Siha’s aunt sat in her chair and listened to our conversation. I sensed she was something more than curious about the interview. When I suggested we play soccer for a bit to pass the time, the aunt urged us to stay inside, smiling all the while, pointing at the drawing material I had. She wasn’t suggesting we stay inside; she was demanding it as politely as possible.
Times were dangerous for the Burmese migrants living in Thailand, and the attention brought by a foreigner could mean harassment, prison, or deportation back to Burma. Playing soccer with me was not an option. Lying low demanded keeping discreet company, even for a little boy in soccer shorts. As the only foreigner in this part of town, far from any plausible tourist attraction, my visit demanded a level of secrecy.
Siha’s aunt sat nearest the door to the sparsely furnished room and glanced out the window over my shoulder. The shades were drawn, and she had to brush them aside with her hand to look outside. Her own son, a boy in his mid teens, paced in and out of the room, looking to the door every time a dog barked. Siha was right. Everyone was afraid.
Since 1962 Burma has been under military rule. A coup staged by commander-in-chief General Ne Win in March 1962 created a military junta, which has since controlled the nation of Burma. Their tactics are propaganda, fear, violence, and oppression.
In 1988 pro-democracy demonstrations turned into bloodbaths all over the country, when troops were sent to crush the student-activists who agitated for democratic reforms. In the following days, hundreds of unarmed youths died in clashes with the military police, either as a direct result of violence or through drowning or trampling in the chaos. Many dissenters and suspected dissenters fled the country to Thailand, where they called on the international community to recognize their struggle for democracy.
In 1990, under intense pressure from the population, “free” elections were held. Those in exile hoped the results would allow them to return home. The National League for Democracy (NLD) won in a landslide and their leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, was promptly arrested, as were her supporters. Rather than cede power to the elected NLD, the military junta renamed the country Myanmar, renamed their party the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), and upheld the authority of military rule. Freedom of opinion and freedom of expression are stifled. Dissidents are jailed, tortured, and murdered.
Though Aung San Suu Kyi had not been involved in politics for most of her life, when the opportunity came to restore her father’s legacy, to unite the country, which had been under threat of breaking apart along ethnic lines since its founding, she could not refuse. Not only did she become Burma’s elected prime minister, a champion of nonviolent resistance, and a Nobel Peace Prize winner, she became Burma’s most prominent political prisoner. She has remained under house arrest or in prison for most of the years since she was elected leader of her country in 1990.
Since she has been incarcerated, the military has jailed, tortured, and murdered many members of the NLD, using them as examples to discourage others from joining. The director of information for the NLD, Myint Aung, was arrested in December 2000, along with his assistant. They remain in the notorious Insein prison, where reports of torture during interrogations have leaked out over the years. Aung Tun, an historian of the student resistance movement in Burma, was arrested in 1998 and charged with aiding terrorists. The courts sentenced him to over a decade in prison. In Burma alias Myanmar, peaceful student protests are considered terrorist acts. For this reason, the University of Rangoon is closed more often than it is open.
In May 2003, after one year out of detention, Aung San Suu Kyi was arrested again, and the military junta resumed a harsh crackdown on democracy activists. As of August 2006, they continue to ignore international pressure demanding Suu Kyi’s release. She was forty-five years old when she was elected prime minister. She celebrated her fiftieth and sixtieth birthdays in prison, never having taken office.
In the wild jungles along the Thai-Burma border, a guerilla war is ongoing. The military government blames the violence in remote areas alternately on rebel ethnic minority groups who want the right of self-determination and on supporters of democracy who want to destroy Myanmar’s “stability” and “prosperity.” But for those who do not recognize the authority of the junta, these rebels and dissidents are freedom fighters. It depends entirely on whether one considers the country a place called Myanmar or a place called Burma and to which ethnic group one belongs, the Burmese majority, or the Karen, Shan, Chin, or Mon minorities.
The State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), which the military junta renamed itself in 1997, continues to clash with ethnic minority armies and political parties fighting for autonomy, such as the Karen National Union (KNU) and the Mon State People’s Army, who, in turn, fight with each other for control of lucrative smuggling routes into Thailand.
Cease-fire arrangements with SPDC—the military junta—do little to stop the violence. During a cease-fire with one of the ethnic armies, I was told about military buildup and forced displacement of civilians in that region. Villages are razed and civilians are raped and killed to force their relocation, often to make way for lucrative infrastructure projects like dams and railroads or to cut off the militias from any source of income, support, or recruits. Civilians are forced into government-controlled relocation centers or are displaced internally in Burma. There are no precise figures for internally displaced persons inside Burma, but some estimates put the number around 500,000.
I visited one migrant school near a cease-fire region and worked with all the children at the school on a large drawing of their village. They elected two artists to draw on the board (democracy in practice!) and they told the artists what to include in the picture.
“Houses,” they shouted and the artists drew houses.
“Ox,” and the artists drew an ox.
“Clothes on the line and flowers.”
“No,” one of the artists said. “That’s not interesting.”
