The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma

by Thant Myint-U

  My first view of Burma was of the quiltlike rice fields, green and brown, as the plane flew over the south coast and then touched down at Mingaladon Airfield. From inside the propeller plane I could see soldiers marching past against a low line of trees in the near distance.

  A crowd of people were waiting just off the tarmac. They included dozens of my relatives, almost all of whom I was meeting for the very first time. One took my hand and led me away. But there were no government representatives and not even an official vehicle to transport the shiny oak coffin, only a slightly battered Volkswagen van belonging to the local Red Cross. U Thant’s body was then driven to the Maidan, where the old racetrack was, to give ordinary people a chance to pay their respects before the burial.

  Ne Win’s position was made crystal clear to anyone who might have had dissenting thoughts. The deputy education minister, U Aung Tin, was a former student of my grandfather’s and in a gesture of personal loyalty had come out to the airport. He also suggested at a cabinet meeting that day that the actual day of U Thant’s funeral should be made a holiday. He was immediately sacked. Others were frightened enough that one floral wreath placed in front of the casket at the racetrack was simply signed “Seventeen necessarily anonymous public servants.”

  At the old racetrack, I remember the crush of people filing past the coffin under what seemed to me a huge tent. There was a small mountain of flowers and wreaths in front, together with his framed portrait. I sat for a long time on a wooden stool nearby, the sun setting, mosquitoes buzzing around, with the floodlit Shwedagon Pagoda gleaming under the evening sky.

  The next day Ne Win’s ire took him a step further, and the state media claimed that my family had broken the law in bringing U Thant’s body back without sanction and said legal action might follow. While we waited for official clearance for burial (which for anyone in Burma meant negotiating a bureaucratic labyrinth), my grandfather’s casket remained on the unkempt grass in the middle of the racetrack, where ever-larger crowds of people in colorful longyis and velvet slippers gathered every day. Finally permission came, not for burial in any special place but in a small private cemetery. A little disappointed, my family agreed.

  There were hints of trouble ahead, and my parents decided not to take me to the funeral, leaving me instead at the home of my greatuncle to play with my cousins in the big backyard. The Buddhist funeral service itself went as planned, but then, as the motorcade began driving toward the cemetery, a big throng of students stopped the hearse carrying the coffin. They had been arriving all day long in the thousands, with thousands more onlookers cheering them on. Through loudspeakers mounted on jeeps they declared: “We are on our way to pay our tribute and accompany our beloved U Thant, architect of peace, on his last journey.” One of my grandfather’s younger brothers pleaded with them to let the family bury him quietly and to take up other issues later, but to no avail. The coffin was seized and sped away on a truck to Rangoon University. Their intentions were clearly in sympathy with my grandfather, but their actions left my family shaken.

  At the university the casket was placed on a dais in the middle of the dilapidated Convocation Hall, ceiling fans whirring overhead in the stifling heat. Buddhist monks chanted prayers, and students kept a vigil night and day. Soon the campus was filled with an enormous number of ordinary people. But now a political mood was also in the air. Speeches were made condemning the government and calling for change. The next day the student organizers sent a letter to the authorities demanding a proper state funeral and said that if the government did not agree, they would hold their own funeral, one befitting a Burmese hero. For the location of their planned mausoleum, they chose the site of the old Student Union, where U Nu had first tried his hand at public speaking, where Aung San had been president in the 1930s, and which Ne Win had blown up in 1962. More speeches followed as crowds grew and demands became more strident.

  On 7 December the government offered a compromise. U Thant would be buried at a mausoleum to be built at the foot of the Shwedagon Pagoda, but there would be no state funeral. The students were inclined to say no immediately, but my father and my great-uncles counseled them not to reject anything out of hand; after all, a public funeral in many ways would be more fitting than a state funeral organized by a military regime. There were also concerns for the students themselves and their fate and whether an amnesty for their actions would be guaranteed. At a meeting among my family, student representatives, and Buddhist monks, the majority agreed to accept the government’s offer.

