A Savage Dreamland

by David Eimer

  Much of the Mong Tai Army disarmed along with Khun Sa. But Yawd Serk led a breakaway unit of 800 soldiers who refused to surrender. They would become the Shan State Army – South/RCSS. The RCSS has repudiated its heroin heritage in recent years. Just like the Wa and Lin Mingxian in Special Region 4, Yawd Serk insists that they are no longer in the drug business. Loi Tai Leng has its own miniature version of Mong La’s Drug Eradication Museum, a one-room hall with the usual photos of burning poppy fields.

  Renouncing their past has been a spectacular success for the RCSS. Just over twenty years ago Khun Sa was one of the most wanted men on the planet, described by the then US ambassador to Thailand as ‘the worst enemy the world has’. Now, diplomats from the American embassy in Bangkok join Yawd Serk for dinner in Loi Tai Leng. What can’t be forgotten, though, is the way that Khun Sa and those who followed him have irretrievably reorientated Shan State’s economy towards the production of illicit drugs, and the disastrous effect that it continues to have on communities across the region.

  Before leaving, I joined a group of mostly Thai and Shan journalists for an audience with Yawd Serk. We were loaded into pickup trucks and driven down a dust track to a modern two-storey house painted in camouflage colours, Shan flags flying from its terrace. It is one of the two residences in Loi Tai Leng used by Yawd Serk. Beyond the house, green hills staggered away to the interior of Shan State. A chair was set up in the shade for the chairman, a translator by his side, while his overbearing bodyguards were stationed nearby.

  Faced with a series of parochial and gentle questions Yawd Serk batted them away with ease. I asked about the current clashes with the TNLA. ‘It’s a misunderstanding,’ said the chairman in his not very martial voice. ‘The TNLA doesn’t want to talk to us. We’re like a boy who wants to talk to a girl, but the girl doesn’t want to talk.’ It was a homespun analogy for the conflict between the two groups, but the chairman qualified it with a more forceful assertion. ‘We will go anywhere in Shan State where the people want us.’

  More surprising was his admission of burgeoning ties with the Chinese government. Traditionally, the RCSS has always been closer to Thailand. Now, though, the RCSS is eager to claim a portion of the lucrative cross-border trade with China. ‘Shan people and the Chinese are like brother and sister. We share a border, our people go there all the time and most of the goods sold here are Chinese. We have to maintain a good, close relationship,’ said Yawd Serk.

  Again, though, he sounded a warning. ‘China doesn’t interfere with our internal policies,’ stated the chairman. ‘No one influences the RCSS. We stand and fight alone.’ It was a unilateral declaration of his army’s independence and a reminder of how partisan the warlords of the region are. National day was almost over and the usual rivalries would soon surface again. Shan solidarity could be forgotten until it was time for next year’s performance.

  18

  The Triangle

  Dropping altitude, propellers droning and our ears popping, the plane began the descent into Putao. I gazed down on forests so dense they disguised the contours of the hills they smothered, forming what looked from above to be one giant tree blooming in an explosion of dark green foliage. Rough squares cut out of the valleys, glimmering lime in the sunlight, indicated rice fields. Carving through the land were two rivers, the N’Maihka and the Malihka, racing each other to a confluence point just north of Myitkyina where they form the Ayeyarwady River.

  Myitkyina, the capital of Kachin State, was 220 miles south. No buses or trains run north of there. Only private vehicles and Tatmadaw trucks travel the dire road that connects Myitkyina to Putao. It is a journey that takes twenty-four to thirty-six hours, longer in the rainy season, depending on how fast you drive and the level of discomfort you are willing to endure. But foreigners are banned from the road. Plane was the only way for me to reach Putao, Burma’s most northerly town and the last settlement of any size before the country collides with the Himalayas along the borders with India, Tibet and China.

  Waiting at Putao’s tiny airport was Ngwalisa, recommended to me both for his local knowledge and excellent English. Sturdy, with a brown face and thinning black hair, he was in the hiking gear that was his only apparel during our acquaintance. Ngwalisa had learned his English in bible school, before polishing it further by studying in Bangalore, across the nearby border with India. He was thirty-three, married with three kids and Lisu, the ethnic minority who make up around half of Putao’s population.

