On the Street Where I Lived

Article in The Irrawaddy about the fire on the street where I lived.

Last week, I began tracking the Horsemen of the Apocalypse as they rode through Burma. First they appeared in Meiktila, a town in the scorching inland. An argument between a Muslim jeweler and a pair of Burmese customers agitated the country's old wounds, still raw from the Rakhine-Rohingya riots from last November in western Burma. After the reported killing of a passerby Buddhist monk, the tension boiled over. In the sectarian violence that followed, some neighborhoods and mosques were reduced to rubble and ashes. People were fleeing in the hundreds. Casualty numbers were initially reported to be around 20; later they were revised to 40.

But the Devil's riders weren't done. They continued to Bago, roughly 60 miles away from Rangoon. Here, the havoc led to more burnt mosques, curfews in several villages, and police firing on rioters with rubber bullets. By March 25, Rangoon was sleeping with one eye open. In a news story published on March 25, locals talked of a sword-wielding band driving around at night, shouting racial epithets and claiming places of worship were under attack. The shadowy group was sighted in Muslim neighborhoods as well as Burmese ones.

I mapped out the path of devastation using headlines from the Burmese press. From behind a computer screen, from the safety of my San Francisco studio with fog-dusted windows, I observed the Buddhist-Muslim showdown overseas. The ashes, the smoldering piles, and the angry mobs were 8,000 miles away. With the Pacific Ocean as a buffer, I could adopt a measure of professional indifference. I was merely collecting data for news reports, I told myself.

But on Friday March 29, the violence hit close to home, quite literally. A message from my 20-something cousin Ni Ni slipped through the barriers of time and space and landed in my Facebook inbox. "The mosque on our street burned down around 2 AM this morning. About 17 people now dead. Police keeping a barricade in front of our house," she wrote. (The actual casualty was 13, as later confirmed by newspapers.) The street Ni Ni mentioned was where I once played soccer in monsoon downpours. The house she now calls home was once mine. The mosque that burned down was the one I'd pass by every morning on my way to school.

I grew up on 48th Street in Rangoon's Botataung neighborhood. On one side of our home stood a Hindu temple. Its towering roof was guarded by carvings of dancing Vedic gods, painted in saffron yellow, chili red, and Ganges blue. During Diwali, the festival of light, I'd join the other neighborhood kids inside the temple. I'd jostle for a spot by the stage so I could watch dancers reenacting the epic battles from the Ramayana. On the other side stood an Islamic school for orphans. In the mornings, walking to the government-run school a block away, I'd pass by young Muslim boys in long tunics and white caps, getting ready for prayer. Some were sitting on the door steps with their Korans, reciting verses.

Photos of the fire published by The Irrawaddy on Facebook.

 
In the photos of the burning incident published by the Thailand-based Irrawaddy, I saw the familiar mosque, a two-story structure with a coat of muted blue, crowned with a series of mini-towers. Its gate was now barred. Its windows showed scorch marks on the rims. I looked at the photos of grief-stricken relatives. One of these men, now bearded and gray, could be a boy I'd seen memorizing the Koran in my childhood.

Theories of how the fire started were radically different, split along the Buddhists-Muslim divide. The former accepted the local police's explanation that an overworked generator, a failed transformer, and a can of diesel fuel nearby were the fatal combination that ignited the disaster. The latter insisted it was arson, an intentional act by radical Buddhists.

Knowing a lack of answers could prompt both sides to go on a rampage, authorities took swift action. They held a series of press conferences to make clear there was no foul play. Holding the charred remains of a diesel can, assistant police chief Myint Aye posed for photos, The police also arrested two school administrators and charged them with criminal negligence. But that didn't do much to quell the speculations online. Commenting on a report from the Irrawaddy, one reader said, "The preliminary finding of the cause of fire is not very convincing in the absence of any tangible material evidence."

Each side felt their plight and miseries had been under-reported. Each accused the other side of exaggerating their grievances. For those seeking vindication or confirmation of suspicion, no fact was beyond dispute and no evidence conclusive enough. If it was a tragic accident, the fire on 48th Street was indeed ill-timed, coming on the heels of deliberate fires elsewhere.

Signs of hope finally emerged on March 28. Young men from all faiths decided they'd had enough. After a meeting at YMCA, they began a campaign to advocate interfaith coorperation. They wore T-shirts inscribed with the pledge "I will not became a cause for racial-religious conflict." They also began handing out flyers and placards with the same message.

In my teens in Rangoon, my friends and I spent many evenings in curbside teashops, often located under a tarpaulin roof or a leafy fig tree. Sitting on small wooden stools polished in sweat, we sipped Burmese milk tea (lephet ye) to cope with the oppressive heat, and a military regime that was even more oppressive. With some, I'd debate the merits of the latest mystery novel by Min Thein Kha, Burma's own Arthur Conan Doyle. With others, I'd discuss the political cliffhangers of the time, appropriated from the overheard conversations of adults who had access to Times, Newsweek, and Reader's Digest. (It was much safer to talk about the Iran-Contra affair than to talk about the local government's failings.) We all bonded over our shared adoration of certain girls, and our distaste for the teachers who were too quick with their canes in disciplinary acts. I didn't see my friends as Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists; I saw them as neighbors and classmates, roasting under the same sun, pricked by the same swarm of mosquitoes.

When I return to Rangoon the next time, will I still be able to share a bite of samosas or a cup of tea with my childhood friends who happen to be Muslims? When they look at me, will they see the boy who grew up with them? Or will they see me as someone who grew up in a Buddhist household?

On the street where I lived, 13 boys perished in a fire at a mosque. But the real casualty is the goodwill between people of different faiths.

My report on the sectarian violence, for LinkAsia.
My blog post on the riots, for Link Asia.