Living Silence in Burma (31 page)

In addition, permission for leave was rarely granted. According to Kyaw Win, in his battalion only fifteen to twenty people out of 800 were allowed leave during the one-month rest periods after six months at the front lines. Kyaw Win said that if you did not send a bribe along with your application for leave, you would be automatically rejected.

Moreover, it was almost impossible to resign. Like other soldiers I interviewed, Kyaw Win was unable to leave, even after ten years’ service. He had joined when he was fifteen, but when he turned twenty-six and thought about resigning, his superior officers refused to consider it, arguing he could still serve for many more years. Kyaw Win said,

    If you submit your resignation letter often, you will be given a promotion. Then, since you have a bar [epaulette] on your shoulder, you will become proud and you won’t [want to] leave any more. You can get another bar in six months. And so you carry out your duty. After having two bars, you will become fed up. It’ll be harder for you to get a third bar. But if you submit your resignation quite often, they’ll give you another bar. They won’t let you leave. So when soldiers want to leave, what they have to do is to bribe people from the hospital to hospitalize them. They have to tell them, ‘Help me quit. I’ve gone crazy. I can’t see. I can’t hear.’

Only if a specialist signs such a declaration can a youngish soldier retire.

For all these reasons, another military man, ex-sergeant Maung Maung,
referred to life in the military as worse than a prison sentence. While actual prison inmates would surely disagree, he felt that he was treated terribly, even though he had done nothing wrong. He talked about how his unit had had to work for several days on the rubber plantation of his divisional commander’s daughter. When the daughter married, the family sold the plantation for a large sum of money, but the soldiers were not even provided with extra food when doing this work, let alone given any monetary compensation. ‘That’s why we constantly said to each other that we had been charged with life imprisonment with hard labour,’ he said. ‘We have no days free from that.’

Interestingly, Maung Maung is Karen and grew up in Pa-an, the capital of Karen State. He said he joined the
tatmadaw
because he was inspired by what he read at school about the important role the armed forces had played during Burma’s independence struggle. He said that although he was often distrusted and discriminated against in the army because he was Karen, this didn’t bother him too much. What did upset him, though, was how the officers abused their power. ‘In the military, there is great discrimination among the ranks,’ he said. ‘The officers treat us as having much less value than themselves. They eat good food. But when the soldiers get sick, they don’t even check up on them. They have no sympathy.’

The danger of expressing an opinion

Even when senior officers do ask about the well-being of the lower ranks, it is better not to tell the truth. Maung Maung learned this the hard way. On one occasion when the chief tactical commander came through on an inspection, he asked the troops whether they had any complaints. Maung Maung said that they had water difficulties. The chief tactical commander promised to look into it but, after he left, Maung Maung’s commanding officer summoned him and some of his men and angrily told them to solve the water problem themselves by digging a well. Maung Maung said, ‘Later, when any senior officer asked us if there were any problems, we kept quiet. We realized that what “expressing your opinion” really means is you should keep your mouth shut.’

Maung Maung said he joined the army not to reach a certain rank or make a certain amount of money; fighting was what he was interested in. He wanted to be a good soldier on whom people could rely. ‘But actually,’ he said, ‘now I’m not a good soldier for all the people, but only a good soldier for a handful of people. I cannot protect the people. I am only protecting my high-ranking officers.’

In his last post, Maung Maung’s relationship with his Burmese company commander was not good. They were based in a Karen village, and the wife of the headman told Maung Maung that she was worried about her two teenaged daughters. The captain would often get drunk and stay late into the night at her house chatting up her daughters. She said her daughters had studying to do and the captain’s behaviour was inappropriate in a socially conservative Karen village. She asked Maung Maung to tell his captain to stop visiting. Maung Maung explained to her that he couldn’t say this to the captain because he was an officer and Maung Maung was only a sergeant. He suggested that she send her daughters to stay at another relative’s house. So the next day, she sent them to stay with her niece.

