The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (58 page)

There was no bread, but there was also little circus. For a brief and shining moment Burma had dominated Asian soccer, and from 1965 to 1973 it had won the biennial Southeast Asian Games an unprecedented five times and the Asian Games twice, in 1966 and 1970. But then the decline set in, and by the late 1970s there wasn’t even much of a sports team, in any field, to cheer on. Then a big change happened: television and videos.

Television was first introduced in 1979 to a population starved for entertainment. The cinema had always been popular, but for a long time very few Western films were being shown, for financial reasons as much as anything else. One exception was James Bond, who always packed them in, and a generation of young Rangoonites were at least able to make the transition from Sean Connery to Roger Moore in step with the rest of the world. But now there was TV as well. There was only one channel, and this channel offered a mix of tightly controlled news, staid Burmese music performances, and old local films. It was on the air only a few hours a day but ushered in a quiet revolution in expectations. First, it did broadcast, usually in the early evenings, an episode of some American television series, and for a while
The Love Boat
captivated Burmese audiences, showing people an admittedly strange and warped but still not an entirely inaccurate vision of rich and prosperous life in the West.

Then there was the arrival by the early 1980s of videocassette recorders (VCRs) and bootleg videotapes smuggled over the Tenasserim hills from Thailand. I remember in the mid-1980s (when I often spent the summer holidays in Rangoon) visiting the corner video shop, usually a little wooden hut where the selection was decent (especially if one’s tastes tended toward B movie action thrillers with lots of blood and gore). It wasn’t just in Rangoon. Though the relatively well-to-do had televisions and VCRs in their homes, others even in up-country towns could still watch films at tea shops. All in all, a sizable section of the population was seeing for the first time and in living color what they were missing under their nativist and puritanical regime.

THE KACHIN HILLS

In the cold weather of 1991–92 I traveled across western Yunnan, first from Dali southeast to the old Burma Road crossing at Shweli and then north by truck along the valley of the Salween River and into the Kachin hills. It was an illegal trip. At that time foreigners were not allowed in that part of Yunnan, and I was guided all along the way by representatives of the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), the political wing of the rebel Kachin Independence Army. We crossed some of the most spectacular scenery in the world, a landscape of rolling green hills, empty except for a few small villages and ponies munching on the fresh grass, interspersed by deep gorges and towering snow-covered mountains. Three of the world’s great rivers—the Yangtze, the Mekong, and the Brahmaputra—come within a hundred miles of one another here, in nearly parallel lines, before setting off for thousands more miles in different ways and meeting the sea at Shanghai, Saigon, and Calcutta. The area had once been the heartland of the ninth-century Nanzhao Empire and was the home of the Burmese language. Today much of the hills, on both sides of the border, were the home of the Kachins, a mix of different peoples, with distinct cultures but speaking languages kindred to Burmese and Tibetan.

The Kachins, who had been in rebellion for the better part of a quarter century, would continue the fight for a few more years until agreeing to a cease-fire with Rangoon in 1994. Their headquarters were at Pajau, a sprawling army base of bamboo and thatch huts, nestled along the largely denuded mountains and looking a little like a cross between
M*A*S*H
and
Gilligan’s Island
. It wasn’t a guerrilla war. After having taken control of a vast arc of highlands, but never being able to capture and hold the major lowland towns, the Kachins settled into a defensive position, administering their territories and keeping Rangoon’s forces at bay. The cost had been enormous: thousands killed, villages razed, and tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people displaced from their homes, out of a total Kachin population of well under a million.

Almost everyone wore an army green Chinese overcoat, and I had bought the smartest one I could find at a market in southwestern Yunnan along the way. Though the days were sunny with temperatures in the fifties and a brilliant blue sky overhead, by late evening it was biting
cold, well below freezing. Sleeping in a thatch hut like everyone else (I had the clean and spacious “guest hut”), I had to decide whether to keep a small fire going and have a smoky room or instead wake up in a very frosty bed. Early on, Kachin officials had tried to impress on me their commitment to ending opium cultivation in their area, saying that they were encouraging their farmers to grow potatoes instead. It was to impress this point that they served up a big dish of French fries and, finding that I liked them, served French fries for almost every meal.

It didn’t really feel like a war zone. Pajau in those days seemed quite settled, even though the front lines were only twenty or so miles away. It was all very orderly, with huts for various parts of the Kachin Independence Organization and even a special hut where shortwave radio broadcasts of the BBC, Voice of America, and All-India Radio were regularly monitored. There were little children everywhere in brightly colored knits and padded jackets, as well as a kindergarten and school, and all this was built very neatly along the slope of a great mountain, with China to one side and the headwaters of the Irrawaddy somewhere down below.

I spoke to some of the new recruits, young men in their late teens and early twenties who had volunteered straight out of high school in Myitkyina and Bhamo, both government-held towns. In asking them why they had joined, I had thought they might respond with words of Kachin nationalism, but instead they all gave me a reasoned and sad commentary about what they saw as their lowly place in the world and their desire to improve the basic lot of their people. They criticized the education system they had grown up with, the health care system, and even sanitation in their hometowns, comparing it with what they saw as global standards and saying that they were fighting for equal rights and a better life for the Kachins more than anything else.

