For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question Read online

  “One thousand three hundred sixty-six dollars,” I said. “That’s ...” I did some math in the top margin of my notebook, above TIPS FOR WRITING A MEMO. “Fifty-four thousand six hundred forty baht.”

  “Fifty ...” He narrowed his eyes.

  “Fifty-four thousand six hundred forty. Here.” I turned my paper toward him and pointed at the number.

  His face didn’t unfurl, and he just shook his head, then shrugged before saying, “A lot.”

  “How much money do you make?” I asked Htan Dah at dinner. For the past three meals, he had come to get me from my room when he was done cooking, and then he and Ta Mla had sat at the table with me. The others trickled in or came and went while I ate.

  “Five hundred baht per month.” About $13. Ta Mla was smashing fish paste and rice into neat little cones between his vertical thumb and four fingers before scooping it up to his face. Htan Dah shoveled a huge spoonful of rice into his mouth. I had a spoon, too, which he always set out for me. Tonight, he’d also set a plate piled with finger-thick, footlong branches topped with comely green leaves in front of my place.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  Htan Dah and Ta Mla both scowled at the little woodpile as if they’d never seen it before, though they’d each just put an end of one of the limbs between their teeth and then quickly chomp-chompchomped it into smaller pieces before swallowing. “I don’t know(!),” Htan Dah said. Each word was a note higher than the last, a singsong in ascending tones. His exclamations, I realized, made him sound like Yogi Bear. He laughed and shook his head. “You want to try?”

  “No, I’m good.”

  “What about fish paste?” he asked, nodding at the ever-present bowl of sedimentary oil on the table. His eyes sparkled fiercely. “You don’t like fish paste?” That morning, when he saw me turn my head to escape the smell as Ta Mla splashed the sauce onto his plate, he’d opted to describe how thoroughly you had to let the fish rot before you mixed it with chilies and oil while I tried to eat.

  “Shut up,” I said.

  The Blay walked in singing. “Say it together. ...”

  “What is this?” I asked him, pointing at the branches.

  “Morning glory?” he guessed. He laughed. “No. I don’t know.” Another unfamiliar face joined him in the dining room/garage, and together, they left.

  “How many people live here?” I asked Htan Dah.

  “Maybe . . . ten.”

  I’d seen a lot more dudes than that milling around the house. Many of them were dudes in Che Guevara T-shirts. “Who lives here? You, Ta Mla, The Blay, Htoo Moo”—he of a silent h and the constant smiling and the never talking to me and the stupefyingly round and hard-looking ass—“Ta Eh Thaw. ...” That latter was the girl, whose name I knew now that Ta Mla had written it down for me. “Who else?”

  “Gaw Sayyy,” Htan Dah began, drawing out the final syllables of the names, “Eh Soooe, Georgieee, Eh Kawww5. ... They are inside. In Burma.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Doing interviewww, taking videooo, taking picturrre. . . . They go to the village, and they tell about what is going on in Burma, and about how to unite for democracy. Also, they ask, ‘Have you seen Burma army? Have they raped you, or shot you, or burned your village?’” This explained the “Human Rights Vocabulary” translation cheat sheet I’d seen my first night. I’d gotten a better look at it that afternoon while organizing my class, studying the fifteen most used phrases. One side listed words in Karen script, a train of circular characters, loops that extended lines or swirls above and below the baseline. The other side was in English: 1.) Killings 2.) Disappearances 3.) Torture/inhumane treatments 4.) Forced labor 5.) Use of child soldiers 6.) Forced relocation 7.) Confiscation/destruction of property 8.) Rape 9.) Other sexual violence 10.) Forced prostitution 11.) Forced marriage 12.) Arbitrary/illegal arrest/detention 13.) Human trafficking 14.) Obstruction of freedom of movement 15.) Obstruction of freedom/expression/assembly.

  “Then what?”

  “Then they enter information into Martus.”

  “Into . . . what?”

  “Human rights violation database.”

  “Then what happens to the information?”

  “We can share, with other HRD.”

  “With other ...”

  “Human rights documenter.”

  “So you guys collect it all ...”

  Htan Dah stared at me.

  “And then what? Then it just sits there?”

  Htan Dah shrugged.

  “How do the guys get to the villages?”

  “They walk.”

  That explained Htoo Moo’s ass. “How long are they gone?”

  “Depends. Maybe three months.”

  “Do they just hide around the jungle that whole time?”

  “Yes(!),” Htan Dah said. “If they are caught, they could die.”

  This, though probably obvious, caught me off guard. Htan Dah and I watched each other for a moment.

  “Do you ever do that?”

  “No. I am office manager.”

  “Do you?” I asked Ta Mla.

  “Yes,” he said, nodding gravely. “I am . . . human rights . . . documenter.”

