For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question (6 page)

Ta Mla had already been settled in Ban Salah refugee camp, near the Salween River, for a year when the Burma army attacked his village again. The villagers had been warned and dashed into hiding, though a few straggled behind a bit to feed their hungry chickens—who knew how long they were going to be displaced this time? But the soldiers made it to the village before all the villagers had made it out, and they opened fire, injuring six and killing two. One of the dead was Ta Mla’s uncle. The other was his father.

Ta Mla was twenty-one. He could have gone home to the village where his family was murdered, but army offensives were becoming so frequent and disruptive that he’d probably be unable to cultivate
enough food for himself, and even if he could, it would likely be stolen or burned by government soldiers. He couldn’t get a job in Burma, because he wasn’t qualified to do anything and they were few. He couldn’t continue his education in Burma, even if the government didn’t regularly shut the universities down, because he didn’t have any money, just like he didn’t have any identification papers, or money to bribe his way into some. He could, of course, have resigned himself to sitting in a six-foot square of hut floor area—the space each camp refugee is allotted per international humanitarian recommendations—literally all day, forbidden to leave camp or work, waiting for his monthly or semimonthly rations like a paycheck, maybe get married and have some babies so they could do nothing, too. Given his options, and his anger over his father’s death, well, that would be when taking up arms as an insurgent became the clear path.

THE BRITISH
takeover of Burma, one historian has pointed out, was basically the Iraq War of the 1800s. Strategists had assumed it would be cheap, fast, and easy, the colonialists sweeping in and simply installing a new government. Instead, the occupiers found themselves overwhelmed, besieged on all sides by insurgencies. By the end of 1886, the year after the third and final war, the British had forty thousand troops stationed in their new territory, more than three times the number they’d deployed for the invasion, more than was required to occupy all of Egypt, a country one and a half times Burma’s size. Hundreds of Empire troops were killed in uprisings in which thousands of Burmese guerrillas died. As a method of battling them, British soldiers and even civilians destroyed the natives’ access to key resources—food, shelter, personnel—by burning down villages. It was a brutal and high-casualty tactic. “We simply wiped out the village and shot everyone we saw,” wrote Sir James George Scott, an intrepid administrator who, in addition to killing Burmese, introduced them to football. “Burned all their crops and houses.”

Another method of maintaining control was again employing the trusty Karen. You’ll remember that some Burmans considered the minority subhuman—take the Rangoon viceroy, who in 1851 told an American missionary that any literate Karen he encountered
would be shot—but the British thought they were just lovely, model workers whether as nannies or army men. And some were Christian, too, since the missionaries had been having luck up there in the hills where they lived. Vast numbers of Karen were enlisted as soldiers and military police, and they helped put down popular revolts. During World War I, three of the sixteen Burma Rifles companies were Karen. The British selected them and other hill tribes to form most of Burma’s army, a slap in the face to the warmongering, long-powerful almighty Burmans, about whom many British felt the same way bigoted Burmans felt about the mountain minorities. On top of these insults, these tribes were, unlike the Burmans, left largely to their own devices by the royal administration, which, as a matter of written policy, did not “oppress them or suffer them in any way to be oppressed.” Under the British, ethnicity became primarily, exaggeratedly important. Under the British, the Karen, long considered inferior slave labor, acquired autonomy, a growing ethnic nationalist identity—and armed authority.

Predictably, this didn’t do a lot to quell tensions in a polyethnic country with a millennium-long history of racism-tinged war. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Karen were no longer divided against the majority Burmans by only language, culture, religion, and tradition, but now also by treatment under—and loyalty to—His Majesty Edward VII, King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions and Emperor of India. Further fueling a nationalistic Burman fire were the quarter of a million Indians who began pouring in yearly and working successfully in government and business ventures; the British far favored them, too, over Burma’s native majority. The 1930s brought a series of riots in which hundreds of Indians were massacred. When the Burmans turned their discontent on the British, they were massacred in turn; when several thousand students, civilians, and monks demonstrated in Mandalay in 1939, government troops opened fire. Fourteen were killed.

The infuriated and humiliated Burmans agreed that they had no
choice but to fight for independence. And a crew of nationalist leaders called the Thirty Comrades were under the mistaken impression that the Japanese were the ones to help them get it.

