I clung to the back of the motorcycle and held my breath, each bump threatening to knock me off. We slowed, but did not stop as we passed. The officers looked us over but made no move to halt us. Thailand relies on tourism. We continued on.
We missed the bar and had to double back again. None of us were happy about crossing paths with those policemen again. I held on tight and we approached the bridge. That was when I saw what the policemen were doing. They had stopped a Burmese man walking at night with a sack over his shoulder. For a Burmese man, coming from a land of military oppression and vanishings, to encounter a group of uniformed men on a dark bridge is a harrowing experience. As we passed, the soldiers circled the man, blocking him from our view. They were shaking him down.
“The police,” my colleague told me, “request to get stationed here. They’re all getting rich.” If the Burmese can’t pay up, they can be arrested. The family must come up with money to pay off the police and retrieve their relative. Otherwise, the unlucky migrant will find himself or herself deported, or worse. We learned from a local NGO that the slave trade is flourishing, with over a hundred Burmese sold into slavery every single day. Children were certainly not exempted from this and were all forbidden by their families to go out at night. Every Burmese child I met said that they did not go out a night for fear of criminals and fear of the police.
The next morning I went to a migrant school outside of town. The school sat in the middle of a field. My guides were a group of students who arranged human rights education and democracy training for the exiled Burmese.
It was crowded and stuffy inside the one-room school building, which was made from leaves and bamboo. There were too many students in too little space. The headmaster and his two teachers greeted me at the door. They offered me a seat outside in the shade of the building. The sun shone, and we thought it would be good to take advantage before the rain came. So my translator and I sat and waited for some students to be brought to us. Through the openings in the bamboo, I saw children’s curious fingers and wide eyes peering out to get a glimpse of me. Most of these children’s families had been subsistence farmers in Burma, and they had little exposure to the world beyond the distant hills. There was a lot of excitement in the air, especially when I brought out markers and paper to draw on. The school had few supplies and everyone, even the teachers, was eager to make use of the new materials. A group of children were sent out. Before anything could begin, I distributed paper all around.
Eleven-year-old Nicholas had wide almond eyes and wore soccer shorts and a frayed jersey. We looked at his drawing—the frightful crucifixion of a villager, bodies falling from the sky, a little boy in purple hiding behind a tree. Nicholas told me about the SPDC attack on his village and his recurring nightmares in Thailand. He had trouble sleeping because he was afraid. His mother tried to comfort him when he couldn’t sleep, he said. She told him he was safe now, that it was okay.
Her assurances were not entirely true.
Nicholas said he still had bad dreams, “but not for a while when my mom comforts me.” It was hard to ignore the tension in the air, and the children, like the adults, seemed very alert to it. Every child I met mentioned how it was not safe to go out in the town on their own, not safe to go out at night. I imagine the strain can be very tiring for a child and that the bad dreams will not go away until Nicholas is secure, his future stable.
He said he wants to be a teacher when he grows up. He liked his teacher, who told the children about their history and their language.
Nicholas is a member of the Karen ethnic group, which shows little sign of ending its fight against the SPDC in Burma. The Karen have been fighting for an autonomous region, off and on, since the 1950s. The military cracks down on the Karen areas, on the civilian populations, as part of what is called the Four Cuts Policy. The policy aims to cut rebel factions off from food, money, intelligence, and recruits, the four factors that allow them to continue their war against the military junta. When the junta suspects rebel activity in an area, they will enter and forcibly remove the civilians. Anyone who stays behind is considered an insurgent and will be shot. Karen villages are often burnt to the ground, heavily mined, and the inhabitants moved into resettlement areas that, by some accounts, resemble concentration camps more than villages. Some of the resettlement areas are better than others, and sometimes, even after the military allows them to return home, people stay in the resettlement areas because they have nowhere else to go. People who do not go into the resettlement areas find themselves internally displaced in the jungle, with little or no access to aid, vulnerable to disease, starvation, and forced recruitment into either the government army or the rebel army.
Without a population to draw on for support, the junta hopes that the rebel armies will wither. The same idea was used against the Kurds in Iraq, the Albanians in Kosovo, the Dinka in southern Sudan, the Tutsi in Rwanda, and the tribes in Darfur. Kill all the people to eliminate the rebels that may or may not be among them.
The education system in Burma attempts to eliminate notions of ethnic identity from the young and to create loyal cadres for the central government. Ethnic minorities are forbidden to study their own language in state schools. Though approved in 1967, Karen language textbooks were not printed until 1980 and, even then, no new teachers were hired to teach the language. In classes, none of the history or culture of the minority groups is taught. The junta hopes to assimilate the minority groups into the majority Burmese culture, eliminating claims for regional autonomy. As with the political and social spheres, the junta wants to control cultural life of the people. The educational program of the central government serves as a kind of ethnic cleansing, aimed at erasing future generations of ethnic nationalists.
Nicholas’s ethnicity placed him in danger and, despite any ideas he may have formed on his own, aligned him with a particular side in the conflict.
