In the Danger Zone

by Stefan Gates

  A pick-up truck rolls into the car park and a group of gnarled, baseball-capped guys jumps out. No one says anything. After a tense stand-off, I can't bear it any longer and I say, 'Hi. I'm Stefan.' One of the guys comes forward. 'I'm Black Tom.' You couldn't make this stuff up.

  We throw our kit into the back of the pick-up and jump in. Black Tom grins at me, and it's a real smile. Thank God for that.

  • • • • •

  Before I carry on, let me tell you a little about Burma and the Karen rebels.

  Alongside North Korea, Burma is one of the most repressive, corrupt, brutal and undemocratic regimes in the world, which, until very recently, has had little significant censure from the international community. They've been having a whale of a time repressing all manner of Burmese people and pissing all over democracy, but they've reserved some of their most vicious treatment for the Karen people.

  The Karen rebels have been fighting the Burmese regime for 60 years, making this the world's longest-running civil war, and for the most part, the Karen have been losing. The Burmese army has invented some fantastic ways of screwing up life for the Karen, and most of them involve the use of food as a weapon.

  The military is trying to starve the Karen out of existence by laying landmines in their fields, cutting off access to farmland and confiscating crops. These guys really know how to repress. As a consequence, the Karen people (who don't really need the junta's help in making their lives miserable as they are already desperately poor) are often forced off their land through hunger, and become refugees in their own country (some have escaped over the border to camps in Thailand, but this is currently illegal). They are liable to die of starvation, and even if they survive, they and their children are at risk from malnutrition, mineral and vitamin deficiency, dysentery and high infant mortality.

  Sadly, as the situation gets more and more desperate, the political leadership of the KNU (Karen National Union) appears to be suffering from an internecine power struggle, and the rebel troops are sometimes refusing to accept their orders. The future of the Karen looks bleak indeed, and over the last few months there's been a huge escalation in fighting, and the current offensive is the strongest in ten years. It's widely seen as an attempt to crush Karen opposition once and for all. I'm expecting to have a traumatic couple of weeks.

  • • • • •

  Back in the pick-up we chat with our hosts: they are friendly, wiry Burmese refugees who work the border smuggling supplies and information and, tonight, a couple of journalists from Britain. We are driving towards a weaker section of the Thai-Burmese border, and Black Tom warns us that we've got a long and tiring night ahead of us.

  Several hours later, the pick-up stops halfway up a jungle road, and we all dive into the trees, following our leader, Tu La Wa, an old soldier of 50 or so who's small and absurdly fit, despite the fact that he smokes endless stinking cheroots. Our rucksacks containing all our kit are left in the pick-up, to be smuggled over the border posing as humanitarian aid (still illegal but less sensitive). I wonder if we will ever see them again.

  We begin an interminable trek through the jungle, and it's bloody hard work. The jungle is extremely humid, we are sweating profusely and the mountainous terrain makes walking extremely difficult. Our legs strain at the ridiculous gradients, and we stumble continually on the loose rocks under our feet. To add to the discomfort, after a couple of hours, despite the fact that I wore them for two weeks solid before we left the UK, my new jungle boots have raised a small army of blisters on my feet. Who'd have thought that the mountains in Thailand could be so different from Sainsbury's in Islington?

  Marc holds a small infrared camera so he can film the border crossing, but it makes life very difficult for him – the camera screen he stares at is so bright his eyes can't adjust to see where he's going in the murk, and he keeps tripping over. It's all rather exciting in a cowboys and Indians kind of way until Marc loses his footing at the top of a hill. Black Tom and I grab him just in case he falls and, looking to our left, we see a terrifyingly precipitous drop. It looks like we just saved his life so Marc and I start to take things a little more seriously after that.

  Marc isn't very fit. He can hold a cripplingly heavy TV camera for hours on end and endure the burden of my constant teasing, but he simply isn't built for jungle mountain trekking. He has to ask everyone to stop for a break every 15–20 minutes or so. This has both good and bad aspects – it's not great that we are constantly losing time, but at least I get lots of opportunity to tease him. He gets very grumpy and, in his best scoutmaster voice, tells Black Tom, 'You should only go as fast as the slowest person in the group,' as though it's not him. I, on the other hand, am built for endurance rather than speed. I'm useless at sprinting or Herculean feats of strength, but I can swim, cycle or hike for hours on end.

