And like any decent paramilitary force, they’ve got uniforms, too. I saw one of the specially printed T-shirts—soft jersey knit, in nice army olive, with FREE BURMA RANGERS in a white insignia over the left breast—hanging to dry in Office Two on one of my first days teaching. I didn’t know what FBR was, or how much cred it had, when I laid eyes on the shirt, but I told Collin I’d do anything to get my hands on one. What with the flattering color and emblemed front and motto—“Love each other. Unite and work for freedom, justice, and peace. Forgive and don’t hate each other. Pray with faith, act with courage. Never surrender.”—printed in Karen on the back, I just thought it was a really nice shirt.
“Nice shirt,” Htan Dah said the first time I wore the one Collin had quickly gifted to me. Every coworker I saw that day said the same thing. I was the pinnacle of refugee activist fashion. I didn’t realize until Lah Lah Htoo showed me one of FBR’s videos that the reason people were impressed with my outfit was that the rangers were highly respected as total fucking badasses.
Lah Lah Htoo wasn’t one of my students but served a function in Office Two similar to Htan Dah’s in Office One. Like Eh Soe’s, his black hair stood up enthusiastically from his head, only Lah Lah Htoo’s shock was taller. An artistic type with a penchant for drawing and singing, he was alone among the guys in that he wore chokers. Or as Eh Soe put it, “Lah Lah Htoo can’t play football. He is very good at painting.” When he spotted (and complimented!) my shirt while I was on break between classes one day, he invited me into the little Office Two computer room and loaded up a DVD. Some of the BA guys had been on missions with FBR. The two groups shared information; via villagers’ and their own observations, they did collective reconnaissance on the Burma army so they could prepare the civilians they encountered—and be prepared themselves, an early warning
system for the guys running around in the field. And since the ragtag little groups of Karen, mostly young, mostly men but some women, working for these two NGOs are nearly the last defense against the massacre in Burma’s hills’ going completely undocumented, they also shared footage. But where BA made heartbreaking videos with villagers running and babies crying, FBR made soul-crushing videos with adults weeping openly and villagers bleeding a lot.
The video Lah Lah Htoo loaded starts with war footage, guys shooting guns in tall jungle bush and loud rocket fire, and a village burning down and screaming women running for their lives, before moving briefly to photo stills: a picture of villagers standing over a group of dead bodies, a picture of a beaten woman with her shirt torn open, dead on the forest floor, a picture of murdered children on the ground, lying all lined up in a row. Then the camera centers on the face of a seventeen-year-old boy with lifeless, unfocused eyes, rolling his head on the ground, moaning, while a hand pets his cheek, a
longyi
held up below his neck so he can’t see what’s going on with the rest of his body, which is that a few men hold on to his completely exposed lower leg bone, a bloody white stick still hung with a few slick and glistening black-purple sinews, protruding from a bloody knee, a land-mine wound swarmed by flies. Then he’s in a thin hammock, with a man in cheap plastic flip-flops at each end of the bamboo pole from which it swings, and another walking alongside holding an IV drip dangling from another piece of wood, being carried through the mountainous terrain. For four days. Which is how long it takes the team to get him to a clinic on the border, where a proper amputation can be done.
