I went to Myanmar looking for George Orwell, hoping to walk in his footsteps. Instead I found a really scary genocide story
In this file photo taken on October 16, 2017, persecuted Rohingya can be seen escaping to Bangladesh from Myanmar through the Naf River
Ok, this story has nothing to do with Mumbai or Thailand. It takes place in Myanmar, a country that has always felt to me like a strange salad of Thailand, India and Nepal with bits of something called Burma thrown in. The reason why I think it's important is because genocide is so terribly popular these days. Everyone seems to have some community they'd love to kill.
In Trump's America it's anyone non-white. In India, it's Muslims and Dalits. The Serbs hate the Croats, the Scots hate the Brits, and nobody, it seems, wants the Rohingya of Myanmar's Rakhine province. So I decided to take a closer look. I really don't like seeing bullies kicking weak people around.
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This wasn't why I went to Myanmar, if truth be told. I wanted to walk in the footsteps of George Orwell, the author 1984 and Brave New World who so uncannily captured the surveillance economies in which we now live, monitored 24/7 by our phones, Aadhaar cards and governments.
I'd learned with surprise that Orwell's books had been inspired by the brutal governments he'd seen in Burma, where he worked as a policeman. With even greater surprise, I learned that walking in George Orwell's footsteps was a cliché. There was practically a tourism industry built around walking in Orwell's footsteps. There was a must-read book called Finding George Orwell in Burma by Emma Larkin.
Abandoning the idea, I found myself suddenly a traveller without a purpose. That afternoon, despondent, I remember that I was in a taxi to Jake's Place, the AirBnb home I was staying in. As is my habit, I began chatting up the taxi driver. They're always interesting fellows. "My name is Zaw Zaw," he said, answering my question. Burmese people have these double barrelled names, just in case you didn't catch it the first time.
"And surname?" I asked. "Rahman," he said. A Muslim. I was suddenly very interested. Zaw Zaw told me it wasn't easy being a Muslim in Myanmar, even for non-Rohingya. They just felt uneasy. Children were tutored to keep a low profile. Communities were advising their members to keep their thoughts to themselves, even though there had been no overt incident outside of Rakhine province where the Rohingya were being raped and slaughtered. "We don't say it but we know what's really going on," he said.
And what's really going on? Would he care to share? He would. He became so voluble that I finally had to ask him to pull into an alley so that he could focus on telling me the story.
Around 2015, Zaw Zaw told me, a German archaeologist overflying the Rakhine province had been puzzled by barren patches within the forest. Returning the following year with a theodolite, he discovered rich seams of uranium and titanium. He presented their exact geolocations as a gift to the military junta.
[FACT CHECK: Government lab tests found uranium and titanium in the sand along a beach in Rakhine. In 2015, Burmese tycoon U Tay Za claimed to have purchased two stones containing uranium. The land where the stones were found did look scorched.]
Myanmar already had a nuclear cooperation treaty with North Korea. China had built about 260 nuclear power reactors in 2016 and was very interested in uranium. I imagine India and the USA were pretty interested as well. But if you want to mine uranium quietly no one should be nearby watching - and Rakhine teemed with Rohingya. Clearly they had to go. The Buddhists of impoverished Rakhine hated them anyway. It was easy for the junta to fuel that fire. Incidents started.
In 2015, Zaw Zaw told me, the military junta asked the Rohingya to surrender their papers, as a first step towards replacing them with passports and making them legal citizens.
Meanwhile, the government apparently began buying up large tracts of land in Rakhine. The economic development of Rakhine showed up for the first time, with a budget attached, in the country's economic development plans.
By the time the so-called "ethnic cleansing" started it was 2017, the Rohingya were nobodies - they had surrendered their identity papers but not received passports. They were labelled outsiders - and the Buddhist Rakhines, with a little help from the military, were happy to help in the purge. My heart breaks when I see an image of a homeless Rohingya woman, trudging between countries, carrying a child born of a rape by an unknown savage soldier.
Zaw Zaw believes the ethnic cleansing story is convenient and makes a good cover for the real story - uranium mining, with some of the world's most powerful economies interested. That's why I'm not surprised that the world has sounded more indignant about the killing of one Khashoggi than of tens of thousands of homeless Rohingya.
Here, viewed from there. C Y Gopinath, in Bangkok, throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai, the city that raised him. You can reach him at cygopi@gmail.com Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
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