The Burma Effect (27 page)

He threw the pass out into the living room and put his hands over his head. The soldier, AK poised, advanced slowly and kicked the red booklet behind him. He shouted at Delaney in Burmese. One of his colleagues picked up the pass and opened it. It had a picture and identified Delaney in five languages as a foreign correspondent, but none of the languages was Burmese. Delaney prayed the young soldier knew a bit of English or French.

The lead soldier shouted at Delaney again, motioned for him to lie flat. He came over and kicked at Delaney with his boot and knocked him from his sitting position sideways onto the floor. Then with his foot he stretched out Delaney's legs. Two other soldiers came onto the balcony and trained their guns at Delaney as the first one searched him for weapons and papers.

“Media,” Delaney said. “Media. Canada, Canada.”

The lead soldier went to the balcony opening and shouted something down to the street. Shouts came back up. In the living room, a soldier with a radio spoke in rapid-fire bursts of Burmese and a crackling voice replied.

The rest of the squad searched the other rooms in the apartment.They pulled the screaming woman and her children out into the living room and she let loose with a volley of Burmese, pointing at Delaney, pointing at the balcony, pointing all around. The children simply sat on the floor and cried.

Then an officer rushed into the apartment from downstairs, followed by another small squad of young troops. He was carrying a pistol and looked very angry indeed, enraged.

“What language, what language,” the officer shouted to Delaney. “Quelle langue? English, French, what? Quick, quick, quick.”

Delaney thought the officer was going to beat him with the gun, so enraged did he look.The name patch on his uniform said Hla Min.

“English, English,” Delaney said. “Press. Media, Canadian media. I'm a journalist.”

“A journalist?” Min said. “No. No. Not possible.”

“There's my press pass over there. The red booklet. Your man has it,” Delaney said.

Min looked over at the soldier holding Delaney's press pass, motioned impatiently for it to be brought to him. He thumbed it open, read what was inside.

“Not possible, not possible,” he said. “Montreal Tribune. No. Where is your passport, where is your visa?”

“They are lost,” Delaney said.

“How are you here? How are you here? I have many men dead today. You were with the Western soldiers down there. Now you try to escape. Where is your weapon?”

“No weapon, no weapon. I'm doing a story, a story for my newspaper,” Delaney said. “I'm a journalist. I came from Bangkok.”

Min walked over to where Delaney lay, pulled the action on his pistol and pushed the muzzle against Delaney's ear.

“There are many Burmese soldiers dead today,” Min said. “Too many men dead. I could kill you. I want to kill you now, now.”

Delaney said nothing, trying to control his fear. “Journalist,” Min said, pushing the gun muzzle harder into Delaney's ear. “No.”

Eventually, Min pulled the gun away. “We will see,” he said. “You will answer and we will see.”

He barked instructions at his men and two of them pulled Delaney to his feet. Min glared at him and pointed his weapon at Delaney's chest.

“Now we go to Rangoon city, to Insein, Insein,” Min said. “You will tell us everything there.”

He motioned for his men to take Delaney out and they half dragged, half carried him down the dim stairs into the brilliant sunshine of the street. Delaney could see no sign that any of the mercenaries were still alive. But only three Western bodies lay near the military police van. He thought the third one could be Stefan—a hideous head wound made it impossible to tell for sure. Burmese soldiers shouted and pointed when they saw Delaney being dragged outside, all enraged at what had happened that day, all mourning lost comrades and looking for someone, anyone, to blame.

Rangoon, Bangkok and Ko Chang

R
angoon's Insein Prison is notorious among Burma's democracy campaigners and also among local and foreign journalists. Scores, hundreds, of opposition activists have been detained there—interrogated, tortured, half starved there by the military regime. And journalists who fall foul of the regime also find themselves there, all interrogated, many tortured, some executed. Some, the lucky ones, usually the foreign ones, are deported from Burma and barred from returning for life.

Delaney's cell was small, airless, but better, he knew, than many others in the prison where important enemies of the Burmese Way to Socialism were held incommunicado for years. Delaney, for the first days of his stay—he calculated it was about a week—was also incommunicado. Not cut off from just the outside world but from everyone except for a few guards who manned this section of the prison.

No one came to interrogate him; no one spoke to him at all. He was given two small meals a day, mostly rice with some bits of meat or vegetables, sometimes with a murky soy broth. He was given no explanation about what was planned for him, what charges might have been laid, when he might be able to see anyone in a position of authority or any foreign officials. It was a common technique in totalitarian regimes, he knew, and he accepted that he would simply have to wait.

