Everything Is Broken (33 page)

Just over three weeks later, a crack appeared in the 2,300-year-old pagoda, and the entire edifice collapsed in on itself. Reports varied as to how many people were killed. Though the state media reported that only two people died, Burmese exile news sources outside the country claimed up to twenty dead.

A Burmese journalist in Rangoon showed me photographs he was able to take the day after the accident; the pagoda had been reduced to a large mound of bricks, dirt, and splintered bamboo scaffolding. He said the authorities were sifting through the rubble, looking for the
hti
and its diamond-encrusted orb.

The
New Light of Myanmar
, which had chronicled Kyaing Kyaing’s ceremonial visit three weeks earlier, ran a terse article blaming shoddy and rushed renovation work.

Everyone else, of course, knew that there were other causes for the accident. The symbolism was not difficult to interpret. As the
hti
is the crown on top of the pagoda, the fact that the crown had tumbled signaled the imminent demise of the king. It was a fearful omen for the regime; an irreversible and supernatural declaration of dissatisfaction with Burma’s current rulers. Call it wishful thinking or the manifestation of unvoiced hope, but there was no doubting the frisson of excitement that ricocheted through Rangoon as the story of the pagoda’s collapse spread across the city.

In piecing together the story of Cyclone Nargis, I relied mostly on first-hand information and interviews. For backup, I used news clippings from the time and various reports released by NGOs and the United Nations. Situation reports by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs helped me chart the international emergency response. The OCHA-run Web site,
www.reliefweb.int
, and the UNSUPPORTED Myanmar Information Management Unit (MIMU) served as portals for documents, maps, and other material on the cyclone collated from a wide variety of sources.

The main official document on the effects of Cyclone Nargis is the Post-Nargis Joint Assessment (PONJA) report, which was launched in July 2008 by the Tripartite Core Group.
Post-Nargis Analysis—The Other Side of the Story
by Yuki Akimoto (Another Development for Burma, October 2008) and
After the Storm
(Emergency Assistance Team, Burma, and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, March 2009) were written to provide an alternative view to the PONJA, while
Listening to Voices from Inside: Myanmar Civil Society’s Response to Cyclone Nargis
(the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, Cambodia, May 2009) detailed the extraordinary determination of private citizens in Burma to provide assistance to cyclone victims. Also useful was issue 41 of the
Humanitarian Exchange Magazine
(December 2008), which took the response to Nargis as its theme. A frank interview with the comedian Zargana, who was imprisoned after speaking out about the failing relief effort, was published online by
The Irrawaddy
magazine (“Zarganar’s Relief Role,” June 2, 2008).

Among sources I turned to in search of background information on the regime were Mary Callahan’s
Making Enemies
(Cornell University Press, 2004), which documents the early years of the Burmese military, and
Burma’s Armed Forces
by Andrew Selth (Canberra, 2001), as well as Selth’s working papers on recent events such as “Even Paranoids Have Enemies: Cyclone Nargis and Myanmar’s Fears of Invasion” (
Contemporary Southeast Asia
, vol. 30, no. 3, December 2008). I came across the profile of the soldier who enlisted at the same time as Than Shwe in
The Caged Ones
by the late Burmese journalist Ludu U Hla (reprinted by Orchid Press, 1998). Further details were sourced from reports such as
Neither War Nor Peace
by Tom Kramer (Transnational Institute, July 2009), which offers a recent analysis of ethnic minority politics, and
Total Impact
(EarthRights International, September 2009), which covers Total and Chevron gas projects in Burma.

Before I traveled to Naypyidaw and while I was writing about it, I examined the capital from an aerial perspective on Google Earth and read
The Road to Naypyitaw
by Maung Aung Myoe (Working Paper Series No. 79, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, 2006). I often found myself returning to Dominic Faulder’s articles; he is the foreign correspondent who timed his Burma visits against “power days,” which he describes in a 2001 article entitled “Predictions, Observations and the Power of Nine: Why Myanmar Confounds Outside Analysis.” In a 2004 issue of
The Irrawaddy
he recalled trying to report on a fire that took place in Mandalay in 1981. His words became startlingly prescient as I reread the piece in the wake of Cyclone Nargis: “A town of 10,000 people could burn to the ground here and nobody would ever know about it.”

