Land of Jade

by Bertil Lintner

  “We had a happy childhood in Bhamo. And I knew about Sweden even in those days. Because of the movies, you know. Ingrid Bergman and Greta Garbo. I had heard about other Scandinavian countries also. One of the songs they taught us at school was ‘Wonderful, Wonderful Copenhagen’.”

  He burst into an impromptu rendering of it as we moved along the garden path. It was hard not to feel sympathy for the disabled veteran. One of the officers had told us that once a large contingent of government troops had been approaching a KIA camp in the Hukawng Valley. The force had been much stronger than the camp’s defenders and many of them had become apprehensive. To encourage them, Bawk Di had asked Pan Awng—a childhood friend from Bhamo—to let him have a horse and the command of a platoon. Bawk Di had then led his men into the jungle and set up an ambush. Their morale raised by the spectacle of the cripple on horseback, the guerrillas successful thwarted the attack.

  During our third week at the camp, Ja Reng was stricken with a severe attack of fever. Her temperature rose rapidly to over 40 degrees Celsius and her skin burnt to the touch. We feared it might be malaria or dengue fever and in an effort to bring her temperature down began giving her rubs with napkins soaked in cold water. We also sent a runner to call for Sinwa Naw’s wife who was a qualified nurse. When she arrived, she assured us most babies in the area had such fevers from time to time and it was nothing serious. She brought some Tetracycline and Anaquine which we pulverised, dissolved in boiled water and gave to Ja Reng. The news had spread and a crowd gathered in and around our house. Among them was an old man who stepped forward to offer his services also. The nurse acted as his interpreter.

  “He’s a shaman,” she said, looking faintly embarrassed. “You know, not all Kachins are Christians. Some are still Animists. According to him, your baby is so pretty that somebody’s got jealous and put a spell on her. He claims he can remove it. What do you think?”

  Rather than give offence, we agreed it could do no harm. So while the nurse continued her ministrations inside the house, the shaman gathered the necessary equipment to begin his healing ceremony outside the door. He used a small bamboo table as an altar and could soon be heard chanting the appropriate appeals and offerings to the spirits.

  Three anxious days later, to our immense relief, Ja Reng’s temperature was down to normal again. The glad news was soon known all over the camp and shortly, the shaman appeared, smiling broadly and proudly. We gladly paid him the traditional fee for a successful healing: a bottle of rice liquor.

  At the end of January, a young man came to see us. He had walked for a few days from his home village in the Hukawng Valley. It was Hpauwung Tanggun, Yaw Htung’s elder brother. He wore spectacles—a rare sight in the Kachin Hills—and looked very much the intellectual. We were glad to see him; we had not forgotten that his brother had died defending our family. In his shoulderbag, Tanggun carried some photographs of his family and a small notebook from which he began reading. The entire family, it turned out, had been involved with the KIA since the early 1960s.

  “Our father actually came from Bhamo in the south,” said Tanggun as he began his story, checking details with the scribbling in his notebook. “He was an orphan, but the missionaries helped him go to school and later he became a teacher. But when World War Two broke out, he went to the north to join the Kachin Levies. The British made him an officer but he resigned from the army when the war was over. He settled in Sumprabum in the north. That’s where all of us children were born.”

  I took down my own notes as he was relating the story. From time to time, Hseng Noung refilled our glasses with tea.

  “There were eleven brothers and sisters in our family originally. One of our elder brothers studied in Rangoon and took part in the student demonstrations there in July 1962, four months after General Ne Win seized power and abolished our old, federal constitution. Scores of students were shot dead by the army at that time. Most of them were actually Burmans who resented the takeover by the military.

  “Our brother had to flee from Rangoon and returned to Kachin State where he joined the KIA. Another brother followed a year later. Both of them are since dead, killed in action against Ma Sa La.”

  He used the Burmese abbreviation for the Myanma Sosialit Lanzin Pati—the Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP) in English—since the military takeover in 1962 the only legal political organisation in the country. The Kachin rebel movement stresses that theirs is a political struggle against the government, not a racial one. The enemy is thus always referred to as ‘Ma Sa La’ rather than ‘Burmese’, as was common early in the insurgency when separatist ideas had some currency.

