The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (59 page)

Three years before, when Karen outposts were being overrun by the Burmese army, this small band of guerrillas, mainly teenagers, had managed to fight their way out of a Burmese encirclement. According to local lore, the cheroot-smoking twins had inspired them to stand and fight, and an army of spirits had joined the battle. From then on, their following grew, and the group broke off from the main Karen force with Luther and Johnny in charge. Some said that the twins were invulnerable
to bullets and that they were able to step on land mines without fear. The twins laid down the law in their village: no pork, eggs, or alcohol. But in some ways they were still children, playing with dogs and cats and climbing trees. A shadowy dwarf known only as Mr. David became their chief adviser, and he was said to wield considerable influence behind the scenes. They claimed to be Baptists, and guests at the Kersay Doh Christmas feast in 1998 were treated to a giant lizard, monkey, and deer, as well as a selection of wild vegetables. There was singing and dancing all night.

But after the hospital takeover, the pressure on God’s Army was stepped up, and eventually Johnny and Luther decided to lay down their assault weapons and surrender to the Thai Army. In Thailand they found a new life. Luther soon fell in love and married an older woman (she’s nineteen) and is now a father. Both he and Johnny also learned to play the guitar, and playing the guitar has become their passion. They say they are still committed to a better life for the Karen people. But what they now hope for most is a music scholarship.

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For many people outside the country the Burmese civil war, to the extent they have heard of it at all, remains confusingly and hopelessly exotic, with passing images of opium merchants and child soldiers and Vietnam-like jungles, a war without a clear beginning or end, a natural part of a faraway corner, and a sideshow to the more understandable duel between Aung San Suu Kyi and the military junta. The story of Johnny and Luther Htoo was virtually the only story about the fighting in Burma that has been covered in the international press over the past several years, underlining an impression that whatever armed conflict there may be in that country, it is of a different and perhaps less serious kind than, say, the wars in Afghanistan or the heart of Africa. Some may have heard of the Karen rebels, helped by the proximity of that longstanding rebellion to the air-conditioned comforts of Bangkok and the small industry of largely Western aid workers who for years have helped Karen refugees along the border. But it is not that the rest of the civil war went away. Instead, because of a strange turn, barely reported and away from the television cameras, nearly all the guns have at least temporarily gone quiet and the longest-running armed conflict in the world has come tantalizingly close to ending.

In March 1989, way up in the blue green Kokang mountains, where early-spring mornings are still cold and frost covers the ground, ethnic Chinese soldiers under their commander, Pheung Kya-shin, openly challenged the leadership of the Communist Party of Burma. Since the late sixties the Communists had been in control of Kokang, and Pheung’s men were part of the multiethnic Communist army. Their timing had been right. Within days the revolt spread quickly to the other Communist bases strung along the thickly forested hills, and one by one, Communist army units overthrew the party that they had been set up to serve. On 16 April mutineers from the Twelfth Brigade stormed the headquarters at Pangsang, smashing portraits of Marx, Engels, and Lenin and seizing arms and ammunition. The aging party officials, who had for a lifetime dreamed of a tropical proletarian paradise, now sped off into Yunnan and into the dustbin of history. The Burmese Communist insurgency, almost exactly four decades old, suddenly collapsed, defeated in the end not by special American weaponry or shrewd Burmese army tactics but by the weariness of the local people, who had for so long been carrying the burden of the leftist struggle.
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For ten years Deng Xiaoping had kept open China’s doors to the outside world, improving relations to the West and setting the stage for unprecedented economic growth. China would soon end its support to the Khmer Rouge and had already worked to strengthen ties with Ne Win. But the septuagenarian Marxist intellectuals from Rangoon had showed no signs of wanting to give up the people’s war and remained as keen as ever on using local villagers as cannon fodder for a revolution that would never happen. Now the local villagers were finally free of the party masters, but they were still armed to the teeth. The question for the mutineers was: What next?

Few, if any, of the mutineers were Burmese in the sense of being from the Burmese-speaking Buddhist majority. Several of the officers were ethnic Chinese, either from across the border or from Kokang, including more than a few former Red Guards from the days of the Cultural Revolution. The vast majority were Was, the little-known but fairly numerous hill people of the region. It was these Was who had died in droves time and again in Maoist-style wave attacks against Burmese
army positions. They were dirt poor, but at least now they could protect their own interests. In the weeks that followed, the Communist force quickly and fairly amicably broke up along ethnic lines, and the new United Wa State Army became the main successor army of the once-feared Communist force.

The heartland of the Wa people is an awe-inspiring series of north-south mountain ranges that drop down steep slopes into valleys four or five thousand feet below. There are about seven hundred thousand Was in Burma and another three hundred thousand in China, and many live in this compact area, stretching about a hundred miles along the wild Salween River and about fifty miles east toward the Mekong. Their little villages are often set along the sides of these mountains and were once considered impregnable, with earthen ramparts surrounding them and the only entrances through long tunnels. Until the first American Baptist missionaries arrived a hundred years ago and converted some to Christianity, the Was were almost all animist. They claimed to have been an indigenous people, present in the Wa hills since the beginning of time and to have evolved from tadpoles on a mysterious mountain lake.
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But their main reputation was as headhunters.

