For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question (11 page)

They did indeed, he told me when he got back. He could hardly contain his awe of my powers of prediction.

As we ate breakfast, we made plans. I’d promised to take him into a city someday and to the movies, to which he’d never been, and he’d said he would take me to his camp, several hours’ drive southeast, to see pictures of his wedding. This was another reason he was keen on driving me to school: Though any motorbike trip was possibly dangerous for an undocumented runaway refugee, throwing a foreigner into the mix opened up the potential for even long drives. “No one bother me,” Htan Dah had said, “if I am with very beautiful white girl.”

Our meandering conversations and schemes helped occupy Htan Dah while he kept me company during breakfast and dinner. He’d continued to sit diligently at the table with me, though he always finished eating before I did, with his lightning-fast shoveling and chewing. That morning, as I ground every last bit of rice
into oblivion between my molars, he finally called me on it. As much as he enjoyed our chats, I was sure, his job as office manager, handling the books, the money, the cooking, hardly left him time for two-hour brunches.

“You are so slow,” he said, watching me chew. “Why don’t you eat fast?”

“Why should I?” I asked. “I’m not in a hurry.”

“But what if you are under attack, or have to run away?”

“Htan Dah, I’m from Ohio.”

“Yes, but I am refugee(!). We are taught to eat fast.”

Be that as it may, we were in peacetime Thailand, so this attack seemed like an incredibly hypothetical scenario, even though Htan Dah had mentioned something about refugee camps’ getting burned down on the very first day of class. But in all the times in my life I’d envisioned what it was like to live in a refugee camp, which had been approximately zero times, a camp being under attack and burned down wouldn’t have entered the picture. Since I’d been unable to imagine it, and since I’d gotten the sense that Htan Dah, with his copious exclamations, had a flair for the dramatic, I’d kind of dismissed it.

So boy, did I feel like an asshole when he turned in an essay with this intro for workshop on Tuesday:

THE KAREN
resistance had begun well armed—British occupation and World War II may have been fleeting, but weapons last a really long time—and though they had lost their chance at the capital, in the decades following independence, the KNU built the largest, richest, and most threatening insurrection in town. The rebels commanded
the passages to Thailand, taxing the teak and other smugglings flowing through the porous border. By the ’80s, the KNU claimed its annual income from border taxes and trade was in the tens of millions a year US, plenty to buy more guns and ammunition. Despite Four Cuts, huge pieces of what had always been Karen land in the area that even the government called Karen State were under KNU control, which infuriated the regime. Also, there was that whole bad-blood-from-being-on-opposite-sides-of-international-wars-for-more-than-a-century thing. And so in ’84 the Burma army, which had historically instigated only dry-season assaults, started fighting right through the rainy season.

Which brings us to a wee Htan Dah living in Thailand with his mother. For years, small groups of Karen had stayed in the neighboring country during offensives, running from Four Cuts but returning home when the fighting subsided. This time, the Tatmadaw was intent on cutting off the KNU’s black-market tradings and funding, and gaining control of the border area. It didn’t retreat when the monsoons came. Now that the refugees were in as much danger as combatants were year-round, it wasn’t safe for them to go home. In 1984, ten thousand refugees, including Htan Dah’s family, had set up more permanent camp on the Thai side of the Moei River. And the civil war roiled on. In fact, though it was nearly forty years old, it was escalating, and no one—not the government, not the rebels, not the villagers—predicted peace anytime soon. By 1994, the fugitives totaled eighty thousand.

For a while, the asylum seekers in Thailand were safe. Though they worked as illegal and terribly underpaid and underappreciated immigrants, if they could find work at all, at least whole battalions of Burmese soldiers were less likely to march into a sovereign country to attack them. But what the Burma army could do was arm and otherwise supply and aid a different Karen group to do so, if only a breakaway Karen group would form and start attacking other Karen. Which, sadly, is what happened.

According to Karen villagers, Burmese soldiers had for years been spreading discontent with the KNU among other Karen inside Burma. KNU leadership was largely Christian, and Karen villagers were largely Buddhist or animist, and the Burma army claimed that, as such, the Karen revolution would benefit only Christians. Further, if the KNU won, they would at least marginalize and possibly kill Buddhists. And it was true that, though they didn’t torture them, the KNU sometimes used villagers as porters. And it was true that the rebels often depended on the villagers’ food sources, and that the government had enacted Four Cuts in retaliation for KNU attacks and to stanch the group’s viability.

