YANGON,
Myanmar — For 12 hours nearly every day, Sgt. Khin Myint Maung stands
in one of the most chaotic intersections in this chronically gridlocked
city, untangling traffic snarls with patience and unflagging good humor.
It
is not the most likely résumé for a recipient of a hero of the year
award from a leading daily newspaper, or designation as a “role model”
officer by the Yangon police force or a “real-life hero” by a German
foundation.
But
the 26-year-old from the provinces, only recently promoted to sergeant,
has earned all those awards, rising to fame purely by word of mouth. It
is nearly impossible to find a taxi driver in Yangon who does not wax
lyrical about the sergeant’s ability to direct traffic through
rainstorms and searing heat.
“We looove him,” U Nay Win Hlaing, a 37-year-old taxi driver, shouted recently. “There’s no one who doesn’t like him.”
In years past, the streets of Myanmar’s
largest city were often so empty that taxi drivers could test the
forces of gravity as they screeched down winding thoroughfares.
These
days, though, the emergence of debilitating gridlock in Yangon is
perhaps the most obvious sign that after five decades of cloistered
military rule, Myanmar
is finally open for business. It has taken only three years for the
number of cars registered in the city to double, to more than 400,000.
And
in this new Myanmar, where car ownership is no longer the exclusive
domain of the superrich, Sergeant Khin Myint Maung has emerged as a new
sort of civic hero. Not a human rights campaigner, not a philanthropist
nor someone who saved puppies from a blazing fire, but a traffic cop.
Men
in uniform are still widely feared and despised in Myanmar, but
Sergeant Khin Myint Maung has won the hearts of legions of erstwhile
grumpy drivers who roll down their windows and hand him frosty bottles
of water and boxes of food. They also give him cash, a gesture that
would be inappropriate in the West but that motorists say shows their
gratitude and is an unsolicited supplement to his paltry salary. The
sergeant accepts all this booty with a flash of his perfect white teeth
gleaming in the tropical sun.
On
the few days Sergeant Khin Myint Maung has been absent from his post,
the surrounding neighborhood has descended into chaos, including two
months ago when he traveled to Naypyidaw, the country’s capital, for the
ceremony marking his promotion to sergeant.
“For
three days, it was terrible. Everyone was honking. Cars weren’t moving.
Everyone was upset,” said Daw Phyu Phyu, who manages a shop nearby.
Sergeant
Khin Myint Maung’s popularity is not a vote of confidence in the
traffic police, who are notorious for shaking down motorists, nor is it a
tribute to a new government made up largely of holdovers from the
military regime that preceded it. If anything, his fans say, praise for
the sergeant is implicit criticism of the rest of the traffic police and
the bureaucracy.
“You
could never count on civil servants before to do their job,” said U Pe
Myint, a commentator and columnist. “Here is a civil servant who is
doing his duty.”
Heroes
are scarce in Myanmar. The society is stacked with officials,
businessmen and informants who served or collaborated with the brutal,
dictatorial junta that imprisoned thousands of dissidents and treated
ordinary citizens with derision.
“It’s
very hard to find civil servants worthy of the award,” said Daw Nyein
Nyein Naing, the executive editor of 7 Day News Journal, which began
bestowing its annual hero trophies in 2012, around the time the
country’s media was unshackled from five decades of censorship.
“Every
year, we go through a lot of names,” Ms. Nyein Nyein Naing said. “But
we look at their backgrounds, and we find things that disqualify them as
heroes.”
Change
in Myanmar is proceeding at varying speeds. Bureaucrats still wait for
orders as they did during military rule. Farmers remain dirt poor. The
middle class is seeing only a small fraction of the lucrative jobs that
the government promised to deliver.
But
the streets of Yangon look nothing like those of five years ago, when
most of the cars were so old and dilapidated that downtown traffic
resembled a rolling junkyard. Forty-year-old jalopies spewed oil onto
the pavement, and on rainy days customers had to place their feet over
the holes in the floors of taxis to avoid water gushing up from below.
Then,
three years ago, the government lifted its severe restrictions on car
imports and, as if a switch had been flicked, a car culture was born in
Yangon. Used car lots, mostly selling secondhand imports from Japan,
became ubiquitous. A radio station with traffic reports is now essential
listening for those wishing to avoid the worst gridlock. When President
Obama visited this month, residents complained that closed roads had
created an “Obama jam.” The traffic police started a Facebook page this
year that encourages drivers to send in photos of other drivers breaking
the law.
U
Win Tin, 34, a woodcarver who lives on the outskirts of Yangon, used to
spend half an hour riding to his stall near Shwedagon Pagoda, a famed
golden Buddhist shrine. Now the commute takes two hours on a sweltering
bus with no air-conditioning. The upside, he said, is that business has
picked up with the influx of tourists from China and South Korea who
place orders for wooden Buddhas.
“I liked the easy traffic of the past, but I wouldn’t want to go back to the old days,” he said.
The secondhand Japanese imports vie with an array of luxury and exotic cars.
Sergeant
Khin Myint Maung directs Range Rovers that would not look out of place
in Beverly Hills and American S.U.V.s that seem far too wide for
Yangon’s roads.
In
a stark reminder of the gulf between rich and poor in Myanmar, he is
paid the equivalent of $150 a month, a salary that might buy him one of
those cars at the end of his career — if he saved every penny.
The
third of five children from a rice-farming family in a remote village
three miles from the Bay of Bengal, he shows no resentment toward the
wealth that flashes past, only Buddhist fatalism.
“Everyone
has their own destiny,” he said during a break from directing traffic
at the corner of Dhammazedi and Link Roads, his usual spot not far from
Shwedagon Pagoda. “The rich are rich because they did many good things
in their past life. Everyone has their own place.”
The
sergeant is generous with his smile but thrifty with words. When he
accepted his hero award in 2012, he stood onstage in a large banquet
hall in a Yangon hotel.
“We gave him three minutes for a speech,” said Ms. Nyein Nyein Naing, who headed the awards committee.
“He just said, ‘Thank you,’ ” she recalled. “And of course he smiled.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/22/world/asia/myanmar-yangon-traffic-cop-khin-myint-maung.html?_r=0
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