For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question

by Mac McClelland

  By now, instantly, I’d twisted my face into a permanent wince, and it didn’t get any easier to watch. A husband and wife sit next to each other on the ground while he explains that their two sons and daughter were taken by Burma army troops that stormed into their village. Local Karen leaders negotiated the return of the two boys, but they haven’t seen the girl since. “We want her back,” the woman says, smiling sadly, before dropping her face to her knees, covering it with her pink sweater, and starting to sob. When she calms down a little, the man says, “My wife and I are like dead people.” There are people getting ready to run from an attack, like they did at the village Htoo Moo visited, little girls running around talking fast directions to each other while they throw shit in baskets and sacks they can carry strapped to their foreheads. A man on his back breathing hard and fast and shallow as Free Burma Ranger medics jab their fingers and instruments into the bloody stump below his knee where his calf and foot were before he stepped on a land mine. Skulls and bones on the ground and a ranger telling how he brought a bunch of children’s presents donated by kids overseas only to find that there are no children in this village anymore. Rangers tearing out infected teeth with pliers. Rangers stitching up a gaping, blood-spurting hole in someone’s foot. Rangers cleaning the gory, festering wound on a little kid’s leg as the child stands still, calm, pantsless. Rangers delivering a baby in the darkness by the green glow of the camera’s night mode, in open jungle air, on the jungle floor. The partially decomposed decapitated head of an old man on the ground, which the rangers bury when they find it. A shot of a Burma army compound, the camera zooming in shakily on the faces of the boys with rifles, the hiding cameramen whispering breathlessly to each other. Shots from an FBR team that came under attack when they went back to a village of some recent IDPs to see if they could recover any food; the camera jostles violently as they run along, set to the sound of gunfire cracking and thundering through the trees. An FBR team rushing to the scene of a new attack and meeting two fleeing villagers, young guys who tell them they were taking a smoke break with four other friends when the explosions and bullets started coming. They’re not sure if the guys who were running with them survived, since there was so much shooting. By way of illustration, one of the guys points to a bullet hole in the side of his loose jacket. A man rocking the tiniest sleeping baby and complaining about the Burma army because his wife died during childbirth in the jungle while they were running. He worries that he has no idea how to take care of this child without her. Tears streaming hard and quiet down the face of a woman mindlessly fingering her jacket zipper with one hand, standing among the ashes of her old village, in which her husband was killed. A toddler barely grown enough to stand picking his way through the jungle as his village flees, carefully parting the brush with his chubby little fingers and stepping through with his bare, scratched legs and feet. Three more stills: a dead villager facedown on the ground. A dead villager faceup on the ground. A five-year-old with a bullet in his leg. Video of yet another land-mine casualty, medics holding a bleeding, seething, sinew-dripping, mangled hunk of something vaguely human looking, recognizable as a foot only because it comes at the end of an ankle. An FBR team leaves a group of IDPs and the IDPs call out please don’t leave us, please come back. A man keeps hiding his face it’s so contorted with sorrow as he says, sobbing convulsively, “I don’t understand why they killed my children. They didn’t even know their right hand from their left hand,” while the woman next to him weeps silently and gnashes her teeth. The video ends with a quote from Galatians on the screen: Let us not grow weary while doing good. In due season we shall reap if we don’t lose heart.

  Currently, FBR is running some forty full-time teams on month-long missions in Burma throughout the year, treating about 2,000 people in each, trekking hundreds of miles. They find malaria, AIDS, gastric disease, dysentery, colds, diarrhea, severe vitamin deficiency and malnutrition, worms, anemia, skin disease, skin infections, respiratory infections. When the Burma army massacred villagers in Htee Law Bleh in 2002, rangers were there to treat people who didn’t die from their gunshot wounds and photograph a pile of dead children. Sometimes the team members get shot at. Sometimes they fall fatally ill or are captured and tortured. Just like Htan Dah always reminded me about the BA field workers, if FBR personnel are caught, or get a disease, or step on a land mine, they can be killed. Sometimes, they are: six of them in the organization’s first ten years.

  “What do you think?” Lah Lah Htoo asked me when the video was over.

  I thought I might like to close myself in the bathroom so I could punch myself in the chest, just a little, to try to release some of the tightness and weight there, let my face into my hands and press hard.

  “Good video?” he asked, because I was taking so long to answer.

  “Yeah, it’s a good video.”

  He nodded and waited politely for me to continue, but I just sat quietly, awkwardly, before simply nodding back at him.

  “Do you want to see picture?” he asked.

  Not really. I knew what types of violent and devastating pictures these guys had on their hard drives, and the strain of watching the video had taken the wind out of any morbid curiosity sails I might otherwise have been flying. But I didn’t want to be rude, or a pussy. “Sure.”

  Lah Lah Htoo browsed through some files on his computer before finding what he was looking for and giving his mouse a hard double-click. An image filled the screen. My mouth dropped open.

