For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question (50 page)

And not just the Karen; several ethnic groups joined the Allied side. The British recruited and armed an entire fighting force of Kachin, for example, under whose direction some Allies adopted the practice of lacing the roadside with hardened, pointed, shit-smeared bamboo spikes and covering them with vegetation so that the Japanese would be impaled and, if they lived, infected when they dove for cover at the sound of gunfire.

It’s kind of weird that Burma has largely been forgotten in the popular World War II narrative, given its strategic importance and the staggering casualties there. The theater was Japan’s greatest Pacific War defeat: Three out of five of the three hundred thousand soldiers who entered it never went home. More Japanese died there than in the bombing of Hiroshima, even factoring in the radiation-exposure casualties of the following several months.

?!

The PATRIOT Act made it illegal, additionally, to even try or verifiably
want
to provide material support to a terrorist organization. Thus were two Iraqi Kurds living in upstate New York convicted for
conspiring
to provide material support. “If a terrorist came to Albany,” the US attorney leading the prosecution said, “my opinion is that these guys would have assisted 100 percent.” The men were sentenced to fifteen years apiece.

Some other specifications of the law: Section 31: Whoever imports or keeps in possession or utilizes any type of computer . . . without the prior sanction of the Ministry of Communications, Posts and Telegraphs shall, on conviction be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend from a minimum of 7 years to a maximum of 15 years and may also be liable to a fine. Section 32: Whoever sets up a computer network or connects a link inside the computer network, without the prior sanction of the Ministry of Communications, Posts and Telegraphs shall, on conviction be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend from a minimum of 7 years to a maximum of 15 years and may also be liable to a fine.

When he eventually found out what was really going on, he resigned. It wasn’t until more than a decade later that the Americans actually admitted to the Burmese government what they’d done.

They weren’t really wild about the Reds either: The leader of the Communist Party of Burma had called revered Karen leader Ba U Gyi a “lackey of imperialism,” as communists are wont to do.

Nor was that the end of the KMT’s role in history. Throughout their tenure in Burma, they’d been dragooning villagers as workers in a burgeoning opium trade, and after their defeat, plenty of KMT stayed behind to build a hulking narcostate, some of them joining forces with Zhang Qifu, better known as Khun Sa, a.k.a. the world-famous Opium King.

Thailand may not have signed the UN refugee convention, but it
did
sign the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which states, “In accordance with their obligations under international humanitarian law to protect the civilian population in armed conflicts, States Parties shall take all feasible measures to ensure protection and care of children who are affected by an armed conflict,” giving special protection to children who either have or are seeking refugee status and taking “all feasible measures to ensure that persons who have not attained the age of fifteen years do not take a direct part in hostilities.” Additionally, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which all UN members are bound, states, “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.”

The filters are effective indeed, though very low tech: 87 percent clay, 13 percent rice husk, pressed and fired and painted with colloidal silver. Though they cost less than ten bucks to make, water that has passed through them is safe enough for even my pampered North American gut. Perfected, based on a pre-Columbian American design in the ’80s and distributed internationally by US-based Potters for Peace beginning in the ’90s, the filters have eliminated diarrhea in test households in Thai refugee camps and been spread worldwide through UNICEF, Doctors Without Borders, and the International Organization for Migration to curb the death toll of the four thousand people a day killed by diarrhea from unsanitary water. The NGO Burmese Youth Project had given BA these two filters for free, before its initiative to mass-produce them for refugee camps was shut down for lack of funding.

It was the cause of some sectarian territorialism. As one Boston pastor wrote, emphasis his, “
This field belongs appropriately to the American Baptist churches
.”

A Muslim also visited a Karen village in 1816 and gave them a book he said contained writings about the true God, but he didn’t stay long, and he wasn’t so much a white guy.

I asked Htan Dah once how tall he was, and he responded, “Who knows?” The practical answer was that he was a little bit shorter than I. But I said reflexively, stupidly, “You should know how tall you are.” For what? So he could get on a roller coaster? Get a driver’s license? Tell a doctor at an annual checkup?

