“Nothing I’d ever experienced had prepared me for what lay ahead. More than anything I’ve done in Myanmar before or since, the journey into the delta by train revealed the chasm between the fictional world the generals were trying to create through their propaganda, and the reality of life under their rule.”

Clare Hammond worked as a journalist in Myanmar from 2014 to 2020. When she arrived, democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi was out of house arrest and sitting as a member of the country’s parliament. Her political party, the National League for Democracy (NLD) was gearing up for elections in 2015. A momentous time for the Burmese people. A heady time for anyone in Myanmar. Especially a journalist.

“I was an editor at The Myanmar Times, and I worked such long hours that I mostly only got to explore the country through the articles that were being filed by the journalists from all over the country. So I was reading a lot about it but I hadn’t actually been to a lot of these places. And then I found this map of the railways that came as quite a big surprise to me because I’d been hanging around Yangon Central Station looking at the services and had looked at maps of the railways and on most of the maps it was just the old colonial railways, the backbone of the network. On this map there were tonnes and tonnes of new lines that I’d never seen before, and it sparked my interest. I started looking them up and found that nothing had really been written about them.”

Clare would end up travelling further than most foreigners have ever travelled on the rail network of Myanmar. In her recently published book, On the Shadow Tracks, she writes:

“As a journalist, it was the absence of information, more than anything, that got me hooked on the story. In the world I inhabited and thought I knew, the idea that thousands of miles of railway could be built without any national attention or scrutiny was unimaginable.”

So, she sets off: battling with railway managers to obtain a ticket for lines they insist are not operating. She struggles in Yangon to receive permits for remote stretches of the country far from the tourist trail and at times slips into war-torn regions undercover. For much of her journey, Clare is accompanied by bemused, sometimes surly, always polite, policemen. On one journey, unaccompanied, in southern Shan State, she is taken aback while scribbling away in her notepad, as the man opposite her awakes from his slumber and starts dressing in khaki …

“I looked again around the carriage. One by one, the young men who had been dressed in civilian clothing and who I had assumed were traders, stood up and began to pull out green canvas satchels and metal boxes from beneath the seats, and to dress themselves in army jackets and hats.”

Clare’s sense that there is something to investigate on these mysterious rail lines increases as she travels further.

“Was it possible, I wondered, that the military’s railways—​all of its railways—were​ weapons in themselves? Everything I’d heard on my journey so far indicated that they weren’t built for economic development, as railways usually were, but instead to increase the military’s power, through the state. The use of mass forced labour on the railways had helped the generals to break multiple insurgencies. Building railways also required a large military presence, which subsequently become permanent, helping the military to wield power in the far reaches of Myanmar. In areas that were already under military control, contracts for new railways had enriched officials and their cronies, engendering loyalty. And all over the country, new military bases and factories were connected to the railway network, making it easier (at least, on the lines that still functioned) for soldiers and weapons to be deployed against Myanmar’s people.”

In Rakhine State – a volatile region of Myanmar that in the minds of many Rakhine people, is set apart and should be independent – her guide believes the military’s intention to build rail lines through some of Rakhine’s most treasured archaeological sites reveals their intention to destroy Rakhine’s cultural heritage. By building railway stations in the middle of these ruined cities, he tells Clare, the junta hoped that they would be overrun with people. “That way, we would destroy our own culture, by ourselves.”

Clare has written an account of her journey and her findings in On the Shadow Tracks: A Journey through Occupied Myanmar, published in June 2024.

Clare left Myanmar in 2020. Just months later, the military seized back power from the civilian government. Her time working in Yangon almost exactly covers the 5-year period of Myanmar’s flirtation with democracy. Sampan’s Managing Director, Bertie Alexander, starts by asking her how she looks back on that time now …

You had people flocking to Myanmar from across the world – everyone was so excited about the democratic transition. US President Barack Obama was there, along with other heads of state, the CEOs of multinational companies and journalists descended on the country too. This sense of excitement was shared by people across the country: the idea that this really was something new. There had obviously been elections before and great disappointment when the military had come back again. But this time there was a feeling of great hope.

I will always remember that election day and how everyone spilled onto the streets afterwards to celebrate. In retrospect it’s quite obvious that it was an illusion – that things weren’t exactly as they seemed.

When I travelled across Myanmar after the elections, that illusion was already being shattered. In October 2016, just six months after Aung San Suu Kyi’s government took office, I was travelling over the mountains into Rakhine State when the Rohingya crisis broke out. It wasn’t just Rakhine – conflict started up again all across the northern borderlands.

This was a time when more of Myanmar was open to outsiders than at any other time in its modern history. But even as I travelled, large parts of the country were already closing again behind me.

At the same time, many of the reforms that had been anticipated under the NLD didn’t happen and people started to question whether it really was going to be the great transition to democracy that everyone had hoped it would be.

