Junta-dodging in Burma

Burma’s military junta don’t like western journalists. JOE sneaked in any case – and nearly wound up cracking rocks in a labour camp.

By Robert Carry

Burma’s ruling military junta’s ban on foreign journalists has put it firmly on the holiday wish-list for keyboard monkeys the world over.

I ‘d been planning a trip to the stricken country for some time but after having my application knocked back repeatedly a desperate search of the web turned up a possible alternative to the standard queue-fruitlessly-at-the-Myanmar-embassy-in-Bangkok-along-with-a-million-other-people method most are forced to pin their hopes on.

I came across a Yangon-based travel agency which claimed to be able to secure a ‘visa on arrival’ in exchange for a fee. All I had to do was book a flight, get some digital passport photos taken, fill out a few forms and then email the lot back to the agency. They then sent me a document, entirely in Burmese, which when printed off was enough to get me onto my flight from Bangkok to Yangon without a visa stamped into my passport.

It wouldn’t be enough to get me through immigration in Myanmar I was told, but the plan was that a representative from the agency would then meet me in Yangon airport and arrange for my passport to be visa stamped on site. The plan ran like clockwork. Until I got to immigration. And no one was there to meet me.

As I frantically looked around for someone holding a sign with my name on it, the seriousness of the situation I’d landed myself in began to dawn. Myanmar is suffering under one of the most paranoid, brutal regimes on the planet. They round up opponents and subject them to decades of torture and neglect in stinking overcrowed prisons. They also have a particular bug-bear against western journos.

Three years ago they shot 50-year-old Japanese photographer Kenji Nagai at point-blank range in broad daylight in front of thousands of witnesses.

I stood in the near empty immigration hall while the few mostly Thai and Burmese stragglers I’d shared my flight with filtered their way past the shockingly stern-faced officials who all wore military uniform replete with firearms. Before leaving Bangkok I felt happy I’d pass the normal cursory inspection meted out to visitors, but not having a visa or anyone to help me get one meant I would be scrutinised.

I could lie for Ireland if necessary but my passport, if examined closely, would betray my real line of work because it bore a work permit stamp featuring the name of a company I used to work for in Thailand – called Ensign Media.

I shuffled around at the back of the queue while the officials looked on until I could delay things no longer. I stilled my urge to throw up as I slid my passport to the grumpy, middle-aged official. He flicked it open to the page where my visa stamp was supposed to be, looked at me, looked at my passport and then back at me again.

“No visa!” he barked.

“No, I don’t have a visa. Sorry about that. Someone was supposed to meet…” I mumbled before being interrupted.

“No visa”, he said again as if this was now my name. “You go over there!”

“Where?”

“Over there!” he yelled again, without actually looking up or indicating in any other way where I was supposed to go. So, I picked a desk which was manned by an equally miserable excuse for a human being who snatched my passport out of my hand and again opened it to the harrowingly-blank no-visa page.

“No visa! You go in there!”

This lad had the decency to point so at least I now knew where I was going. Through a little doorway with an armed, green-clad official waiting patiently for me on either side of it. As I walked towards the door I realised there were two other officials walking behind me. I’d no idea how long they’d been there but it all seemed academic by that stage – I was caught rapid.

The interview room I was shown into had a small, greasy, be-spectacled fellow sitting behind a desk with a notepad and a pen on it. I took a seat in front of him when he motioned me to sit down. He looked at me in a way that spelled out the fact that he wasn’t up for any bullshit.

I was about to hit him with a few mouthfuls of it anyway when suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed someone entering the room. When I turned around I was confronted with what I’m still convinced is the most gorgeous girl I’d ever clapped eyes on. She was made all the more stunning by the fact that she had a piece of card with my name written across it.

“Mr Robert?” she asked.

“Yep.”

“I am Aye from Magadas Travel. So sorry I’m late!” she said, putting her hands together in front of her face and bowing slightly in the traditional Southeast Asian show of deference. She then said something in Burmese to the official behind the desk who responded with a grunt and a nod.

“OK, OK, he say no problem, you can go and collect your bag. I will arrange visa for you and see you outside in five minutes.”

Relief. I got my bag and Aye came after me with my stamped passport and a bill. She also gave me a map of Yangon, hailed a taxi for me and apologised again for being late.

“I read your passport,” she said quietly as I threw my bags into the back of the battered old motor. “Make sure you take care.”

As it turned out, Yangon was a kip, basically. It looked like it hadn’t seen the construction of a new building in 30 years and everything was drizzle-soaked, mildew-stained and stagnant. All the footpaths were smashed to pieces – they looked like someone had battered their way up and down with a sledgehammer decades ago.

