I'm sitting in an internet café in Phnom Penh and I can hear a child singing in the street. It's one of the little newspaper boys, he looks about 12 or 13, and he's sitting on a stool by the door singing to himself. The song is plaintive and sad, and his treble voice is very sweet. It sounds like a folksong, I think perhaps this is a little piece of genuine Cambodian folk culture which has survived the attempt of the Pol Pot regime to commit cultural suicide, and I ask the man who runs the café what the song is. He listens and grins. "He's singing about himself. He says, 'I have no money today, I have no food, how shall I eat today?' I think he made this song himself." 

The little boy was called Kim. According to him, he was 15 - but no Western child of that age could be so small. The internet café was located under my apartment, and I got to know Kim and the other newspaper sellers and shoeshine kids who came there in search of customers. I heard their stories and learned something of their lives and sometimes bought them medicines when they had a cold or breakfast at the little noodle stall across the street. Kim lived with his family, eight people in one room, in a street not far away. Then there was Puong, Kim's best friend, bright-eyed and mischievous, who lived in a slum near the Russian Embassy with a big sister who had been born unable to speak. There was Khine, older brother of Kim, who had run away from home and now lived in the street and smoked yama; and Sina, from a truly terrible semi-rural slum across the river where his house stood on stilts over stinking green mud; Ratana, who had only tenuous family links in Phnom Penh and slept with Khine and Sina in the street; and Socheat, the most intelligent and mature, speaking English as well as many of the Cambodian officials I dealt with, formerly living in a rooftop tenement near the Royal Palace, but the tenement had burnt down the year before and his family had been resettled out near the airport and now he slept in the street with Khine and Ratana and Sina because there was no work out near the airport and he had to help support his family.

These were not all the kids from the internet café, just the ones who made the most impression on me. Others came and went, but this small group were constant. It was their patch, the corner by the Foreign Correspondents Club and the River Street restaurant and up the line of café-bars favoured by backpackers and tourists and resident expatriate journalists and down as far as the Sunny internet café and the Sky guesthouse. If kids from outside the group tried to sell papers or shine shoes without an invitation, there'd be trouble.

According to UNICEF there are three categories of street children: street-living; street-working; and street families. Street-living are children who have lost all ties with their families and live totally alone in the street. In 2001 Mith Samlanh, an organisation which runs programs for street-kids, reckoned there were 1,200 such children sleeping in the streets of the city every night. Twenty percent were girls and the majority were aged between 12 and 18.

Street-working kids spend all or most of their time working in the street to support themselves or their families. These children have homes, such as they are, and do not usually sleep in the street. Half are girls, and they are aged from 6 years to about 15. Mith Samlanh reckoned there were 10,000 to 20,000 such children in the city in 2001.

The population of the last group, the children of street-living families, ebbs and flows. If conditions in the countryside are good, families stay in the villages. If there are droughts or floods - and in 2002 Cambodia managed to experience both at once, Cambodia itself suffering a drought while heavy rain in Laos and China produced floods in the Mekong - then the poor are pushed into the city in search of work or to throw themselves on the charity of distant relatives, or to beg. Half the children of these families are girls, and they are of all ages.

Since 1990 - roughly the end of the Pol Pot menace and the return of stability to most of the country - Cambodia has had a population growth rate of 3% per year, enough to double the number of Cambodians every 35 years. As a result, half the population is children. The rate of urbanization in 2001was 6% a year, double the rate of population growth as a whole. While the economy has shown remarkable strength in the last decade, thanks to the garment industry and to tourism, the future is far from assured. What's to become of all these children, I do not know. Neither, unfortunately, does anyone else.

***

The kids from the Riverfront corner were more street-working than street-living, although some, like Sina, were on the cusp. Sina took me to his village one day. It's a squatter settlement, just across the river from the Riverfront restaurant. Sina's house is perched at the end of a bridge of slimy pieces of lumber across a quagmire of mud and human and animal excrement, a travesty of the traditional Cambodian peasant stilt-house with its pond and ducks and farm animals. A whole family lives in this tiny bamboo-walled hut. Although probably within sight from the roof of my apartment, Sina rarely goes there. The street is healthier and less crowded, he has a choice of shop-fronts to sleep under, access to a public toilet and to piped water from a tap in the stairway of the nightclub above the River Street (whether by permission of the manager or not I have no idea, but Cambodian restaurateurs are not without charity towards the kids in the street - many remember what their own lives were like, not so long ago), and money from selling newspapers. Every so often Sina goes home to give some money to his father, but mostly he's on the street.

A child living in the street with only tenuous links to family is extremely vulnerable. Probably the greatest immediate danger is from street crime and street gangs. The kids outside the River Street restaurant and the cafes make money. Not a lot, maybe five to ten dollars a week, but tourists and backpackers are generous to a child selling a paper or asking to shine their shoes, even if the last thing the average backpacker needs is shiny shoes. So the boys usually have a few dollars on them. There are other people who find it easy to take those dollars. The kids can be - frequently are - robbed as they sleep outside at night. So the street-sleepers - Sina, Khine, Ratana, Socheat - sleep together, not alone, and in well-lit places. Restaurants and guesthouses are favourites, because these places have security guards, who sometimes stay awake for some of the night. And they hope that if anyone robs them, it's someone like Black Kmao, who is a fairly harmless yama addict in search of money for his habit, and not the truly dangerous ones like Tok-Lok and his gang. Even the police are afraid of Tok-Lok.

The other great hazard is drugs. The favourites are glue-sniffing and yama, which is methamphetamine. Mith Samlanh, the children's NGO, found that in 2001 a little over half of Phnom Penh's street-kids were using drugs regularly, ranging from 70% of 16 to 18 year olds down to an astonishing 10% of under-eight year olds. This figure was a pretty accurate description of the situation with the small group of kids I knew. Several of them used drugs recreationally, but only one could be described as an addict. This was Khine, the 16-year old brother of little Kim the singer. He seemed an unlikely drug addict. Polite and friendly, with a shy smile and acres of acne, he was around when I first moved into my apartment, then disappeared from the corner for almost a year. Then one day he was back selling newspapers. He swore he had given up drugs. According to his brother Kim: "Khine before bad, but now good".

Khine had been teetering on the brink. The short-term effects of yama ('horse medicine', presumably because it makes you feel strong as a horse) include feelings of happiness and energy, heightened sexual urges, and an ability to go without food and sleep - just the thing for adolescents who work long hours selling newspapers and shining shoes and who don't have enough to eat or an adequate place to sleep. Higher doses produce hallucinations. Khine described sitting by the river and plucking stars from the night sky. Wonderful, if your home is a single room shared by eight people and a mother who nags you about not bringing home enough money, and the alternative is the street. Long-term effects include weight loss, sweating, red eyes, violent or unpredictable behaviour, schizophrenia and psychosis. And, of course, the need for greater and greater amounts of money to feed the habit - money which the addict is increasingly unable to earn as the yama saps his ability to work.

"Khine before bad, but now good."  Let's hope so.

