Another organisation which provides real hope is the Free Burma Rangers. In 1993, David Eubank, a former American soldier who had served in both the US Army Rangers and Special Forces, met the Wa people’s Foreign Minister in Thailand. Eubank, the son of missionaries in Thailand, had studied at Fuller Seminary in the United States and become a missionary himself. Inspired by the story of William Marcus Young, the first missionary to the Wa people, he responded to the Wa Foreign Minister’s request for help, and was told by one of their leaders that as a former soldier he was ‘the type of missionary we need’.35 He made several subsequent visits to the Wa, traditional headhunters, who he says were ‘feeling very disaffected from the rest of Burma’. In 1996, he went to Rangoon, and had a meeting with Aung San Suu Kyi which changed his life. Aung San Suu Kyi, a devout Buddhist, told this American missionary that she reads the Bible every day and that her favourite verse is John 8: 32 – ‘You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.’ She then issued a request, even a challenge, to him: saying that she knew he was a Christian, and that Christians pray, she asked him to mobilise Christians around the world to pray for Burma. As a result of the direct request of Burma’s democracy leader and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, David Eubank established the Global Day of Prayer for Burma – an annual event on the second Sunday of March around the world. She also pricked his conscience about the need to build unity among the peoples of Burma. Eubank’s mission was born.
A year later, Eubank became aware of a major offensive by the Burma Army against the Karen and responded immediately by going to the border. Thousands of Karen were fleeing attacks, and the humanitarian crisis was desperate. Joined by a few Karen volunteers, he established the Free Burma Rangers as a relief team to bring, as their motto puts it, ‘help, hope and love’ to the people in the conflict zones of eastern Burma. Since 1997, the Free Burma Rangers have trained 110 multi-ethnic relief teams, drawing together Karen, Karenni, Shan and Pa-O and, more recently, people from northern and western Burma – the Kachin, Chin and Arakanese (or Rakhine). At least fifty-five full-time Free Burma Ranger teams are currently active, consisting of people from eleven ethnic groups, and have conducted over 350 relief missions into the conflict zones, each one usually lasting one or two months, on average treating 2,000 patients per mission. Each team consists of a medic, a videographer and photographer to document human rights abuses, and a pastor or counsellor. Although the ethos of the Free Burma Rangers is overtly Christian, the teams are multi-faith and include Buddhists and Animists. ‘We are held together by a bond of love and a common purpose of freedom, justice and reconciliation in Burma,’ says Eubank.
Besides delivering much-needed emergency relief, the Free Burma Rangers document atrocities and issue detailed reports, often with photographs and maps. Equipped with satellite communications, their reports are now able to reach the desktops of human rights groups, journalists and politicians around the world, direct from the jungle, within hours of an incident occurring. The reports are always shocking. In May 2009, for example, the Free Burma Rangers spoke to a Karen man who had been tortured, accused of planting a landmine which destroyed a bulldozer. He was given a choice – destroy all the village’s food crops, burn down the village or pay for the bulldozer, a sum of 3 million kyats or 2,400 dollars. ‘Then a pistol was held against the side of his head and shot twice on both sides and then up to six times in front of him. He was then tied to a durian tree and, thinking he was going to be killed, he asked to see his wife and children,’ the report claimed. ‘When they saw his condition, they began crying before being sent away by the Burma Army soldiers. Hot water was then poured on his legs and head and his back was beaten with a gun. He was also smashed in the mouth with a gun by troops whom he said were drunk. The torture began at 1 p.m. and continued until nightfall when he was released.’36 Another report includes an interview with a Karen man who had witnessed his father being tortured by Burma Army soldiers. ‘The soldiers started kicking, punching and hitting him with a branch of wood,’ the man told the Free Burma Rangers. ‘His face was smashed; his neck and chest were badly hit; and his penis was burned and sliced. They also put the knife in his mouth and twisted … He was taken away by soldiers and I was ordered to go back home. Within a few minutes I heard two gunshots. I knew that he had been killed.’37
Free Burma Ranger teams take significant risks in order to reach people who need help in Burma’s conflict zones, and several have given their lives. Saw Mu, known as ‘Mr Happy’, for example, stepped on a landmine and died on 5 May 2006. Saw Lee Reh Kyaw was captured by the Burma Army while delivering aid to Karenni villagers. He was tortured and interrogated for two days and then, on 10 April 2007, he was executed. Shining Moon died on 20 May 2008 from acute malaria. Disease, landmines and the Burma Army are some of the dangers the Free Burma Ranger teams face on a daily basis. Writing about Saw Lee Reh Kyaw, David Eubank said: ‘He was a wonderful man who smiled at everything; he is missed by us all. He was killed doing what he believed in: bringing help to people under oppression. His death is tragic, but not in vain. He has made a mark of love and service that made a difference in the lives of those he helped, and in all of our lives.’
