Burma’s Spring: Real lives in turbulent times (13 page)

The once thickly-forested hillsides of Mae La in Thailand’s Tak province were first settled in the mid-1980s by refugees escaping the state-sanctioned abuses against the hill peoples for which Burma became infamous – forced labour, gang rape, land grabs and village raids. The first exodus was triggered by an incursion by the Tatmadaw into territory traditionally held by Karen fighters, followed by revenge attacks on civilians branded as rebel sympathisers. Villages were looted and burnt, women raped, and young men forced to work as unpaid porters for the army. The next wave came in 1988, when the student-led uprising in Rangoon was violently crushed, and thousands fled across the border to escape reprisals and plot their next moves against the military government. Over the following two decades, spikes in migration across the border corresponded to surges in fighting and attacks on civilians. From 2005, the escapees were joined by another breed of refugee, those like Mu Mu and her friends, not running directly from danger but fleeing Burma’s economic ruins. The camp was not their new home, but a staging post, they hoped, to a new life overseas.

‘When I got there I found my name was not on the list,’ Mu Mu told me later. ‘So I had to buy a place.’ Mu Mu had money saved, all she needed to do was pay off someone whose name was on the United Nations list, and assume their identity. In a camp where no one had a passport, few had ID cards, and many Burmese names were drawn from a limited repertoire (each person would likely share their name with dozens of others), this was a straightforward operation. The camp dwellers could be broadly divided into two categories: those keen to get out, and those content to stay. The children and grandchildren of the first generation of escapees had known no other life. The razor wire surrounding the camp marked the perimeter of their world – many had never stepped outside. In the camp, the United Nations staff ensured they were given sufficient rations of rice, oil and beans. Most of Mae La’s inhabitants were
Karen, and many of them Christian – Baptists and Seventh Day Adventists whose forebears had been converted by nineteenth-century missionaries. Well-funded American ministries and other Western charities had a strong presence in the camps, ensuring there were good schools, nurseries and medical clinics. With their essential needs met, there were plenty of volunteers who were delighted to receive a few thousand Thai baht in return for relinquishing the opportunity to start a new life in Utah or Vancouver – places they had never heard of and had no desire to see.

Mu Mu secured her place on the list, and turned her attention to finding somewhere to live. This was the first time in her adult life that she was doing something just for herself, for her own future. She stopped sending money home; her efforts to sort out the financial problems of her feckless parents had yielded little success. ‘I told them I couldn’t help them any more. I told them to sell the house. It was all they had left,’ Mu Mu said. ‘I had to talk to them like I was the parent and they were the children. In Burma we don’t talk to our parents like this.’ As profligate as her parents had been, she still found it hard to wash her hands of them. Her youngest sister Hla Hla had followed in her footsteps and had found a position as a domestic worker in Bangkok – she would become the family breadwinner for now. Mu Mu slept on the floor of her friend Wan’s house for a few weeks, and then spent her savings on her own bamboo hut – her very first home of her own. She found beauty in her new life in this strange cocoon on a Thai hillside, with its fresh, clear days and candlelit nights. ‘It was cool at night, so beautiful,’ she recalled. ‘It was cheap there, we had no worries. We didn’t need new clothes or anything like that. We got just enough food. It was a simple life.’

While it was possible to subsist with no cash at all in the camp, Mu Mu missed having an income. The refugees were not permitted to step beyond the camp’s
perimeter fence to find work, and doing so would mean running the gauntlet of the Thai security guards who would demand bribes from the men and sexual favours from the women. Any formal business activity inside the camps was forbidden by the authorities, but of course the more industrious and entrepreneurial bent the rules and set up their own small enterprises: beauty salons, electrical repair shops, carpentry and food stalls. Mu Mu got a job working in a makeshift crisp factory, run from one of the shacks, where potatoes were peeled, chopped, fried, salted and bagged. It was piece work: Mu Mu was paid half a Thai baht for each bag she filled, and aimed for fifty bags each day, giving her twenty-five baht, or around seventy cents – just enough for her to buy small luxuries such as shampoo, Internet time, or a pirated DVD to watch on her friend’s laptop. Mu Mu’s task was to sit and fill up the clear plastic bags with their greasy contents. It was the first sedentary job she had ever had. ‘I was sitting all day long, I started to get fat. I was eating the crisps and not moving at all.’ Mu Mu was waiting, biding her time. She knew this wouldn’t be for ever, and she kept her sights on her goal, day-dreaming about life in America, the little house she would live in, the car she would buy, all the while filling her bags of crisps, one after another.

