For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question Page 8

  Did you use prison porters or villagers?

  They were all villagers, captured and forced to become porters. But at the Kaw Moo Rah base they used prison porters. When we were on patrol we used villagers as porters.

  That soldier had ended up a prisoner-porter himself, having been convicted of desertion and conscripted into portering for his former fellow military men. One of the reasons he’d run away from the army was that he’d never wanted to be a soldier in the first place; he had been arrested at a bus stop and pressed into service when he was twelve. But he felt he certainly couldn’t serve after witnessing the atrocities his army inflicted on its countrymen. Some of the other escaped porters were so horrified by having witnessed SPDC abuses of ethnic villagers and even fellow Burmans that they joined the KNU. All were happy to get their stories on record with Htoo Moo.

  The path out of headquarters was tricky—it was laden with land mines, and diverged at one point, where the right turn led to a rural community and the wrong one to an SPDC camp—so two KNU soldiers accompanied Htoo Moo on the walk, from dawn well into nighttime, to the next small village. They entered it to find that some sort of plague had landed on all ten houses, and most of the people there were dying. One house contained a dead boy whose father, the only family member left, was too sick to bury him. The villagers encouraged Htoo Moo to look, to bear witness, and he did. He visited the ill and took pictures but left after a few days, because there was nothing else to be done.

  By the time he’d walked two days to another village, documented the story of a boy who’d been shot with his father and brother by SPDC soldiers while cultivating rice; by the time he’d looked at the fresh bullet holes in the boy’s shoulder and ass, and at the bloody track another round had grazed into the side of his head; by the time the boy had explained how he’d sent other villagers back to the field to get his brother and father as soon as he’d staggered home but it was too late, they were already dead; by the time Htoo Moo had taken pictures of the boy’s wounds, which had been treated with only boiled water and cotton dressing, he was ready for a rest.

  “The SPDC is coming,” the chief told him.

  You’ve never heard of Four Cuts, but it’s a Tatmadaw strategy that every Karen child knows very well: cutting off the enemy’s sources of food, finance, intelligence, and recruits (and, some say, their heads). Unfortunately for villagers, these sources of support include the villagers themselves, in addition to their rice, livestock, and able-bodied sons. Does this sound familiar? The military government that seized control in 1962 had learned the lessons of Western subjugation amply; some Burma army officers had even gone to London to study British warfare. Like the great colonialist power before them, Burmese soldiers in the ’60s—the Karen war still raging—started walking into defenseless villages with guns blazing and burning them down, issuing orders to Karen villagers, who were potential insurgents, that they could be shot if they kept more food on their farm than was needed for one person, or traveled at night, or traveled out of their village at all, or ran from Burma army troops that were shooting at them, or didn’t. Unfortunately for Htoo Moo, the Four Cuts campaign was, even decades later, alive and well.

  The Burmese military had assumed, correctly, that the village where he was staying, which was in an area under KNU control, was home to some KNU members and sympathizers. A scout had spotted assailing soldiers, and it was time to go. So this is the drill: You have to flee, carrying everything you can, big heavy loads, as much rice as you can stand on your back in giant baskets, any clothes or anything else you want to own for maybe the rest of your life, your baby. Htoo Moo helped the villagers hide rice, salt, fish paste, and some extra sets of clothing among the surrounding trees before they all took off together in the early evening. Htoo Moo followed the eighty villagers along a path he hadn’t noticed hidden beneath tall grass. Figuring a six-hour walk put them far enough out of harm’s way, they stopped at midnight and Htoo Moo slept, finally, on the forest floor.

  The next morning, he woke up to find people quickly gathering the food and family they’d brought. A scout had arrived with news of the SPDC’s offensive; everyone needed to leave. Htoo Moo had slept through breakfast, and there wasn’t time to make more. While people were getting ready, he sat on the ground and counted. Neighboring villages had evidently joined the flight; there were two hundred heads in the makeshift camp. They had with them one KNU soldier. Not wanting to further strain the villagers’ supplies, he stalked an enormous rat he’d spied lumbering around and killed it with one strike of bamboo. When Htoo Moo smiled, pleased with his efficiency, an old man next to him laughed. “Before you woke up,” he said, “I tried to kill that. I think it was already tired.”

