Another Man's War

by Barnaby Phillips

  Today, many of the Muslims living in Rakhine State have lost the right to call themselves Burmese. So too they have been written out of the history books. I had noticed that the official guidebooks at Mrauk U made no mention of the Muslim influence at the Arakan court, just as the government museum in Sittwe, which otherwise made a deliberate effort to celebrate Burma’s ethnic diversity, did not so much as mention them. They have become invisible. I had carried a thank-you message from Africa for what Shuyiman’s people had done in a war that ended two generations ago, only to discover that they still do not have peace in their own land.

  Subsequent events would make my meeting with Shuyiman’s family all the more poignant. At the end of May 2012, a long period of relative calm in relations between the groups now commonly known as Muslim Rohingyas and Buddhist Rakhines came to an abrupt and bloody end. The trouble started when a Rakhine woman was raped and killed in the town of Ramree, reportedly by three Muslim men. A few days later, a crowd of Rakhine villagers stopped a bus, pulled off ten Muslims and beat them to death. The effect of these crimes was electric across the old Arakan region. Mobs of Rakhines and Rohingyas, armed with swords, knives and iron rods, attacked each other’s villages, burning and killing. They destroyed mosques and temples. The Burmese army and police watched as the violence unfolded, and, when they did choose to intervene, invariably took the side of the Rakhines. In Sittwe, Rakhines burnt most of the Rohingyas’ homes, while the police turned their guns on those who tried to put the flames out.* Many Rohingyas, and a smaller number of Rakhines, were forced into overcrowded camps, without adequate food, shelter or medical care.

  Burma’s president, Thein Sein, had few words of comfort for the Rohingya, whom he called ‘Bengalis’. The only solution to the crisis, he said, was to expel them all, as Burma would be better off without them. ‘We will send them away if any third country would accept them,’ he said. His new and supposedly democratic government used exactly the same harsh and exclusionist language as the previous military regime.

  Tens of thousands of Muslims decided to leave Burma in any case. They set out by sea for Bangladesh, Thailand and Malaysia. It was a dangerous journey, and several hundred drowned. Those who did manage to reach neighbouring countries discovered that they were not welcome.

  I wondered what was happening to Shuyiman’s family amid this turmoil. A few days after President Thein Sein spoke, I managed to get through to them on the telephone. They were using a mobile that seemed to be shared by several families in the village. Over a terrible line, with long delays and wild interrupting sounds and frequent cut-offs, we had a halting conversation, with an exiled Rohingya activist in London doing his best to translate for me. The family explained that Mairong had not been attacked, but it had become like a prison.

  They were running out of food, sharing what they had among themselves, but had been explicitly prohibited by the army from trying to buy any supplies from neighbouring Rakhine villages. ‘If we go there, we will be killed,’ said Shuyiman’s grandson Roshi. ‘We have shown our great-grandfather’s ID card to the authorities, but they are not interested,’ he explained. ‘They say it makes no difference, we are all illegal immigrants and eventually we will have to leave.’ He said the family did not want to go anywhere. They were ready to die.

  Several months later, in October, the violence erupted a second time. This time, the worst of it was much closer to Mairong. It appeared to be more organised, less spontaneous than before. Rakhine crowds, egged on by Buddhist monks and extremist politicians, attacked several Rohingya villages. Again, the army and police either looked the other way, or joined in, as Rohingyas were killed or forced to flee.* In a village outside Mrauk U, a human rights group reported that dozens of Rohingyas were massacred, including many children who were hacked to death. The police had been warned of the impending attack, but the only action they took was to disarm Rohingya villagers. In the following days, there was fighting around Kyauktaw. One source told me that some 120 Rohingya homes were burnt down and three people had been killed near Mairong; others said that, for the first time, the security forces actually fired at the Rakhine crowds to try to control the situation.

