For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question (40 page)

Part of the Election Day preparations involve the military’s trying to reinforce control over those always troublesome minority militias. Most major insurgent groups have been in cease-fires on the fringe for decades, and the government is trying to bring them into its fold, to achieve complete, cohesive national militarization, ordering that they turn their armies into border guards under the command of the Tatmadaw. The DKBA has happily agreed to report for Burma-army-assisting duty. They’ve even started conscripting villagers to serve in that capacity. Plenty of other troops had already been forced into the militia of six thousand, of course, whether physically or circumstantially.
“If I didn’t go to the DKBA, my family would have starved,” one wounded soldier told an interviewer.

The chairman of the DKBA says the army’s decision to sign a cease-fire and join forces with the government has been “beneficial.” Seriously! Their alliance has granted them freedom from Tatmadaw attack and a cut of the border trade. Teak, gold, antimony, zinc, tin—the business interests that bankroll the junta continue to drive the war between the DKBA and KNU, as the former aims to capture all possible logging and mining territory. They’ve got education, and commerce, and don’t live in free-fire zones. And all they have to do to maintain the upper hand is continue to attack other Karen, some of whom are insurgents, and many of whom probably philosophically or physically support the insurgents, anyway.

Those KNU insurgents have never signed a cease-fire—not now that they’re down to four thousand troops, not in all this war’s sixty years. Maybe it doesn’t matter anyway. It’s not like life for the general nonwarring Burmese population is free from forced labor and portering and torture and oppression and starvation. And cease-fires haven’t stopped the Burma army from confiscating land and displacing villagers and continually expanding military presence in some other minorities’ areas. Cease-fire or no, war could still rage for the resources and territory in Karen State, whether between Burman and Karen, or Karen and Karen, or Karen and someone else.

The KNU and SPDC have talked about calling the war off a couple of times, but it just never works out. Once, while they were in the midst of peace negotiations, a KNU brigade stormed a Burma army weapons depot. Once, KNU leadership rejected the proposed terms—like surrendering their arms—as, and I quote, “out of the question.” When the junta courted cease-fire talks with the KNU in 2009, the Burma army, together with the DKBA, launched a massive attack on the Karen insurgents about ten days later. So as I write this, the Tatmadaw and DKBA have captured several of the few remaining KNU bases and are shelling unprotected IDP camps,
and thousands of refugees, having run out of places to run, are making their way over mountains and land mines with babies and diarrhea and no provisions, through soldiers, snake bites, and brumes of malarial mosquitoes, another refugee flood into Thailand. And after the assassination of the DKBA commander who was rumored to have orchestrated the assassination of the KNU general-secretary, the DKBA says it’s going to destroy Mae La, Thailand’s most populous Karen refugee camp, next.

Several groups have broken away from the KNU since the ’90s and agreed with the junta, in the face of interminable conflict with it, to stop fighting—or in the case of the DKBA, just start fighting other Karen. But Burma’s dystopia breeds new Walts and Ta Mlas and other troops who are looking for revenge or purpose every day. And not just in the hills; small bombs planted by unknown groups have started going off in Rangoon. Everyone in the world knows what some people will inevitably choose given the choice between battling for liberty and rolling over and dying. In the face of the demand to make their inactive militia part of the murderous Burma army’s border force, the Mon have said no, and that, further, if they are asked to disarm, they “will do something.” The Kachin who’ve been in a cease-fire since 1994 also said no, and are now actively recruiting. The still terrifying and now druglording Wa’s twenty-thousand-strong army is refusing to submit to anyone’s authority. To prove it, just in case someone wants to make them try, they are preparing for war. And the Kokang broke a two-decade truce with a firefight that sent thousands fleeing across the border into China. As a porter Htoo Moo interviewed put it, in a poem he wrote after he escaped:

“To stop the war is to surrender,” General Mu Tu See, the KNU’s current commander in chief, once said. “The atrocities will go on because these people are not for democracy.”

Did he consider the war a success, given the staggering casualties?