***

My friend Tess had been working on a project in the provinces and had met little Puong on her regular trips to Phnom Penh. Puong is 13, cheeky and warm and spontaneous, the original little friend of all the world. She decided she would pay for him to go to school for a year, as this was what he said he wanted and it would be a useful contribution to his future. So Tess went back to America and asked me to handle things at the Phnom Penh end. The first question was, what school and how much would it cost? Puong said that his Cambodian government school also offered English classes, and I told him I would go and talk to the teacher. No, said Puong, that would not be good. Anyway, it was very cheap, only $5 a month, plus a little for books. Tess would be pleased. Puong would not be pleased if I visited the school. So I visited the school. There I was told the fee was indeed not much - in fact it was $3 a month. "Puong, why did you tell me five dollars when it's really three dollars?"

 "Because I give two dollars to mother-me!"

All the kids on the River Street corner want education. The problem, quite apart from finding the money for school, is that their parents expect them to continue contributing to the family income. Puong is one of the luckier ones, his parents actually encourage him to go to school. In fact, according to Puong, "if me no go school, father-me boxing me!"

Another foreigner decided she would help Socheat, by giving his mother $300 to make up for the income he would lose by attending school full-time for a year. Socheat's mother is not a bad woman, but she has many children, and the family is very poor. Socheat's older sister asked if she could borrow some of this money. Socheat was told that the remainder was for him, and that his sister would repay what she had borrowed. Then Socheat's mother had to have an operation. And within a few months there was no money left. "I am sorry for my mother," says Socheat. "She was in the Pol Pot time, so she has no school, she cannot read and write. But I wish there is something for me."  When he was 15 and I first met him, Socheat talked about how he hoped to go to university. By the time he was 16, he was talking about how he might become a motordop driver.

Tess also paid for Sina to go to school. For Puong it was English school, but for Sina, totally illiterate at the age of 16, it was Cambodian school. He sat there in a class of children half his age, but he went every day, and showed me his books where his teacher had written Good Work next to his painfully carved Cambodian alphabets. It was money well spent. But for Sina the street is his home, where he eats and sleeps and does his homework and tries to work out what time it is so that he can go to classes on time. One day he asked me to buy him a watch. Cheap Chinese watches are only a few dollars in the market. So Sina got his watch, and he was so proud of it. Then one day there was no watch. I asked where it was. "Me go home. Father-me watch have". His father had taken a fancy to the watch, and Sina had given it to him. Socheat explained: If Sina had refused to give up the watch, his father would have thrown him out of the family - not just out the house, but cut off all contact, forever. This would not be a step Sina would take lightly. And public opinion would be on the side of the father, who had been afflicted with such an unfilial son.

Every day they arrive from the provinces, families with children (rare is the Cambodian who has no children), children with families. First they look for a place to sleep. Mostly they can find something, a distant relative with a small house, or a slum shack of bits of board perched over a quagmire of green mud which can be rented on a motordop's income, and if they can't, there's the street. Then they look for work. Even in a slum there is rent to pay, bottled water and bottled gas to buy. The children must go to work. They can go to school if they're lucky. If the children are lucky, the family stays together and slowly things improve. Or perhaps there is a fire in the squatter settlement, or a major illness, or the father leaves for another woman. Life is always on the edge.

One such squatter settlement is out at the Phnom Penh garbage dump, the city's version of Manila's famous Smokey Mountain. I went out there once. The garbage trucks start arriving at dawn, dumping load after load of refuse. As soon as each truck dumps, a horde of scavengers swarms over its load. Each one carries a short metal hook, for raking over the rubbish as it comes off the truck, and a burlap sack for anything that could conceivably be of value. And it seems just about everything has value. They come from a settlement down near the gates to the dump - dust in summer, mud in the monsoon. Outside every hovel is a pile of these sacks, all filled, waiting for the buyers. Children are a blessing - far more than half the scavengers are children. The more children a family has, the more scavenging it can do. My abiding image of the Steung Meanchey dump is a child walking along a ridge of garbage, silhouetted against a background of smoke from the smouldering mountain.

***

Selling newspapers to tourists is not easy. It takes all day, from dawn to late in the evening, and the profits are pretty small, and it has its dangers. But it's better than a lot of the alternatives. And the tourists are rich, because how else did they get from their own countries to Cambodia, and they sit in cafes where a single meal costs more than a newspaper boy makes in a week, and they ought to be generous, because they leave on their plates as much as a shoeshine boy eats in a day.

The tourist cafés and bars along the block from the Riverside corner to the Ponluk restaurant produce prodigious garbage of food scraps, empty bottles, old cardboard boxes. In the wee small hours the city garbage trucks come slowly and collect all the garbage and take it out to the city dump at Banteay Steung. By that time the newspaper boys and little shoe shiners are home in their slums, or asleep in groups in the brightly lit doorways of shuttered restaurants, and the tourists are asleep in their guest houses, or partying in the late-night bars in other parts of town, because this part of town by the riverfront is not that sort of place, it's a clean-living place. And then in the morning the sun will come up, and the streets will be clean, and life will start again.

There are several organisations assisting street children in Phnom Penh, the largest being Mith Samlanh ("Good Friends"), offering food, accommodation, vocational training, formal education, and medical attention to over 1,600 children every day. The annual budget for its operations is only $750,000.  Mith Samlanh has been awarded the Order of Australia (Australia's highest civil honour) for service to humanity. If you would like to learn more about Mith Samlanh and the plight of street kids in Cambodia, and how you can help, visit their website at http://www.streetfriends.org.

Donations via purchases of photographs can also be made through TheArtichoke.org. Please see the DGL Gallery and World Images Gallery.  

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Kuon Pheng’s Ghost

Kuon Pheng with Philip Coggan

There were eight of us in the restaurant in Vientiane, from all over Southeast Asia, in the restaurant to socialize after a meeting about assistance to mine victims.  The Belgian leant over the table to the Cambodian and said: “What was it like for you during the Pol Pot time?” Very direct, the Belgians. It was a question I would never have asked, but, let’s be honest, of course I wanted to know the answer. So Kuon Pheng told us what it was like for him during the Pol Pot time. This is his story, told that evening in the Silapa Restaurant in Vientiane. Next day we had a five-hour stopover in the airport in Bangkok, and in the airport restaurant I asked him to repeat the story. This time I had paper and pen and I took down his words as accurately as I could. Every so often he had to ask one of his colleagues to suggest the English word he needed, but mostly it’s his own words.

Kuon Pheng’s Story

 I worked in Kompong Thom, (north of the Tonle Sap lake, in east-central Cambodia), under the Lon Nol regime, on the staff of the Ministry of Rural Development and Refugees. I was married in 1975 January, in Kompong Thom province, and after two months the Pol Pot win the war. They take out the people outside the town to the countryside to be a farmer to grow rice. At this time I am living with my wife and my baby daughter in a village called Mango Island, in Kompong Thom province, near my wife’s parent’s home village. They order me to plough the field for the rice, far from the village, maybe 10 kilometer, but I cannot control the buffalo. So when the Pol Pot see I cannot plough the field they order me to catch fish for the group. Then they bring us back to a place 2 kilometer from Mango Island and tell us to plough there, and after that they make a new move, but this time not normal, bring no bags, and on the way is one tree, and my skin is feeling goose bumps, and I fear maybe they bring me to kill, and the Pol Pot chief is there with three guards, and one guard has a knife and an axe, because Pol Pot they don’t shoot, they kill by a knife and an axe.