  Some 140,000 people were displaced in these two bouts of violence, most of them Rohingya Muslims. It wasn’t the story the outside world had expected, or wanted to hear, from Burma in 2012. Western leaders had lifted sanctions, and were queuing up to visit. Aung San Suu Kyi had been elected to parliament, but, instead of using her new freedom and power to denounce the cruelty, she preferred not to talk about what was happening in Rakhine State. When pressed, she would only say that she would not take sides. In April 2013, a Burmese government commission recommended the rigid separation of Rakhine and Rohingya communities ‘until the overt emotions subside’. But, in Mairong, the villagers told me that the security forces were acting more like their jailers than their protectors, not even allowing the sick to travel to hospital.

  It was the worst violence in the Kaladan Valley since the Second World War. And, despite the long decades between the two conflicts, there were striking similarities between the outbursts of ethnic and religious hatred. Now, as then, gangs marched from village to village, brandishing whatever weapons they could find. There must have been village elders, Muslims and Buddhists, who witnessed this latest violence and were reminded of what they’d seen in their childhoods. But Rakhine State’s present doesn’t just resemble its past; it is also shaped by it. No doubt some of the families with the most traumatic memories of 1942 took satisfaction in exacting their revenge this time around, in seizing back land that was stolen from their parents or grandparents, and in killing those who resisted. Many who lost relatives, friends or property then would have carried a burning sense of injustice, even loathing, through the years, and many would have passed this on to their children.

  In part, this is Britain’s and Japan’s legacy. Outside powers, both exploited murderous local divisions in the Arakan for their own immediate advantage. They armed and raised the hopes of those who fought alongside them, with little concern for the long-term consequences. There are few people in Britain today who would know that in areas of Burma there are people still suffering from the fall-out of the Second World War.

  In Britain, the war is seen, at least in moral terms, as a relatively straightforward affair. It’s remembered as a time when the British people showed courage and pluck in the face of overwhelming odds, decency in the face of brutality. For a short and glorious period, the mantra goes, Britain stood alone for freedom (until the Soviet Union and the United States joined the war). This stirring story – of Dunkirk, the Blitz and the Battle of Britain – is captured in Churchillian language. ‘Never Surrender’, ‘Their Finest Hour’, ‘Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat’. Britain’s passage through the twentieth century may have been characterised by relentless decline, but at least its role in the Second World War is a source of near unequivocal pride. And, while the British people are open to reassessing and finding new moral ambiguities in other aspects of their past, the consensus around the Second World War has remained firmly intact. Politicians still draw on memories of it to try to bind the country together. Anniversaries are observed with, if anything, increasing pride and solemnity. It was a war fought, the British believe, for all the right reasons. Where there is debate and even regret, for example over the bombing campaign against German cities, it is the morality of the methods that are scrutinised, not the end objectives.

  From Isaac’s or Shuyiman’s perspective, that of the colonised, things look very different. The events of the early 1940s are not cast in black and white, but in shades of grey. Seen from Nigeria or Burma, Britain is less heroic and far from selfless. It was a Great Power under attack, and it mobilised its imperial resources in order to protect its far-flung possessions against other, emerging empires. Standing alone? Hardly. Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians and white Southern Africans all played their part. But millions of the Empire’s less favoured peoples
were also co-opted into the British war effort. Basothos and Swazis were taken from the mountains of Southern Africa to fight in the deserts of North Africa and on the long slog up the Italian peninsula. The Caribbean regiment also fought in Italy. East and West Africans fought first in Somalia and Abyssinia, and then travelled across the Indian Ocean, where they joined Punjabis, Baluchis and Gurkhas to play their part in the recapture of Burma from the Japanese. So on and so on. Were the British really fighting for freedom? In Europe, perhaps, but, when it comes to Asia, that seems a generous interpretation of their motives. The Burmese would discover that British rule was more humane than that of Japan, but they made it clear they preferred to live under neither. General Slim wrote that the Japanese army had to be destroyed and smashed as ‘an evil thing’. However, the war in Burma was less a struggle of good against evil than it was one for wealth and influence. And, in waging this struggle, Britain depended to a large extent on the sacrifice and courage of others, of men like Isaac and Shuyiman. Once these others had served their purpose, they were forgotten.

