Travelling in the shadows of Myanmar’s past

To the British mind, railways naturally evoke nostalgia: tiny train stations in idyllic locations and winding journeys away from the cities. Even the crowded London underground seems kindly with its iconic map, the train lines a criss-cross of multi-coloured straws. British journalist Clare Hammond’s new book, “On the Shadow Tracks: A Journey Through Occupied Myanmar,” shatters that sentimentality. Her investigation into the country’s railways uncovers the murky politics beneath the tracks and the mass human suffering caused by railway expansion. The book is ambitious, covering the intrepid author’s train journey through eight regions of Myanmar and capturing some of the fraught history and politics of each area from the post-coup present to Burma under British occupation. This physical as well as intellectual feat is vast, and the conflicts that Hammond examines continue to shake the ground she travels. What results is a clear-eyed travelogue that brings modern Myanmar to life. The people we meet along the way are memorable and illuminate power dynamics at play during the hopeful era of civilian rule under the National League for Democracy (NLD). They include policemen who quiz the author about travelling alone; nervous NLD lawmakers; abrupt, bejewelled generals; bereaved mothers; and forced labourers, rightfully rageful at the military. Storytelling Karenni men who drink rice wine for breakfast and eccentric stationmasters who love their trains like sons are also along for the ride. These voices weave humanity into the twists and turns of Myanmar’s recent history and ethnic politics. But more, “On The Shadow Tracks” leaves the reader thinking about larger questions that the author brings home via the tracks. Lives dispensable to those in power The book lays bare how those in power have caused senseless personal suffering on a mass scale. Hammond’s tour of Myanmar shows what forced labour, a ubiquitous fact of life as the military built new railroads countrywide in the 1990s, looks like close up. Legal under British colonial laws, the practice remained on the books post-independence. We meet a few of the hundreds of thousands who were forced to carry out work at devastating cost to their lives, their homes, and the natural environment. The book details how the Myanmar military showed up in villages, demanding that their inhabitants leave their homes and hack through dense forest to build railway lines or military bases. Years of their lives were lost to this dangerous and often deadly unpaid work. Workers died of starvation, disease, beatings, and torture. If the backbreaking labour had been of benefit, that might have offered some small consolation. But too often, the suffering was for nothing. In Dawei, for example, workers spent three months building a stretch of railway only to be told that the route had been changed. In many cases, the newly constructed railways proved utterly useless, or if functioning at all, could only provide painstakingly slow travel, taking over 24 hours to cover 100 miles. The military trumpets the whole thing as a glorious triumph, never acknowledging the massive exploitation involved. In Magway, we learn of locals who were kicked off their land without notice and then forced to build a railway on it. Families that farmed the area for generations were left destitute. Floods caused by the construction, which blocked waterways, added to their hardship. Homes and crops were destroyed, and children could no longer get to school. Devastatingly, some drowned in the floodwaters. Meanwhile, as sections of the railway were opened, the generals staged opening ceremonies, posing for photos and cutting ribbons. In stories like this, we see the military’s systematic abuse and disregard for Myanmar’s people intersecting with capitalism, climate, and conflict. The colonial-era Gokteik viaduct is a vital link between northern Shan State and the central plains. Now more than a century old, it is in danger of collapsing. (Libby Burke Wilde) British colonial Burma: a parallel track In case the foreign reader thinks this strange, one of the strongest aspects of the book is how Hammond shows that the British were the first to use railways as a tool of occupation and extraction. Tentacle-like railroads extended the occupying power’s reach throughout Burma, and it was through railways that local people would often come into first contact with their colonisers. In practice, this meant that villagers in colonial India and Burma were violently turfed off their land by the British to build railways. Uncovering surprising parallels between British tactics and those of the current junta, Hammond writes: “Tens of thousands of people were moved, and their former homes were burned to the ground, in the same strategy that would later form a core part of the junta’s counter-Insurgency campaigns in Myanmar’s borderlands.” Like the Burmese generals who came after them, the colonial authorities used railways to carry weapons and soldiers to the frontline to quash opposition. Hammond uncovers her country’s crimes unflinchingly, combing through colonial-era documents and archival manuscripts to reveal mass arrests, executions, and massacres. De-sanitising British violence obscured by official accounts, she shows how powerful men made decisions in the interest of commerce that affected millions, with almost no interest or oversight from Britain. Meanwhile, the British seem as deluded as the junta, opening railways with fanfare and fireworks and declaring their actions to be for the good of the people. This is not a side of history taught in British schools. As well as opening critical conversations about Britain’s legacy in Myanmar, Hammond shows how patterns of violence repeat to the present day, as the Myanmar military seeks to dominate ethnic areas, with railways still a tool in their arsenal. Even international actors seeking investment in Myanmar before the coup can be seen in the same frame: prioritising profits while disregarding what this means for ordinary people. Truth from the shadows Bringing British and Burmese abuses into plain sight, the book breaks through official propaganda and the Myanmar military’s stranglehold on information. It exposes the cruelty behind the innocuous-sounding topic of railways, showing the importance of documenting wrongs against ordinary people and of a press that can tell the truth. It reminds the reader of the danger of silence, bringing up weighty questions of memory and forgetting and what these ideas mean for securing justice. We are reminded that without making truth explicit, mass suffering can be erased from history and the national imagination, making it possible for human lives to be swept aside as nothing. In the absence of a functioning justice system, Hammond shows how cycles of exploitation and impunity have played out again and again. Foreigners living or travelling in Myanmar have always been shielded from seeing conflict and violence, even before the coup when the country was more open than at any other time in its history. The book counteracts that by bringing reality to the forefront. On the Shadow Tacks raises questions that are relevant worldwide. It leaves the reader wondering what else remains hidden, undiscussed and invisible in official accounts.

Travelling in the shadows of Myanmar’s past

“On the Shadow Tracks, A Journey Through Occupied Myanmar” takes readers around the country by rail, exploring questions of injustice, colonialism, and memory

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