I met a ten-year-old girl whose family had taught her to speak Burmese rather than Karen so that she could pretend to be a member of the Burmese majority, just as Melanie had learned to speak Swahili rather than Kinyarwandan so she could pass as an ethnic Hutu.
“I came here to stay with my grandmother and attend the school,” the little girl said. “My brothers and sisters cannot go to school in Burma. We have no money.” While she framed her reasons for leaving in economic terms, the causes of those conditions were the results of conflict and persecution. She is Karen and therefore vulnerable to the Four Cuts, to attack and forced labor, and to a hostile education system. Rather than await the destruction of their village, forcing them into resettlement areas or into the jungle to starve as internally displaced persons, her family took her to Thailand.
In Thailand, regardless of ethnicity, it is not safe to be Burmese. Many of the children at the school near the border were born in the refugee camps on the border. Kyaw Win, another eleven-year-old boy, was one of those children. The Burmese army attacked his village, and his family sought safety in Thailand. They were placed in a refugee camp from which the KNU was rumored to operate. The camps were fertile ground for new recruits. In the schools, the teachers could expound Karen history or political thought. Ethnic nationalism developed easily, though the KNU has abandoned calls for independence and now seeks only regional autonomy in Burma. Sitting near the border, the camps acted as a convenient base of operations for attacks against Burma. Threatened by these camps, the Burmese military burnt them to the ground, forcing the inhabitants to flee into the Thai countryside, where they were often unwelcome. Thailand fears the buildup a huge refugee industry and does not want to make any of the refugees terribly comfortable.
Residents of the camps have little access to health care. An American girl I met who was teaching English in one of these camps told me the story of a student she had recently lost. He grew ill very suddenly. There were no medical facilities in the camp. It was an arduous journey through dangerous jungle roads to get to the hospital. He was not legally allowed to leave th
e camp, and permission took time. When he eventually did get to the hospital, it was too late. The boy died at age sixteen. When I spoke with his teacher, the family was fighting with the hospital to release his body. The hospital wanted several thousand baht, hundreds of dollars, to return his body to the family. The family, living off a meager amount of aid, and stuck in the camp, could not afford it. They were raising money, but having trouble getting enough. Even the dead Burmese had no rights in Thailand.
A spy sat outside the lobby of the hotel where I was staying. He was watching the activities of foreigners. He wore a white dress shirt, slacks, and dark sunglasses. In the morning he would watch the guests coming and going. I had been warned that there were many people watching in Mae Sot, that it was a good idea to be discreet.
My guide was late one morning and I sat nearby writing in a small journal. The man in dark glasses came to me and looked over my shoulder. I closed the book and walked away. That afternoon, when I returned from my interviews, he took a great interest in my day, asking many questions in decent English. I told him I had been sightseeing, that I was backpacking through Thailand, but he continued to pry.
“Where did you go?” he asked.
“I explored the market.”
“Careful,” he said. “There is much crime in the market. You should not go without an escort. I can go with you. What do you do in Mae Sot?”
“I’ll be all right,” I said, ignoring his question and excusing myself. The man was still lingering the next morning. He watched my guide very closely when she picked me up. Foreigners had been banned from the refugee camps a few hours away, and all arrangements to go in had to be kept extremely quiet. The man in dark glasses wanted, I assume, to make sure I was not violating the ban or meeting with political groups whose activities caused trouble for the Thais. Every child I spoke with was put at risk if I was followed. I would not come to harm, except maybe by losing my visa, but the risks for the Burmese in speaking to me were very great.
Back at the offices of the youth organization that had taken me to the school, we spoke with the doors and windows closed, despite the stifling tropical heat. They had “officially” suspended activities for the time being because of the police crackdown and were trying to present the appearance that the office was closed. A poster proclaiming the rights of all people to self-determination hung on the wall above my head.
“The Thais do not want our programs to operate,” my translator said. “We teach about democracy and women’s rights. This is seen by the Burmese government as insurrection and, therefore, Thailand is seen as harboring rebels. This strains their relations.”
Categorizing most Burmese as economic migrants denies many of the rights to which children are entitled by international refugee law, such as education and healthcare equal to the standards of the host country. While on the surface it seemed that many families had come to Thailand to find work, protracted discussion with children who had arrived recently revealed the danger of life caught up in the Burmese conflict: Nicholas’s drawing of the attack on his village, Siha’s drawing of the dangerous border crossing, the families who have chosen to live in isolation in Bangkok rather than face the dangers of Burma or the border areas.
One look at their drawings showed the deep impact the political turmoil has had on their lives. In one drawing by Win, an eleven-year-old boy who also suffered nightmares of the violence in Burma that he had witnessed, a detailed representation of a machine gun points at the flag for the Karen National Union (Figure 12). Violence and flags were linked in his imagination.
Many young people expressed their allegiances through the flags they represented in their drawings. These children were not neutral in the conflict. When asked why war tears at their homeland, Win said simply: “The Karen are fighting for freedom from the Burmese.”
