Saturday, June 29, 2013

The Irrawaddy Magazine

The Irrawaddy Magazine

Among the Moken, the Sea Gypsies of Myeik

Posted: 28 Jun 2013 06:05 AM PDT

The Myeik Archipelago consists of more than 800 islands of varying sizes, stretching from Myeik to Myanmar's southernmost point at Kawthaung.

It’s 3 am, and I’m sitting on a freight boat off the shore of an island in the Myeik Archipelago as the crew sends signals to shore with a flashlight. Around five hours earlier, my guide and friend U Soe Khai (not his real name) smuggled me aboard, avoiding the watchful gaze of immigration officials at the Myeik Jetty. When I ask him why we had to do this, since my media permit gave me unrestricted access to the islands, he says: "This way immigration has no eyes and no ears."

So began my six-day journey in search of the Moken, the elusive sea gypsies of Myanmar’s far south. The island, I later learned, is called Kristiang, and it is one of some 800 unspoiled islands extending from the town of Myeik all the way to Myanmar’s southernmost point, Kawthaung. The Moken, or Selung, as they are officially known, have lived among these islands and others farther to the south off the coast of Thailand for 3,500 years.

Despite their long presence in this area, however, the Moken are rapidly losing their way of life under pressure from the environmental impact of fishing and logging. To survive, they have had to adapt to modern life while still clinging to what’s left of their culture.

For most of the year, the Moken live at sea, on boats known as kabang that are carved from a single tree. Their entire lives revolve around these hand-hewn vessels, which are not only a means of transportation, but also their homes. And as the terms for describing the parts of these boats attest, they are seen almost as living things, complete with a mouth, cheeks, neck, shoulders, ribs and even anus.

Traditionally, when a couple decides to make a life together, the man was expected to build a suitable kabang and present it the father of his would-be wife. These days, however, there are few kabang left. The Moken no longer have access to the trees they need to build them, and they also lack the skills that were once their most important inheritance.

If the kabang is their home, then their backyard is the sea. The Moken are expert free divers, capable of remaining beneath the water's surface for extended periods of time. By contracting the irises of their eyes, much like a camera lens, they also have a unique ability to double the accuracy of their underwater vision.

In the past, pearl farmers used the Moken's diving skills to collect the rare gold-lipped oysters now raised in hatcheries. Reaching the wild oysters required the Moken to dive at deadly depths of up to 80 meters without proper equipment. Decompression sickness claimed many casualties among the Moken. These days, however, their services are no longer required. According to U Myint Lwin, a marine biologist and owner of the Orient Pearl Co., most people employed in this industry today are mainland Burmese.

U Myint Lwin (who also owns shares in a number of fishing companies) said that the degradation of the marine environment has hurt his pearl farms and depleted fishing stocks. But for the Moken, it has meant not the loss not just of profits, but of a culture that has supported them for thousands of years.

The morning before I was smuggled out of Myeik, I saw the effects of this steady erosion of traditional Moken values. A Moken family, waiting for high tide at the dock, invited me onto their boat and offered me beer and whiskey at 7 o'clock in the morning. The men were already drunk.

Ten years ago, 12,000 Moken roamed the Myeik Archipelago; now there are only around 2,000. One person I spoke to described the Moken as "useless," and described them as "amphetamine users smuggled from Thailand."

The shrinking number of Moken still living among the Myeik islands, and the decline of their culture, is inextricably related to the ever-worsening condition of the environment, which has been subjected to excessive logging and dynamite fishing, and to the pressure of resettlement and modern society.

As animists, the Moken have a deep respect for the ocean. During the monsoon season, they gather mainly on three islands for their annual celebrations. Traditionally, their spiritual life is led by shamans, but according to U Soe Khai, many have converted to Buddhism over the past 10 years. In their own language, they have no word for "worry," but these days, they have good reason to worry if their culture will survive another generation.