A monk started turning people within the KNU itself, and some of the KNU’s practices made that pretty easy. Several of its leaders were using the money the organization was still earning from border taxes and selling teak to build great big houses. Rumor had it that sympathetic overseas donors were sending chocolates and cigarettes, but the guys at the top were eating and smoking them all. A Christian commander didn’t allow some Buddhist soldiers to leave their posts to pray, and in swooped a monk of discontent. He preached to the Buddhist KNU soldiers that they shouldn’t fight alongside the KNU because they killed Burmese, who were Buddhist. He preached that he could get them weapons, and food, and indeed he could, since he was buddies with the junta.

Eventually, in 1994, several hundred soldiers defected. They called themselves the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army, or DKBA. They didn’t behave much like democrats or Buddhists, and they had a thing for killing Karen civilians. But they were most certainly an army. They passed out flyers telling the refugees in Thailand, many of whom were KNU sympathizers or soldiers or ex-soldiers or families of soldiers, to return home. Their warnings unheeded, they started attacking.

The huts at Huay Kaloke were cloaked in thick, warm Thai darkness when soldiers moved in on the seven thousand refugees living
in Htan Dah’s settlement in January 1997. Residents generally went to bed early; there was no electricity, and flammable materials cost money that nobody had. Htan Dah’s mother wanted to provide her kids with the opportunity to study at night if they needed to, and sometimes hired herself out as daily labor, plowing fields for about a dollar a day. That was less than half of what the legal Thai workers alongside her made, but she needed to buy candles—she wasn’t wild about her kids using homemade lamps, which were essentially tin cans filled with gas and set on fire—and nails, since that scavenged-bamboo-and-thatch hut wasn’t going to hold itself together. The small encampment had become overpopulated, so that there wasn’t even enough space to play soccer, and Htan Dah barely ever left it. But a Christian organization had donated some books, and NGOs were running a full school system now, and Htan Dah had exams the next day. He had stayed up past sundown, studying by candlelight, and had been asleep for hours by the time the sound of gunshots reached his family’s shelter. Some children somewhere screamed as he leaped off the floor along with his parents, sister, brother, and aunt. Though a short ladder provided access to the hut, they jumped through the front door, over it, and onto the ground. They ran, backs and knees bent, low to the dirt, for the surrounding woods as troops set fire to the camp. The bamboo and thatch huts went up like tinder, burning hot and fast. The members of Htan Dah’s family kept their mouths shut so they wouldn’t catch the attention of the troops, moving quickly and quietly among the chaos. Htan Dah kept his head down, so that he hardly registered the other people running alongside them, not even noticing that some of them were in their underwear. “Please, God,” he prayed. “Oh my God. Save me. Save my life,” over and over again. “Please, God. Oh my God.” It was a few days before his sixteenth birthday. He prayed and ran until he reached the forest, where, like everyone else, he stopped, turned around, and stood silently watching the camp—bedrooms, books, photos, shoes, a shirt woven by a grandmother—burn to the ground.

The next morning, the refugees returned to the smoldering plot. What had been a tightly packed village hours before now reminded Htan Dah of deserts he’d seen in pictures, only made of charcoal instead of sand. His family, like many others, had taken nothing when they fled. Thai authorities decided not to move the refugees from Huay Kaloke despite its clearly dangerous location just inside an unsecured border, so the residents made beds in the ash. They began slowly rebuilding, though they were afraid to continue living there. None had illusions that the Thai security posted at the front gate was there to protect them. To be sure, the refugees had long ago noted that the function of the guards was not so much keeping danger out as keeping the refugees in, collecting bribes from those who wanted to leave the camp to work or collect firewood or make a trip to the market. The assailing troops met no resistance on their way into Huay Kaloke that night. And no one stopped them less than fourteen months later when they drove vehicles full of soldiers in again.

