For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question (39 page)

The year I volunteered for BA, 2006, nearly five thousand people from Burma resettled to other countries through Thailand. That’s just 3 percent of the number of Burmese refugees at that time, but it was double the number that had done so the year before. Then in 2007, the 2006 number tripled.

The difference was made by Condoleezza Rice. In May 2006, two months before I arrived in Mae Sot, the US secretary of state granted a waiver of material support for Burmese refugees who lived in Thailand’s Tham Hin camp, which was disgustingly overcrowded and increasingly crime-infested. It didn’t get those who actually
were
terrorists—former or current soldiers or card-carrying members of the KNU—off the hook, but it opened the door for those refugees in Tham Hin who’d been ineligible to become Americans for having given rice or a glass of water to a rebel.
⁷⁵
A few months later, three
weeks after I left, Rice extended the waiver to more Karen refugees in Thailand. In January 2007, the US extended eligibility to all refugees who’d provided material support to the Karen National Union. In 2008, the Karen National Union had its designation as a terrorist organization under the Immigration and Nationality Act removed altogether.

In 2009, the fifty-thousandth Burmese refugee processed for resettlement in Thailand was shipped out of Asia, in the largest UN resettlement program in the world. Most of them go to the United States, which accepted nearly fifteen thousand in 2008 alone. That year, Htan Dah and his wife and son arrived in Northern California.

I started jumping up and down when I saw him, and he smiled a little and I ran and threw my arms around his neck. He put his arms up in reciprocation because he was supposed to, but neither they nor any other part of his body gave in to the hug, and I apologized for violating his customs, but I couldn’t help it.

“It’s so good to see you! Oh my god how are you(!)? Are you so excited to be in the United States?”

He wasn’t.

“When I moved here, our neighbors,” he told me, speaking of the Karen family that lived next door, that had been in the United States for years, “they said, ‘Now that you are in America, you have to be afraid of everyone.’ So now I’m a scaredy-cat.”

“You don’t have to be afraid of everyone. Who are you afraid of?”

“I don’t know! Maybe . . . hooligans.”

“Hooligans! Htan Dah, that’s absurd. I walk around all the time, all over the place, all by myself.”

“For you it is different! You were born here. You’re an American.”

At some point, I asked him if he had gone to any bars in his neighborhood.

“I’m too scared to go to white-people bars,” he said.

“There’s not really any such thing as white-people bars. You can go
wherever you want. You live in California. There are tons of Asians here. People will just think you’re Chinese.”

“But I do not want to go outside! My neighbors also. Like me, they just stay inside, and eat, and sleep, and watch TV.”
⁷⁶
The only time he left was for his ESL instruction, twenty hours a week worth of class with other immigrants, Mexicans and Vietnamese. He went to that only because he had to in order to keep getting his $680 welfare check. For his family of three. He said he wasn’t well enough to walk around America. He said he and his family were all still airsick. They’d been here for a month.

The next time I spoke to him, on the phone, I tried to talk him into letting me pick him up and drive him and his son to the state fair. When he refused vehemently, I told him that he had to go outside at some point, especially if his wife, who spoke no English, wouldn’t, since he’d told me their kid was tired of being in their apartment all the time and begged to be let out. I swore to him that there would be lots of people of different races together, so we would blend in with everyone else, and no one would pay him any attention.

“People will look at me!” he shouted. “I have no idea what I am doing, what to do!” His voice caught, panicked. He was getting increasingly agitated, and I’d never heard him so worked up. “People will think I am some kind of . . . monkey!” He sounded like he was panting, or choking, even. “I do not know how to act! I am refugee, from the jungle. My son wants to go outside all the time, but I don’t want to take him. He has only been in refugee camp, so he is curious about everything, and he cries when I won’t take him outside. I wish I was IDP.”
⁷⁷

“Shut up. You do not.” He laughed guiltily, imagining, I imagine,
hundreds of thousands of IDPs rolling over in their living jungle graves. He did calm down, eventually—and agree to go to the Sacramento fairgrounds.