U Soe Khai, who has worked with the Moken for 18 years and speaks their language fluently, called out a greeting as we approached Annawa Island, where some Moken have settled in a village called Langon. Usually shy and defiant, the Moken came out to welcome us in a couple of small canoes, each big enough for just one adult. They used plastic lids instead of proper oars.

Langon is nestled on a small beach of pure white sand, surrounded by pristine jade waters. The shore is lined with fishing boats, and there's a small jetty. The island is mountainous and green and the houses are built upon the beach on stilts that are five to six meters high to allow for tidal influx. The entrances of the houses face out to the sea. A Buddhist temple dominates the village, but coexists with traditional Moken totems. The matriarch of the village, a cheerful 93-year-old woman, welcomed us to the village and the shy children followed us around, curious about our appearance. Like everywhere else we went around the Myeik Archipelago, the locals refused payment for anything, and we were treated to coffee, cigarettes, dried fish and fresh squid and oysters.

Despite the idyllic setting and the gracious welcome we received, however, it was clear that the island was no paradise. As I made my way down to the beach from the houses by the shore, I noticed that there was no waste or sanitation system in the village. There was garbage and human waste everywhere: the only garbage collector here is the tide.

People living in these island villages believe that the sea can absorb everything. Even though they tell us that turtles sometimes mistake plastic bags for jellyfish, contributing to the dramatic decline in the turtle population, no one here—Burmese or Moken—seems to understand the need to change their behavior or way of thinking.

With the destruction of coral reefs by dynamite fishing and the development of offshore gas fields, the sea that once provided so abundantly for the needs of the Moken is losing its ability to support life. This means that the Moken way of life is also in grave danger of vanishing forever. As the bad habits of "civilization" take hold among the Moken, that process can only accelerate, depriving the world of yet another culture that was once far more attuned to nature than our own.

A Taste of Chinatown

Posted: 28 Jun 2013 06:02 AM PDT

In Yangon's Chinatown, expats often frequent Kosan café to sip on Mandalay mojitos and sit at the café's under-appreciated balcony. (Photo: JPaing / The Irrawaddy)

Out of sight of most tourists’ cursory visits, Yangon's Chinatown is where Myanmar meets its massive neighbor to the north, hundreds of kilometers from their nearest border crossing. As a cultural meeting place in the heart of Myanmar's largest city, it is also, among other things, a culinary treasure-trove.

Every afternoon, hawkers with garlic fried chili crabs, steamed dim sum and straw baskets full of strawberries set up their shop around the Guanyin temple, bracing themselves for the onrush of evening strollers.

By the time the sidewalk spills into the street, the butcher at Good Diamond Sausages has sold out his daily output of pork sausages he says are made according to a recipe brought over from Guangdong in the 1940s. "They’re just a bit less sweet than in Hong Kong," he says.

Most of Yangon’s Chinese population of about 150,000 still live in the area and most use Myanmar names and resort to the Myanmar language in their conversations. Men wear traditional longyi gowns and many waiters at Chinese restaurants are Myanmars. After decades of fearing a re-eruption of racial tensions, Yangon’s Chinese make a point of being Myanmar first, Chinese second.

Old, and some very new, wire fences around first and second floor windows show that concerns over long-simmering ethnic hatred haven’t faded.

Discovering how they preserve their heritage is becoming less of challenge. Chinese is once again the language to learn, and many young people speak crisp Putonghua along with the Cantonese, Hokkien or Fukkien dialects of their grandparents. The two bookstores that have Chinese books have put their money in schoolbooks; copycat DVDs of Chinese television series are sold near the Guanyin temple.

The foods that can be found on the streets of Chinatown are the strongest statement of a unique Chinese identity in Myanmar's largest and most ethnically mixed city.

The Liangtai Lashio Broken Crisp Buns Restaurant on Latha Street, opposite the more crowded Cherry Crown Restaurant serving cold Myanmar Beer and Myanmar food, has the typical culinary compromise that makes Yangon’s Chinatown unique.

