For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question (26 page)

“The US government and the international community must do something to assist the people of Burma and stop the brutality,” said Representative Joe Pitts (R-Pennsylvania) in a speech to the House in 2003. “Otherwise, we will all be responsible for the successful genocide campaign ethnic cleansing going on by the vicious military of the SPDC.” The sanctioning Freedom and Democracy Act, which is US law, notes very simply and clearly, “The SPDC is engaged in ethnic cleansing against minorities within Burma, including the Karen, Karenni, and Shan people, which constitutes a crime against humanity.” But even after we settle this quibble over semantics and decide that the living hell of Burma is genocide or crimes against humanity or both or what, relief for the people on the ground there could be a long time coming. Even if the UN draft resolution is brought—and in 2006, a proposal just to talk about one was rejected by China, Russia, and Japan—and then does pass, and does contain some of the magic words, and does bring Burma under the responsibility to protect, then the Security Council will still have to agree on what “timely and decisive” measure is appropriate, whether coercive actions like putting peacekeepers on the ground or establishing criminal tribunals—and the secretary-general is a big advocate of noncoercive measures—then find the resources to do it, then actually do it. Such UN action would be unprecedented, and redeeming.
At the current pace, getting to only the point where the Security Council votes on a resolution, someone involved in the process has estimated, will take two or three years. Which, in the scheme of this war, is not so long. Though in a village where inhabitants have been buried up to their necks and bludgeoned to death with a shovel, it’s a fucking eternity.

Currently: US policy only imposes sanctions on a country of breathtakingly impoverished citizens. It does not involve calling for the Security Council to invoke the responsibility to protect, or referring Burma to the International Criminal Court. It does not address Burma’s committing the sorts of crimes the international community has sworn to prevent. Burma gets less than a tenth of the aid money Cambodia does; people living with AIDS must wait until someone else with AIDS dies so they can take their place on the very short list of people getting AIDS meds; the relief money coming in comes out to less than $3 a person, while in Sudan, each person gets about $50. American policy involves ignoring our old Karen allies. It involves disregarding the Wa,
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though they’re flooding
the world drug market with heroin and meth.
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It doesn’t involve significant dialogue with the Shan and Mon and Kachin, though they’ll be crucial to eventually rebuilding the nation and building a more inclusive national identity in a country with seven major and a dozen subnationalities, where the minorities collectively are not so minor, where a settling of the ethnic-war score precedes even so much as a distant dream of a functioning democracy. The US isn’t asking, even nicely, its pal Thailand to—in the long, continuing meantime—grant the displaced Burmese within its borders the right to work and walk around, to make them less subject to the whims of a police force that is, as one DEA agent working in Bangkok put it, “so corrupt it turns my stomach,” to recognize and protect them as refugees—people with “a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion”—even though the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants ranks Thailand one of the seven worst countries in the world in which to be a refugee. Even Iraq and Afghanistan didn’t make that list. Or as Collin put it in his workshop essay:

But there’s no popular call for a different policy, because no one’s ever heard of this particular genocide, partly because we’re not calling
it a genocide. There’s no mass movement behind the cause. And what’s perhaps most heartbreaking about our unawareness of Burma’s people is their hyperawareness of us.

The Karen have a story. It’s about how, when man was created, the Karen and the European, like all the other nationalities, were brothers. As the first created, the Karen was the oldest brother, and as last the European was the youngest. The two brothers adored each other, and so traveled together when Buddha sent them to settle in the world after bestowing upon them gifts of rope and knives and knowledge and, to the Karen brother, a betel box and forbiddance from opening it until he reached Burma. But the younger brother wanted to see what was inside, and persisted through all the Karen brother’s insisting that they shouldn’t look until, finally, they did. It was the Karen’s land and literacy, which spilled wide and far from their container. They couldn’t get them back in the box, and they couldn’t carry them as they were, and were forced to move on without them. “That is why the Karen are the orphans of the world and must live from swiddens cut on mountainsides belonging to other peoples,” goes the story. But it doesn’t end so hopelessly. “One day, our European brother will return to us and make up for the hardship he has caused us. One day we shall have a land of our own.”

And it’s not just the Karen. The citizens of Burma have followed recent American presidential races closely,
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sure that, given the idealized bullshit the US government spouted in the run-up to the Iraq War, we’ll invade and depose their dictator, too. With each impotent visit of the UN envoy, tea leaves are sifted for signs of impending change. Like the minorities who thought we’d honor our promise to protect them after that great war, like the minorities who now believe
that FBR’s Dave must be CIA sent to redeem them, like the rebels and activists waiting for us to reinforce them in the jungles after the demonstrations of ’88, like Eh Soe, who danced in his computer chair when BBC Burmese reported that Bush had pledged some tiny bit of money to the country for AIDS relief, however much I insisted that it didn’t mean we were about to take interest and action, like even the junta, which went through that exorbitant expense and trouble to move its capital far inland, the Burmese as a whole simply cannot believe that no one is going to come to their country’s rescue. In May 2008, US Navy ships arrived in the waters off Burma’s coast, after Cyclone Nargis killed 140,000 people, who were given no warning of the storm’s landfall by their government. The ships—which the junta turned away—were full of aid supplies, not invading soldiers and weaponry. Still, excited citizens crowded the phone lines of an embassy in Rangoon.

