Incendiary Circumstances (25 page)

The fighting was a good distance away, but the sound of gunfire came rolling up the misted mountainside with uncanny clarity, the rattle of small-arms fire clearly audible in the lulls between exploding artillery shells. The noise sent flocks of parakeets shooting out of the mountainside's tangled canopy.

With daybreak I had my first look at the camp—a string of thatched bamboo huts arranged along a mountain stream. A great deal of thought had gone into the camp's planning. The plumbing was far from rudimentary: water was piped directly into bathrooms and showers from the stream. There was a dammed pond teeming with fish and, nearby, a pen full of pigs.

Next to each hut was a vegetable patch. Once Sonny had ascertained that the fighting was not headed our way, he picked up a watering can and waded into a patch of bok choy. Following his lead, the others put aside their battle gear and disappeared into their pumpkin trellises and mustard beds like a troop of Sunday gardeners.

"Growing food is as important to our survival as fighting," Ko Sonny explained apologetically. "We do this before we go on patrol."

We set out an hour or so later, a detachment of half a dozen student fighters, with Sonny in the lead. Once we had crossed the border, an unmarked forest trail, Sonny and his men reclaimed a cache of aging M-16s and slung them over their shoulders.

We climbed onto a ridge, where I found myself gazing at a majestic spectacle of forested gorges, mountain peaks, and a sky of crisp, pellucid blue. The shelling was sporadic now: occasionally the forest canopy would silently sprout a mushroom cloud of smoke, the accompanying blast climbing leisurely up the slope moments later.

Mae Hong Son was clearly visible, a smudge in the floor of a
tip-tilted valley. While Sonny counted off the caliber of the exploding shells—120mm, 81mm—I turned his binoculars on the town and spotted my hotel.

Sonny pointed to the Karenni post we were to visit. It was called Naung Lon and was built around a peak that reared high above the surrounding spurs and ridges. We entered through a gate hidden in a wall of bamboo stakes. After crossing a moat and a barbed-wire barrier, we made our way cautiously past a ring of heavily sandbagged gun emplacements and were met by a Karenni officer, a tall, stooped man with melancholy eyes and an air of regretful doggedness. The officer and his men, like most Karenni insurgents, were devout Christians. The officer himself happened to be a Baptist. His eyes flickered constantly as we spoke. His arm describing a semicircle, he pointed to the Burmese Army positions on the mountaintops around us. The Burmese Army had concentrated ten thousand men in the area, he explained. The Karenni army had a force of about six hundred. He knew that he was defending a hopeless position and had already made plans to evacuate.

Later, on the way back to the student camp, I remarked to Sonny that I didn't see how the Karenni army could possibly escape defeat.

Sonny laughed. The Karenni, he pointed out, had been fighting against dire odds for fifty years. Many regarded the war against SLORC as a direct continuation of the war against the Japanese. Some Karenni families had been at war for three generations, and many of their fighters had spent their entire lives in refugee camps.

What does it take, I found myself wondering, to sustain an insurgency for fifty years, to go on fighting a war that the rest of the world has almost forgotten? What did freedom mean to the Karenni—democracy or simply the right to set up an ethnic enclave of their own?

 

The next day I returned to Mae Hong Son and went to see Mr. Abel Tweed, the foreign minister of the Karenni National Progressive Party, in his small back-alley office. A voluble square-jawed
man, Mr. Tweed delved into a makeshift archive housed in a cupboard. "We have always been independent," he announced, "and we have the documents to prove it."

Leafing through the papers he handed me, I saw that he was right: the British had clearly recognized Karenni autonomy in the late nineteenth century and had rejected the option of annexing the Karenni territories to Burma proper. Their reasons were not altruistic. "It is evident that the country is perfectly worthless in itself," one British administrator wrote of the Karenni area. "It is almost impracticable, for even an elephant."

