Another Man's War

by Barnaby Phillips

  In 1982, Ne Win’s regime introduced a new Citizenship Act that excluded the Rohingya from a list of Burma’s indigenous ethnicities. Existing citizens were not affected, but any new applicant needed to show ‘conclusive evidence’ that their ancestors had lived in the Arakan before independence in 1948.* For a population of mainly subsistence farmers and fishermen, this was an almost impossible stipulation. Many of the Arakan Muslims, or Rohingyas, who could not comply were now de facto foreigners in Burma, but, as nobody else would recognise them either, they had become effectively stateless. Families that had not taken great time and effort to get citizenship papers during the years after independence often now lost the right to own land in Burma, and could no longer work in government health or education services. Their freedom of movement was restricted, even their right to marry and have as many children as they wished.* They were persecuted in the country in which they had been born and lived their whole lives.

  In the early 1990s, there were shadowy reports of new Mujahid guerrilla resistance groups, operating out of jungle enclaves in what was now Rakhine State. In 1991, following more allegations of persecution by the Burmese army, there was another mass exodus of Muslims into Bangladesh. But their refugee camps were disease-ridden and poorly built. Some Muslim families tried to scratch a living in Bangladesh by merging into the local population; others wandered voluntarily back across the border into Burma, or were forced to do so by the Bengali authorities. Some managed to flee further afield, to Thailand and Malaysia, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Today there are almost as many Muslims from the old Arakan living outside Burma as within its borders. Little wonder that in Asia they are known as the ‘new Palestinians’.*

  I worried what had happened to the village of Mairong in the years since 1944, whether it had been caught up in these waves of unrest, and how Shuyiman’s family might have been affected. Balwant Singh, describing the turmoil in central Burma in the late 1940s, said he was impressed by the resilience of many in the countryside as law and order broke down. ‘No doubt they felt insecure but there was nothing to be done except mend the village defenses, keep a sharp vigil at night, stay alert and hope for the best,’ he wrote. ‘Meanwhile the land had to be cultivated, the cattle fed and the house fires tended.’* I was assuming that this was how it had been in Mairong. The villagers would have done their best to keep their heads down, to survive.

  But I couldn’t be sure of anything. Perhaps Shuyiman’s family had been killed by the Burmese army, a Buddhist militia or one of the various rebel groups. Or they might have fled during the upheavals of 1978 or the early ’90s. Maybe they now lived in one of the miserable refugee camps in Bangladesh, or had scattered across Asia or the Muslim world. If that was the case, I would never find them and Isaac’s letter of gratitude would never be passed on.

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  ‌Impregnable

  Arakan is a second Venice; its streets are rivers; its gardens, valleys; its ramparts, mountains. For, as the natives of the country are naturally weak and timid, they have chosen for their city a site fortified by nature, and impregnable by force of arms.

  Father A. Farinha,

  Jesuit Portuguese visitor to Mrauk U, 1639*

  June 2011

  Rakhine State, Burma

  I travelled up the Kaladan River on a wooden boat, some thirty feet long, with a stinking old diesel engine and no name. Between them, the busy crew of four steered, bailed water, repaired a flapping tarpaulin, prepared a fish curry and brewed cups of sweet milky tea to keep our spirits high. The boat was dhow-shaped, painted red and blue, with a prow and stern that rose high out of the water and a fussy, decorative balustrade along the sides. The crew had tied a glass vase full of white, daisy-like flowers to the prow, ‘to bring us luck on our journey’, they said.

  We left the port of Sittwe and crossed the choppy sea at the mouth of the Kaladan, a distance of several miles. Black clouds gathered above us and the wind picked up. When the rain started to fall, heavier and heavier, louder and louder, there was no place to hide. The boat was tossed left and right, forwards and backwards, and the waves lashed across the small deck, soaking everything. I retreated to the back, held on to the flimsy balustrade, and wondered at the wisdom of delivering Isaac’s letter at the height of the monsoon season.