“You’re coming to save us,” the callers asked the diplomat who answered the phone, “aren’t you?”

THE MAE
Sot gongs broke the nighttime silence, in darkness still thorough but thin-feeling. I guessed it was 4 AM when the shallow tinning struck, and I listened to the distant shimmer and the dogs that caught it and spread it through the city, the far-off barking and howling coming closer and louder in a wave with the ringing at their backs until it smacked against the house, our street’s dogs in a sudden frenzy, and echoed still by the woofing and tolling from the temple where it started. The monks were awake, and I was, too.

Downstairs, Htan Dah and I sat at the table preparing breakfast before daybreak was complete. The hours peeling and slicing acidic onion and garlic twice a day had peeled the skin off the tips of my fingers. Left index and thumb. Right index, thumb, and middle. Pink and raw. I showed Htan Dah, who looked at me skeptically and checked his own intact hands. I laughed at him when he scratched his head, showing me why he kept long nails on his pinkies and thumbs. “Also,” he said, then pantomimed cleaning out his ear.

Soon a visiting administrator from BA’s Bangkok office joined us, a round Australian with a pale, pretty face, walking through the open dining room/garage door and plopping down at the table on the bench opposite mine in the yellowing light. We said hellos. Though she’d walked from her temporary room in town in the early chill, her
face was sleepy, and she watched us groggily as we slowly slid heavy knives through vegetables and into cutting boards.

“I tried to give Sheh Reh a hug,” I told Htan Dah. Even though Sheh Reh had criticized my burned potatoes. “He wouldn’t let me.”

Htan Dah chuckled. “Really?”

“Yeah. He came up to me yesterday and told me he was leaving this morning, at four in the morning or something. So I said, ‘Oh, well it was great to meet you. Can I hug you?’ And he said, ‘That’s okay.’” I had learned, quite slowly, that “That’s okay” didn’t mean what it meant to me, which was “That would actually be great, but don’t trouble yourself,” but was a euphemism for “Absolutely not,” so I’d stepped back from him. “He said, ‘Just say, Thank you very much.’ He said, ‘Our cultures are very different.’”

I wasn’t totally shocked by Sheh Reh’s rejection, since Htan Dah had already asserted that there was no hugging in Karen culture. Period. (“You don’t hug your parents?” I’d pressed. Negative. “Or your girlfriends?” Never. “Ever?” No. When I’d insisted, “But you like, wrap your arms around each other when you make out,” he’d looked at me like something radically unexpected had flown out of my mouth, like a cockatiel, maybe.) But though the action didn’t exist in their personal lives, my coworkers had seen it in movies, and most of them were amenable to the performance of it if the occasion called, the same as I
wai
’d, or bowed with prayerful hands, at Thais I interacted with. Htan Dah, for example, had been hugged before. Once in his life. By a Canadian.

Htan Dah seemed more surprised than I was that Sheh Reh hadn’t acquiesced to my friendly request. “That is strange,” he said, his mouth screwed up as he tried to think of an explanation. “Maybe because he is animist.”

The Bangkok administrator turned on him. “What do you mean?” she asked, her blue eyes rounder and more awake now. “What would his being animist have to do with anything?”

Htan Dah shrugged. “I don’t know(!). Maybe animists don’t like to touch people.”

The Australian made a face of great doubt. “Well they have to touch each other at some point, don’t they? Since they haven’t died off and must make more animists sometimes?”

Htan Dah giggled, embarrassed. Some of his excessive othering of Sheh Reh—after all, Ta Mla was animist, and Htan Dah knew he didn’t live in a physical isolation bubble—was due to Sheh Reh’s being Karenni, or Red Karen, a subgroup of the Karen ethnicity. The Red Karen had their own language and traditional clothing (you could probably guess the primary color) and ceremonies and state, Karenni State, a small piece of land just north of Karen State. In Thailand, they had their own two refugee camps. They also had various subgroups within their ethnic subgroup—specifically, Sheh Reh’s traditionally wore short
longyis
and wrapped their knees in thick black cotton. Even within the White Karen, to which all my housemates belonged, there were several subgroups, Sgaw and Pwo and Pa-o and Padaung. Even within my housemates, two of these groups were represented, which I hadn’t even realized until Eh Soe told me. He was, for example, unlike most of the guys, Pwo Karen, which had its own dialect and traditional dress and even script.

According to Karen lore, there’s a perfectly good explanation for all this. Long ago lived Toh Meh Pah, a virile man with a magic comb of perpetual youth. One day, when his offspring outnumbered the output of his land, he gathered his family and moved everyone to where the soil would be as fertile as his loins. They were separated when some of the band stopped to boil snail shells until they were soft enough to eat. The determined diners cooked the shells for weeks, giving up and getting going again only after some Chinese came along and made fun of their impossible culinary endeavor. By then, though, the trail of the patriarch had been lost, and the family was separated forever. “Karen people are very confused,” Eh
Soe had told me. “Even me. I don’t understand my ethnic situation.” But he did understand Sgaw Karen, which is what he spoke around the house so that he and his coworkers could understand one another.
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