Land of Jade

by Bertil Lintner

  “Let’s get out and push,” said Kyaw Nyunt.

  We jumped out and began shoving the jeep uphill. But again the vehicle bogged, the engine shrieking and the tyres spinning helplessly.

  “Planes!” I shouted.

  Kyaw Nyunt straightened and listened. The roar of aero-engines was easily audible across the hills, followed by the reverberating boom of explosions. We set to the jeep again, spurred by the realisation that the aircraft were only a few minutes flying time away. Straining and gasping we manhandled the vehicle step by step up towards the crest. To avoid slipping back into the mud, I wedged a rock under my right foot and pushed the jeep with my shoulder, using my full strength.

  The planes were now definitely too close for comfort. Kyaw Nyunt too was growing nervous. If they flew over us and spotted the jeep—not a mode of transport used by the average villager—they would very probably shoot it up.

  We struggled and groaned with sweat pouring down our faces and we were soon covered with mud. Suddenly, the pressure on our shoulders eased. The road levelled out after a sharp bend on the last uphill stretch. We were out of the mud. Kyaw Nyunt and I jumped in and the jeep sped off, on towards Mong Ko.

  There were no other vehicles on the narrow dirt road through the forest, apart from two trucks, laden with munition boxes, which passed us driving in the opposite direction. Shortly after meeting them, we reached a ridge from which we could see Hsi-Hsinwan. I looked back. Dirty pillars of brown smoke were wreathing up from the heights.

  “Stop!” I shouted above the noise of the jeep’s engine. “Hsi-Hsinwan’s being hit!”

  We climbed out of the jeep to get a clearer view. The four bald humps of Hsi-Hsinwan rose from the forests on the horizon. From the distance came the growl of aero-engines punctuated by the rumble of exploding bombs. Fresh clouds of white and brown smoke billowed over the mountain.

  I thought of the positions we had visited on the previous day—and of the young Wa boys now defending them. It was intimidating enough from this safe distance; to sit huddled in the trenches and bunkers with the bombs falling all around would have been terrifying. With its handful of obsolete, propeller-driven PC-6s and PC-7s, the Burma Air Force ranked as the least impressive in Asia. But that would be no consolation to those beneath the bombs it did manage to deliver.

  We climbed back into the jeep and drove on in sombre mood. Some three hours later, the Mong Ko valley hove into view. It was considerably larger than the Mong Paw valley and in broad fields ripening paddy rippled in the wind. The village itself was located in the middle of the valley floor and consisted of more than 100 houses, surrounded by bamboo groves. A stream running down the middle of the valley formed the international frontier between China and Burma. On the other side, a cluster of concrete buildings made up the Chinese village of Man Hai.

  We drove through the village, past the market and on to the CPB’s Northern Bureau headquarters a few kilometres to the east. An armed sentry in communist uniform guarded the entrance to the camp. Two twin-barrelled anti-aircraft machine-guns were positioned in a nearby field. The jeep pulled up outside a solid brick building where three party officials were awaiting our arrival. We shook hands and the most senior of the three was introduced to me. This was Kyaw Sein, a tall, slim veteran of the communist struggle. The other two were younger intellectuals in their mid-thirties; the one a short, swarthy Burman from Mandalay, the other a thin frail-looking Shan from Myitkyina in Kachin State. We sat down inside and were served coffee and biscuits. A red banner adorned with a yellow hammer and sickle hung on the wall.

  “You’ll have to stay here for a few days and then continue your journey to Panghsang on foot. The motor road ends here,” Kyaw Sein said through Kyaw Nyunt. The old man spoke no English but smiled and nodded after each sentence was translated. I asked about Hsi-Hsinwan but there was no news. I could not help worrying about Hseng Noung and Hseng Tai. Presumably, they were still at the KIA’s 4th brigade headquarters at Man Pi. But if the entire area between the Mong Paw valley and the Chinese border had now become a battlefield, it would be difficult for them to reach Panghsai and the bus from Wanting on the Chinese side of the border.

