A title that sounds extreme, Everything Is Broken, A Tale of Catastrophe in Burma (2010, Penguin Press, 224 pages, US$25.95), turns out to be much too mild. Tragedy knows no bounds in this true account by Emma Larkin.
Driven by gusts of urgency, Larkin tells how Cyclone Nargis ravaged much of Burma (also called Myanmar), especially the Irrawaddy delta, on May 2, 2008. “After what felt like an eternity, a hazy dawn began to break over the shattered landscape…. As more sunlight filtered through the knotted branches, she saw that there were other people lying nearby and noticed that they too were keeping absolutely still even though some lay with their limbs twisted in uncomfortable-looking positions…. As Ma Pyu looked up toward the sky she saw that there were also people hanging in the trees. Their bodies were like over-sized dolls, lazy and limp among the branches.”
The author gives the most complete account yet of death, damage and devastation left by the storm. “Photographs of dead bodies had become common in the city and people handed them around as if they were exchanging baseball cards.”
In truth, everything's broken in Burma all the time as its military abuses and exploits most of the 50 million people. The country's political system, media, courts and economy all get manipulated at gunpoint to enrich powerful men in uniforms.
The iron-fisted, paranoid and secretive military rulers concede that Nargis killed 138,300 Burmese, surely a lowball number. As millions more struggled to survive in the aftermath, the junta made “an unfathomable decision of near-genocidal proportions”, trying to ignore the humanitarian crisis, even blocking global aid agencies from helping properly. Outsiders deemed the junta's behavior appalling and incomprehensible. Valiantly, Larkin tries to explain why all-powerful Senior General Than Shwe and his subordinates showed such cruel indifference.
“…the regime's attempt to cover up evidence of the destruction wreaked by Cyclone Nargis would prove to be a grave mistake. These images were a chronicle of nature's fury, not of the regime's brutality. By banning them and preventing the local press from running photographs deemed to be negative, the authorities were handling the disaster as if it was something that needed to be hidden from public view. As a result of this secrecy, the contraband images had taken on a different attribute; images of people killed by a natural disaster became atrocity pictures that portrayed the callous neglect of an already vilified regime.”
Impact from Nargis, one of Asia's biggest natural disasters since the 2004 tsunami, lingers cruelly. “The dead had become indelibly etched into people's memories and onto the landscape. The bodies of people and carcasses of farm animals that floated in the waterways during the weeks after the cyclone had now sunk beneath the surface, but they still appeared at low tide when the water receded and human remains became visible – anonymous piles of bones slick with the fertile, alluvial mud of the delta.”
Appropriately, the author probes other issues too:
-- Why do Burma's military leaders hold such political and economic power, yet govern their own lives by fear and superstition? (“Years of isolation have kept the generals obscured behind a smokescreen of propaganda, artifice and rumor…. The generals live in a rarified atmosphere; the very air they breathe is clouded with paranoia and the ground they walk upon is riddled with the fault-lines of treachery.”)
-- How do the leaders become warped enough to repeatedly order soldiers to kill, beat or arrest protesters, even if the victims are peaceful Buddhist monks? (“To understand the regime, you need only to understand one man – Senior General Than Shwe. What we have here in Burma is a classic textbook case of totalitarian dictatorship.”)
-- Does Than Shwe embody evil? (“Many people… think that Than Shwe may not even realize the full extent of the country's woes. Surrounded by ‘yes’ men, he makes few forays around the country and, when he does travel, his trips are meticulously planned.”)
-- How do historical, religious and economic circumstances nurture the brutal dictatorship? (“…the army continued to grow. Throughout the 1990s, an energetic recruitment effort expanded its troops from 200,000 in 1988 to an estimated 400,000 ten years later. The army also stocked up on weapons and ammunition.")
-- What inner strength sustains millions of Burmese as waves of injustice and violence splash over them? (“We cannot fight with weapons. All we have is loving kindness.”)
-- What repercussions await people accused of opposing the rulers? (“The young man had not participated in the protests and had only followed along out of curiosity, but the soldiers arrested him anyway. He was held in a large room with around 100 other men and women. They were given no food or water for the first 24 hours and were kept in total darkness. As the detainees were not allowed access to toilet facilities and the roof leaked due to the rains, he had to sleep on a filthy and wet cement floor.")
-- How does a nation blessed by natural resources push most of its people into poverty? (“…the regime's coffers – and the generals' private piggybanks – are illicitly filled through a variety of exports. Burma is rich in natural resources and the generals profit from the sale of gems, jade and teakwood. Most of the regime's gains, however, are now made by auctioning off concessions to Burma's plentiful reserves of oil and natural gas.”)
-- Is Burma's situation hopeless? (“…a Burmese saying cautions that predicting the outcome of political events is like trying to guess the color of a chick's feathers by looking at the egg or like proclaiming what shape a cloud will take.”)
There's no doubt about military brutality or the injustice of daily life. “After the soldiers took control of each block, fire engines drove along the streets to hose down the tarmac and wash away the blood.”
Harsh realities blatantly contradict the regime's propaganda stories. “The Burmese state media stuck doggedly to its version of the truth…. The mood conveyed was one of happy and productive activity, of hard times overcome thanks to the government's heroic contributions.”
Larkin (a pen-name) is an American writer born and raised in Asia who studied the Burmese language, lives in Thailand and often visits Burma. For the world to know and better understand what happens there, let's hope the author's “secret reporting” missions can continue.
Few stories need telling more than those of tragedies, hardships and abuses in Burma. Few books needed writing more than this one did. Larkin deserves extremely high marks for researching as thoroughly as possible and writing with thoughtful compassion and understanding.
Approval rating: 91 per cent.
For more information: www.us.penguingroup.com
(July 18, 2010)
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