IN THE
late summer of 1948, Karen police stopped helping the government keep the peace and started attacking government stations after Burmese paramilitary police assaulted one of the headquarters of the Karenni, an ethnic cousin to the Karen. On Christmas Eve, Burmese soldiers killed dozens of Karen in church and hundreds of others in surrounding villages, and weeks later a Karen village was attacked by Burmese military police, who killed 150 civilians. The armed wing of the Karen National Union stormed the Burmese treasury. Led by Major General Ne Win, a Burmese army battalion burned down an American Baptist mission school for Karen. On January 30, Karen settlements in Rangoon were shelled with machine guns and mortars.
On January 31, 1949, Karen and Burmese fighters battled in the streets just outside Rangoon. Karen forces set up a siege from the suburb of Insein and came within four miles of the capital. The country had been independent for barely a year, and several other insurgent groups were already at war with the government. Now the KNU was
officially at war, too. Karen Lieutenant General (Mr.) Smith (Goes to Washington) Dun was replaced with Ne Win as commander in chief of the Burma army, while Karen villagers were mobbed. The three Karen battalions that made up a third of the Burma army revolted, turning their British training and leftover British weapons on the government. They took Mandalay with the help of Kachin soldiers. They took Toungoo and Henzada. They might have taken the capital—and the government—if they’d really gone for it. They didn’t, though, not hard or fast enough.
Hundreds were killed in the siege from Insein, which lasted 112 days. It was a disorganized smattering of battles. Rangoon movie theaters still ran several shows a day, civilians could pay a couple of rupees to take a tour bus to the front line and shoot at Karen fighters, and neither the Karen nor the Burmese won any decisive victories. Instead, they began a lifetime of war, the same war that led Ta Mla to enlist as a KNU soldier in 2000, that brought Ta Mla and me together in the Mae Sot house, a war older than the both of us combined. “Ba U Gyi was no terrorist,” the former British governor of Burma had told the
Times
of London back in those beginning days. “I, for one, cannot picture him enjoying the miseries and hardships of a rebellion. There must have been some deep impelling reason for his continued resistance.”
However complicated the history and politics of it, though, and whether or not the Karen were erstwhile allies and all-around stand-up guys, United States law put my country and my new roommate on opposing sides of the fight. Burma’s government, after all, was internationally recognized, a member of the United Nations. And that landed the Karen National Union, which was waging an insurgency against that government, squarely inside the United States Department of State’s designation of third-tier terrorists.
There are lists, of course, of groups that are specifically designated as terrorist organizations. The KNU wasn’t on them. But the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 added another, very inclusive dimension
of terrorism, the third tier, to the lawbooks, classifying as terrorist “an organization that is a group of two or more individuals, whether organized or not, which engages in” any terrorist activity. Which includes, per clause (iii) of section 1182 of Title 8 of the US Code, even “the use of any . . . explosive, firearm, or other weapon or dangerous device (other than for mere personal monetary gain
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), with intent to endanger, directly or indirectly, the safety of one or more individuals or to cause substantial damage to property.” Which certainly includes the KNU.
The title of section 1182 of Title 8 is “Inadmissible aliens.” Also banned from the United States at the time, besides Ta Mla: Htan Dah. Though he’d never been a soldier himself, his dad was in the KNU, and spouses and children of any person who has engaged in terrorist activity are specifically barred from the States in the PATRIOT Act,
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too, terrorists by association. And even if his dad hadn’t been in the KNU, Htan Dah still couldn’t have immigrated to America, having engaged in so much terrorist activity himself.
Under US immigration law, one has “engaged in terrorist activity” if one “commits an act that the actor knows, or reasonably should know, affords material support” to someone doing something terroristy or in a terrorist organization—like Htan Dah’s dad, and Ta Mla, and a hundred other people Htan Dah knows. “Support” includes activities as specific and potentially dangerous as providing weapons or explosives, as well as vaguer and less insidious exertions, such as providing “service” and shelter and “intangible” property. Htan Dan had assisted, tangibly and intangibly, I guess, with food or motorbike rides or moral support, plenty of KNU soldiers in his
life, so the possibility of his entry into America was out. And even if Htan Dah hadn’t given his support generously and willingly—which he had—there’s no amount of support too minimal to be considered material support, and there are no exceptions even for people who’ve provided said support under duress. (For example, a Sri Lankan fisherman who fled to the States after being kidnapped by the Tamil Tigers in 2004 was instantly detained upon his arrival for having provided the group material support—money for his own ransom.) To win exemption from the automatic inadmissibility of providing material support requires proving with “clear and convincing evidence” that, whether you provided the support willingly or at gunpoint or what, you had no way of knowing that the people you helped, or who were making you help them, were terrorists.
