For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question Read online

  Rangoon wasn’t exactly fooled. It had been having enough trouble establishing peace in its democratic republic. Now, thanks to its sovereignty’s being flagrantly violated by the United States, it was sweating a Chinese invasion and sparring with yet another insurgency. The Thais joined the fray, too, providing crucial support to the KMT. And also fighting alongside the KMT were the forsaken but still-trusty Karen.14 Clearly, Burma’s US-assisted military needed cohesion and ultimate priority in order to fight the US-backed KMT, and it began aggressively expanding under the (justifiably) paranoid General Ne Win, he of the Karen Baptist school burning of 1947. A military-run government entity opened a bunch of businesses and bought up many other existing ones, including a bank, until it held the lion’s share of Burmese commerce. Civilians in government posts were replaced with soldiers. The Burmese prime minister had been doing the best he could, but the stressed government was racked with rifts that couldn’t be mended, and the military was starting to take charge.

  In 1958 the Burmese army, now bigger and badder and more in control, surrounded the government seat. To avoid a coup, the prime minister handed over power to Ne Win to run a caretaker government until the next elections. The War Office was running the country now. There were no royals, no colonials—there was no government that could or would even bother trying to keep the country from militarization at a time like this. The KMT ended up selling and sharing their military equipment with other insurgents. There were a fuckload of guns in Burma. A lot of them were ours.

  Burma was so vulnerable that it needed to team up with those willing and able and close enough to help the government take back its country: commies. In 1961, after years of KMT occupation of Burmese land near China’s border, twenty thousand People’s Liberation Army soldiers came after them. Together, the PLA and the ferocious Burmese army routed the KMT at last. But that one war ended was hardly the only war going, of course.15 The Shan had formed an army, in response to the Burma army’s continually coming through their territory to fight the KMT. The Allies’s old mighty fighting Kachin founded an armed resistance as well. And as for our protagonists, the Karen had been pushed way back away to higher border ground by the new and improved Burmese military. And now their Chinese allies had lost. They’d even suffered the death of Ba U Gyi, who had been gunned down by a Burma army unit. But whatever their setbacks, they weren’t any more inclined to stop fighting than they’d ever been. Before he was killed, Ba U Gyi had laid out the four principles of the Karen revolution, principles that had become religion and law:

  1. For us surrender is out of the question.

  2. Recognition of Karen State must be completed.

  3. We shall retain our arms.

  4. We shall decide our own political destiny.

  If the Karen insurgents were going to have to wage their war from the literal and figurative periphery of the country, so be it.

  Ne Win wasn’t giving up, either. The period of his caretaker military government over, he’d had to cede power back to the prime minister when the people of Burma voted for him overwhelmingly in the next election. But the general thought he was the better man for the job, and nobody could stop his army from taking it. Given the recent events, the soldiers had more arms and a better excuse than ever. Besides, everybody else was doing it: Burma was literally surrounded by military dictatorships in Thailand and Pakistan, which bordered it to the west at the time.

  Like the artistic young Hitler before him, Ne Win hadn’t dreamt as a child of destroying millions of lives with gruesomely misguided evil. No, he wanted to be a doctor. Unfortunately for Burma, and for history, and for Htan Dah, he failed his second-year exams. So he started a coal business, but he couldn’t get a foothold in an industry dominated by all those damned Indian immigrants. It’s not like he was satisfied just working his job at the post office. Even when he became a military man, being a rank-and-file soldier wasn’t enough, and then neither was having worked his way up to commander in chief. Shortly after the prime minister was restored to his elected office, Ne Win arrested him and dozens of other ministers and chiefs. Ne Win, warmonger, paranoid, xenophobic, racist control freak, declared himself president of Burma.