Another widespread practice to weaken opponents of such regimes is the deliberate use of illness, even poisoning. This, apparently, the jailers also employed in Delaney's case. After two days in his cell he was literally floored with stomach cramps, diarrhoea, vomiting, fever, chills. The cause was of course the food and water, or maybe an additional substance added to them, but whatever it was, it worked its dark magic. A severely ill and uncomfortable prisoner soon loses the capacity to resist or make plans or attempt to escape. For days, all Delaney could manage was to lie in his bunk and try to control his bowels.

His fever became severe. Even his guards began to look concerned as he lay sweating and trembling for hours. Eventually, through the haze of fever and delirium, Delaney saw what he thought was a more senior man arrive outside the cell and look in through the bars alongside the guards. This officer left, returning shortly afterward with a Burmese civilian, clearly a doctor.

The medical man came into Delaney's cell, speaking slow but exact English.

“Your illness is worrying to us,” he said. “I am a doctor, Doctor Kyaw Ba.”

Delaney shifted onto his side and said weakly: “I need medication and good water.”

“Yes,” Ba said. “I will arrange this. Even enemies of the country are well treated, as you will see.”

Ba left the cell and returned about half an hour later. He carried an old-fashioned doctor's bag this time and some bottles of mineral water. He set these down on Delaney's small table and began preparing a syringe.

“What's that?” Delaney asked, knowing that whatever it might be it would be administered anyway.

“Antibiotic,” Ba said. “Another one like this tomorrow. And a third day.” He expertly swabbed Delaney's upper arm and gave him the injection. He poured some water into a glass and stirred a sachet of powder into it, stirring it for a long time.

“Drink this slowly, very slowly at first,” Ba said.

“I will leave you some other packets. It is for rehydration. Soon your sickness will go.”

His captors had clearly decided he had been sufficiently weakened and tamed by the bout of dysentery. In a few days, Delaney was feeling well enough to sit up and take tentative steps around the cell. The guards let him shower in a cubicle at the end of the cellblock. They gave him fresh clothes, khaki prison issue. They gave him something to read: The New Light of Myanmar, the official English-language newspaper. The story of the firefight in the suburbs and his arrest did not appear.

The fever lingered. It intensified his dreams:

Of course he dreams of Natalia. But just of Natalia now, no other women, no other female figures. They are swimming together, diving together, deep in an aquamarine lagoon, through which rays of sunlight undulate. There are dolphins with them, making wise noises, which he tries to understand. Above them floats his beloved sailboat, the hull dark against the bright sea and sky. Natalia swims ahead, at ease under the water, never surfacing, never needing to surface. Delaney feels no regret in this dream, no grief, no guilt anymore at his role in Natalia's death. She pauses occasionally, looking behind to see if he is still with her on their underwater journey. Delaney swims closer, closer, overtakes her, and suddenly she is gone. But again there is no regret. He feels the warm wonderful certainty that at last he and Natalia have become as one, that no matter where he goes, what dangers and troubles he encounters, they are swimming together as one.

His interrogator identified himself as Lieutenant General U Maung. His English was very good.

“You are feeling better now,” Maung said. It was not a question.

“Yes,” said Delaney, sitting on his bunk. “Almost better.”

“We have helped you to get better,” Maung said. He sat in the cell's one chair. He was in his late fifties, still soldier-straight, with close-cropped saltand-pepper hair and an extremely well-tended moustache. “Now you must help us to understand some things you have done. I am with the Directorate of Defense Services Intelligence.”

Delaney knew, as any foreign correspondent in Southeast Asia knew, that the DDSI is the major player in a vast security apparatus that keeps Burma's population, and its opponents, under control.The methods were tight restrictions on contacts with foreigners, media censorship, surveillance of government employees, harassment of political activists, intimidation of families, confiscation of property, arbitrary arrests, detention, torture and extrajudicial executions.

The DDSI came under the direct control of General Khin Nyunt, the military intelligence chief known throughout the country simply as Secretary One. Other generals were above Nyunt in the SPDC hierarchy, but it was he who held sway. Delaney wondered how direct a connection there was between his interrogator and Secretary One. The more direct the reporting arrangement, the more danger he was in.

“You claim to be a journalist,” Maung said.

“I am a journalist,” Delaney said.

“Journalists do not simply come into this country and do as they like. Everyone knows that. If you are a journalist you would know that, too. There is too much false reporting about our country already,” Maung said.

“I entered illegally,” Delaney said.

“If that is true, you are in serious trouble with my government at least for this. If it is true and you are a journalist,” Maung said. “We do not believe that this is true.”

“What do you believe is true?” Delaney asked.

“We believe that you are a member of the band of foreign mercenary soldiers sent into Myanmar to encourage the overthrow of our government,” Maung said.

“I'm not a soldier,” Delaney said.

“We believe that foreign interests were part of a plan to sow discontent and agitation among the population, those in the population who oppose this government. We believe, we know, that your mission was to enter the home of the lady, Aung San Suu Kyi, take her away from Myanmar and create agitation in the population.”