  Lah Lah Htoo, who’d seen the FBR video a thousand times, had instantly and completely switched gears, evidently, at the end of our screening. He smiled proudly now as I gaped at a picture of him and The Blay and That Khaing. It looked as if their likenesses had been cut from separate photos and pasted on a black background. They were, for some reason, dressed for a rap-video parody. There were bare chests. There were necklaces. There were black knit skullcaps and low-slung pants. The three affected tough-guy postures, crossed arms.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “This is the gayest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  Lah Lah Htoo stopped smiling. “Not gay! Gangster.”

  “Mmmm. ...” I looked back to the picture. The Blay was scowling vigorously, with a pouty-lip thing going on. “No, it’s pretty gay.”

  “Not gay!”

  “Okay, whatever.”

  We sat in silence again as he beamed at the screen.

  “So . . . what do you guys do with the videos you make?”

  “We send them. To human rights organizations, UN, news.”

  “Do they ever use them?”

  Lah Lah Htoo shrugged.

  “I can’t believe I never heard of any of this before I got here,” I said. “Seriously, my friends are really smart. Nobody I know has ever heard of this.”

  “So,” he said, nodding emphatically, “you will tell everybody in America.”

  It was easy for even my really smart friends to be ignorant of this war, the world’s longest-running war, such an active war; it didn’t get a lot of media play. “I don’t think there’s enough news in the Karen war itself,” a New York Times Magazine editor told me once. He was certainly right. As juicy as the real-time footage was, the situation is, as even FBR’s Dave once put it, “not a car wreck. It’s a slow, creeping cancer,” a conflict that’d started sixty years ago, which is actually the opposite of news. Every year, when the United States Department of State slams Burma in its “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices,” saying that the government rapes and tortures and kills people and indiscriminately and indefinitely and illegally detains people and blah-blah-blah, the media ignore it.

  Except the Burmese media, which report how the Burmese government is flabbergasted by these absolutely flabbergasting charges. Take this press release from the Permanent Mission of the Union of Myanmar to the United Nations Office and Other International Organizations, in Geneva. It’s a re-release of the press release whereby Burma’s Ministry of Foreign
Affairs rejects 2008’s State Department report. It’s titled, aptly, “Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Myanmar rejects US State Department’s human rights report.” It explains how the US has, due to its dire need of fact-checkers, made Burma sad, and how, further, Burma is rubber and the US is glue: The United States Department of State released on 25th February 2009 its 2008 Country Report on Human Rights Practices of over 190 countries, including Myanmar. As in the past, the report repeated its unfounded and unsubstantiated allegations of human rights violations in Myanmar.

  It is saddening to find that the report contained the usual sweeping accusations of human rights abuses in Myanmar without verification of the validity and accuracy of the information and reliability of its sources. Instead of making false allegations at other nations regarding human rights matters, the United States should concentrate on uplifting its own human rights records.

  Myanmar has long been a victim of a systematic disinformation campaign launched by anti-government elements, generously funded by their foreign supporters. The rootless allegations of human rights violations which invariably emanated from anti-government elements have found their way into the reports of the U.S. State Department. Thus, there is a need to verify all information before it is judged fit for inclusion in official reports.

  Verify this: Even if you haven’t had the pleasure of opening a Martus database of human rights violations and being assaulted by the headlines of the hundreds of reports being collected there by independent documenters and nonprofits—A WOMAN GANG-RAPED AND STABBED TO DEATH IN MURNG-SU; GUIDE BEATEN TO DEATH BY SPDC TROOPS; A WOMAN CUT TO DEATH IN THE THROAT, IN KUN-HING; VILLAGERS ROBBED, ARRESTED, TORTURED AND KILLED IN NAM-ZARNG; A HANDICAPPED WOMAN GANG-RAPED, CAUSING DEATH, IN LAI-KHA—it’s possible you may have actually seen some of the FBR footage I watched with Lah Lah Htoo. PBS’s Frontline did an episode called “Burma: State of Fear” in 2006 that followed the “mainly Christian medics who bring aid to villagers being targeted by the Burmese government” and even borrowed some of their film. Rambo, the 2008 one, which deals with the plight of the Karen, which the movie’s white lead actors also think is pronounced like the name of my parents’ blond divorced friend, opens with some BA footage and FBR footage that’s as disgusting as the outlandishly gory effects in the rest of the film. And even if you’ve missed all those, and your media aren’t reporting the story, you don’t have to take Lah Lah Htoo’s word, or my word, or the State Department’s word that the regime is violating international law and human decency to an astounding degree every day. FBR has a website. And a Wikipedia entry. You can just google the organization’s name. The guys have it all on tape, filmed in bloody, handheld real time. You can verify that shit on YouTube.

  X.

