Unpacking Burma, by Emma Larkin

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Just back home after a couple of weeks in Burma, I find myself shaking shredded notes out of my bags as I unpack. In the country’s unbearably tense climate, I did not feel comfortable throwing away anything that I had written down while I was there – phone numbers, addresses, surreptitiously scribbled interview notes, or even innocuous shopping lists. Instead, I tore-up the notes and shoved the resulting confetti deep inside my luggage.

After the military regime cracked down on peaceful protests led by thousands of monks in Burma at the end of last month, an even more treacherous crackdown began and is now taking place behind the scenes. Part of this crackdown involves stopping the flow of information from leaving the country (brave Burmese bloggers had been sending out up-to-the-minute news reports and rare photographic evidence of the regime’s brutality – pictures of bleeding demonstrators who had been severely beaten by government soldiers, the corpse of a monk floating face down in a river). The regime’s response was simple: turn off the Internet.

As I visited old friends and met people who had witnessed the protests in Burma, I was constantly given messages to carry out of the country; without the Internet, the safest way to get messages out is to send them by hand. Among the variety of messages I have unpacked from my bags are:

A typed essay written in English by a school teacher who read it out loud to me with great anger and emphasis before thrusting it into my hands. Entitled “For the World to Know” it begins, “Nowhere in the world have people treated clergy so poorly. It is humiliating to see and have the world watch monks being kicked, beaten up, shot at, disrobed, and made to obey orders given by soldiers…”

A hand-written poem from a Burmese poet who feels paralysed creatively and physically, preferring to stay in his house rather than go out and mingle with his fellow writers as he would normally do. One verse of the poem reads, “Imagination, dead lost, dead imagination. Depression, dead depression. Core, dead core. Meditation on death. Buddha, dead Buddha.”

All of the various missives have one thing in common – a request that their senders remain anonymous. As the crackdown continues, government soldiers are widening their net, hunting down not only those who participated in the protest but also those who took photographs to post on the Internet.

But, still, the messages keep coming. I was also given visual messages: video footage of the demonstrations, and cartoons depicting individual impressions or political commentary with black humour. Most of all, though, the messages came in the form of spoken words. As the regime tries to silence the country through terror and intimidation, people are fighting back with their words and stories.

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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