For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question (10 page)

And:

Indeed, prison authorities did bug an interview that was supposed to be confidential between a prisoner and a UN envoy in 2003. But even those Red Cross brief and insubstantial reprieves were fleeting. The organization was thrown out of the country after 2005.

Still
. Whatever the hardships of being a Burmese prisoner, portering is a worse fate. Those who can afford it pay bribes to stay in prison—if the alternative is donning the dark blue porter’s dress and being driven in crowded trucks to the front line.

A brutal and dangerous enslavement, portering has been feared long and wide. In
Heart of Darkness
, Marlow, whose diary entries in the book mirror the journals and experiences of Conrad’s time in the Congo, describes deserted villages of natives fleeing from porter duty for the ivory trade, from which they knew they were unlikely to return alive. In Burma, porters follow soldiers, carrying woven bamboo baskets on their backs. Survivors swear the loads weigh up to a hundred pounds. Htoo Moo had pictures of the lesions the straps left in their shoulders, giant, disgusting open wounds, raw, pink
holes infested with flies and maggots, as if pieces of their bodies were already dead. Porters receive little food, rest, or water and endure repeated beatings with fists and kicks and bamboo. Soldiers motivate porters who’ve fallen down from weakness by stepping on their necks or striking them with the butt of their rifles, and prisoners who still fail to get up are shot or left to die. When necessary, porters do double duty as minesweepers, either walking ahead of the soldiers to detonate the explosives or attempting to dig them out of the ground with their bare hands. Offenses by the SPDC—which, though the name of the government, is also what people call the army, since the government and the army are the same thing (though the army actually has its own name: Tatmadaw)—can be partially charted by the trail of porters’ corpses left in their wake. By the time human rights organizations come in to investigate, sometimes all that’s left to be photographed is piles of bones in navy uniforms. Though soldiers tell the porters that they’ll be killed if they’re captured by the KNU, some stack the odds of escaping against those of surviving their portering stint and decide to take that chance.

On his last trip, Htoo Moo had met the most recent batch of porters the KNU had intercepted; they were working at headquarters, farming and keeping house for a month or two while the soldiers questioned them for SPDC intelligence before sending them home. For a few days, Htoo Moo recorded long, heavy interviews with the twenty-eight escapees, mostly Burmans, who talked about nearly being killed by soldiers, and he even interviewed deserted Burmese soldiers, who talked about doing the killing of the porters:

That soldier had ended up a prisoner-porter himself, having been convicted of desertion and conscripted into portering for his former fellow military men. One of the reasons he’d run away from the army was that he’d never wanted to be a soldier in the first place; he had been arrested at a bus stop and pressed into service when he was twelve. But he felt he certainly couldn’t serve after witnessing the atrocities his army inflicted on its countrymen. Some of the other escaped porters were so horrified by having witnessed SPDC abuses of ethnic villagers and even fellow Burmans that they joined the KNU. All were happy to get their stories on record with Htoo Moo.

The path out of headquarters was tricky—it was laden with land mines, and diverged at one point, where the right turn led to a rural community and the wrong one to an SPDC camp—so two KNU soldiers accompanied Htoo Moo on the walk, from dawn well into nighttime, to the next small village. They entered it to find that some sort of plague had landed on all ten houses, and most of the people there were dying. One house contained a dead boy whose father, the only family member left, was too sick to bury him. The villagers encouraged Htoo Moo to look, to bear witness, and he did.
He visited the ill and took pictures but left after a few days, because there was nothing else to be done.

By the time he’d walked two days to another village, documented the story of a boy who’d been shot with his father and brother by SPDC soldiers while cultivating rice; by the time he’d looked at the fresh bullet holes in the boy’s shoulder and ass, and at the bloody track another round had grazed into the side of his head; by the time the boy had explained how he’d sent other villagers back to the field to get his brother and father as soon as he’d staggered home but it was too late, they were already dead; by the time Htoo Moo had taken pictures of the boy’s wounds, which had been treated with only boiled water and cotton dressing, he was ready for a rest.

“The SPDC is coming,” the chief told him.

You’ve never heard of Four Cuts, but it’s a Tatmadaw strategy that every Karen child knows very well: cutting off the enemy’s sources of food, finance, intelligence, and recruits (and, some say, their heads). Unfortunately for villagers, these sources of support include the villagers themselves, in addition to their rice, livestock, and able-bodied sons. Does this sound familiar? The military government that seized control in 1962 had learned the lessons of Western subjugation amply; some Burma army officers had even gone to London to study British warfare. Like the great colonialist power before them, Burmese soldiers in the ’60s—the Karen war still raging—started walking into defenseless villages with guns blazing and burning them down, issuing orders to Karen villagers, who were potential insurgents, that they could be shot if they kept more food on their farm than was needed for one person, or traveled at night, or traveled out of their village at all, or ran from Burma army troops that were shooting at them, or didn’t. Unfortunately for Htoo Moo, the Four Cuts campaign was, even decades later, alive and well.

The Burmese military had assumed, correctly, that the village where he was staying, which was in an area under KNU control, was home to some KNU members and sympathizers. A scout had spotted
assailing soldiers, and it was time to go. So this is the drill: You have to flee, carrying everything you can, big heavy loads, as much rice as you can stand on your back in giant baskets, any clothes or anything else you want to own for maybe the rest of your life, your baby. Htoo Moo helped the villagers hide rice, salt, fish paste, and some extra sets of clothing among the surrounding trees before they all took off together in the early evening. Htoo Moo followed the eighty villagers along a path he hadn’t noticed hidden beneath tall grass. Figuring a six-hour walk put them far enough out of harm’s way, they stopped at midnight and Htoo Moo slept, finally, on the forest floor.

