Return of the Junta by Oliver Slow

Author:Oliver Slow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350289628
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2022-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

5

Life on the margins

A few months after the 2015 election in Myanmar, I flew from Yangon to Kale, a dusty town in the country’s west, close to the Indian border.

Months earlier, the town had been devastated by flooding, brought about by heavier than usual monsoon rains. The entire town and surrounding area had been swamped, with thousands displaced, and residents forced to move around on makeshift boats, or climb aloft flimsy structures to escape the rising water levels.

I planned to travel to Kale to write about how the town had recovered from the flooding, but I also had, I confess, an ulterior motive. I wanted to travel to Chin State, which Kale sits on the cusp of, and which had been described to me as the most beautiful corner of Myanmar, an already exceedingly picturesque country.

Convincing my fellow editors that the flooding aftermath story needed to be covered, I flew to Kale, where I spent a few days conducting interviews around the town about the floods, before catching a bus that would take me to Falam, a small town high up in the Chin hills.

After leaving Kale’s ramshackle bus station pre-dawn, the road out of town was initially smooth, and we journeyed westwards at an impressive rate. But within minutes, the flat surface gave way to a bumpy track, immediately cutting our travelling speed in half.

Kale is located in Sagaing, one of the seven regions in Myanmar, where the Bamar comprise the majority, while Chin is one of seven states, where ethnic minorities make up the largest number of people. The border between Sagaing and Chin is just a few miles west of Kale, and the drastic change in road condition happened almost exactly at this boundary.

Many ethnic minorities in Myanmar, including the Chin, will tell you that this is not a coincidence, and this drastic contrast in road condition between the regions and states is the perfect metaphor for the neglect they have been subjected to by the Bamar-majority government for decades. In Myanmar’s borderlands there’s a strong perception that while the country’s centre has seen development in the form of roads, bridges, jobs, schools and hospitals, the groups living at the country’s periphery have witnessed few changes, ignored by authorities because they are not Bamar, or Buddhist, or both.

Next to me on the bus from Kale was Jessica, an English student who was travelling back to Falam, her hometown, after completing her studies in Yangon. Kale and Falam are less than 100 kilometres apart, but the journey was expected to take anywhere between four and eight hours, such was the poor condition of the only road between the two towns.

‘It’s better than it used to be’, said Jessica, who told me the road had recently been upgraded, and that previously the journey took about a day, with travellers often stopping overnight to sleep along the way.

Shortly before we started our ascent into the Chin hills, the bus stopped by the side of the road, and everyone onboard fell silent.

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