“How do you know the Thai soldiers just let them drive right in through the front gate?” I interrupted Htan Dah as he was telling me this story in more detail later, on the reading bench in my room. That an army would allow a raiding foreign army unfettered access to seven thousand sleeping civilians—twice—was frankly a little far-fetched. The atrocities of the Karen crisis are so incredibly outlandish and untold that they often seemed to me, then, literally not credible. Even with my refugee pal, my partner in online-social-networking crime right in front of my face, I thought this story sounded a little conspiratorial and fantastic, maybe hearsay, the exaggerated gossip of victims trying to piece events together after the fact. I knew better than to find this nonintervention of people trying to kill their own people hard to believe. A lot of people in Thailand, of course, feel about Burma the way most of the world feels about, say, the entire continent of Africa. Still, I suggested, “Maybe the soldiers were trying to protect the gate, but the soldiers just went around or something.”

Htan Dah had told this story before, and to several foreigners, but
never to one rude enough to suggest that he was a liar. He cocked his head and paused. “Because,” he said, crinkling his eyebrows, taken aback because I distrusted him, and because his life had been such that he didn’t find this series of happenings hard to believe at all. “There is only one road. The only way into the camp is through the front gate(!).”

Everything he said was, of course, true. For a second time, Htan Dah was awakened in the middle of the night to gunfire and shouting; for a second time, he flew from his house with his family and the clothes he was wearing and ran and prayed until he reached the safety of the surrounding trees. He was again lucky enough not to run into any soldiers, who would possibly have been drunk or on speed and have asked him if he was Buddhist or Christian. (Like the other Christians the Buddhist soldiers encountered, he would have lied.) But this time, the soldiers set up mortars and shelled the camp, too, while setting fire to it. This time, a pregnant woman and mother of two was shot dead and two girls from Htan Dah’s school who’d hid near their burning house suffered burns that later killed them. This time a seven-year-old died of shrapnel wounds and dozens were injured, and nearly the whole damn thing was burned down all over again.

“We accept that we were inactive,” Thailand’s National Security Council secretary-general conceded. Not inactive enough. Shortly after the first attack on Huay Kaloke, human rights workers reported that the Thai army had forced a group of Karen males who were seeking reprieve from the bands of murdering, torturing government soldiers in their village back across the Burmese border. Later that night, Thai forces loaded about six hundred Karen and Burmese women and children onto trucks and sent them to a Thai province, and then, a few days later, back to Burma. That same week, Thai border soldiers turned around about a hundred men running from an offensive, urging them to go back and fight for their villages. Three thousand refugees were sent home from Kanchanaburi, where they were seeking asylum, and nine hundred newly arrived women and
children were forced to walk back to their villages from which they’d just fled.
¹⁶

When the UN, EU, and US heard allegations that the Thai army was sending fleeing civilians back into a war zone, they asked it to desist. The commander in chief lied outright to the press, claiming that the refugees
wanted
to go back. Bullshitting though it may have been, the army consented. For a while. In the meantime, new refugees were being denied entrance to Thailand. The refugees, as well as democracy activists inside Burma, humanitarian organizations, and the international community, asked Thailand to allow the UNHCR into the camps to provide assistance, but back then the country said it had the situation under control. Already sanctuary to evacuees from Vietnam et al. by the time the Karen rolled in, the Royal Thai Government was hardly in a hurry to recognize that it was the only option for yet another desperate population. Nor would Thai officials want to deal with the prickly Burmese junta for complicating (read: acknowledging) the dire humanitarian crisis it was causing with official international involvement. The UN had confirmed that “violations appear to be committed consistently and on a wide scale by the soldiers of the [Burma] Army against innocent villagers (particularly those belonging to the ethnic minorities) in the form of summary or extrajudicial executions and arbitrary killings which occur in the contexts of forced labour, rape, forced relocation and confiscation of property.” But the commander in chief of the Thai army was at it
again. Karen refugees were victims of fighting inside Burma, he told the
Bangkok Post
, not victims of warfare, which, the semantically aware might argue, is basically the same thing. Whatever they were, by the end of 1997, the UNHCR reported that there were more than 105,000 of them in Thailand, with the disclaimer that they could have been grossly undercounted. It estimated, also, that it was helping only some 2,100 of them. But whatever else it might be fair to call Thailand, it was not “inactive”: Authorities were, for example, forbidding all those victims of fighting from cutting bamboo to build crude shelter. An NGO had to start supplying them materials.