  In the 1950s, Burma had hundreds of newspapers and magazines that were free to print what they pleased. Within a month after the coup, Ne Win had dismantled the free press, instituting the crippling censorship practices in place ever since. The prime minister had recently held a Nationalities Seminar to settle unrest between the increasingly armed ethnic groups and the government, but Ne Win halted the reconciliation process. He ended state scholarships that sent students to study abroad. He fired the experienced bureaucrats. Foreigners—be they aid workers, advisers, teachers, tourists—were declared verboten, as were horse racing and beauty pageants and nightclubs and Western dancing. Later, he threw several hundred thousand Indians out of Burma. Suddenly only one single crappy plane flew in and out of the country, and only to Bangkok. The military dispensed with the constitution and seized businesses in every sector, from oil to print, while loading government positions with soldiers. There was no civilian government anymore, and hardly any civilian industry. Soldiers controlled much of the economy, running it with a system of kickbacks and bribes in which every individual stood to gain as much as he was willing to exploit from others. Within five months, industrial production was down 40 percent. All major businesses were nationalized under the ruinous Burmese Way to Socialism. The only beer in the country was made by the People’s Brewery and Distillery. Ultimately, Ne Win’s Burma Socialist Programme Party became the only political party allowed. Burma, and any remote hope it had of overcoming ethnic tension and political aggression and total weapon saturation to become a thriving independent nation of any sort—let alone a democracy—effectively died in 1962.

  In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson invited Ne Win to the United States for an official visit. Really, Johnson just wanted to make friends. America had invaded Ne Win’s country when Ne Win was in charge of the army, and then Mamie Eisenhower had gone and talked shit on Ne Win’s wife within her earshot when the couple had last visited. A Red scare was a good reason to intervene in a sovereign nation’s affairs, but a military dictatorship enacting murderous human rights and economic policies, not so much. An independent socialist military regime was better than a Russian or Chinese communist satellite. Lunch was had. Golf was played (though Ne Win wore a metal helmet, just in case). As long as Burma was going to stay neutral, Washington was going to stay out of its business, regardless of the horrors it was about to start visiting upon its people.

  VII.

  HTOO MOO, unsurprisingly, did a lot of squats. The night following the MySpace-a-thon, he walked into the dining room/garage, where he stood at the end of the picnic table stretching his arms out in front of him and clasping his hands. “Have you exercise today?” he asked me, his feet planted shoulder-width apart, his knees bent as he started repeatedly dropping his ass toward the floor.

  Htan Dah and I were sitting at the table with 7-Eleven spoils. Hungry and in search of supplemental calories after dinner, I’d persuaded him to come with me to the convenience store I’d discovered just a couple of blocks away, on the way toward Office Two, to buy chocolate-flavored whole milk. His swig of the little bottle I’d bought him had elicited a face of shock and confusion, followed by this verdict: “It’s sweet!”

  “I have, actually,” I answered Htoo Moo. “I did yoga in my room this morning.”

  “What?”

  “Yoga,” I repeated. “It has a lot of stretching, and breathing, and strength building. From India. ...”

  “Oh, yes, yes, I have heard.” Htoo Moo shook his head.

  “It’s exercise!” I said. “It can be really hard, and you can become really strong—” Htoo Moo dramatically reached his arm over his head, then his other arm out to his side, like a ballerina, then bent over with a sassy flourish. “That’s not what yoga is like!” I said, and he laughed.

  �
��If you do not exercise, you will not be strong.”

  “I am strong.”

  “I do not think so. I think you will get fat.”

  “I’m not going to get fat!”

  “I think so.”

  I leveled my gaze at him and spoke slowly. “Do you want to wrestle?”

  He didn’t. But an hour later he did want to go for a walk to get snacks for the World Cup match later that night. He, Ta Mla, and I brought armloads of fruit back from the big roadside stall around the corner, dumping them on the picnic table. We stood around and peeled rambutan, fruit like a tiny Koosh ball, digging our fingers into tough red skin covered in wild bendy spines. The white flesh beneath tasted much like lychee, its cousin, like lightly perfumed gelatin.

