Peter Carty

Guns and poppies

At last, contact with the outside world is raising local aspirations and fuelling pressure for reform

My uncle Edward did not like talking about his service in Burma during the second world war. When I asked him what fighting in the jungle was like, his response was brief. ‘Grown men were crying for their mothers,’ he said, and would say no more: the worst combat theatre of that war was not a subject for children. Meanwhile, in India, my grandparents were taking in British refugees from Burma who had little to say either, being sick and traumatised after fleeing the Japanese over high mountain passes during the monsoon.

Before 1939, Burma was one of Asia’s most prosperous countries. Yangon was the second busiest port in the world (after London) and the country the largest rice exporter. But after the war, its cities were mostly destroyed and its economy ruined. The gist of David Eimer’s pessimistic account is that, nearly 75 years on, Burma (as I shall  continue to call it) has yet to recover its pre-war prosperity. It’s not a place where time has stood still, as the travel-writing cliché would have it, but one where the clock has run backwards and stopped.

Eimer, formerly the Telegraph’s Asia correspondent, is one of the best travel writers to focus on politics and current affairs. Of course Burma has been in the news in the past few years. Aung San Suu Kyi’s failure to denounce the military for their horrifying persecution of the Rohingya minority has been shocking. As far as the generals are concerned, according to Eimer, the mistreatment of the Rohingya distracts the wider population from the country’s economic failure.

During his researches, he interviewed a large cross-section of Burmese and visited areas normally off-limits, including war zones. The sad reality is that the country has never really seen an end to warfare.

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