Un-Normality by Emma Larkin:

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As soon as the protests had been violently quashed by the army, the regime set about making everything look normal again. At the UN General Assembly, the Burmese junta’s Foreign Minister, Nyan Win, even went so far as to declare, “Normalcy has now returned to Myanmar [Burma].”

But Rangoon felt to me like a movie set. I imagined an invisible director ordering a cluster of fruit vendors to set up their stalls at the edge of a market, calling for a crowd of pedestrians to surge across a busy street, and hanging billboard advertisements for the latest cinema releases.

On my first day in Rangoon I telephoned an old friend who had a merry greeting: “Welcome to my wonderful country where nothing has just happened!” Later that same day I bumped into another friend who was visibly agitated by events: “Everyone is just pretending,” she told me.

Things might look normal on the surface but, in the diary I kept while I was there, the adjectives I used to describe the moods of the various people I spoke to are repeated over and over again: angry, scared, depressed, angry, scared, depressed, angry, scared, depressed…

In order to solidify the crackdown, the regime’s lackeys and informers are infiltrating teashops, schools, monasteries – anywhere where people gather. As a result, what little trust existed before the recent protests took place is being systematically broken down.

And the effect on the monastic order is equally insidious. While posing as a tourist to visit a monastery in Mandalay with a tour guide friend of mine (it is an incredible thing that the regime feels confident enough about its control on people and information to still allow tourists into some monasteries), my friend pointed out “new” monks with freshly-shaved heads – government spies, he warned.

On the morning I left Burma, I went to visit the Shwedagon pagoda, the country’s holiest site. Armed soldiers wearing flak jackets and helmets guarded each of the four stairways leading up to the pagoda. Heavy monsoon clouds hovered above the golden spire and the rain-wet marble platform was cool and slippery beneath my bare feet. I exited down the eastern stairway, an area that had been a rallying point during the protests. The stairwell and street, normally filled with vendors selling religious items (gold leaf, candles, garlands of fresh flowers), were mostly deserted. As I hailed a passing cab to take me back to my hotel, I noticed a statue of the Buddha on the fence surrounding a monastery. Whether it had been put there on purpose as some kind of secret symbol or had been there long before recent events, I’ll never know, but it seemed particularly poignant; the statue was broken and the image of the Buddha was headless, as if it had been decapitated.

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Emma Larkin, Finding George Orwell in Burma, Penguin Books, Burma, Myanmar, George Orwell, 1984, Animal Farm, oppression, reporter, travelogue, journalism, protests, Aung San Suu Kyi, books