Another Man's War

by Barnaby Phillips

  Francis Buchanan-Hamilton, Asiatick Reseaches‌*

  19 June 2011

  Rangoon

  Under General Ne Win, Burma turned inwards. His xenophobic and repressive regime was to become one of the longest-running military dictatorships in the world, driven, it seemed, as much by the memory of the humiliation of colonial rule as by an acute sense of threat to his country’s unity. British-trained civil servants were sacked en masse, and British-trained officers were weeded out of the national army.

  The regime was also vehemently opposed to giving ethnic minorities greater autonomy. The Burmese army tried to cut off the insurgency areas from the rest of the country. Whole towns and villages were destroyed, and residents were forced to move into mass relocation camps, whether or not they themselves had any connection with the rebels. But the fighting dragged on, fuelled in part by the heroin trade, from which the army and various rebel militias were earning huge profits.

  Burma’s soldiers, like their Nigerian counterparts, had grabbed power because they believed they were the only ones who could hold their country together. But Nigeria’s generals ultimately lacked the ability, and possibly even the desire, to build an enduring military state. Instead, they contented themselves with looting oil revenues from the national treasury, with disastrous results for ordinary Nigerians. In Burma, the dictatorship was more complete, more perfect in a sense. The military seized control of much of the economy – gemstones, logging and oil – but also asserted its power over society as a whole. The generals saw themselves as the protectors and promoters of the nation’s traditional Buddhist culture. They changed Burma’s name, to Myanmar, ostensibly a more inclusive word for the non-Bamar population but also one that marked a clear break with the colonial past. Christianity and Islam, the religions of the ethnic minorities, were marginalised. The army continued to grow and consume an ever-larger portion of the government’s budget. Over the decades, the military and the state became one.

  I had flown into Rangoon, now known as Yangon, on an evening of glowering skies in June 2011.* I had reported from Africa for fifteen years, but this was my first visit to South East Asia and I had little idea of what to expect. The monsoon rains had begun and much of the lowland of the Irrawaddy Delta was underwater. From the plane, it was impossible to say where the sea ended and the land began; there was no coastline as such, just a merging of grey waters as the Bay of Bengal met the paddy fields and fishponds of the delta. Palm trees, wind-lashed and sodden, stood like sentinels over this drowned landscape.

  The city streets were dark at night, long avenues lined with mango and frangipani trees but few streetlights. I caught glimpses of elegant couples passing in and out of the shadows. In the hotel lobbies, there were many more Chinese businessmen than tourists. In downtown Rangoon, heavy old colonial buildings – government offices, banks and law courts, mostly – sat dark and brooding behind Doric columns. Many were stained green and black from damp and decades of neglect. They exuded sadness.

  I had entered Burma pretending to be a tourist, because foreign journalists and writers were not welcome. The country was in a state of transition, and nobody seemed sure in which direction it was heading. A few weeks before my arrival, the military regime had surprised its critics by appearing to step aside. An elected, civilian government had, at least notionally, taken its place. But many opposition politicians had been prevented from taking part in the elections, or had chosen to boycott them, unconvinced that the regime was sincere about loosening its control over the country. It was not easy to read the generals’ minds. They seemed keen to end Burma’s isolation, and they certainly wanted more investment to revive the moribund economy. But there were also good reasons to be sceptical of their intentions.

  Burma had known false dawns in the past, moments when it seemed the military might give way. Yet, brutal and tenacious, it had always clung on. There had been the great uprising of 1988, the annulled election of 1990 and, as recently as 2007, the ‘Saffron Revolution’, when Buddhist monks had protested and soldiers had used live ammunition to break up the crowds. The latest elections had taken place in November 2010, under a new constitution drawn up by the military twenty years after it had dissolved the last one. The constitution specified that a quarter of the seats in parliament were reserved for the military. The new president, Thein Sein, was a former general, and he appointed fellow officers to almost all the positions of power. If this really was a revolution, it was a carefully controlled, top-down one.