  The villagers fled from seven in the morning until noon. Some of the shoeless children lost flesh and bled as their feet pounded the ground, and some of those cried silently as they ran. Htoo Moo carried his bag on his back, the dead rat in one hand, his digital camera in the other, occasionally snapping pictures of the exodus. When they stopped, he dug his fingers into the rat’s skin and ripped it off. He tore the meat into pieces and went in on lunch with another man, who provided a pot containing some chilies and salt. Five minutes over a fire later, seared jungle rat was served.

  Htoo Moo could finally relax: His belly was full of warm meat, and he lay back on the cool jungle bed beneath the canopy of an abundant tree. He closed his eyes as sleep started to descend upon him, and then the sound of gunshots.

  Gunshots. He clutched his bag and got to his feet as the villagers started hustling. Nobody screamed. The boy with the bullet holes Htoo Moo had photographed had been carried by village men in a hammock this far, but now he jumped up and started running, new blood rushing from the wound in his ass. Htoo Moo took off, ahead of even the village chief, reaching a flat-out run, crashing shoulder-first through tall croppings of bamboo in his path, before realizing that he had no idea where he was or where he should be going. He stopped, turned around a couple of times, and considered ditching his camera. What if the SPDC caught him? What if they had him in captivity and saw that he’d been taking pictures of gun-shot farmers, prisoner-porters with skin disease, cigarette burns, knife wounds, raw and infected shoulders that bore the permanent scars of carrying, over mountains, for days or weeks at a time? He’d keep the camera for the moment, he decided. But sometimes fleeing groups ran head-on into other military divisions, and the villagers in the back had the best chance of being ambushed or taking stray gunfire from the pursuing ones. Though he felt like a coward, he fell back into the middle of the throng. Indeed, by the time they stopped at nightfall, news had spread through the crowd that one man in the rear had been shot dead.

  Htoo Moo lay down but couldn’t sleep. He listened to the men next to him talking. Of the two hundred people, they four had guns. They counted their ammunition and determined that they had four or five rounds apiece. One admitted that he had only three bullets left. “No problem,” another told him. “You will just aim very well.”

  After three days of squatting and swatting bugs in the jungle, Htoo Moo told the chief that he wanted to leave. Sometimes, villagers hide out for weeks because they don’t know if it’s safe to go back yet. Sometimes, it never is. Sometimes, those who’ve had to leave behind sick or elderly or shot who couldn’t run have to sneak back to bury their bodies quickly, looking over their shoulders—assuming the bodies haven’t already been disposed of, burned along with the rest of the village. Htoo Moo didn’t know how long this displacement was going to last, but he needed to get back to work. A hunter was making his way back toward the border, and Htoo Moo could follow him away from the escaping villagers.

  “I will take you myself,” the chief said. “I am ready.” He was in no hurry now. He’d heard news over the radio that the soldiers had stopped at the village and weren’t pursuing them. He didn’t have to run, and he didn’t have anywhere to go: The SPDC had killed the pigs and the chickens, then burned the village to the ground.


  In the face of the oncoming attack, the KNU had set up scores of new land mines, and the old way in was no longer a safe way out. Htoo Moo and the chief trudged through the jungle for three days back to KNU headquarters, where they shook hands and parted. Soon after Htoo Moo and yet another guide started off from base, the parasites that had entered his body through mosquito spit and been multiplying in his liver burst through the cells that hosted them and flooded Htoo Moo’s bloodstream. He trekked, though more slowly, through his fever, stopping when the retching brought him to his knees. “Don’t rest there!” his guide screamed when he moved toward a smooth patch of soil just to the side of the path. He’d nearly knelt on a land mine. It took another two days to reach the riverbank, where he bought antimalarial tablets with his last few baht and boarded the boat toward what had, by default, become home.

  “I WILL take you to Office Two for school today,” Htan Dah said Monday morning. We were both, as usual, up at dawn. I’d admitted to him that Htoo Moo’s driving terrified me, and I was pretty excited to hear that. I was also excited about the stack of neatly sorted and stapled papers I was carrying out of the computer room, a twelve-page workbook of English exercises for my beginner students I’d labored over all weekend, having got a better sense of their skill level the week before.

