“On the Shadow Tracks: A Journey Through Occupied Myanmar” by Clare Hammond

Okekan, Myanmar (via Wikimedia Commons)

Railways are major public infrastructural projects; one would therefore think it should therefore be easy to find out which rail lines exist and at what times trains are running. Not in Myanmar. Aside from the well-known main lines, Clare Hammond a myriad of smaller branch lines in remote parts of the country, with little information as to when the trains will run or if the lines are even operational. 

Many of these train tracks are not part of a public service, rather they were built for use by the military. In On the Shadow Tracks; A Journey Through Occupied Myanmar, Hammond travels across Myanmar in a 3000km journey to find more about these mystery train tracks and the military regime that ordered their construction. Far from being a public good, the railways were designed to help the military keep its control of Myanmar.

 

On the Shadow Tracks: A Journey through Occupied Myanmar, Clare Hammond (Allen Lane, June 2024)
On the Shadow Tracks: A Journey through Occupied Myanmar, Clare Hammond (Allen Lane, June 2024)

The railways serve as a useful narrative device to tell the story of the military in Myanmar, particularly in the ways it has sought control in Myanmar’s frontiers in recent decades: “by physically following the military’s railways, I could chart the regime’s physical expansion since the uprising in 1988.”

Starting in south-eastern Myanmar along the Andaman coast, Hammond then travels to western Rakhine state near the Bangladesh border and then to the northern Chinese border, before ending in the new capital of Naypyidaw. Everywhere she travels, she sees how the construction of these railways have been contested and exacted a heavy toll on the local population.

In Dawei, Hammond journeys to the so-called second death railway, named in memory of the villagers who died while being forced by the military to build the line in the deep jungle. Yet today, despite the huge  human cost to build the line, the line is poorly maintained and seldom used. In the Irrawaddy delta, the embankments of a defective railway line have interrupted rivers and often cause mass flooding destroying farmers’ crops. In rural northern Kachin State, stationmasters still live at railway stations on lines that had closed years ago. Hammond finds that one line to the Bandwin mines in northern Shan State was running, but only if you hired your own train.

Far more than a mere travelogue, this is a commendable work of investigative journalism.

The journey is supplemented with rich supplementary information, both historical and contemporary. Hammond is a journalist, so the book is full of interviews with those she encounters on the railways. There are interviews with those who eke out a meager living working on or nearby the railway, or those who were forced by the military to spend weeks in the jungle building it. She met with farmers who routinely had ancestral land taken away from them only for a railway line that was either never finished or worked for more than a few months at a time.

The poor condition of the rail infrastructure also shows how much public services have been neglected. The construction of railway lines was an aim, maintaining them was not nearly as important. Corruption in railway construction was endemic and doomed the railways to be poorly built. As few opportunities for corruption were available in maintaining the railways, little money was allocated for it, condemning the railways to a state of perpetual decay. Many other lines were abandoned half-finished, their detritus lingering around Myanmar’s frontier as “symbols of a coercive relationship.”

As the book is set in the written aftermath of the National League for Democracy 2015 victory and before the coup in February 2021, it offers a snapshot of a unique time in Myanmar’s history. The afterword discusses the coup, political resistance and highlights the role the railway workers played in Myanmar’s ongoing civil disobedience movement. Far more than a mere travelogue, this is a commendable work of investigative journalism that will be of interest to anyone interested in Myanmar’s politics.


Maximillian Morch is a researcher and author of Plains of Discontent: A Political History of Nepal’s Tarai (1743-2019) (2023)