Drive out through Yangon’s bumpy streets — past the pagodas and the gently decaying colonial architecture, past the new shopping malls and the bustling alleys of Chinatown, past the tenements where families live nine to a tiny apartment — and cross the old bridge over the Bago river. Beyond the margins of the city, in a country beyond the margins of the international community, is the village of Zigon.
There is nothing particularly remarkable about Zigon. It is better off than many villages in a country where the average annual income is US$1,000. However, when William Hague visited last week — the first by a British foreign secretary in 56 years — he would have passed over thousands of settlements like this when he flew from the capital, Naypyidaw, down to Yangon.
Naypyidaw, with its 12-lane highways and monumental architecture, has been carved out of scrub and farmland as a monument to the power of the autocratic and secretive military clique that has ruled Burma for decades — a power that now appears to be waning, or at least evolving.
Hague’s visit, coming after that of US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton last month, would have been unthinkable even 18 months ago.
“The aim of my visit is to reinforce change in this country,” he said last week as he sat on the terrace of the British ambassador’s vast residence in Yangon, itself a monument to former rulers whose power finally faded.
However, if there has been talk this week of democracy in Myanmar and the tentative reforms being implemented by the government since an election in November 2010, there has been less interest in the rural areas, where 70 percent of the population live.
The focus, inevitably, has been on Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel prize-winning campaigner who was released from decades of house arrest only 14 months ago, and her largely urban-based National League for Democracy (NLD). If few are interested in places like Zigon at the best of times, last week such communities seemed almost non-existent.
Burmese presidential adviser Nay Zinn Latt described a bright new democratic and capitalist future for the nation.
“Unless we grow economically there will be unrest in our cities and no one will be able to drive a Mercedes down a street without fear,” he said in an interview at a hotel he owns in Yangon.
“If we want capitalism, we need a free market — and that means we need some freedoms that we didn’t have before. So now is the time for change,” he said.
He did not mention the villages. And though British officials spoke of economic issues in Myanmar in background briefings, Hague’s announcement that £10 million (US$15.5 million) of existing British aid would go to provide small, cheap loans to the “poorest of the poor” seemed almost an afterthought.
It is true, of course, that the 1,000 or so inhabitants of Zigon — a strip of largely wooden homes built on a narrow spit of land at the confluence of two rivers — have much to worry about apart from politics. Local council head O Win Thei lists the problems faced by his fellow villagers: Their wooden homes barely keep out monsoon rains; no proper sewers mean effluent floats around the village during frequent floods, bringing gastroenteritis and worse; clouds of mosquitoes bring deaths from dengue fever every year; the public school is overcrowded and the monastery school has no places; and it is only due to a donation from the Singaporean government that the village has a clean water supply.
“It’s tough here. Sometimes when we have a bit of money we eat chicken or even beef, but usually it’s vegetables only. If I can get fish from the river then we’ll have that, but even the fish are rare these days,” said Moe Moe Win, 46. “It was easier when my sons were smaller, but you know how hungry teenage boys get.”
Zigon does, however, have electricity — unlike 90 percent of Burmese villages — installed by the government late last year. This has meant a number of changes. One of the more significant is the arrival of television. A satellite dish has now been installed at the village tea shop, largely used to watch state TV networks and English Premier League soccer.
Though censorship has been eased in recent months, information is still tightly controlled. News of the Arab revolts last year was blocked for weeks — though millions use cheap Chinese-made radios to listen to the BBC, Voice of America or other networks broadcasting in local languages.
However, ask about the changes in the country and people talk, albeit warily. All remember the elections of 1990. These followed an uprising against military rule two years previously and, once it became clear that Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD had won a landslide victory, were annulled.
“I was sad, like everyone else, when that happened,” Moe Moe Win said.
Most of the villagers participated in the last election in November 2010, casting votes for a range of different parties. Neither free nor fair, according to international observers, and boycotted by the NLD, the polls resulted in a huge majority for the ruling clique’s political vehicle, the Union Solidarity and Development Party. A government candidate, unsurprisingly, won in the Myo Hong East constituency of which the village is part.
However, issues such as the continued detention of between 300 and 1,700 political prisoners, depending on the estimate, or the ongoing conflict between ethnic groups and the Burmese army in the northeast of the country, both repeatedly stressed by Hague during his visit and by Aung San Suu Kyi, matter little here.
“We are not political people. We are too busy trying to make a living. Most of the men here are day laborers and work is scarce,” O Win Thei said.
Such answers are sensible in a country where criticizing the government can earn a lengthy prison sentence for “defaming national leaders,” but also reflect local priorities. The villagers say they support political change — if it means development.
There are currently two major questions in Myanmar: Is there a genuine desire to “democratize” on the part of a regime, which in 2007 used live ammunition against demonstrating monks and responded to the catastrophic Cyclone Nargis a year later with mendacity, incompetence and a cynical disregard for human suffering? And if so, how fast will those changes occur?
Hague believes that Burmese President Thein Sein is “sincere,” though he stresses that pressure from the international community must be maintained. Yet many doubt the capacity of the president, who was appointed by the ruthless dictator Than Shwe on his retirement from public life, to counter conservatives.
Thi Haw Saw, a newspaper editor in Yangon, believes “a backlash is possible” and even Nay Zinn Latt says nothing is “irreversible” for the moment. As for the speed of the changes, Hague has indicated that if they continue the EU may modify, or even lift, sanctions by April. To many observers, this seems too rapid.
“There has been no real change yet. We must be cautious. Any transition will take much more time,” one recently released political prisoner said.
The villagers of Zigon have a different timescale in mind. Their land is disappearing at the rate of 9.14m a year due to erosion of the banks of the river. Having cleared the mangrove swamps that once lined the muddy shoreline, there is nothing to hold back the earth. The operations of a government-run gravel company — the profits of such enterprises usually flow back to people who are part of, or connected to, the ruling clique — make the problem worse. Within five years, tidal surges will have reached the heart of the village, rendering half the homes uninhabitable. Another few years and Zigon will disappear.
A non-governmental organization run by Phone Win, a political activist who stood in the 2010 elections, is replanting mangroves, but can only cover a small section of the shoreline each year and the plants take time to grow. Eventually they will be 15m high with roots firmly anchoring the earth, he said. However, that will take a decade — and, like much in Myanmar these days, the outcome of the project is uncertain.
“We are hopeful,” O Win Thei said. “We are hopeful.”
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