For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question

by Mac McClelland

  The next morning, the refugees returned to the smoldering plot. What had been a tightly packed village hours before now reminded Htan Dah of deserts he’d seen in pictures, only made of charcoal instead of sand. His family, like many others, had taken nothing when they fled. Thai authorities decided not to move the refugees from Huay Kaloke despite its clearly dangerous location just inside an unsecured border, so the residents made beds in the ash. They began slowly rebuilding, though they were afraid to continue living there. None had illusions that the Thai security posted at the front gate was there to protect them. To be sure, the refugees had long ago noted that the function of the guards was not so much keeping danger out as keeping the refugees in, collecting bribes from those who wanted to leave the camp to work or collect firewood or make a trip to the market. The assailing troops met no resistance on their way into Huay Kaloke that night. And no one stopped them less than fourteen months later when they drove vehicles full of soldiers in again.

  “How do you know the Thai soldiers just let them drive right in through the front gate?” I interrupted Htan Dah as he was telling me this story in more detail later, on the reading bench in my room. That an army would allow a raiding foreign army unfettered access to seven thousand sleeping civilians—twice—was frankly a little far-fetched. The atrocities of the Karen crisis are so incredibly outlandish and untold that they often seemed to me, then, literally not credible. Even with my refugee pal, my partner in online-social-networking crime right in front of my face, I thought this story sounded a little conspiratorial and fantastic, maybe hearsay, the exaggerated gossip of victims trying to piece events together after the fact. I knew better than to find this nonintervention of people trying to kill their own people hard to believe. A lot of people in Thailand, of course, feel about Burma the way most of the world feels about, say, the entire continent of Africa. Still, I suggested, “Maybe the soldiers were trying to protect the gate, but the soldiers just went around or something.”

  Htan Dah had told this story before, and to several foreigners, but never to one rude enough to suggest that he was a liar. He cocked his head and paused. “Because,” he said, crinkling his eyebrows, taken aback because I distrusted him, and because his life had been such that he didn’t find this series of happenings hard to believe at all. “There is only one road. The only way into the camp is through the front gate(!).”

  Everything he said was, of course, true. For a second time, Htan Dah was awakened in the middle of the night to gunfire and shouting; for a second time, he flew from his house with his family and the clothes he was wearing and ran and prayed until he reached the safety of the surrounding trees. He was again lucky enough not to run into any soldiers, who would possibly have been drunk or on speed and have asked him if he was Buddhist or Christian. (Like the other Christians the Buddhist soldiers encountered, he would have lied.) But this time, the soldiers set up mortars and shelled the camp, too, while setting fire to it. This time, a pregnant woman and mother of two was shot dead and two girls from Htan Dah’s school who’d hid near their burning house suffered burns that later killed them. This time a seven-year-old died of shrapnel wounds and dozens were injured, and nearly the whole damn thing was burned down all over again.

  “We accept that we were inactive,” Thailand’s National Security Council secretary-general conceded. Not inactive enough. Shortly after the first attack on Huay Kaloke, human rights workers reported that the Thai army had forced a group of Karen males who were seeking reprieve from the bands of murdering, torturing government soldiers in their village back across the Burmese border. Later that night, Thai forces loaded about six hundred Karen and Burmese women and children onto trucks and sent them to a Thai province, and then, a few days later, back to Burma. That same week, Thai border soldiers turned around about a hundred men running from an offensive, urging them to go back and fight for their villages. Three thousand refugees were sent home from Kanchanaburi, where they were seeking asylum, and nine hundred newly arrived women and children were forced to walk back to their villages from which they’d just fled.16

  When the UN, EU, and US heard allegations that the Thai army was sending fleeing civilians back into a war zone, they asked it to desist. The commander in chief lied outright to the press, claiming that the refugees wanted to go back. Bullshitting though it may have been, the army consented. For a while. In the meantime, new refugees were being denied entrance to Thailand. The refugees, as well as democracy activists inside Burma, humanitarian organizations, and the international community, asked Thailand to allow the UNHCR into the camps to provide assistance, but back then the country said it had the situation under control. Already sanctuary to evacuees from Vietnam et al. by the time the Karen rolled in, the Royal Thai Government was hardly in a hurry to recognize that it was the only option for yet another desperate population. Nor would Thai officials want to deal with the prickly Burmese junta for complicating (read: acknowledging) the dire humanitarian crisis it was causing with official international involvement. The UN had confirmed that “violations appear to be committed consistently and on a wide scale by the soldiers of the [Burma] Army against innocent villagers (particularly those belonging to the ethnic minorities) in the form of summary or extrajudicial executions and arbitrary killings which occur in the contexts of forced labour, rape, forced relocation and confiscation of property.” But the commander in chief of the Thai army was at it again. Karen refugees were victims of fighting inside Burma, he told the Bangkok Post, not victims of warfare, which, the semantically aware might argue, is basically the same thing. Whatever they were, by the end of 1997, the UNHCR reported that there were more than 105,000 of them in Thailand, with the disclaimer that they could have been grossly undercounted. It estimated, also, that it was helping only some 2,100 of them. But whatever else it might be fair to call Thailand, it was not “inactive”: Authorities were, for example, forbidding all those victims of fighting from cutting bamboo to build crude shelter. An NGO had to start supplying them materials.

