On the Shadow Tracks: A Journey Through Occupied Myanmar
By Clare Hammond
Allen Lane/Penguin Books, 2024
Clare Hammond’s new book On the Shadow Tracks is a creative exploration of authoritarianism in Myanmar. She did this riding the railways of Myanmar in 2016, during a brief time when this was possible if you were patient, stubborn, and willing to compromise with confused officials. You also needed to realize that official maps and what is on the ground are two different things. Railway travel in Myanmar is never as simple as showing up in the train station, buying a ticket, and then settling into your seat at the assigned time.
Hammond’s conclusion is that this is because Myanmar’s trains were never about hauling passengers or freight. Rather, Myanmar/Burma’s trains are first and foremost about military domination, and have been since the British first built railways in the 19th century. In short, Myanmar’s railways are and were tools of colonization whether by foreigners (the British), or by the Tatmadaw (Myanmar’s military). The point of Burma’s railways is, Hammond writes, to deliver military force to the periphery, and bring back lootable commodities like silver, lead, teak and jade for which royalties are paid to distant governments. Passenger travel, and especially tourists like Hammond, are of incidental interest, or perhaps no interest at all, to Myanmar’s railway operators. For that matter, the people living near the railways are of little interest either, except, as Hammond documents, as a source of forced labor, and a potential source of sabotage. Through it all, though, colonialists, Myanmar’s generals, and international donors have assumed that railways’ “constant and vigorous expansion driven by capital, industry … was a force for good.”
Understanding Hammond’s conclusion requires the reader to strip away the railway ideology, which assumes that “rails are a simple benign expansion of free markets.” Instead, at every turn, Hammond writes, the expansion of Myanmar’s railways is about the projection of military power, for the benefit of distant urban elites in London, Calcutta, Yangon, and now Naypyitaw. The key to all this was forced labor regimes which were and are human rights catastrophes.
Britain’s establishment of railways: Rice, teak and capitalism
Burma’s railway system is intertwined with the British conquest of Burma in three wars between 1824 and 1885. British engineers began proposing railways in the 1850s, with the most ambitious goal being a railway from the Indian Ocean to southern China. The first railway was actually completed in 1877, and went from Rangoon (Yangon) to Pyay (Prome) and brought the rice crop to port. Rail construction accelerated after the sacking of the Mandalay court in 1885, and
“…engineering parties were sent under armed guard from Rangoon to survey a railway through the newly annexed territory towards the sacked Burmese capital of Mandalay. Its construction was approved without any serious discussion about its economic viability. Some 24,000 laborers were rounded up and a battalion was formed to protect them as they worked. The railway was built specifically to carry artillery, and its stations were designed to withstand attacks … gradually expanding British authority form the cities to the villages between them—a tactic that Myanmar’s military would later try to use against ethnic insurgencies.
“British troops meanwhile…. ‘thoroughly explored and … cleared’ the surrounding forests and ‘vigorously disarmed’ Burmese leaders. These were euphemisms that, like much colonial writing … obscured and sanitized British violence … entire villages … suspected of providing support to the resistance were forcibly relocated to new sites …Tens of thousands of people were moved, and their former homes were burned … the same strategy that … [is] a core part of the junta’s counter-insurgency campaigns.” (pp. 177-178)
So what did the British send to Burma? Hammond’s conclusion is that British railways were first a means to extend the territory of the colonial state and extract raw resources, as they are for the more modern railway builders from the Tatmadaw. Hammond’s trip to the remote Bawdwin silver and lead mine in southern Shan State, an enormously rich mine that filled the coffers of future US President Herbert Hoover’s London-based Burma Corporation, illustrates this point well. The remnants of the wealth extraction in a remote area of colonial Burma are of course now long gone—when Hammond visited in 2016, there were only ruins, and the train tracks were just barely serviceable for the small railcar she rented for her tour.
Also inherited from British colonialism was a dream of tying British India to the markets of southern China by rail. This dream persists today, and it is a part of Chinese Belt and Road Initiative plans developed for Myanmar. Hammond’s point is that whether it is British colonialists, Myanmar generals or Chinese banks building railways, there is little interest in local development. As important is the shared assumption that the only way that civilization arrives is if military power is used to kill, imprison and subdue people whom the owners of the railways call bandits, warlords, rebels and dacoits. When it comes to railways, much violence is needed in the name of peace! Pacification was brought by heroic soldiers and their guns, whether it was from the British Indian army, or today’s Tatmadaw. Simple train tickets, and markets, remained inaccessible to Burma’s peoples, who only feared the violence railways brought to their traditional lands.
So, there is good reason for local people to stay away from train projects. As Hammond found in her archival research in London, forced labor did not begin with the junta in the 1990s. Railway construction by its very nature requires armies of workers ready to make stone aggregate by hand, cut rail bed into hillsides by hand, lay tracks at the direction of engineers, and establish mobile camps deep in the forest.