  “Yaw Htung was the brightest of us kids, but he could only study up to third standard in Sumprabum. In May 1964, our entire family went underground. The army repression in the towns was just too heavy. My father had actually wanted Yaw Htung to go to Bible school and become a missionary. But the war altered the course of all our lives.

  “We lived in the jungle for years, trying to evade the Ma Sa La army and moving about with other civilians and KIA guerrillas. Sometimes we had no rice to eat, not even salt. Our clothes were in rags and our mother had no cotton to stitch our tattered shorts and shirts with. She had to use a sliver of cane as a needle and fibre from jungle plants to serve as thread. We had only the clothes we stood up in and they were soon full of fleas and lice. It was during this most difficult time that our eldest brother died in battle. The other was killed about a year later.”

  He lapsed into a pensive silence. It was clear he had given much thought to what he was going to tell me. I prompted him to continue by asking about Yaw Htung’s childhood.

  “Yes, my father and mother educated Yaw Htung and when he was in his teens, the KIO employed him as a teacher in what we call the Northern Frontier Agency, which is near the Chaukan Pass and Pinawng Zup on the Indian border, where the Morses and their Lisu followers had settled. That’s how Yaw Htung learnt to speak Lisu. He already spoke Jinghpaw, the main Kachin dialect, as well as the language of the Marus, our mother’s tribe. And, of course, he knew Burmese, too. He left his job as a teacher in 1972 to become a soldier. That’s how I became a teacher. Our father was too old to teach, so he started preaching and continued until his death in 1978.”

  Tanggun opened his notebook and glanced at a page, before resuming his story.

  “Yaw Htung was attached to the 2nd Brigade and was appointed liaison officer with the groups from northeastern India who came here regularly. Bawk Di taught him English and he picked up Nagamese and Manipuri by himself. So in the end he was fluent in seven languages.” He looked up from his notes. I could sense the admiration he felt for his dead brother and the immensity of his loss.

  “You probably don’t know he had a problem with his health. He suffered from a stomach disease and sometimes went secretly to Myitkyina and even Mandalay for treatment, dressed as a civilian and using a faked ID card. But the MIS caught up with him and he was arrested in Myitkyina in 1979. His young wife and our old mother, who at that time was more than 60, were arrested also, but later released.

  “Yaw Htung was taken away by the MIS. They tortured him throughout the interrogation. For the first 16 days, he was not even allowed to use a lavatory. He had to urinate and defecate in his trousers and he was constantly beaten up. The torture went on for eight months until all political prisoners were released under a general amnesty in 1980. Yaw Htung rejoined the KIA immediately and served with the army until his death in the Naga Hills.”

  Tanggun ended his narration and put his little notebook back into his Kachin shoulderbag. The he looked me straight in the eye.

  “I’ve lost three brothers in his war,” he said in a voice he was striving hard to keep under control.

  “But I’ve also found a new brother from abroad.”

  I had tears pricking at the back of my own eyes as we clasped hands.

  Tanggun left for his home village in the Hukawng Valley after spending a few days with us at
the camp. We had found a new brother.

  Karang, the NSCN officer who had accompanied our party to explain the death of Yaw Htung and his comrades—and to ask for more ammunition—departed after some weeks. The KIA officers to whom he gave his brief explanation—that Yaw Htung’s “lifespan had run out”—found this a less than satisfactory account of the battle. They gave Karang a letter to the NSCN leaders, requesting Muivah or some other high-ranking officer to come for talks with the Kachins. They gave Karang 600 rounds to replace those borrowed by the Kachin soldiers after the battle—but told him that as a matter of policy nothing more would be forthcoming.

  We turned out to say farewell to Karang and his men at their departure. It was sad to watch them as they began their march back to the Naga Hills to continue their lonely fight for a hopeless cause. The eastern Nagas, to whom Karang belonged, would be much better off if they set up their own group, allied themselves with the KIA and the NDF and fought for autonomy within a Union of Burma—instead of clinging to a belief that the Naga-inhabited areas of both India and Burma could become an independent country. To us, at least, it was also apparent that the eastern Nagas, culturally and historically, were closer to the Kachins than to their distant cousins from across the international frontier.