After more than a year, he was still “a little bit” sad to be here. Like I’d inwardly threatened to call Delta and book the next flight back home my first night in Mae Sot, Htan Dah still threatened to return to Thailand every time I talked to him. “I want to go back to the place where I was born, where it is familiar, with my people,” he said. “I miss my friends. I miss working at BA. I feel like I have a big load to carry.” He was not, understandably, all that pumped about becoming part of the American underclass. He still wasn’t working, because he was working to get his GED, and was eager to get a job, though he knew that finding one was hardly the end of his problems. “People have to have many jobs. They work long hours and then come home and go to bed and just start over. That is American life. I have no idea how I will pay my rent, and electricity, and food. Here, I have no time to work for my people. I have to work for my family, for survival, for food. If possible I would like to go back.” Worrying that he was overworrying me, he added, “But it’s no problem. I will cope with my situation, in maybe five or six years. I’m good. I learn from everything. There’s no time to be sad. It’s time to learn.”

Part of Htan Dah’s reluctance to give his all to the massive readjustment was his absolute reluctance to leave Southeast Asia in the first place. He’d always been, together with Walt, the strongest BA proponent of staying and (peacefully) fighting, and his new American inaction—however arguably ineffective his old Thai action—plagues him. He and his wife fought bitterly over the issue of resettlement; she turned in their family’s application behind his back, and he ultimately conceded that it was the best thing for their son, which was hard to contest. Even Htan Dah, after he’d trekked deep into the Thai hills to pay off villagers and headmen and civil workers and had his picture taken, and papers were forged and the identity of a dead Thai Karen had been assumed—even after he’d stopped
getting arrested, thanks to his several-thousand-dollar ID—he still hadn’t been able to shake the panic, out of doors, the fear that he’d be found out for being what he really was. He’d still mostly avoided traveling. He was born in a refugee camp, and his kid was born in a refugee camp, and if he’d stayed in Thailand his kid’s kid probably would have been born in a refugee camp, too.

Maintaining that status quo is certainly the junta’s plan. In 2009, the two sides of the China-EU summit failed to reach an agreement about whether the world should stay out of Burma’s business. Media in the West were fretting about a North Korean ship breaking Korea’s arms-exporting sanctions to deliver weapons to Burma, while media in the East were broadcasting photographs confirming years-old suspicions that North Korea helped the junta build a top-secret underground tunnel system near the new capital; outlets in both hemispheres have turned out such headlines as BURMA, NORTH KOREA IN AN UNHOLY MILITARY ALLIANCE and IS BURMA THE NEXT IRAN? and IS MYANMAR GOING NUCLEAR WITH KOREA’S HELP? and IS THERE A BURMA-NORTH KOREA-IRAN NUCLEAR CONSPIRACY? Even US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledged “growing concerns about military cooperation between North Korea and Burma, which we take very seriously.” Some Southeast Asian politicians suggested that Burma be suspended from ASEAN, but not enough of them. Nicolas Sarkozy and Gordon Brown and Barack Obama and Julia Roberts called for the release
⁷⁸
of Aung San Suu Kyi, who was tried and had her house arrest again extended after she hosted a misguided middle-aged American fan who stole into her compound uninvited. The Obama/Biden campaign had promised that the two “will press China to end its support for regimes in Sudan, Burma, Iran and Zimbabwe.” But the president’s unwillingness to press that Most Favored
Nation and major US stakeholder to do anything was always pretty clear, even before Hillary Clinton said China and the US would just have to “agree to disagree” on things like human rights when there were problems such as the economy to be dealt with. The administration unveiled its new Burma policy, which involves a combination of the sanctions that have never worked and “engagement,” which ASEAN has been using with Burma totally unsuccessfully for years. The Genocide Prevention Task Force, led by Obama adviser and former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, put Burma on the genocide watch list, not that watching has ever been a particularly effective form of assistance to people on the business end of a genocide. The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for the Sudanese president, and so the president of East Timor, José Ramos-Horta, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, swore he was going to talk the court into similarly charging Than Shwe. And while a few people made some noise about trying to make Burma do something, the junta continued construction on an elaborate new airport that will accommodate its commerce further exploding.

One August day, Roger P. Winter, director of the US Committee for Refugees, surveyed the Karen refugee situation on the Thai border. “The spirit in the camps,” he said, “is a strange mixture of hopefulness with vibrations of a fading dream.” I could write that same description now. Only Roger P. Winter said that in 1986. Htan Dah and his wife recently had another baby, their “American baby”; as far as that kid’s welfare is concerned, they left just in time. No shit, Htan Dah’s wife didn’t want to wait around Southeast Asia for a sea change. Her new baby could be in college by then.
Or
freebasing meth in a Thai containment camp.

 

IN THAILAND,
Mae Sot Office One still has cool tile floors and the warm earthy smell of constant rice. It still teems with young Karen men.