Mu Mu recalls the optimism of that time, the sudden bursts of excitement and chatter in the camp when it seemed that the next group of people was about to be selected for resettlement. ‘It’s coming soon, it’s going to be soon!’ her friends would tell Mu Mu. More countries had offered new homes to the Karen refugees – New Zealand, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and Japan. Her best friend Wan had made the cut. Wan had recently married her childhood sweetheart in a ceremony complete with a white satin dress, a professional wedding video and food and drink for scores of relatives – paid for by the bride from her job looking after two Dutch children in Bangkok. Now she and her new husband were heading for northern
California after taking part in cultural orientation classes which taught them how to use an electric stove, what to pack in a suitcase, coping with cold and the best way to eat pizza. Mu Mu went to the camp gate to watch her friend leave. Wan’s face was pressed up against the window of the bus, tears in her eyes. She raised her hand in a half-executed wave. Mu Mu stood still, her plastic flip-flops slowly sinking in the mud, for a long time after the bus had pulled away and the crowd around it had dispersed. Mu Mu was happy for Wan, but she couldn’t help wondering when her time would come.

EIGHT

Bones Will Crow

Afterwards he found out it was a week. He was hooded and handcuffed the whole time, beaten and questioned, woken from sleep, punched, kicked, tormented. Later in his prison life his knowledge of time would become a point of pride, but in that first week, drowning in its constant darkness, he lost track of it.

Win Tin was arrested on the morning of Tuesday 4 July 1989, and arrived at Rangoon’s Insein prison at around 3 p.m. ‘They went through my details, and when they had written everything in the book, I was taken to my cell. It was Block 2, cell number 54.’ The single-storey cellblocks at the sprawling, British-built prison radiated from a central tower. Most of them faced to the outside, across a triangle of scrubby ground to the next block. But in Block 2, the brick cells faced inwards to a dark corridor and a cell opposite. This block was usually reserved for condemned prisoners. ‘In death row, the rooms were facing each other. They had metal gates, not solid doors. This was so if someone tried to commit suicide, someone else would see it. But no one was around me, the cell opposite was empty, the cells around me were empty.’

Darkness fell quickly just after six. An hour later, they came to his cell, prison officials and intelligence officers. A group of them, he couldn’t remember how many. The thick, rough, hessian hood went on. His hands were cuffed behind his back. He was marched off to another room – a small windowless room, he believed, from the heat, the air, the acoustics. And then it began.

‘They came in one after another and asked questions and questions. If I didn’t answer, if I didn’t say what they wanted, I was knocked and kicked and beaten. This
was my first experience of such behaviour. I was a well-known journalist, not a brute or a thug.

‘I was resigned. I had no feeling at all. Someone would beat me and leave. Then a new man would come in. I would say I have just been beaten, and the officer would say “No you haven’t. That didn’t happen. That didn’t happen to you.” I didn’t know who was doing it. I had no witness.’

Win Tin, then a reasonably fit fifty-nine-year-old, was given no food at all, just sips of water. After what was probably several days, he was given some rice to eat, but by then he was beyond eating. His stomach growled, but his head felt no hunger. Sometimes they took him to a room and told him to sit and stay silent. Then they would bring in other dissidents – his friends and colleagues from the National League for Democracy – and interrogate them while he listened. The others were hooded too; they didn’t know he was there. ‘They gave accounts of meetings we had and things I was supposed to have said,’ Win Tin told me. ‘It was not their fault, they were forced to do it.’ Through nineteen years of imprisonment, through all the blows and kicks, Win Tin refused to betray his colleagues. But in his instinctively generous way, he was completely sympathetic to those who succumbed.

The seventh day was the day of his court hearing. When Win Tin arrived at the courthouse he was broken. All he could do was lie down on the floor. His upper teeth had been kicked in, his speech laboured and mumbled. Win Tin’s niece was allowed to see him, she had brought him clean clothes. When she helped him to change, she saw the black and purple welts across his body. She demanded that he tell the court he had been tortured. No, he said, exhausted but resolute. If people know this, if the young men and women who want to join our democracy movement know this, they may be afraid. I cannot stop our movement. But what about truth, what about justice?
‘Bones will crow,’ he told his niece. He was convinced that one day, even if he died, the truth would be told.

