Filming in Burma: the Last Day

An account of my last day in Burma after seven weeks filming the documentary ‘Burmese Dreaming’.
 
 
As the sun goes down this afternoon there is stillness, serenity, and peace. Why now? This feeling, it was not there this morning, nor yesterday, nor the day before, nor before that. Outside the bus in which I sit there is such richness in colour. Shadows are long, a man’s skin is golden brown. He musters cattle up a track towards the main road between Mandalay and Rangoon. They are the white cows with big humps on the back of their necks, the cows of Asia and Africa. Some cows, the ones that had been at the front, stop and eat but the rest of the herd walks along the track, goaded by a piece of bamboo. There is beauty in the simplicity of the scene.
 
When I had got on to this bus, it was not the bus I had thought I would be boarding. ‘Sorry,’ a man had said, ‘there was a mistake with the bookings.’ And so I do not board the big coach with a smattering of tourists on it. Instead I am ushered on to another bus, a more run down bus full of soldiers in military uniform. I note this immediately but am not too concerned. Only two days ago I was sitting and eating coconuts with a group of soldiers outside the compound of a Shan State military battalion. On the same day I had lunch inside the compound of another military battalion. The second group of soldiers had told me that they had just returned from the front line and that they would be stationed here, safe, for the next four months. They had said to me, “You are the man who was filming in the market.” “Yes,” I replied, but later we talked about other things. One of the soldiers, an old man maybe in his late 50s, used to be a geography teacher and he talked about the climate, the flora, the fruits and the vegetables that we have in Australia. He is pleased to talk in English about a subject in which he has obvious interest.
 
In these scenarios I had not felt threatened by being in the presence of the Burmese Military. Like other Burmese, they share their food, they are friendly and they are happy to talk to me about my country. So now, on a bus full of soldiers, I have some, but not gross, concerns for my personal security.
 
I walk down the aisle and find that my seat is at the back of the bus, on the right hand side, the aisle seat, not the window seat. There is a man already sitting in it and he is talking to the man next to him. They look at me with hard faces and sharp eyes. Then a sentence is exchanged with the two men in the seats in front, and then the man sitting in my seat moves. I see that both he and the man sitting next to the window are wearing jeans and western style shirts. In Burma, this can be a sign of wealth or importance or at least of people who want to show that they might be wealthy or important.
 
When I sit in my seat, I think to myself, I know the hard face of these people. I have encountered them before on many occasions whilst working in Burma. These are the faces of military intelligence. Hard and cold but again, I do not see this as too personally threatening. Then a peculiar thing happens. When the bus starts the man sitting in the window seat pushes his elbow hard into me. As he does this I see that there is a gap on the seat between himself and the window of almost six inches. He has his hand braced on this part of the seat so that he can push harder. This is very strange behaviour. I do not understand. There is ample room for us both. Nonetheless, I do not confront the man and instead brace myself and push back. I begin to sweat, such is the exertion. This cannot be comfortable for him either.
 
This lasts for maybe 20 minutes before the man shifts himself into the middle of his seat and sits in a normal position. It is a relief and I look past him and out of the window. Sunset in Burma, a time when the rural workers return from the fields, a beautiful time of day.
 
I do not know how the conversation begins but I start talking to the man. He is surprised that I can speak some Burmese and as I ask him whether or not he is married he looks at me quizzically. He asks if I am married and I say that I have a girlfriend but that she cannot travel with me because she is working in Australia. I ask, ‘Do you have children?’ and he says he has two. ‘What are there names? How old are they? Do you like children?’ He answers and I tell him that I also like children.
 
This man sitting next to me, he is military and probably military intelligence but now we are talking person to person about children and families. And for the first time there is an ease in his manner and warmth in his face.
 
After dark the bus stops at a restaurant, the dinner stop, and when I disembark the man asks me if I will join and him at a table. We sit down and he asks me what I would like to eat. I say I will get my food but he persists and I accept his offer. ‘Pork curry thank you,’ and with that he departs. When he returns we eat and as we do so he shows me a chain with a feather on it that he is wearing. He asks if I like it and I say yes. Then he offers it to me as a gift but I do not accept. I think it is too substantial a gift to accept and I still have a strange feeling with regard to the elbowing incidents that had occurred.
 
When dinner is finished we return to the bus. However, once the bus continues on its way the strange pushing behaviour begins again. There is no more talking and the man pushes against me as if wanting to make my journey as uncomfortable as possible. But this time the problem is easily solved. At the back of the bus there are two seats on either side of the aisle. But between these two sets of seats, slightly recessed in amongst the baggage is another seat. This seat is now empty and so, without further ado, I move from my seat into this one.
 
When I sit down the man who had originally been in my seat when I got on the bus turns and looks back at me from down the bus. His face is again hard and I remember this image clearly. But after this I do not remember much at all.
 
It is twenty minutes after our dinner stop and they put a video on the television at the front of the bus. It is ‘The Gods must be Crazy II’ and I would like to see this film. Then I slump forward. I pick myself up but a few moments. ‘I would like to watch this film’ I think but I cannot keep my eyes open. I try, even to the extent of trying to hold them open with my fingers. Then I pass out. This is strange. I am habitually someone who sleeps very little on overnight bus rides. But tonight it is eight o’clock and I cannot keep my eyes open. I sleep.
 