The next morning, he woke up to find people quickly gathering the food and family they’d brought. A scout had arrived with news of the SPDC’s offensive; everyone needed to leave. Htoo Moo had slept through breakfast, and there wasn’t time to make more. While people were getting ready, he sat on the ground and counted. Neighboring villages had evidently joined the flight; there were two hundred heads in the makeshift camp. They had with them one KNU soldier. Not wanting to further strain the villagers’ supplies, he stalked an enormous rat he’d spied lumbering around and killed it with one strike of bamboo. When Htoo Moo smiled, pleased with his efficiency, an old man next to him laughed. “Before you woke up,” he said, “I tried to kill that. I think it was already tired.”

The villagers fled from seven in the morning until noon. Some of the shoeless children lost flesh and bled as their feet pounded the ground, and some of those cried silently as they ran. Htoo Moo carried his bag on his back, the dead rat in one hand, his digital camera in the other, occasionally snapping pictures of the exodus. When they stopped, he dug his fingers into the rat’s skin and ripped it off. He tore the meat into pieces and went in on lunch with another man, who provided a pot containing some chilies and salt. Five minutes over a fire later, seared jungle rat was served.

Htoo Moo could finally relax: His belly was full of warm meat, and he lay back on the cool jungle bed beneath the canopy of an abundant
tree. He closed his eyes as sleep started to descend upon him, and then the sound of gunshots.

Gunshots
. He clutched his bag and got to his feet as the villagers started hustling. Nobody screamed. The boy with the bullet holes Htoo Moo had photographed had been carried by village men in a hammock this far, but now he jumped up and started running, new blood rushing from the wound in his ass. Htoo Moo took off, ahead of even the village chief, reaching a flat-out run, crashing shoulder-first through tall croppings of bamboo in his path, before realizing that he had no idea where he was or where he should be going. He stopped, turned around a couple of times, and considered ditching his camera. What if the SPDC caught him? What if they had him in captivity and saw that he’d been taking pictures of gun-shot farmers, prisoner-porters with skin disease, cigarette burns, knife wounds, raw and infected shoulders that bore the permanent scars of carrying, over mountains, for days or weeks at a time? He’d keep the camera for the moment, he decided. But sometimes fleeing groups ran head-on into other military divisions, and the villagers in the back had the best chance of being ambushed or taking stray gunfire from the pursuing ones. Though he felt like a coward, he fell back into the middle of the throng. Indeed, by the time they stopped at nightfall, news had spread through the crowd that one man in the rear had been shot dead.

Htoo Moo lay down but couldn’t sleep. He listened to the men next to him talking. Of the two hundred people, they four had guns. They counted their ammunition and determined that they had four or five rounds apiece. One admitted that he had only three bullets left. “No problem,” another told him. “You will just aim very well.”

After three days of squatting and swatting bugs in the jungle, Htoo Moo told the chief that he wanted to leave. Sometimes, villagers hide out for weeks because they don’t know if it’s safe to go back yet. Sometimes, it never is. Sometimes, those who’ve had to leave behind sick or elderly or shot who couldn’t run have to sneak back to bury their bodies quickly, looking over their shoulders—assuming
the bodies haven’t already been disposed of, burned along with the rest of the village. Htoo Moo didn’t know how long this displacement was going to last, but he needed to get back to work. A hunter was making his way back toward the border, and Htoo Moo could follow him away from the escaping villagers.

“I will take you myself,” the chief said. “I am ready.” He was in no hurry now. He’d heard news over the radio that the soldiers had stopped at the village and weren’t pursuing them. He didn’t have to run, and he didn’t have anywhere to go: The SPDC had killed the pigs and the chickens, then burned the village to the ground.

In the face of the oncoming attack, the KNU had set up scores of new land mines, and the old way in was no longer a safe way out. Htoo Moo and the chief trudged through the jungle for three days back to KNU headquarters, where they shook hands and parted. Soon after Htoo Moo and yet another guide started off from base, the parasites that had entered his body through mosquito spit and been multiplying in his liver burst through the cells that hosted them and flooded Htoo Moo’s bloodstream. He trekked, though more slowly, through his fever, stopping when the retching brought him to his knees. “Don’t rest there!” his guide screamed when he moved toward a smooth patch of soil just to the side of the path. He’d nearly knelt on a land mine. It took another two days to reach the riverbank, where he bought antimalarial tablets with his last few baht and boarded the boat toward what had, by default, become home.

 

“I WILL
take you to Office Two for school today,” Htan Dah said Monday morning. We were both, as usual, up at dawn. I’d admitted to him that Htoo Moo’s driving terrified me, and I was pretty excited to hear that. I was also excited about the stack of neatly sorted and stapled papers I was carrying out of the computer room, a twelve-page workbook of English exercises for my beginner students I’d labored over all weekend, having got a better sense of their skill level the week before.

“Look what I did!” I said, holding the pages out proudly. “All this!”

“Wow,” he said, fingering them unenthusiastically. “That is . . . not so much.”

I swung the papers at him, hitting him in the arm. “This was really hard. This took a lot of work.”

He just laughed at me. “This morning, I have interview. But I will be back in time for breakfast before we go.”

The previous night, when I’d sat down next to Htan Dah in the living room as he watched Thai soaps—because, he insisted, they helped him learn the language—he’d told me that he’d been selected to interview for a journalism-school program at the University of Chiang Mai. It was a free, eight-month, highly intensive and selective course aimed at training reporters and editors from ethnic communities. I’d shot some standard interview questions at him, for practice, and promised him that they were going to ask why he should be picked.