It was a small but consistent form of resistance, reminding yourself and anyone who heard you that the government that changed the name is illegitimate, and sometimes giving you an excuse to explain the existence of that illegitimate government when someone asked why you called it Burma instead of Myanmar. The United Nations and
The New York Times
may have adopted the name change, but
The Washington Post
and even the United States government had not. Most important, our housemates—and the organization we were working for—called it Burma, and if that was their call, that was the call for us.

Which is to say KNLA-friendly. Though technically the KNU is the political wing and the KNLA is the armed wing of the KNU, KNU leaders are commanders in the KNLA and have guns, and KNLA soldiers are in the KNU, so “KNU” is used colloquially to refer both to the political wing and the army.

See?

Like Htan Dah’s, That Khaing’s is a less-simply-transliterated name: The pronunciation is fast and sounds like the “Tha” in “Thatcher” plus “Khai” (rhymes with “lie”).

I wasn’t the first white person with this idea. And the volunteer who’d carried through had just been frustrated when the guys had insisted on eating their pizza and spaghetti over rice.

In a survey of the Burmese refugees in camps on the Thai-Burma border, the percentage of respondents with “no religion” was zero.

The minimum standard of calorie consumption set by the UNHCR and World Food Bank is twenty-one hundred per day. The rations provided by the TBBC provide twenty-one hundred and two. As an adult in camp, in one month you’re given to eat exactly 15 kilograms of rice, 250 grams of fortified flour, 750 grams of fish paste, 330 grams of salt, 1 kilogram of mung beans, a liter of cooking oil, 40 grams of dried chilies, and 125 grams of sugar. Unless you’re pregnant—in which case you get a little extra produce and eggs—or a severely malnourished child—in which case you also get milk powder.

Ta Eh Thaw’s was a cheap, jangly incarnation of “Another Saturday Night.” Eh Soe’s was “Jingle Bells.” “Nice ringtone, dude,” I said the first time I heard it. He, missing my sarcasm, had smiled eagerly and lifted his eyebrows and asked, “Do you like it?” “No.” I felt bad later when he changed it.

Eh Soe admitted also that his job was at least better than Htoo Moo’s, because, he said, laughing again, “If you go into a village with a camera, the SPDC will kill you.”

They even fell prey to one that killed two soldiers inside a week. After the first man died, his comrades set a trap and waited in a stalking platform in a tree for the man-eater, which did show up, but only to eat one of the hunting soldiers’ heads right there in the little tree house they’d built.

The pilots were also advised to avoid Burma natives because they are unfriendly and “superstitious and suspicious,” but if forced to interact with them, try to win them over with string tricks like cat’s cradle rather than threatening them with “terrorist methods.”

Dave’s wife, having found the Karen to be incredibly generous regardless of their situation, wouldn’t have it any other way. “The gifts they gave were of themselves,” she explained in an interview. “Their time, energy, and love. In my experience in the West it is easier to go to the store and buy a trinket as a gift. For this reason I have chosen to raise my children in this war. The influence of these people is something I have never experienced anywhere else.” Sometimes the girls go on the missions, but the lifestyle isn’t all rough: Dave has implemented the use of pack animals, and subsequently kept the girls in ponies. Also, they got to learn to swim the fun way. You can see Dave chucking the youngest daughter into a raging river by the seat of her underpants in a video the family made to submit to the “Postcards From You” segment of PBS’s
Arthur
cartoon.

“Burma is a country that has never known, and can never know, famine,” posited colonial administrator James George Scott, “except as a direct result of civil war and misrule.”

“Superstitious” is not a pejorative in Burma; it is, true to the Air Force survival guide’s assertion, a way of life. Even in the early centuries, prosperous cities featured twelve gates, one for each sign of the zodiac. Said Scott on the Burmese’s preoccupation with astrology and luck, “Tuesday and Saturday are bad days to do anything. If you commence an extensive work on either of these days, you will soon die. . . . Beyond this, men born on certain days are exposed to dangers in particular months. Children born on Wednesday or Friday ought to be very careful what they do in the months of May, September, and January. The best thing is for them to do nothing, and in Burma they act on the precept with great zeal.”