By now, instantly, I’d twisted my face into a permanent wince, and it didn’t get any easier to watch. A husband and wife sit next to each other on the ground while he explains that their two sons and daughter were taken by Burma army troops that stormed into their village. Local Karen leaders negotiated the return of the two boys, but they haven’t seen the girl since. “We want her back,” the woman says, smiling sadly, before dropping her face to her knees, covering it
with her pink sweater, and starting to sob. When she calms down a little, the man says, “My wife and I are like dead people.” There are people getting ready to run from an attack, like they did at the village Htoo Moo visited, little girls running around talking fast directions to each other while they throw shit in baskets and sacks they can carry strapped to their foreheads. A man on his back breathing hard and fast and shallow as Free Burma Ranger medics jab their fingers and instruments into the bloody stump below his knee where his calf and foot were before he stepped on a land mine. Skulls and bones on the ground and a ranger telling how he brought a bunch of children’s presents donated by kids overseas only to find that there are no children in this village anymore. Rangers tearing out infected teeth with pliers. Rangers stitching up a gaping, blood-spurting hole in someone’s foot. Rangers cleaning the gory, festering wound on a little kid’s leg as the child stands still, calm, pantsless. Rangers delivering a baby in the darkness by the green glow of the camera’s night mode, in open jungle air, on the jungle floor. The partially decomposed decapitated head of an old man on the ground, which the rangers bury when they find it. A shot of a Burma army compound, the camera zooming in shakily on the faces of the boys with rifles, the hiding cameramen whispering breathlessly to each other. Shots from an FBR team that came under attack when they went back to a village of some recent IDPs to see if they could recover any food; the camera jostles violently as they run along, set to the sound of gunfire cracking and thundering through the trees. An FBR team rushing to the scene of a new attack and meeting two fleeing villagers, young guys who tell them they were taking a smoke break with four other friends when the explosions and bullets started coming. They’re not sure if the guys who were running with them survived, since there was so much shooting. By way of illustration, one of the guys points to a bullet hole in the side of his loose jacket. A man rocking the tiniest sleeping baby and complaining about the Burma army because his wife died during childbirth in the jungle while they were running.
He worries that he has no idea how to take care of this child without her. Tears streaming hard and quiet down the face of a woman mindlessly fingering her jacket zipper with one hand, standing among the ashes of her old village, in which her husband was killed. A toddler barely grown enough to stand picking his way through the jungle as his village flees, carefully parting the brush with his chubby little fingers and stepping through with his bare, scratched legs and feet. Three more stills: a dead villager facedown on the ground. A dead villager faceup on the ground. A five-year-old with a bullet in his leg. Video of yet another land-mine casualty, medics holding a bleeding, seething, sinew-dripping, mangled hunk of something vaguely human looking, recognizable as a foot only because it comes at the end of an ankle. An FBR team leaves a group of IDPs and the IDPs call out please don’t leave us, please come back. A man keeps hiding his face it’s so contorted with sorrow as he says, sobbing convulsively, “I don’t understand why they killed my children. They didn’t even know their right hand from their left hand,” while the woman next to him weeps silently and gnashes her teeth. The video ends with a quote from Galatians on the screen: Let us not grow weary while doing good. In due season we shall reap if we don’t lose heart.
Currently, FBR is running some forty full-time teams on month-long missions in Burma throughout the year, treating about 2,000 people in each, trekking hundreds of miles. They find malaria, AIDS, gastric disease, dysentery, colds, diarrhea, severe vitamin deficiency and malnutrition, worms, anemia, skin disease, skin infections, respiratory infections. When the Burma army massacred villagers in Htee Law Bleh in 2002, rangers were there to treat people who didn’t die from their gunshot wounds and photograph a pile of dead children. Sometimes the team members get shot at. Sometimes they fall fatally ill or are captured and tortured. Just like Htan Dah always reminded me about the BA field workers, if FBR personnel are caught, or get a disease, or step on a land mine, they can be killed. Sometimes, they are: six of them in the organization’s first ten years.
“What do you think?” Lah Lah Htoo asked me when the video was over.
I thought I might like to close myself in the bathroom so I could punch myself in the chest, just a little, to try to release some of the tightness and weight there, let my face into my hands and press hard.
“Good video?” he asked, because I was taking so long to answer.
“Yeah, it’s a good video.”
He nodded and waited politely for me to continue, but I just sat quietly, awkwardly, before simply nodding back at him.
“Do you want to see picture?” he asked.
Not really. I knew what types of violent and devastating pictures these guys had on their hard drives, and the strain of watching the video had taken the wind out of any morbid curiosity sails I might otherwise have been flying. But I didn’t want to be rude, or a pussy. “Sure.”
Lah Lah Htoo browsed through some files on his computer before finding what he was looking for and giving his mouse a hard double-click. An image filled the screen. My mouth dropped open.
Lah Lah Htoo, who’d seen the FBR video a thousand times, had instantly and completely switched gears, evidently, at the end of our screening. He smiled proudly now as I gaped at a picture of him and The Blay and That Khaing. It looked as if their likenesses had been cut from separate photos and pasted on a black background. They were, for some reason, dressed for a rap-video parody. There were bare chests. There were necklaces. There were black knit skullcaps and low-slung pants. The three affected tough-guy postures, crossed arms.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“This is the gayest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Lah Lah Htoo stopped smiling. “Not gay! Gangster.”
