Storyteller

by Zoe Daniel

  Rowan and I open a bottle of good Aussie red and drink it in front of the fire as the wind whistles and the gum trees dance outside in the dark. We turn on the TV and watch the story of Stuti and Aradhana. As I’ve seen it already, I’m dry-eyed, but Rowan sheds tears for the twins and some more for his mum.

  A few days later he flies direct to Pakistan for work. I take Arkie and Pearl and head back to Bangkok.

  SIXTEEN

  Burma is turning back into a bad news story.

  The transition was never going to be ideal. With the government still controlled by members of the junta, just in civilian clothes, rights violations by the military and others in positions of authority continue. Hundreds of political prisoners are still in jail. It’s one step forward, a few steps back.

  Long-running ethnic conflicts continue to fester. In Rakhine state, which shares a border with Bangladesh, an ethnic Rakhine woman is raped and killed. The crime is blamed on ethnic Rohingya men and it sparks a deadly flare-up between the Rakhine, who are Buddhists, and the Rohingya, who are Muslims.

  The Rohingya are a stateless people. They have generations of heritage on the Burmese side of the Bangladeshi border, yet the Burmese call them by the offensive words ‘Kalar’ and ‘Bengali’ and claim they’re not Burmese. The Burmese government refuses them citizenship and the rights that go with it, and Bangladesh also won’t accept them either. They exist in a kind of limbo.

  None of this is new. Yet after the rape, there’s an explosion of hate. It seems the newly liberated population feels free to express itself, and previously repressed social and religious divisions are boiling over.

  By the time we arrive in August, the first of the fighting has passed. We land in the state capital, Sittwe, on a damp, sunny morning, the turboprop spearing through clouds left over from an early downpour and depositing us into the steamy aftermath.

  Foreigners are banned from visiting because of continuing community tension, or some desire to hide it. We heard this only a day ago, so we’re not sure whether we’ll be allowed to enter the town or if we’ll be sent straight back to Yangon on the same aircraft. There’s no hiding, as we’re the only Westerners on the plane, so we disembark, collect our mountain of bags and then steel ourselves to pass through the military checkpoint at the exit.

  The soldier in charge baulks. ‘No foreigners allowed,’ he barks at our fixer, who contemplates this for a moment before owning up: ‘They’re journalists.’ David, Jum and I loiter around, trying to appear unconcerned. The soldier cocks his head and examines our media visas. ‘Okay, can go,’ he says in English, smiling. His offsider waves us out the door and into the steam bath that is Sittwe. We’re rather surprised, but perhaps it’s part of a plan by the authorities to seem open.

  The streets are wet although the sun is still shining. Our van forges through giant pothole puddles, sending a muddy spray over pedestrians and people on bicycles. Sittwe is an undeveloped but pretty town, with palm trees swaying over old temples and religious monuments that are interspersed with grand buildings constructed by the British after the first Anglo–Burmese War in the 1820s.

  The Bay of Bengal’s potential for tourism is awesome, particularly when combined with the stunning, virtually untouched beaches around Thandwe further south. The evidence of recent conflict, though, is impossible to miss.

  Anger over the rape led initially to the killing of ten Rohingya men. It then escalated into communal violence: angry mobs torched homes and the fires burned to the ground parts of Sittwe and other local towns, destroying property belonging to both ethnic groups. Along the seashore are piles of rubble and signs that prohibit rebuilding where Rohingya homes once stood.

  Many of the displaced Rakhine are sheltering in Buddhist monasteries around Sittwe. We visit them amid deafening torrential rain that falls in sheets from the eaves around us as we listen to their stories. There’s a lot of anger. The displaced Rakhine blame the Rohingya for the conflict and the subsequent loss of their houses and livelihoods. They have nothing to go back to and they’re now reliant on handouts from the World Food Program and the goodwill of the monks.

  There’s been talk that the monks are fanning their anger with hate speech and intolerance directed at the Rohingya. One monk, U Kumara, says that Muslim doctrine is at fault. He tells me and the followers sitting around us that Muslims want to kill people who do not follow Islam and that’s a reason to oppose them. He denies, though, that he and other monks are exacerbating the tension.