  From the back of Ngwalisa’s motorbike, a perch I got to know well, Putao appeared as a leafy town set on the flat plain of a large valley irrigated by a tributary of the Malihka. Two paved roads divide Putao, rocky lanes and dirt tracks branching off them. There are a number of churches, principally Baptist, and a large market in the centre of town where alongside the snow trout I was surprised to see an abundance of grapefruits, blood oranges and tangerines, all grown locally.

  ‘American missionaries introduced them to Putao,’ explained Ngwalisa. ‘The Morse family. They came here in the 1950s and saw that the people were vitamin-deficient. So they started growing citrus fruits.’ The Morses converted most of the Lisu to Christianity, along with the Rawang, the second most numerous minority in Putao, before being expelled from Burma in 1965. Buddhists are represented by the Tai Khamti people, a branch of the Shan family found in northern Burma and India, and the Bamar, almost all of whom are government officials or soldiers.

  Beyond the town are the Burmese Himalayas, marking the frontiers with India and Tibet. Putao can be foggy in the early morning, the mist settling above the valley from the late afternoon and staying throughout the night. As the sun rises, though, the snow-capped summits emerge. To the west and the border with Arunachal Pradesh in India, the mountains seem close and not that high. But they are all over 4,000 metres and it is a five-day trek to the frontier.

  Farther away to the north is the boundary with Tibet and more forbidding peaks. Just inside Burma are Hkakabo Razi and Gamlang Razi, the two highest mountains in Southeast Asia at almost 6,000 metres. It is a three-week march to their base camps from Putao. South-east of those peaks, the frontier with Tibet bleeds into the border with the far north-west of Yunnan Province. Putao’s proximity to India, Tibet and China means the region is sometimes known as ‘The Triangle’, the borders with Arunachal Pradesh to the west and Tibet and Yunnan in the east making up the legs of the trilateral.

  During the colonial period Putao was considered part of the North East Frontier, the far eastern edge of India. Herbert Robinson, the miscreant army officer and friend of George Orwell who inspired the character of Flory in Burmese Days, was based here with the military police in the early 1920s. Setting out on horseback from Myitkyina, it took Robinson over three weeks to reach Putao. The town was newly built at that point, having been laid out in 1914 by the then deputy commissioner William Hertz, who gave his name to the local army base.

  Ritchie Gardiner came close to Putao, too, escaping over the Chaukkan Pass, just south-west of town, to India in July 1942. He had returned to Burma soon after fleeing Rangoon on a futile mission to join the fight against the Japanese. But by the time Gardiner arrived the battle was over and the British were in full retreat. With the rest of the country under Japanese control, Gardiner was forced to head north to Kachin State. It took his small party two months to reach India, struggling through leech-infested mountains in the monsoon season and fording endless rivers, men dropping dead along the way.

  So remote was Putao at that time that the Japanese didn’t bother occupying the town. A small garrison of mostly Indian soldiers stayed at Fort Hertz throughout the war, manning an emergency airstrip used by the American and British supply planes flying over the eastern Himalayas from India to China. Putao feels like a lost world even today, cut off from the rest of the country, the few roads north of the town soon petering out so that access to the frontier areas is by foot only.

  Nothing remains of Fort Hertz now, except for some stone
steps on the gentle rise of land in Putao’s northern outskirts that it once occupied, much of it now home to the police station. Walking there the day after my arrival, I thought that Putao, no matter how isolated, is still more pleasant and developed than many other places in rural Burma. It is a tidy town of substantial wooden houses separated from each other by gardens of banana, tea and citrus trees, as well as palms with fan-shaped leaves and spiky stems, a species unique to northern Burma.

  As usual in the borderlands, I was faced with Tatmadaw-imposed constraints on where I could go. Putao and the far north was mostly barred to foreigners in the junta era. Opened up afterwards for the odd mountaineering expedition and parties of high-end tourists, the region was shutting down again by the time I arrived. Foreigners were no longer allowed to spend nights outside Putao, and various villages in the surrounding area were closed. Ngwalisa assured me that we could still go where I wanted during the day. But I would not be able to visit the Chaukkan Pass or trek to the border with Tibet.

