Ta’ang and the other minorities, their battle with the Burmese state is as much about equality as the desire for self-determination. ‘We’re fighting for development really, because the government is not fair with us,’ explained Major Robert. ‘We want the companies who invest here to give jobs to us and not people from outside. We want electricity, clean water, better hospitals and schools and roads. You go to the hospital in my hometown Namhsan and they don’t have good medicines and the nurses aren’t really trained.’

  Fifty-odd miles west of our position, Namhsan is the capital of the Ta’ang region. Like much of Shan State, including the hilltop the TNLA and I were camping on, it is barred to foreigners, as the Tatmadaw is anxious to keep westerners from seeing close up the destructive impact of decades of fighting on the communities who live here. The military is also keen to ensure that its role in exploiting Shan State’s natural resources, and its involvement in the smuggling of illegal narcotics and other contraband across Shan’s shared borders with China, Laos and Thailand, remains as little known as possible.

  Tatmadaw soldiers have moved into Namhsan in large numbers in the last couple of years, so I knew I would be unable to visit. But I had been there before, a trip that served to confirm what I was hearing from Major Robert about the lack of development in the Ta’ang homeland. Maurice Collis, the former Rangoon chief magistrate and district commissioner of Myeik in the early 1930s, travelled from the town of Hsipaw to Namhsan in 1937, a journey of fifty miles that took him five hours. Over seventy-five years later I spent six hours following the same route on a road that appeared not to have been upgraded in the interim.

  Driving me was a Hsipaw man visiting his girlfriend in Namhsan. We set off soon after dawn, a pinkish sun edging up above the hills atop which our destination sat, wood smoke from the teahouses drifting across the road as their grills and ovens were fired up for the morning rush of customers. The driver’s bike was a Chinese-made 125cc model: standard transport in Shan State. Hunched on the back, with my boots perched on footrests that raised my knees up to the level of the seat, I knew it was going to be an uncomfortable ride.

  Initially the going was as good as it gets in Shan. We shot off down a sealed two-lane road, passing the barracks and army-owned golf club on the outskirts of Hsipaw. But before two hours had passed the sealed road gave way to a desperately rocky and uneven track that ascended into the hills past isolated villages and fields of maize. I felt every stone, pothole and bump along the way. The steel springs which acted as the bike’s suspension weren’t designed to absorb the sort of pounding the vehicle was taking with two people aboard.

  My knees were wrecked by the time we reached the first Ta’ang village. As we paused for a break a patrol of teenagers casually clutching AK47s appeared, dressed in the green uniforms and bush hats, with brims tightly folded against the crown, worn by Tatmadaw soldiers. They were members of the Namhsan Militia, a government-backed force opposed to the TNLA. It was too late to hide, but they carried on moving through the village with only a few curious stares directed my way.

  Seemingly endless curves lay ahead, looping so tight I would have felt sick if it hadn’t been for the pain in my knees. Finally, we swung around one last bend onto the ridgetop where Namhsan lies. We were now 1,500 metres above sea level and as the view widened dramatically I could see rows of tea trees clinging to the hillsides below. In the distance partially forested hills, scarred with yellow patches where trees had been felled and separated by ravines, soared and dipped towards the border with Yunnan.

  Simple wooden homes, tea leaves drying outside them, heralded Namhsan. Ponies with bamboo baskets across their scrawny backs stood tethered, waiting to be loaded with
the harvest. Spread out along the narrow road that hugs the ridge, with pagodas at the highest point, Namhsan looked and felt like a frontier settlement that had time travelled from the nineteenth century. When I struggled off the bike, barely able to walk, I wondered if the journey had been worth it.

  Little has changed in Shan State in the years since Burma’s independence. Dominating the east of the country, Shan accounts for almost a quarter of its landmass, an area bigger than England and Wales combined, but remains overwhelmingly rural, with just a few towns of any significant size. Outside them infrastructure barely exists and the majority of the population are subsistence farmers who live in villages which, motorbikes, televisions and solar panels to provide electricity apart, look much the same as they did a century ago.

  Shan State takes its name from the Shan people because they are the majority in the region. There are over five million Shan, making them the most numerous of Burma’s 134 official minorities. Large numbers of Shan can also be found across the frontiers in China, Laos and Thailand, where they are known as the Dai or Tai. Their populations have been swelled in recent years by refugees from the poverty and fighting in Shan State. So many Shan have fled to Thailand that they now make up one in six of the people in Chiang Mai, the country’s second city.

  Living alongside them in Shan State are other minorities: the Akha, Danu, Intha, Kachin, Lisu, Lahu, Pa-O, Ta’ang and Wa. Like the Shan, they spread into China, Laos and Thailand as well, making this patch of Southeast Asia one vast transnational space. People of Indian and Nepali descent, whose ancestors arrived in the colonial era, live here, too, as do an ever-increasing number of Chinese, working as traders and shopowners or running agri-businesses and mining operations.