An article entitled “A Preliminary Study of Burmese Prophetic Sayings” by Saw Tun (
The Journal of Burma Studies
, vol. 7, 2002) provides a concise history of
dabaung
. For more on Burmese superstition and magic I dipped into
Burmese Supernaturalism
by Melford E. Spiro (University of Chicago, 1967).

I read “The Abbott Is Frying Eggs” in
Burmese Monk’s Tales
by Maung Htin Aung, now sadly out of print outside Burma. Juliane Schober’s papers, “Buddhist Just Rule and Burmese National Culture” (University of Chicago, 1997) and “Venerating the Buddha’s Remains in Burma” (
The Journal of Burma Studies
, vol. 6, 2001), informed my explorations into the regime’s appropriation of regal attributes.

For an understanding of the events that led up to September 2007, the findings of the Open Heart Letter Campaign (The Burma Fund, March 2008) were illuminating. Thanks to the work of brave and diligent Burmese journalists, there is some astounding footage available online of the various events that were key to the September marches. Short films taken by the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), an exile Burmese media organization, and others can be seen on YouTube. I was particularly moved by footage of the solo protests conducted by Ohn Than, who stood alone outside the U.S. Embassy in Rangoon in August 2007 and was later sentenced to life imprisonment.

The haunting audio recording of monks invoking the
thabeik hmauk
, or overturning of the alms bowl, was obtained by the Asian Human Rights Commission and can be listened to at the Web site
www.ahrchk.net
.

There have been some excellent reports written on the September 2007 marches, compiled at considerable risk to the researchers and their sources. Particularly helpful to me were
Bullets in the Alms Bowl
(National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma, March 2008);
Crackdown
(Human Rights Watch, December 2007);
The Resistance of the Monks
by Bertil Lintner (HRW, September 2009), which has additional historical context and interviews with monks who fled to the Thailand-Burma border; and the Asian Legal Resource Centre’s special report,
Burma, Political Psychosis & Legal Dementia
(article 2, vol. 6, October-December 2007). For up-to-date information on Burma’s prisoners and their sentences, I used the Thailand-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma) Web site,
www.aappb.org
, which has an extensive and regularly updated database.

For insight on Buddhism in Burma, I looked at
Mental Culture in Burmese Crisis Politics
by Gustaaf Houtman (it was he who used the phrase “Aung San amnesia” to describe the phenomenon of how the generals rewrite their own history) and
Burma’s Mass Lay Meditation Movement
by Ingrid Jordt (Ohio University Press, 2007).

When checking points on Burma’s modern-day history, I referred often to
Living Silence in Burma
by Christina Fink (Silkworm Books/ Zed Books, 2009) and
The River of Lost Footsteps
by Thant Myint-U (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). Two other recently published books that serve as good introductions to Burmese history are
Burma/Myanmar: What Everyone Needs to Know
by David I. Steinberg (Oxford University Press, 2009) and
A History of Modern Burma
by Michael W. Charney (Cambridge University Press, 2009). I garnered otherwise hard-to-find descriptions of the early settlement of the Irrawaddy Delta from
The Burmese Delta
by Michael Adas (University of Wisconsin Press, 1974).

For daily updates I turned to my old favorites,
The Irrawaddy
magazine’s online version at
www.irrawaddy.org
and Burmanet at
www.burmanet.org
, which compiles news sources from around the world. Indispensable to my research was the online edition of the
New Light of Myanmar
, the regime’s de facto mouthpiece; I made good use of the archive available at
www.myanmargeneva.org
.

I owe an enormous thanks to the following people: my loyal agent Jeffrey Simmons; my editor Janie Fleming for her patient guidance; SB, who got me started
and
finished (though her role in the making of this book is absent from the text, it is there in memory!); K for offering shelter from the storm to myself and others; Paul Wyatt for creative logistical support; Ko Ba Hein and Khin Khin Lay for their wise and lyrical insights; LB for generously sharing her endless knowledge of, and enthusiasm for, all things Burmese; my trusty undercover researchers in Rangoon, No. 2 and No. 3; Hla Thein for kind Burglish assistance; also “Ko Ye,” “Aung Moe,” MG (the
peh nanbya
fairy), ZL, and Nic Dunlop; my parents for their unflagging support, particularly my father who allowed me to fall asleep on the couch during hospital duty; and, finally, Justin for having faith that broken things can be fixed.