  It's now pitch black, and the atmosphere becomes tense. We have headlamps, but Tu La Wa tells us that we shouldn't use them in case the army spots us. Suddenly there's a big crash and I can't find Marc. I begin to panic and take the risk of turning on my headlamp, to see a huge hole in the path in front of me about 10 metres deep, at the bottom of which lies Marc, on his back with his arm stretched ominously to the heavens. It looks like a trap hole straight out of Tarzan. I scramble down to him and discover that the camera sits in his hand.

  'Is the camera OK?' he croaks heroically.

  Thank God. He's shaken, bruised and scratched, but generally unhurt. I suppress the urge to give him a big hug. He sits for a few minutes to gather himself whilst I scour the jungle floor for bits of camera. We put it back together and even though it looks slightly less camera-like than when we left, miraculously, it still works.

  Finally we stop by a small track and collapse, exhausted. Black Tom takes this opportunity to reveal that this is only the start of the night's journey. Great.

  We wait for an hour or so, until another pick-up comes along. To my delight, this one is carrying our bags. We jump in and speed off. I am way beyond tired now and the exhaustion, together with the impending fear, makes me extremely tense. My mood is not improved when Black Tom tells us that we still aren't anywhere near the border – we're taking a long circuitous route around army bases and checkpoints just to get to the crossing point.

  Suddenly the pick-up skids to a halt, and once again we all jump out and run off into the undergrowth where eight ragged men, who have agreed to help carry our kit, wait for us. We share the stuff out between us and race off, with Marc bringing up the rear and protesting at the pace.

  It's another crippling, hot, sticky, mosquito-ravaged walk, and after a couple of hours my legs are beginning to feel dangerously wobbly. There's also a grating sound coming from my knee (too much crosscountry running as a teenager). My blisters have begun to grow blisters and Marc has lost any remaining sense of humour he might have had. Tu La Wa tells us not to talk, which is just fine as it helps us preserve energy and contain our irritation with each other. I've long since given up teasing Marc for being unfit – we're both at the limit of our endurance, but needless to say our uncomplaining Burmese helpers are skipping along like mountain gazelles on heat.

  Four-and-a-half miserable hours later, we wait whilst a spotter goes ahead: we are nearing the border crossing point. When he returns we are urged to move on in silence and eventually we come to a large, filthy house raised about 5 metres off the jungle floor on thick bamboo poles. This is a safe house, owned by a Karen sympathizer, and we sit in his open-air, bamboo-floored room and gratefully drink his water and eat some small, sweet bananas.

  We're late, Tu La Wa tells us, and we've missed the boat that was going to smuggle us across the border, so we'll have to wait until just before dawn for it to return. We sit down for a moment and fall asleep immediately.

  The border between Thailand and Burma is a wide river, and to get across Marc and I will hide in the bottom of a boat. Thai fishing boats are allowed on this section of river, but either side can stop and search them. Tu L
a Wa says that there's a strange light scanning the river from the Burmese side that they've never seen before, and everyone is nervous. My hostile environments training taught me that the greatest dangers are presented by situations where you are tired and disorientated, and when carefully laid plans are changed at the last minute, but what can we do? We are in the hands of our hosts and they have 60 years of experience dealing with the Burmese army, so we have to follow their advice.

  When Black Tom wakes us for our journey, we stumble out of the door and in his exhausted state, Marc falls down the stairs of the hut, twisting his ankle. It's still pitch black as we stagger off down the hill, shouting our thanks to the owner of the house. Tu La Wa tells us to keep quiet from now on, and warns us about a large riverbank that we'll have to climb over as quickly as we can when we reach Burma. This is when we'll be most vulnerable.

