Burma is a kip

Myanmar’s ruling military junta threw down the shutters to foreigners after cyclone Nargis blasted its way through the country, in an attempt to keep out overseas journalists who might bear witness to the extent of the damage and the junta’s complete failure to help its victims. However, through a combination of reckless optimism and dumb luck I managed to secure a visa and gain entry. After some hairy moments at the Yangon Airport immigration point I was bumping around in the back of a battered taxi on my way to my hotel. I was relieved to be leaving the airport – it was packed with officials and soldiers armed to the teeth with sometimes ancient but no doubt viable firearms. The TV screens inside the terminals and waiting areas were playing footage of the country’s generals taking the lead on an aid effort, which beyond a few tokenistic PR exercises wasn’t actually happening. Telescreens from George Orwell’s 1984.

            The city was a kip, basically. I mean, I thought my native Ballybrack was bad. Yangon looked like it hadn’t seen the construction of a new building in 30 years and everything was drizzle-soaked, mildew-stained and stagnant. Hacked up trees were strewn at roadsides with the pitiful makeshift shelters of whole families of storm refugees strung out between them. 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 so badly hacked up that it was impossible to sweep them so years of rubbish and detritus from the bleak roadside eateries would mix with the leaves from the scraggy roadside trees and reduce to a thick, slippery black sludge. It made the whole city stink.
            The British once controlled Myanmar, known then and for some period after as Burma after one of the ethnic groups that lives within its borders. Much like Dublin, Yangon is covered with colonial era architecture. It even has a bulky, thick-walled behemoth of a building in the centre of the city called the GPO. In Yangon however, the buildings, with a handful of exceptions, are run into the ground. Vines are creeping around green, mouldy columns and shoots are bursting through the ancient road paving. It gives the whole place an almost post-apocalyptic feeling.

            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 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 leadership was once told by one of its 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, the leader stepped in to make the change himself – he declared that from now on Burma’s drivers would switch from driving on the left to driving on the right. He could rest easy – the prophecy had been satisfied.
            “So he’s crazy,” I said.
            “Yes,” replied my guide with a tragic smile. “He’s crazy.”
            It’s like running a country on the basis of what Mystic Meg tells you via the horoscope in The Sun.
            I arrived in my rundown, side street hotel to find a team of staff with perfect English who seemed to be 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 for years on end. They were living an Orwellian nightmare. It was written all over their faces.