“I’m interested in that,” I said. “Everything is interesting for me. There are no wrong answers.” Everyone laughed that there were no wrong answers. The children usually learned by rote memorization. Even the teachers, who gathered around the edges of the classroom, enjoyed seeing the students shout and get excited describing their village. They allowed the shouting to go on, much to the disbelief of some of the students. The teachers were laughing among themselves, walking back and forth to get a better of view of the kids, of the board, and of me. I was excited, pointing at kids to make sure they got a chance to speak. Some chickens wandered in to investigate, but the teachers chased them out. The artists drew the flowers and the clothes on the line and some chickens.
“Soldiers,” one of the girls said. No one disagreed. The teachers grew quiet. The artists drew soldiers. They drew airplanes dropping bombs. They drew bullets coming from the soldiers’ guns.
I left the village after some tea and a conversation with four of the students. They didn’t talk much about the drawing on the board or the soldiers. They told me a joke that took a long time to tell and, via the translator, wasn’t very funny. It went like this:
Monkey was eating a piece of fruit and he told Tortoise to go with him to the riverside to get some more. Monkey told Tortoise to climb the tree and get the fruit, but Tortoise said, “I can’t climb trees,” so Monkey climbed the tree and ate the inside of the fruit and gave Tortoise the empty husk. Tortoise went off and found his own fruit tree and ate perfumed fruit. Both of them went before the king who liked the smell of Tortoise. Monkey asked where he got that nice smell and Tortoise sent him to a different fruit tree with stinking fruit. When Monkey came back, he smelled terrible and so the king exiled him forever.
We all stared at each other for a while, thinking about the joke they had just told, and then we burst into laughter at how hard it was to tell a joke through a translator. One of the girls said it would be better if we acted it out. One of the boys asked where she would get all that stinking fruit. The tran
slator joked that he was a preacher by profession, not a comedian.
Three days later, I learned that the village was attacked, despite the cease-fire in the area, and that all the children, all the inhabitants of the village had fled into the jungle. I could not find out who was responsible, why fighting had erupted there, or where the children were. I knew only that everyone had run off into the jungle somewhere in Burma. Some weeks later they returned and rebuilt the school, rebuilt the village. This time the school is made of stone and concrete, not so easy to knock down as the wooden stick school they used to have. I wonder if these children know the story of the three little pigs, if they would find it funny or nod knowingly because they live in a world where the big bad wolf often comes knocking.
Land mines litter the regions where members of the minority groups settle, and internecine fighting displaces thousands into the jungle. In addition, the military levies a heavy tax from the people, as a soldier’s wages are not adequate. To keep the war going, civilians are conscripted into forced labor, acting as porters or builders for military projects without pay. Many of the porters who are sent with units into fighting are killed. If they cannot carry their loads they are beaten and abandoned. Often, their bodies are left where they lie when the soldiers move on.
According to a recent Human Rights Watch report, the Burmese army recruits more child soldiers than any other army in the world. The report, “My Gun Was as Tall as Me,” puts in the number of soldiers under eighteen in the SPDC ranks at around seventy thousand. The children fight, cook, clean, and carry for the army. As economic conditions in the country continue to decay, families are left with fewer options and more children join the armed forces, on one side or another. It can be a method of protecting one’s family to have a child in the army, though children are sometimes taken and forced to join as well.
To escape these dangers, many Burmese of dissenting opinions or from minority ethnic groups flee to Thailand. In stable, prosperous Thailand, the Burmese hope to find work, safety, and a future for their children. They find none of these.
Current Thai policy creates arbitrary guidelines for classification of Burmese into various categories, such as “economic migrant,” “person of concern,” and “temporarily displaced persons.” These classifications can be misleading and dangerous for the refugees, as they determine their legal status and level of assistance. Often, the classifications deny the underlying causes of migration to Thailand: civil strife, persecution, and human rights abuses.
The Thai government recognizes some 138,000 “temporarily displaced” persons, mostly from the Karen and Karenni ethnic groups, whom the Thais have determined were “fleeing fighting,” ignoring the nearly 2 million from various ethnic groups that live as registered migrant workers or illegal migrants in the country. Those illegal “migrants” are an embarrassment to the Burmese government, which passed Law 367/120-(b) (1), making it illegal to travel to Thailand without authorization. In the eyes of the Burmese government, all these “migrants” are criminals, and the Thais are quick to agree.
In an attempt to improve relations with their profitable neighbor and avoid a massive refugee influx, Thailand discourages the Burmese from migrating. Given the economic boom in Thailand and the need for unskilled labor, a registration process was initiated for Burmese workers, but the process was expensive and the burden fell largely on the employers, who benefit from illegal and frightened employees. The registration process became a way to crack down on the migrants rather than protect them. Police extortion of the refugees is overlooked, as evidenced by a set of brutal murders in the town of Mae Sot in the summer of 2003.
Migrant children are not given access to school or health care (unless provided by the migrant community themselves), even though these are promised rights under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to which Thailand is a signatory.