 

IN DECEMBER
1941, a few days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Japanese Army marched into Burma, with the Japanese-trained Burma Independence Army close behind them, picking up random recruits along the way.

Unfortunately for the Karen, these untrained soldiers-come-lately tended to be recently released criminals or general scumbags. They looted and profiteered unimpeded. Some units burned down a Karen orphanage and Catholic mission and slaughtered Karen civilians. They raped Karen women as they happened upon them. Even the war-crime-propagating Japanese thought the BIA was out of control and demobilized it, deploying in its place a new “Burmese” army loaded with Japanese soldiers.

By the spring of 1942, the invaders had vanquished the British in Burma, deposing the last unified government the country has ever seen. But the Japanese were soon taking heavy losses in the war, where British forces were conducting a tremendous counterattack in Burma assisted by Indians, Gurkhas, Chinese, Africans, Americans, and, of course, minority peoples of Burma. Like Major Snodgrass before them, the British and American forces in the Burma theater during World War II found the Karen invaluable allies.
⁸
They laid mines. They assisted airstrikes. They stashed Allied troops and supplies dropped into Burma by parachute. They showed the British, who were struggling to use tanks and trucks in the jungle, how to use elephants. They fought fiercely. In their capacity as protectors of the
Allied troops hiding in their villages, they were tortured and killed for refusing to surrender their comrades. So many Karen were tortured to death by the Japanese for their unwillingness to disclose the whereabouts of embedded secret serviceman Major Hugh Seagrim that the Brit finally gave himself up to certain execution, dressed in traditional Karen costume, heavy, embroidered homespun. “The Karen,” said Field Marshal William Slim, author of
Defeat into Victory: Battling Japan in Burma and India, 1942-1945
, “are no fair-weather friends.”

Not that the Karen had a lot of options beyond violent devotion to the Allied cause. It was unthinkable what would happen if the victors were the Burman-allied Japanese, who’d taken to pressing Karen and other natives into forced labor. Their only chance at autonomy was a British-brokered and -enforced Burma deal. The war between the Karen and the Burmans was then, as it had long been and is to some extent today, a war between Anglophiles and Anglophobes. The Karen told the British that they were happy to help—so long as the Europeans returned the favor after the war. British commanders and senior officers swore that the Karen would be rewarded with independence. One British civil serviceman had written in his appropriately titled
The Loyal Karens of Burma
that in the earlier days of British occupation, the Karen were “the staunchest and bravest defenders of British rule” and that without their “loyalty and courage ... the Queen’s government would, in all probability—for a time, at least—have ceased to exist.” In this world war, too, the British, by all accounts, could not have won Burma without the assistance of the minorities. Allied Karen killed at least 12,500 Japanese troops in Burma in just the last months of the war.
⁹

In early 1945, another—most unexpected—group joined the British offensive against Japan: the Burmans. The Japanese were not going to win, and had made it clear that they had no intention of relinquishing power even if they did. The Burmans had bet on the wrong horse, and they knew it. Led by Aung San, a prominent member of the Thirty Comrades and the Burmese minister for war under the Japanese, the nationalists switched sides just months before the Japanese surrendered, just in time to demand British independence as their reward.

Postwar, the British on the ground laid out a nice, sensible plan for rebuilding Burma. The country was in ruins, everything from its economy to its roads to its rice paddies. The governor aimed to slowly prepare the nation for self-government under overarching British rule—after the necessary reconstructions. Moderation, though, was not an option for Aung San. No would-be Burmese leader could survive a call for
eventual
independence. Anyone with hopes of ever being in charge had no choice but to demand independence right now. Politicians 5,500 miles away were on board with that, anyway; the Labour Party had won Britain’s election and was dropping colonialism like hot to the floor. Some Conservatives wanted to stick around and oversee Burma’s transition to independence, but England had way bigger problems—like Gandhi, and rebuilding London—and the Empire was being hastily dismantled. Now Britain didn’t even
want
to do anything but comply with Aung San’s demands.