  “I thought this was for the game tonight,” I said as we tore through the supply. “Shouldn’t we be saving this?”

  “We want to eat it now, we eat it now,” Htoo Moo said. “It doesn’t matter.” And he was right, since every man in the house was about to accidentally oversleep the middle-of-the-night match anyway. Not a single alarm existed in the BA household. The guys always told me that if they just told themselves to wake up at a certain time, they would—famous last words in every culture.

  “Here,” Htoo Moo said, foisting half a kilo of pineapple on me. I declined, already full of pineapple and rambutan and chocolate milk. “You don’t eat enough rice. You need to eat that, so you will get strong.”

  “I am strong.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  We continued to argue about my fitness, until I finally raised my voice and my shirt, exposing my abs. “I am strong!” I yelled. “I’m solid! Do you want to punch me in the stomach? Come on. You and me,” which is a fighting colloquialism that’s ridiculous to say to anyone, much less a remote Southeast Asian hill-tribe coworker peace-activist refugee whose hands have touched neither woman nor white person in any capacity, much less a punching one, ever in his life.

  Htoo Moo laughed like a lunatic, steadying himself with one hand on the table as he actually doubled over. He declined, and dropped it. But when I said, minutes later, that I didn’t think I was going to shower, he insisted that I should.

  “What do you care?” I asked. “Why don’t you lay off me? It’s chilly outside, and the water in that trough is freezing.”

  “If you take cold shower,” he asked, pausing to smile patronizingly at me, “will you die—or not die?”

  TWENTY-EIGHT-year-old Htoo Moo was, like Ta Mla, a human rights documenter. A couple of times a year, he shouldered a bag carrying whatever he wasn’t wearing of nine shirts, three pairs of pants, two pairs of shorts, four pairs of underwear, and two pairs of socks, plus a tape recorder, six tapes, a notebook, three pens, a digital camera, a battery charger, a kilo of sugar, cold, sinus, and stomach medicines, a bottle of water, and 150 bucks’ worth of Thai currency and trekked clandestinely into Burma.

  His most recent trip had started with a six-hour drive by BA-arranged car, five hours in a longtail boat watching the banks of the Salween River and a darkening sky, and two days of walking over mountains and jungle trade paths subsisting on just sugar and found water until he reached a village. Even by Karen standards, this settlement was pretty remote; a fish-paste purchase was a day’s walk away. At night, he slept outside on the ground, and during the day he stood thigh-deep in a river, trying—though he couldn’t get the hang of the procedure, however effortless the villagers made it look—to help net fish, chatting up villagers about abuses by the State Peace and Development Council. That’s what the government of Burma calls itself, which would be funny were it not tragically otherwise.

  After a month, Htoo Moo walked two days to KNU headquarters to interview the prisoners-turned-porters seeking refuge there. The Burmese military has long used villagers for labor, including portering, but the past decade had seen an increase in offensives against armed opposition groups, and more offensives meant more work to be done. Consequently, there’d also been an increase in the military’s filling its slavery needs with convicts.

  Burma’s biggest and most infamous lockup, Insein (pronounced “insane,” built by the British for the crime-infested territory), is notorious, but the conditions in its other forty-three prisons are just as heinous. Detainees—who are not uncommonly arrested and sentenced without charge or trial—are generally not allowed reading or writing materials and share an overflowing bowl for a toilet with maybe eight other men crammed into their cells. With provisions for neither hot nor cold, any weather extreme is torturous, plus there’s the constant threat of overt torture, should the authorities want to extort money or information. Many inmates see sky for but five minutes a day, when they are emptying their shit buckets. The few who receive medical attention risk deadly infection from used needles. Work is uncompensated and forced: weaving straw mats, making incense, plowing paddies like oxen, cleaning prison grounds. There’s no soap and little medicine, except maybe on the day the International Committee of the Red Cross came to visit, which it started doing in 1999. Escaped prisoners whom human rights documenters like Htoo Moo and Ta Mla found and interviewed told how short-lived those perks were:They never gave us any vegetables or meat. Sometimes the ICRC would come to visit, but prison authorities told us that if we had anything to report to the ICRC we should first tell them. So when the ICRC actually came we were not allowed to say anything. When the ICRC visited, the prison authorities prepared good food for us. But when they left, they took all the food away again. The ICRC was told that the prisoners get this food every day. But we never really received it. The ICRC left things such as cups and soap for prisoners. But we never got to use these things. The food they served when the ICRC came was curries and bean dishes, every other day we just got rice and bad fish paste. The ICRC also brought us soap, toothpaste, dishes and cutlery but the prison authorities took all this away once the ICRC had left.