  “Look what I did!” I said, holding the pages out proudly. “All this!”

  “Wow,” he said, fingering them unenthusiastically. “That is . . . not so much.”

  I swung the papers at him, hitting him in the arm. “This was really hard. This took a lot of work.”

  He just laughed at me. “This morning, I have interview. But I will be back in time for breakfast before we go.”

  The previous night, when I’d sat down next to Htan Dah in the living room as he watched Thai soaps—because, he insisted, they helped him learn the language—he’d told me that he’d been selected to interview for a journalism-school program at the University of Chiang Mai. It was a free, eight-month, highly intensive and selective course aimed at training reporters and editors from ethnic communities. I’d shot some standard interview questions at him, for practice, and promised him that they were going to ask why he should be picked.

  They did indeed, he told me when he got back. He could hardly contain his awe of my powers of prediction.

  As we ate breakfast, we made plans. I’d promised to take him into a city someday and to the movies, to which he’d never been, and he’d said he would take me to his camp, several hours’ drive southeast, to see pictures of his wedding. This was another reason he was keen on driving me to school: Though any motorbike trip was possibly dangerous for an undocumented runaway refugee, throwing a foreigner into the mix opened up the potential for even long drives. “No one bother me,” Htan Dah had said, “if I am with very beautiful white girl.”

  Our meandering conversations and schemes helped occupy Htan Dah while he kept me company during breakfast and dinner. He’d continued to sit diligently at the table with me, though he always finished eating before I did, with his lightning-fast shoveling and chewing. That morning, as I ground every last bit of rice into oblivion between my molars, he finally called me on it. As much as he enjoyed our chats, I was sure, his job as office manager, handling the books, the money, the cooking, hardly left him time for two-hour brunches.

  “You are so slow,” he said, watching me chew. “Why don’t you eat fast?”

  “Why should I?” I asked. “I’m not in a hurry.”

  “But what if you are under attack, or have to run away?”

  “Htan Dah, I’m from Ohio.”

  “Yes, but I am refugee(!). We are taught to eat fast.”

  Be that as it may, we were in peacetime Thailand, so this attack seemed like an incredibly hypothetical scenario, even though Htan Dah had mentioned something about refugee camps’ getting burned down on the very first day of class. But in all the times in my life I’d envisioned what it was like to live in a refugee camp, which had been approximately zero times, a camp being under attack and burned down wouldn’t have entered the picture. Since I’d been unable to imagine it, and since I’d gotten the sense that Htan Dah, with his copious exclamations, had a flair for the dramatic, I’d kind of dismissed it.

  So boy, did I feel like an asshole when he turned in an essay with this intro for workshop on Tuesday:Having been fallen a sleep at midnight, my parents, sister, aunt and I heard the children’s screaming and the voice of the shelling mortars simultaneously came about, and suddenly jumped through the ladder from the top to the bottom of the house to get away from the attacking troops’ ammunitions without grabbing any facility.

  THE KAREN resistance had begun well armed—British occupation and World War II may have been fleeting, but weapons last a really long time—and though they had lost their chance at the capital, in the decades following independence, the KNU built the largest, richest, and most threatening insurrection in town. The rebels commanded the passages to Thailand, taxing the teak and other smugglings flowing through the porous border. By the ’80s, the KNU claimed its annual income from border taxes and trade was in the tens of millions a year US, plenty to buy more guns and ammunition. Despite Four Cuts, huge pieces of what had always been Karen land in the area that even the government called Karen State were under KNU control, which infuriated the regime. Also, there was that whole bad-blood-from-being-on-opposite-sides-of-international-wars-for-more-than-a-century thing. And so in ’84 the Burma army, which had historically instigated only dry-season assaults, started fighting right through the rainy season.

  Which brings us to a wee Htan Dah living in Thailand with his mother. For years, small groups of Karen had stayed in the neighboring country during offensives, running from Four Cuts but returning home when the fighting subsided. This time, the Tatmadaw was intent on cutting off the KNU’s black-market tradings and funding, and gaining control of the border area. It didn’t retreat when the monsoons came. Now that the refugees were in as much danger as combatants were year-round, it wasn’t safe for them to go home. In 1984, ten thousand refugees, including Htan Dah’s family, had set up more permanent camp on the Thai side of the Moei River. And the civil war roiled on. In fact, though it was nearly forty years old, it was escalating, and no one—not the government, not the rebels, not the villagers—predicted peace anytime soon. By 1994, the fugitives totaled eighty thousand.