  Ultimately, after the second attack on Huay Kaloke, Thailand accepted the UNHCR’s help. It also announced that it would close the camp, which the Karen had established more than a decade earlier, and move the residents to other camps farther from the border. Htan Dah’s family set up a temporary shelter made of sticks and a raincoat, under which they lived while they were waiting to be shipped elsewhere.

  The trucks didn’t arrive for almost a year and a half. When they did, Htan Dah tried hard not to get sick as he was driven for two hours along narrow, winding roads to Umpiem Mai, where he and his family, together with relocated refugees from some of the other destroyed camps—Mae La, and Sho Klo, and Maw Ker, and Don Pakiang, Ta Per Poo, Kama Lay Kho, Mae Ta Waw, Kler Kho, and Mae Ra Ma Luang were attacked and burned, too—joined the growing number of inhabitants there and set up house again, this time where the population in exile eventually became twenty thousand strong, where Htan Dah eventually grew up and got married and had a baby of his own, where the cold, wet winds cut through the shacks stacked high in the hills of central Thailand, far away enough from the attackers.

  FINALLY, AFTER a week and a half in the house, I was starting to feel secure in my routine and surroundings. I had been sleeping long, restful, clothesless nights in my own room, going downstairs mornings, to chat with Htan Dah while he cooked, or after he finished and came to fetch me, saying, “Now you can eat, because you are always hungry,” teaching class four hours a day with an hour break in between at Office Two, and coming home to Htan Dah waiting in the dining room/garage amid parked motorbikes and rice and oily piles of fried green beans, which he’d been making just for me. But when I came home the night after Htan Dah had turned in his Huay Kaloke story, not only was he not in the dining room/garage, but a dozen people I’d never seen before, including another white person, were.

  I found my friend in the computer room, where I walked up behind him and ran my hand down the back of his head. “What’s going on?�
�� I asked him.

  “HRD,” he said. “They have come back from inside. Also, we have new volunteer. She is from Israel, I think.”

  Moments later, I ran into said Israeli as I walked through the living room. “Hi, I’m Abby,” she said. In perfect East Coast American English.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” I said, shaking her hand. “Where are you from?”

  “New York.”

  I didn’t know how long she’d been there in the house teeming with chattering Karen dudes, but she sure looked happy to see me. She asked me how long I was staying, and where I was from, before she got to what she really wanted to know.

  “Do all these people really share one bathroom?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Really? Do you really just fill the bowl up in that trough and like, throw it on yourself for a shower?”

  I, of course, replied with another nonchalant “Yeah,” as if I’d been filling up bowls of freezing water full of dead mosquitoes and throwing them at my naked body my whole life. When she asked me if I drank the same water the guys did, I responded similarly. And truly, I had been drinking from the two giant plastic tubs beneath the simple clay filters into which the tap water was poured. As of exactly eight hours ago. The Blay had offered me the nonbottled business on my first night, saying that “maybe nothing would happen” to me, but as that was an enormous maybe in Thailand, where you could contract not just vomiting and diarrhea but also hepatitis and typhoid from the water, I’d somewhat huffily refused. I’d been drinking and brushing my teeth with bottled water until that very morning, when it was explained to me that previous volunteers had partaken of the big tubs with no trouble.17 Though I’d been doing it only half a day, I told Abby that it was fine, expertly filling my new role as the person who had been there longer and was, therefore, cooler.

  “Well, you seem like you have it under control,” she said, finding my display of assimilation utterly assuring.

  “Yeah, you’ll be fine. What do you do?”

  “I’m a strategic planner.”

  Ah, so that was the source of The Blay’s confusion.

  “I was set up as a volunteer here through the American Jewish World Service.”

  And that was the source of Htan Dah’s.

  “Oh my god, Htan Dah,” I muttered as I turned away from her to walk back into the computer room. When I got to the desk he was sitting at, I bent down low into his face. “That volunteer is not Israeli!” I whisper-yelled.

  “Really?”

  “Yes!” I hissed. “She’s an American! Did you think she was Israeli because she’s Jewish?”

  Though a lot of remote hill-tribe people have probably never heard of Judaism, and would fail to associate the word “Jewish” with Israel, or maybe with anything, some Karen have learned it in their indoctrinations into Christendom. In 1812, Massachusetts Baptist Adoniram Judson set sail on the very first ship of American missionaries to go overseas. When he landed in Rangoon, he had high hopes of making converts of Burma’s deeply Buddhist natives. It took him six years to get just one. The fellow was baptized on a June day, in a pond watched over by a giant Buddha. When Judson finally gave up on the Burmans and walked into a Karen village, however, he hit the missionary jackpot.