Siha, his aunt, his mother, his cousin, and my translator are all illegal migrants from Burma, members of the Shan ethnic group. They fled consequences of the civil war and human rights abuses by the government, though they cannot establish that they arrived in Thailand directly “fleeing fighting.” They cannot attain refugee status. They have lived without documentation in Thailand since 1998.
“My mom’s not afraid anymore, so I am not afraid anymore. The other children’s parents are,” Siha said. His own mother, who was out of the country at a human rights training at the time we met, I was told, is politically engaged and a confident, fearless woman. Siha seemed proud of his confidence, glad that he had conquered his fears. In conflicts, children often take their cues on how to react from their parents. The level of stress they feel is directly connected to how the adults around them react and can bear little relation to the amount of violence they have actually experienced.
Siha’s warning about how fearful other children’s parents were was played out in the following days. I tried to arrange visits with families living on construction sites. I saw the level of fear in which the refugees in urban areas lived.
The first person to speak with me was a Thai performance artist who worked with refugee children. “I will do what I can for you,” he said. “I can try to help you, but now is a difficult time. The government is cracking down on the migrants. I will talk to people.”
He could not arrange anything for me because he was leaving the country the next day to perform abroad. He referred me to a woman who provides assistance to the migrants on construction sites. Call her P——. No real names can be used here, since operations to assist the refugees are under constant scrutiny and might be put at risk. On July 15, 2002, the Thai National Security Council declared martial law on all northern border areas with Burma, banning foreign journalists and NGOs. P——, an affable British woman, is under constant threat of being shut down.
P——met with me over a soda.
“Now is a difficult time,” she said.
“How so?”
“The Thais want to reopen the border with Burma. They make a fortune off the trade. The refugees are an embarrassment to the region, especially because the Burmese suspect many of them of trying to undermine the military authority. Often they are accused of involvement in the Karen National Union or one of the other insurgent armies. Usually they are farmers who could not support themselves in Burma anymore.”
The Karen National Union (KNU) is one of the largest ethnic armies in Burma. Since 1949, when disputes over the drawing of the border for the new Karen state led Karen officers in the post-colonial Burmese army to mutiny, the KNU has been fighting for autonomy in areas dominated by the Karen people. The KNU leadership, according Burma scholar Christina Fink, was a mix of university-educated dissidents and experienced soldiers. Boasting thousands of members and income from smuggling and improvised border tolls, the KNU remains a formidable foe to the Burmese government over fifty years after its founding. The KNU enjoys popular support along the Thai-Burma border.
P——continued: “The work that the migrants do on the construction sites is dangerous and they get injured sometimes, but that is not the worst problem. They have to remain hidden or else they lose their jobs and they can be arrested. They are very afraid of strangers. I do not think I can bring you out to see them. It would draw too much attention.”
I asked, naively, if the children could be brought to meet me.
“I don’t think so,” P——answered. “These people have seen children taken away for one reason or another and never return. They would not be comfortable with that, and it would scare the children far too much. Even if I could arrange for you to meet them, they might not say anything at all to you. The fear runs very deep.”
I tried many more avenues. None worked. While I met with one local NGO, a field office called the headquarters in a panic. The police were raiding the office. They demanded identity cards from everyone, they searched files and looked for information about any activities supporting the “illegals.” Luckily, the Burmese woman talking to the police had
Thai identification papers. A wave of relief went through the headquarters. Though these local NGOs operate on shoestring budgets, they must use encryption on all their computer files. The police and the National Security Council threaten to shut down their operations every few months.
Later that day, most of the organizations aiding the Burmese destroyed or encrypted their files. One woman was asked to shut down her operation by the Thai National Security Council because of her involvement with the “terrorist” ethnic groups in Burma. She also learned on the same day that there was a price on her head. Someone did not like what she was saying about the military junta. The SPDC sees aid to the refugees as aid to their enemies, and this threatens trade with Thailand, which cannot be seen as harboring its neighbor’s enemies. Powerful people want the refugees to vanish.
The children on the construction sites are vanishing. They live in hiding. With the few exceptions Siha mentioned, they do not go to school. They have little contact with the outside world.
In Bangkok, I had more luck talking to some of these hidden children. An NGO agreed to take me to see some families in their homes, provided the families were willing. We would have to travel very low profile. Of medium height, white, and not speaking a word of Thai, I was not sure how I would maintain a low profile in the slums of Bangkok, but early on a Tuesday morning I found myself on a narrow street beneath a massive concrete building. A variety of smells overwhelmed me: sandalwood, sweat, excrement, exhaust fumes.
We walked through a shop of some kind. Two men and an older woman followed me with their eyes as I passed, bowing my head respectfully. A blind dog rested by the door. An old television blared. A shrine to the Buddha sat next to the television, its face partially obscured by the rabbit ear antenna. As in most Thai businesses, a photo of the king hung on the wall. They turned back to their television as I walked out the back door without a word.
One Day the Soldiers Came Page 9