  I spent two days in Sittwe, waiting for the rain to stop so that I could catch a flight back to Rangoon. During the war, this city had been Akyab, the town on the coast with the airfield that the 81st Division had always coveted. On the evening of the second day, the weather brightened, and I took a long walk along the coastal road to the lighthouse on the rocky point that juts out into the Bay of Bengal. On one side, the beaches face the ocean, but, on the other, the coastline turns sharply inwards, marking the beginning of the estuary of the Kaladan. The seawater was brown, stained by the soil carried down the river from the highlands, past Mairong and Pagoda Hill and Mrauk U. The tide was out and Sittwe’s wide grey beaches shimmered in the evening sun. Clusters of children played football on the flat sands, fishermen pulled their nets in and gathered to examine and divide up the catch. Rusty old trawlers and wooden canoes bobbed side by side just beyond the surf.

  This was where British and Indian troops had stormed ashore in January 1945. But the Japanese had already gone, leaving only their dead behind. The British discovered that their own bombs had destroyed most of the town.

  I looked out to sea, and thought of an old man in Africa, whom I knew was waiting impatiently for my call.

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  ‌Epilogue

  19 January 2013

  Emure-Ile, Nigeria

  Isaac was rushed to hospital in Lagos in September 2012, suffering acute pain from a perforated duodenal ulcer. He was operated on, but afterwards there were several complications. His daughter, Tayo, the doctor, felt that he was beginning to lose the will to live. She and Isaac’s other daughters and his grandchildren sat by his bed in shifts through several long days and nights, preparing themselves for the worst. Then Isaac made a recovery. He started talking again, and could shuffle up and down the ward, even climbing stairs. Tayo told me that his spirits seemed to be improving, and that she was making plans to look after him at her own house after he was discharged.

  I’d spoken to Isaac many times on the phone over the previous two years. The most memorable occasion was just after I’d returned from delivering his letter in Burma. I’d made careful notes before calling him that day, so as to convey all the events I’d experienced and the people I’d met as distinctly as possible. I didn’t want to confuse him. But when I got through to Isaac I couldn’t help blurting out, ‘I found Shuyiman’s family. They are still thinking of you.’ There was a long pause. Was he still there? Phone calls to Nigeria often drop out for no apparent reason, but this time I could still hear the hiss and crackle of the line from Lagos. I said it again, slowly, my voice wavering a little, ‘I found them, Isaac, they’re still thinking of you.’ Now I could hear Isaac over the hiss, gasping at first, then whispering, ‘Alleluia, Alleluia.’ He repeated it louder and louder, until his shouts were vibrating down the line, ‘Alleluia, Alleluia!’ I held the phone away from my ear. I could picture Isaac, in his little yard in Surelere, struggling to his feet and reaching for the sky.

  I think my news was an affirmation for Isaac. Through the decades, he had dwelled on the experience that had defined his life, in all its horror and wonder. Now, right at the end, he had the satisfaction of learning that he had indeed remembered it the way it was. He’d been forgotten by those he’d fought for, but not by the strangers who’d saved his life.

  We spoke often in the weeks that followed. Isaac would call me out of the blue, and ask me to go over this or that detail, to explain once more how I had found the village, what Shuyiman’s son and grandson had said, even to describe the Kaladan in the monsoon rain. A few months later, I made another trip to Lagos. I gave Isaac the photographs I’d taken in Burma, and he made me go through every aspect of my adventure once more. He seemed buoyant and at peace.

  That was then. Now, when I called Isaac in the hospital ward, he sounded weak and depressed. When I talked about planning to visit him once more in Lagos in the coming months, he said he hoped this would happen, but I could hear the doubt in his voice, which trailed off into silence. I put the phone down, and I had the cold and clear feeling that we would not talk to each other again. Isaac had decided to go. The following morning, 9 November, he suffered a massive blood clot to the lung, and collapsed. Despite Tayo’s best efforts to revive him, Isaac died shortly afterwards. He was one month short of his eighty-seventh birthday.