“That would be an extremely foolish plan of action,” Delaney said. “Impossible to carry out.”

“Impossible without major support and complicity from certain foreign powers who oppose my government,” Maung said. Delaney said nothing.

“You are aware that Madame Suu Kyi is free to leave Burma at any time?” Maung said. “So she is told,” Delaney said.

“She can leave at any time. She chooses to stay. She is confined to her house for her own safety. Do you think she needs mercenary soldiers to rescue her?”

Delaney said nothing.

“Even when her husband was dying in England she did not go, she chose to stay,” Maung said. “What does that tell us? She wishes to remain in Burma. She does not need soldiers to rescue her.”

“That plan had nothing to do with me,” Delaney said.

“Do you know of another foreigner, who also claimed to be a Canadian and a journalist, named Mr. Nathan Kellner?” Maung asked.

“Yes, he is a friend from many years ago. I knew him well when we worked in Montreal. He is the reason I am here,” Delaney said.

The admission unsettled Maung, it seemed. “You admit to knowing Kellner,” Maung said.

“Yes. I was asked by his editor in London to try to find out where he had gone. He disappeared from Bangkok. They asked me to try to find him.”

“And you joined a band of mercenaries who entered this country illegally, carrying weapons, knowing they were enemies of this government with evil intentions,” Maung said.

“I entered with those soldiers because they forced me to. I had found them in a house Kellner used in Thailand, in Mae Sot. I was trying to find out where Kellner was, what he was doing. They took me with them into Burma.”

“You were working with them, helping them.”

“No. I am not a soldier.”

“You are an agent.”

“No.”

“If you are a journalist, you were to write about their plan, help them sow agitation and opposition to this government.”

“No.”

Maung himself was becoming agitated. “Do you know what happened to your friend Kellner?” he said.

“Yes, I think so,” Delaney said. “I was told Kellner was dead.” “Who told you that?”

“General Thein. When he came to arrest the mercenaries in the apartment that day.”

Maung stood up suddenly and put on his officer's cap.

“That day, General Thein and many of our good soldiers died,” he said. “Your comrades killed many men before they were killed themselves that day.” “They were not my comrades,” Delaney said.

“We believe they were. But only you crawled into another apartment when the fighting started and hid there like a rat in a corner while brave Burmese soldiers fought to defend this government against evil foreign interference,” Maung said. The initial interview, it seemed, was over.

Lieutenant General U Maung returned each day for almost a week, asking Delaney questions, pressing for details, usually rejecting or debating the answers he got. One day he brought with him an extremely thin man in civilian clothes who was from the Press Scrutiny Board, the country's chief censoring body and overseer of the policy that severely limits reporting about the regime inside and outside Burma.

“You are aware that every foreign journalist is required to make application before entering Burma for a media visa, and to register with our representatives abroad their intentions and the articles they intend to produce?” the press man said. He introduced himself only as Myint. He chain-smoked all the time he was in Delaney's cell, extinguishing his spent cigarettes on the bars and throwing them into the seatless toilet.

“Yes,” Delaney said. “I have told General Maung that I entered the country illegally.” “You admit to this,” Myint said.

“Yes,” Delaney said.

“This is a serious offence,” he said.

“I have told General Maung that I want to speak to an embassy official about all this. This is my right, surely,” Delaney said.

Maung, standing to one side, laughed out loud. “Please, Mr. Delaney,” he said. “Do not speak of rights when you are in detention for serious crimes against our country.”

“I should be allowed to speak to an embassy official.”

“Which country are you from? Which one will it be today?”

“Canada. I have always said Canada. You know that.”

“Where is your passport then?”

“It was taken from me. You know that already. Look at my press pass. It says where I am from.”

“Canada does not have consular representation in Burma,” Maung said.

“Australia's embassy will deal with Canadian issues; they do this,” Delaney said. “I want to speak to someone from that embassy. Any Western embassy.”

Delaney began to lose track of days. He was not ill treated, never tortured, but the repeated visits by General Maung and others occasionally accompanying him began to dissolve into each other. Delaney thought he had been in custody for almost three weeks when Maung, arriving at the usual hour, told him he would be escorted elsewhere in the prison.

Three armed guards went with them down a series of corridors and stairways. Maung walked ahead. On the way Delaney saw some other Westerners in cells, some looking very bad indeed, and he saw many Burmese, also looking haggard and unwell. No one spoke or called out.

Eventually they stopped in a damp sub-basement outside a heavy double door.

“This is our morgue,” Maung said, and waited for Delaney to react.

“What do you expect me to say, General?” Delaney asked. “That I am frightened?”

“I want to show you something in here. Come,” Maung said.