  Kyaw Aye sits on the monastery steps with his wife and child. Their home was burnt in the fighting. He says he will not co-exist with Muslims again. ‘They came into the country illegally with plans to take over the Rakhine state. We do not dare to live together with them again because they are all very rough; they are butchers.’

  It’s a common refrain, and it’s difficult to see the two communities being able to live side by side again. There’s substantial evidence, too, to suggest that the police and military have participated in the violence. They can’t be relied upon to keep the peace, although the authorities deny they’ve taken sides. ‘To say security forces protected the Rakhines and not the Muslims is wrong,’ says General U Hla Thain, the Rakhine state advocate.

  In town, the Rakhine move around as normal, but there’s a deep sense of anxiety among them. At the main market, security passes are issued to non-Rohingya only, and formerly Muslim-run shops are padlocked or boarded up. Shopkeeper Khin Saw Oo says, ‘I am able to open my shop only because there are police and military. If they were not here, there would be no security at all. Even now, we’re still living in fear.’ She explains that a group of Rohingya men made a break from the camps that morning, coming early to the market to buy food and other supplies. They were chased off by people wielding sticks. She’s lost a lot of business since the Rohingya left, but she doesn’t want them back.

  David, Jum and I are staying in a simple hotel in central Sittwe overlooking the main street. There’s a rooftop terrace and we sit there together after the curfew, watching thousands of bats sweep through the evening sky. Their screeching is the only sound in the artificially quiet town. The curfew keeps everyone indoors and off the street between dusk and dawn. Looking down from the hotel rooftop, there’s almost no movement, apart from a couple of stray dogs sniffing the gutters and a lone man on a motorcycle in the distance, probably a policeman.

  Authorities have adopted a policy of apartheid-style segregation, isolating the Rohingya in makeshift camps. They’re not allowed to return to Sittwe and they claim that if they try they’re stopped at gunpoint by soldiers.

  We travel the few kilometres to the camps. Conditions vary. Some Rohingya are living in rough bamboo structures that have been put up with the help of aid agencies, mainly from Muslim countries like Turkey. Others are in tents made from sticks and covered with pieces of plastic provided by the UN. Still others are sheltering under nothing but straw and woven leaves. Everyone lives in a mixture of mud and excrement. The rain stops and starts but when it falls it’s torrential, rushing through the camps, washing human waste everywhere.

  There’s a sense of helplessness among the Rohingya. They’ve spent their lives as stateless, persecuted people. This is more of the same, but now whatever livelihoods they’ve managed to eke out have been taken away as well. Their movement is so restricted that they can’t reach their remaining places of employment. They’ve been allowed to live, but they’re not allowed any sort of life, and the weak are dying from malnutrition and food- and water-borne illness.

  In one of the camps we visit, it’s claimed that thirty people have died. One woman holds a crying baby as she tells us dully that her other children were burnt to death during the fighting. Her husband is working somewhere in Malaysia, like many Rohingya men who become labourers elsewhere. He doesn’t know. Now her remaining child is sick, weak with diarrhoea and vomiting, the archenemies of mass camps like this one where there’s no hygiene and little medical help.

 
‘Returning is their right, but if their return would cause problems for the Rakhine community, we don’t want this to happen. For that reason we have to detain them for the time being,’ says U Hla Thain about the decision by the authorities to enforce the camps. He claims that plans for a better strategy are being made – but almost a year later, as I write this, the situation is worse, not better.

  ‘We are being made to stay separated,’ the Rohingya camp leader tells me. ‘They wanted to separate us in their mind and that’s why we are here.’

  But there’s little for the Rohingya to return to. The part of Sittwe where they lived is a restricted area. We drive in anyway and when we’re stopped by a group of nervous police, we convince them to let us keep going on foot, with them as an escort.

  What was once a community of homes and businesses is now a wet and dripping mass of burnt-out buildings. Some are half collapsed, their contents pulled out onto the street and torched or smashed to pieces. Books are torn, plates broken, clothing ripped to shreds and left on the road in the rain.

