In an interview on Burma

Interview Extract:

Your next book is Outrage by Bertil Lintner. 

This is an important book because it documents a really major event in Burmese history and there are very few books that have done this in any depth. This was 1988 when there was a nationwide uprising during which the government killed about 3,000 protesters. So it was this huge event but there is no public record of it inside the country. And Bertil, a Swedish journalist based in Thailand, went around and talked to all the people who had come out and compiled a journalistic account of what had happened. I dare say it is inaccurate in some of the smaller details because it is on-the-ground reporting, but it is the only account of its kind and so critical to have as a record of an important chapter in Burma’s recent history that the regime has tried to erase.

How did he manage to do that given the censorship that goes on?

Well, as far as I know, he did it mostly from outside the country, talking to people who had left and gathering their impressions of what had happened.

You have just done a similar thing with your book, Everything is Broken, which tells people’s stories from the cyclone two years ago. How did you manage to get people to talk to you, given how dangerous it is?

It is a really slow process as you have to get people to trust you. Usually people introduce me to someone and on the first meeting they won’t talk to me about political things or even current affairs which are always political in Burma. It might take until the second, third or even the fourth meeting before we discuss what is happening in Burma, what their opinions are or what their involvement is. 

And yet you say there is this appetite to get their stories out.

Yes there is because otherwise they would disappear. I have this obsession with vanishing stories which is a kind of side effect of the regime’s control over the country and all public forums. As a result of the regime’s actions, stories are vanishing, history is being rewritten, memories are being eroded and stories lost. So I think it is really important that these things are written down so that they can somehow be maintained for the record.

But that is a very dangerous for the people involved.

I must say that it is not dangerous for me. The worst thing that would happen to me is that I would get deported. Past experiences show that when foreigners are caught they are usually put on to the plane that same night. 

But, for the Burmese people who help me, it is clearly dangerous. That’s why I use a pen name because it makes people feel more comfortable that they won’t be associated with me under my real name, and so far it has helped. None of my sources have ever been interrogated. It is true that when you are working in Burma you develop a heightened sense of paranoia. I find myself shredding my papers, even shopping lists. Some of us foreign writers who work in Burma call it Burma Head and it is a symptom of the extreme paranoia you get from being there. 

So how do you remember the stories if you had to shred your notes?

I would give my notebooks to other people to carry out of the country. I would hide them in people’s houses or around my hotel room or I would record interviews. Though I’ve had my hotel room searched, I have never had my bags searched at the airport going into or out of the country, so I wonder if it is the paranoid workings of my mind that led me to these extremes and whether they were really necessary, which in itself says something about what it is like to be in Burma!

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