  Hundreds of political prisoners were still in jail. The opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, had been released from house arrest six days after the 2010 elections, but she remained non-committal about whether she would engage in the political process. She was a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, but her image was banned, her party illegal. Despite these restrictions, or perhaps in part because of them, she had attained an almost mythical status. She was admired at home and abroad, a resolute and morally courageous woman who had sacrificed her freedom in order to save her country. And, as the daughter of Aung San, the man who had charmed first the Japanese and then General Slim before becoming the martyred hero of the independence struggle, she had a legitimacy that subsequent military regimes could only envy. To many Burmese, Aung San Suu Kyi was simply ‘The Lady’.

  I had arrived in Burma just days before her birthday, and the authorities feared there would be demonstrations in her honour. Groups of soldiers and policemen – a Burmese friend referred to them disparagingly as ‘green monkeys and blue monkeys’ – stood on the wet street corners. The patrols watched passers-by with impassive faces, machine guns jutting from their ponchos. Their presence was unusual; the security forces in Burma tended to keep a discreet profile and were rarely seen on Rangoon’s streets. But, if the armed men intended to deter any protests, they seemed to have succeeded. The crowds scurried past, heads bowed.

  Rangoon was a city of strange, stilted conversations. People seemed to talk to me in riddles, hinting at fear and frustration rather than explicitly spelling it out, only to abruptly shut up whenever a stranger approached. The regime’s spies, I was warned, were everywhere, and wearing plain clothes.

  The newspapers, still rigidly censored, were a curious mixture of anodyne reports on ministerial workshops or road-construction projects, and shrill warnings of the dangers of foreign interference. The New Light of Myanmar printed a large notice on its back page every day, denouncing the Voice of America and the BBC for ‘sowing hatred among the people’ with their ‘killer broadcasts designed to cause troubles’. Under the title ‘People’s Desire’, it listed the objectives to which patriotic readers should aspire. They should ‘oppose those relying on external elements, acting as stooges, holding negative views…wipe out those inciting unrest and violence’ and ‘crush all internal and external destructive elements as the common enemy’. The people should strive, above all, to become ‘polite and disciplined citizens’.*

  In subsequent months, the situation in Rangoon would change dramatically. Aung San Suu Kyi met President Thein Sein, and afterwards announced that her party, the National League for Democracy, would rejoin the political process and contest future elections. Many political prisoners were released, and Thein Sein enacted new laws that allowed workers to form unions and recognised the right to peaceful protest. American and European leaders arrived, promising an end to Burma’s political and economic isolation from the West. Posters of Aung San Suu Kyi began to appear on walls and in shops all over the city, and the New Light of Myanmar stopped printing its daily denunciations of evil foreigners and their domestic stooges. Rangoon’s days of fear were over.

  On a city junction, behind wrought-iron gates and an overgrown garden is what remains of the Pegu Club, once the preserve of senior British Army officers and civil servants. It is now derelict. George Orwell, who was born in India and worked in Burma for five years as a policeman, understood the significance of the racially exclusive club in the Empire. In his novel Burmese Days, he wro
te, ‘In any town in India the European Club is the spiritual citadel, the real seat of the British power, the Nirvana for which native officials and millionaires pine in vain.’* The club gave the Englishman a chance to play billiards and bridge, or share complaints about the natives with his colleagues. It emphasised his separateness and superiority. In the last years of British rule, the colonial government tried to make such clubs open up their membership to the Burmese, and the tensions around this process are central to Orwell’s story in Burmese Days.

  After independence, when most of the British went home, it turned out there were not so many Burmese who had been pining to join these prestigious institutions after all. Edward Law-Yone, in a 1951 editorial for The Nation, urged his fellow countrymen to put aside old resentments, and take up positions in the Rangoon clubs that were now rightfully theirs. He wrote that he had it on good authority that they would be welcome, whatever their misgivings. The problem, as he saw it, was that the Burmese still suffered from an inferiority complex: ‘we should like to see less veiled hostility, less shyness in consorting, or just being together with Europeans’. If only the Burmese could understand that ‘there is very little snobbishness left on the part of Westerners in Burma, because the pukka sahib tradition has been broken, and they realise they are here on sufferance’.* Law-Yone’s pleas fell on deaf ears. Membership to the British clubs withered in the 1950s, and finally collapsed after General Ne Win’s 1962 coup.