I was there over Christmas, and the Kachins were all Christians, a mix of Baptists, Anglicans, and Roman Catholics. In a fairly novel explanation, one of my hosts told me that earlier in the century, his ancestors, believing that to be modern, they needed to trade in their traditional animism for either Christianity or Buddhism, chose Christianity because, being avid hunters, they “enjoyed killing animals.” They invited me to a big Christmas feast and a play, in the Jingpaw language of most Kachins, with the plump uniformed officer in the seat next to me translating matter-of-factly as if I had never heard the story
before (“the woman will have a baby … they are now in a new town and have to sleep in a manger …”). There was also quite a lot of caroling, with the local choir going from hut to hut and ending each song with an energetic “Merry Christmas!”

Some of the caroling was done by a small group of ethnic Burmese university students, most from Mandalay, who had fled to Pajau following the end of the uprising in 1988. Some were eager to return home; others were determined to train as soldiers and take up some sort of armed fight against the military government. But with their Christmas cheer they didn’t seem quite the hardened revolutionaries they wanted to be. They followed with enthusiasm the recent news that Aung San Suu Kyi had won the Nobel Peace Prize, though more than one exstudent, in talking about the award, kept referring to it as the Oscar, the other, perhaps better-known prize, even at the edge of the Kachin hills.

*

By 1988 a somewhat better economy, a rising level of foreign aid, and a generally more relaxed government mood had fed a sense of growing expectations. Many exiles, including U Nu, had returned, and many other political opponents were released from prison. And Ne Win himself was getting old. Surely things would change soon, people thought. The desire, first and foremost in those days, was for a return to normalcy, a reintegration of the country with the world. Then Ne Win gave his speech calling for a return to democracy, and thousands took to the streets, demanding an end to military rule. And in the distant hills, an equally profound shift in Burmese politics was taking shape. 

Notes – 12: THE TIGER’S TAIL

1
. On the Socialist period, see David Steinberg,
Burma: A Socialist Nation of Southeast Asia
(Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1982); Robert H. Taylor,
The State in Burma
(London: C. Hurst & Co., 1987).

2
. On Ne Win, see Maung Maung,
Burma and General Ne Win
(London: Asia Publishing House, 1969). On the Ne Win period generally, see Silverstein,
Burma: Military Rule and the Politics of Stagnation;
David Steinberg,
Burma’s Road Toward
Development: Growth and Ideology Under Military Rule
(Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1981); Robert H. Taylor,
The State in Burma
(London: C. Hurst & Co., 1987).

3
. For a personal story of expulsion, see the memoirs of the former Pegu commissioner Balwant Singh,
Burma’s Democratic Decade 1952–62: Prelude to Dictatorship
(Tempe, Ariz.: Arizona State University Program for Southeast Asian Studies Monograph Series Press, 2001). See also Mira Kamdar,
Motiba’s Tattoos
(New York: PublicAffairs, 2000).

4
. On the civil war in the Ne Win years, I have drawn largely on Bertil Lintner,
The Rise and Fall of the Communist Party of Burma (CPB)
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1990); Lintner,
Burma in Revolt;
and Martin Smith,
Burma: Insurgency and the Politics of Ethnicity
(London: Zed Books, 1991).

5
.
Chiefs and Leading Families of the Shan States and Karenni
, 2nd ed. (Rangoon: Govt. of Burma, 1919); Jackie Yang Li,
The House of Yang, Guardians of an Unknown Frontier
(Sydney: Bookpress, 1997). On the Yang family genealogy, see Christopher Buyers’s Yang Dynasty page at www.4dw.net/royalark/Burma/kokang2.htm.

6
. Oral history interview with Henry Byroade, Potomac, Maryland, 19 and 21 September 1988, by M. Johnson, Truman Library.

7
. “Grinding to a Halt,”
Time
, 24 December 1965.

8
. Lee Kuan Yew,
From
Third
World to First: The Singapore Story, 1965–2000
(New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 321. 

9
. “The 200% Neutral,”
Time
, 16 September 1966.

10
. Recounted in oral history interview with Henry Byroade.

11
. Lintner,
Burma in Revolt
, 201–209; Smith,
Burma: Insurgency and the Politics of Ethnicity
, 219–46.

12
. Lintner,
Burma in Revolt
, 211–34.

13
. Ibid., 209–10.

THIRTEEN

PALIMPSEST

L
uther and Johnny Htoo were the illiterate and lice-ridden twelve-year-old twin warlords of the self-styled “God’s Army,” a nominally Christian force of perhaps two hundred Karen hill tribesmen nestled along the Burma-Thailand border. Together they lived in a bamboo and grass-thatched village at Kersay Doh (“God’s Mountain”) in the malarial rain forests of the Dawna Range, about a day’s drive along the motorway from Bangkok and a world away from twenty-first-century civilization. There was no running water or electricity on God’s Mountain, and their followers worshiped the not quite teenage militants as messiahs. Then, one day in early 2000, ten of their fighters left the bush and took hostage over five hundred doctors, nurses, and patients at the provincial Ratchaburi General Hospital in Thailand. Their apparent aim was to protest a recent shelling of their village by the Thai Army. Outraged and determined to look tough, the Thai government quickly ordered its commandos to storm the hospital. The medical workers were soon freed, and the ten soldiers of the little messiahs were gunned down or executed.
¹