In early 1945, another—most unexpected—group joined the British offensive against Japan: the Burmans. The Japanese were not going to win, and had made it clear that they had no intention of relinquishing power even if they did. The Burmans had bet on the wrong horse, and they knew it. Led by Aung San, a prominent member of the Thirty Comrades and the Burmese minister for war under the Japanese, the nationalists switched sides just months before the Japanese surrendered, just in time to demand British independence as their reward.
Postwar, the British on the ground laid out a nice, sensible plan for rebuilding Burma. The country was in ruins, everything from its economy to its roads to its rice paddies. The governor aimed to slowly prepare the nation for self-government under overarching British rule—after the necessary reconstructions. Moderation, though, was not an option for Aung San. No would-be Burmese leader could survive a call for eventual independence. Anyone with hopes of ever being in charge had no choice but to demand independence right now. Politicians 5,500 miles away were on board with that, anyway; the Labour Party had won Britain’s election and was dropping colonialism like hot to the floor. Some Conservatives wanted to stick around and oversee Burma’s transition to independence, but England had way bigger problems—like Gandhi, and rebuilding London—and the Empire was being hastily dismantled. Now Britain didn’t even want to do anything but comply with Aung San’s demands.
But the nationalists weren’t the only ones making demands. For the Karen—being traitors to their country and all—total and permanent annexation to British India may have been the best possible scenario. Short of becoming British subjects, they needed their old allies to make their autonomy a nonnegotiable condition of an independent Burma, as they’d been promised. A Karen group of representatives went to England to cash in on that pledge. By that time, though, His Majesty’s Government didn’t in fact have the means to make good on it. The British weren’t going to risk Aung San’s inciting a nationwide revolt over negotiations about hill tribes that likely lacked the political and military clout to maintain independent states anyhow. The prime minister received the Karen delegates, couldn’t offer them what they came for, and sent them on a tour of a local soap factory. The minorities had been sold out. Literally: In lieu of liberty, they were given some money.
“All loyalties have been discarded and rebuffed; all faithful service has been forgotten and brushed aside,” wailed Winston Churchill. “We stand on the threshold of another scene of misery and ruin.” He condemned his opponents in Parliament, that the abandonment “should ever haunt the consciences of the principal actors in this tragedy.” Whatever. Churchill wasn’t in charge anymore. The agreement his successor signed with Aung San promised ultraquick independence and included a provision expressing hopes that the hill peoples would cooperate with unification.
At least Aung San was unification’s best chance. He knew the Karen were both armed and suspicious, and he seemed genuinely, if a little unpopularly, interested in a union of autonomous nation-states. He proffered peace with the Karen after the Burma Independence Army massacres. He expressed his desire to appease the minorities in numerous speeches, publicly insisting that “Burma should consist of specified autonomous states . . . with adequate safeguards for minorities.” He insisted that the hill tribes be part of the independence process. He held a conference where the Shan, Kachin, and Chin agreed that they’d give the Burmese government their cooperation and get autonomy.
The Karen didn’t even go to the conference. One of their most prominent leaders, Ba U Gyi, hadn’t wanted a fight; born to wealthy Karen landowners at the turn of the twentieth century, he was a university-educated lawyer who’d practiced in London, a gentleman, handsome, with a kind face, soft-looking beard, and handlebar mustache. He’d advocated nonviolently for Karen autonomy, joining Aung San’s pre-independence Cabinet, helping organize the Karen delegation to England, filing resolutions with the British government. But his minority voice had been drowned out in Aung San’s Executive Council, London had brushed off his delegation, and his resolutions had been ignored. So instead of attending Aung San’s conference, the Karen held their own, where they formed the Karen National Union. They also boycotted the national elections. The British would save them, they were sure, or the Americans, or both. It was 1947. If Pakistan could be independent, they could, too. And they’d been too terrorized by the Burmans for too many centuries to submit to their authority.
In the end, agreements made or not made didn’t matter much, because the brand-new Union of Burma was soon to fall under spectacularly evil and incompetent military authority. In July 1947, Aung San, the father of the republic, and the peaceful union and minorities’ only hope, was assassinated—along with a Karen leader, a Shan chief, and an important Muslim figure, among others—by political rivals in a shower of bullets at a meeting of his interim government. On January 4, 1948, at 4:20 AM, the exact moment Burmese astrologers had deemed auspicious, Burma became independent. On the pole in Fytche Square, Rangoon, the British flag was exchanged for the Union of Burma’s as British officials and their misty-eyed wives stood by. The new and first president was Shan. But the surviving council member who became prime minister announced that he was 100 percent in opposition to the idea of autonomous ethnic states, Karen and otherwise.