I have travelled with the Free Burma Rangers, attended some of their training and witnessed their extraordinary courage, grace, humility and compassion. They are among the real heroes of Burma’s struggle. Men like Eliya, known to his friends as ‘Mad Dog’, provide an example of true love in action to people in the comfortable free world. A medic, trainer, cook, singer, artist and champion kick boxer, Eliya is, say his friends, ‘almost always smiling’. He was one of the first Karens to join the Free Burma Rangers, when Eubank met him in 1997. Eubank recalls the encounter:
Over ten thousand people were fleeing into Thailand during the 1997 Burma Army offensive. The border road we were on was clogged with families carrying all they had. I pulled my truck over to the side of the road and as I stepped out, a man emerged from the jungle. He was in full camouflage fatigues, with a hand grenade on his harness and a M16 in his hand. He had a warm and open smile and a bright red earring in one ear. He looked like a pirate. ‘Hello,’ he said in English. ‘My name is Eliya and I am a medic. Can I help you?’ Eliya immediately began to help Eubank unload packs of medical supplies from his truck, and then stopped some of his fellow Karens who were fleeing. ‘You can run away tomorrow,’ he told them, ‘but now is the time to help your people.’
Since 1997, Eliya has helped treat thousands of people, including landmine victims. On one visit, the Free Burma Rangers met a seventeen-year-old boy, Saw Sa Lu, who had stepped on a landmine. ‘His lower leg was shredded,’ Eubank recalls. ‘The bone shattered and was only connected by a strip of skin to his upper leg. Eliya immediately took charge of the situation, organised our other medics, and began to work on the boy … He controlled the bleeding from the stump, put in intravenous [drips] and began to clamp and suture off blood vessels and arteries. He comforted the boy, and prepared him for travel. Saw Sa Lu’s life was saved.’
In one of the most remarkable examples of Eliya’s commitment to his people, Eubank describes an incident that occurred in a village at the end of one three-month mission in northern Karen State. ‘A steady stream of families fleeing attacks far to the north were trickling into this village,’ he says. ‘We had no medicines left so we treated them the best we could as we waited for the re-supply.’ As they waited, Eubank was told that Eliya had gone to treat one of the children who was sick. ‘The boy had sores all over his face and had both mucus and pus draining out of his nose … He had not changed his clothes or bathed in days. He was dirty, sick and scared. Eliya was talking to him gently and trying to calm him down.’ The boy had been playing with a ballpoint pen, and had pushed it up his nose, where the tip had broken off and stuck in his nasal passage. ‘I will try to get it out,’ Eliya said. He tried to remove the pen tip with forceps, but after an hour he had made no progress. Eubank describes what happened next: ‘He looke
d at the boy and the parents and said “There is no other way” and smiled. He then bent over and put his mouth over the boy’s nose and began to suck the mucus and pus out … He kept sucking, hoping that the pen tip would come out too. In the end, the pen tip was removed … I looked at the whole scene and was amazed and grateful for Eliya’s love and commitment.’