It was the Second World War that thrust the Karenni's "impracticable" country center stage. Looking for Asian partners in the struggle against the Japanese, the Allied powers encouraged several ethnic groups along the borders of Burma to rise against the occupying army. The Karenni, the Karen, and the Kachin eagerly embraced the Allies. A number of British and American military personnel took up residence in their villages, and some of them virtually assumed the role of tribal elders.

The Karenni, along with the Karen and the Kachin, were spectacularly effective guerrillas, and their loyalty proved to be important to the Allies. The payment that these groups expected was independence. To this day they nurture a bitter historical grievance that the debt was never paid.

Abel Tweed was born long after the war, but his voice shook as he talked of the British departure from Burma. "The British knew that the Karenni were not a part of Burma," he said. "But the Karenni are a small people; they forgot us."

There are six thousand or so displaced Karenni refugees, and they are divided among five camps. Until fairly recently, these camps were in Burma, on a narrow tract of land controlled by the insurgents, but the steady advance of Burmese troops has gradually pushed the camps back over the border into Thailand. The camps are now clustered around Mae Hong Son, a tourist town that promotes an activity known as "hill-tribe trekking." The camps have come to be linked to this tourist entertainment
through an odd symbiosis. The women of one Karenni subgroup have traditionally worn heavy brass rings to elongate their necks, and these women are now ticketed tourist attractions, billed as "giraffe women"; their refugee camps are a feature of the hill-tribe trekking routes. In effect, tourism has transformed these camps, with their tragic histories of oppression, displacement, and misery, into counterfeits of timeless rural simplicity—waxwork versions of the very past that their inhabitants have irretrievably lost. Karenni fighters returning from their battles on the front lines become, as it were, mirrors in which their visitors can discover an imagined Asian innocence.

 

I had come to the border hoping to find that democracy would provide a solution to Burma's unresolved civil war. By the time I left, I was no longer sure what the solution could be.

"The majority of Burmans think that democracy is the only problem," a member of the powerful Kachin minority reminded me. "But ethnic groups took up arms when Rangoon had a democratic government. A change to democracy won't help. The outside world expects too much from Suu Kyi. From our point of view, we don't care who governs—the weaker, the better."

There are thousands of putative nationalities in the world today; at least sixteen of them are situated on Burma's borders. It is hard to imagine that the inhabitants of these areas would be well served by becoming separate states. A hypothetical Karenni state, for example, would be landlocked, with the population of a medium-sized town: it would not be less dependent on its larger neighbors simply because it had a flag and a seat at the UN.

Burma's borders are undeniably arbitrary, the product of a capricious colonial history. But colonial officials cannot reasonably be blamed for the arbitrariness of the lines they drew. All boundaries are artificial: there is no such thing as a "natural" nation, which has journeyed through history with its boundaries and ethnic composition intact. In a region as heterogeneous as Southeast Asia, any boundary is sure to be arbitrary. On balance, Burma's
best hopes for peace lie in maintaining intact the larger and more inclusive entity that history, albeit absent-mindedly, bequeathed to its population almost half a century ago.

Aung San Suu Kyi is the one figure in Burma who has popular support, both among ethnic Burmans and among many minorities, to start a process of national reconciliation. But even Suu Kyi would find it difficult to alter the historical borders. In the event of a total military withdrawal, it is possible that some insurgent groups would attempt to reclaim the territories they once controlled. A rekindling of the insurgencies would almost certainly lead to a rapid erosion of Suu Kyi's popular support. Suu Kyi is aware that she cannot govern effectively without the support of the army, and she has been at pains to build bridges with middle-ranking officers as well as with the rank and file, repeatedly stressing her heritage as the daughter of the army's founder.

Somewhere in the unruffled reaches of her serenity, Suu Kyi has probably prepared herself for the ordeal that lies ahead: the possibility that she, an apostle of nonviolence, may yet find herself constrained to wage war.

 

I spent a lot of time with Sonny. He was very good company: always witty, ready to laugh, enormously intelligent, and so devoid of macho posturing that it was easy to forget he was a hardened combatant. When we were in the mountains, he would go striding along at the head of a column, looking every inch the guerrilla, with his dangling cheroot and his cradled M-16. When he came down to visit Mae Hong Son, he would exchange his fatigues for jeans and a T-shirt, and it was hard to tell him apart from a holidaying business executive.

