A Mosque Burns in Lashio

If you have time, please read the preceding post first as a set-up for this one.

A couple of hours after I finished writing the last entry, I went for an evening stroll around the edge of the downtown core of Lashio. I came upon some kind of demonstration, with maybe 100 males in their teens and early 20s trying to break down an iron gate to some kind of compound. The number kept growing as messages were passed on by cell phones, and as friends arrived via their 90 cc motorcycles. My cluelessness as to the reason why was made bigger by the appearance of a dozen or so Buddhist monks on the inside of the compound. It didn’t look like a monastery to me, but it’s impossible to miss those saffron robes.

I was in total blackout as to what was going on. There was no one around me who spoke enough English to give me the lowdown. No Live Reporting from Action Central News When You Really Need It. But not having those cues let me look at the situation from a very stripped-down perspective. For the past two days wandering around Lashio I’ve seen countless young men either hanging out at tea shops, hanging out on their motorcycles, or hanging out in their three-wheeled taxis waiting for a fare to show up. A lot of young men with too much time on their hands. A lot of young men listening to messages of anti-Muslim hatred spoken by a renegade Buddhist monk in Mandalay. So last night I saw a lot of frustrated, angry young males waving their fists in the air, calling their friends to tell them “Get down here, there’s something happening,” and pushing against the iron gate. (I went and looked the next morning, and they never succeeded.)

My sense that something bad was about to happen was strong enough that I started moving in the general direction of my hotel, taking the long way. I walked down three streets that are normally filled from sidewalk to sidewalk with portable stalls with people selling stuff. There are three streets in Lashio that have three markets depending on the time of day. The morning fruit and vegetable market starts at 4:30 a.m., and if there’s one of the regular electricity blackouts at that time, the farmers and merchants sell their produce by candlelight. That market shuts down at 7 am, and two hours later the daytimers take over the same streets, selling a mix of produce, cooked food, and some non-edibles like toys. They leave around 5 pm to make space for the mostly clothing night market, which stays open until 10 or 11.

But tonight they knew something I didn’t, or they heard rumors I hadn’t, and as I was walking along two of those three streets all I saw were merchants working as fast as possible to pack their goods in boxes, tear down their stalls, and get out of Dodge. The storefront businesses behind the vendors, which are usually filled with customers during the evening hours, were already shuttered at 6:30.

For the next hour I watched a parade of older residents moving away from downtown. Cars that were normally parked on the street were gone. Almost all lights inside and outside the buildings surrounding my hotel were shut off. But there was not a single cop to be seen, which has been the SOP for several riots in Myanmar cities since mid-March. I will send three stories about those riots as attachments, and suggest that you read at least the first one.

Chances are you haven’t heard about those anti-Muslim riots, starting in a town outside of Mandalay and moving south toward Yangon. All kinds of strange details. Two Muslims accused of starting the fight that lead to the death of a Buddhist monk in one city were sentenced to 13 years in prison; they did not do the actual killing. Not a single Buddhist, lay person or monk, was arrested for burning down 30 Muslim houses and setting fire to a madrassa, killing 25 students inside. I’ve read multiple reports of cops standing along the sidelines, not doing anything to stop the violence at any of the riots. There were curfews in Yangon’s Muslim sector as rumors flew about potential attacks by local Buddhists. But as I said, in Lashio the young men I witnessed were trying to knock down an iron gate with monks on the other side, so at first the Muslim thing didn’t completely fit.

It turns out that it was all about the Muslim thing, and within two hours the main mosque, located three blocks from my hotel, was in flames. After the mob set fire to the mosque, it started roaming the streets looking for businesses “owned by Islamists,” as a fellow hotel resident, a Burmese, described it. As far as mobs go, the only one I saw was pretty small—50 young men max breaking into and destroying a digital photo processing shop two storefronts down from my hotel, where I was essentially sequestered. I couldn’t see anything from any window. But I heard the sounds of big, blunt objects striking folding metal doors, glass shattering, equipment being smashed, and cheers from the crowd over their mighty, mighty victory against the forces of Islam.