  These restrictions are a consequence of the conflict farther south in Kachin State. Putao itself is home to few Kachin people, and the KIA does not operate in the town. Nor do the Lisu fight. Having supported the KIA in the 1960s, with some joining as soldiers, the Lisu sit out the ethnic conflicts these days. Alone of the minorities of their size in Burma – around 350,000 people spread across Kachin, the neighbouring Sagaing Region and Shan State – the Lisu do not have their own army.

  But the 70,000-odd Rawang people are represented by the Rebellion Resistance Force, a snappy title for a very modest militia that devotes most of its time to trafficking timber into Yunnan with the tacit assistance of the Burmese military. And the KIA is active in areas south of Putao. There is bitter fighting around the town of Tanai, home to gold and amber mines that the KIA relies on for funds, as well as being the contraband capital of northern Kachin State with smuggling routes leading west across Sagaing into India.

  Unable to get close to Tibet, Ngwalisa consoled me by introducing me to some of his Tibetan friends. I was barely aware that there are Tibetans living in Burma. Tashi was the proof, a slight eighteen-year-old with a perpetual smile on his face. It was obvious straightaway that he was Tibetan, despite his jeans and baseball cap, his features much closer to central Asia than those of Burma’s other peoples. And he declined the offer of some of Putao’s delicious fruit. I have never known a Tibetan eat anything except meat, noodles, dumplings and tsampa, the barley flour they mix with butter tea.

  Tashi is one of eight children of a ninety-year-old father, five of whom died in childhood. ‘We couldn’t get them medicine,’ said Tashi. When he told me where he lived, I realised that finding a doctor nearby was not an option. His village sits at 2,000 metres, 1,600 metres above Putao but low by the standards of Tibet. It is a five-day trek from Hkakabo Razi’s base camp and two days to the frontier with Tibet. On his phone he showed me a photo of a stone standing in utter isolation with the characters for China carved into it. ‘That’s the border,’ laughed Tashi.

  Taking photos is all Tashi’s phone is good for in his village and the area around it. ‘The nearest place with phone reception is Nogmung. That’s a week’s walk from my village,’ said Tashi. ‘You can’t drive past Nogmung, not even a motorbike. You have to walk.’ Nogmung is a Rawang outpost, little more than a village itself, a day’s drive north-east of Putao. Tashi’s family and the other villagers visit it once a year to stock up on supplies, before hauling them back home.

  ‘Each Tibetan can carry thirty vis,’ said Tashi, using the traditional Burmese measure of weight. One vis is equivalent to just over one and half kilos, so Tashi would have close to two thirds of my bodyweight on his back. ‘We walk twenty hours a day. We take a break for a few hours at midnight.’ I knew he wasn’t exaggerating. Tibetans travel fast at altitude, something I had witnessed while trekking around Mount Kailash in western Tibet. Most westerners complete the hike in three days. Tibetans do it in eighteen hours. It would probably take me over two weeks to walk from Nogmung to Tashi’s village.

  The Triangle is home to four Tibetan settlements, each with around one hundred residents. In a land of remote places and peoples, Burma’s Tibetans might be the most distant of them all. They are in the country because of the idiosyncratic border between Burma and China and past conflicts in Tibet, most notably the 1959 Tibetan uprising. It was a rebellion against Chinese rule that lasted three years, cost over 85,000 Tibetans their lives and resulted in the Dalai Lama fleeing into exile in India.

  ‘We always lived on the Burmese side of the frontier, but there was no real border so we considered ourselves to be living in Tibet. We paid tribute to the monks in Tibet,’ Tashi told me. ‘But then the war with the Chinese happened and the border was demarcated in 1960. My father thought it would be safer to stay in Burma.’ Soon after came Ne Win’s coup of 1962. The Tibetans in Kachin State found out quickly that it isn’t just the Chinese Communist Party who have an unreconstructed attitude towards minority ethnic groups.

  ‘Tibetans were treated badly here when my father was young. We weren’t even allowed to come to Putao. That’s changed in the last ten years and we got given our identity cards. Now, I think the Burmese regard us like they do the Rawang or Lisu. We’re just ethnic people to them,’ Tashi stated. Three Tibetan families are now resident in Putao. ‘More Tibetans will come in the future. It’s a less hard life here.’

