For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question (24 page)

“Are you okay?” I asked him now.

“Yes,” he said, nodding gently.

We sat for a moment, he looking at the table, I looking at him the way Htan Dah had been looking at the cat.

“What did you do today?”

He’d gone to the border to pick up a girl, a friend of a friend, who had moved to Thailand years ago. She’d gotten away from the war in Burma, and had gotten a job as a servant for a rich woman. But the rich woman had beaten her severely.

I’d actually been reading reports like this off one of the shelves upstairs. There are about two million migrant workers from Burma in
Thailand, three-quarters of them illegal. Like the refugees, they don’t have any legal protection and are subject to police abuse. There was a jail for them in town, actually, off one of the side streets; it just looked like a great big dog cage, and was so close to the road that you could see the facial expressions of the people crammed inside on your way to the nearby guesthouse. Employer abuse is apparently rampant, with business owners garnishing wages, locking workers in their rooms at night, beating them, blackmailing them, fucking them, whatever. And all that was to say nothing of the trafficking, the masses of women and children from Burma living as sex slaves in Thailand. That was a whole nother book of testimonials, which I’d also taken off the shelf, but was having a hard time reading.

This particular woman from Burma was struggling to keep her wealthy employer happy enough that she wouldn’t beat her, but to no avail. One day, the rich woman beat her nearly to death, called a cab, and paid the driver to dump the body. He took the money, but dumped the near-dead maid at the hospital instead. The doctors there saved her life. Still, she was illegal, so the authorities shipped her back to Burma. Now she was running away again, and she and Htoo Moo’s mutual friend had called him and asked him to meet with her, show her around town.

“She’s missing a lot of hair,” Htoo Moo said, so quietly that I had to strain to hear him, pointing to his head, “from surgery.” He put his hands back on the table in front of him. “She has . . . scars.” He squinted, his face cringing. “All down her body.” He shook his head. “I feel sad.”

“I’m sorry Htoo Moo. I wish I could help you feel better.” I tried to think of what to say next, but just sat there with him for a while. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Do you have any medicine?” he asked.

I winced. “Not for that.” I watched him watch his still hands. “You do sound like you might be a little stuffy though. Here, I’ll get you some allergy medicine. It might also help you sleep.”

I went upstairs and got a pill out of my bag. When I brought it back down to him, he was sitting just as I’d left him. I got him a glass of water, and sat with him while he drank it.

He said he was tired.

I was tired, too. The darkness had taken the edge out of the heat, but it was still muggy, and late. I said goodnight. Htoo Moo said he was going to bed, but didn’t get up, so I walked back into the kitchen, back toward the stairs, leaving him there alone but for the cat breathing slow and hard and bleeding out in the corner.

“Burma, and its reclusive and repressive regime, may represent one of the most intractable challenges for the global community.”

—US AMBASSADOR TO THE UNITED NATIONS-DESIGNATE SUSAN RICE, 2009

 

 

 

IN AUGUST
2008, first lady Laura Bush made a visit to Mae La refugee camp. She toured the grounds with a shawl of traditional Karen homespun around her shoulders, fringed, embroidered earth tones over her button-down. She brought one of her daughters, and some press, and a gift, ten thousand insecticide-treated bed nets.

Make no mistake: Though most Americans are startlingly uninformed about the shit going down in Burma, your federal lawmakers and political leaders are aware of and on it. In 1997, President Bill Clinton barred new US investment in the country. In 2003, after Aung San Suu Kyi’s convoy was attacked, Congress introduced the Freedom and Democracy Act, banning any item produced in Burma from import into the United States, opposing international loans to the country, and freezing assets of the regime in—and denying its members visas to—the States. In 2005, Condoleezza Rice awarded Burma a special designation as an “outpost of tyranny.” Bush 43 gave it
shout-outs in several State of the Union addresses (“We will continue to speak out for the cause of freedom in places like Cuba, Belarus, and Burma”). There’s a US Senate Women’s Caucus on Burma, and a Block Burmese Jade Act, and Bush nominated a White House representative and policy coordinator for Burma, and sanctions get repeatedly extended and occasionally further tightened, and there are congressional hearings in which refugees testify about the horror and experts commend the sanctions and cry for more, more, more. Also blacklisting Burma: Australia, which doesn’t allow defense exports out or regime members in and has placed financial sanctions against 463 military men, and the EU, which has stripped Burma of trading privileges and instituted an arms embargo. And your usual host of well-meaning celebrities, doing video spots
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and benefit CDs and writing sort of weird open letters
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to no one in particular.