When we come to the place there are twenty of us, they have our names. The chief of the Pol Pot talks to us, he says the Organisation will provide us each a white suit today. I know this means a cloth for the dead. They start to call us in to the room, one at a time. They don’t want anyone to see, they don’t want anyone to know. They kill with the ax and the knife. So I say to the guard that I have forgotten my bag with my clothes, Oh, I say, I am stupid, I forgot my bag, someone will find it. So he thinks that someone will find my bag and they will know what has happened. So he says to me to go quickly and get my bag. I run and when I am out of sight I jump down into a hole. (Kuon Pheng is struggling for the right word. He doesn’t mean ‘hole’. His colleague translates: Kuon Pheng means a ditch, the deep ditch that his work team was digging as part of the irrigation scheme of the Khmer Rouge. The ditch was two meters deep and perhaps two kilometers long).

So I jump down into the ditch, and I run. I run bent over, no one can see. I run and I run until I come to the end of the ditch, then I walk along the national road to the village of my wife’s parents. When I tell them what has happened, at first they don’t believe me, they want me to go back to Mango Island, but after they see that I am so frightened they believe me. They make me some rice and my wife’s brother writes a letter saying that I am ordered by the Organisation to go to work on the ditch in another place. So I start walking, I am going to my own mother land in Kompong Cham (on the Vietnamese border, on the other side of the Mekong River).

At first I come to the Pol Pot checkpoint. The guard takes the letter that my brother in law has written, he turns it and turns it, he cannot read. So I tell him it is to say I am to go to work in another place. But he sees there is no number. My brother in law forgot to write a number on the letter, every letter must have a number. So the guard is angry, he say, You are lying, you are a spy! So I am afraid, and I cry, and I say, I am not a spy, the chief of the Pol Pot forgot to write the number, and the guard believe me and let me go. But I am afraid and I decide I will only go at night, in the day I will hide.

That night I follow the road again and I come to a river, and I don’t know how deep it is. I cannot use the bridge because there is a Pol Pot check point, so I go up a little bit and start to go down into the water. The water goes to my knees, and to my chest, and to my chin, and I am afraid because I cannot swim. But then the water starts to get shallow again, to my chest and to my knees, and I can climb up the other side. I stop there where there is a big tree and the birds are singing and the breeze is blowing in the tree and it is a beautiful day, and I miss my wife and my daughter, and I think I will go back, I miss them so much, I know the Pol Pot will know I am missing, and they will catch me if I go back, but for long I stay there and think will I go on or will I go back.

That next day I hide again and come out at night and follow the road again. I have to be careful of the Pol Pot, but at night there are no people. I come to a pagoda, but there are no monks, the Pol Pot has sent them all away. In front of the pagoda are a lot of tombs. When I get there I meet a light, like that (pointing at the little spot lights in the restaurant ceiling), far from me ten meter, I think this is maybe Pol Pot posted there to catch people, but when I look it fly to me, and I am afraid.  I sit down I close my eyes. When open my eyes he near me maybe two meter, and the light become the white hair, like this, (drawing a circle with long hair), and the face is blue, had no eye, had two hole, black, no eyes, and the neck like a stick, and the body, and arms were sticks, but no hands, and the legs like sticks but no feet, and it is above the ground. The head is calm (indicating he meant motionless, unmoving), but the rest is moving (indicating quivering), I cannot say in English. At that time I pray, my hands like this (joining his hands in prayer in the Buddhist fashion), I told him not to frighten me, that I escape from the killing, please help me to find the way to go to my village, and please take care of my wife and daughter, and at that time I stand up and I walk, and the ghost follow me about ten meter, and after I walk about 500 meter the ghost become a light and goes above and in front of me and guide me.

That night the ghost guides me across the field across pond across the jungle across the bamboo forest, no more the road. At daytime I sleep, I cannot see the ghost. I reach the bank of the Mekong, there is a lot of bamboo, at that time maybe about four o’clock in the morning, not yet light, so I see the boat and take this boat, this boat full of water but not yet leak down the river. I take this boat to middle of the river, I clear the water out (indicating bailing out the boat with his hands), I do this when I young so I know. So at this middle of the Mekong there is one island in the middle, and there are two ways (drawing a large island dividing the river into two branches). I would like to go this way, to the east, because this is my mother land, but the ghost-light is on the way near the island (that is, the channel to the west), but I try to go east, the ghost doesn’t follow me, and maybe 500 meter I have no way to go (drawing how the eastern channel turns into a dead end), so I go back, so I go the other way, and the light guide me again.

And at that time of year there are so many cucumber, and the ghost guide me the bank, and in the field they grow corn and cucumber, and I cut young corn to eat and some cucumber, and put in my bag to eat, and at that time nearly daytime, so there is small trees near the field, and I sleep. The boys bring the cows, the Pol Pot go around there, but they don’t enter into the small trees, I think the ghost protect me. And at night I continue across the fields, and I reach a rubber plantation, and at nighttime the ghost is guiding me.

I cross the rubber plantation, maybe one night, and I know the rubber plantation is near my village, and I know the way to nearly reach my village. I remember that the road goes this way, (drawing a road exiting the rubber plantation in a straight line), but I am confused, I like to go here (drawing a second road forking off from the first at a right angle to the right), to my village (drawing a small square to indicate his village at the end of the second road), but I lost my memory, maybe the ghost make me, I miss the road, I just walk through like this, and this the field, (drawing a large square beyond the fork in the road), and this another village and pagoda (drawing a second symbol at the end of the first road to indicate the pagoda in the next village), and I remember again when I see the peak of the pagoda, so I turn across the rice field, across the pond and another pond, and I go straight to my village.

Later I find out there is a guard post of the Pol Pot on the straight road, if I go straight they will catch me, the ghost has found a way to escape me to my village.

In my village I find my mother my father my brothers my sisters is pushed out, not there, but I have my relation there and they tell the Pol Pot that I am their nephew and so I stay with my aunt. I work there and stay there from 1976 till 1978 December when my village is liberated because it is near the Vietnam border. A lot of tanks cross my village, and Pol Pot ran away. In the commune office is a big book of names of people to be killed, my name is there, I am to be killed in January 1979. My mother and my father come back, but my three brother are killed by the Pol Pot.

The 7 January 1979 all the country is liberated. After that I can go to Mango Island to look for my wife and daughter. When I meet my wife she cry, tears stream from her eye, she tell me our daughter die because of sickness and nothing to eat. I stay in Kompong Thom till middle 1979, then I go to Phnom Penh to find a job, and after three months I go back to Kompong Thom to bring my wife to Phnom Penh. Now I have three children, two boys and one girl. My daughter now is eighteen years old.