  The engine whined and strained as it fought against the waves. It belched black smoke, and whined a little more. It seemed only a matter of time before it would choke and die, but, obstinately, it kept going. Behind us was the sea, in front of us the Kaladan River, two currents colliding head on, and the boat somehow had to struggle through the middle. Maung,* the captain, wearing a black longyi and shiny purple raincoat but barefoot, steered with one hand on the tiller, staring intently ahead into the foaming brown swirl, until the boat passed over a final ridge of waves and entered the Kaladan.

  We were heading up the same river that Isaac had travelled down in 1944. The Kaladan was not beautiful; swollen by the rains, it was the colour of the crew’s milky tea. It was some two miles across, much wider than Isaac would ever have seen it. But, of course, he never made it this far down the valley. The surrounding landscape, though, would have been very familiar to him. The floodplain had changed little over the decades. There were still no roads, no electricity pylons and no modern buildings: just vivid-green paddy fields, rows of scruffy palm trees and clusters of huts built from mud and bamboo. Much as the villagers of Mairong had done while Isaac was in hiding, farmers were wading through the fields, or checking fish traps in the mangrove swamps on the edge of the river, their faces sheltered from the pounding rain by conical woven hats. Herds of water buffalo, their bodies more angular, their horns thinner, than their more intimidating African cousins, were splashing through the shallows and grazing on top of muddy banks. The odd hill rose out of the floodplain, covered in jungle – the ‘Hill of Five Hundred Ducks’ on the west bank, then, a bit further on, the ‘Hill That Reaches The Sky’. Beyond the hills, in the far distance, were the mountains, steep and forested. Very occasionally, the flash of a golden pagoda rose above the tree line.

  Once, we passed a ferryboat coming downriver, an old rust bucket, its listing decks alarmingly crammed with passengers, bundles of firewood and wicker baskets full of pigs and ducks. The women, their faces covered in thanakha, protective white paste made from tree bark, watched in silence as we chugged past.

  It felt ominous and a bit discouraging: the impenetrability of the landscape, the dark skies threatening endless rain, the vast, wide river. It had been one thing to trace the course of the Kaladan with my finger over a few inches of dry map in the living room of my flat, quite another to travel up the real thing. Each of the straggling villages that we passed resembled Isaac’s description of Mairong in some way. How would I ever know whether I had found the right one? And, even if I did, what if the people who’d lived there had been dispersed long ago?

  To answer my endless doubts, I clung to one consoling idea. Provided that the community of Mairong was intact, then surely the events surrounding Isaac and David’s stay there would be part of local folklore – the legend would have endured.

  There was a shoot-out on the riverbank just near the village. Several soldiers were killed. Afterwards, we brought food to two injured black-skinned men. They said they were soldiers from Africa fighting for the British. We helped them for many months; they even came and stayed in our house. They tried to learn our language. If they had been caught, the Japanese would have punished the whole village. But, praise be to Allah, the British came back to rescue them. We never heard from them again.

  Somebody, I was convinced, would remember this story, or at least have been told about it.

  It was after dark when we turned up a tributary and arrived at Mrauk U. It had taken us eight hours to travel twenty miles.

  Mrauk U means ‘first accomplishment’ in old Arakanese. A Dutch visitor in the seventeenth century described ‘the golden roofs of the palace, which shone m
agnificently…lakes, fishponds, orchards and country houses…indeed it would be difficult to imagine a more entrancing landscape’.* Another European visitor from that time estimated that at least 160,000 people lived in Mrauk U.* But empires rise and fall. The Arakan Kingdom, and its capital Mrauk U, was overrun by the neighbouring Burmans at the end of the eighteenth century, its treasures looted or destroyed. By the time the British arrived, in 1825, and moved the Arakan’s capital to Akyab, on the coast, Mrauk U had sunk into obscurity. In January 1945, when the West Africans of the 81st and 82nd Divisions drove the Japanese out of Mrauk U, their prize had been the ghostly remains of an abandoned city. Today, the modern town is a small and unremarkable place, a handful of shops and bungalows on a pot-holed grid of dirt roads; tuk-tuks, cyclists and children scurry around under bright umbrellas. The town is overshadowed by the crumbling palace walls and the old pagodas and temples, many of which are in ruins.