The trouble isn’t so much a lack of measures as their total ineffectiveness (except maybe the celebrities’, which could at least put the country on the map of global consciousness). For example: Malaria had long vexed the residents of border camps like the one the first lady visited, of course. But in the ’90s, researchers dispatched hundreds of Karen refugees, including Htoo Moo, on epidemiological surveys. From sunset to sunrise the men worked in four-hour shifts, sitting around, talking, catching mosquitoes that landed on them before they bit with a small vacuum for 100 baht a night, bringing the insects back to the Western doctors alive in time-labeled cups. Thus did the researchers determine that malaria transmission occurs in the camps via the mosquito vector that flies in the early evening—not overnight, when people are in bed. Thus were malaria workers desperately disappointed with Mrs. Bush’s present. It was a nice gesture, and the publicity was pretty good, but the money spent on those nets, they said sadly, should’ve gone to drugs that there are never enough of and that have actually been proved to interrupt malaria transmission in camp.

Similarly, sanction proponents say that it’s not the idea of sanctions but our execution of them that’s flawed: Though US investors have had to pull their money out of, say, Burma’s garment industry, they can still deal in its oil and gas, which is where a lot of the junta’s big export money comes from. Unocal/Chevron lobbyists (including one Alan Hoffman) have kept Congress from making the company sell its stake in Burma gas fields. No provision mandating that Chevron divest was included in the Block Burmese Jade Act, which was meant to deprive the government of big income and was spearheaded by Joe Biden (whose former chief of staff was one Alan Hoffman). Efforts to strip Chevron of a sweet tax concession on its business in the country got downgraded to a
suggestion
that the company “consider voluntary divestment over time.”

Following the junta’s gross abuses in the ’88 uprisings, world governments had to show some kind of action. So foreign aid, some $500
million a year, mostly stopped flowing. Soon, the regime was drowning in debt. It could have been the end of an evil era, maybe, had capitalism not swept in and saved the day. To solve its cash crisis, the long-closed Burma opened itself to private businesses and foreign trade. International hotels were built; tourists arrived; nightclubs opened; the Thais bought logging rights. Foreign investments kept the economy running, as they largely keep it running now. So if we’d only fashion better and better-targeted sanctions, advocates say, Burma’s economy would collapse and the government might just give up and get packing. But whether or not you believe that sanctions were what finally broke South Africa, you cannot believe that they would have worked in that country if half the world’s governments had said “We’re not going to give you money for your stuff anymore” while the other half had said, “Awesome. More for us.”

China is building a pipeline that will carry energy directly through Burma from one of Burma’s western ports, easily accessible from the Indian Ocean and Gulf states—which would avoid the long trip around the Strait of Malacca, through which an estimated 80 percent of China’s imported crude passes. Thailand has the rights to 1.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in one concession alone. One Indian firm has signed up for 5 trillion cubic feet of gas; Russia’s got several firms drilling; a single pipeline operated by France, Thailand, and, yes, Chevron earned the junta more than $1 billion in 2008; South Korean Daewoo plans to make more than $10 billion over twenty-five years from its drilling project in the immense Shwe gas reserves; handling Daewoo’s exploratory Burma drilling was US firm Transocean. As a member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Burma is included in the free-trade agreement that eliminates tariffs on thousands of products exchanged with India, which has signed an understanding that it will invest billions of US dollars in two Burmese hydroelectric dams. The EU is discussing a free-trade agreement with ASEAN, as well, though England swears that it will ensure that the deal won’t benefit Burma—though it’s got oil and gas dealings there,
too. In 2008 Burma experienced a 165 percent increase from the year before in the number of Chinese multinational companies involved in mining, oil and gas, and hydropower development. Trade between the two countries was up to $2.6 billion in 2008, from $630 million in 2001. Burma is estimated to be running a $2.5 billion trade surplus, with $5 billion in currency reserves.
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Indeed, our pulling our cash out after Burma opened its economy up to foreigners in the ’90s just concentrated more money and power in the government/army when its businesses could have begun being controlled by nonevil investors and legitimate concerns.