  By chance, the first Kachin missionary to the eastern Nagas, an old reverend called Labwi Htingnan, came to visit 2nd Brigade headquarters while we were there. He was short and stocky with a weather-beaten face. Always dressed in a Kachin longyi and a turban, he looked every bit the backwoods preacher he was. Wherever he went, he carried a well-thumbed Kachin translation of the Bible in his shoulderbag.

  Labwi Htingnan had left the Naga Hills when the war broke out in the early 1960s and now managed a Bible school in the Nam Byu valley. He regarded himself as a “KIO worker”, but could still visit the government-controlled towns; he was a far too well-known personality in Kachin State to be arrested and there was actually no charge the authorities could bring against him.

  Lashi Naw Ja’s parents had come together with Labwi Htingnan and all of us gathered in our bamboo house. Lashi Naw Ja’s mother had worked in the first missionary clinic to be established in the Naga Hills some thirty years before. I asked them whether they thought any Westerners had been to the wild Naga area between the Nampuk River and the Indian border before I went there. His reply intrigued me.

  “No, not voluntarily. Not even we Kachin missionaries dared to go west of the Nampuk. But once during World War Two an American Dakota flying supplies over the Hump crashed in that area. The two pilots, both Americans, survived the crash but were captured by the Nagas. One of them was beheaded and sacrificed to the spirits. But then, for some reason, the Nagas got afraid. They probably began to have second thoughts about these strange, huge white men who had fallen down from the sky. Maybe they were spirits? Of course, I don’t really know what the Nagas thought. But they let the second American go and he made it on foot back to the US base at Shingbwiyang on the Ledo Road. I believe he was flown back to America afterwards.”

  The memory of the Dakota engine we had spotted outside one of the morungs in Kesan Chanlam flashed through my mind.

  “Do you by any chance know the name of the village where the Dakota crashed and the pilots were captured?”

  “Yes, I do. It was a very wild and remote village close to the Indian border. It was called Kesan Yangnaw. I don’t know if the village still exists. None of us ever went that far.”

  I was stunned. Kesan Yangnaw, of course, belonged to the same village cluster as Kesan Chanlam; it was located only a few hours’ march away. The engine cylinder block Hseng Noung had photographed could only have come from that very same Dakota.

  Kachin villagers in northernmost Burma.

  The day after Labwi Htingnan and Lashi Naw Ja’s parents had left, news reached us from Nam Byu. On 27th January, a Burmese Army column from the garrison at Tanai town had managed to make their way through the jungle and enter the outskirts of Kawng Ja village without being seen. There were no KIA troops in the vicinity at that time, but apparently the Northern Command in Myitkyina felt the village had to be punished for letting Pan Awng and his troops stay. At five in the morning, the unit began firing into Kawng Ja. One target was the KIO township office. Lashi Naw Ja woke up, reached for a bag containing KIO funds—he was the local treasurer—and a sniper’s bullet hit him in his chest. He died instantly.

  The indiscriminate shooting continued for more than an hour, also killing a Lisu school teacher called Joseph, an old woman and a local clerk. Five villagers were severely wounded. After inflicting this reprisal, the Burmese Army unit withdrew to the Tanai garrison. Both Hseng Noung and I were shocked and angry. It had been a senseless attack with absolutely no military justification. We asked Sinwa Naw, who brought us the news, about Lashi Naw Ja’s family.

  “His wife and children managed to run away so they’re safe. And, as you know, his parents left for Nam Byu only yesterday. One of our runners caught up with them and told them what had happened. They stopped in the jungle and wept. I believe they halted there to hold a memorial service, led by Labwi Htingnan.”

  Early morning in the Kachin Hills.