  And:ICRC also brought us medicine. But we never received it. . . . We could not share our ideas or feelings with the ICRC. If we did, the SPDC [State Peace and Development Council] would put us in dark jail and they would torture us as well. We could not express any feelings, we could only tell what they order us to.

  Indeed, prison authorities did bug an interview that was supposed to be confidential between a prisoner and a UN envoy in 2003. But even those Red Cross brief and insubstantial reprieves were fleeting. The organization was thrown out of the country after 2005.

  Still. Whatever the hardships of being a Burmese prisoner, portering is a worse fate. Those who can afford it pay bribes to stay in prison—if the alternative is donning the dark blue porter’s dress and being driven in crowded trucks to the front line.

  A brutal and dangerous enslavement, portering has been feared long and wide. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow, whose diary entries in the book mirror the journals and experiences of Conrad’s time in the Congo, describes deserted villages of natives fleeing from porter duty for the ivory trade, from which they knew they were unlikely to return alive. In Burma, porters follow soldiers, carrying woven bamboo baskets on their backs. Survivors swear the loads weigh up to a hundred pounds. Htoo Moo had pictures of the lesions the straps left in their shoulders, giant, disgusting open wounds, raw, pink holes infested with flies and maggots, as if pieces of their bodies were already dead. Porters receive little food, rest, or water and endure repeated beatings with fists and kicks and bamboo. Soldiers motivate porters who’ve fallen down from weakness by stepping on their necks or striking them with the butt of their rifles, and prisoners who still fail to get up are shot or left to die. When necessary, porters do double duty as minesweepers, either walking ahead of the soldiers to detonate the explosives or attempting to dig them out of the ground with their bare hands. Offenses by the SPDC—which, though the name of the government, is also what people call the army, since the government and the army are the same thing (though the army actually has its own name: Tatmadaw)—can be partially charted by the trail of porters’ c
orpses left in their wake. By the time human rights organizations come in to investigate, sometimes all that’s left to be photographed is piles of bones in navy uniforms. Though soldiers tell the porters that they’ll be killed if they’re captured by the KNU, some stack the odds of escaping against those of surviving their portering stint and decide to take that chance.

  On his last trip, Htoo Moo had met the most recent batch of porters the KNU had intercepted; they were working at headquarters, farming and keeping house for a month or two while the soldiers questioned them for SPDC intelligence before sending them home. For a few days, Htoo Moo recorded long, heavy interviews with the twenty-eight escapees, mostly Burmans, who talked about nearly being killed by soldiers, and he even interviewed deserted Burmese soldiers, who talked about doing the killing of the porters:We had permission to shoot any porter that tried to flee because they didn’t want the KNU to get any information about the Burmese army. I personally experienced three porters being killed by Burmese soldiers. One porter couldn’t bear the burden of his pack anymore so he asked to go home but they forced him to keep going and after we had climbed another mountain he tried to flee and a soldier just shot and killed him. Another porter actually confronted a soldier and said, “We are one; we come from the same country, is it fair to treat us like this?” The lance corporal, his name was Kyaw Oo, said to him, “Are you confronting me?” And then he shot him dead. With the last porter, in the night one of the guards fell asleep and the porter tried to flee. But there was another guard who was awake who saw him and shot him dead.