I saw a couple of isolated pickup trucks filled with either cops or soldiers during the evening, but no flashing lights and no sirens. Then I heard an announcement over a PA system that someone translated for me as signifying a curfew from 7 pm to 5 am. At 5:30 a.m. I left my hotel with my iPod camera, hoping to get just one shot of the mosque. I went down several side streets that I’d become familiar with over the preceding three days, trying my best to not look like a white Euro-American. I think it was my bald head that gave me away, I should’ve worn a hat. I might have gotten some shots had I left at exactly 5 a.m., but by 5:45 soldiers and cops were setting up barriers so that even local people couldn’t get near the mosque.

So, some unexpected excitement on my journey. I’m a semi-eyewitness to a disturbing trend in Myanmar: anti-Muslim riots. Again, I encourage you to read the first story I am sending, from an “alternative” Burmese news source operating out of Chiang Mai, Thailand. But if you’re pressed for time, I’ll just mention one aspect of this multi-faceted story: some Burmese believe that the riots have been purposefully set up and promoted by the uppermost echelon of the military, which does not like the “nominally civilian” government of the current president, Thein Sein. They are hoping that the riots do spread to Yangon, which would give them sufficient reason to enact a coup and regain power at the top.

I’m in no position to support/refute such an argument, and I'm reluctant to comment because I'm still the new kid on the block. But this is not 1962, when the last coup happened. My understanding is that the civilian government at that time was so corrupt and incompetent that many Burmese welcomed the shift to a military regime, although the socialist dictatorship that eventually emerged was a complete disaster. Times are very different.

Just Catching Up

No attempt at creative writing today, just an update on my whereabouts because I haven’t written anything for several weeks.

I spent a total of 30 days in limbo in Yangon, waiting for the wheels of dharma, the Shwe Oo Min center, and the Myanmar guvmint to move just enough to approve my visa application. It was frustrating at times, but I was rewarded with an extension of almost seven full months instead of six, so I am free to stay here until November 21. At that time I start the application process all over again.

Why did I cool my heels in Yangon instead of exploring upcountry? The reasons were one part not knowing when the approval might come, one part Myanmar New Year’s, one part not being in possession of my passport while my visa application was being processed, and one part the logistics of Myanmar travel.

I had heard that Myanmar New Year’s was a lot like Chinese New Year’s in two important aspects: getting tickets for planes, trains, and buses is pretty much out of the question during the last few weeks leading up to the holiday, and everything in the way of businesses and restaurants shuts down. The difference is that Myanmar New Year’s lasts a full week—for four days I had to schlep way crosstown to eat at a Thai joint or one of several Muslim/South Indian tea houses. True, some sidewalk tea operations were open for business, but I’ve been super careful about eating street food on this trip. Seeing pots of cold, barely soapy water filled with utensils and bowls worries me a lot more than it used to.

I spent the whole month at the Three Seasons Hotel under the kind and always smiling supervision of Miss Hla Hla, the owner; “Hla” means “pretty” in Burmese. During the New Year’s shutdown she served free dinners to all guests in addition to the normal free breakfast. On two nights it was me, myself, and I. And once she discovered that I actually liked mohinga—the fish and noodle soup that is the national dish of Myanmar—she made that for me every morning instead of eggs and toast. It’s hard to walk 20 feet in Myanmar without running into a mohinga stall on the street, or a regular restaurant with mohinga on the breakfast menu. Miss Hla Hla’s is by far the best I ever et. She also demanded that I give her two of my shirts to launder so she wouldn’t have to look at my ring-around-the-collar anymore.