  For a while, the asylum seekers in Thailand were safe. Though they worked as illegal and terribly underpaid and underappreciated immigrants, if they could find work at all, at least whole battalions of Burmese soldiers were less likely to march into a sovereign country to attack them. But what the Burma army could do was arm and otherwise supply and aid a different Karen group to do so, if only a breakaway Karen group would form and start attacking other Karen. Which, sadly, is what happened.

  According to Karen villagers, Burmese soldiers had for years been spreading discontent with the KNU among other Karen inside Burma. KNU leadership was largely Christian, and Karen villagers were largely Buddhist or animist, and the Burma army claimed that, as such, the Karen revolution would benefit only Christians. Further, if the KNU won, they would at least marginalize and possibly kill Buddhists. And it was true that, though they didn’t torture them, the KNU sometimes used villagers as porters. And it was true that the rebels often depended on the villagers’ food sources, and that the government had enacted Four Cuts in retaliation for KNU attacks and to stanch the group’s viability.

  A monk started turning people within the KNU itself, and some of the KNU’s practices made that pretty easy. Several of its leaders were using the money the organization was still earning from border taxes and selling teak to build great big houses. Rumor had it that sympathetic overseas donors were sending chocolates and cigarettes, but the guys at the top were eating and smoking them all. A Christian commander didn’t allow some Buddhist soldiers to leave their posts to pray, and in swooped a monk of discontent. He preached to the Buddhi
st KNU soldiers that they shouldn’t fight alongside the KNU because they killed Burmese, who were Buddhist. He preached that he could get them weapons, and food, and indeed he could, since he was buddies with the junta.

  Eventually, in 1994, several hundred soldiers defected. They called themselves the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army, or DKBA. They didn’t behave much like democrats or Buddhists, and they had a thing for killing Karen civilians. But they were most certainly an army. They passed out flyers telling the refugees in Thailand, many of whom were KNU sympathizers or soldiers or ex-soldiers or families of soldiers, to return home. Their warnings unheeded, they started attacking.

  The huts at Huay Kaloke were cloaked in thick, warm Thai darkness when soldiers moved in on the seven thousand refugees living in Htan Dah’s settlement in January 1997. Residents generally went to bed early; there was no electricity, and flammable materials cost money that nobody had. Htan Dah’s mother wanted to provide her kids with the opportunity to study at night if they needed to, and sometimes hired herself out as daily labor, plowing fields for about a dollar a day. That was less than half of what the legal Thai workers alongside her made, but she needed to buy candles—she wasn’t wild about her kids using homemade lamps, which were essentially tin cans filled with gas and set on fire—and nails, since that scavenged-bamboo-and-thatch hut wasn’t going to hold itself together. The small encampment had become overpopulated, so that there wasn’t even enough space to play soccer, and Htan Dah barely ever left it. But a Christian organization had donated some books, and NGOs were running a full school system now, and Htan Dah had exams the next day. He had stayed up past sundown, studying by candlelight, and had been asleep for hours by the time the sound of gunshots reached his family’s shelter. Some children somewhere screamed as he leaped off the floor along with his parents, sister, brother, and aunt. Though a short ladder provided access to the hut, they jumped through the front door, over it, and onto the ground. They ran, backs and knees bent, low to the dirt, for the surrounding woods as troops set fire to the camp. The bamboo and thatch huts went up like tinder, burning hot and fast. The members of Htan Dah’s family kept their mouths shut so they wouldn’t catch the attention of the troops, moving quickly and quietly among the chaos. Htan Dah kept his head down, so that he hardly registered the other people running alongside them, not even noticing that some of them were in their underwear. “Please, God,” he prayed. “Oh my God. Save me. Save my life,” over and over again. “Please, God. Oh my God.” It was a few days before his sixteenth birthday. He prayed and ran until he reached the forest, where, like everyone else, he stopped, turned around, and stood silently watching the camp—bedrooms, books, photos, shoes, a shirt woven by a grandmother—burn to the ground.