Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Borit slowly expanded her family’s landholdings. She now has a small hotel in Mrauk-U; a guesthouse by Inle Lake up north; a forty-five-acre farm; and a school for hotel management, organic farming, and traditional arts. She employs more than two hundred full-time staff. She also founded the Inthar Heritage House, retraining local artisans in historical building techniques so they could help construct a museum of traditional crafts. She has filled it with her grandparents’ furniture and antiques accumulated as her neighbors opted for new, factory-made items from China. Inthar Heritage House also encompasses a breeding center for Burmese cats—previously long vanished from Myanmar—and the best restaurant in the country, which serves delectable renditions of her grandmother’s recipes, including the national dish, lahpet, a salad of fermented tea leaves mixed with chilies, sesame oil, fried garlic, dried shrimp, peanuts, and ginger; it’s rather caffeinated and best not eaten near bedtime. Her guests sometimes marvel at how everything is homegrown and handmade, but she points out, “We were always farm-to-table because there wasn’t anyplace else to get anything for the table.”

Inle is a gorgeous, shallow lake where the locals have for many years lived by fishing. They stand up in their boats and paddle with one leg to keep their hands free for their nets. It’s a spectacular sight: they stay tall and move with astonishing grace, in a kind of serpentine full-body undulation. You go by boat to visit the lake’s many shrines, numerous pagodas, picturesque villages, and an abandoned temple complex, now overgrown. There are a famous floating market and some less touristic markets along the shore where weavers produce cloth from the fibers of lotus roots.

In 2011, Myanmar had two hundred thousand visitors; in 2012, 1 million; in 2013, nearly 2 million; in 2014, over 3 million. Above Inle’s eastern shore, a gash in the landscape marks the beginning of a construction project that will triple the number of hotel rooms around the lake. The area’s rickety infrastructure can in no way support such a deluge of visitors. The lake itself is silting up because of unsustainable farming practices, and the narrow waterways around it are already crowded. The beauty of the lake—indeed, the beauty of all Myanmar—is partly a consequence of its long-term inaccessibility. It is becoming accessible at such speed that there may soon be nothing to access.

In early 2014, many writers and journalists were arrested. After staff at Unity Journal reported on the construction of an alleged chemical-weapons factory, the CEO and four journalists were sentenced to ten years’ hard labor, later commuted to seven years. More than fifty others were arrested for protesting those convictions. While Aung Kyaw Naing, a former bodyguard for Aung San Suu Kyi, was reporting on the conflict between Karen rebels and the Burmese army in Mon State, he was taken captive by the army and killed in custody. Another journalist was jailed for a year for “disturbing a civil servant on duty” and trespassing after attempting to interview an education official about a scholarship scheme at a new government school in Chin State. Laws require that newspapers be registered, but the government withholds registration capriciously, so newspapers publish unregistered until they annoy officials, whereupon they get shuttered. Four newspapers were closed down in Chin State in the fall of 2014. When the Bi Mon Te Nay printed an erroneous statement from an activist group claiming that Aung San Suu Kyi had formed an interim government, three reporters and the two publishers received sentences of two years each. Htin Kyaw was sentenced to thirteen years for disrupting public order because he organized a protest march in Yangon.

In the ranking of countries for freedom of the press, Myanmar’s status has steadily improved. It was 169th out of 180 countries in 2011; 151st in 2012; by 2013, it had been promoted to 145th. But Dave Mathieson, senior Myanmar researcher for Human Rights Watch, noted that two hundred people had been detained in 2014, including peaceful protesters, journalists, and activists. Yanghee Lee, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, reported to the General Assembly that the government continues “to criminalize and impede the activities of civil society and the media,” meting out “disproportionately high” sentences. The writers, artists, and other intellectuals I interviewed in Myanmar had all been released under article 401 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, which allows only conditional pardons: they risk having to serve out the remainder of their sentences if they displease the government.