But the nationalists weren’t the only ones making demands. For the Karen—being traitors to their country and all—total and permanent annexation to British India may have been the best possible scenario. Short of becoming British subjects, they needed their old allies to make their autonomy a nonnegotiable condition of an independent Burma, as they’d been promised. A Karen group of representatives went to England to cash in on that pledge. By that time, though, His Majesty’s Government didn’t in fact have the means to make good on it. The British weren’t going to risk Aung San’s inciting
a nationwide revolt over negotiations about hill tribes that likely lacked the political and military clout to maintain independent states anyhow. The prime minister received the Karen delegates, couldn’t offer them what they came for, and sent them on a tour of a local soap factory. The minorities had been sold out. Literally: In lieu of liberty, they were given some money.

“All loyalties have been discarded and rebuffed; all faithful service has been forgotten and brushed aside,” wailed Winston Churchill. “We stand on the threshold of another scene of misery and ruin.” He condemned his opponents in Parliament, that the abandonment “should ever haunt the consciences of the principal actors in this tragedy.” Whatever. Churchill wasn’t in charge anymore. The agreement his successor signed with Aung San promised ultraquick independence and included a provision expressing hopes that the hill peoples would cooperate with unification.

At least Aung San was unification’s best chance. He knew the Karen were both armed and suspicious, and he seemed genuinely, if a little unpopularly, interested in a union of autonomous nation-states. He proffered peace with the Karen after the Burma Independence Army massacres. He expressed his desire to appease the minorities in numerous speeches, publicly insisting that “Burma should consist of specified autonomous states . . . with adequate safeguards for minorities.” He insisted that the hill tribes be part of the independence process. He held a conference where the Shan, Kachin, and Chin agreed that they’d give the Burmese government their cooperation and get autonomy.

The Karen didn’t even go to the conference. One of their most prominent leaders, Ba U Gyi, hadn’t
wanted
a fight; born to wealthy Karen landowners at the turn of the twentieth century, he was a university-educated lawyer who’d practiced in London, a gentleman, handsome, with a kind face, soft-looking beard, and handlebar mustache. He’d advocated nonviolently for Karen autonomy, joining Aung San’s pre-independence Cabinet, helping organize the Karen
delegation to England, filing resolutions with the British government. But his minority voice had been drowned out in Aung San’s Executive Council, London had brushed off his delegation, and his resolutions had been ignored. So instead of attending Aung San’s conference, the Karen held their own, where they formed the Karen National Union. They also boycotted the national elections. The British would save them, they were sure, or the Americans, or both. It was 1947. If Pakistan could be independent, they could, too. And they’d been too terrorized by the Burmans for too many centuries to submit to their authority.

In the end, agreements made or not made didn’t matter much, because the brand-new Union of Burma was soon to fall under spectacularly evil and incompetent military authority. In July 1947, Aung San, the father of the republic, and the peaceful union and minorities’ only hope, was assassinated—along with a Karen leader, a Shan chief, and an important Muslim figure, among others—by political rivals in a shower of bullets at a meeting of his interim government. On January 4, 1948, at 4:20 AM, the exact moment Burmese astrologers had deemed auspicious, Burma became independent. On the pole in Fytche Square, Rangoon, the British flag was exchanged for the Union of Burma’s as British officials and their misty-eyed wives stood by. The new and first president was Shan. But the surviving council member who became prime minister announced that he was 100 percent in opposition to the idea of autonomous ethnic states, Karen and otherwise.

What happened next was a shit show. Independent Burma had been created by military men. The country was flush with weapons. And the upcoming generation of a country with its own legacy of war had spent its formative years watching Japanese, Chinese, British, Indian, and American soldiers throw down on its soil in the fight of the century. In March, the Communist Party of Burma revolted. The People’s Volunteer Organization, a collection of militias, followed. Six battalions of Karen and Kachin fighters held the country
together under Lieutenant General Smith Dun, a Karen supposedly named after the protagonist in
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
. He was commander in chief of the army—which was in mutiny. Still loyal soldiers at first, even to a government that wouldn’t grant them independence, the ethnic units rescued towns from Communist Party control. Some Karen in the military police, also in mutiny, captured another town. They gave it back, and a commission was established to settle the rift between Karen and Burmans. The prime minister wanted the minority to participate in the government through the parliament. The Karen said they’d never get their fair share. No one would compromise. By the summer, Karen and Burmans were killing each other. The newly formed Karen National Union started aggressively arming fighters, aided by some old British special forces soldiers, who smuggled weapons to them. For decades, the Karen had been putting down violent uprisings. Now, amid the deepest internal chaos the country had seen yet, they were going to mount one.