Steamed filled rice dumplings (200 kyat) are served cut into slices along with the typical Myanmar chili-tomato sauce wrongly called ketchup. The sweet buns with their savory fillings come with strong Myanmar black tea (200 kyat) made sweet and heavy by condensed milk.

Liangtai’s red and pink plastic stools are separated from traffic by a row of wooden deck chairs, where businessmen stop by for an hourly foot massage (4000 kyat), a cigarette (50 kyat) and a chat.

Angshandu, on a side street cornering to Guanyin temple, has Guangdong food with a Myanmar twist. Char siu pork comes with a spicy, peppery sauce and chicken broth. Stewed pork comes with chives and fragrant mushrooms. Hundun dumplings are either served in soup or cold in a bowl with shredded chicken or pork and crispy fried garlic.

On the other corner of the temple, rice porridge (500 kyat) is cooked every day in giant metal pots on carts. A bowl comes with fresh steamed blood, liver, fried garlic and chives. The zongzi, pyramid-shaped portions of steamed sticky rice with pork or chicken, sold wrapped in banana leaves and hanging from metal rods, (1,000 kyat) are a traditional dish eaten for the Dragonboat Festival on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month.

Nearby, elderly Ms Jiang sits on stool selling bright red and white sticky rice dough filled with sweet red bean paste or crushed peanuts. She also sells "tea cake," an adapted version of Cantonese niangao sticky rice cake made with eggs and coconut milk. With a chop she has branded her shop’s calligraphic name on the sticky deserts.

By the time the stands are up outside Guanyin temple, the fortuneteller inside the temple has gone home for the day and young novice Buddhist monks play in its courtyard. 19th Street, just around the corner, will start filling up with tourists and locals coming for cheap beer and Yunnan-style barbecue.

Most of those expats who have been around a while end up at Kosan, not for the average food, but for the their Mandalay mojitos (800 kyat) made with Mandalay Rum, and to sit at their under-appreciated balcony, which looks down on the steaming pots and grills that feed the increasing stream of travelers to the once sleepy street.

The balcony looks down on the street in which, some 50 years ago, the Chinese embassy distributed little red books in a long-since forgotten effort to spread the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution abroad.

New Chinese migrants settle around town. With soaring land prices, new immigrants seek their fortune in the suburbs, where land is affordable and shops are still few. Yangon's Chinatown is the home of those who ventured to Myanmar when it was a different place.

This story appeared in the June 2013 print issue of The Irrawaddy magazine.

Online Burmese ‘Looking for a Place to Meet, Socialize and Have a Voice’

Posted: 28 Jun 2013 06:01 AM PDT

Rita Nguyen, right, stands alongside her SQUAR employees at a BarCamp conference in Prome, Pegu Division, last week. (Photo: SQUAR / Facebook)

Burma's notoriously low Internet penetration rate will not deter Rita Nguyen, who last week rolled out SQUAR, the country's first Burmese-language social networking site.

First drawn to long closed-off Burma early this year, Nguyen saw potential in the country, which hosted the world's largest Internet conference focusing on user-generated content just a few years after most online censorship was lifted by the government.

The SQUAR cofounder brings more than 15 years' experience in gaming and social networking, having worked for the US video game developers Electronic Arts, where she helped build and lead online communities and social media strategies for the company's products.

Born in Vietnam but a Canadian citizen, Nguyen returned to Asia three years ago and began to focus on social networking and mobile gaming applications. She visited Burma for the first time in January, when Rangoon hosted the world's largest BarCamp, which are conferences held globally with a focus on technology and the Internet. Debuting in Burma in 2010, BarCamp has seen rising participation each year since, and drew 6,400 participants to Barcamp Yangon in 2013, making it the largest user-generated conference in the world.