Two years ago I went back to that pagoda where I saw the ghost the first time and I made a shrine to the spirits. It was six days and five nights that I was running from Kompong Thom to my village. The ghost came to me on the second night, and stayed with me till I came to the rubber plantation. Before this I did not believe in ghosts. When I was a child my mother told me stories of ghosts so I would not wander far. But at secondary school I learnt that the Earth goes round the Sun, and I believed in Science. But when I saw the ghost, I was so afraid, I had my skin like pop-corn. Now when I think of the ghost, I have the same.

~Kuon Phen with Philip Coggan

The Artichoke.org

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Remembering Baghdad

by Philip Coggan

It’s February 2000 and I’m in Dakhla, in far southern Morocco, where the Sahara meets the Atlantic.  A long rocky peninsula creates a bay and shelters one of the few harbors on the western bulge of Africa.  Across the water is Brazil, home of bananas and girls from Ipanima, but here there is a miserable collection of fishermen’s shacks huddled against the never-ending wind, and disconsolate Moroccan bureaucrats pining their days away in fly-blown tea-shops, exiles from the civilized north.  I’m pining in exile myself, sent here by my current employers, the UN, to prepare a referendum that’s been under preparation for a decade and will never be held.  Neither the Moroccan government nor the Polisario Liberation Front intends accepting any outcome except their own victory, and work is stalled yet again. 

I have time on my hands, and I’m spending it today taking photos on the beach in the center of Dakhla town.  Fishermen are pulling boats onto the sand where crowds of children beg for fish, or painting and caulking upturned hulls.  The children are everywhere, they have no fear and no manners, and a foreigner with a camera is fair game.  They crowd around me – a novelty, a change from the fish – and try to go through my camera bag.  I can’t beat them off, so I select one of the oldest and tell him, in my erratic Arabic, that he’s the boss, al rais, and will be responsible for keeping his friends away.  He turns out to be very good at it, a couple of thumps and kicks and the crowd is reduced to this little ruffian and his band of selected buddies. I’m not quite alone, but it’s better than before.  In fact I’m impressed by the force of his personality – after the first barrage of violence, he maintains control purely by glaring at the crowd, and they quickly give up and drift back to the fishermen. I make small-talk: “Shu ismak ya walid?”- what’s your name, my child?

“Ismi Saddam!”

Yep, thirteen years ago, about 1987, this lad’s father decided to name his first-born after the Beast of Baghdad.  I believe this Moroccan Saddam will go far, but whether he’ll end up advising his king on matters of policy (a career in internal security seems not out of the question), or decorating a cell, is too close to call. 

But the Beast has always been popular in the Arab world, especially those parts with no immediate knowledge of him, and Morocco is about as far as you be from Iraq without getting wet.  Nor is the popularity fading with time.  Some months later I was in Marrakesh, easily my favorite Moroccan city, with it’s labyrinth of crowded, dusty alleys lined with nondescript doors that open onto courtyards set with fountains and lemon trees. There I made friends with a humble seller of sardines in the fish market – the magic of the camera again – and was invited to his home. We watched satellite TV while his daughter prepared the traditional Moroccan welcome of sweet mint tea. Moroccan women are not particularly oppressed – there are rules (I could never enter a Moroccan home in the absence of the man of the house), but women will happily talk with guests.  So my new friend and I chatted over the tea, (he was surprised to hear that Mexico was not in fact a rich country, an impression he’d formed from a popular and opulent Mexican soap dubbed into Arabic for Moroccan TV – the family envied the Mexicans their high standard of living), and his eldest daughter listened from the kitchen door.  “Where have you visited in the Arab world?” she asked.  Egypt, I said. I lived in Cairo for a year, to learn Arabic. And Baghdad. I was there with the UN.  “Ah, Baghdad!” she breathed.  “Did you meet Saddam? He’s a wonderful man!”

**

I had as much chance of meeting Saddam as she has of going to Mexico, and far less desire.  But a friend of mine did actually meet him, entirely by accident.  He was in the Australian embassy in Baghdad, back during Iraq’s war with Iran, about the time that Saddam of Dakhla was being born.  There was a kind of beach resort at a lake outside Baghdad, and my friend, like many locals and expatriates, went there at the weekends.  One weekend he was there at the beach, surrounded by the sounds of children at play and families picnicking, so warm and peaceful, and he dozed off.  When he awoke (how much time had passed, what sixth sense had awakened him?), the noise was stilled.  He opened an eye.  The beach was deserted.  He opened the other eye.  Not quite so deserted.  On this side there was a squad of tough-looking young men in suits, couching automatic rifles.  They weren’t doing anything in particular, just standing there, but looking alert. Very slowly my friend sat up.  The family groups were now much further down the beach, much fewer, and much subdued.  In the center of the circle of tough young men there was another family group, and a familiar mustachioed figure.  Seeing that the foreigner was now awake, the man with the moustache spoke to one of the young men, who came across and asked my friend if he would like to join al rais, the President. As my friend said later, he could hardly refuse.

Saddam proved to be a courteous host, offering a choice of cold drinks or hot tea, pressing honey-soaked pastries on his guest, asking inconsequential questions of the type one asks of chance acquaintances, not so different from those I’d met in Morocco – how do you like our country, have you tried our famous local delicacy, and how long are you staying?  As short a time as possible, but it’s sometimes hard to leave without giving offence.

**

For me, back in 1990, it was bloody impossible to leave. I was due to go on vacation from my position in the Australian embassy on the first day of August.  My bags were packed, I had my tickets, I was ready to go.  So was Saddam.  That night he invaded Kuwait, and all flights were cancelled.  Not that I was a prisoner.  In fact I suddenly had more freedom than ever before, if of a rather restricted kind.  I was now free to go to Kuwait, previously a foreign country, now a province of Iraq, without visa formalities.  In fact it was my job to go to Kuwait.  I had to go down and find out what was happening to the Australians who had been caught by Saddam’s invasion.

On the plains of the lower valley of the Tigris and Euphrates….  The road rolls on and on, miles and miles of the same desolate wasteland, an endless plain of gravel where camel thorn grows in low hummocks. Vast heaps of mud mark the sites of vanished cities where civilization began. A collection of hovels, a line of camels and goats appear here and there.  Occasionally a town, with a crossroads marked by a giant billboard where the King of Babylon salutes Saddam across the centuries while a rabble of Persians is routed between them. A line of garages on the edge of town where mechanics are emptying truck sumps into the black sand, while an army of tattered plastic bags blows out into the desert.

Outside Basra the Iraqi army is backed up all the way to the Kuwait border.  They’re expecting an American attack.  A small truck bristling with antennae, evidently some kind of command vehicle, is being fitted with a frame to take metal plates painted with the symbol of the Red Crescent, local equivalent of the Red Cross. Iraqi soldiers are hitching rides on the highway from Basra to Kuwait City.  I stop for a very young one; he looks no more than about sixteen. Does he like Kuwait? Yes. Very big. Very nice. They have ice-cream! First time in his life, ice-cream.

