Land of Jade

by Bertil Lintner

  It was terribly cold that night. Ee Ying cried and we tried to keep her warm with our Naga shawls. We heard sporadic gunfire and mortar explosions all day, which continued into the night. But we had no idea of the course of the battle.

  On the following day we stayed close to our banana leaf hut by the poppy field and I went out as little as possible. Still no news—which was nerve-racking. No messengers had arrived, only some villagers from Donyu had come to give us rice and other food. After dinner, we went to sleep early at 8 pm.

  I had been asleep for a few hours when I woke to hear Hseng Noung whispering my name. She put a finger to her lips:

  “Listen carefully,” she breathed in my ear.

  I sat up on the sleeping mat. The sound of men hacking their way through a bamboo grove with machetes cut the silence of a bitterly cold night. Voices came through the dark and the sound of heavy objects being dragged along the ground.

  “Reinforcements,” I whispered. “In the gorge below us. Just a few hundred metres down.”

  We moved quietly outside and squatted beside the hut, straining our eyes to catch a glimpse of any movement below us. We saw nothing. But the noises were so clear we could estimate the length of the column without difficulty. We concluded there were more than 50 men but less than 100. And they were moving westwards, obviously heading for a mountain range opposite Kesan Chanlam. I heard Hseng Noung’s urgent whisper:

  “Send a runner to headquarters and warn them. There’s a lot of men down there. And they’re dragging quite a few ammunition boxes, too.”

  “Oh God! Ee Ying’s woken up! Can you keep her quiet?”

  The baby had begun whimpering. Hseng Noung ducked inside the hut to nurse her. She came with the suckling and now quiet baby in her arms and sat down beside me again.

  “You see,” she said, “the Burmese may not suspect that there are Naga soldiers here. But if they hear a baby, they’ll think we’re villagers and come to ask for news about the rebels.” She rocked the baby in her lap.

  We sat there for more than an hour listening in the dark. When the Burmese troops had moved about a kilometre away from us, we went up to the hut where our Naga escorts were staying. We found them sound asleep and had to shake them hard to wake them up. Hseng Noung explained calmly in Burmese what we just had heard. While she was talking to the sleepy group, I suddenly noticed one of the soldiers had just lit a fire a few metres away. I rushed over, cursing and smacked it out with my bare hands.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “But it’s so cold!”

  None of the soldiers took what we had said seriously.

  “It must have been the wind.”

  “There’s no wind!” Hseng Noung and I snapped it out in unison.

  “Perhaps it was monkeys.”

  “Monkeys sleep at night and anyway they don’t cut bamboo with machetes.”

  Trying to get through to them was hopeless. We returned to our hut. A few minutes later, we caught sight of another, bigger fire burning in their hut. I raced up the slope, burst inside and beat the fire out bare-handed.

  “Are you out of your f***ing minds?” I hissed in plain English. Even if they did not understand the words, it was clear from their abashed looks that my message had got through. Obviously, strong measures were required. Hseng Noung and I conferred briefly and then came over to them with the ultimatum:

  “We’re going back to Donyu right now. If you want to stay here, light fires and keep the monkeys company, that’s your business.”

  “Oh, let’s go after breakfast,” they suggested.

  “And what about your headquarters? That Burmese column will reach it before dawn. A runner has got to be sent to warn the people there,” Hseng Noung said.

  We ignored their grumbles and started assembling our gear. When they saw how determined we were, they finally changed their minds. As we set off, they fell in behind us on the trek up to Donyu. Now and then we could hear the noises of the Burmese government forces cutting their way through the jungle on the opposite side of the gorge.

  When we reached Donyu at three o’clock in the morning, it was swarming with Naga troops who had retreated from their headquarters. The officers strode around the bamboo huts of the village shining torches in all directions. We had, however, become accustomed to the failure of the Naga guerrillas to take even the most elementary security precautions, so we said nothing. I just sighed. Christmas 1985 was only a few days away, but we realised that we would have to celebrate it in a manner quite different from what originally had been planned.

  For almost forty years, a virtually unknown civil war has been tearing Burma apart. The country’s ethnic minorities, who make up an estimated 40% of the country’s near 40 million people, have been fighting for autonomy, and in some cases even separation, for their respective homelands. I had been covering that civil war from Chiang Mai in northern Thailand since 1980 and made several trips up to the rebel bases along the Thai-Burmese border.

  It was during one of these expeditions that 1981 I had met Hseng Noung, then a cipher clerk in the Shan State Army (SSA), a guerrilla group from Burma’s Shan minority. Two years later, in February 1983, we were married and she left her jungle life to become a photographer. Together we visited and reported on various insurgent groups along the Thai-Burmese border including the Karens, the Karennis, the Mons and the Pa-Os.

  Such trips were always fascinating and often quite enjoyable. But we were always aware that to discover whether insurgency in Burma was simply an isolated irritant to the central government in Rangoon, or if the rebels did have the strength to carve out a legitimate role in the country’s future, a trip to the north where the main insurgent groups are active was a necessity.