  The next day I was given a guided tour of Mong Ko. Kyaw Sein, dressed in baggy green fatigues, Chinese army boots and the inevitable cap with a plastic red star, acted as guide and some other local party cadres accompanied us down to the market. Groups of traders were unloading a mule pack nearby and a couple of Palaung women were carrying vegetables in cane baskets with forehead-straps. In the shops around the market, tailors were busy sewing clothes and the local video hall announced the latest Kung Fu movie from China. Despite the occasional thud of explosions in the distance, we seemed a long way from Hsi-Hsinwan.

  We continued past a large cone-shaped obelisk that stood next to the local primary school, a monument to Mong Ko’s sole claim to historical importance. Engraved on it and crowned by a red hammer and sickle in relief was a date which had drastically transformed both the village and the entire course of the Burmese civil war: January 1, 1968.

  Kyaw Sein belonged to that group of Burmese communists which had gone underground shortly after Independence in 1948, when the party had quickly taken over large tracts of the countryside and even threatened Rangoon. But the still fledgling Burmese Army had driven them back into the Pegu Yoma range north of the capital and other jungled areas of central Burma and the Irrawaddy Delta.

  In the early 1950s, more than 100 communist rebels—including Kyaw Sein—had trekked to China to receive military and political training. As long as U Nu was Burma’s prime minister, however, relations between Beijing and Rangoon remained good. That, however, changed in 1962 when Gen. Ne Win and the military seized power. Beijing, long wary of the ambitious and unpredictable general, decided on open support for the Burmese communists soon after the military takeover.

  Preparations began almost immediately for a large-scale “invasion”. The exiled Burman theoreticians were introduced to Naw Seng’s Kachins who had been residing in China separately since their retreat in 1950 through this very place, Mong Ko. With the CPB cadres as the political leaders, Naw Seng’s 200-odd Kachins formed the core of the new “People’s Army”, while the bulk of the manpower came in the form of several thousand volunteers from China’s militant Red Guards. Everything was set for a push into Burma by the end of 1967, with the aim of “liberating” the rugged hill country along the Chinese frontier and, ultimately, linking up with the “liberated zones” the CPB still held in central Burma.

  Early in the morning of New Year’s Day 1968, communist forces crossed the border stream between Man Hai and Mong Ko. New Year’s celebrations were abruptly interrupted by the sound of heavy gunfire from the Army garrison, which was overrun in less than an hour and its commander killed. Before the week was out, CPB forces were advancing on the predominantly ethnic Chinese district of Kokang, east of Mong Ko and the Salween River.

  The entire area was in communist hands before the end of 1968. Khun Hai and Man Hio, two small enclaves of Burmese territory north of the Shweli River, opposite Namkham and Muse, were taken over at the same time. Mong Paw was captured on March 21, 1970 and on March 28—the 22nd anniversary of the CPB’s uprising—the border town of Panghsai fell after an intense two-day battle.

  But Kyaw Sein omitted one important detail from his narration. The Mong Ko-Mong Paw area was an old KIA stronghold and Naw Seng, much to his dismay, discovered he had to fight not only government troops but also fellow Kachin guerrillas. He himself died in 1972, in mysterious circumstances, and the clashes between the CPB and the KIA continued until the cease-fire agreement between the two rebel armies was signed in 1976.

  In the hills surrounding Mong Paw and Mong Ko fierce fighting halted the CPB’s advance, but the communists pushed south from Kokang into the unruly Wa Hills, still then the home of head-hunters, Kuomintang warlords and local opium-trading chieftains. Mong Mau—or “Maing Maw” as the Burmans pronounced it—was captured
on May 1, 1970, in line with the CPB’s preference for capturing places on dates important for the communist movement. By 1973, the entire Wa Hills, save for the towns of Hopang and Panglong, had fallen under communist control. A new headquarters for this northeastern base area was set up at Panghsang near the Chinese frontier in April of the same year.