You are referring to the illusion of the military ceding power to democracy or the illusion of Aung San Suu Kyi’s expected reforms?

It’s a bit of both. Illusion in that it suited the military to create the appearance of a transition to democracy when they were never going to budge on the constitution they had drafted – which remains in place today – or give up control over key ministries. They were never really going to allow liberalisation of various parts of the economy that were in their hands.

But also it was an illusion that Aung San Suu Kyi’s party would have power to change things that weren’t actually under their control. As I travelled across the country it became clear that the peace process led by the civilian government would fail, because armed groups including the military barely recognised their authority.

Many of the new officials had also never governed before, and there was no real handover, of documents or anything else. I describe in the book how in Magway the new lawmakers I met seemed uncomfortable in their new position of power, and afraid of losing it. In a region where the generals and their cronies were still immensely powerful, they struggled to imagine themselves as the agents of real change.

Do you think media outlets reporting from within Myanmar at the time, such as The Myanmar Times and Frontier, should have seen more clearly what was just hype?

Yes. And to a degree they did. But I think people wanted it to go well. And that blinded a lot of people.

Since the military seized power in February 2021, sometimes Myanmar people say to me, that the international community, and in particular international media, were myopic in griping at the NLD’s failings when the real danger in the country was always the military, and the risk of the military seizing back control.

I think there was probably a lack of understanding outside the country of how little space the NLD had to manoeuvre. It was generally poorly understood why they weren’t doing more and I think there could have been a greater attempt to understand the structural challenges. But it is easy to say that with hindsight.

In the book, when travelling in northern Shan State, fighting breaks out close to where you are staying. You go straight to check your Twitter feed and your guide goes to his feed on Facebook.

You write:

“Phones were passed around, showing posts on Facebook about abductions, and live videos of gun battles, and crude ‘before’ and ‘after’ photos of their victims. In contrast, there was nothing on my newsfeed about the violence that was gripping the north. As an outsider, I had no way to access the profiles, groups and networks that people here were tapping into, which had names in languages I didn’t speak, and were run by people I didn’t know. Even though we were all physically in the same place, we inhabited different online worlds.”

Is this something unique to Myanmar at that time? That you could be a well-informed and well-travelled journalist and still not be party to so much of what was going on?

Absolutely not. Even well-informed travellers have always to some extent occupied different worlds to the people who live in the places they travel through. We can think of languages, customs and unwritten histories as walls between these worlds. Some information siloes are deliberate, others are accidental. But since the adoption of the internet and in particular the rise of social media, there is no longer a shared set of public facts, even within one place. This is not unique to Myanmar, it’s a growing problem all over the world – and it’s threatening the foundations of our own democracies.

But it really hit home for me for the first time when I was travelling through Myanmar. It was 2016, the year that Donald Trump was elected in the US and everyone began to wake up to the power of social media to create different online worlds. Because most people in Myanmar had only just come online and because its democratic institutions were so new and so vulnerable, the cracks were more obvious there. When Facebook was weaponised during the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar it became one of the first global case studies of how an online hate campaign could lead to real world violence. But it’s very much a problem everywhere.

In the first chapter of your book you travel south to Dawei, in Tanintharyi Region, and you meet many people who had been forced to work on the construction of the railway line there. Working in brutal conditions, it has been dubbed “the second Death Railway”, not far geographically from the “first” Death Railway, built during the Second World War.

Later in  Kayah State you meet others there who had also been forced to build railway lines. I had come across this in the John Pilger documentary Inside Burma. But apart from that, have never seen it mentioned …

Right. It’s basically not known about, except of course by the people who were forced to work – and even they didn’t know much about what had happened beyond their own experiences. Millions of people were forced at gunpoint to work – state media reported that some 800,000 people had “volunteered” to build the railway into Kayah State alone, and new railways were built all over the country.

There is the Pilger documentary, and there are a handful of reports written in the 1990s by human rights groups on Myanmar’s border with Thailand, who interviewed refugees. There is a United Nations report, from around the same time, which found that the military had systematically abused Myanmar’s people. But I couldn’t find anything that had been published online since.

It isn’t even widely known about in Myanmar. One of the most striking things I found when I interviewed people in different parts of the country about their experience of being forced to work on the railways, was that they had no idea that other people in other parts of the country had been forced to do the same thing. They worked in the same brutal conditions, spending weeks and sometimes months in the jungle without pay, food or shelter. There had been no national discussion about what had happened on the railways – let alone justice.

You were Business Editor at The Myanmar Times. In the book you appear sceptical of the idea that the liberalisation of the economy that took places from 2010 to 2021 had a positive impact on the lives of Myanmar people. You write:

“There was a lot of talk about responsible business, and there were new aid programmes, but all of this was to some degree a distraction from the main event, which was a rush for profits that was driven by many of the same forces that had once driven British colonial expansion.”