  Out in their villages, though, the Tibetans continue to live as their counterparts do on the other side of the border in the far south-east of Tibet. Few speak Burmese, something that will change as more move to Putao, and they marry other Tibetans, although Tashi said people occasionally take Rawang partners. Crucially, they practise Tibetan Buddhism, a newer version of the religion than the Theravada Buddhism that dominates Burma. ‘We follow the Dalai Lama,’ said Tashi, showing me a picture of him on his phone. ‘When my father was young, the lamas would come to our villages from Tibet.’

  Barely touched by the trappings of modernity, Burma’s Tibetans lead an uncomplicated life. I asked Tashi to describe a typical day in the village. ‘We wake up at daybreak, we cook dumplings – wheat ones with beef – then we feed the chickens and pigs and release the mithun to go off and graze for the day,’ he said. Mithun are a breed of cow found across the Himalayan region.

  ‘After that we work in the fields, we grow barley and wheat, or in the summer we go looking for mushrooms and herbs. We sell them to Tibetans across the border and they sell them to the Chinese. They’re good for health. Sometimes we hunt for barking deer and serow. My father hunted a lot when he was younger. We come back home at five in the afternoon, feed the animals again, fetch water from the stream and start cooking tsampa. We listen to the radio – we get Burmese radio stations – and we are in bed by nine. We don’t feel bored. There are always things to do.’

  Like the Wa and Kokang peoples in their enclaves in Shan State the Tibetans in Kachin live in a space that is outside Burma proper. But they don’t have to fight or manufacture and sell drugs to establish an existence beyond the state. Geography does the job for them. ‘We never see anyone. No army, no police, no government officials. Where we live is too far for the Burmese to walk to,’ said Tashi, his eyes twinkling.

  They have become even more isolated in recent years as China tightens its grip on Tibet. Unlike Yunnan, Tibet’s frontiers are now guarded zealously by both drones and soldiers. The villages along the borders are closely watched, and army patrols will open fire on any Tibetans discovered trying to leave the country. For Tashi and the other villagers that means no more visits from lamas or relatives across the frontier.

  ‘People used to come from Tibet, but not in the past few years. The Chinese government won’t let them,’ Tashi said. Nor do the Chinese cross the border anymore. ‘Occasionally they would come to buy animal parts. But it’s too hard to find rare animals now, so that doesn’t happen anymore.’ Ngwalisa nodded in agreement. His father had once traded in endang
ered species – tigers, clouded leopards, pangolins, Himalayan black bears and the antelope-like takins – selling them to Chinese dealers from Yunnan.

  ‘When I was young there were still tigers around here, maybe fifteen years ago, and my father would buy the skins and bones from the hunters and sell them on. But there are no tigers now,’ said Ngwalisa. ‘It is very difficult to find even pangolins now. It’s easier to find bears. But I think they are mostly bears who come from India. They are wandering bears, and they regret it. They end up in China. The Chinese don’t care about getting stopped at the border with animals or their parts. They say, “We’ll just give the army money”, and they do.’

  Perhaps in acknowledgement of their separation from the rest of Kachin State, Burma’s Tibetans are allowed to cross into Tibet without having to pass through official border posts. ‘We can go to the villages just over the frontier. It’s illegal to go further. But sometimes we do, travelling by motorbike. I’ve been as far as Cawarong, which is the nearest town. I’d like to go to Lhasa one day,’ said Tashi.

  Despite Beijing’s continuing assault on traditional Tibetan culture, with monasteries monitored by the government and children made to study in Mandarin rather than Tibetan, Tashi said he wished his village was on the other side of the frontier. ‘I think most of the Tibetans in Burma would rather live in Tibet. It’s much more developed. They have roads and television. But the Chinese won’t let us. They say we are Burmese now.’

  Unlike his father, though, he won’t grow old in his village. Ngwalisa has already identified Tashi as a future guide, someone who can lead the groups of rich Bamar who come to the Triangle for an adventure in the foothills of the Himalayas. With his mountain upbringing and equable personality, I thought Tashi would do very well. He will join the Tibetans already living in Putao, and many others will follow him to the town or beyond in the future. I wondered if the four Tibetan villages would still be inhabited in twenty or thirty years.