  Almost simultaneously, an area near the Lao border was captured and code-named “815” after the date of the party’s founding, August 15, 1939. The 815 forces soon pushed west, making an alliance with Khun Myint, a local Shan resistance leader in the Mong Yang area, north of Kengtung. The whole area from the Mekong River and the Lao border up to Panghsai had thus been brought under firm communist control six years after the initial thrust into Mong Ko.

  The Burmese Army soon recognised it would not be possible—at least immediately—to push the CPB back in northeastern Shan State. Instead, Rangoon turned its attention to the much weaker CPB zones in central Burma where communist guerrilla pockets, cut off from logistics support from China, were slowly throttled. Finally in 1975, the Pegu Yoma headquarters was overrun. The CPB’s scheme to link up the central and northeastern base areas had thus been thwarted, leaving the communists effectively isolated in their buffer state along the Chinese border.

  The first major counter-offensive in Shan State was launched in 1979 and code-named Min Yan Aung—“King Conqueror”. It succeeded in regaining control over a large area known as Mawhpa in the southern Wa Hills, opposite the CPB’s new headquarters at Panghsang. Since that time no territory had changed hands.

  Now, however, fierce fighting was raging at Hsi-Hsinwan and despite assurances from CPB leaders at Mong Ko, I was less than certain their forces would be able to withstand the government’s massive counter-offensive. Already, several regiments had been redeployed from central Burma to reinforce local units around Hsi-Hsinwan. The fighting was clearly the heaviest since the Min Yan Aung operation seven years before.

  Our stroll around Mong Ko had been punctuated by distant artillery and bomb explosions, which, if nothing else, provided a suitably dramatic backdrop to Kyaw Sein’s account of events. We returned to the brick building in the camp for more coffee and biscuits. It was then I heard that Brang Seng and Zawng Hra would be arriving at Mong Ko a few days later.

  “You’d better leave before they come,” Kyaw Sein told me.

  Quite why this should be necessary I failed to grasp. But as a guest I felt it would be churlish to object. Besides which, I was also eager to reach Panghsang and see Hseng Noung and Hseng Tai.

  The night before my departure, a dinner party was arranged after which a film was shown for my benefit. It was a 16 mm propaganda documentary made in 1978 by a Chinese film crew that had travelled all over the CPB-controlled zone. Its Burmese title translated as the “Inextinguishable Flame”, and the production was in the inimitable style of China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution—heroic, world-conquering and highly stylised.

  As the film progressed however, it became clear that its Chinese makers had had some difficulty adjusting to the somewhat different conditions of northern Burma. They had evidently been schooled to produce footage that relied heavily on mass scenes—throngs tens of thousands-strong outside the Gate of Heavenly Peace, workers’ rallies on a Shanghai wharf, waves of Liberation Army troops sweeping to victory. Attempts to bring off similar effects in the sparsely populated mountain ranges of Shan State bordered on the ludicrous.

  One memorable sequence purported to show the masses welcoming party chairman, Thakin Ba Thein Tin, to a CPB base camp. The scene was set with footage of a group of soldiers diligently polishing their weapons, sewing uniforms and tapping out Morse messages over wireless sets. Enter a messenger among the crowd calling out with an excitement impossible to contain that the Chairman had at last arrived. Joy! Ardour! Apparently from numerous bamboo huts, surged forth a steady stream of hundreds more soldiers, waving clenched fists and cheering lustily.

  A critical eye, however, might have detected that in fact the revolutionary hundreds issued from what were in fact the same four or five small huts shot many times and from many different angles. Having emerged into the radiant sunshine of the chairman’s presence, the throng of troops began to chant in spontaneous unison:

  “Long live the Communist Party of Burma!”

  “Long live Chairman Thakin Ba Thein Tin!”

  “Long live Marxism-Leninism Mao Zedong Thought!”

  Virtually every scene was on this pseudo-epic scale. It was not enough to show ten women returning from the fields carrying the rice harvest: there had to be 200 or 300 of them. Three or four horses would not suffice; a herd of 50 or 60 was required. Indeed, it must have been a exhausting exercise in logistics to gather this enormous cast of extras from across the barren hills of the “liberated” area.