  My journey to Burma had rekindled Isaac’s desire to find out what had happened to David Kargbo after the war. Of course, I shared Isaac’s curiosity. David’s version of events in Burma – and the tale of his subsequent life in Sierra Leone – were the most significant loose ends to the whole story. Isaac died before I was able to track down David’s family, but I pushed on with my research nonetheless. It felt like unfinished business that I needed to resolve. Eventually, it was an enterprising lieutenant colonel in the Sierra Leonean army, Fatorma Gottor, who helped me put the pieces together. He made contact with John Abdul Kargbo, David’s eldest son, who in turn told me his father’s story.

  When David Kargbo returned home in April 1945, he too was mistaken for a ghost. His parents, just like Isaac’s, had assumed their son had died when they were told he had been missing for months behind enemy lines. They had performed traditional funeral rites for him. David arrived in the village of Rogbin in the middle of the night after a long walk, and knocked on his parents’ door. His father, Foday, and his mother, Kadday, looked outside and saw what they assumed to be an evil spirit disguised as their son. Terrified, they refused to let him in. But the spirit, who was wearing a British Army uniform, carried on knocking, and eventually lit a cigarette. This was what convinced Foday to open the door. Within moments, all of Rogbin was woken by his excited cries, and the celebrations began. David stood there, surrounded by weeping brothers, sisters and cousins.

  David got a job in the colonial civil service, as a native administration clerk. He married and, just like Isaac, had six children. In the 1950s, the family moved to the southern town of Bo, where David was a school bursar. He seems to have been a much-loved figure, with friends all over the town, including many former soldiers who had fought in Burma. He liked to sing, not just hymns, but also the lovers’ laments he had learnt en route to the war when he saw women from Nigeria and the Cameroons saying goodbye to the men who were boarding the ships. In the evenings, children and friends used to gather to hear David’s Burma stories. He had a reputation as a raconteur, and with the passing of years his tales lost nothing in the telling. With a gleam in his eye, his memory perhaps lubricated by a beer or two, he would take his enthralled audience into the dark jungles of the upper Kaladan. Always outnumbered by the dastardly Japanese, David and his fellow West Africans fought bravely to the last bullet. When they ran out of ammunition, they swam across rivers, were captured, but managed to escape from a prisoner-of-war camp. An injured colleague begged David to put him out of his misery and kill him with a bullet to the head. Reluctantly, David complied. Eventually, after m
onths of derring-do, the unit was rescued by British helicopters, and whisked back to India. ‘I thought they were fairy tales,’ said one boy, little knowing that the truth was scarcely less credible.

  In fact, others did hear a more accurate version of David’s Burma adventure. A nephew, Almamy Tom Kanu, was a pupil at the school in Bo, and remembered David talking about ‘a Nigerian fellow’ who had been stranded in the jungle with him, and who had been shot in the leg. ‘He said he was always thinking of this fellow, always hoping to hear from him.’*

  David Kargbo never lost his slight limp. He would point to his ankle, and tell children that in Burma he had pulled maggots out of his wound with his own fingers. But it was his lungs that would kill him. In June 1962, he was admitted to Bo Government Hospital with severe respiratory problems, and died a week later. He was in his late forties. His school held a special assembly in his honour, where the pupils sang his favourite hymn, ‘Amazing Grace’.

  In the hills to the east of Freetown, a woman sits on the porch of her simple two-roomed house, and enjoys the view over the peninsula mountains and the city far below. She is a great-grandmother, in her late eighties, but she’s still a striking woman, with a fierce and proud stare. Her name is Ya Marie, and she is David Kargbo’s widow.

  Ya Marie says her husband died so young ‘because of the mysterious things that had happened to him in the war’. She never remarried. She cannot read or write, and has little to remember him by now. There were not many people in Sierra Leone who were left untouched by what is called the ‘Rebel War’, the murderous insurgency of the 1990s. In 1999, the rebels attacked Freetown. They raped, looted and murdered their way through the eastern suburbs, hacking the limbs off many civilians. Ya Marie’s house was burnt down, and all her photos of David and the records of his war service were destroyed.