  A mosque stands silent and empty. David and I tiptoe around it, trying to be respectful as we film what was once a community hub, a place of worship. Prayer rugs lie in a tangled mass on the tiles with torn copies of the Qur’an, desecrated, their ripped pages fluttering in the breeze.

  The police don’t like us being here, so we don’t linger too long. As the rain starts again, we say we’re heading back to the hotel. Once we’ve shaken them off, we stop at a vast open field littered with debris. It once held ten thousand houses, mainly inhabited by Rohingya. Nothing is left standing.

  In the blinding rain, I walk over foundations, rubble, broken glass and the detritus of lives ruined. Here and there I retrieve something that’s survived the flames: a tube of toothpaste, a cup, a shard of crockery, a baby’s shoe. The trees are bent double by the wind and rain. The umbrella that Jum is trying to hold over David’s camera is broken. We’re miserable, inside and out.

  Nearby, faded boats are lined up on the shore, safe from the wild waves whipped up by the monsoon. Men hammer and sand the wooden hulls of the old vessels. David stops to get a few shots and children run and jump in front of the camera, smiling and waving as the rain stops and the golden sun peeks through for a moment.

  I squint out to sea. It’s too rough now, but soon the boats will be heading into the danger of the open ocean, towards the shores of other nations that will not welcome them either.

  I’ve not been feeling well on this trip and I’m certain I’m finally pregnant. As my contract ticked over into its last year, we started trying for another baby, but unlike with the instant blind luck that gave us Arkie and Pearl, nothing’s happened. I’m in my late thirties and while we’ve always been aware that age might be a factor, we’ve never really expected any problems.

  We delayed having another child so that I could take the job in Bangkok, and Rowan and I both worry that we’ve squandered the last few years with the kids, allowing so much time to be chewed up by travel and work. We’re hardly ever in the same city at the same time. We just tag in and out.

  It’s in Sittwe airport, just before boarding the plane, when I realise that, again, it’s not to be. I’m having a miscarriage. Losing a baby in a toilet in an airport in Western Burma is not a place I ever thought I would be.

  I sit listlessly waiting for the plane and wishing I was home. As it taxis in, I think of the kids and remember Arkie’s request for pictures of planes with ‘repellers’, so I use my phone to film the turboprop trundling along the tarmac as it arrives to pick us up. Then we take off over the shimmering Bay of Bengal and climb into the black and blue sky towards Yangon.

  When we get back to Bangkok, I take myself to the doctor. Rowan is away when I get the test results, and Arkie hears me in tears with him on the phone, explaining that the doctor has said I won’t be able to have another baby, at least not without help.

  Arkie snuggles up next to me. ‘What’s wrong, Mummy?’

  I explain that I’m probably too old to give him and Pearl a little brother or sister.

  ‘That’s okay,’ he says pragmatically. ‘That means we can go on an African safari soon.’

  I laugh. Arkie knows he has an African connection and he’s been keen to visit for a while. I’ve told him that we can’t go on a safari until the youngest person in our family is at least eight. As far as he’s concerned, no new babies will mean this can happen sooner rather than later.

  The doctor has suggested trying IVF, which is heavily commercialised in Bangkok, and freely and cheaply available. But I dismiss that option straightaway. Apart from anything else, I can’t see how I could juggle it around all of my work-related travel.

  Anti-Muslim violence continues to flare in Rakhine state and spreads to other parts of Burma, fed by hate speech from radical Buddhist monks – although they deny it. Over several trips through the next year we visit communities, like Meikhtila and Lashio, where parts of town are burnt to the ground in vicious riots, and dozens more Muslims are killed, among them women and children. Shopkeepers post ‘969’ on their windows to mark themselves as Buddhists, because extremist monks encourage people to shop only at Buddhist stores. Muslims, they tell me, have too much economic power.

  I fear the whole country will explode. For a while the authorities fail to control the situation at all. Eventually they hose down the anger by calling in the army, but it still smoulders.