With all those laws in place, and with The Blay’s and Htoo Moo’s and Htan Dah’s dads all in the KNU, and BA sometimes collaborating with the guerrilla organization, not one of my coworkers was legally allowed into my country. And two laws passed after the original 1990 material-support law—one in 1994 and another in 1996, after the first World Trade Center and Oklahoma City bombings, respectively—
criminalize
material support, so that if Htan Dah, much less Ta Mla, had found his way to America, he could have been immediately jailed.
So, among the other possibilities not open to Ta Mla after his father’s death, in addition to safely growing enough food to feed himself, getting a job, going to college, traveling legally outside his home country, traveling without threat of harm or death inside his home country, or living anywhere but in an active war zone or a refugee camp: applying for asylum in the United States.
When Ta Mla enlisted, he knew he’d be in boot camp for a year: six months of theory, six months of practical. For three weeks, he waited at a KNU headquarters in Burma for the rest of the recruits to be collected. The guerrillas needed to get to Shan State, to the north, for training. But since they have a far more cordial relationship
with the Thais than the Burmese, they were loaded into vans and driven east over the border, back into Thailand, so they could do the bulk of their traveling there before recrossing. More cordial, but, as we know, not
that
cordial: Thai police officers stopped the enlistees and wouldn’t let them through. The class went back to Karen State to start training, but Ta Mla had by then had time to reconsider his decision. He wasn’t looking for a physical fight, and he wanted to finally get a high school education, which he could obtain in camp. After several weeks, he went back to Thailand, leaving the other new soldiers to their preparations for war.
V.
FOR TERRORISTS,
even from the nebulous third tier, these guys had really, really boring meetings. Every Friday morning, all the staff got together at Office One to discuss the progress they’d made on their projects, any prospective projects, ideal future improvements, standard organizational housekeeping. Htan Dah had asked when I’d woken up if I wanted to attend, as the meeting took place early enough for me to still make it to my ten o’clock class. I’d agreed, groggily; though I was going to bed by nine, I was having trouble dragging myself out from under my mosquito net every day. The shotgun stress of putting together and performing four quality hours of broken-English class a day was wearing on me. That, and the lack of protein in my diet. While I ate about every three hours in the States, my housemates observed only breakfast and dinner, and I hadn’t eaten any meat since I’d arrived nearly a week ago. I hardly ever ate meat back home, and when I did I had the luxury of being picky about it. Here, I almost exclusively ate rice. Here, I’d recently come upon Htan Dah in the kitchen, holding a piece of pork so gamy I could smell it from the doorway. He was standing in a big red puddle, and when I’d asked him if it was blood, he’d looked down at his flip-flops, submerged to his feet. “Yes,” he’d said, and narrowed his eyes at my fatuity. “From the pork.”
When the meeting started, I sat on the edge of the hushed living room filled with twenty or so guys and a couple of girls, all cross-legged and grave-faced on the floor. The Blay introduced me in English, though I’d met most everyone by now. He then announced that Htan Dah was formally responsible for me, so if I needed anything, that was whom I should ask, at which point Htan Dah gave me a nervous eyebrow raise, smile, and thumbs-up. Staffers said their piece in a monotonous Karen drone. Occasionally the group laughed quietly, all together, the contained, inauthentic laughter of the conference room. There were many periods of silence in which throats were cleared. One of the guys had offered to translate for me at the beginning of the meeting, but he wrote only eight of the nine hundred sentences spoken on a dry-erase board at the front of the room. His bullet points were hardly enough to retain my attention, so I occupied myself by reading a profile of a ladyboy movie star in the
Bangkok Post
.