Railways, from General Ne Win to SLORC
General Ne Win seized power in 1962 and began military campaigns to extend power to the borders of what was British Burma. Like the British, Ne Win’s generals sought to control the highlands by rail. They also expropriated vast forest tracts as “military reserves” where military cronies harvested teak, and other resources. Gen. Ne Win’s military successor General Than Shwe, leader of the military junta initially known as the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), took railways a step further, extending rail networks as more land was appropriated by the military to exploit teak, jade and gems for its own companies. The people living there were subject to clearances known as “Four Cuts” military operations. Such anti-insurgency policies generated millions of internally displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees in the 1980s and after.
Hammond’s 2016 rail trips
Hammond documents Than Shwe’s strategies by seeking to travel on both the old British rails and the newer rails. At times she was successful, and saw portions of the rail system in Dawei, the Irrawaddy Delta, Magwe, Rakhine, Kachin, Shan and, most oddly, in Naypyitaw. In some places the rails were already abandoned, closed by flooding and landslides or disused because the military needs had disappeared.
Hammond interviewed survivors of Than Shwe’s forced labor camps. She heard how soldiers ordered families to provide labor to manually break stones for the bed, dig cuts into the mountainsides, create rail tunnels and drain swamps. The labor was always under the watchful eye of soldiers, the food supplied was poor, and malaria and other diseases rampant. Death rates were also high. The labor, according to the survivors, was unpaid, and done in the context of violent threats to their families. Construction standards were also low, and new lines deteriorated quickly. In places, she even found “trapped” rail cars still operating on short isolated routes, some of which were found on route maps, others not.
Perhaps the strangest example of the Than Shwe railway policy is found in Chapter 8, where Hammond traces railways built in the early 2000s that led from now-abandoned facilities to Naypyitaw. These railways started in the quarries used to mine the lime used to construct Naypyitaw’s vast concrete boulevards, which were finally shown to the world in 2005. But when she was briefly admitted to the factory, no one she asked knew what the railway was for, or why the terminus was at the cement factory.
Chaos on the borders: The art of not being governed
It is also significant that Myanmar’s rail system remains isolated from the rest of the world. Despite 180 years of trying, dreaming and construction, a route to China has never been finished. Neither has one to India. A brief effort by the Japanese to link their Thai and Burmese allies during World War II was completed, briefly operated and abandoned by the returning British by 1947. Only later was it immortalized in the 1957 Best Picture Academy Award-winning “Bridge on the River Kwai,” with its hit song “Colonel Bogey’s March”. As the movie dramatically documents, allied troops were forced by the Japanese military to install the line from Kanchanaburi to Dawei. The result was 12,000 dead British, Australian and Dutch prisoners of war, many buried in a Commonwealth Century in Thailand that is today, due to the movie, a tourist destination. What Hammond demonstrates in her writing, though, is that undoubtedly many, many more Burmese died in similar projects as recently as the early 2000s. Their deaths of course have yet to be dramatized in an Academy Award-winning movie.
Today, Myanmar’s many railways remain inoperable, and subject to attack by ethnic revolutionary organizations (EROs), People’s Defense Force groups, and other small militia who are keen to keep the Tatmadaw at a distance. None of the trains in the north are currently operating. As Hammond demonstrates, neither the Tatmadaw nor the EROs see the railways as civilian projects bringing the benefits of civilization.
As a sociologist, I found myself searching for sociological conclusions after reading Hammond’s book. James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed about the highlands of Burma quickly came to mind, and it would be interesting to evaluate Hammond’s book against what Scott writes about the lack of cooperation colonial forces experienced across highland Southeast Asia as highlanders sought to avoid “capture” by colonial institutions. But perhaps the most relevant book is Adam Hochschild’s (1998) King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa, about the Belgian Congo between 1885 and 1908. As Hochschild writes, there, too a railway was built to bring world capitalism’s civilizing project to the interior of Africa. This project was exposed in the early 20th century when an accountant, E. D. Morel, in his job as an accountant for the firm Elder-Dempster, was assigned to facilitate shipping to and from Belgian King Leopold’s Congo Free State. The financial accounts of Elder-Dempster revealed to Morel that Congo exported extraordinary quantities of rubber and ivory to enrich Belgium. But the ships returning brought guns, chains, manacles, explosives and soldiers to a “Heart of Darkness” described by Joseph Conrad. One wonders if a similar examination of the Burma Corporation, which looted the Bawdwin Mines of Shan State before World War II, or for that matter the books of the companies that supplied the raw materials to build Naypyitaw, would reveal similar “free trade.”
Tony Waters is a Visiting Professor of Sociology at Leuphana University, Germany, and formerly at Payap University Chiang Mai. He recently published with Saw Eh Htoo a book, “General Ne Win’s Legacy of Burmanization: The Challenge to Peace in the Twenty-First Century.”