  The attack on Nam Byu was only one of several signs of increased activity by the Burmese Army in the area. People who came from the towns along the Ledo Road spoke of a rumoured push against 2nd Brigade headquarters, to include air strikes, and planned to coincide with the unofficial Kachin National Day celebrations on February 5. On that date in 1961 the KIA had been established and since the anniversary was marked annually with parades and speeches in insurgent areas.

  Orders were given to dig a solid air-raid shelter for us in case the reports proved true. It was ready within half a day’s hpatick carried out by a section of soldiers. The shelter was two metres deep and roofed with solid logs which were in turn camouflaged with sand. We stored our personal belongings there: my notebooks, Hseng Noung’s camera bags and a set of necessities for taking care of Ja Reng.

  Earlier, it had been planned to celebrate the event on the camp’s parade ground. But since civilians from the surrounding Maji Bum villages—including women and children—had been streaming in, it was decided to relocate the celebrations to a clearing in the nearby jungle. Bawk Di and I made our way there, each on his own elephant. It was a simple and solemn event. High-ranking officers gave speeches, an army chaplain read the day’s lesson from the Bible and the entire congregation sang a few hymns in the forest. There was tension in the air throughout the day and everyone was constantly alert for the sound of approaching aircraft. But in the event, the day passed without any untoward incident.

  That night, we were told arrangements had been made for our departure. Sinwa Naw came together with other officers, including a young 2nd Lieutenant, Khun Nawng. He was a tall, slim university graduate in his early thirties with a sharp-featured, triangular face. His uniform was impeccable, a reflection of an orderly mind and a strong sense of duty. Even though there had been no attack on February 5, it was obvious the Burmese Army was preparing for an offensive.

  It was decided Sinwa Naw and Khun Nawng should lead our march towards 1st Brigade headquarters in the V-shaped region formed by the rivers Mali Hka and Nmai Hka in northern Kachin State and known as the Triangle. This was the longer but safer route to Pa Jau; a shorter but much riskier route led over the closely guarded railway from Myitkyina to Mandalay. Supplies that had been ordered for the journey from the Hpakan jade mines had not yet arrived, but these were to be sent after us by runners.

  We left 2nd Brigade headquarters well before dawn to keep our movements as secret as possible. It was February 10 and we estimated the march up to 1st Brigade headquarters in the Triangle would take almost two weeks. Our column consisted of 40 men and three elephants carrying supplies and myself. We moved through the surrounding villages in the dark. Only a few villagers were awake but still inside warming themselves by their morning fires. I could see the warm glow of dancing flam
es through the slits in the bamboo walls while I was shivering in the morning chill on the back of my swaying elephant.

  The news was not good. The Burmese Army was closing in on three sides, presumably aiming for 2nd Brigade headquarters. It was uncertain whether the expected offensive had been prompted by our stay of more than three weeks in the camp. Rumours were also afoot that the government intended to resettle all the Maji Bum villagers along the Ledo Road to deprive the KIA of its support base up in the hills above the Hukawng Valley.

  Whatever the case, it was high time to be moving on. We followed the Tanai River, heading north as the sun rose. On the sand along the riverbank we discovered fresh tiger tracks Above us, wild geese were flying north in arrowhead formations. Beside the track loomed the dark wall of the jungle, brooding, majestic and curiously inviting.

  It was in fact refreshing to discover there was some untouched jungle still left in Southeast Asia. When Burma’s war is finally over, large parts of the Hukawng Valley might well be turned into game sanctuaries and national parks where foreign exchange could be generated through responsibly controlled tourism. But the main threat is posed by international logging companies which are already casting their greedy eyes on the forests through which we were now marching and planning for them a fate similar to that which has already befallen the jungles of Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia.

  We reached an elephant training camp at noon and decided to stay there overnight. There were no civilians, only Kachin armymen and mahouts busy training newly caught elephants. The camp was situated on the bank of the Tanai and in the afternoon Sinwa Naw and I went fishing. I still could not walk; an elephant had to carry me to a broad stretch of smooth water just below a series of rapids which we were told was a good place to fish. I crawled out of the howdah and limped out onto a big boulder by the river. While I was fixing a spinner on the line, Sinwa Naw looked on, smiling sceptically.