  I was travelling with a man called Moe Kyaw,* a registered guide who was authorised to accompany tourists and had led previous tours to Mrauk U. Moe had been recommended to me by a foreign reporter who had made many undercover trips into Burma during the years of military rule. Moe was an astute person, and through hints in his conversation I sensed that he had already guessed that it was not the pagodas of Mrauk U that had brought me this far. That night, we ate in the dining room of an almost-deserted hotel. After the waiter brought our food and retired to the kitchen, I told Moe the reason for my journey. I had no choice. I needed his help.

  I told him everything, from the beginning: the African soldiers who came to Burma to fight the Japanese, the medical unit that had been attacked on the banks of the Kaladan, the young soldier – Isaac Fadoyebo – who had been left for dead, the villager called Shuyiman who had saved him and his companion and kept them alive, their eventual rescue nine months later. I told Moe that Isaac was still alive, and that I was carrying a letter from Lagos. He listened to all this impassively. Then I came to the crux of the matter: I was asking Moe to accompany me another thirty miles upriver. Although my plan, to find Shuyiman’s family, could hardly be judged threatening to the Burmese state, I wanted Moe to travel with me to an area that the army considered sensitive and where he had been explicitly warned not to take any foreigners. We both knew that this was a much greater risk for him than it was for me. If we were caught, I would probably be bundled out of the country for violating the terms of my visa. Moe, at the very least, would have his tourist guide permit confiscated, which would have left him without a livelihood. It was very possible he would also be thrown in prison.

  I had already noticed how cautious Moe was in our conversations. When I asked him what he thought of the monks’ uprising of 2007, he said, enigmatically, that he knew why the monks had to stage protests, but he also understood why the regime had used force against them. At one point, he had discreetly pointed out someone sitting nearby whom he suspected was a spy; another time he had drawn my attention to what he believed was a piece of electronic surveillance equipment. And, within moments of our having arrived at the hotel in Mrauk U, a well-dressed man had turned up at the reception desk, and asked to see my passport. He looked at it for a long time, returned it to the receptionist and pulled Moe aside. They talked intently for some minutes before the man left without addressing a word to me. ‘Military intelligence officer,’ Moe said. ‘He wants to know why you are here.’ In Mrauk U, I was a plausible tourist, albeit a rather adventurous one to have come during the monsoon season. Now I wanted him to take me into forbidden territory.

  Moe did not say anything for a long time. He frowned and looked confused. But when his frown turned to a smile, and he clutched my hand, I knew that he was on board. He went to speak to Maung, the captain of the boat, who knew the Kaladan, and who could suggest our best approach. Together, they hatched a plan, which they presented to me in the empty dining room.

  Maung would ride a motorbike the following day to Kyauktaw, where he would hire a boat. He would then travel several miles further up the Kaladan and look for a village called Mairong on the west bank. If he found it, he would try to get as much information as possible about its current inhabitants. Maung insisted on going alone. He said there was an army camp in that area, and, if I were seen there, as a white man, I would draw attention to all of us, with unpredictable but perhaps serious consequences. We would also have to contend with the fears and suspicions of the villagers themselves. Maung was a Rakhine Buddhist, not a Muslim. This was not ideal, but at least he was a local man. Moe, on the other hand, coming from Rangoon, could easily be mistaken for a policeman or government spy. We agreed that, if Maung did make contact with Shuyiman’s family, he’d arrange with them a time and place where we could all meet together safely.

  I liked Maung, if only for the phlegmatic skill with which he had steered his old boat, but I wished I could talk to him directly. Moe did his best to translate for me, giving Maung every scrap of information that I possessed that might help locate Mairong, and telling him exactly what he should ask if he did find the village. I could sense Maung’s frustration that I was not more precise about Mairong’s location, and he could probably sense mine that its name meant nothing to him. ‘Don’t worry, many villages have changed their names,’ Moe said, although he was starting to sound doubtful. I realised there was something else that I needed to explain to Moe and Maung; if anybody did remember Isaac and David, it would be under their adopted Muslim names of Suleman and Dauda Ali. So many complications, so much that could go wrong.

  The more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed that Maung would return unsuccessful. My brave quest would die with a whimper, and an apologetic phone call to a disappointed Isaac in Lagos. But everything was out of my hands now. I could only trust Maung. He would leave at dawn the following day, and promised to telephone as soon as he had news and was able to make a call.

  I spent the next day with Moe, wandering around the temples and pagodas of Mrauk U, thinking about what Maung might find. The rain came and went in a series of bursts interrupted by pale sunshine. A pair of small girls in bright dresses, their solemn little faces covered in thanakha, watched me as I made my way up the steps of the massive Koe-thoung temple, past rows of stoic stone Buddhas and hideous ogres. The girls carried big floppy leaves, which they used as improvised umbrellas whenever the rain resumed.

  In the Sanda Muni monastery, a friendly monk took me up to the museum, a dark and chaotic attic room. He showed me dusty cabinets crammed full of miniature Buddhas: Buddha sitting, Buddha standing, Buddha walking, Buddha underneath a tree. ‘These are fifteenth century and these are sixteenth century,’ he said with an airy wave at one cabinet, and then pointing to another, ‘and here is Buddha’s molar tooth, only brought out on special occasions.’ A sacred relic, it had been venerated for centuries for its perfect proportions, cleanliness and unique qualities of whiteness. Another display case was full of coins – ‘Ancient,’ said the monk. I peered inside the cabinet. I could just make out the profile of Queen Victoria on one, and George VI on another.

  In the afternoon, Moe and I walked back to the hotel, hoping there would be a message from Maung. There was none. We looked at each other, but didn’t say anything. The receptionist told us that, because of the rain, the authorities in Sittwe had closed the river to any further traffic. We had got to Mrauk U just in time. This was a relief, but the weather would make things difficult for Maung as he travelled upriver. Here was yet another reason to steel myself for disappointment, to prepare myself for the message I would have to deliver back to Isaac.

  Moe suggested we walk to the Shitthaung temple, the ‘Shrine of Eighty Thousand Buddhas’ famous for its labyrinthine sandstone passages. The walls are elaborately decorated with reliefs, not only of the Buddha, but also of elephants and giants. By the time we reached the temple, it was pouring once again. The inner passages were barely lit. A British soldier who visited the temple in the 1920s reported that ‘bats are numerous though mercifu
lly there are no tigers or snakes as one might expect’* and recommended examining the ground carefully with a torch for possible reptiles. Thankfully, we encountered no wildlife, but for the carvings of the famous Byala, the mythical animal of the Arakan that boasts the crest of a dragon, the horn of a rhinoceros and the tail of a peacock.

  In the monastery outside, novice monks, boys in their early teens with cropped hair and wearing only a saffron cloth round their waists, slid on their backs and tummies along the glistening tiles of the courtyard, their screams and shouts of joy just audible over the cacophony of the rain beating down on the tin roof. I could only wonder at what the West African soldiers had made of this strange and magical place in 1945. They must have felt a long way from home.

  Moe went to see a friend, so I walked back to the hotel alone in the dark, along puddle-pocked streets, passing small candlelit shops and darting children who shouted their goodbyes for the day. I replied ‘goodbye, goodbye’, but my mind was elsewhere, stuck on my hope that there would be word from Maung when I got to the hotel. At reception, I was handed a note. The man behind the desk explained that Maung had returned a short time ago and was resting in his room. I tore open the envelope, but the note was in Burmese script. I asked the receptionist to translate it for me.