These are the sorts of unhappy, backfirey results US Burma policy has long tended to achieve. Remember all those Burma-invading KMT troops we secretly supported, in our efforts to thwart Red China, who went on to build drug cartels? Well, then, the Reagan administration’s solution to Burma’s out-of-control opium production was to give the junta millions of dollars for an opium-eradication program involving US aircraft and 2,4-D—the chemical that makes up half the composition of Agent Orange. The Burmese government sprayed it all over Shan villages. The Shan complained that it killed cattle and people.
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Also, it wasn’t much of a deterrent for those who were opium farmers, who weren’t superinclined to plant
food
instead of drugs on that land, now that it’d been covered in poison. Burma
went on to be named World’s No. 1 Opium Producer by the US government in 1991, a distinction it held until it was briefly surpassed by Afghanistan in 1999 and then fully usurped by the country in 2003, after the US had ousted the Taliban.

The United States can better target its sanctions all it wants, but those policies will continue to produce undesirable side effects. Already, they’ve put tens of thousands of Burmese textile workers out of factory jobs—and, as even the State Department has admitted, into sex work. And they will continue to be useless. Burmese timber still comes into the United States through China, and Burmese gems via the $8 billion of jewelry imports from Thailand. In 2008, more foreign companies had invested in Burma’s energy sector than ever. According to the Ministry of National Planning and Development, foreign investment dollars in the country nearly doubled in the first nine months of that year compared with the same period of the previous year, and in 2007, foreign investment in oil and gas was more than triple that of the year before. So, as Chevron has pointed out, if we pull out our remaining investments, someone else—and perhaps someone less conscientious
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—will just gladly put their money in. The international community can’t even agree to stop giving the regime weapons. Norway has gone so far as to ban investment in one of
China
’s manufacturers because said manufacturer sells military vehicles to Burma. But
even Germany, along with Singapore and Pakistan and Russia and Ukraine and Serbia, has supplied the junta with military equipment, which workers at a Rangoon port say is offloaded from cargo ships in the middle of the night as in an Indiana Jones movie. North Korea, too, which has missiles and will sell them to anyone with the money to buy, and with whom the Burmese foreign minister recently agreed to resume ties after twenty-five years of a diplomatic kibosh. And China, of course, which is the sole buyer of Daewoo’s Shwe gas output and has showered Burma’s military with weapons. Burma’s resources were those that allowed the founding and thriving of Burmah Oil, which became Burmah Castrol, which was bought by BP in 2000 for some $5 billion. They built Herbert Hoover’s silver-mining fortune. We know well enough to know that as long as there’s money—and energy—to be made in Burma, there’s unlikely to be a cohesive or constructive policy of international financial disengagement.

But even if everyone did collectively agree to simultaneously disinvest, including two of Burma’s neighbors—the world’s two most populous, energy-desperate countries—which is never going to happen—who says regime change would necessarily follow? There’s no guarantee that a government that’s worked so hard to isolate itself from prying, hostile foreign eyes—that’s had its suspicion that the West isn’t good for it repeatedly confirmed with incursions and, later, sanctions—will be sad if the whole world decides to just stay out of its business, considering that it puts up all over the country giant white-on-red billboards that say this: