For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question (51 page)

In 2008, despite the jobless and prospectless migrants flooding back into the country after being laid off in Malaysia and Thailand, Burma’s prime minister insisted that the new global recession would have no effect on his homeland. State media echoed the claim, in an article titled “We Remain Unperturbed,” that the Burmese would fare far better than the Americans, who “are a people who are extravagant and do not hesitate to buy an elephant if it is available on credit.”

Then-Assistant Secretary of State of the Bureau for International Narcotics Matters (and “Just Say No” architect) Ann Wrobleski thought that raining the chemical—which was under EPA review at the time—all over Burmese hill tribes was the best way to get rid of poppies. Incidentally, you may remember the Washington PR firm Jefferson Waterman International, which had ties with the State Law and Order Restoration Council when it became the State Peace and Development Council in ’97. That’s where Wrobleski went on to work, first as a lobbyist from ’91 to ’97, and then as the firm’s president.

The current dam projects, for example, are causing rampant displacement and abuse and environmental destruction. And Daewoo was the subject of a complaint that it condones human rights abuses around one of its gas projects, in violation of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development code it’s sworn to. Although, “less conscientious” is still sort of relative: In 1996, with the help of EarthRights International, fifteen villagers from Burma sued Unocal—now part of Chevron—for being party to government soldiers’ raping, murdering, torturing, and enslaving civilians, tens of thousands of whom were displaced, during the construction of the gas line. It was the first non-Holocaust international human rights case charging a corporation with complicity in foreign-government brutality that ended in a cash settlement. (Though the actual amount was confidential, it was, according to one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers, “more money than these people will ever know what to do with.”)

“To all town and village
thugyees
[leaders], heads of cavalry, heads of the Daings, shield bearers, heads of jails, heads of gold and silver revenues, mine workers, settlement officers, heads of forests, and to all royal subjects and inhabitants of the royal empire: Those heretics, the English
kalás
[barbarians], having most harshly made demands calculated to bring about the impairment and destruction of our religion, the violation of our national traditions and customs, and the degradation of our race, are making a show and preparation as if about to wage war with our State. They have been replied to in conformity with the usages of great nations, and in words which are just and regular. If, notwithstanding, these heretic
kalás
should come and in any way attempt to molest or disturb the State, his Majesty, who is watchful that the interests of our religion and our State shall not suffer, will himself march forth with his generals, captains, and lieutenants, with large forces of infantry, artillery, elephanterie, and cavalry, by land and by water, and with the might of his army will efface these heretic
kalás
and conquer and annex their country.”

In case you want some background info on this ethnic-group-to-watch—and trust me, you do: The Wa are former headhunters (official open season was March to April) who claim as their ancestors not, like most peoples, gods or majestic sea creatures or rainbows or whatever, but slimy tadpoles and ogres. In colonial times, one European visitor to this mountain-dwelling collection of tribes said that they were so dirty that the only thing that kept them from getting dirtier was that more dirt couldn’t stick to how much dirt was already on their bodies. They were naked. They were pretty much the closest existing things on earth to actual bogeymen, and the British were terrified of them and left them largely alone, as the Wa couldn’t guarantee they wouldn’t kill white people who wandered into their territory, their towheads being quite the catch on the headhunting scene. In the late ’60s, they were enlisted by China and the Communist Party of Burma to help wrest a bunch of Burmese territory from our old buddies the KMT. With these fierce warriors on their side, the commies took and held thousands of square miles—all the way until 1989. Now the Wa just have the biggest nonstate army in Burma, which they fund by running probably the biggest drug army in the world, a commander of which is wanted by the US government for druglording. So if you want to collect $2 million from the State Department, find out where Wei Hsueh-kang is.

Not to be entirely outdone by Afghanistan, in 2007 Burma cultivated 29 percent more opium than it had the previous year. Since Burma is also one of the world’s largest amphetamine producers (which the State Department says could turn the Golden Triangle into the “Ice Triangle”) and the second-largest producer in East and Southeast Asia of a key raw material in ecstasy—which, unbeknownst to most people, comes from Southeast Asian trees—the regime was recently honored by the United States as one of only three governments in the world that “‘failed demonstrably’ to meet its international counternarcotics obligations.”

Though most papers weren’t allowed to run President Barack Obama’s inauguration speech. One that was couldn’t put it on the front page and had to cut some of it, like this part: “To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”

“I speak Sgaw Karen, Pwo Karen,” Eh Soe said to me once, counting the languages on his fingers, “Burmese, English, Thai. . . . How many languages do you speak?” When I said one, plus a little French, he shook his head sadly and said, “Oh, you are very stupid.”

Also into proverbs: FBR’s Dave. As he once told an assembly of ethnic leaders from Burma, “One small dog cannot fight a tiger. But many dogs can do something.” He also has a knack for metaphor, once comparing Burma to
The Lord of the Rings
: “Mordor is the SPDC, and guys like us are hobbits. We’re just little guys trying to do some good. On the surface it seems like Mordor has all the strength and power and might. But if our fellowship of hobbits stays united, good will defeat evil in the end.”

This is particularly true as far as electricity is concerned, as Burmese say their country is the blackout capital of the region. Even in Rangoon, residents often get only a few hours of electricity a day. Outside the old capital, some cities don’t receive any state electricity at all, but buy it from private companies for reportedly more than ten times government prices, and still only for a few hours a day. The only place in the country that receives reliable round-the-clock power is the crazy new deserted capital in the middle of nowhere, which even boasts a zoo, and with a climate-controlled penguin habitat.

This sort of country-crossing was what kept regional malaria workers on their toes. These days, the hardworking staff of the Shoklo Malaria Research Unit—the ones who determined that transmission happens in the early evening—annually treats thirty to forty
thousand
cases of malaria in the political badlands of the Thai-Burma border, plus NGOs treating half that again inside the camps, those cases mostly due to back-and-forth like Eh Kaw’s. On an annual budget of $2 million, SMRU keeps the transmission Burma breeds and does nothing to combat way down, preventing the epidemic from spreading. And it’s a good thing, because this malaria is the most drug-resistant malaria in the world. And because this is where malaria comes from: Genetic testing has shown that a resistant strain plaguing Africa was carried there from here, and has gradually spread across the entire continent.

And I would remember that poignantly, dreadfully, oh yes I would, after I got back to the States and a hard fever brought me shaking and tearing my clothes off and pressing my chest to my bathroom floor, against cold winter tile, intermittently vomiting and hallucinating and hoping it wasn’t long-incubated cerebral malaria so that I would wake up alive.

Dr. Cynthia Maung, a rumored 2005 Nobel Peace Prize nominee, fled to Thailand after the ’88 demonstrations, carrying a stethoscope, traveling at night to avoid capture, setting up a wood-scrap safe house for student activists in Mae Sot. Karen leaders soon started sending their sick there. Now, twenty years later, she and her clinic treat more than ninety thousand cases a year, half migrants and refugees, half people who’ve just come all the way over from Burma to go to the doctor because the health care there sucks so bad. The clinic is a somewhat haphazard collection of buildings and hospital beds operating illegally and at the beneficence of the Thai government, swarming with gunshot victims and the malaria-stricken and women recovering from $4 Burmese back-alley abortions. I visited there once. There was a girl hobbling around on two prosthetic legs; she’d stepped on a land mine on her flight out of Burma with her boyfriend and had been hanging around the clinic for years. There were Western doctors come to assist for a while during their vacations. Also, there were cartoony public-service posters depicting AIDS as a menacing-looking purple monster and a strapping, personified condom with arms and eyes punching it in the face.

The greater likelihood of the educated and English-proficient to successfully complete the application process also causes serious brain drain in the Karen’s Asia-based population. Keeping camp schools staffed with qualified teachers is difficult, since 11 percent had already left by 2008, and an additional 65 percent said they were considering following them.

For a while, DHS agents were flying back and forth between Bangkok and Mae Sot to avoid the eight-hour, $8 bus—a matter of no small derision in Mae Sot’s rough-and-tumble and cash-strapped NGO community.

This, also, was a matter of no small derision among NGO workers.

Eh Soe’s potbelly was getting to him that day. He’d told me at breakfast that he was on a diet. “I’d like to reduce my weight,” he’d said. “I eat only few. And I will not drink any more beer.” He’d mistaken the disbelief on my face for disappointment. “Except for your party.” As an additional part of his new weight-loss regimen, and because, he told me, he was afraid that being inactive would cause him to get diseases, he also went and played soccer that night with Htoo Moo. I was sitting at the table on the front porch when they returned. “How was it?” I asked, and Eh Soe shook his head brusquely. He had mud on his shoes, whereas Htoo Moo was covered in it from waist to toe, his legs coated like an elephant’s. “That is a very terrible place,” Eh Soe said while Htoo Moo, disgusted, shook his head at what a pussy he was.

The UNHCR and Committee for Coordination of Services to Displaced Persons in Thailand report that the refugees’ endless boredom and confinement breed drug and alcohol addiction, as well as violent crime. DARE has some eighty employees trying to handle the drug problem in the camps, but unfortunately, no real legal body is responsible for the stateless camp dwellers, so KNU members can serve as de facto law. Sexual and gender-based violence generally go unpunished. The leaders are allegedly unfair to the very small minority of other minorities—Shan, Mon, for example—and Burmans in the camps. The UNHCR charges that in extreme cases the rebels have punished individuals by dragging them back into Burma and executing them. For the most part, Thai authorities don’t get involved, but when they do, it can be just more bad news: Thirty percent of assaults on refugees in camp are perpetrated by Thai security guards.

This, for the record, is true.

The KNU claims, and Walt corroborated, that it doesn’t recruit child soldiers—anymore. But back then, at least, if a kid wanted to take up arms and fight after he’d, say, seen his mom raped, he certainly wasn’t turned away, and there have additionally been rare reports in the past of children pressed into KNU service. (The Burma army, by contrast, was estimated to have
seventy thousand
child soldiers in 2002. Many of them, like the one Htoo Moo interviewed who’d been picked up at a bus stop, are conscripted.)

“Wait a minute,” Abby, who was sitting nearby when Walt told me this story on the front porch one day, had interrupted. “You know those crazy brothers?” “Yes, I know them,” Walt had said. “I stayed with them. I worshipped with them morning and night.” The crazy brothers were Luther and Johnny Htoo, tough, barefoot, lice-ridden, illiterate nine-year-old Karen twins who smoked a lot and were rumored to be magical and bullet-proof. The pair, fundamentalist Christians, started commanding the Soldiers of the Holy Mountain—“God’s Army” was a media construct—in 1997, when they led a victorious battle against the Burma army, supposedly at the behest of the Lord’s coming to them in a vision. They made huge news in 2000 when a group of their soldiers reportedly stormed a hospital in Thailand and took several hundred hostages before being slain by Thai commandos. Except that that was a media misstatement, also, as the attack was actually led by a (Burman) fringe group of the All Burma Students Democratic Front. But that was all later, anyway, after Walt left them.

Luther and Johnny Htoo ultimately gave up their arms as well and settled in Thailand, where they enjoyed playing guitar.

Although the British colonialists mocked the Burmans for also being submissive to women, they were, on paper, at least, not so much so. According to the
Attasankhepa Vannaná Dammathát
, or Institutes of Burmese Law, of 1882, “Of the three kinds of wives that may be put away”—wife like a murderess (?), wife like a thief, and wife like a master—“and the four kinds of wives that may be cherished”—wife like a sister, wife like a mother, wife like a slave, and wife like a friend—“the one that is like a slave is the most excellent.” Further, wives who were not good wives “may be corrected by beating or abusing them within the hearing of the public.”