ENGLISH DEYEA NEWS

by Peter Hitchens Mail Online |

The Mail on Sunday columnist infiltrates this sinister state and uncovers the Generals' secret new capital

Golden past: Peter Hitchens at the beautiful Shwedagon Pagoda

In Burma the people are afraid of their rulers - and the rulers are so afraid of the people that they hide from them in a crazy capital city hundreds of miles from anywhere. The only open opposition comes from a lonely woman in a besieged villa and a troupe of comedians in a tiny back-street theatre, who are forbidden to tell jokes in their native language.

In the strange league of pariah states, where Cuba jostles with North Korea and Belarus for the title of most fear-ridden nation on Earth, Burma is certainly the oddest of all.

You step off the edge of the known world when you go there. The last part of the journey, from Bangkok to Rangoon, takes less than two hours. But it hauls you roughly out of the smooth, the globalised and the familiar into a dark, disturbing place.

Bangkok's gargantuan airport is a bloated celebration of everything we have come to accept as normal. It is a colossal shopping mall with some serviceable runways attached, so immense that the traveller can easily get lost in its hallways, throbbing with the urgent pulse of consumer culture, adorned with every brand name, sparkling and garish at every hour of day or night.

Rangoon, by contrast, is dingy at all hours. It is decrepit and secretive, and perhaps the last city on Earth where the ghost of the British Empire still walks.The great globalist tidal wave of concrete, money and credit, advertising and electronics, which has made the whole world bland, faltered and flopped before it got to Burma.

In Rangoon your mobile phone sits dead in your pocket and your credit card is useless. The internet is busily censored. There are a dozen monasteries and not a single Starbucks or McDonald's. The traffic is reasonable rather than frantic, and often actually sparse. The billboards mostly advertise local products you have never heard of.

It is profoundly poor. Child labour is common and blatant, with small boys toiling on road gangs. There are dreadful, fetid slums within a mile of the heart of Rangoon.

The airport road passes close to the well-named Insein prison, a giant circular fortress of repression which was once the largest jail in our Empire. It is now the hopeless home of many protesters and dissenters who wrongly thought last year that they had a chance of overthrowing the Burmese military regime. Some have just begun truly insane sentences of as long as 65 years.

At the great seaport's heart, tremendous decayed structures of dark brick or heavy stone, like vast Yorkshire town halls or broken-off chunks of Whitehall, rear above the cratered streets and ruined pavements. Several of these relics even have trees growing out of their upper storeys, much as you used to see in Communist East Berlin. In an odd way, Rangoon is a sort of tropical East Berlin, its derelict decay made worse by the sweaty heat.

Hitchens makes a telephone call by candlelight in Mandalay

Slovenly police officers loaf about their sinister headquarters, offering incorrect directions to travellers. Clerks can be seen filling in forms with typewriters, a technology vanished everywhere else but still employed by this unhurried police state.

Gaggles of suspicious soldiers skulk - especially on or near bridges, though they are plainly under orders to stay in the background for now.

The spires of Gothic cathedrals, in cold white stone and livid pink brick, stand out from a skyline that is still only slightly disfigured by concrete tower blocks.

Lovely ornate apartment houses, some dating from before the First World War, crumble gently above narrow, pungent streets laid out long ago by colonial planners who believed British rule would last for ever. You are walking through the ruins of a collapsed civilisation.

When twilight comes, the sensation of being in a lost world grows stronger. Electricity dribbles unreliably and weakly to homes and businesses even here in the richest and most bustling part of the country. Tiny shop fronts and tea shops are lit with candles.

Even where there is power, it is feeble. The windows of the big buildings have a North Korean look, giving off the same greyish, sad light that you see after dark in Pyongyang.

The unbelievable, floodlit golden tower that is the Shwedagon Pagoda, supreme shrine of Burmese Buddhism and the country's single most precious possession, broods over the twilit former capital, reminding you time and again that this is still a profoundly pious country, and one that has - for better and for worse - missed the economic revolution that has transformed the rest of the Far East.

In any other major Asian city, 80-storey hotels and office blocks would long ago have eclipsed it, reducing it to a tourist toy, but here it springs into view from a thousand places, often glimpsed at the far end of squalid lanes, half-obscured by webs of knotted power cables and phone lines.

If you walk slowly enough down such lanes, you will find yourself being gently approached by ordinary Burmese, anxious for contact with the outside world. Some crave tourist business - one money-changer even asked me how many people had come in on my flight, so anxious was he for trade. Others begin boldly but clam up when questioned about conditions.

When I asked one man, with excellent English, why he didn't work abroad, he suddenly changed his tone of voice and said: 'This country is so wonderful that nobody could possibly want to leave it,' which I took to mean that he didn't think it safe to discuss such matters.

Many do leave. A whole street seemed to be given over to the offices of agencies offering jobs abroad. Exile of this kind is one of the many curses of Burma, where an educated and intelligent people are held back by a superstitious, ignorant and small-minded state.

In private, people told me how they often have to live for months by pawning their most precious possessions, including the jewels that are a favourite form of saving, working extra hard when the chance comes so as to redeem their goods ready for the next hard time.

When they felt really safe they spat out scornful remarks about General Than Shwe, the psychological warfare expert who heads the Junta. One man pronounced the tyrant's name, paused for five eloquent seconds and then pronounced the word 'Stupid!' with such force that we both collapsed into laughter. Several people complained in low voices that the army stole much of what they earned in oppressive taxes.

One man spoke of the near-impossible hardship of trying to bring up a family on an income of £10 a month, with a 90-minute daily commute from his village, hanging on to the bars of a truck as it bumped among the potholes. Monks revealed that their state rice rations had been withdrawn in revenge for their support of last year's anti-regime protests.

But I tried to make sure that all these encounters were completely untraceable, entirely private and in places where nobody could possibly have overheard. Nobody who spoke to me knew I was a journalist. I was safe enough. If detected by the authorities, I would be expelled, perhaps after a little rough handling. But for them to be caught speaking to me would mean terror and ruin. I was determined not to put any Burmese person at risk if I could help it.

Hitchens on the Mandalay to Rangoon train in his efforts to see the new capital, Nay Pyi Taw

There is open opposition here. Its heart is a forlorn, mildewed house, once lovely but now as attractive as a tomb, which lies next to a great lake in the north of the city.

I managed to get close enough to see the jauntily-painted red and yellow gate, the only place in Burma that can now display the symbols of the once-powerful National League for Democracy. But busloads of armed men lurk down a side-road ready to squash any hint of protest or support.

And I had to view this from the far side of the road. Barbed-wire barricades and inquisitive steel-helmeted police prevent anyone getting near the front door, and the whole road is closed to traffic at night to prevent visitors slipping in under cover of darkness. This, No 54 University Avenue, is the home of Aung San Suu Kyi, the hauntingly beautiful and tragic leader of the resistance.

Hers is a series of sad stories. Her long-dead father, Aung San, is even now the official hero of the state, a fact that has probably saved her life. He was the acknowledged leader of the independence movement which took Burma out of British control in 1947.

The General, as he is universally known, was a complicated figure who collaborated energetically with the Japanese when it looked as if they were winning, and then developed objections to their methods when they began to lose the war.

He also wears a martyr's crown since he was assassinated before he could take power and so has the blemish-free reputation reserved for politicians who were murdered before they had a chance to make a mess.

His daughter did much of her growing up in India, where she fell under the influence of Gandhi and his rejection of violence. Her refusal to support bloody revolt is now causing hotter heads in Burma's opposition to whisper that she should make way for them.

Child labour: A boy carries a basket of rocks in Mandalay

They will not find it easy to push her aside. Suu Kyi is terrifyingly determined. She amazed and disturbed many of her own supporters when she refused to go to the bedside of her dying husband, the Oxford academic Michael Aris.

She feared, probably rightly, that if she went she would never be allowed back to Burma. Even so, it is a sacrifice that no normal person would have made. Now she must hope that elections promised for 2010 will take place, and that they will at least free her from her house arrest.

But as things stand, she and the Generals must sit and wait in a permanent state of frozen war. They dare not kill her, and she cannot destroy them, but they are the ones in power and she is the one confined to a crumbling suburban house where nobody can go.

Anyway, the Generals have left town, hoping to put themselves beyond the reach of Suu Kyi and the people of Rangoon. In one of the oddest political decisions in human history, they have shifted the capital to the remote, undeveloped middle of the country. It is as if Gordon Brown, sick of being criticised in London, relocated Westminster and Whitehall to the North York Moors.

I tried three times to go to Nay Pyi Taw, the Royal Abode of Kings as this place is called. I couldn't reach it by air, as I couldn't get permission to go on the plane. I couldn't reach it by road, as cars containing foreigners are diverted round it. But I finally succeeded in getting there by taking the Mandalay-Rangoon express, whose tracks run right through it.

It is a bizarre mixture of Milton Keynes, Pyongyang and a Costa del Sol retirement community. You come out of the forest, where pigs roam the dusty streets of tiny villages, and the houses are made of split bamboo and roofed with palm leaves. And all at once it is as if a giant hand has reached down from space and planted a modern metropolis among the sugar cane and the paddy fields. There are vast six-lane highways on which cattle can roam in perfect safety since there is no traffic.

Hidden in low, wooded hills to the west are the secret villas of the Junta. All around the tawny earth has been turned over to prepare the land for ministries, barracks and perhaps another of Burma's enormous jails.

Just to the east, a misty blue ridge of mountains marks the beginning of Shan State, one of Burma's many half-tamed and unsettled tribal provinces.

There is a super-modern railway station, in keen contrast to the ancient train with its wooden seats, careering wildly over buckled tracks so that luggage often tumbles from the racks on to the heads of travellers, who are visibly bouncing up and down as we snort and rattle on our way.

The train does not stop at Nay Pyi Taw, since we have no Generals aboard, but clatters on past streets of kitsch villas and curlicued hotels, propaganda billboards, grandiose office blocks and a majestic but unfinished pagoda, plainly intended to rival the mighty Shwedagon in size if not in grace.

Perhaps it was the great cranes clustered round it but it reminded me oddly of the enormous mosque begun by Saddam Hussein in Baghdad when he was trying to prove he was really a devout Muslim.

Do the Generals fear that they, like Saddam, will be the victims of a Western invasion?

This could explain why they have sited their new metropolis far from the coast, to keep themselves safe from attack or kidnap. They worry too much. Like Iraq, they possess oil and gas but they also have the kindly protection of next-door China, always a ready customer for such things. This puts them in the Mugabe class of dictatorship - subject to frequent rude remarks and critical missions by eminent persons but ultimately safe from invasion.

A more likely explanation is that they are afraid of their own people. Just north of Rangoon's railway station is unsettling evidence of the mistrust between rulers and ruled. A huge barracks sits there, plainly sited so that troops can flood into the city centre in minutes if there is trouble. But look at its walls and you will see that they are full of relatively new loopholes in the brickwork, as if a siege is expected.

Children carry stones onto a barge on the outskirts of Mandalay. They get 15 Kyat, approx 1.5 US cents for each basket

The same techniques can be seen on the outer walls of almost every military establishment in Burma. This is not an army to defend the country against its enemies but an army designed to defend the state against the people.

Do they have much to fear? Apart from Aung San Suu Kyi and the monks, whose mild pacifism makes them horribly easy to crush if they rise in revolt, the only flickering trace of opposition is to be found in a rubble-heaped side street on the wrong side of the tracks in Mandalay.

Here each night at 8.30, a small and incredibly brave group of people keep a light of free speech burning in the surrounding darkness. And it is very dark. For Mandalay at night makes Rangoon look like Manhattan.

Night falls here like a thick blanket. You must fumble your way along unlit streets, hoping that you will not fall down one of the many yawning holes in the pavement, down into the stinking drains beneath. Even the state telephone bureau functions by candlelight. And in the few tourist hotels, so empty that the bar staff volunteer to play pool with lonely customers, the air-conditioning and lights frequently fail before the generators kick in.