  To hear a Christian tell it, the Karen, who were mostly animist and some Buddhist, had an ancient legend about a god called Y’wa, who had created woman from the rib of man. Also, the couple lived in a paradise of fruit trees until they cursed themselves by eating from the one that had been forbidden. Also, you could probably guess which kind of reptile talked them into doing so. And it got better: Karen mythology told of a younger white brother who would deliver the race when he came from overseas. Bearing a book of truth.

  But then to hear a historian with a doctorate in Oriental studies tell it, the idea that those ideas got there before a Christian planted them is nonsense, and the Karen wholly and happily embraced Christianity because it was a way of attaining literacy and higher (advanced/Western) civilization while sticking it to the underestimating Buddhist Burmans.

  Either way, the conditions were ideal for Judson. So many Karen converted so enthusiastically that the Karen village became the hottest missionary spot on the globe.18 So much energy—and fundraising—was being devoted to the Burmese minority that when the trend started to fade, a 1907 report announced “a very marked decline in the cult of the Karen.”

  Pros: The missionaries built schools. And churches. And a seminary. They devised a written language for one that had been only oral, into which they translated the Bible and for which they created dictionaries and a grammar book, converting many rice-farming Karen heathens into educated and potentially capable professional Christians—which was part of what made them so appealing to the colonialists.

  Cons: The American missionaries were complicit in the British smear campaign against Burmese (read: Buddhist) character that helped justify later wars, writing well-publicized tracts about how without the white man (and his god), the whole country was evil (“almost to a man dishonest, rapacious, prone to robbery, and to robbery ending in blood”), beset by evil (“ever since the English governed the country the tigers do not seem so ferocious as they were when the Burmans governed it”), and full of little brown pagan babies destined to “go down to the tomb without God and without hope.” Famed supermissionary Judson even explicitly endorsed the second war as “the best, if not the only means of eventually introducing the humanizing influences of the Christian religion.” The prevalence of Christianity in the Western ruling government and infrastructure like churches, schools, and hospitals undermined the benevolent influence and long-established importance and authority of a crucial institution—the Buddhist monkhood—in a country where the social structure was already being upended. It was also a source of ultimately violent division between Karen and Burmans, who started burning down churches and reportedly crucifying converts, as well as between Karen and Karen—as anyone who lived at Huay Kaloke could well attest.

  So the seminal overseas American mission of one Baptist left quite the legacy: By the time Judson died, in 1850, there were seventy-four Christian churches attended by eight thousand converts in Burma. Today, estimates of the occurrence of Christianity among the Karen in Burma range from 20 to a whopping 40 percent. And today, as in Judson’s day, there are still many Christians involved in Karen aid and education efforts, albeit with the setting largely changed to refugee camps—where 60 percent of Karen are Christian. Some of these aiding and educating Christians still believe, as some missionaries two centuries before them claimed, that the similarities in the Bible and Karen lore were inspired by God and predated Christianity itself. Others, who found that idea too good to believe, even for believers, have speculated that the Karen must have run into the Nestorians, mid-migration, somewhere around the eighth century, and others that an Italian missionary had made it all the way out to Karen territory and spread the story of the white brother-savior in the mid-1700s—which would explain why a British diplomat who went into Karen territory in 1795 caused something of a stir when excited villagers mistook him for their messiah.19 And still others couldn’t help making the leap that the Karen are one of the lost tribes of Israel. Most of my housemates had been to camp, and so been aided and educated by Christians, some very conservative: It was why the unmarried ones were avid virgins, and why, the guys told me, they’d heard of birth control only in their last year of high school, when one visiting Irish instructor spilled the beans. It was also why Eh Soe said to Abby over dinner,

  “You know, I might be Jewish, too.”

  Eh Soe, pronounced like the ExxonMobil fueling omnipresence Esso, was one of the newly arrived guys, just back from several months in Burma. He was short, even shorter than the other guys—who were mostly a couple of inches shorter than my five feet, nine inches20—with a little potbelly and black hair that stuck up perfectly on end from all over his head. He talked fast and gesticulated liberally and spit red juice from the
betel nut that stained his teeth and thick lips. He was very agitated because he’d been in the jungle so long that his Yahoo email account had been deactivated for inactivity. He was also very agitating to me.

  There’s no privacy in a village, much less in a packed refugee camp, or a Karen hut. But though dudes wandered in and out of my room at will, they assumed they shouldn’t wander in too much when the white girl was actually in there, and certainly never at night. I’d been somewhat selfishly using their discriminatory politeness to my advantage. This was a safe house and place of employment, after all, but after my screaming-cold after-dinner showers I stretched out in the privacy of my own space, nude under the sheets, reading books and writing notes in the silence, listening to the call of the tokay lizard in the ceiling come like clockwork, every night, once a night, calling out a midpitched and perfectly articulated “uh . . . oh,” and then waiting a couple beats before another “uh . . . oh,” and then another one of those again before, with longing and decreasing determination, “oh . . . oh . . . oh,” while I listened below him, beaming, luxuriating in the calm and euphony and fresh cleanliness.