Afterward, we settled down to breakfast, and I eyed the revolutionary pictured on Htan Dah’s chest; he was, apparently, the one whose turn it was to wear a Che shirt that day.
“Isn’t the idea to document the human rights violations in Burma, and walk all over the countryside preaching to the villagers about democracy, so you can fight the government peacefully?”
“Yes(!).”
“What’s with you guys and the Che shirts?”
“Because! He is revolutionary. We want also to be revolutionaries. He is good role model for us.”
“But you know that that revolution was violent.”
“Yes(!). I know it. But I would like to know more about Che, about his life. About . . . his struggle.”
Htoo Moo walked out of the bathroom and into the dining room/ garage, wet and half naked. The past couple of days, he’d seemed to stop toweling off and getting dressed for a while after his showers. It was possible he’d just become more comfortable with my presence,
but I had a suspicion that he’d caught me marveling at his butt. He stood now at the end of the table in nothing but a pair of little shorts, his hair dripping and pecs glistening. I paused, ready for a break or a new participant in the conversation, but he just propped one leg up on the bench where I was sitting and started picking up chunks of fried pork and popping them into his mouth.
I turned my attention back to Htan Dah. “Why don’t you wear Gandhi shirts?”
“They didn’t have any Gandhi shirts. Also, because Che is attractive.” He smiled at me radiantly. “I like his style.”
At dinner, after class, I told Htan Dah that I’d emailed home and asked someone to send a biography of Che Guevara to the BA post office box. He was excited. He seemed equally excited about the mention of my having friends I could contact in the United States.
“Do you have picture?” he asked. “Of your friend?”
I knew better than to travel anywhere, let alone remote destinations, without pictures of my friends and family, but here I was, photoless. I apologized, regretting my lazy packing, until I remembered that I could in fact show Htan Dah nearly everyone I knew. “Let’s go to the computer room,” I said.
Thus were several Karen refugee activists of Mae Sot, Thailand, bestowed with one of democracy’s greatest gifts: that of wasting exorbitant amounts of time on social networking websites. I logged in to MySpace, explaining to Htan Dah that it was a website where people could make pages about themselves that friends and strangers could look at. I clicked through some of my pals’ profiles, talking about who they were, or where they were or what they were doing in the pictures. Htoo Moo, who was working diligently at the next computer, glanced over as nonchalantly and infrequently as possible. Htan Dah said very little. Once, he asked me to clarify the gender of the girl I was pointing to on the screen. “Are you sure?” he asked. “She looks like a boy.” I laughed and told him that she was a lesbian, my ex-girlfriend, actually, which seemed to clear it up for him. Other
than that, he mostly just stared at the monitor in stunned silence, for so long that it actually started to weird me out.
“What do you think?” I asked him when I’d finished the tour.
“Wow,” he said quietly.
“So, those are my friends,” I said. He made no move to get up or take his eyes off the web page.
I asked him if he wanted to see how the website worked. I showed him the browse feature, dropping down the long list of countries whose citizens we could gawk at. “How about Myanmar?” he asked, spying the country in the options.
I was surprised it was there, and even more surprised that our first search turned up some three thousand profiles. The junta has some pretty awesome restrictions on owning electronics, especially computers. In 1996, Leo Nichols, honorary consul for Norway and Denmark and friend of Burmese activists, violated the Computer Science Development Law and was sentenced to three years’ hard labor for the illegal possession of fax machines
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(a sentence he never served: When he was taken into custody, he was denied medicine and tortured, and died). There are Internet cafés, but they get raided, like meth labs, cops rushing in and yelling at everyone to take their hands off the keyboards and then inspecting what’s up on the screens; the café workers are required to automatically capture customers’ screenshots every five minutes and submit their web histories, along with corresponding home addresses and phone numbers, to the state for scrutiny. The Committee to Protect Journalists ranks Burma the No.
1 worst country in the world to be a blogger, ahead of China and Egypt and Iran—prison sentences for them have been at least as high as twenty years. Humanitarian geeks in India and Germany, though, worked full time to keep Burma’s citizens in illegal international Internet access with proxy servers that update when the government figures out how to block them. From the looks of it, they were doing their job.