  The difference with Nigeria is striking. The clubs of colonial Lagos were just as important to the British, but most of them are still thriving today. Once the likes of Aduke Alakija had forced their way into the Ikoyi Club, they never looked back. Another prominent Lagos club, the Island Club, was established in the 1940s specifically to promote inter-racial friendship. Today, it occupies the former officers’ mess of the Royal West African Frontier Force. In Nigeria, British snobbishness met its match in the local elite’s own sense of entitlement. Nigerians cheerfully adapted colonial traditions they admired and discarded the rest.

  The ruins of the Pegu Club looked as though they might not be standing for much longer. Skyscrapers of glass and steel were rising up all over Rangoon, and land in the city centre was becoming increasingly scarce and valuable. Like the country’s politics, the city was in transition, only this outcome was more predictable. The new government was planning economic reforms to attract foreign investment. As Burma gradually opened up to the world, as excited investors came in and as the population continued to grow, Rangoon’s streets would become clogged with imported cars and much of its history would surely be swept away. A new city – blander, less distinctive – was taking shape.

  Somehow, I had to find Shuyiman’s village in the middle of the Arakan, now known as Rakhine State. The only person I knew who had been to Mairong was Isaac himself, but he was understandably vague as to its location. Isaac was never given a map in the Arakan; he went where his officers told him to go. So even before the attack, he did not have a precise sense of where he was. Afterwards, he and David Kargbo had been traumatised and confused, barely able to communicate with the villagers who saved them. Many decades had passed since they’d been carried away from a rice farmer’s basha in triumph.

  I knew that Mairong was on the banks of the Kaladan River, but this runs through Burma for over a hundred miles before emptying into the Bay of Bengal. Isaac did not remember exactly where the 29th CCS had embarked on their raft journey, and was probably never told their intended destination. But there was one piece of information I had deduced from his account. Isaac had always said to me, ‘When you are coming from India, Mairong is on the right side of the river, but, if you are returning, it is on your left side.’ Just to make sure I had understood this point, he called me in London the day before I flew to Burma. ‘Do you get me?!’ he bellowed down the line from Lagos. ‘Check the right side of the river. The right side. Is it clear?’ Mairong, in other words, was on the west bank of the Kaladan. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.

  Slowly, by reading and crosschecking the accounts of British officers, I had managed to build up an idea of the geography of the Kaladan Valley. I knew that the 81st Division had passed through Paletwa, but had retreated from Kyauktaw after the defeat at Pagoda Hill. Mairong was somewhere between the two, which narrowed the search down to a stretch of some forty miles. It was the late John Hamilton, meticulous chronicler of the 81st Division, who came to the rescue. In his notes, he had estimated where the attack on the 29th CCS had taken place, to within a couple of miles.* I had also found a large-scale American military map of the valley dating from the 1950s. This had all sorts of useful details, although, discouragingly, I could find no village on it by the name of Mairong.

  There was another potential flaw in my plans. I might be able to find where the village had been, but there was no guarantee that the people who had lived in it in 1944 would still be there today. In fact, there was no guarantee the village would still be standing. The Japanese surrender had not signified the end of fighting in the Arakan, any more than it had in other parts of Burma. In 1945, the Arakan’s towns were in ruins and, as elsewhere in the country, there were large stocks of weapons available to anyone who knew how to use them. The Buddhist majority in the Arakan had largely turned against the Japanese by the end of the war, but that did not mean they were ready to welcome the returning British. In the immediate post-war chaos, a Buddhist monk, U Sein Da, rebelled against the British. His revolt was put down by force, but after independence Arakanese Buddhists continued to demand greater autonomy. They had always felt separate from the rest of Burma, and the war years had only increased their sense of isolation. Rival Communist factions also tried to align themselves to the cause of Arakanese separatism.