What happened next was a shit show. Independent Burma had been created by military men. The country was flush with weapons. And the upcoming generation of a country with its own legacy of war had spent its formative years watching Japanese, Chinese, British, Indian, and American soldiers throw down on its soil in the fight of the century. In March, the Communist Party of Burma revolted. The People’s Volunteer Organization, a collection of militias, followed. Six battalions of Karen and Kachin fighters held the country together under Lieutenant General Smith Dun, a Karen supposedly named after the protagonist in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. He was commander in chief of the army—which was in mutiny. Still loyal soldiers at first, even to a government that wouldn’t grant them independence, the ethnic units rescued towns from Communist Party control. Some Karen in the military police, also in mutiny, captured another town. They gave it back, and a commission was established to settle the rift between Karen and Burmans. The prime minister wanted the minority to participate in the government through the parliament. The Karen said they’d never get their fair share. No one would compromise. By the summer, Karen and Burmans were killing each other. The newly formed Karen National Union started aggressively arming fighters, aided by some old British special forces soldiers, who smuggled weapons to them. For decades, the Karen had been putting down violent uprisings. Now, amid the deepest internal chaos the country had seen yet, they were going to mount one.
IN THE late summer of 1948, Karen police stopped helping the government keep the peace and started attacking government stations after Burmese paramilitary police assaulted one of the headquarters of the Karenni, an ethnic cousin to the Karen. On Christmas Eve, Burmese soldiers killed dozens of Karen in church and hundreds of others in surrounding villages, and weeks later a Karen village was attacked by Burmese military police, who killed 150 civilians. The armed wing of the Karen National Union stormed the Burmese treasury. Led by Major General Ne Win, a Burmese army battalion burned down an American Baptist mission school for Karen. On January 30, Karen settlements in Rangoon were shelled with machine guns and mortars.
On January 31, 1949, Karen and Burmese fighters battled in the streets just outside Rangoon. Karen forces set up a siege from the suburb of Insein and came within four miles of the capital. The country had been independent for barely a year, and several other insurgent groups were already at war with the government. Now the KNU was officially at war, too. Karen Lieutenant General (Mr.) Smith (Goes to Washington) Dun was replaced with Ne Win as commander in chief of the Burma army, while Karen villagers were mobbed. The three Karen battalions that made up a third of the Burma army revolted, turning their British training and leftover British weapons on t
he government. They took Mandalay with the help of Kachin soldiers. They took Toungoo and Henzada. They might have taken the capital—and the government—if they’d really gone for it. They didn’t, though, not hard or fast enough.
Hundreds were killed in the siege from Insein, which lasted 112 days. It was a disorganized smattering of battles. Rangoon movie theaters still ran several shows a day, civilians could pay a couple of rupees to take a tour bus to the front line and shoot at Karen fighters, and neither the Karen nor the Burmese won any decisive victories. Instead, they began a lifetime of war, the same war that led Ta Mla to enlist as a KNU soldier in 2000, that brought Ta Mla and me together in the Mae Sot house, a war older than the both of us combined. “Ba U Gyi was no terrorist,” the former British governor of Burma had told the Times of London back in those beginning days. “I, for one, cannot picture him enjoying the miseries and hardships of a rebellion. There must have been some deep impelling reason for his continued resistance.”
However complicated the history and politics of it, though, and whether or not the Karen were erstwhile allies and all-around stand-up guys, United States law put my country and my new roommate on opposing sides of the fight. Burma’s government, after all, was internationally recognized, a member of the United Nations. And that landed the Karen National Union, which was waging an insurgency against that government, squarely inside the United States Department of State’s designation of third-tier terrorists.
There are lists, of course, of groups that are specifically designated as terrorist organizations. The KNU wasn’t on them. But the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 added another, very inclusive dimension of terrorism, the third tier, to the lawbooks, classifying as terrorist “an organization that is a group of two or more individuals, whether organized or not, which engages in” any terrorist activity. Which includes, per clause (iii) of section 1182 of Title 8 of the US Code, even “the use of any . . . explosive, firearm, or other weapon or dangerous device (other than for mere personal monetary gain10), with intent to endanger, directly or indirectly, the safety of one or more individuals or to cause substantial damage to property.” Which certainly includes the KNU.
The title of section 1182 of Title 8 is “Inadmissible aliens.” Also banned from the United States at the time, besides Ta Mla: Htan Dah. Though he’d never been a soldier himself, his dad was in the KNU, and spouses and children of any person who has engaged in terrorist activity are specifically barred from the States in the PATRIOT Act,11 too, terrorists by association. And even if his dad hadn’t been in the KNU, Htan Dah still couldn’t have immigrated to America, having engaged in so much terrorist activity himself.