  Well, somebody had to document it—stealthily. One activist who gave an interview to a PBS Frontline reporter served seven years in prison. Another was sentenced to twenty-five years for giving an interview that was critical of the regime to the BBC in 1997. Of the 173 nations in the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index 2008, Burma ranked 170th, behind Iran and China and Cuba and every other country except the “unchanging hells” of Turkmenistan, North Korea, and Eritrea. Burma is third in having the most journalists in jail. If one exile newspaper’s tagline, which quotes Napoleon,6 is right that one newspaper is worth a thousand bayonets,7 and the employees of BA were fighting one of the largest armies on the planet by keeping villagers abreast of relevant world news and trying to collect the villagers’ struggles to disseminate to the rest of the world, they did indeed need a solid grasp of English.

  WHEN I’D told The Blay that I had no qualifications to teach English as a second language, I’d meant, really, that I had one, sort of: five years of high school and college French.

  “Okay, you guys, today we’re going to conjugate some verbs,” I told my afternoon class, the beginners. BA apparently had another office in Mae Sot, and most of my students apparently lived there. So, after one more full day of frantic Internet searching for a month and a half of lesson plans, Htoo Moo had, with neither a word nor a helmet and with a maniac’s speed, driven me to Office Two on the back of his motorbike. The beginner’s class contained Ta Mla, Ta Eh Thaw, and five people I’d never met. One of them was a middle-aged woman smooth of face and voice whose first question was how long I was staying and whose second was how they were supposed to have enough time to improve their English in six weeks. I’d only been in Mae Sot for four days, but even I was savvy enough not to use the “Six weeks is a really long time!” defense again with someone who’d probably lived in a refugee camp for twenty years. Instead, I just shook my head, my mouth open, apology creasing my forehead.

  My morning class, the advanced students, had been easier, since their comprehension was higher and I hadn’t had to painstakingly guide them through the very basic conversational interviews with each other and verb forms I hadn’t thought about since second grade. Like the beginners, they all had brand-new notebooks with creatures and chaotic shapes in gaudy colors on the front and multiplication tables on the back. They were made for five-year-olds, possibly Japanese ones, but they’d been bought special for the occasion. As I settled myself on the blue tile floor, against one edge of the whitewashed drywall, the morning students pulled up a bench and a couple of chairs or sat on the floor with me. Having gone to graduate school for writing, I had, unsurprisingly, decided to run the class as a workshop. After I regaled them with my tips on memo writing (“Most important: connect your purpose with the needs and interests of the re
ader”), for which they all leaned forward eagerly, we set up a schedule for them to bring in short essays describing a typical day in camp. The Blay, for all his insistence that I bring him up to professional level, hadn’t shown, but we’d assigned due dates for four students I’d just met, as well as Htan Dah and Ta Mla.

  “Ta Mla!” I said after the afternoon class ended. It was two-thirty; I’d only managed to fill an hour and a half of each two-hour session, and I was exhausted. “You’re in both of my classes!”

  “Yes,” he said, following me out of the room into the humid sunshine. “I . . . want . . . to learn. Very much.” His voice, like his features, was soft and serious. In our three hours of class together that day, I’d realized that he was taking in quite a bit more of what I said than his English-speaking abilities might’ve suggested. I just had to ask him enough questions and be patient enough to let him fully answer. He offered to give me a ride back to our office/house. Though I was relieved that he drove way slower than Htoo Moo did, he also seemed much less steady.

  First thing the next morning, Ta Mla was sitting in the living room, facing the computer room when I strolled out of it after sending an obligatory email update back home. I’d also taped up a piece of paper saying that if I was hit by a motorbike/killed by a diseased mosquito/trampled by elephants, call my father, with his contact information.

  “Are you finished?” Ta Mla asked.

  “Yes.” He didn’t appear to be doing anything. “Were you waiting for me?”

  “Yes. I . . . wait. For you.”

  “You didn’t have to.”

  “Yes. I wait for you. I have . . . no . . . friends . . . at the moment.” It did seem awfully quiet. Though it smelled like Htan Dah had been cooking, it didn’t sound like anyone was in the house. “Have you eaten . . . your . . . breakfast?”

  “No, I haven’t. Do you want to eat with me?” We walked toward the dining room/garage. “How long have you been in Thailand?”

  Ta Mla told me, while he gathered his tidy fingerfuls of rice, that he’d left Burma in 1999, when he was twenty, because he wanted to go to school. He was born in a small village, just sixteen houses, that had a teacher only for kindergarten; to attend middle school, he had to move into a dorm a five-hour walk away. When he finished, he worked as a security guard in the village where he was born. Once, when he was fourteen and away from home, Burma army planes flew overhead before anyone could run away, strafing and dropping bombs. His father was hit in the thigh and ankle, but he recovered. Ta Mla’s job after that was to look out, warning everyone when government soldiers were coming so they could grab their babies and some rice and disappear into the jungle, which is about as much security as a village guard can provide. Though serving as an early warning system is a pretty risky job—sentries are killed if they’re spotted—Ta Mla managed to avoid detection, and for three years he worked and lived with his family. But he wanted to continue his studies. And considering the country’s abysmal infrastructure and economy, the best place to go to school in Burma was in Thailand.

  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.

  IV.

  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.
r />   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