In Kuwait itself, chaos, barely contained. Darker black rectangles on the tarmac of the roads mark the spots where the Kuwaiti resistance has torched Iraqi army vehicles with petrol bombs. The Iraqis are sealing off whole suburbs, conducting house-to-house searches for ‘suspects’. I’m caught up in one of the searches and taken to a local military headquarters.  The officer in charge is apologetic. He never intended that his men should bring in foreign diplomats; they were merely following orders, simple people. Please accept his apologies. And … be careful at night, some of his men are no better than scum.

**

It ‘s 1997, and I’m back in Baghdad. This time I’m working for the United Nations, in the food for oil program.  My job is to monitor the distribution of the food and medicine and other humanitarian supplies brought in through the proceeds of the sale of oil.  In theory, the imports should be enough to meet all the basic needs of the country. That’s the theory.

I think one of the hardest moments of my life was one day soon after the program began, in one of those desolate towns decorated with a billboard of Saddam and sump-oil in the streets, when a man came to me carrying a child in his arms. He was shabbily dressed but in the clothes of the professional classes, perhaps an elementary school teacher or other junior functionary. The child was a little girl, about five years old, and she lay there quite flaccid, like a rag doll, no muscle tone whatever. In one hand her father held a grubby piece of paper with a few lines written on it. I have heard that the food for oil program has arrived, the man said. My daughter needs medicines to survive, the doctor told me the names but they are not available. Do you have them? And he stood and looked, and I answered, and he carried his daughter away again.

During 1997 and 1998 I traveled all over Iraq, (except Kuwait, which was no longer a province), far more than I did or could have done as a diplomat. In the far north, on the Kurdish border with Turkey, I saw the ruins of one of Saddam's palaces, a bare concrete shell stripped of the marble cladding, and the gold-plated fixtures, and the carpets and chandeliers.  It was built in the shape of an eagle, up on the mountain, overlooking the valley and the snow-capped peaks of the Zagros. Now even the eagle was crumbling, as local people pulverized the concrete to salvage the steel reinforcing rods.

In the far south I visited villages in the marshes, their date groves dying as the marshes were drained, skinny pot-bellied snot-nosed children playing in the gutters filled with liquid filth, and asked their parents whether the food ration was sufficient. (Barely, just barely, but the children were infested with worms, because the water was not clean, so …). And I talked to some Arabs in well-pressed dish-dishas in a speedboat full of pretty girls; they were quite friendly but didn’t want to say what they were doing in Basra, except that they were visitors from somewhere further down the Gulf. Bahrain or Abu Dhabi or some such place. They invited me to a party in the hotel that night – dancing girls and singers, Kowliyya, the gypsies of Iraq, who don’t care who rules them so long as they can carry on their traditional trade of thievery and prostitution and dancing at weddings.

And I saw in Baghdad the street where new cars are sold, and the street where computers are sold, and the street where chandeliers that need ten-meter ceilings to hang from are sold, and I saw the endless stream of society weddings in the five-star hotels, and the shoe shine boys and sellers of cigarettes and the former headmasters and doctors who drove taxis at night to make ends meet. And so this was the time I really saw Iraq.

* * *

What impressions of those two years? In no particular order:

The Friday book-market in the old city, where second hand books are bought and sold. Here for two hundred dollars my friend Roger bought a complete set of the first edition of Burton’s Arabian Nights, marked with the bookplate of the British Council Library.

Driving with my friend Mohammed the taxi-driver, behind another car. “How many people in that car in front of us?” he asks. “One,” I say, “the driver”. “But a minute ago he had a girl beside him. Now you don’t see her. Wait and you’ll see her again…”

Another taxi-driver friend, explaining to me that it was not wise to make jokes about Saddam. (There’s a standard statue of Saddam that shows him with one arm raised and fingers outstretched – I had said that this was a statue of the President hailing a taxi). “Perhaps nothing will happen today”, he says. “Perhaps nothing will happen this week, perhaps nothing this month or even this year. But one day, something will happen. it will be Mr Philip, and Mrs Philip, and Mr Philip baby. All.”

Walking round one of the up-market parts of town, seeing a house under construction, going in and asking the watchmen to show me round. They were quite happy to do so. They showed me the swimming pool with its ornamental fountain with painted tiles from Spain, the kitchen from Sweden, the floors of imported Italian marble. The main reception room was an atrium high enough to hang one of those gigantic ballroom chandeliers from the street of chandeliers. Madame was very particular about the kitchen, had already ripped it out two times and re-designed it. The owner was a new man, had made his money in money, so to speak – he held a license to exchange foreign currency. There were a lot of new men around these days.

The owner of a carpet shop, one of the best in Baghdad, filled with beautiful pieces from Iran and central Asia, telling me that old money was dying; it was all new money now. Old money had bought good carpets because they knew carpets; new money bought flashy stuff as a sign that they had arrived. But carpets were just a sign of culture. People who knew carpets would also know the great poets and writers of the Arab world, were the people who would discuss and publish art and philosophy, the people who had made Baghdad synonymous with Arab civilization before The War (but which war?). But the old class was descending into poverty, and a whole culture was dying.

Zaki, who bought up a row of two-story shop-houses, gutted them, and turned it into a very pleasant restaurant on one of the best streets in Baghdad. Beer was served discretely in coffee mugs at the window-seats on the second floor, and you could sit and watch the crowds passing. Then one day Zaki disappeared, and his restaurant was closed. It seemed more than beer was being served upstairs in the wee small hours. There were dancing girls and singers. I doubt that there was anything more, but for the red-bearded guardians of Tradition, that was quite enough. Someone talked, and Zaki was inside. Over the next months, through contacts in the restaurant trade, (meaning the owner of the pizza place across the street), we followed Zaki’s efforts to get out again. He tried to bribe the right people, but they refused to take the money. Someone really big must be behind it. Discrete inquiries were made at the Palace. Saddam himself was behind it. The red-beards had complained direct to the President, and he had to make an example. Nothing personal, just be patient. Zaki was patient, but it was many months before he returned home, and he never re-opened his restaurant.

Ali the cigarette boy. Aged fourteen perhaps, though he wasn’t sure. Sold cigarettes one stick at a time to taxi drivers. Lived in Thawra, the poorest part of the city, two families, nineteen people, all in one small house. His father was a war veteran, had been given a small car by Saddam in return for serving his country. It still stood in the street outside the house, no tires (couldn’t afford them), no petrol (couldn’t afford it). Never used. Ali’s father was crippled from his war wounds. Only Ali and one other brother had jobs. When Ali’s father dies, Ali cries all day, but goes to work at his stand outside one of the downtown hotels.

A tiny water pumping station out in the countryside. I arrive unannounced, checking to see if some water purification chemicals have been delivered. The watchman, an old man in a dust-stained robe, is in a panic as we approach, two white 4-wheel drives kicking up a column of dust across the desert. He sees that it’s the UN, and relaxes. “I thought you were the President. He comes inspecting like that, you know. Anyplace, anytime. Could happen any day!”

Driving in the desert south of Mosul, towards sunset, coming across a car broken down beside the road. The driver is standing beside it. “He’d better get a move on”, says my own driver, an Iraqi from Baghdad. “It’s ninety miles to Mosul, and if he’s out here tonight they’ll murder him when they come to steal the car.” There’s no security on the roads after nightfall. I point out the village just down the road, about a mile away: couldn’t the man stay there tonight? “No, those village people are all related, and he’s a stranger.” The only safe place he can go is a big town, where everyone is a stranger.