Under US immigration law, one has “engaged in terrorist activity” if one “commits an act that the actor knows, or reasonably should know, affords material support” to someone doing something terroristy or in a terrorist organization—like Htan Dah’s dad, and Ta Mla, and a hundred other people Htan Dah knows. “Support” includes activities as specific and potentially dangerous as providing weapons or explosives, as well as vaguer and less insidious exertions, such as providing “service” and shelter and “intangible” property. Htan Dan had assisted, tangibly and intangibly, I guess, with food or motorbike rides or moral support, plenty of KNU soldiers in his life, so the possibility of his entry into America was out. And even if Htan Dah hadn’t given his support generously and willingly—which he had—there’s no amount of support too minimal to be considered material support, and there are no exceptions even for people who’ve provided said support under duress. (For example, a Sri Lankan fisherman who fled to the States after being kidnapped by the Tamil Tigers in 2004 was instantly detained upon his arrival for having provided the group material support—money for his own ransom.) To win exemption from the automatic inadmissibility of providing material support requires proving with “clear and convincing evidence” that, whether you provided the support willingly or at gunpoint or what, you had no way of knowing that the people you helped, or who were making you help them, were terrorists.
With all those laws in place, and with The Blay’s and Htoo Moo’s and Htan Dah’s dads all in the KNU, and BA sometimes collaborating with the guerrilla organization, not one of my coworkers was legally allowed into my country. And two laws passed after the original 1990 material-support law—one in 1994 and another in 1996, after the first World Trade Center and Oklahoma City bombings, respectively—criminalize material support, so that if Htan Dah, much less Ta Mla, had found his way to America, he could have been immediately jailed.
So, among the other possibilities not open to Ta Mla after his father’s death, in addition to safely growing enough food to feed himself, getting a job, going to college, traveling legally outside his home country, traveling without threat of harm or death inside his home country, or living anywhere but in an active war zone or a refugee camp: applying for asylum in the United States.
When Ta Mla enlisted, he knew he’d be in boot camp for a year: six months of theory, six months of practical. For three weeks, he waited at a KNU headquarters in Burma for the rest of the recruits to be collected. The guerrillas needed to get to Shan State, to the north, for training. But since they have a far more cordial relationship with the Thais than the Burmese, they were loaded into vans and driven east over the border, back into Thailand, so they could do the bulk of their traveling there before recrossing. More cordial, but, as we know, not that cordial: Thai police officers stopped the enlistees and wouldn’t let them through. The class went back to Karen State to start training, but Ta Mla had by then had time to reconsider his decision. He wasn’t looking for a physical fight, and he wanted to finally get a high school education, which he could obtain in camp. After several weeks, he went back to Thailand, leaving the other new soldiers to their preparations for war.
V.
FOR TERRORISTS, even from the nebulous third tier, these guys had really, really boring meetings. Every Friday morning, all the staff got together at Office One to discuss the progress they’d made on their projects, any prospective projects, ideal future improvements, standard organizational housekeeping. Htan Dah had asked when I’d woken up if I wanted to attend, as the meeting took place early enough for me to still make it to my ten o’clock class. I’d agreed, groggily; though I was going to bed by nine, I was having trouble dragging myself out from under my mosquito net every day. The shotgun stress of putting together and performing four quality hours of broken-English class a day was wearing on me. That, and the lack of protein in my diet. While I ate about every three hours in the States, my housemates observed only breakfast and dinner, and I hadn’t eaten any meat since I’d arrived nearly a week ago. I hardly ever ate meat back home, and when I did I had the luxury of being picky about it. Here, I almost exclusively ate rice. Here, I’d recently come upon Htan Dah in the kitchen, holding a piece of pork so gamy I could smell it from the doorway. He was standing in a big red puddle, and when I’d asked him if it was blood, he’d looked down at his flip-flops, submerged to his feet. “Yes,” he’d said, and narrowed his eyes at my fatuity. “From the pork.”
When the meeting started, I sat on the edge of the hushed living room filled with twenty or so guys and a couple of girls, all cross-legged and grave-faced on the floor. The Blay introduced me in English, though I’d met most everyone by now. He then announced that Htan Dah was formally responsible for me, so if I needed anything, that was whom I should ask, at which point Htan Dah gave me a nervous eyebrow raise, smile, and thumbs-up. Staffers said their piece in a monotonous Karen drone. Occasionally the group laughed quietly, all together, the contained, inauthentic laughter of the conference room. There were many periods of silence in which throats were cleared. One of the guys had offered to translate for me at the beginning of the meeting, but he wrote only eight of the nine hundred sentences spoken on a dry-erase board at the front of the room. His bullet points were hardly enough to retain my attention, so I occupied myself by reading a profile of a ladyboy movie star i
n the Bangkok Post.
Afterward, we settled down to breakfast, and I eyed the revolutionary pictured on Htan Dah’s chest; he was, apparently, the one whose turn it was to wear a Che shirt that day.
“Isn’t the idea to document the human rights violations in Burma, and walk all over the countryside preaching to the villagers about democracy, so you can fight the government peacefully?”
“Yes(!).”
“What’s with you guys and the Che shirts?”
“Because! He is revolutionary. We want also to be revolutionaries. He is good role model for us.”
“But you know that that revolution was violent.”
“Yes(!). I know it. But I would like to know more about Che, about his life. About . . . his struggle.”
For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question Page 5