To their credit, the colonialists didn’t always handle Burmese rabble-rousing so ignominiously. Students launched major protests, for example, in response to the Rangoon University Act of 1920, which made higher education less available to the masses. At times throughout the early 1900s, citizens were able to peacefully organize, rally, and protest. It’s a right they haven’t had since, for nearly a hundred years.

The same year that the name changed, a couple of Burmese companies known to be strongly connected to, if not straight-up part of, the junta hired Washington PR and lobbying firms, causing speculation that the switch was the work of American image-make-over ingenuity. When I asked a senior vice president of one of the firms, Jefferson Waterman International, he insisted that though JWI published newsletters about how Burma is totally swell and contracted to set up meetings with US government figures, his firm’s consultants “don’t change names. We wouldn’t tell a government to change their name.” (In case you’re wondering, the adverb that would best describe how this information was asserted to me is “angrily.”)

Not that the journalists themselves are necessarily free from the danger. One American magazine columnist who was secretly (he thought) interviewing villagers in 1999 woke up drugged and naked in an alley, beaten and covered in urine and feces.

“But,” he added as he was telling me about his reservations, “we must work or it won’t change.”

Thailand reportedly earns a billion baht ($28 million) a month from the trade between Myawaddy and Mae Sot.

Legally, it has to. Burmese movies can’t contain any footage that might make the country look bad. Scenes that depict poverty, for example, are against regulations.

Rambo would be an appropriate metaphor for the junta, too, so it’s the ultimate clash of the titans when he goes up against the Tatmadaw in part IV. (Spoiler alert!) It turns out to be kind of a draw, really, since Rambo saves a couple of abducted missionaries and Karen civilians and cuts a few scores of Burmese soldiers into so many disgusting pieces with a giant machine gun but neither ends the Karen war nor upends the big bad regime. Still, the movie was banned inside Burma, where, naturally, it became an underground hit.

In 2009, Than Shwe was down one spot from No. 3 the year prior, outranked by Zimbabwe’s Mugabe, Sudan’s Omar Al-Bashir, and North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il. But he still held evil reign over King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, Hu Jintao of China, Sayyid Ali Khamenei of Iran, Isayas Afewerki of Eritrea, Gurbanguly Berdymuhammedov of Turkmenistan, and the terrorism-funding and torture-loving Muammar al-Qaddafi of Libya.

JENNIFER ANISTON (to aide, outside a movie-lot trailer, frustrated): I’ve been waiting in there for over two hours, this is costing us way too much money, please, what does he need? A soy maté latte, what? What, are there chemicals in there he can’t breathe? Okay, you got the AC off, what, so then tell me what the problem is. WOODY HARRELSON (throwing open trailer door): I’m not coming out until Burma is free!

“Nineteen years ago, the Burmese people chose Aung San Suu Kyi to be their next leader. And for most of those 19 years she has been kept under house arrest by the military junta that now runs the country. She is the world’s only incarcerated Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. . . .

“We must not stand by as she is silenced once again. Now is the time for the United Nations and the entire international community to speak clearly, and with one voice: Free Aung San Suu Kyi.

“In support, George Clooney, Sec. Madeleine Albright, Wes Anderson, Drew Barrymore, David Beckham, Bono, Matthew Broderick, Sandra Bullock, James Carville, Michael Chabon, Daniel Craig, John Cusack, Matt Damon, Robert De Niro, Dave Eggers, Peter Gabriel, Jake Gyllenhaal, Václav Havel, Helen Hunt, Anjelica Huston, Scarlett Johansson, Nicole Kidman, Ashton Kutcher, Norman Lear, Madonna, Mary Matalin, Sen. John & Cindy McCain, Rose McGowan, Orhan Pamuk, Sarah Jessica Parke [
sic
], Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Robert Rodriguez, Salman Rushdie, Meg Ryan, Liev Schreiber, George Soros, Steven Spielberg, Meryl Streep, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Naomi Watts, Prof. Elie Wiesel, Owen Wilson”