It's that online enthusiasm that Nguyen hopes to tap with SQUAR, a homegrown social application that launched last week and can be downloaded through the Google Play store. In an e-mail interview with The Irrawaddy, Nguyen talks about the launch of the application and Burma's insomniac web users, and describes "something very special happening" among the country's web users.

Question: The beta version of SQUAR was introduced last week to Burmese mobile phone users. Will there be more development soon on a version for PC, Mac or tablets?

Answer: Yes we are working hard to launch a desktop and mobile browser version for early next week. In addition, plans are in the works to add iOS and maybe a few other platforms, but that will be a little later.

Q: What is your impression of young Burmese who are very active on Facebook and other social media?

A: You know, they are not much different than groups of Asian youth in other markets. They are looking for a place to meet, socialize and most importantly, have a voice. I am very surprised at how active Burmese youth are on Facebook and SQUAR, especially very late at night. Apparently the kids in Myanmar don't sleep.

Q: How did you come up with the idea to introduce a Burmese-language social application like this?

A: I came to visit Myanmar early this year after hearing the news that Yangon had the largest BarCamp in the world. After spending a week here, I could see that there was something very special happening. And while there was so much talk of big investments and big infrastructure deals, I noticed that there was nothing that was built specifically for the Burmese nationals. I knew that the access to Internet connectivity would correct itself with the new foreign carriers coming to the market, but even if Burmese were online, there was really no destination that belonged to them, built for and by them.

Q: What kind of challenges have you encountered so far in developing SQUAR?

A: Wow, we learned so many things that we simply did not anticipate. Like more than half the Android users can't access the Google Play store and couldn't download our app! Also, the translations to Burmese and different keyboards was a lot of fun.

What's more interesting though is that we really took a leap of faith to release the product as early as we did. It's very common in Silicon Valley to develop technology like this. Something very light, called a minimum viable product. The idea is that you have something that is functional so that your customers can use it, feed back and help you refine and build your product.

What I wasn't sure about is if the Burmese youth would be very forgiving with such a light product since they would not have had a lot of exposure to products built in this manner. We didn't have photos, profiles and barely even had notifications in. There was a very good chance that people would download it, try it and then abandon it. However, the positive response we have had has been overwhelming! The people of Myanmar have rallied around this, providing hundreds of ideas in thousands of posts in just over a week.

Luckily we were already working on the most pressing things like photo support and sharing to other social networks but they also gave us a lot of other ideas and I think I have a good handle on what the youth of Myanmar want with their social network. Now it's just a matter of getting it built! Our plan is to keep releasing new features every Tuesday to allow our community to test, try and feed back on the new features.

Q: What do you expect from Burma's active social media users? Do you think that SQUAR will be able to beat an established social networking site such as Facebook?

A: Well my view is that there is room here for more than one social network and I fully expect that everyone in the SQUAR community will also have a Facebook account. That said, we are offering a different experience than the largely 1-to-1 and personal relationships that are more Facebook's focus. We will also be rolling out many, many other features and experiences in the upcoming months that are solely built for the Myanmar market.

Q: Will SQUAR be a free application like Facebook or do you have any marketing plans?

A: SQUAR will always be free to users.

Burma Business Roundup (June 29)

Posted: 28 Jun 2013 06:00 AM PDT

Mobile Phone Use Will Be 'Rapid,' Telenor License Winner Promises

One of the winning bidders for mobile telephone service licenses, Telenor of Norway, has compared the challenge it faces in Burma with its move into Pakistan, where it invested US$2 billion eight years ago.

Pakistan was like Burma then, with very low mobile phone network penetration, Telenor chief executive Jon Fredrik Baksaas told Bloomberg business news agency.

"The growth factor will be pretty significant since we all start from zero," said Baksaas. "We'll see a rapid buildup in penetration."

At present only about one Burmese in 10 has a mobile phone, making Burma one of the least wireless phone-connected countries in the world.

Telenor and the Qatar company Ooredoo were this week named by the government as winners of a much anticipated bidding race for two licenses.