  And so the next day a second attempt to bury my grandfather was made. His coffin was first lifted and placed temporarily at the site of the old Student Union, as a gesture toward the students who had wished him interred there. My family prostrated themselves on the ground before the casket, together with the many young men and women nearby. What seemed like all Rangoon was lined up along the broad avenues from the campus to the Shwedagon Pagoda a couple of miles away. But it was all not to be. At the last moment the more radical student faction seized the coffin yet again with the intent of burying U Thant at the Student Union site, no matter what.

  For three days it went on. No one knew what to do next. Students were still camped out at the university, and my grandfather’s body remained at the makeshift “Peace Mausoleum” erected by the protesters. Then, at two in the morning on 11 December, approximately fifteen platoons of riot police backed by over a thousand soldiers stormed the university grounds. The students and monks who had been on watch near the coffin put up a brief struggle, pleading with the soldiers to join them in defying Ne Win. Within an hour the army was in full control. Some reports say dozens of students were killed, some trying to guard the coffin to the very end, though no one really knows how many might have died. Many hundreds were rounded up and arrested. Some would serve long years in prison. Flanked on all sides by armored vehicles and automatic weapons just unleashed on unarmed men and women, the body of the former schoolteacher and UN secretary-general was hurried to his final resting place. Riots broke out around Rangoon. An angry crowd of several thousand destroyed a police station, and both a government ministry and several cinemas were wrecked. Troops opened fire, and more people were killed. The hospital was said to be filled with wounded. Martial law was imposed, and soldiers in full combat gear lined the main streets.

  At about six that morning we were woken up at our hotel by a phone call from downstairs. The caller, who identified himself as a government agent, said that U Thant’s body had been retrieved from the university and was now at the Cantonment Garden near the Shwedagon Pagoda. They said there had been no violence and that only tear gas had been used. My family was allowed to pay their last respects. We were asked to leave the country and about a week later headed back to New York. Only much later did we realize the full magnitude of what had happened that day.

  Being eight, I took only some of this in. I remember the feeling of having missed more than three weeks of school as well as Christmas. I didn’t see any of the violence myself, but I did see the faces of the crowds at the university as they pressed around our car and the young, often scrawny soldiers in their ill-fitting uniforms with their bayonets and shiny boots. I also met my great-grandmother, U Thant’s mother, then in her early nineties, and in playing with my cousins learned a little about all the fun things childhood in Burma could mean, colors and sounds and flavors far away from suburban New York. I also remember their excitement at eating vanilla ice cream and fairly tasteless sandwiches at our Soviet-built hotel, the only place where Western snacks could be bought. I saw Rangoon at the height of Ne Win’s road to socialism, with barely a car on the street and the old colonial buildings quietly crumbling, musty shops without much to sell, a city even a child could understand had seen happier days.

  One day during this trip, I don’t know when, my parents were having lunch at the home of friends, a retired air force officer and his wife, and I was outside with their daughter and her nanny. It was a posh residenti
al neighborhood, and a solitary military policeman in white gloves was checking his motorcycle along the empty tree-lined street. Then suddenly he stood to attention, and a black limousine preceded by two outriders whizzed past us. In the backseat of the limousine, waving as we waved, was a smiling general Ne Win.

  *

  There were other challenges to the status quo in the mid-1970s, including an abortive coup by some mid-level officers that led to their arrest and execution and to the imprisonment of the army chief of staff General Tin Oo. Tin Oo, who later emerged as Aung San Suu Kyi’s closest colleague and chairman of her party, had remained loyally in charge of the army during the U Thant demonstrations but was now accused of knowing about the assassination plot against Ne Win and of not doing anything to stop it.

  After this, and from the late 1970s to the 1988 uprising, the country settled into a low groove. There was little unrest; the economy after its darkest days had started to pick up a bit, there was new aid from the West and from the United Nations, and the civil war, still sputtering on, was largely confined to the border areas. Ne Win was getting old, and everyone looked forward to better times ahead.