  After six years with the SSA, Hseng Noung had greater insight than I into the complex situation deep within the country. Even so, she had never been to Kachin State, the area of operation of the Kachin Independence Army (KIA). Though there are hardly more than a million Kachins in Burma, they are considered a martial race with a long and proud tradition, like the Nepalese Gurkhas, of past service with the British army during both World Wars. Their resistance movement is generally said to be the strongest ethnic rebel army in Burma, with approximately 8,000 armed soldiers. So far, no foreign correspondent had ever been to their area.

  At that time there was also the powerful Communist Party of Burma (CPB), whose 10,000 troops occupied a 20,000 square kilometre large area along the Chinese frontier in eastern Shan State. The CPB took up arms only a few months after Burma’s independence from Britain in 1948 and was one of the last surviving communist rebel movements in the world.

  Long before we left Bangkok we were aware that an important gathering of rebels was in the offing. Preparations were being made by all the insurgent groups along the Thai border for a long trek up to Pa Jau, the headquarters of the Kachin rebels. The various members of the National Democratic Front (NDF), an umbrella organisation comprising the KIA, the SSA and seven allied resistance armies, had been invited by the Kachins to study the situation in the strategically important north. There were also rumours of the planned setting up of a Kampuchean style resistance coalition, comprising the nationalist groups in the NDF and the ideological adversaries of the CPB. For years—even decades—the civil war in Burma had led nowhere; the insurgents were divided among themselves and unable to pose a unified threat to the Rangoon government, whilst the Burmese Army was engaged on too many different fronts to achieve a total military victory despite its superiority in manpower and conventional weaponry over the rebels.

  In anticipation of major developments we decided to make our trip to the north of Burma at this particular time; our hope was to reach Pa Jau well before the NDF-delegation arrived.

  We had spent months studying maps and old travelogues, mostly from World War Two when the last expeditions, then military, had been made into the Kachin Hills from India, and reached the conclusion that there was no other alternative.<
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  Initially, we contemplated accompanying the NDF people from the Thai border but soon scrapped that plan at an early stage. Shan State, which we would have to march through in order to reach Kachin State in the north, forms part of the infamous Golden Triangle, Southeast Asia’s main opium growing area. There is a mishmash of private, mercenary armies who would not have taken our presence there lightly. Without us, the NDF delegates could probably move with little trouble. But had we been with them, the alarm would very likely have been sounded.

  We were familiar with the experiences of Adrian Cowell and Chris Menges, two British filmmakers who had gone into Shan State with the SSA in 1972. Their intention had been to spend six months with the SSA and make a television documentary about the Golden Triangle. Eighteen months later Adrian and Chris finally returned to Thailand after the Burmese military authorities had made several sorties with the intention of assassinating them and various opium gangs had attempted to kidnap them. Though they eventually emerged unscathed, the prospect of similar adventures was unattractive.

  Another, simpler possibility was through China’s Yunnan province. There are several roads leading from Kunming up to various points along the remote and rugged Sino-Burmese frontier, some controlled by the KIA and others by the CPB. Whilst the guerrillas, in civilian disguise, move relatively freely back and forth across the porous border, the presence of foreign journalists would have been a completely different matter. The KIA officers in Thailand with whom we had discussed our journey doubted if the Chinese authorities would allow us to pass through, let alone to return the same way again. Regretfully we had to decide against this route also; it was by far the easiest option.

  There remained only the route through India, which approximately coincided with the one the Allied forces had followed during World War Two when Burma was retaken from the Japanese. A road had been built across the wild Patkai Range: the watershed that forms the international frontier, down through the dense forests of the Hukawng Valley and on to Myitkyina, now capital of Burma’s Kachin State, and from there to the Chinese border.

  This extraordinary road construction project had been initiated and vigorously pushed through by an American general, Joseph ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell, after whom the road became popularly known as ‘Stilwell’s Road’. It was also known as ‘the Ledo Road’ as the road began in the small railhead of Ledo in Assam.

  From the maps we noted that the actual border crossing would not pose any major problem for there are many clandestine routes over the Patkai Range and once we had sneaked over the border and crossed the Chindwin River in North Western Burma, we would be safe in areas controlled by our hosts, the Kachin rebels.

  In this area the Burmese government’s presence is limited to major garrison towns and the roads between them—each few and far between. KIA contacts in Thailand warned us that parts of the Ledo Road had even returned to jungle whilst the main stretch through the Hukawng Valley to Myitkyina is dotted with Burmese army camps. But the surrounding countryside would be safe.

  The principal obstacles along this route would not be posed by geography, though the Patkai Range is high and wild, or by difficulties in dodging Burmese government troops—the problem was that the entire northeastern region of India, through which we had to pass to reach the Burmese border, is prohibited territory for foreigners.

  The easternmost states of Nagaland and Manipur have for years been closed because of intermittent fighting between the Indian Army and separatist Naga guerrillas. Assam, once a tourist destination, was made a Prohibited Area after widespread unrest there in the early 1980s, when the local Assamese began violent protests against the influx of ‘illegal immigrants’, mainly from the overpopulated neighbour Bangladesh.