That afternoon, the captain summoned Maung Maung and ordered him to get his platoon ready. Claiming there were enemy movements about forty-five minutes away, he told Maung Maung to march over there immediately and radio back about the situation. Maung Maung did as he was told, but when he arrived at the named location, there were no enemy troops to be found. Still, his captain ordered him to stay there overnight. Maung Maung felt it would not be safe, however. With only twenty-eight soldiers in the platoon, they could be easily overpowered by KNU troops. Maung Maung protested, but the captain told him to obey and turned off his radio.

Maung Maung didn’t know what to do. To disobey an order was a serious offence, but to stay could mean risking their lives. He called his troops and informed them of what the company commander had said. Then he said that they would return to the base. ‘Whether I get fired or punished, I don’t care,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you to all die here.’

After they had reached the camp, the company commander summoned him, grabbed him by the shirt and shouted, ‘You didn’t obey my order!’ Soon after, Maung Maung found out that his captain had sent him on the mission to punish him for encouraging the headman’s daughters to move.

That night, the captain got drunk and barged into the room where the headman’s daughters were staying. The headman’s wife ran to Maung Maung and asked him to help, but he had no authority to stop his superior. Still, he accompanied the headman’s wife to her relative’s house and heard the girls shouting fearfully to their mother. He pulled out his gun, put it on automatic fire and shot over the house. The captain burst out of the house and shot at Maung Maung three times with his pistol, but Maung Maung managed to escape without injury.

The captain followed him, drunk and swearing that he would take action against him the next morning. Maung Maung replied, ‘If you take action against me, I will tell the senior officer that you, a captain, went into the girls’ room.’ This only made the captain angrier. Soon after, Maung Maung ran away to escape being imprisoned. At the time of our interview, he was a migrant worker in Thailand.
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Maung Maung explained that although there were only two officers per company, they were able to control the troops by relying on divide-and-rule tactics. If the sergeants united with the soldiers against the officers, the officers wouldn’t be able to act so abusively, so the officers used rewards and punishments to split the lower ranks. Those who went against their commanders were sent off on dangerous missions, while those who were submissive were allowed to stay in safe locations. Maung Maung said that he explained to his soldiers how they were being manipulated, and they understood. But some wanted promotions badly enough that they went along with the officers’ tactics anyway.

Maung Maung served in the army for eleven years. ‘If the military were good,’ he said, ‘there wouldn’t be any reason for me to come over to Thailand. I still haven’t completely lost my desire to be a soldier. But it’s not that I want to hold a gun without reason. I want to sacrifice for the country.’ He decided that serving merely to support senior officers was pointless, particularly since the senior officers had so little concern for their soldiers. ‘I feel that if I continued staying in the military, there would be no one left in the army who was as stupid as me,’ Maung Maung said. ‘If I were killed, it would be meaningless.’

Although it is impossible to know the number of soldiers who have run away like Maung Maung, desertion has become a serious problem for the army. The numbers would probably be greater if soldiers had a safe haven to which they could flee. Senior officers try to scare soldiers by telling them that if deserters are caught inside the country they will be sent to prison or executed, and if they try to escape across one of the borders, they will be killed by insurgents.
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In 1997, a group of
tatmadaw
deserters who made their way to India and joined with the Burmese pro-democracy groups there were later deported back to Burma by the Indian government.
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Deserters who make it to Thailand generally hide their identities and work as migrant labourers, but few migrant labourers have work permits, so they can be sent back to Burma at any time. Despite the risks, four members of Maung Maung’s battalion fled to Thailand within seven months of his desertion.

A cycle of violence

According to all accounts, brutality within the military has increased since 1988. This is most likely because the economic situation has continued to decline and the current military regime has no real ideology beyond enforcing national unity. Moreover, officers are generally not punished for treating their soldiers or civilians badly; they are punished only for disloyalty to their higher-ups.