Two days after the New Year’s holiday ended I decided to take another bus trip to Shwe Oo Min with the thought in mind that seeing me in person might get the staff to move faster on my visa application. When I entered the monastery grounds I saw Dta Dta (the woman with the best English in the front office and who suffers mightily because of it) taking a short break outside. I did a double-take: I’d never seen her anywhere but behind her desk, sitting in a chair that’s way too low for her. Standing outside she was an absolute knockout in a beautiful electric blue traditional Myanmar blouse and ankle-length skirt. Breathtaking, really. Then she looked in my eyes and said the words that any man would want to hear in such a situation: “Come inside and get it,” meaning my visa. On top of that I got a $30 refund for overpaying the application fee.

I took the bus back to town, booked a flight to Heho in central Myanmar, said my goodbyes to some people in the neighborhood I had made acquaintances with, bought some fancy chocolates for Miss Hla Hla, and was out of Yangon within 36 hours of retrieving my passport. Talk about liberation.

That was April 26. Since then I’ve spent four days at Inle Lake, followed by a ride with sixteen others in the back of a late 70s/early 80s Toyota pickup truck to the town of Kalaw, where I did my second retreat of this trip, this time for ten days. In many ways it was a much richer experience than the one I had at Shwe Oo Min in Yangon, I’ll save the details for later. Kalaw is up above 4,000 feet, meaning cool nights just short of needing a blanket, broad vistas from the meditation center, and hiking on mountain trails! From Kalaw I traveled to the lowlands to see the ancient stupas, payas, and temples of Bagan, most of them built in the 11^th-13^th centuries. At just a few hundred feet above sea level and at the very tail end of the dry season, daily temperatures in Bagan were 100-103 degrees F. I rented an old, heavy steel bicycle and rode about 20 miles/day seeing the sites, 10 in the morning followed by a long midday nap, then a return pedal in the late afternoon. Inle Lake and Bagan are two of the “Big Four” sites that the large majority of Myanmar visitors visit. And you can tell the difference in the way that locals in those places treat foreigners.

Next stop was Pyin Oo Lwin, a town that used to be called Maymyo, named after a British Colonel May or General May or something militarily May when Burma was a British colony. In British English it’s known as a “hill station,” a place for the colonial rulers to escape to when the temperatures in Mandalay hit the 90s and 100s. Leafy green, cool, with a cheap but clean guest house, several wi-fi locations, and, because of a big military presence, the most reliable electricity I’ve encountered yet in Myanmar. The “National Botanical Gardens” are in Pyin Oo Lwin, and I visited them on a nice, Seattle-like drizzly day. I spent mornings exploring and afternoons working on editing projects that had piled up.

I’m writing this entry in the northern Shan state city of Lashio, where things are very different. Some background: ever since I first heard about this town back in Seattle, during the first lecture of a ten-week lecture series on all things Myanmar sponsored by the Seattle Asian Art Museum and the Gardner Center of Asian Art, I’ve had the idea in my head that Lashio would be the place where I would hang my hat for a while and revive my long-dead ESL teaching skills. Lashio is 100 miles from the Chinese border. It is 400 or so miles from Kunming, where I taught at the Yunnan Province National Minorities Institute in 1988/89. All of my students were non-Han Chinese , and a large percentage were from ethnic groups that live along the China-Burma border.

But right now there’s a war going on in the northern Shan state between the Myanmar army and a mix of Shan and Kachin rebels. Not too far away is a pipeline that will soon transport oil and natural gas from ships offloading in the Bay of Bengal all the way across the country to China. The pipeline may be a target for local insurgents, which means things could get messy here. There is also speculation about the Myanmar army’s interest in attacking the local Wa Army. The Wa are an ethnicity known for two things: their complete success in never being controlled by any state, Chinese or Burmese, and for producing the second largest crop of opium poppies in the world, surpassed only by the Afghans. They’ve used a lot of their drug money to buy top-of-the-line and state-of-the-art arms from various sources. According to a recent article in one of the world’s most respected journals on military matters, the Wa have purchased three attack helicopters from China. Now, why China would want to sell attack helicopters to an already heavily armed insurgent army that could potentially blow up parts of a gas/oil pipeline that it owns and controls is beyond my comprehension.

As are many things in this country. At least for now.