Most of my former comrades in Chang aren’t there, swept up in the tide of Burmese resettlers currently leaving Thailand at a rate of
three hundred a week. Htan Dah lives in the type of American place described by a word I recently taught him: suburbs. Htoo Moo joined his brother in England. Eh Soe moved to Sydney, but not before impregnating his girlfriend, and is working three jobs and trying to get her and the baby to Australia. Ta Mla lives in Milwaukee, where he can go outside whenever he wants. Kaw Ku, who returned to Mae Sot from inside shortly before I left, so didn’t spend much time with me, started calling me after he was relocated to Lakewood, Ohio. I offered him a lot of useless apologies, for his crushing poverty and loneliness and the weather. “It’s okay,” he replied. “You can never find a good place to live in the world. Only in heaven.”

But some of the faces still at BA are familiar. Saw Kaw has been transferred to another city but remains in the organization. He sends me emails with the subject line “Don’t forget.” (To which I reply in the subject line, “I never forget.”) Walt has been promoted to a more intensive role at BA and says he’ll stay in Thailand no matter what. He has not filled out any resettlement applications. Lah Lah Htoo has moved on to an organization that handles the refugees’ education. He’s considering resettlement. There are lots of new faces, too, guys rushing or milling about in jeans or l
ongyis
, pressing back a little, however thorough the spirit breaking and insurmountable the pile of obstacles.

These new recruits seem to have chosen wisely from among their other options in Southeast Asia—forced laborer, IDP, KNU soldier, camp dweller—even though they’re in hiding. Despite the dangers of being on the run in Mae Sot, they’re in better shape than their people and families in camp. The effects of the world financial melt-down have managed to smack into the packed UN settlements. Since donations are down and commodity prices and the Thai baht are up, the Thailand Burma Border Consortium has been forced to reduce food rations. “Luxuries,” such as soap, have been cut entirely. The Burma Forces Welfare Association of the Royal Commonwealth Ex-Services League no longer has enough money to distribute small
stipends to the hundred surviving Karen in camp who fought for the British.

Even being in the KNU wouldn’t afford them the protection it once had in Thai border towns. The guerrilla organization—having lost more territory and trade routes and money and men—is of increasingly limited use to its neighbor. Its old enemy is now one of Thailand’s major trading partners, and its new enemy, the DKBA, now runs a bulk of the cross-border trade and is therefore a much more valuable ally to the Thai police. After decades of complicity, cooperation, and sanctuary, Thailand has told the KNU, which has long been largely based there, to get out, and go back where it came from.

 

IN BURMA,
the junta is conducting evil business as usual, even in the face of some unusual business: In 2008, it announced it would hold elections in 2010. These would be the first Burmese elections in twenty years, which is a slight improvement in the thirty-year gap between the previous two. But obviously no one in the world believed they were going to be free or fair or legitimate. Under the junta-drafted constitution, which took thirteen years to write, and which the populace supposedly overwhelming supported—it passed with 92 percent yeas! And in a vote held in the middle of Cyclone Nargis’s chaos!—the military is basically its own sovereign entity with total immunity.
⁷⁹
Anyway, we know what happened after the 1990 election. We know, too, what happened during 2007’s massive uprising in Burma, when thousands of maroon- and saffron-robe-clad monks and dissenters marched through the streets peacefully, until the military started shooting at people and killed a Japanese journalist and at least one monk and a couple dozen other Burmese. The
Internet was shut down. Some citizens braved videotaping it and blogging about it, which kept the death toll down, many believe, and a lot of citizens were arrested. Whether the people of Burma overcome the obstacles to rising up—cell phone prices kept at more than four times the per-capita gross national income; government surveillance of all text messaging; oppression and censorship so thorough that Burmans and minorities throughout the country don’t know that, just like in ’88, they’re all on the same side; having no unified opposition group, since the members of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy have been mostly jailed or exiled or buried, and even within the NLD there are warring factions, too; the plain fact that, as Dr. Cynthia has pointed out, it’s really hard to muster the time and strength to get involved in politics when your family is starving—Burma’s leaders are no doubt counting on the same old outcome. Dissent will be crushed by the monster military machine. Cronies will be installed. And the brief international media blitz won’t cover the aftermath—like it didn’t cover the doubling of the political-prisoner population or the locked-away monks or the 104-year prison sentences for peaceful dissenters last time. Or the junta’s exporting all its rice on the cheap even though its country is in a state of food emergency post-Cyclone Nargis. Or the imprisoning of Burmese aid volunteers who tried to distribute relief to Nargis’s victims.