As a result, a cycle of violence has developed, particularly in the remote areas, with officers treating their soldiers harshly and military men taking out their aggression on civilians. While few soldiers will admit the more unsavoury things they have done, they will discuss the abuses committed by others in the army. Ex-sergeant Maung Maung talked about how so many civilian porters died because of ill-treatment by military officers. ‘But’, he said, ‘we were given orders to march on, so I had to keep going ahead without looking back at them.’ Reflecting on how upset he would feel if members of his own family were taken as porters, he said, ‘Those officers didn’t treat the porters even as cows or animals. If the porters died, they just left their bodies there. At the very least, they should cover the corpse with leaves.’

In conflict areas,
tatmadaw
soldiers tend to perceive ethnic minority villagers as supporters of the ethnic resistance armies even though the villagers present themselves as neutral. According to Moe Kyaw, a former
tatmadaw
captain who spent several years in Karen civil war areas, this is in part because the soldiers know that many of the villagers have relatives in the resistance armies and that some villagers work for them, but they don’t know exactly who. In practice, this often leads to their treating all the villagers as the enemy.

Moe Kyaw said that
tatmadaw
officers may countenance the rape of villagers for various reasons. One reason is their anger at the villagers, whom they see as endangering their troops’ security by supporting the resistance armies. Another reason is that they feel sorry for soldiers who must serve in the front lines for such long periods at a time. A third reason is that they don’t want to lose current soldiers because recruiting new soldiers is so difficult. It is not only enlisted men who have committed rape, however. Human rights organizations have documented numerous cases of rape by officers and gang rape involving officers and soldiers as well.
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Other abuses include laying landmines in front of villagers’ houses and torturing and murdering those suspected of providing information to the resistance armies, sometimes in front of other villagers. Many
soldiers may not want to terrorize local populations but they are scared or feel compelled to obey orders. They may believe that their own security is dependent on such behaviour, or they take advantage of unarmed civilians to release their own pent-up anger.

Moe Kyaw said that in his officer training course, they were not given any practical training on how to handle local communities. As an officer, he said, his main priority was to protect his men. Thus, he never thought about the suffering his orders caused people who had to serve as porters or do other work for the military. He thought only about getting his job done and making sure his own soldiers didn’t get hurt. He said he was never trained to analyse orders, only to obey them. It wasn’t until he left the military that he began to see how the
tatmadaw
was not serving the people, even though this is one of the army’s main principles. He took the bold step of writing letters about this to former colleagues in the military. He was later informed by a friend that a case had been filed against him in which he was accused of dividing the military, a very serious crime, so he decided he had to leave the country.

With no knowledge of how other countries have handled ethnic conflict and no training in critical thinking, it is not surprising that military officers have not challenged the military’s strategy for dealing with the armed ethnic minority groups. Colonel Soe Thein, who resigned in 1993 and later joined an anti-government group based on the Thai–Burma border, said that previously he never thought that the regime should try to negotiate with the ethnic nationalists. ‘We didn’t think about a political solution to the problem, only fighting.’ Moreover, he explained that at that time he and his colleagues thought federalism meant anarchy. ‘Now’, he said, ‘I realize we must give autonomy to ethnic groups, but I don’t agree with independent states.’ Since most of the ethnic leaders are now calling for federalism rather than full independence, he has come to believe that a negotiated solution is possible.

While some soldiers are still swayed by the argument that the military is needed to unify the country and wipe out insurgents, others have been dismayed by the regime’s respectful treatment of some of their former enemies who have been involved in drug production and trafficking. Khun Sa, for instance, was one of the world’s top heroin traffickers in the 1980s and 1990s and the former head of the Mong Tai Army in Shan State. In the past, the government-controlled press always referred to him in derogatory terms, but after he cut a deal with the regime in 1996, he was officially called ‘U Khun Sa’ and given a home in Rangoon, where he lived comfortably until he died in 2007.