  IT WASN’T like the Karen were the only people suffering severely in Burma. After Ne Win got back from golfing with US diplomats in Hawaii, he subjected the whole population to increasingly crushing oppression. His junta was like a rightfully insecure boyfriend; it knew it wasn’t good enough, and so knew only how to be paranoid and controlling. The policies of isolationism enacted within months of the coup prevailed for decades. The government was (not surprisingly) intensely nationalist protectionist, Western- and ethnic-insurgent-hating, with a capability for militarism that matched its vast legacy of it. The only sanctioned literature included such classics as Cruel and Vicious Repression of Myanmar Peoples by Imperialists and Fascists and the True Story about the Plunder of the Royal Jewels, published by the media group of the Committee for Propaganda and Agitation to Intensify Patriotism. There was no TV until 1980. Under the Burmese Way to Socialism, farmers were forced to sell grain on the cheap to the government, which in turn sold it to export or the black market. Unless they wanted to buy their rice back off the black market for ten times what they’d sold it for, the farmers got to eat whatever crap was left over. A disincentivized agrarian class turned what had been, before World War II, the world’s largest exporter of rice into a net importer.34 Meanwhile, Ne Win had gotten those plundered royal jewels he’d been so concerned about back from England’s Victoria and Albert Museum. Though they were supposedly held in Rangoon’s National Museum, the rumor was that the ones on display were fake, the real ones taken by Ne Win, so he could prance around his house in them, I guess.

  In the mid-’80s, the economic policies of Ne Win, who was no economist, became even more crippling. One day, the government suddenly demonetized bills of ten, fifty, and one hundred kyat, the Burmese currency, rendering most of people’s cash savings—even the cash in their pockets—instantly worthless. The seventy-five-year-old Ne Win replaced them with seventy-five-kyat and thirty-five-kyat notes. Within just a couple of years, both those just-introduced bills were demonetized and replaced with denominations of forty-five and ninety: numbers whose digits added up to and were divisible by superstitious Ne Win’s lucky number nine.35

  Up to 80 percent of the country’s currency was completely useless. Those who’d managed to wring any more savings out of the dismal economy since the previous demonetization lost them again. This alone would seem to be enough to put an end to the population’s civility. Then, a few months later, some students got into a tea-shop brawl with locals—including a high-ranking official’s son. When the locals were not held accountable for beating the shit out of the kids, students were ready to demonstrate. When several students were killed during those demonstrations, people rioted.

  The British, remember, had dealt with their protesters fifty years earlier by opening fire.36 Ah, precedent. In March 1988, a few days after the tea-shop incident, unarmed protesters in Rangoon took to the streets. They were shot at. Boys and girls alike were clubbed to death. Students were chased into a nearby lake, where many drowned. Several dozen student activists died of suffocation in a police van. The government shut down all the universities. As the weeks passed, the hot, broke, and restive Burmese became increasingly angry. The price of food went up prohibitively. In June, thousands of people poured into the streets around the country. The radio reported that students were being killed, but the demands for a revolution continued.

  In late July 1988, Ne Win did something astounding. In a televised speech, he lamented the lack of trust in the government and said that, clearly, elections would have to be held. Burma hadn’t had elections in three decades, and last time they’d led to Ne Win’s coup. He called for a multiparty government, which was surprising, since at the time Burma had a one-party system made up of only his Burma Socialist Programme Party, and he was the one who’d made all the other political parties illegal. Though it seemed like good news at first, it wasn’t, exactly.

  Although I said I would retire from politics, we will have to maintain control to prevent the country from falling apart, from disarray, till the future organizations can take full control. In continuing to maintain control, I want the entire nation, the people, to know that if in the future there are mob disturbances, if the army shoots, it hits—there is no firing into the air to scare.

  But wait. There was more. He later appointed as his successor Sein Lwin, the one who’d ordered the attacks on the protesters in the first place—the guy people called The Butcher. It was like a really extreme version of George W. Bush resigning at some point in his presidency and telling rioting American liberals to calm down, everything’s cool, because Dick Cheney would be in charge now.

  This was not what the people were gunning for, which was the resignation of the whole horrible government. At the astrologically auspicious moment of eight past eight in the morning on August 8, 1988, Rangoon dockworkers went on strike. Tens of thousands of Burmese throughout the country marched, hollering for democracy, crowding the streets of every major city, without interference from the regime. All day, people cheered and gave speeches. Then, around midnight, the military/government, which had no interest in giving up power as the people demanded, cut the electricity, drove in tanks and trucks, and opened fire, shooting, as promised, to hit.

  For five
days, the death toll climbed as neither soldiers nor increasingly incensed civilians stood down. When a group of doctors and nurses at Rangoon General Hospital called for the army to stop shooting people, it shot at them. Rumors circulated that the army was tossing bodies of the wounded into the incinerators along with the dead. On August 13, in an apparent bid to restore order, the army withdrew and Sein Lwin resigned. But the people were fired up.

  “It is hard to describe the thrill people felt in finding their voices for the first time, in being able to speak out,” Pascal Khoo Thwe wrote in his memoir. And it’s hard to understand for anyone raised with free speech and institutional encouragement to think and argue for herself. Infrastructure was at a standstill as workers walked out of their jobs punch-drunk and giddy with their new liberties: the freedom to get together and talk about whatever they wanted. In late August, a massive crowd that had gathered on a slope of the Shwedagon Pagoda was addressed by a slight but steady woman. She was Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of Aung San, and many thousands—tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, they say!—of people listened to her call for a democratic government, though she’d never been involved in politics. “I could not, as my father’s daughter, remain indifferent to all that was going on. This national crisis could, in fact, be called the second struggle for independence.”