“It’s a draw. Nobody is winning, and nobody will win.”

SOURCING

THE FIRST
rule of fact-checking is that everything you read and hear is wrong.

Were you to be hired as a fact-checker, as I was in 2007, at
Mother Jones
—or the other remaining bastions of fact-check, like
The Atlantic
, or
The New Yorker
, or
Harper’s
—you would be taught that information cannot be trusted. It is, rather, presumed fallacious until proved otherwise. Statistics and news clips must be subjected to intense tests of verification. Don’t even think the word “Wikipedia.” In my first meeting, among new coworkers of startling cynicism and genius, the announcement that the source of some fact was a
book
set off a mighty wave of scoffing and eye rolling around the conference table.

In true fact-checking, literally every word of every factual statement must be traced to a primary source, whether a document or the corroborated accounts of independent experts or witnesses. “Primary source” means that if the story you’re fact-checking says some soldier was the forty-fourth Canadian soldier to die in Afghanistan since 2002, you’re calling the Canadian Army. Once, I heard one of our fact-checkers call a bar in Mexico to ask, in Spanish, whether its floor was metal, per William T. Vollmann’s assertion.

For the record, it was. But often, it’s not. People just get things
wrong. They read them wrong, or remember them wrong or the way they want to, or the information they read right was wrong in the first place. You hear the same fact a thousand times, but if you track down its origins, you find out all the repeaters are using the same source, and source zero was just guessing, or citing a highly questionable source or study. Or
mis
citing a highly questionable source or study. Or confusing the details, so that by now, everybody’s under the erroneous impression that a shot of espresso contains more caffeine than a cup of coffee.

So I wasn’t a week into my job before I, too, had undergone the completely life-changing installation of an irrevocable—and warranted—skepticism of everything I heard or read. So it’s life-ruining, also. Which is why I did something writers rarely do—which is subject their manuscripts to a
Mother Jones
-style fact-check—and that they rarely do for really good reason—which is that holy fucking shit is it hard.

Enter former
MoJo
research editor Leigh Ferrara, a fact-checking and multitasking wizard, and the hardest-working and most charming person you could hope to be stuck in a studio apartment with for twelve-hour fact-review marathons. The manuscript I gave Leigh had 1,240 footnotes, plus piles of sources noted haphazardly within the text, plus a bunch of sentences with no sourcing at all. So: I’d read and subsequently written that Burma had the fourth-highest child-mortality rate in the world, and Leigh had to figure out whether that was true or not. It’s not. Burma is thirty-sixth on that list, actually, which Leigh tracked down in UNICEF’s “State of the World’s Children 2009.” That took care of eleven words, out of more than a hundred thousand, probably at least half of which she was responsible for. And that was a pretty easy one.

For historical details, we unearthed and paged through colonialists’ reports and missionaries’ diaries, or cross-checked information with other historical accounts we’d made sure weren’t all using the same one original source—as is often the case—and/or vetted the minutiae and main ideas with scholars and specialists. We tracked
down witnesses to and experts on subjects way outside the spotlight of popular scrutiny. We then evaluated those sources, trying to determine if they were reliable and where they were getting
their
information. One of Leigh’s experts helpfully eliminated a handful of questions from her long list of outstanding facts; then she realized the source of his expertise was a book we’d already determined to be mistake-tastic.

Further complicating the fact-checking process was the inconvenience that there’s often no such thing as “fact.” Another figure I’d cited was that trade between China and Burma was up to $2.6 billion in 2008, from $630 million in 2001. That turned out to be “true” (shout-out to
The Wall Street Journal
for its Burma info’s being totally solid
⁸⁰
), based on data Leigh uncovered in the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Database. Mexicali’s 13 Negro bar either does or does not have a metal floor, but the trouble with this trade statistic is perfectly summed up immediately following it in the
WSJ
article where it appeared: “Analysts say the official numbers vastly understate the full extent of China’s investments in Myanmar.” Mmmm, analysts do say that. Knowing that—however meticulously we sourced our facts, and though every estimate we were working so hard to find and confirm was at least the best possible estimate in existence—“true” is often still kind of a relative concept . . . it’s demoralizing.