Eliya is perhaps best known within the Free Burma Rangers for an occasion when a team was being pursued by the Burma Army. Accompanying ninety-six people who were fleeing a forced relocation site, with grandmothers, small children and babies, the situation was extremely dangerous. ‘The Burma Army was chasing us and had us surrounded by five battalions,’ recalls Eubank. Everyone was hiding, and silently trying to work out a plan of escape. As they crouched on the ground, Eliya came along.
He was bent over slightly with a broad grin on his face. Still smiling, he leaned over to me and very softly sang, ‘Don’t worry about tomorrow, just really good today, the Lord is right beside you to guide you all the way; have faith, hope and charity, that is how to live successfully; how do I know? The Bible tells me so.’ Then he continued up the line of people on the ground, smiling and encouraging them in a soft voice. Everyone he passed smiled back at him and the whole mood on the jungle floor shifted. By prayer, the skill of the Karen soldiers and Eliya’s and others’ can-do attitude, we were eventually able to get out of that situation and take all of the ninety-six people to safety.38
But Eliya is not by any means the only inspirational Free Burma Ranger. Doh Say, a Karen who grew up in Karenni, now spends almost the entire year in Karenni State, having established a mobile medical clinic. In 1991, he joined the KNPP and became a soldier, but a year later, on the front line, he was shot. After a miraculous recovery, he decided to devote his life to working for his people. The risks he takes today are immense, working in very demanding conditions. But he shows a remarkable lack of concern for his own hardship, recognising the scale of suffering of his own people. ‘It is good for us to live in the same conditions as the villagers,’ he says. ‘We wake up every hour with the cold, but it is better to do this than to sleep deeply, as we have to be ready to move at any moment … I always have to hang my hammock low for four reasons: more chance of being below the line of bullets, less possibility of being hit by shell blast as it spreads out, it is warmer near to the ground, and it is less far to fall if it breaks!’39
An email which Doh Say sent to me in 2005 sums up his spirit: ‘I will try my best to follow what God asks us to do and will never give up in fighting against the dictators who are oppressing the entire people of Burma in many forms for many years already. I will also always try to find a way to help the oppressed … My big present to the oppressed people is [to be] “free from fear” … I will try my best until my last day.’
The Free Burma Rangers have also made a significant contribution to deepening unity between the ethnic nationalities. Since 1997, Eubank and his team have organised ethnic unity seminars, bringing together all the major groups, including ceasefire groups. ‘Disunity starts with a lack of faith in each individual, that what they are doing is good enough. If you don’t have faith then you grab everything you can see, and it makes you more selfish and insecure. From that comes jealousy when you see other people getting things. And beyond that, disunity is caused by unequal resources, and by disagreement on the way forward: one person wants to go right, another wants to go left,’ he says. Competing political and religious ideas, and tribal identities, also contribute to a lack of unity. The common enemy, the Burma Army, is not enough to unite people, Eubank believes, without a common vision of what Burma might look like after the military regime falls. As a result of the ethnic unity seminars run by Free Burma Rangers, he adds, there is ‘more respect and more understanding’.
Building on the Free Burma Rangers’ efforts, several agreements have been signed between the different people groups in Burma in support of federal democracy. In 1992, the Manerplaw Agreement was signed by the two major ethnic alliances, the Democratic Alliance of Burma (DAB) and the National Democratic Front (NDF), along with the NCGUB and the exiled NLD. Four years later, the NLD expressed its support for autonomy for the ethnic nationalities and the ‘Panglong spirit’. In 1997, at a conference convened by the Free Burma Rangers, ethnic nationalities signed the Mae Tha Raw Hta Agreement, in which they declared that they ‘unanimously agree to establish a genuine federal union’. On 14 December 1998 the exiled NLD, exiled MPs and the ethnic groups signed the Thoo Mweh Klo Agreement, again pledging support for a federal democracy.
In November 2010, an alliance of ethnic armed groups – ceasefire and non-ceasefire – was formed, calling itself the Committee for the Emergence of a Federal Union. Three months later, it was dissolved and replaced with a broader alliance, the United Nationalities Federal Council, consisting of most of the ethnic groups except the Shan State Army. Its objectives were clear: to form a united front in support of a political settlement for the ethnic nationalities.
