For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question

by Mac McClelland

  The protests didn’t end until six weeks had passed. Survivors and state radio reported hundreds killed. Doctors in Rangoon claimed wildly that three thousand unarmed civilians had been murdered on August 8 alone. The government was “overthrown” in a coup, which was generally believed to have been staged by a behind-the-scenes Ne Win. It got a new, heartwarming name: the State Law and Order Restoration Council. (It adopted its current name, the much friendlier-sounding State Peace and Development Council, in 1997.37) The new government announced that it would hold elections, but nothing changed. Though 234 parties registered, their campaigning was rigorously restricted. They could choose their insignia only from a preapproved list, which included tennis rackets and beach balls. Hundreds of political activists were in jail. Aung San Suu Kyi was locked under house arrest. Still, when the elections finally took place, in May 1990, two-thirds of those eligible to vote did. The National League for Democracy, Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, won 60 percent of that vote, and the majority of the seats in parliament. The people had called the government’s election bluff by voting against it.

  “Don’t gamble with the Burmans,” warned the Handbook of Burma and Northeastern India put out by the US Army Air Forces Tactical Center in 1944—“they’re poor losers.” Indeed, like a rebuffed petulant child, the regime simply refused to give up its property, declared the elections invalid, and locked itself in power, which it retains to this day. In the meantime, it has cracked down harder than ever on its citizenry. There’s the Printers and Publishers Registration Law, which requires that all printed material—magazine, hand-lettered flyer, whatever—pass the inspection of the Press Scrutiny and Registration Division of the Ministry of Information before publication. Verboten is the distribution, in any medium, of any information that is unfriendly to the state, the state ideology, members of state government, the state of state government, the state socialism program, the state of the economy, or the state of the union (plus Internet porn). BBC and Voice of America radio broadcasts have been jammed. CNN has been blacked out. Universities have been shut down regularly, for long periods of time; when open, students might be forced to do their classes at satellite locations to keep them from congregating on main campuses. Aung San Suu Kyi has largely been kept under house arrest, despite having won the Nobel Peace Prize the year after the elections; one of the two times she was let out, a mob of government-backed goons attacked a convoy carrying her through the street and beat some of her supporters and colleagues to death—up to a hundred, they say!—though she escaped; though only to be arrested again; she was still incarcerated when I arrived in Mae Sot. And there has been, of course, an expansion of the military, requisite to keeping the mean peace. There were 200,000 Burma armed forces soldiers before the 1988 uprisings. By 1996, there were twice as many.

  The Burma army did need all the troops it could get in the days following the ’88 protests; the countrywide rebellion wasn’t the only fight in town. The ethnic groups in the eastern hills were still at work on their armed revolution. Thousands of the student demonstrators joined the Karen, fleeing for days, weeks through the jungle to their territory, arriving at encampments with signs saying things like “Welcome to the Karenni Liberated Zone: you will possess our land only over our corpses.” The primarily Burman protesters formed the All Burma Students Democratic Front at mighty Manerplaw and became an armed resistance, the Karen rebels teaching the students jungle warfare and fighting alongside them as the army came in hot pursuit, battling face-to-face, old school, the government using unarmed captured civilians as human shields. Between firefights, the authorities spoke to the protesters via state radio, urging them to come home. Like diabolical stepparents in a fairy tale, they baited the students with sweet entreaties over the airwaves: “Come back, children, we still welcome you with open arms. ...” Those who turned themselves in disappeared. Government aircraft dropped leaflets on the bases, some claiming the exiles would be safe if they just went home, some saying they would be bombed in their hiding spots if they didn’t.

  The rumor and lifeline of hope among the Burmese hiding in the jungle with the battle-hardened Karen was that Americans were coming with arms and Special Forces soldiers and battleships. When they didn’t, the KNU tried nevertheless to seize the day, calling a conference with the sudden, unexpected, and welcome allies, but the seventy student representatives were incapable of constructive dialogue. Pascal Khoo Thwe, who was present, blamed their lack of any model but the regime, which had taught them only to be defensive and uncompromising. The students went back home, or to another country to live in exile, having grown tired of waiting at the border for Western reinforcements to help take Rangoon, leaving the Karen back to fending for and waiting by themselves.