When I wake up next it is still dark, the bus has stopped and there is no one inside. It is breakfast stop at 5:30 in the morning. I get my camera bag and get out of the bus. I sit at a table only a few metres away, order some coffee, but then people begin boarding a bus. I join them but as I walk up the steps the bus driver waves me away. This is the wrong bus. I am confused and go back to my seat on the correct bus. Then, when the bus starts, I look in my camera bag. My camera is there, my sound recording microphone is there, all of my blank tapes are there. All up this is about US $8,000 worth of equipment, a lot of money in a country where public servants and members of the military are paid US$10 per month. But while this equipment is still in my bag all of the video tapes which I have been filming on have been removed.
 
Some days earlier I had been talking to a friend of mine, an old, well educated Burmese man with a history of confrontation with the Burmese military. He had said, ‘Military intelligence will be keeping track of you. You have been to this country before, you have a three month visa, you spend too long in places where tourists spend much shorter times, you have a video camera and you take pictures that tourists do not take. They will be watching you. They will leave you alone here but be careful when you go back to Rangoon.’
 
It is still dark and the bus drives on. I sit and think slowly, very slowly. It is like I am consciously plodding through my thoughts. I know what has transpired – I have been drugged and whilst asleep my recorded footage has been taken. I am not scared by this, in fact I am bizarrely relaxed but this is almost certainly the effect of the drugs. I sit and try to work out what to do. Then we pull into a military compound. A group of soldiers walk around the outside of the bus and stop near the back windows, looking in at me. Another six soldiers get on at the front of the bus, walk about a third of the way down the aisle and then stop. The man at the front, a solid man with a big face asks someone for papers. They are produced and he looks at them and in between he keeps looking up at me. The soldiers disembark and the bus drives on.
 
It is getting light now and I think, ‘Should I confront the man I was sitting next to?’ But what would this achieve? Even if he has my tapes he is not going to give them back to me. In fact, any confrontation is likely only to get me into more trouble. I sit and look at him. He is sleeping or pretending to sleep in a half curled up position with his back towards me. Is this so I cannot see his face? I don’t know but again, like at sunset last night, outside there seems to be a pervasive sense of peace. The sun is rising over the hills and the rice paddies and people are getting ready to begin the day.
 
We reach Rangoon and the bus pulls into the Northern bus station. The man and I have not spoken but outside the bus I go to him, touch him on the arm, and ask him for a cigarette. I do not want him to walk away from what has happened without any further communication. He does not look at me, does not speak, but he gives me a cigarette before joining the two people that had sat in front of me and the man that had originally been in my seat. Together they walk to a white car with dark tinted windows and a Burmese flag on the front left hand side. They get in and the car drives off. I get a taxi to take me to my regular hotel in Rangoon. About half way through the journey my state of mind changes sharply. Maybe adrenalin because any sense of plodding fogginess is gone in almost an instant. My heart races and I am scared. Apart from a few international representatives that have been hand picked by the military, foreign media is not welcomed by the Burmese military regime.
 
Once I am at the hotel I check into a room and then destroy all of the notes I have taken on Burma on this trip. I sit and wonder what to do, knowing that the military may come at any time or, maybe, not at all. It is hard to think clearly. Then I realise I should go to the British Consulate. When there, I give a brief explanation of what has happened and am taken into a room to be interviewed by the vice consul. At first she is angry with me as I explain what has happened in the last 12 hours. She says that it is very difficult for the British consulate to protect its citizens when they are taken into custody by the Burmese military. Then she says that I should leave Burma immediately, today, within the next few hours if possible. The consulate will help organize my ticket and I am to call when I have arrived back in Bangkok.
 
I return to my hotel and then fly out of Burma three hours later. Within five hours I am in a hotel in Bangkok. Even today, as I think back, the whole incident seems surreal. But what I remember the most vividly is the sense of peace and serenity in the evening at sunset and then in the morning looking at the man from military intelligence.
 
One of the essays that I had destroyed in my Rangoon hotel room was a piece about the burdens that rest upon the shoulders of everyone in Burma. Many of these burdens are obvious and are borne by the civilian population – poverty, economic mismanagement, restrictions on movement, speech, freedom of information, oppression at the hands of the military. This is a burden of fear. But there are other burdens that arise because of the current regime and its nature. Talking to one Burmese friend, he had said, ‘No one likes soldiers. People do not talk to soldiers. People do not have friends who are soldiers because then you are “a friend of a soldier” and this is something that you do not want to be. It will make people suspicious about you. Soldiers support the government so we do not talk to soldiers.’ Soldiers know this, that they are isolated, ostracised by their own communities and it cannot be something which gives them happiness. This is a burden they must bear. It is not a small burden. And military intelligence are the most hated people in Burma. Maybe this is why they have such characteristically hard faces. But the man sitting next to me on the bus, he has a family and two children and when he had talked about them to me his face had noticeably softened. I am sure that he would rather be soft and smiling than wearing his hard face. And when I think about him, I think that he is not such a bad man, he is just another person in Burma with another burden to bear.