For Karenni leader Rimond Htoo, unity among the ethnic nationalities is crucial. ‘We cannot fight on our own. We need to join hands with other ethnic nationalities, and we need encouragement from the international community,’ he told me. He also emphasised that their struggle now is for a free – and federal – Burma. ‘At the beginning of the revolution, our fight was for independence. Everyone was for independence – the Shan, Karen, Karenni. But now, all the ethnics are together and we are focusing on federal union. We are not going to split up the union. The regime always says we are separatists, but this is not true. Federalism is the only way for peace in Burma.’
In 2011, President Thein Sein began to change the regime’s rhetoric about the ethnic people and move towards ceasefire negotiations. In a speech to Parliament on 30 March 2011, he promised to ‘give top priority to national unity’ to overcome ‘the hell of untold miseries’ brought about by decades of war.40 Subsequent months proved confusing, as he dropped previous demands for ethnic groups to surrender and form part of a Border Guard Force (BGF) under the Burma Army’s control, and offered peace talks, while at the same time breaking long-standing ceasefires with two major ethnic groups, launching new offensives against civilians in Kachin and northern Shan states. Nevertheless, although a new war was waged in these areas, by the beginning of 2012 there were preliminary ceasefire agreements with several key ethnic groups, including the KNU and the SSA-South. The peace process is fragile, and hinges on the establishment of a longer-term nationwide, inclusive political process that addresses the political desires and needs of the ethnic groups. Without a political agreement, a ceasefire is simply an absence of fighting and no guarantee of genuine peace.
The situation in eastern Burma has been one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, and one of its least known. Since 1996, over 3,700 villages in eastern Burma have been destroyed41 – a scale comparable to Darfur. Over half a million people are internally displaced. Pascal Khoo Thwe has described what is happening as ‘Pol Pot in slow motion’. Amnesty International,42 Human Rights Watch, and leading international jurists call it ‘crimes against humanity’, and the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in Burma has called for these to be investigated.
4
A Silent Cry in the North
‘All we do know … is that evil labours with vast power and perpetual success – in vain: preparing always the soil for unexpected good to sprout in.’
J.R.R. Tolkein, 1944
HALF AN HOUR after entering the hotel to meet a man who had come especially from Myitkyina, the capital of Kachin State, to talk to me, I received a message from my Kachin hosts. ‘We have just received news that the Burma Army’s Northern Region commander and Kachin State commander are passing through town. They will be having lunch in this hotel. Do not under any circumstances leave the room you are now in until we let you know,’ they said. I had already been smuggled into the hotel through the back door, having been brought there in a car with darkened windows.
Now, I was sitting two floors above two of the most senior officers in Burma’s military regime. I was tempted to go and join them for lunch, as a conversation with them would have been most interesting, but I knew the consequences for my hosts if my presence was discovered, so I remained hidden in the room. A little later, I glanced out of the window. The courtyard was swarming with Tatmadaw troops, their guns glistening in the midday sunshine.
This was how it was even though the Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO), the main resistance group for the Kachin ethnic people, had a ceasefire with the regime at the time, and under the terms of the ceasefire agreement they were in control of this area. The KIO had signed a ceasefire with the regime in 1994, which brought an end to armed conflict, mass displacement, destruction of villages and widespread killings and enabled the KIO to engage in business and establish some semblance of fledgling civil society. Yet the peace was always fragile and the atmosphere was one of fear. The Tatmadaw came back and forth through KIO-controlled areas, as I discovered that morning, and while my Kachin friends were glad to have me with them, they were terrified about what might happen if my presence became known. Human rights violations, as I shall describe in this chapter, continued even during this supposed time of peace – rape, forced labour, religious discrimination and land confiscation in particular. And for many years, the Kachins’ silence on these abuses had been bought by the regime. The Kachin were afraid to report what was happening to the international community, out of fear that it might jeopardise the ceasefire.
Burma- a Nation at the Crossroads Page 13