  There was another reason for the Arakan’s enduring instability, of course, and that was the discontent of its Muslim minority. The communal hatreds and fears that had helped bind Mairong to the British cause were not resolved in the years after the war. Muslim guerrillas, calling themselves Mujahid, had taken up arms in the brief period between the end of the war and independence. Some wanted an autonomous Muslim region on the border with the new neighbouring country of East Pakistan, citing alleged promises made to them by the British during the war. Just like the Karens and the Kachins, the Muslims in the Arakan had hoped that their loyalty to the Empire would be rewarded once the Japanese were driven out. Others even flirted with the idea of the northern part of the Arakan being incorporated into East Pakistan. In the confused and violent years around independence, the Mujahid co-operated not only with Communist guerrillas, but even with Arakanese Buddhists rebels; the groups spoke of dividing the region between them once they had defeated the central Burmese government. At one point, in June 1949, Rangoon lost control of all of Arakan except for the port of Akyab and its immediate surroundings.

  The Mujahid never numbered more than a few thousand men, and, in the 1950s, as the Burmese army grew stronger, the guerrillas were beaten back to the jungles of the northern Arakan. There they sought refuge in the same border hills that Isaac and the West Africans had marched across on their way into the Kaladan Valley. The insurgency spluttered on, small groups of men looting from villages and making money by smuggling rice across the border to East Pakistan.

  The Mujahid guerrillas spoke of themselves as being ‘Rohingya’ people, a fiercely contested term. They traced the word back through the generations, as proof that Muslims are indigenes of the Arakan, descendants of Arab, Moorish and Bengali traders who arrived hundreds of years ago. But the majority Buddhist population maintained that most of the Muslims were descended from more recent immigrants who had entered Burma from India when they were both under British rule, especially in the last years of the nineteenth century. The word ‘Rohingya’, the Buddhists said, had only come into widespread use since the Second World War, in an attempt to lend credibility to an ethnicity that was essentially invented.

  In Rangoon, successive governments regarded claim
s coming from any minority group as a threat to Burma’s unity. Although some Arakanese Muslim leaders professed loyalty to Burma, the government gradually forced Muslims out of the civil service and police force, and excluded them from the army. But it wasn’t until 1962, and the military coup, that Muslims in Arakan learnt that even their right to remain in Burma was in question.

  When he took power, General Ne Win immediately decided that Burma needed to get rid of those he saw as foreigners. He ordered the confiscation of Indian property and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of people of Indian origin from Rangoon and other cities. Many of them had only returned to their homes in Burma after the war, following the exodus as the Japanese invaded in 1942. Mira Kamdar’s family had lived in Burma since the turn of the century. Her grandfather, Prabhudas Kamdar, was forced to abandon his livelihood and leave Rangoon in the early 1960s. ‘All valuables were confiscated, jewelry of course; watches; cameras; radios; banknotes of more than fifty rupees,’ Mira wrote of her grandfather’s experience. There were also humiliations. ‘Women and men alike were thoroughly searched,’ she said.* General Ne Win was tapping into a rich vein of Burmese prejudice; the Indians made an easy target, as the riots of the 1930s had already shown, and Indians in Rangoon were regularly called Kalars, a derogatory word for the dark-skinned. Wendy Law-Yone remembered the casual contempt with which poorer Indians were held at the time. ‘It’s awful when I look back at the routine degradation of Indians…It’s amazing the number of epithets and proverbs and jokes.’*

  And so the Muslims of Arakan became the victims, not only of the general suspicion towards perceived outsiders, but also the specific hostility towards people of Indian appearance. They too were Kalars, although often the authorities spoke of them merely as ‘Bengalis’, a people clearly foreign to Burma’s ‘true’ Buddhist identity. In 1978, the military regime launched Naga Min, or Operation Dragon King, a systematic attempt to document the population living inside Burma’s borders and stop illegal immigration. About 250,000 Muslims fled across the Naf River into Bangladesh (the former East Pakistan), taking with them stories of alleged rapes and murders carried out by the Burmese military and Buddhist militias.* Many of those who ran away insisted they were not immigrants from the colonial period, but a long-standing indigenous people, the Rohingyas. They said the army seemed determined to expel them from Burma.