As a backup, the France Telecom SA-Marubeni Corporation joint venture bid has been named "in case one of the winners doesn't fulfill final requirements," according to Bloomberg.

Singapore Bids to Join Oil, Gas Business Bonanza in Burma

A Singapore electronics company has formed a joint venture with Burma's Ruby Dragon firm to pursue business opportunities in the budding oil and gas exploration and production industry.

WE Holdings and Ruby Dragon have formed WE Dragon Resources, which will be based in Singapore.

"[Burma] promises immense opportunities. The country has been actively wooing foreign investors so as to unlock the potential of its huge oil and gas reserves, and we believe that we are well-placed to benefit from this trend," WE Holdings said in a statement reported by Singapore's The Straits Times.

Although the venture will initially seek to acquire support service contracts, it also hopes to eventually bid to acquire oil and gas development projects, the newspaper reported.

Burma's petroleum industry is expected to expand greatly once the winners of bids for 30 offshore and onshore development blocks are announced by the Ministry of Energy. The bids deadline was mid-June.

Thai Plan for Big Coal-Power Plant at Dawei Not Practical, Says Expert

Renewed proposals by Thailand to build a huge coal-burning power station at Dawei on Burma's southeast coast "lack practicality," an industry professional said.

The Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT) was reported by Bangkok newspapers to want to build a 1,800-megawatt station primarily to supply electricity to Thailand.

The Naypyidaw government has previously blocked Thai plans for a 4,000-megawatt coal-fueled plant at Dawei on environmental grounds.

"Apart from the issue of why Burma would agree to such a project to feed Thailand's power needs when Burma itself is desperately short of electricity, there is the much bigger matter of fuel supply," Collin Reynolds, a power industry consultant in Bangkok, told The Irrawaddy.

"There is no coal in the Dawei area or on the Thai side of the border. EGAT has proposed importing coal from Indonesia or Australia, but to do this would involve transhipping it on the Gulf of Thailand and transporting it overland or shipping by sea the long route via Singapore. This all seems to lack practicality."

Original Thai plans for a major oil processing port and petrochemicals center at Dawei included a 4,000-megawatt coal-fueled power station—more than Burma's entire electricity generating capacity at present.

Public opposition to coal burning plants within Thailand has thwarted efforts by EGAT to develop such projects at home.

Japanese Fined for Breaking Financial Sanctions Against Burma

A Japanese bank has been heavily fined by the United States for engaging in financial transactions with Burma during the economic sanctions era.

Burma was one of several countries alleged by the state of New York to have been the subject of numerous illegal "laundering transactions" between 2002 and 2007 by the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ.

New York State's Department of Financial Services fined the bank US$250 million, claiming the value of illicit financial activity totaled more than $100 billion.

The department alleged that the bank deliberately hid evidence of transactions with Burmese, Sudanese and Iranian customers.

New York State has not disclosed how much of the laundered finance involved Burma, nor which businesses or individuals were involved.

Russia-Burma Military Cooperation 'Stepped Up' Following Moscow Visit

Burma and Russia have "stepped up" defense relations following a visit to Moscow by senior Burmese military chiefs, Russian media said.

The Naypyidaw authorities have "showed interest in military-technical cooperation with Moscow, particularly in Russian weaponry and training specialists in military schools," the Itar-Tass news agency said this week following a visit to Russia by Burma's Commander-in-Chief Min Aung Hlaing and other senior officers.

The report did not say whether Burma plans to buy more weapons but the agency noted that the Burmese military currently uses MiG-29 and Mi-17 and Mi-24 aircraft.

"[Burma] has Russia's Pechora air defence systems in its service [and] at least 150 officers and students from [Burma] study at Russian military schools," said Itar-Tass.

China has been Burma's main weapons supplier but military equipment has also been bought in the past from Poland—before it joined the European Union—along with Ukraine and Belarus.
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