  Meanwhile, Aung San Suu Kyi is virtually silent. Her credentials as an advocate for human rights are questioned because at first she fails to speak up for the Rohingya. When she does, her words are carefully chosen. While she talks about racial and religious tolerance, she doesn’t defend them directly. She’s a politician now. If she speaks in favour of the Rohingya, she will alienate the Burmese who don’t accept them as citizens and don’t even acknowledge the term Rohingya.

  As expected, the Rohingya are fleeing in the wooden boats we saw on the shores of Rakhine. We’re again on the road to meet them in southern Thailand and Malaysia as they arrive.

  Patched up and overloaded, they start landing on the coast of Thailand to the dismay of the Thais, who seem to have no idea what to do with them. Initially they’re rejected outright, but because they have nowhere to go back to, they’re reluctantly accepted on a temporary basis, the men caged in squalid detention centres, the women and children in shelters. We speak to women who have given birth on the boats; children who have come alone and can’t account for their parents.

  We investigate claims that Rohingya boats are being intercepted by the Thai Navy and their passengers sold by the sailors to human traffickers. Apparently it’s a profitable business.

  Other Rohingya report being stopped by soldiers who remove their engines and then tow their boats out to drift in the sea for days or weeks until they reach any shore. The dead are pushed overboard as they go. Thai authorities are accused of removing the engine from a boat that drifted all the way to Sri Lanka over twenty-five days. Of 130 people, 97 died.

  In another alleged incident, a group of terrified men tell us that the navy towed their boat out to sea to remove them from Thai territory, and then fired when some refugees jumped into the water. ‘When the boat was being towed out, we were afraid we would be pushed out to sea,’ one man tells us, from a hiding place in a Thai village, ‘so ten to fifteen people jumped off. Then they opened fire … I know that one was dead, some said two were dead.’

  We visit two fresh graves where the Thai villagers say they buried the men. They claim that one had a gunshot wound to the head.

  In a statement, Thailand’s Internal Security Operations Command denies the allegations. ‘There was no such incident. They were not shot by Thai authorities.’

  SEVENTEEN

  In late 2012 I take off to Burma, then Cambodia, then Malaysia, in a flurry of back-to-back assignments during the lead up to Christmas.

  Then, kids in tow, Rowan and I head to our Wye River shack.

  Dad, K
im and my little sister, Elie, who’s sixteen and already as tall as me, help us unpack stuff from my mother-in-law’s house. We have inherited a collection of sentimental items, including ornate teaspoons and a wooden nutcracker carved with a bearded man’s face that Rowan can’t bear to let go of, plus Ba’s beautiful big tagine, lovingly carted from Morocco.

  In the still summery evenings I set a table on the front deck and we eat barbecued lamb chops and Greek salad with feta cheese and drink white wine until we lose the sun behind the hill. The kookaburras sit waiting for morsels of meat, and a cheeky one grabs a lamb bone out of Rowan’s hand when he’s looking the other way. King parrots, rosellas and cockatoos pick birdseed off the deck that’s been strewn around by the kids. A koala sits in the tree above us.

  When Dad, Kim and Elie go, Mum arrives for Christmas along with Rowan’s sisters and their families. They rent a holiday home down the hill and the kids run between the two houses eating two breakfasts and two lunches and generally turning both places upside down. It’s a happy kind of chaos.

  Morning and afternoon we pack up the boogie boards and wetsuits and sunscreen and hats and buckets and spades and snacks and drinks, and wander down the hill to the sand. With eight children and as many adults, it’s quite a sight.

  We have a whole summer of beach cricket, sausages in bread, sunshine and family. Amid the bliss, with my contract in Bangkok coming to an end, Rowan and I make the decision to attempt IVF, if only to be satisfied that we’ve given ourselves every chance of having another baby. I email the doctor and arrange to start the process as soon as we get back to Bangkok.

  We deliberately don’t have an internet connection at the shack and, apart from occasionally checking email or Facebook on my phone, I exit the world of news for a few weeks. The only headlines I see are in the middle of TV cricket matches and in the weekend papers, and mostly revolve around the horrific bushfires and floods that now seem to afflict Australia every summer. There’s some compelling feature coverage of a rape and murder in India, but, as it’s not my region and I’m on leave, I read it out of personal rather than professional interest.