Many other children added their voice of agreement to his. They agreed with the cause of the KNU. Few children I met said they knew the reasons for the war, but all who are members of a minority ethnic group knew what side they were on. Kin Wa, a fourteen-year-old girl who wanted nothing more than to go back to Burma—“Thailand is not my country. I was born and raised in Burma and want to return”—wanted to work in an office when she grew up. Not just any office. She wanted to be like her father and work for the Democracy Movement for Burma, his job, of course, being the reason he’d left for Thailand in the first place. She admired her father and wanted to follow in his footsteps.
“If Burma becomes a democracy, we can go back,” she said, repeating, I imagine, what she often heard at home. For the world in which she lives, family affiliation or ethnicity is enough for her to have a side in the conflict. Her family life and her political views are tied together, and politics plays a role in her worldview as much as any other lesson she learns from her parents, such as respect for elders or how to do her chores. Politics is not separate from her childhood; it is part of her childhood.
In her drawing, underneath a gentle sun and blossoming trees, she drew a monkey hanging from branches, children playing soccer, and a bright and colorful schoolhouse (Figure 13). The flag of the KNU flies next to the schoolhouse. In black and white, two houses burn, a third house, still in color, is engulfed by monochrome flames. Soldiers with machine guns fire on the village—she chose to use pencil and not markers to represent the violence disturbing the colorful lives of her people. Even the monkey is not safe from the soldiers Kin Wa added to her drawing. Soldiers pump the monkey full of bullets.
“The monkey dies too,” Kin Wa said. Along the road there are black and white stick figures, none of them wearing the hats she drew on her soldiers. “Civilians,” she said. She did not say whether or not they were dead along the road or if she had just left them uncolored, but it looked to me as if all that was lifeless or destroyed was depicted in black and white. By putting the civilians in color, the KNU flag in color, and the SPDC soldiers in black and white, Kin Wa gave clear representation of her political point of view.
Given their indiscriminate targeting of villages, if you are not on the side of the junta you are on the other side, and the exiled children of Burma could not help but take a side. Some of these children will grow up to join one of the revolutionary forces, while others, like Kin Wa, might become political activists. Many of them admired Johnny and Luther Htoo, the God’s Army twins, and considered them national heroes.
But there are others who feel no such connection to a cause, despite the persecution they have suffered.
Aung Su was ten years old. He had lived in Thailand for one year.
“I used to live in Mon State, but I came here with my mother one year ago. She wanted to work here and wanted me to work. It’s very difficult to earn money in Burma.”
Judging by this first answer, Aung Su’s family were economic migrants, unregistered and illegal, without any protections afforded those “fleeing fighting.” He did not mention political reasons for fleeing, though they perhaps existed. His disengagement with a nationalist cause might come from his mother’s disengagement or the fact that some parents choose not to discuss politics with their children.
“It was hard to cross the border. There are robbers, Mon soldiers”—the Mon are another ethnic group in Burma—“Burmese soldiers, Karen soldiers, all wanting money. We had to pay many times at many checkpoints. It was dangerous.”
The gamble of encountering hostile or unscrupulous soldiers while traveling through conflict ridden areas away from the safety of one’s own village seems like a big risk to take with a ten-year-old, unless the risks of staying put are greater.
After about half an hour talking together about sports and movies, school and dogs (he hates them, because they chase and bark; I told him that I miss my childhood dog, which he found absurd), Aung Su began to describe life in Burma.
“There are lots of problems with soldiers. They search for young men to take as porters. Many troubles. We came here. They came to my village and took young men and put them on a truck
. They took rice too. My uncle climbed a tree to get away from the soldiers, but he fell and died. A ghost pushed him out. Another uncle died in battle as a porter. They don’t get guns to protect themselves. Many die.”
This description of his situation in Burma presented another side of the story. The reasons his mother could not earn money in Burma were directly connected to the fighting. The threat of theft by the military and of forced conscription loom over everyday life. Aung Su has a bright smile and enjoys talking. He is more outgoing than many of the children I have met. He works at a small shop in town when he is not in school. He recently saw the Spider-Man movie on his employer’s television set and drew me several pictures of the red-and-blue-clad superhero.
“I like to draw Spider-Man, but I don’t usually have colors. I like this.” He held up one of the pictures. “It looks more like it should with color. I am happy when I’m drawing” (Figure 14).
“What would you do if you were Spider-Man?” I asked him.
“First I would go to the Thai gangs. They attack people at night. They rape people and rob them. I would get rid of those gangs.”
“Would you go back to Burma?”
“I don’t want to go back to Burma. I want to be an English soldier. I want to drive and have lots of guns.”
An English soldier? He said he could not explain why. He just liked English soldiers, by which I think he meant American soldiers. (He thought I was English, so perhaps he was telling me what he thought I wanted to hear.)
One Day the Soldiers Came Page 11