In the final chapter of the book, you travel to the capital city of Naypyidaw and eat in an empty hotel which had previously hosted an investment conference organised by a British media company, which you also had attended.

“… the party had continued back at the hotel where I was now eating in the empty restaurant. The bar that was now deserted had been filled with the sound of laughter, as foreign investors and military cronies ordered bottles of scotch and rounds of cocktails late into the night.”

Do you believe that most of the international businesses that came into Myanmar during that time were acting irresponsibly?

The book charts my own personal journey towards the way I understood the foreign investment rush during the transition years. At the beginning, to a degree, I “drank the Kool-Aid” – I saw the economic boom as a sign that Myanmar was leaving its troubled past behind. I also believed that Western investment including British investment was responsible and that it would lead to positive change.

Over the course of researching and writing the book I had to do a lot of unlearning about Britain and its history. We are taught here that Britain is a force for good in the world, but that wasn’t the case during the British occupation of Burma and it’s not always the case today.

We are very good now at dressing it up, with language about responsible business. But fundamentally, any large or medium-scale foreign investment during the transition years meant partnering with military cronies – the same businesspeople or their proxies who had only recently been sanctioned by Western countries for their role in human rights abuses.

There was a belief that given the right conditions the crony-owned companies would clean up their acts. There was also the idea that if money came in it would trickle down to the people. But we know that trickle-down economics doesn’t work in the UK. It didn’t work in British Burma and it doesn’t work in modern Myanmar.

When travelling by train in the Ayeyarwady Delta, you meet a bright young man travelling home to see his family. You pass by his village together.

“This is my native village. It is very poor, very small, very dark.’ He was angered and depressed by his government’s ineptitude and having lived elsewhere, it was hard for him to come home.”

This would have been in the middle of the period of economic liberalisation. You think the majority of the people in Myanmar didn’t benefit from the country opening up?

There are of course people who benefitted – in all kinds of ways.

Talking strictly about the economy, there were new jobs, and new skills taught to employees of foreign companies and organisations. Others benefitted from being connected for the first time to international markets, including online.

The educated elite in the cities were doing well. But life for many of the people I met in rural parts of the country was getting harder. Many of them had been pushed off their land to make way for new investments: infrastructure, economic zones, hydropower dams. Others were in debt, and their debts were growing. People were migrating to the cities, where they lived on the outskirts in extremely unstable conditions, earning very little.

You highlight the contrast between some of the horror taking place in Myanmar with the experience of tourists at hotspots such as Inle Lake, describing the latter as a “fiction”.

You go on to write of travellers in Myanmar:

“Later, back at home, they might be troubled by the stories they inevitably heard on the news about the violence that had been taking place nearby. But by the time violence has become a report about violence, its power is weakened, the facts can be contested, and the person listening to the story will never be troubled by it in quite the same way.”

Do you think it was possible for a tourist in Myanmar, during that time, to get a true sense of the country? How do you feel about tourists going to Myanmar, both then and now?

It’s a tricky one. Myanmar’s security forces are very good at preventing foreigners from witnessing their abuses. Tourists are directed to places that are safe – or almost safe – and it’s hard to get beyond the approved routes. So often on my journey I was redirected away from conflict zones. Because of this, tourists often come home with the impression that what’s happening in Myanmar isn’t too bad. The military very much wants to pretend that everything is fine, and to have tourists descending on the country plays into that.

On the other hand, if people don’t go to a country it’s more likely to be forgotten by the rest of the world. Part of the reason why a lot of the abuses in the 1990s went unreported and people didn’t know about them in the wider world was because Myanmar was so isolated at the time. So it’s complex. I don’t know what the answer is.

So, I would say travelling to Myanmar should not equate to saying that everything is fine. In fact, travelling to Myanmar can highlight that everything is not fine. Most people don’t know about Myanmar. But our clients do. Because they have been here and they care. They care because they have been here.

I do meet tourists in Myanmar today who have no idea what is going on. And that’s not good. But tourism done properly can help keep the spotlight on Myanmar.

I think it depends on the type of tourism – and whether it’s possible to do it without funding the military.

Do you think you will ever come back?

I would love to go back. But not yet.

At the end of Clare’s book is an Afterword. She reflects on what has happened since the military seized power in 2021. It is right that here she has the last word. She writes:

“… as the international community fails them, people across Myanmar continue to fight. Nothing about their struggle is easy: Myanmar is a traumatized society and it is once again permeated by fear … But while the military deals in terror, the resistance is fuelled by hope. At its core, this is a struggle for basic liberties against institutionalized violence and greed, and it is a struggle that the people of Myanmar are determined to win.”

Clare’s book On the Shadow Tracks can be bought here. Reviews of her book can be found here and here. Clare can be followed on X here.

This conversation with Clare has been edited for brevity and clarity.