  The night is absolutely black, and I'm blindly following Black Tom's footsteps. When I eventually hear the river it sounds scarily fast. Too fast for the long, thin, rather wobbly boat that is to be our transport. As soon as we're on our way I spot the light. It's small but very bright, and it's scanning the river from the far side. It looks like a laser, but I can't really tell. We duck our heads down, trying to look like cargo, and the boatman pushes on. The light seems to scan across us a couple of times and flickers green and red, but nothing happens. My heart beats like the clappers and I try not to think about what will happen if the Burmese army catches us.

  We motor slowly up the river for half an hour just as dawn breaks, revealing a spooky, misty scene straight out of Apocalypse Now. We make it up the river without a problem and as we pull up at the water's edge, I can see a jetty and the infamous riverbank. The engine is cut, and we climb out of the boat in the terrifying silence. We scramble up the sand in a panic and jump over the edge of it to find a small bamboo hut. We're in Burma. We walk past more huts and pathways and stumble into the Ei Tu Ta refugee camp, sick from tiredness and nervous exhaustion. We're shown to a large open-sided hut where we're offered a cup of coffee. We sit there like zombies, and when someone mentions that this is the hut we are to sleep in, we drag out our sleeping bags and collapse.

  Ei Tu Ta

  I wake blinking into sunlight with a brilliant, sharp headache piercing my skull. I acknowledge the fact that I am alive, not visibly in custody, and uninjured, and fall back into a deep sleep.

  Many hours later, I wake up to feel a throbbing, searing ache where my legs used to be. We'd slept the night on a big bamboo frame with just a roof of leaves and a floor raised a couple of metres off the ground away from snakes and bugs. It's home to a ragbag collection of charity workers, camp officials and a French would-be journalist called Roman who's cut loose from his job as a cocoa trader to explore the world.

  Ei Tu Ta refugee camp is deep enough into the jungle and far enough away from Burmese interests for the army not to bother attacking it, but not far enough for its refugees to feel totally secure. These people, like the people in northern Uganda, have become Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). The Thai army across the border is primarily there to ensure that the IDPs don't cross into Thailand: no one wants the burden of refugees, but the Thais are keen on peace with Burma and want to avoid militarizing the area. The most that the Thais are prepared to do is to turn a blind eye to aid that's shipped into the camp from Thailand, but it's difficult to imagine the Burmese allowing any UN agencies or charities to help the Karen on any significant scale. So the 3,000 residents of Ei Tu Ta are trapped, most of them having been forced to leave their homes by the brutality of the Burmese army, they are unable to return, yet unable to escape into Thailand to start a new life.

  We sit down for a cup of tea with Peter, the head of the camp. He explains that although the Burmese junta hates the Karen people, they love Karen refugee camps because they know exactly where the Karen people are, and that they are safely disenfranchised, hungry and powerless.

  Peter invites me to join him in the camp leader's hut, and I eat a plate of rice mixed with rotten fermented fish sauce (a bit like Thai fish sauce, but complete with fish-heads, bones and tails) and searing-hot vegetable curry. He shows me the food store, where a small supply of rice, fish paste and chillies is handed out to the refugees. Outside it I meet Ing Ling Wa, a nervous young mother who has recently arrived, having spent 17 days trekking with her family with no food other than foraged vegetation. I ask what forced her to make such a dangerous journey, and she explains that the Burmese army had taken control of her village and imposed forced labour.

  'The army told the villagers to put a fence around the village, and if you were seen outside the village in the jungle you would be shot.'

  This meant that she couldn't visit her fields so her crops were all ruined. I ask what threat she poses to the junta and what the army hope to achieve by doing this, but she just laughs: 'I don't know. I don't understand why they did it.'

  Burma's military leaders have a deliberate policy of starving the Karen villagers, but I find it bizarre that they bother oppressing these people when nature has been doing a fine job of oppressing them for centuries. The Karen rebels are under-equipped and relatively small in number, and the Karen people are generally poor subsistence farmers living in an area of mountainous jungle, little of which can realistically be cultivated.