  Some regimes manage to offset economic difficulties with an appeal to patriotism or some sort of political excitement. Ne Win offered nothing of the sort. He rarely appeared in public and certainly was not one for making speeches or holding flashy parades. In the 1960s he had traveled regularly to Vienna to consult the well-known psychiatrist Dr. Hans Hoff, usually in between shopping trips to London and Geneva. The secrets of what the Burmese dictator said on the couch remained locked in an Austrian office, but whatever was troubling Ne Win, he stopped receiving therapy in the mid-1970s. Around the same time his wife died, and this, it seems, affected him deeply. Soon after, he married Yadana Nat Mai, aka June Rose Bellamy, the daughter of a Burmese princess and an Australian bookie, but the marriage ended acrimoniously, and the general withdrew into deeper seclusion. Few, if anyone, outside his immediate family knew much about his personal life, but stories that emerged pointed to two things, a bad temper and a growing irrationality.

  That Ne Win was temperamental was always well known and probably was part of his success as a strong military leader. In 1976 the resident diplomatic community got to see a bit of it as well. It was New Year’s Eve, and the general was apparently upset with the loud music drifting from the Inya Lake Hotel across the lake to his own villa. Rowing himself across (according to one version of the story), he crashed the party, kicked in the drums, manhandled the drummer, and then punched a Norwegian aid official who happened to be standing nearby. Other stories focused on his passion for numerology and more generally for magic and in particular on his fixation with the number nine. No one knows the truth about Ne Win’s beliefs, but one thing is factual: in 1986, Burmese currency notes were replaced with those divisible by nine. There were no more ten-, fifty-, and hundred-kyat notes—only nine-, forty-five-, and ninety-kyat notes. Shopping suddenly meant becoming much better at math.

  There was no bread, but there was also little circus. For a brief and shining moment Burma had dominated Asian soccer, and from 1965 to 1973 it had won the biennial Southeast Asian Games an unprecedented five times and the Asian Games twice, in 1966 and 1970. But then the decline set in, and by the late 1970s there wasn’t even much of a sports team, in any field, to cheer on. Then a big change happened: television and videos.

  Television was first introduced in 1979 to a population starved for entertainment. The cinema had always been popular, but for a long time very few Western films were being shown, for financial reasons as much as anything else. One exception was James Bond, who always packed them in, and a generation of young Rangoonites were at least able to make the transition from Sean Connery to Roger Moore in step with the rest of the world. But now there was TV as well. There was only one channel, and this channel offered a mix of tightly controlled news, staid Burmese music performances, and old local films. It was on the air only a few hours a day but ushered in a quiet revolution in expectations. First, it did broadcast, usually in the early evenings, an episode of some American television series, and for a while The Love Boat captivated Burmese audiences, showing people an admittedly strange and warped but still not an entirely inaccurate vision of rich and prosperous life in the West.

  Then there was the arrival by the early 1980s of videocassette recorders (VCRs) and bootleg videotapes smuggled over the Tenasserim hills from Thailand. I remember in the mid-1980s (when I often spent the summer holidays in Rangoon) visiting the corner video shop, usually a little wooden hut where the selection was decent (especially if one’s tastes tended toward B movie action thrillers with lots of blood and gore). It wasn’t just in Rangoon. Though the relatively well-to-do had televisions and VCRs in their homes, others even in up-country towns could still watch films at tea shops. All in all, a sizable section of the population was seeing for the first time and in living color what they were missing under their nativist and puritanical regime.