I asked him once, "As someone of Indian descent, do you ever feel out of place as the commander of a regiment of Burmese students?"

"You don't understand," he said. "I don't think of myself as Indian. I hated being Indian. As a child, everywhere I went people would point to me and say
kala
[foreigner], although I had never
left Burma in my whole life. I hated that word. I wanted to show them: that is not what I am; I am not a
kala.
This is why I am here now."

Sonny had grown up in a tiny provincial town, Loikaw, the capital of Burma's erstwhile Karenni province. While he was attending the university in Rangoon (he studied physics there for four years), he championed the cause of Karenni and other minority students. With the start of the democracy movement, in 1988, he returned home and helped to organize peaceful demonstrations in Loikaw. He was arrested on September 18 and released ten days later. Fearing rearrest, he immediately planned his escape to the border.

On the night of October 6, Sonny left Loikaw with a group of activists. They made their way to a rebel base, where Karenni insurgents gave them a warm welcome and provided them with land and supplies so that they could set up bases of their own. Sonny and his fellow activists had never held a gun.

After eight years of fighting, Sonny has no illusions about the "armed struggle." "We're fighting because there is no other way to get SLORC to talk," he told me. "For us, armed struggle is just a strategy. We are not militants here—we can see how bad war is."

I asked, "Have you ever thought of trying other political strategies?"

"Of course," he said. "Do you think I like to get up in the morning and think of killing? Killing someone from my own country, who is forced to fight by dictators? I would like to try other things—politics, lobbying. But the students chose me to command this regiment. I can't just leave them."

Sonny has paid a price for his decision to leave Loikaw. His girlfriend, a Burmese in Rangoon, gave up waiting for him and married someone else. In 1994 his mother died of a heart attack; Sonny found out months afterward from a passing trader. She was, he said, the person he was closest to.

The student dissidents are now in their late twenties or early thirties. They had once aspired to become technicians and engineers, doctors and pharmacists. Those hopes are gone. They have no income to speak of, and their contacts with Thai society are few.

The truth is that they now have very limited options. Legally, they are not allowed either to work or to study in Thailand; to seek asylum abroad as refugees, they would have to enter a holding camp in southern Thailand while their papers were processed. Those whose applications were rejected would risk being deported to Burma, and once there they would almost certainly be imprisoned, or worse. The alternative is to join the underworld of illegal foreign workers in Thailand, vanishing into a nightmarish half-life of crime, drugs, and prostitution. They have been pushed into a situation where the jungle is the sanest choice available.

 

For the insurgents, Aung San Suu Kyi offers the only remaining hope of returning to their country with dignity and reclaiming their lives. When Sonny heard that I had met Aung San Suu Kyi in Rangoon, he wanted to know exactly what she had said. I played him some of my tape, including a segment in which she answered a question about her commitment to nonviolence.

"I do not think violence will really get us what we want," she said. "Some of the younger people disagree. In 1988, a lot of them went across the border because they said the only way you can topple this government is by force of arms. And not just the younger people. Even very mature, seasoned people have said to me, 'You can't do it without arms. This government is the type that understands only violence.' But my argument is: All right, supposing that all those who wanted democracy decided that the only way was through force of arms and we all took up arms. Would we not be setting a precedent for more violence in the future? Would we not be endorsing the view that those who have the superior might of arms are those who will rule the country? That is something that I cannot support. But we have always said that we will never, never disown those who have decided to take
up arms, because we understand how they feel. I tried to dissuade some of the young people who fled across the border, but who am I to force them to stay? If I could guarantee their liberty and their safety, if I could say to them, 'You will not be arrested, you will not be tortured,' I would. But since I could not, I did not even think I had the moral right to stop them leaving."

When the tape was finished, I asked Sonny what he would do if he was pushed out of Thailand as well. "What if the Thais decide to cut off your supplies or starve you out of Thailand?"