Or taking the desert road to Basra, towards sunset again, we stop at an army checkpoint. The soldiers look over our papers and one of them remarks that our car is exactly the type “they” would want to get their hands on – a new 4-wheel drive. Big dollars over the border in Kuwait or Saudi. “But we are the United Nations – no one would touch us!” The soldier just grins. The Iraqi army has posts on all the highways down south, all fortified with sandbags. Our escorts from the ministry in Baghdad plead with us not to visit villages in the marshes. It’s not safe.

Visiting a farm to check the arrival of tractors, the farmer invites us for lunch in the farmhouse. Some farmhouse: a two-story concrete mansion, very new, the rural equivalent of the villas of the best parts of Baghdad. Some farmer: he’s the sheikh of the local tribe. While we wait for the sheep to be slaughtered and the meal prepared, he shows us the photos of his ancestors on the walls. Gaunt proud men in robes are greeting Saddam, greeting the King of Iraq, greeting the British, greeting the Turkish governor of the province. I’m sure that somewhere, buried at the bottom of some pile of mud which was once a city, there’s a pictogram of an ancestor greeting a god.

Once there’s a panic: The Americans are about to attack again! An Iraqi friend comes to ask me if I can give him a hundred dollars. It’s so that he can take his family to safety in his grandfather’s village in the south, far from Baghdad. I tell him not to worry, the Americans aren’t going to bomb civilian houses. “The Americans? Who said I was afraid of the Americans? I’m afraid of the Iraqis!”

I was in a taxi one day in Baghdad, driving from one place to another. The driver said he was twenty-six, wanted to study to become a computer programmer, but of course that was impossible. He’d been sixteen when the war with Iran ended, had missed out on that war, thanks to God. He’d been eighteen when the Gulf War ended, but had managed to miss out on that one too. He’d been ready to go to University, but his father couldn’t afford it any more, what with the price of everything. All he could see for his future was driving this taxi, and perhaps another war, which he might avoid if he was lucky yet again.  He was silent for a long time, lost in his own thoughts, I in mine. Then, a propos of nothing, he spoke: “We have had twenty years of war,” he said quietly.

**

Forward to 2002. A friend in the UN food for oil mission sends me a message from Baghdad. It’s looking bad, he says. People are frightened. They don’t know what’s about to happen.

**

I had intended ending my story there, with just a handful of impressions, when my editor interjected a couple of questions. What does the average Iraqi on the street think of Saddam, and do they want to be liberated?

I think the average Iraqi just wants to get on with his life. Saddam is a fact of that life. He is respected, in the same way a redback is respected. The redback is an Australian spider, and venomous. It lives under toilet seats. Australians continue to use toilets, but check before sitting down to business. In the same way, Iraqis have adjusted to living under Saddam. They don’t yearn to be liberated, any more than Australians yearn to be liberated from spiders. Just make a small profile, and go about your business.

They don’t yearn to be liberated from America or anyone else because they fear what might follow. My friend who wanted to get his family out of Baghdad in 1998 wasn’t afraid of American bombs or of Saddam’s secret police. What he feared was anarchy in the streets. Iraq has seldom had a change of ruler this century without bloodshed. It could well happen again, especially if Saddam is overthrown by a coup.

That, of course, is a fear of what might happen the day before the Americans arrive. On the day they actually do arrive, there’ll be dancing in the streets and girls hanging garlands round the necks of Marines. And the old sheikh will come down from Mosul to have his photo taken greeting the Americans, and he’ll take it back home and hang it up there beside all the others. Saddams may come and Saddams may go, likewise the U.S. Marines, but the sheikhs go on forever...

Iraq is a very old country, and far from simple. Can America build a democracy in Baghdad? Possibly. The Baghdad middle classes, the old people, the cultured ones, the educated ones, know very well what democracy means, and would love to have it. But the sheikhs in their fiefdoms, the red-beards in their mosques, the gypsies at the weddings, the new men in their villas, the cigarette boys in the slums of Thawra, and the villagers all related to each other in the marshes and the desert, don’t. Saddam understood all this, that there was more than fear backed by force holding his Iraq together. The question is whether the Americans understand it, and if they are willing to invest enough men, money and relative wisdom to keep the country from splintering into a ‘democratic’ jigsaw of perpetual war and strife.     

Good luck Iraq. Good luck America. You’ll need it.

Phillip Coggan

The Artichoke.org

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The Lost Tribe Meets the Last Emperor...

Exploring Rangoon's Other Religious Influences

Text and photos by Philip Coggan

In the wild hills of Chin State, along the border where Myanmar, Bangladesh and India meet, lives the Lost Tribe of Menashe. Until a generation ago they were animists, placating (it would be wrong to say worshipping) the spirits of their ancestors, with whom they remained closely linked through their shamans. The shamans had dreams and visions, and passed on to the people the wishes of the ancestors. Then the shamans started having dreams and visions of a new sort, and from these it emerged that the Kuki Chin were not, despite appearances, a people of Tibeto-Burmese descent with origins somewhere in southern China, but Jews, descendants of the tribe of Menashe, one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel carried off into captivity some two and a half thousand years ago and unaccounted for ever since. They had the word of the ancestors, and the ancestors should know. This makes them the first of Myanmar’s Jews, and the group about whom least is known, for the hills of Chin State are wild and rugged and definitely out of bounds to visitors. (The other Lost Tribes, save for the Lemba of South Africa, remain lost).

The first recorded Jew in Myanmar was Solomon Gabirol. He became Commissar to the army of King Alaungpaya in the 18^th century, and may have been present when his royal master conquered Dagon, down in the delta of the Ayeyarwady, in 1755. Renamed Yangon, meaning End of Strife, it was destined to become the main city of Burma.

The Jewish community proper in Burma dates from the early 19^th century, when it attracted Baghdadi, Bene Israel, and Cochinese Jews from Calcutta, capital of the British Empire in the East and one of the great commercial cities of the world at that time. From Calcutta the trade routes stretched westward to Basra, Istanbul, Cairo, the Mediterranean and Europe; to the east the Pax Britannica opened the way to all the ports of the Orient from Singapore to Shanghai.  By 1896 the community was large enough to support its first synagogue. The community in the early half of the 20^th century number numbered between two and three thousand, with 126 Sifrei Torah, a Talmud Torah, a Zionist group and numerous charitable and communal organisations, as well as its own school and a cemetery on 91^st Street.

The Jews occupied a respected position under the British, providing mayors to both Rangoon and to the important city of Bassein. But this very closeness counted against them when the Japanese conquered Burma in 1942. The Japanese regarded the Jews as identical to the English, and most of Burma’s Jews fled to Calcutta. Only a few hundred came back after the war. The reduced community enjoyed a late flowering in the early years of Burmese independence, nurtured by the close personal friendship between Prime Minister David Ben Gurion and the Burmese Prime Minister, U Nu. But in 1962 a military coup brought Burma under the control of the xenophobic, socialist regime of General Ne Win, which was to last until 1988. While there was no persecution of Jews under Ne Win, life for everyone in Burma became increasingly difficult, and their numbers rapidly dwindled.      