  THE KACHIN HILLS

  In the cold weather of 1991–92 I traveled across western Yunnan, first from Dali southeast to the old Burma Road crossing at Shweli and then north by truck along the valley of the Salween River and into the Kachin hills. It was an illegal trip. At that time foreigners were not allowed in that part of Yunnan, and I was guided all along the way by representatives of the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), the political wing of the rebel Kachin Independence Army. We crossed some of the most spectacular scenery in the world, a landscape of rolling green hills, empty except for a few small villages and ponies munching on the fresh grass, interspersed by deep gorges and towering snow-covered mountains. Three of the world’s great rivers—the Yangtze, the Mekong, and the Brahmaputra—come within a hundred miles of one another here, in nearly parallel lines, before setting off for thousands more miles in different ways and meeting the sea at Shanghai, Saigon, and Calcutta. The area had once been the heartland of the ninth-century Nanzhao Empire and was the home of the Burmese language. Today much of the hills, on both sides of the border, were the home of the Kachins, a mix of different peoples, with distinct cultures but speaking languages kindred to Burmese and Tibetan.

  The Kachins, who had been in rebellion for the better part of a quarter century, would continue the fight for a few more years until agreeing to a cease-fire with Rangoon in 1994. Their headquarters were at Pajau, a sprawling army base of bamboo and thatch huts, nestled along the largely denuded mountains and looking a little like a cross between M*A*S*H and Gilligan’s Island. It wasn’t a guerrilla war. After having taken control of a vast arc of highlands, but never being able to capture and hold the major lowland towns, the Kachins settled into a defensive position, administering their territories and keeping Rangoon’s forces at bay. The cost had been enormous: thousands killed, villages razed, and tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people displaced from their homes, out of a total Kachin population of well under a million.

  Almost everyone wore an army green Chinese overcoat, and I had bought the smartest one I could find at a market in southwestern Yunnan along the way. Though the days were sunny with temperatures in the fifties and a brilliant blue sky overhead, by late evening it was biting cold, well below freezing. Sleeping in a thatch hut like everyone else (I had the clean and spacious “guest hut”), I had to decide whether to keep a small fire going and have a smoky room or instead wake up in a very frosty bed. Early on, Kachin officials had tried to impress on me their commitment to ending opium cultivation in their area, saying that they were encouraging their farmers to grow potatoes instead. It was to impress this point that they served up a big dish of French fries and, finding that I liked them, served French fries for almost every meal.

  It didn’t really feel like a war zone. Pajau in those days seemed quite settled, even though the front lines were only twenty or so miles away. It was all very orderly, with huts for various parts of the Kachin Independence Organization and even a special hut where shortwave
radio broadcasts of the BBC, Voice of America, and All-India Radio were regularly monitored. There were little children everywhere in brightly colored knits and padded jackets, as well as a kindergarten and school, and all this was built very neatly along the slope of a great mountain, with China to one side and the headwaters of the Irrawaddy somewhere down below.

  I spoke to some of the new recruits, young men in their late teens and early twenties who had volunteered straight out of high school in Myitkyina and Bhamo, both government-held towns. In asking them why they had joined, I had thought they might respond with words of Kachin nationalism, but instead they all gave me a reasoned and sad commentary about what they saw as their lowly place in the world and their desire to improve the basic lot of their people. They criticized the education system they had grown up with, the health care system, and even sanitation in their hometowns, comparing it with what they saw as global standards and saying that they were fighting for equal rights and a better life for the Kachins more than anything else.

  I was there over Christmas, and the Kachins were all Christians, a mix of Baptists, Anglicans, and Roman Catholics. In a fairly novel explanation, one of my hosts told me that earlier in the century, his ancestors, believing that to be modern, they needed to trade in their traditional animism for either Christianity or Buddhism, chose Christianity because, being avid hunters, they “enjoyed killing animals.” They invited me to a big Christmas feast and a play, in the Jingpaw language of most Kachins, with the plump uniformed officer in the seat next to me translating matter-of-factly as if I had never heard the story before (“the woman will have a baby … they are now in a new town and have to sleep in a manger …”). There was also quite a lot of caroling, with the local choir going from hut to hut and ending each song with an energetic “Merry Christmas!”