  The plan was to establish contacts with the tribal guerrillas in Nagaland, who operate on both sides of the Indo-Burmese frontier, as they would be able to help us through the restricted areas in India’s northeast and across the Patkai Range, from where we could contact the KIA.

  The leadership of the Naga guerrillas consists mainly of tribesmen from the Indian side who have been waging a persistent but apparently futile war for a separate country since the mid 1950s. They are of Mongol stock and Christians—having been converted by American Baptist missionaries at the turn of the century, which only served to reinforce their sense of a separate ethnic identity.

  The Nagas fought against the Indian Army on the Indian side of the border until the mid 1970s, when a sustained Indian offensive drove them across the international frontier to take refuge in Burma. The isolated tribespeople in northwestern Burma are also Naga, and, unaffected by outside civilisation, had even been headhunters until quite recently.

  From these relatively well-sheltered base areas in northwestern Burma, safe across the border from the Indian army and remote from the central government in Rangoon, the Naga guerillas launch periodic forays into India, to retreat back to their hide-outs after their various missions: ambushes of Indian Army convoys, political assassinations of Naga and non-Naga opponents, and the occasional bank robbery to replenish their coffers.

  Though the KIA is a completely different type of rebel movement from the Nagas, for together with other members of the NDF it demands autonomy within a Burmese Union, not separation, there were historical links between the two insurgent groups which we hoped to take advantage of.

  For, during the ten year period 1967-77, several hundred Naga guerrillas trekked through Kachin State to China where, and though they were ardent Christians and not communists, they received political and military training. The KIA had always escorted the Nagas on these trips.

  In the late 1970s, following policy changes after the death of Mao Zedong, China cut off its aid to the Nagas. But the Nagas kept on coming up to KIA territory to make vain appeals to the Chinese for aid and, failing that, to request help from the Kachins. We knew that the KIA had occasionally given arms and ammunition to the Nagas, despite the different political aims of the two groups.

  The most prominent of the Kachin officers we had met was the KIA’s Chief of Staff, Maj.-Gen. Zau Mai, who had paid a clandestine visit to the Thai-Burmese border area in 1984. He had given us a letter of introduction, inviting us to visit Kachin State. This letter, which was written in the Kachin language, mentioned the foreign guest ‘John Hamilton’ which was the pseudonym we had agreed on to confuse the Indian security forces in case our plans leaked out—and to keep the Burmese authorities guessing. Our names are quite well-known to them on account of our numerous Burma related articles in the press. Indeed, international journalists of any kind are not popular with the xenophobic military regime that has ruled Burma since General Ne Win seized power in a coup d’etat in 1962.

  It seemed that with this document in hand, we were certain the Nagas would not refuse to help us, as there was no way they could afford to antagonise the Kachins. So we arrived in India confident we would make the necessary contacts. All we had to do, we reasoned, was to find somebody who was in contact with the Naga underground and pass on our letter.

  However, none of the newspapers or magazines we usually work for had been willing to help finance our trip since it would plainly be an illegal one. All we had managed to scrape together was advance payments for the articles we had promised to write when we came back. We had enough for a couple of months’ stay in India and if all worked to plan, by April or May at the latest, we would cross the border, and reach the KIA’s general headquarters at Pa Jau, near the Sino-Burmese frontier 900 kilometres to the east, well before the rainy season began in June or July.

  If we could not keep this timetable, we would be faced with tremendous difficulties. First of all, the rains would make the jungle paths almost impassable in August and September—and Hseng Noung was expecting a child.

  She was two months pregnant when we left Bangkok, though, so as not to complicate matters, we did not disclose this. In general terms we had asked the KIA officers what medical facilities existed in their area.
They had told us there was a well-equipped hospital at their headquarters with competent personnel, including midwives. We did not worry much; we were looking forward to having our first child born in Burma. After all, that was where Hseng Noung was born, and I have long had a strong personal affection for the country.

  The search for people who might have contacts with the Nagas began in Calcutta on March 8, 1985. We had just arrived from Bangkok and checked in at the seedy Salvation Army Red Shield Guest House in Sudder Street, trying to look like backpack travellers rather than journalists—which was not especially difficult given our limited budget.

  The first lead took us to the leftwing weekly Frontier, which embodies many of West Bengal’s unique intellectual traditions. Its editorial office is located upstairs in a dilapidated house in a narrow, winding back lane, not far from the bustling Bow Bazaar area. The furnishing is Spartan, consisting of a few, crude wooden desks and chairs, and bookshelves crammed with bound back numbers of the small, but well-respected, political weekly. The actual magazine is an old-fashioned letterpress product printed on brownish, frequently recycled paper which makes even the latest issues look ten years old or more.

  An old friend, the assistant editor, despite his obvious political inclination to the far Left, has always been one of our most reliable sources on West Bengal politics and even the all-India scene. We were quite certain he would have contacts with the Indian underground who could put us in touch with the Naga guerrillas, especially since we knew that their most active faction today is a left-leaning one, the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN). He might even have a pipeline to the CPB, which would be useful later on.