But do not be put off, for without tourists the symbolic, heroic resistance of the Moustache Brothers would come to an end. They are comedians who dared to mock the regime. For this crime - for tyranny is terrified of laughter - two of them were imprisoned and set to work on chain gangs.

Now released, they perform their act in English, laboriously learned, to tiny foreign audiences on a miniature stage. In truth, the performance is not very funny. But it is utterly magnificent.

It is a heartbreaking and touching thing to see these men and their families daring to say the unsayable, to laugh at the deadly serious, especially in the menacing blackness from which - at any time - vengeance might suddenly emerge.

A place in the country: The junta have built a new capital, Nay Pyi Taw, left, among paddy fields in a remote part of Burma

The brothers, who had no idea that I was a reporter the night they entertained me, joke about the KGB and openly praise Aung San Suu Kyi. By the time I saw this performance I was so used to the air of oppression that I was lowering my own voice before saying anything remotely controversial. Yet these courageous people say such things out loud.

All that protects them is the interest of the outside world. If the tourists stop coming, how long can their brave demonstration go on? The night I watched them, there were four of us in the audience. If the level falls much below this, will the regime feel it is safe to shut them down and throw them in a dungeon? It is an alarming thought and raises the strange question of the international boycott of Burma.

The only guidebook to the country - the teeth-gnashingly politically-correct Lonely Planet - agonises for pages about whether anyone should go there at all. If they didn't, they presumably wouldn't buy the guidebook.

But what strange selective concern this is. I was struck, the whole time I was there, by how similar Burma is to Cuba, right down to the ancient cars, the picturesque decay of the cities, the astonishing, dreamlike natural beauty of the landscape and the uncorrupted charm and humbling honesty of the people.

And that is not to mention the murderous military dictatorship sustained by jittery and guilty old men who hide from sight, and the ever-present surveillance. There is even a heroic dissident leader living under miserable conditions in the heart of the capital - the noble Oswaldo Paya - though because he challenges a dictatorship of the Left, nobody has heard of him.

Yet Lonely Planet does not agonise over whether anyone should go on holiday in Cuba, currently one of the world's most fashionable destinations. It refers gushingly to that unhappy island's tyrant as Fidel and makes lame excuses for his regime, asking for its repression to be viewed 'in a relative context'.

Richard Branson, whose Virgin planes fly to Havana, would no doubt rather have his beard waxed than open a service to Rangoon.

Every night comics mock the tyrants. The heroic Moustache Brothers have been imprisoned and set to work in chain gangs in the past

And the PC obsessives of the BBC, who cringingly call Bombay Mumbai and Peking Beijing, still refuse to rename Rangoon Yangon and Burma Myanmar, though the logic of doing so is the same.

The strange selective outrage of those who decided which countries are unacceptable and which are not has a mysterious logic, but I suspect that in this case the Burmese generals have somehow managed to get themselves classified as 'Right-wing', which means that Guardian readers cannot go on holiday there.

I long ago gave up lecturing other countries on how they should run themselves. My duty is to stop my own nation going down the plughole of tyranny, which has in my lifetime become a real and pressing possibility.

Burma sears the brain and the conscience. It is one of the most heart stoppingly beautiful countries I have ever seen, and also one of the ugliest.

On the shores of the majestic Irrawaddy River, children bend their small bodies under heavy baskets of stones in brassy, stunning heat, carrying them on to barges for piece-rate wages of less than a penny a load.

By the serene lake at Amarapura, amputees beg with their crude artificial limbs lying next to their sore stumps. One of the loveliest prospects, the misty, magical view from the top of Mandalay Hill as the sun starts to sink, is crudely spoiled by a sprawling, pale yellow prison in the foreground.

Should we long for a violent uprising, for gunfire in Rangoon, the corpses of monks and splashes of blood around the Shwedagon Pagoda? Should we hope for a Western invasion, British soldiers once again on the Road to Mandalay (where enough of them have already left their bones)?

You may wish for these things if you like. I cannot. I can only say that this is what it is like and hope that in time Burma finds its own kindly, peaceful salvation suited to its immensely gentle people.

In the meantime, if you can, go to see the Moustache Brothers. They may not make you laugh but by heaven they will show you what courage looks like.