Outside every village, there is a grove of trees, usually stretching along the ridge. It is usually fairly broad and is made up of huge trees, with heavy undergrowth, strips of the forest which, years and years ago, covered the whole country. From a distance it looks like an avenue, sometimes little over one hundred yards long, sometimes stretching for long distances from village to village. This is the avenue of skulls …
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The early British officials who reached this area said that many villages had dozens of heads set along rows of wooden posts but that some had hundreds of skulls in varying states of preservation. They were safeguards against evil spirits, and the idea was that the ghost of the dead man would protect the area, not because of any concern for the villagers but because of a dislike of any vagrant spirits entering his patch. The Burmese and Shans claimed that the Was were cannibals as well, but the Was themselves denied this, saying that a good skull or two would ensure all the maize and dog and good liquor (strong rice wine) they needed to be happy. Dog was a big part of the Wa table.

They also had a particular attraction for unusual heads and for the
heads of eminent people, and though they were following what one colonial observer described as an “eclectic and dilettante” style of head-hunting, there were certain rules, with the legitimate head-hunting season opening in March and lasting through the last week in April. As late as the 1930s (and perhaps much later) the Was remained true to their tradition, and in the 1930s a touring Sikh physician, resplendent in beard and turban, became too mouthwatering a prize and had to be escorted out of the area under heavy guard. Their reputation was not helped by their dress, which in hot weather consisted of nothing at all, for both men and women.
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In 1989 it was these tough and self-reliant men who inherited the main part of the Communist military machine, armed to the teeth with fairly up-to-date Chinese weapons, peering out from behind their mountain strongholds and wondering who their friends and who their enemies would be.

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An obvious choice for the Was and the other ex-Communist fighters would have been to team up with the existing ethnic insurgencies and present, for the very first time, a united front against Rangoon. The Kachin insurgency in the hills just to the north was still going strong, as were a variety of ethnic insurgencies farther south. In the early weeks after the mutiny, some talks did take place with representatives of the Karen National Union and other groups along the Thai border. But the Burmese army was quick to step in and fill the breach. Rangoon realized what was at stake. Either it could neutralize its longtime battlefield foes once and for all, or it could see the ex-Communist army mutate into an even graver threat, this time in league with all the various ethnic-based armies. It had only been months since the 1988 uprising, and an even more threatening possibility (to the Burmese military) was that all these groups would in turn ally themselves with the prodemocracy movement in the cities. A deal would have to be struck.

That the Burmese army was willing to negotiate under these conditions was perhaps not surprising but was unprecedented nevertheless. Its policy had always been to seek a military solution. But with a democracy movement still simmering in the cities and an ethnic insurgency that still carried some punch, an important strategic decision was made. By negotiating an armistice with the ex-Communist soldiers,
the Burmese army would be free to focus its attention elsewhere. An end to nearly half a century of civil war was suddenly in sight.

And so during the autumn of 1989 a trio of unlikely visitors made their way to Pangsang to make friends with their former enemies. The old militia leader Lo Hsing-Han was dusted off and sent to talk to the insurgents, and he was followed by both the aging warlady Olive Yang and former Brigadier General Aung Gyi, a leader in the just-crushed uprising and an erstwhile colleague of Aung San Suu Kyi’s. But the man who designed and cemented the deal was the intelligence czar Khin Nyunt. Flying by helicopter to the secluded mountain base, he invited Wa leaders to a meeting with the top brass of the Burmese military. The offer was accepted, and at the meeting Rangoon promised a development scheme with roads and bridges and schools as well as food and other aid to this poorest part of a very poor country. More important, the Was would be allowed to keep their weapons and would enjoy de facto autonomy in the area they controlled, pending a final peace agreement. They would also be allowed, even encouraged, to do what they and many other insurgents in the area had long been doing, which was profit from the opium trade, only now they would be able to use government roads and invest their proceeds in a soon-to-be-freed-up economy. The Wa chiefs and other former Communist officers were feted in the official press as great leaders of “the national races.”

Between March 1989 and the end of 1990, General Khin Nyunt reached cease-fire agreements with the leaders of all the successor armies to the Communist Party. The Kokang Chinese formed the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army to rule their highland fastness. Along the opium-rich middle reaches of the Mekong in what had been the Communist 815 War Zone a new National Democracy Alliance Army was set up by former Cultural Revolution Red Guards. And the most important of all was the United Wa State Army, headquartered in the former Communist base at Pangsang, ambitious and twenty thousand strong.

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The new alphabet soup of militia lost no time in making money from the main moneymaking business in eastern Burma, narcotic drugs. The Communists had allowed growing and trading in opium as assistance from Peking dried up, and a local tax on opium helped keep the coffers reasonably full. But now it was time to make big bucks, and the Was
and others moved up the production ladder and into heroin, setting up twenty-three refineries in the Kokang area alone between 1989 and 1991. The old Yang clan jumped into the game as well, and it was only the personal intervention of Khin Nyunt in 1992 that stopped a small war from breaking out between the Yangs and their rivals.

In the Wa country, heroin dealing was mainly in the hands of ethnic Chinese, some tied to the remnants of the old Chinese Nationalist forces in or near Thailand. By the early 1990s the Was were building refineries for themselves. More recently, opium production has waned considerably, and they have diversified into methamphetamines, flooding the Thai market with millions of pills of what the Thais call
yaba
, the crazy drug.