“Mmmm. ...” I looked back to the picture. The Blay was scowling vigorously, with a pouty-lip thing going on. “No, it’s pretty gay.”
“Not gay!”
“Okay, whatever.”
We sat in silence again as he beamed at the screen.
“So . . . what do you guys do with the videos you make?”
“We send them. To human rights organizations, UN, news.”
“Do they ever use them?”
Lah Lah Htoo shrugged.
“I can’t believe I never heard of any of this before I got here,” I said. “Seriously, my friends are really smart. Nobody I know has ever heard of this.”
“So,” he said, nodding emphatically, “you will tell everybody in America.”
It was easy for even my really smart friends to be ignorant of this war, the world’s longest-running war, such an active war; it didn’t get a lot of media play. “I don’t think there’s enough news in the Karen war itself,” a
New York Times Magazine
editor told me once. He was certainly right. As juicy as the real-time footage was, the situation is, as even FBR’s Dave once put it, “not a car wreck. It’s a slow, creeping cancer,” a conflict that’d started sixty years ago, which is actually the opposite of news. Every year, when the United States Department of State slams Burma in its “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices,” saying that the government rapes and tortures and kills people and indiscriminately and indefinitely and illegally detains people and blah-blah-blah, the media ignore it.
Except the Burmese media, which report how the Burmese government is flabbergasted by these absolutely flabbergasting charges. Take this press release from the Permanent Mission of the Union of Myanmar to the United Nations Office and Other International Organizations, in Geneva. It’s a re-release of the press release whereby Burma’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs rejects 2008’s State Department report. It’s titled, aptly, “Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Myanmar rejects US State Department’s human rights report.” It explains how the US has, due to its dire need of fact-checkers, made Burma sad, and how, further, Burma is rubber and the US is glue:
The United States Department of State released on 25th February 2009 its 2008 Country Report on Human Rights Practices of over 190 countries, including Myanmar. As in the past, the report repeated its unfounded and unsubstantiated allegations of human rights violations in Myanmar.
It is saddening to find that the report contained the usual sweeping accusations of human rights abuses in Myanmar without verification of the validity and accuracy of the information and reliability of its sources. Instead of making false allegations at other nations regarding human rights matters, the United States should concentrate on uplifting its own human rights records.
Myanmar has long been a victim of a systematic disinformation campaign launched by anti-government elements, generously funded by their foreign supporters. The rootless allegations of human rights violations which invariably emanated from anti-government elements have found their way into the reports of the U.S. State Department. Thus, there is a need to verify all information before it is judged fit for inclusion in official reports.
Verify this: Even if you haven’t had the pleasure of opening a Martus database of human rights violations and being assaulted by the headlines of the hundreds of reports being collected there by independent documenters and nonprofits—A WOMAN GANG-RAPED AND STABBED TO DEATH IN MURNG-SU; GUIDE BEATEN TO DEATH BY SPDC TROOPS; A WOMAN CUT TO DEATH IN THE THROAT, IN KUN-HING; VILLAGERS ROBBED, ARRESTED, TORTURED AND KILLED IN NAM-ZARNG; A HANDICAPPED WOMAN GANG-RAPED, CAUSING DEATH, IN LAI-KHA—it’s possible you may have actually seen some of the FBR footage I watched with Lah Lah Htoo. PBS’s
Frontline
did an episode called “Burma: State of Fear” in 2006 that followed the “mainly Christian medics who bring aid to villagers being targeted by the Burmese government” and even borrowed some of their film.
Rambo
, the 2008
one, which deals with the plight of the Karen, which the movie’s white lead actors also think is pronounced like the name of my parents’ blond divorced friend, opens with some BA footage and FBR footage that’s as disgusting as the outlandishly gory effects in the rest of the film. And even if you’ve missed all those, and your media aren’t reporting the story, you don’t have to take Lah Lah Htoo’s word, or my word, or the State Department’s word that the regime is violating international law and human decency to an astounding degree every day. FBR has a website. And a Wikipedia entry. You can just google the organization’s name. The guys have it all on tape, filmed in bloody, handheld real time. You can verify that shit on YouTube.