  The acting tended to the melodrama of the silent screen. One sequence showed a mass meeting in a Wa village held to denounce a feudal lord. The actor who portrayed him had good, stolid peasant looks and stood in a village square, unmoving, with his head sunk on his chest in unspeakable shame. Scores of villagers, mostly women, jostled for their turn to scream abuse with stabbing gestures of the forefinger.

  But my own favourite was a scene portraying the arrival of urban intellectuals who had made their way to the party’s base area to join the revolution. It opened with a flotilla of canoes being paddled up a river through dense jungle. They were crammed with earnest-looking young men, the majority bespectacled, and all elegantly attired in traditional Burmese dress—longyi and jackets with high-buttoned necks.

  As they disembarked from the canoes, they gathered up their luggage: briefcases, suitcases and—somewhat incongruously for those shaking off the fetters of Imperialism—Pan Am flight bags. One of the intellectuals then shouted and pointed up the hillside. Cut to an immaculately uniformed, apple-cheeked young communist soldier in heroic pose, rifle braced across his chest. Like Jack-in-the-Boxes, dozens more CPB troops popped up on screen behind him.

  Cut back to the intellectuals, who by now were racing up the hillside, faces suffused with luminous joy, right hands extended stiffly in front of them.

  Cut back to the Vanguard of the Revolution, who by this time were streaming down the hillside, ditto.

  The two sides collided in a tangled melee of extravagant embraces, handshaking and back-slapping. Traditional Burmese costumes began flying through the air and in seconds the camera discovered the new volunteers in brand-new uniforms, belts shining, trousers crisply creased. All were tenderly cradling the new weapons with which they had just been issued.

  Then followed a traditional Burmese dance to the music of gongs and drums and with slowly swaying bodies and graceful sinuous gestures of the arms and hands as the newly arrived intellectuals-turned-soldiers mingled in revolutionary union with their new-found comrades-in-arms. The climax of the scene was a procession of the volunteers, bearing a huge portrait of Chairman Thakin Ba Thein Tin at the head of the crowd and marching through a deserted landscape with enthusiastic shouts of praise for the party.

  Suddenly, I saw a figure I thought I recognised—younger and well-scrubbed, but unmistakably Kyaw Nyunt. I turned and nudged him:

  “Isn’t that you? Third from the left?”

  He winced; then hissed back: “They made me do it.”

  When the lights came on he was ill at ease and obviously disinclined to discuss the extravaganza we had just witnessed. I decided it might be tactful if I had an early night.

  ** No reports of Soviet advisers came in the international press after the battle at Hsi-Hsinwan. But, interestingly, a British weekly reported that “the communists may have been getting help from Vietnam and Laos; Burmese troops apparently discovered tell-tale bodies” after the battle. Another publication suggested that North Koreans had been involved in the attack on Hsi-Hsinwan.

  11

  KOKANG AND THE WA HILLS

  Heavy gunfire was still rumbling at dawn the following morning. I
t had ceased to be a point of comment and we sat down to coffee and to wait for our escorts and guides. Kyaw Sein and Kyaw Nyunt were visibly nervous, however, and from scraps of their Burmese that I could understand, I gathered they feared an air raid on Mong Ko. That was why I had to leave so suddenly. Twin-barrelled, heavy machine-guns had already been set up around Northern Bureau headquarters.

  My guide for the journey down to Kokang and the Wa Hills was to be Sam Mai, a Kachin student who had joined the CPB. Lean with almost Indian features, he spoke good English. Xiao Yang, a Chinese boy in his teens from the Mong Ko area, was also coming along as cook and muleteer. I was somewhat surprised to see what a wide range of unusual provisions was loaded onto the mules. They included family-sized bottles of Mirinda orangeade, canned Tsingtao beer, Chinese brandy, bundles of Burmese cheroots, Nescafe, biscuits, khao soi and a generous supplies of Ma Ling Chinese tinned luncheon meat. Our escort consisted of twelve Wa soldiers. They carried a rifle each and a one full magazine.

  We set off at 11 am—just as hollow explosions echoed from the west of us and the snarl of distant engines came through the air.