They were too badly damaged to sweep, so mud and detritus from the bleak roadside eateries built up and reduced to a slippery, black sludge. It made the whole city stink.

There was very, very little traffic. Cars were a rarity, buses scarce and antiquated and the junta had arbitrarily banned motorbikes, omnipresent in all the country’s neighbouring cities, for what appeared to be absolutely no good reason.

The junta’s leader, my guide later told me, is big into astrology and makes many of his decisions based on the constellations, and this was believed to have played a part in the removal of a form of transport hundreds of thousands of people relied upon. I spotted plenty of soliders however, careening around the streets in the back of trucks or, bizarrely, cycling by in squads numbering in the hundreds.

The paranoid leader was once told by one of his astrological advisors that there would be a big change across the entire country before the end of the year. Fearing that a revolt of some kind was being foretold he stepped in to make the change himself – by declaring that Burma’s drivers would switch from driving on the left to driving on the right. He could rest easy – the prophecy had been satisfied. It’s like running a country on the basis of what Mystic Meg tells you via the horoscope in The Sun.

“So he’s crazy,” I said.

“Yes,” replied my guide with a tragic smile. “He’s crazy.

I arrived in my rundown, side street hotel to find a team of staff with perfect English who seemed somewhat surprised by the fact that they actually had a customer. The hotel had a generator, which meant that while the rest of the city was plunged into darkness for most of the day we had 24-hour access to electricity. Looking out the window at the figures making their way through pitch-black streets I couldn’t help but feel guilty. Something had gone horribly wrong here.

There was a fraught atmosphere in the city – it hung with a bleak desperation and a sense that while things were bad, they were only likely to slide further. But the worst thing about the country wasn’t the homelessness, the general poverty or the lack of opportunity – it was the oppression. People were suffering, but they didn’t have the freedom to speak about it. Thousands of those who did were rounded up and stuck in rotting jails or labour camps for years on end. They were living an Orwellian nightmare. It was written all over their faces.

I wandered among the city’s haunted inhabitants for over two hours and during that time I spotted exactly one foreign face – a western guy who needn’t have bothered removing his press badge – he had ‘journalist’ written all over him. He gave a small, knowing nod as we walked past me by way of acknowledgement. The bloke thought he was in an episode of Highlander.

If a white guy wanders off the beaten track in any of Myanmar’s neighbouring countries he will find themselves navigating their way through a sea of smiles and stares. The Burmese people I passed on the packed footpaths that ran along the sides of the city’s empty roads also stared unashamedly at the rarity of a Caucasian, but the smiles were hauntingly absent. It felt like every time I left my hotel there were a dozen pairs of brown eyes following me around.

People in Myanmar have taken to the practice of chewing a thing called beetlenut. It’s an ungodly mixture of barks, chemicals and some weird little nut all wrapped in a leaf. It’s chewed in much the same way cigarettes as are smoked, and it produces some equally horrible side effects.

It stains the mouths of users blood-red and their gums retreat up their teeth. It can also, with prolonged use, cause the facial features to sag tragically. In severe cases it pulls the lower eyelids downwards revealing their sickly red underside.

Chewers salivate a lot and constantly spit blood-coloured gobs all over Yangon’s slimy, dirt-slicked footpaths. The image of these red-eyed figures staring at me in the gloomy evening light as I approached, spitting as I neared and then craning their necks as I passed, wasn’t easy to get used to.

I had planned to visit the Irrawaddy Delta, the region devastated by Cyclone Nargis when it blazed through Burma nearly three years ago. After spending a couple of days trying to find a tour guide willing to take me to what is still a bit of a no-go area for westerners and a kill-zone for journalists, I eventually arranged one through the company that sorted my visa.

‘Pha’ started by showing me the sites in Yangon but two days before we were due to leave, we noticed a car following us as we made our way around the city. The driver and passenger made no attempt to conceal themselves and would come inside and pull up a table whenever we stopped for a bite to eat.

I returned to my hotel the night before we were due to head into the Delta to find a group of soldiers standing directly across the street from its main entrance. I’m not convinced they had any firm evidence to suggest I was a journalist, but there were hardly any foreigners in Yangon at that time. I fit the profile, but there were so few visitors that they could easily follow them all. Either way, the game was up.

A visibly furious Pha was convinced I was about to be arrested, and told me I should make my way to the airport at the earliest opportunity.

When Pha left, I went to my room and packed. I couldn’t leave that evening because the army guys, visible from my window, remained where they were. I was up and ready to leave at 5am the next morning so after making sure the coast was clear from the window I ran down stairs, paid the remainder of my hotel bill to a sleepy bellboy and grabbed a taxi to the airport. Four-and-a-half hours later I was back in Bangkok freaked to death, but with a bag of stories to tell you good people.