Today there are but a handful of Jews in Rangoon. The Musmeah Yeshua synagogue still stands on 26^th Street, near the city’s main market. I went there one hot and humid morning, asking the Burmese merchants in their stalls if they knew where this place was. “Ah yes,” said a man puffing on a Chinese cigarette as he waited for customers to express interest in his selection of sarongs and shirts. “I know it. It’s the Indian mosque, isn’t it?” His neighbour, an older man offering identical sarongs to an apparently uninterested public, set him right. “No, these people are not looking for the Indian mosque. But, it is near the mosque. Yes. Quite near.”

It was indeed quite near, although easily overlooked in the crowed streets. The gates were closed, but not locked. A boy with a broom was sweeping the steps. He motioned me to wait inside the small yard off the street. After half an hour Mr Moses Samuels, caretaker of the synagogue and leader of today’s Jewish community in Yangon, arrived with the keys and welcomed me inside.

We looked over the beautifully kept place of worship and its fascinating little museum, with its sepia photographs of classes from the Jewish school, street scenes from the time when Rangoon streets featured kosher shops and pukka sahibs in solar topees. Afterwards, we sat and drank tea in Moses Samuels’ office, and he explained to me the problems of the tiny community. It’s simply a question of numbers. A minyan (the quorum required for a religious service) can only be obtained with assistance from the Israeli Embassy and Jewish staff from other embassies, and it has been many years since the last regular Shabbat service was held. The community is so tiny that it is in danger of dying out. Moses Samuels’ son is of marriage age, but whom he should marry is a question which must worry his father, not to mention the young man himself. The synagogue is located in a predominantly Muslim part of the city, with a number of mosques nearby. These Muslims are of Pakistani or Indian descent, and relations between them and the Jews of Yangon are good. The synagogue receives a trickle of foreign visitors, particularly American Jews visiting Myanmar. Their contributions, plus the support of the Israeli Embassy and some Jewish groups abroad, serve to ensure the continued existence of the little building. But I could not help but feel that I just witnessed the last twilight of an age. 

Concerning the Lost Tribe of Menashe I can say no more, not having visited them. Like the synagogue on 26^th Street they’re in touch with the Embassy and form part of the concern of the Ambassador. But Chin State is difficult to reach, with few roads, much malaria, and a sprinkling of insurgents. And, as I said, definitely out of bounds to visitors.

The Last Emperor

 The year 1857 started badly for Bahadur Shah Zafar. Its end would be even worse, but he wasn’t to know this at the time.  

As the year began, Bahadur Shah was engaged in his usual uneventful round. First the hours of daylight and duty, which he disliked. Then the evening, when the poets would come and recite their latest works, mostly nostalgic elegies for departed roses, where the rose, of course, was symbolic of love, and loss, and anything else gently evocative of change and decay, and also of God, who reminds us that all is vanity.  In turn each poet would stand before the company and, with becoming modesty, declaim the predictable quatrains, and the company would murmur polite approbation, gently at first, more heartfelt as the night and the wine wore on, giving prase to Allah in whose hands rest the fate of each mortal. Bahadur Shah was a man whose life revolved around poetry and piety.

Change and decay all around him did Bahadur Shah see. The cushions, for example: once Akbar and Shah Jehan had reclined upon them. Now they were threadbare and dirty, and reclining upon them, last dry twig of the withered branch of the great Mogul dynasty which had once ruled all of India from the Himalayas to the Coramandel Coast, was himself, descendant of that same Akbar and Shah Jehan, Emperor of India, Commander of the Faithful by the grace of Allah. Not to mention the grace of the British East India Company. As the insolent presence of the Company’s representative at the threadbare Court of the not-so-Grand Mogul reminded him every daylight hour. For the Company's representative had his hands on the Emperor’s purse strings, and the Company held the Emperor’s empire, and that was that.

 (In Rangoon they were digging a hole in the shade of a grove of trees).

 The British also had no idea how bad a year 1857 was going to be. It was to be the Red Year, the year several hundred million Indians suddenly realised that they outnumbered the English four thousand to one, and no obvious reason why they should be ruled over by loud-voiced pink-faced foreigners. It began with a misunderstanding over some new cartridges. The rumour among the troops, Hindu and Moslem, was that the grease that covered them, and which had to be tasted in order to render the cartridges useable (the soldiers had to bite the tips off prior to firing), was pig fat. Or beef tallow. Or perhaps both. Whatever the case, this was a mortal offence to both Hindus and Moslems, the cow being holy to one, the pig unclean to the other. Pink-faced and loud-voiced English officers would not listen to attempts to explain this difficulty. Damned impertinence! Do as yer told! Mutterings exploded into mutiny, English officers and their wives and children were massacred up and down the Ganges valley, and it seemed that India, which had so surprisingly fallen into English hands over the last hundred years, was about to fall out again.

 Through no deed or wish of his own, Bahadur Shah found himself in the midst of it. All over northern India, when the soldiers had finished slaughtering their officers and their officers’ wives and children and had looted the Regimental treasury and the treasury of the civil power, the local potentates, sensing that the time was ripe, declared themselves the loyal friends and servants of Bahadur. The fact that Bahadur wanted none of this, that he was an old man, a poet and a patron of poets, and happiest surrounded by poets, not warriors, was irrelevant. Suddenly his name was on every lip. And the mutineers and their self-appointed leaders thronged into Delhi, and into the Red Fort, where they swore allegiance to Bahadur their Emperor. And Bahadur in his audience chamber looked upon the sweaty faces of his new friends, and he looked out from the palace window upon the dark face of the mob, and he knew the loneliness of kingship. Yes, said Bahadur Shah the Second, I am your Emperor.

 (The hole was lined and covered with brick, and a bamboo fence erected, enclosing a large area of ground. Turf was laid over the place, and “…by the time the fence is worn out the grass will have again covered the spot and no vestige will remain…”).

 It ended badly of course. Bahadur Shah’s sudden elevation to titular leadership of a movement of national liberation happened in May 1857. By September of the same year the English were back, and they were not in a forgiving mood. Their atrocities easily rivalled those of the mutineers, a fact which later generations of English historians have freely admitted, “an interlude…at which no Englishman of intellectual honesty can look without embarrassment and unhappiness.”

 The English were in the streets of Delhi, and Bahadur’s recent friends and loyal servants were suddenly making themselves scarce. Bahadur went into hiding at the Tomb of Humayun, one of his imperial ancestors, a man who’s own career had had its ups and downs. From there, through intermediaries, he negotiated surrender for himself, his wife, and his sons. The Emperor made his surrender in a common bullock cart, in the grounds of the Tomb. And from there he was taken to Rangoon, to be kept under house arrest with his wife, two of his sons, (two other sons and a grandson had been summarily executed following the surrender), and various others of the royal circle.