We both had dark moments while trying to keep a million little pieces needing verification up in the air. I had nightmares about working on the final edits and not being able to write any of the words I wanted because I didn’t have sourcing for them and there was no time for further fact-checking. Leigh started inadvertently holding her breath when opening emails from sources, because they might
say that she was out of luck, or an idiot, because the assertion she was asking them to confirm—which I’d pulled from non-fact-checked books or articles—was absurd. We each went through a period of extreme temporomandibular pain, at which point we realized we’d started clenching our teeth furiously. We took turns psyching each other up, holding up opposite sides of motivational conversation:

“Why are we doing this?”

“It’s fine. We’re doing a great job. People are going to give us trophies when they realize how thorough we’ve been.”

“Yeah, because anyone will ever even notice that we did this, and they totally give trophies for fact-checking.”

“You’re doing a great job. It’ll all be worth it when we get the trophies.”

It
was
worth it, actually. I wrote, for example, a long and exciting description of some freaky shit a certain Burmese hill tribe did during a certain world war. I won’t go into who the source was or the possible sourcing mistakes made, but the upshot is that if I hadn’t omitted and you had repeated this story at a cocktail party, at worst a scholar of any of several disciplines would’ve recognized it as a complete load of crap. At the very least, you’d have been going around spreading freaky lies. And that’s how Leigh and I comforted ourselves during the aforementioned marathon reviews, comparing three hundred pages of single-spaced notes from more than seven hundred paper and electronic and human sources while I made changes on more pages than not.

“I can’t believe how much money and how much of our lives this has cost.”

“You can’t put a price on truth.”

“You’re right. We’re heroes.”

In one chapter, I riffed, based on what I’d read, on how the KMT used Dodge and Ford trucks—Dodge and Ford trucks!—and how that was further evidence of how ridiculous the United States’s
denial of assisting the Chinese rebels in Burma was. But you won’t find that in the book, because a foreign-relations scholar pointed out to me that anyone could get mass-produced American vehicles anywhere, there were parades of them on the Ho Chi Minh Trail during Vietnam, did I think the United States was also assisting the Viet Cong? I constructed, and then had to thoroughly de- and reconstruct, a story about ancient Burmese race relations after reading a mountain of history books—books that apparently every archaeologist and Southeast Asian history specialist (we consulted five) knows are based on long-discredited colonial theory riddled with “sheer fantasy” and “Orientalist cliché.” I wrote an entire chapter based on a first-rate historical account of some stupid and misguided action on the part of the United States that oh, man, did I want to be true. One expert corroborated that it was. Three others said it wasn’t, exactly. A declassified State Department memo settled the dispute in favor of the nays. It’s cool; there was plenty of equally stupid and misguided action to take its place. See chapter six.

“No matter how hard we work, we’re going to miss something. All this work and we’ll still know that there are mistakes we didn’t catch. It’s so futile.”

“No! Trophies!”

We terrorized the United States Department of Homeland Security, the World Health Organization, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the history and epidemiology departments of several universities, the authors of dozens of books, the staffs of countless NGOs, lawyers and doctors and soldiers and refugees and multinational corporations and activists. And so on. I’d be swimming in debt without the research support that was provided by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute and the Fund for Investigative Journalism. But no matter how much time and money went into reporting this story, and digging up obscure and untold details (see the stats comparing
eastern Burma with Darfur, chapter twelve), and then making sure they were right—no matter how many months Leigh worked (ten, if you really want to know, so you can imagine how long it would take to fact-check a book in which half the narrative isn’t recounted conversations about socialism and blow jobs
⁸¹
), she still could’ve misinterpreted information herself, and the information could still have flaws, and though the changes we made were hundreds, the mistakes we caught were certainly not every one, and never could be, even if we had unlimited resources and lived in the Library of Congress.