  The answer might lie in the nature of the Burmese army, which, although it's big, is also under-equipped and poorly-trained. Armies are a great way of handing out patronage, maintaining corruption and keeping a network of paid lackeys to oppress the rest of the country, so it's in the junta's interest to keep them busy. In addition, the army has now been ordered to become self-sufficient, so it has to steal and confiscate from the locals to survive.

  • • • • •

  Just as in Uganda, I find Ei Tu Ta camp strangely beautiful – like a Hollywood re-creation of a simple Burmese village, complete with beautiful kids, smoke gently rising from houses made entirely out of bamboo, bare-breasted women washing in streams, young girls giggling flirtatiously, and men sitting around on their haunches chewing betel nut. There are chickens running around everywhere and puppies scampering at our feet (no, really there were). There's even a rudimentary football pitch.

  Peter explains that the camps offer people a better life than their own villages: there's free (if basic) education, healthcare and some food rations, and many people own their own small plot of land to grow vegetables.

  I meet the Tu Pa Lai family who arrived three months earlier. There's a tired, submissive sadness to them, and they tell me that their youngest son died from diarrhoea soon after they arrived. They explain that life is better here than in their old village where they were used as forced labour by the army. Despite the fact that here in the camp they have no prospects, no work, no land, no independence and no long-term future, at least they are free from the persecution they suffered at the hands of the army.

  They are cooking lunch: rice with fish paste and a few greens they've grown beside their rickety shack. It is a decent meal in sheer calorific terms, but woefully lacking in nutritional basics – vitamins and minerals. They make enough for me too, and I'm very grateful. Marc, however, refuses to touch it for fear of losing control of his bowels. I've eaten so many dodgy meals by this stage that I have nothing left to lose, but Marc eats a bag of Boots nuts and raisins and looks bashful.

  As always, it feels strange talking to people about their misery and then walking off to find someone else to interview. This is the journalist's conundrum, I suppose: you dip into people's misery and move on, trying not to feel too grubby.

  The sun sinks like a stone at around 7 p.m. and I head back to the camp hut for supper, which is exactly the same as breakfast but bigger. Marc opts to sup from our survival rations again.

  I want to call Georgia; I always miss her like crazy when I'm in the more remote and difficult places. We have two satellite phones and a couple of spare batteries, which we have to use sparingly because there is n
o way of charging them whilst we're here. I call her anyway, I need to let her know I got over the border safely. She's relieved, but still stressed that we're here – she knows that the real danger has barely started.

  In places like this there's nothing to do after dark – most people can't afford food, let alone candles, so they just go to sleep after the sun sets. I stay up and chat with Peter and Black Tom, and then call it a night.

  Although I'm still exhausted from the journey, I find it impossible to sleep. Our hut-mates all snore like dragsters and I'm essentially lying on a pile of logs with legions of busy little insects living busy little lives, swarming and chewing.

  The camp rises before dawn with the sound of banging and shouting. I lie listening to the cacophony until 7 a.m. and then drag myself out of bed for a wash in some freezing cold stream water. Wow, that wakes me up.

  Peter takes me on a tour of the camp. It's enormous and growing every week with new arrivals. As soon as a new family arrives, they are given a plot of land on which they start to build their bamboo house, which takes a couple of weeks. Everyone seems to have the basic skills to build a house – bamboo has a limited lifespan of around five years, so everyone has to know how to build and rebuild them on a regular basis. A couple of streams run through the camp, and we wander among allotments and houses of varying ages.

  The Nao Gu Putu family are just about to eat breakfast and they wave me over. They arrived in the camp four months ago but weren't able to bring any possessions with them. La Puo, a woman of about 40, explains why.

  'In October the army sent four battalions of soldiers into our area. Fighting broke out between them and the Karen soldiers and mortar shells landed on our village. When the army withdrew, we thought we'd return to harvest our crops, but they put landmines around the village so we dare not live there any more.'

  They escaped their village and hid in the jungle, but hunger forced them to venture back. 'When my father-in-law returned to the village to find food he moored his boat and the Burmese army found it. They waited for him to return and shot him, cut off his head and took it back to the military camp. Later, they forced his cousin to kiss the head.'