 He gave his jailers little trouble, being sunk, for the most part, in deep lethargy – the English felt that he was weak-minded. His queen, Zinat Mahal, was a different proposition, always demanding things, such as the return of her personal jewels. It was explained to her that her personal property was forfeit to the British Crown, as one convicted of rebellion …but rebellion against whom, or what? - Bahadur Shah and his queen had never been subjects of the British Crown. (The Mogul crown, incidentally, was auctioned off to the victorious British troops, along with the other contents of the Emperor’s rooms. It was purchased by a Captain Tytler, who subsequently sold it to Queen Victoria for 500 pounds Sterling. Victoria now assumed the title of Empress of India, and the crown rests today in the vaults of the British royal family). 

On 6 November 1862, Bahadur Shah Zafar, Commander of the Faithful, the last Grand Mogul, descendant of Akbar and the Shah Jehan who built the Taj Mahal, died. He was buried hurriedly, with as much secrecy as possible, his grave a simple brick pit, covered with turf and fenced in with bamboo, so that the place itself would be forgotten when the grass grew back. And it was. Not until 1991 was it rediscovered, by accident. Today it is a minor site of pilgrimage for pious Muslims and the more progressive sort of Indian intellectual journalist, for Bahadur has gained a posthumous reputation as a saint and pioneering nationalist. 

 (“The two sons of the deceased, Jawan Bakht and Shah Abbas, and male attendant Ahmed Beg, accompanied the coffin; no females were allowed to be present, nor were any titles allowed to be rehearsed. The death of the ex-king may be said to have had no effect on the Mohammedan part of the population of Rangoon.”) 

I took a taxi to the tomb. It’s at 8 Zi Wa Ka Road, quite near the Shwedagon. It was as well I knew the address – no one at my hotel did. No one had heard of Bahadur Shah Zafar, last of the Mogul Emperors. The taxi driver was gratified to learn something new – it might come in handy should he ever find another tourist with strange interests. A flock of grey pigeons flew up from the gate, which has Bahadur’s name and dates over it, and a few beggars plied their trade on the steps. The rooms are large and cool and clean. Bahadur Shah’s grave is in one corner of the largest room. It is covered in green satin, embroidered in gold peacock feathers, and bears a scatter of rose petals. It looks like a large double bed. Incense burns, visitors pray, and all is done.

The Cathedral at the End of the World

God is always on the winning side. In 1853 the winners were the British. The first service thanking God for his assistance in the recent conquest of Lower Burma in general and Rangoon in particular was held that year ‘…in a disused hpoongyi-kyaung (Buddhist monastery) in the neighbourhood of the pagoda’, the Rev. T. Vivian Bull presiding. The pagoda was the Shwedagon, and the monastery was disused because the monks, along with most of the population of Rangoon, had fled at the approach of the victorious British. Fear and loathing and sheer incomprehension, on both sides, were to mark the remainder of Britain’s connection with Burma. 

It was clear that services could not continue to be held in the monastery. The Bishop of Calcutta, now in charge of the spiritual wellbeing of Rangoon, arrived on a tour of inspection. On Sunday, November 18, 1855, at 11 o’clock in the morning, he preached to a congregation of 500 and made a collection of 400 rupees. Next day the Governor-General (there was no such office as Viceroy of India at this stage) arrived. Lord Dalhousie consulted with the Bishop and promised to erect ‘the Fabric of a Church in the town of Rangoon, the Gentry engaging to finish and complete the same for Public worship.’ He then donated 500 rupees to get the good work on its way, and the Bishop laid a foundation stone.

Meanwhile, back at the pagoda, things were not looking good. Shwedagon had been the central stronghold for the defence of the town during the recent hostilities, (the English naval force being commanded by Rear Admiral Charles Austen, brother of Jane Austen), and consequently was now under British military occupation. It was to remain so until 1929. It hadn’t taken long for the soldiers to discover that the Buddha images held rubies and emeralds and small figurines in gold and silver. One observer at the time wrote of watching ‘…a soldier busy with his pick-axe, excavating a huge golden image with as much coolness as if he were digging a trench.’ A Major Fraser drove a tunnel 30 meters into Shwedagon itself. A pious judge from Mawlamyaing, U Taw Lay, undertook to fill in Major Fraser’s hole and repair the smaller pagodas on the terrace, re-gilding thecentral spire and hanging the hti (the ceremonial umbrella at the very tip) with gold bells. King Mindon, who still ruled Upper Burma, donated a bell, plus two thousand packets of gold leaf for the use of pious Buddhists who wished to aquire merit.

By 1857 there were 371 Christians in Rangoon, not counting the soldiers. They included 169 followers of the Church of England, 94 Baptists, 56 Roman Catholics, 39 Greek and Armenian Orthodox, and.13 Presbyterians. Churches for the various faithful were springing up. The Roman Catholics were well advanced, the Baptists were already in possession of theirs, and the Armenians had been established for many years. But the English, although they had moved out of the Buddhist monastery, were still worshipping in an old barracks. The reason, hinted the clearly unhappy new chaplain, the Rev. G. B. Howard, was the indifference of his parishioners. His congregation had averaged 11over the previous year, and never exceeded 13. On March 15 it fell to just four, and Howard closed his doors.

The church was to have been called the Church of Saint Andrew, commemorating both the Apostle and his namesake, the Marquess of Dalhousie. By 1861 it was still no more than an idea, and the Bishop of Calcutta – a new bishop – was feeling that things needed moving along. Services at this stage were being held in the Customs House down by the river, ‘a most inconvenient place, though I must say that Mr. Poynder does all that he can to make the services decorous and reverential.’  A new site was selected, a new foundation stone laid, and a new name bestowed, Lord Dalhousie having departed some years previously. The chief place of worship of the Church of England in Rangoon was to be consecrated to the Holy Trinity.

This time it got built. Holy Trinity Church was first used for Divine Service on the Second Sunday of Advent, 1865. The Rev. H. W. Crofton gave the sermon, taking as his text Psalm 122, “I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of God”. The church held no bell, no pulpit, no font, no punkah (!), no lamps, no organ or other musical instrument, but at least it was there. It had cost 72,000 rupees, of which 10,000 had been raised by public subscription. And greater things were in store, for the English population of Rangoon was growing, and quite soon there was talk of the replacing the church with a cathedral.

Upgrading was also going on at the pagoda. King Mindon had donated a new hti, the old one having been found to be unsafe. Its installation was a matter of intense importance to all Burma, and especially to the Rangoonese. The British had given their consent. Then, too late, they discovered that the donation of a hti was a symbolic act of supremacy by the kings of Burma over the area where the pagoda was located. Mindon had never recognised British sovereignty over Lower Burma, and now he was stating this in clear form – clear to the Burmese, but not, alas to the British. It was explained to Mindon that although the donation could go ahead, it would be the British Commissioner who would receive the hti from the Popa Wundauk, the king’s emissary. The Commissioner would then donate it to the pagoda trustees. In this way a proper balance of symbolic actions was maintained. The new hti was of iron plated with over 200 kilos of gold, plus the usual rubies, diamonds, and bells. It weighed well over a tonne. The consecration proceeded to great public jubilation, and all went off without the feared outbreak of nationalistic feeling. The Popa Wundauk was not allocated a carriage to ta