*

I first met Win Tin in the Sky Bistro on the top floor of Rangoon’s Sakura Tower. It was an upmarket place with air conditioning, piped music and panoramic views of the city – the golden Shwedagon, the patched up roofs of colonial apartment blocks, the muddy Rangoon River and green fields of Dala beyond. It was a year since his release, but the country was still locked under military rule. A noisy French family, tourists taking refuge from the heat, were at the next table, reviewing the day’s photographs on a professional-looking Canon. They didn’t recognise Win Tin, but the dinner-jacketed waiters murmured to each other and looked admiringly at the white-haired gentleman ripping open little paper sachets and stirring sugars into his coffee. I was sitting at right angles to him at the square table, hunched up and nervous; being with this well-known opposition leader in a public place was a risk. A few minutes into our conversation, one of the waiters came to the table and pushed a folded piece of paper towards me across the starched tablecloth. I opened it and read the neat handwriting. ‘Do not look round,’ it began. ‘I am seated behind you. I am a Japanese journalist and I would like to meet Mr Win Tin at a secure location. Please tell him to call me at my hotel, at this number, but only on a secure line.’ I was already feeling protective of the charming Win Tin and was irritated by the instructional tone of the message. I passed it across the table. Win Tin read it and laughed. ‘Everyone is so full of fear!’ he said. By then, he had nothing left to be frightened of.

Win Tin was a glamorous figure with thick hair, a handsome square face, and glasses with chunky, black frames which were back in fashion, whether he was aware of it or not. Many of Burma’s younger political prisoners liked to say they were the
age they would have been if they subtracted the lost years they spent in prison. This applied nicely to the octogenarian Win Tin, who, despite his fragile health, had an impish movement and the manner of a much younger man. He was carelessly stylish with his open-necked shirt, tank top and
longyi
, all in blue, the regulation prison colour that he had insisted on wearing since his release from jail as a form of protest against the continued incarceration of many other prisoners of conscience. He carried a woven Shan sling bag that contained his phone, glasses case and a small bundle of kyat. Silver bangles jangled on his lean forearms.

He was happy to talk about his life. His genteel English betrayed his colonial schooling; his memory sometimes failed him for a moment and he strained to recall a name or word, but usually found it. After that first encounter at Sakura Tower, we met for three, long interviews during the peak of the hot season in April 2011, in the tense, unforgiving weeks before the monsoon brings relief. Each time, we sat at one end of a heavy teak table in the conference room of the NLD office in Rangoon. Orange nylon curtains were drawn against the afternoon sun. There were frequent interruptions – the communications officer with the first draft of a new party treatise, a former general returning a borrowed book on Buddhist meditation, the tea lady fussing around. Filing cabinets were crammed around the edge of the room, the overspill of folders piled messily on top. The pale green paint was peeling from the moist walls. There were eighteen straight-backed wooden chairs with faded embroidered cushions and one ancient air conditioner, which didn’t work. Win Tin seemed oblivious to the suffocating heat, but as my recordings of the interviews attest, I didn’t cope well at all, apologetically gulping down water and even requesting breaks so I could stand at the open window in search of fresh air. As my interviewee recounted stories of torture and fortitude, the irony of my feebleness in the face of a little heat was not lost on me.
Thankfully, the former prisoner didn’t seem to register my discomfort, and his words spilled out, punctuated only by his intermittent, hacking cough.

*

Win Tin was born in the small market town of Gyo Pin Gauk on 12 March 1930, just a few months before the Buddhist monk Saya San launched the first revolt against British rule. Burma has rarely been at peace since. Win Tin lived through Second World War bombings and the Japanese occupation, communist insurrections and armed mutinies, two military coups, popular uprisings and the ethnic insurgencies in Burma’s borderlands. At the age of thirteen, at the height of the war in the Far East, he was sent to a local monastery to be ordained as a novice monk. It was a happy time. Win Tin enjoyed the simplicity, the orderliness, and submitting to the collective. It was possibly this experience that inspired him to decide at an early age to devote his life to society, to the exclusion of all else. ‘I am a single person. I have no family life. Most of my life I have lived for my work, as a politician and a journalist. That has consumed my life. Since the age of about nineteen I have lived as a public man. By that I don’t mean as a well-known person; I mean that my life belongs to society, and society is my life.’