  It was just as well that the Burman students gave up: The enormous demonstrations and ensuing murders and unfair fights were barely covered in the United States. Amnesty International released some literature that nobody really read (and that the Burmese state media dismissed as “fabrications” that “emanated from jealousy against establishment of a peaceful and prosperous socialist state”). The United States wasn’t going to take any significant action against the regime, and then only some pretty questionable action, for years.

  XI.

  ABBY AND I agreed that the next person to remind us not to consort with Burmese spies got punched in the face.

  I was, like all Americans without a visa, authorized to stay in Thailand for only thirty days. But since Burma was such a short jaunt away, I could do a border run and reenter Thailand with a fresh, thirty-extra-day-allowing stamp. I prevailed on Abby, who didn’t need to leave the country, who had responsibly paid for and received her extended tourism visa before she left the States, to go with me anyway. The night before we left, Saturday night, the night after we got drunk on Friday night, we got drunk again, to the sounds of our coworkers badgering us to keep quiet about their whereabouts and ethnicity.

  “Do not give any information,” The Blay said for the eleventh time while we drank Chang, again, out of coffee cups, again. His had a drawing of a teddy bear and some German words on it. Mine featured a cartoon middle-aged white man in a cape and said SUPER DAD. This time, I asked someone where they’d gotten all these mugs. No one knew. This time, we were sitting on the floor of The Blay’s room instead of at the picnic table. He stored a few proper glasses on a shelf in here, he showed us, but there wasn’t enough company worth taking them out for. Ta Mla was drinking, but just for the moment; by ten, he was back at work at his computer. Htan Dah’s kid had joined us and was already totally blotto, but shared a cup with his dad. Eh Soe had disappeared—not that he’d have been much of a conversationalist anyway. That morning, in response to a simple question, my hungover roommate had answered me with entirely nonsensical English and, when I asked him to repeat himself, tried again, and then again, before quitting and saying, “I have a very terrible headache.”

  Abby and I mentally inventoried our surroundings. We’d never been behind the door of this long, narrow afterthought off the living room before. It ran the length of the house but for the back corner, which the computer room took up. It was the only room in the house that was occupied by only one person. In addition to solitude, The Blay had, we realized when we were finally invited in for the party, something else no one else did: a mattress. The queen rested on the floor under an enormous pea-green mosquito net and an unsettlingly large pile of stuffed animals. When Abby had walked in and laid eyes on the teddy bears, she’d asked The Blay what the hell. He’d shaken his head and laughed softly. “My wife,” he’d said, and Abby had raised her eyebrows at me.

  “If anyone ask, you do not know us,” he continued now. “Never give this address or phone number.”

  “The Blay,” I said, leaning forward and looking him in the eye. “I’m pretty smart. I know not to tell anyone where to find a bunch of illegal refugees.”

  He looked down and nodded, like he was satisfied, like he believed that I understood
. But then: “There could be spies.”

  “We know!” Abby and I yelled.

  The staff was terrified of spies. With the help of informers, Burma’s military/government has instilled a pervasive fear and paranoia in its citizenry—fear and paranoia so ingrained and severe that people also police themselves. Anyone can become a spy, and the government is always recruiting: friends or neighbors or even family members who tell on people they know because they are coerced into it, or because they need the money, or because the only way to protect their own families is to turn in someone else’s. Between soldiers, undercover agents, regular cops, plainclothes cops, and civilian informers, everyone in Burma understands, and has deeply assimilated, that you never know who’s safe to talk to. The host of the Burma Frontline special, for example, wanted simply to drive past the house of Aung San Suu Kyi. Several cabdrivers turned down the job, because they didn’t want to be seen doing it, and the driver who did agree to take him made the crew hide the camera. The Western journalists who do go to Burma write about being torn between getting the people’s stories and getting the people in deep shit for being caught talking to them.38 And it’s not much easier for the Burmese to communicate with less conspicuous people or even people they know they can trust: In the ’90s, the government reportedly opened a new spying facility that allows it to tap phones, faxes, and emails around the nation.

  The fact that my housemates didn’t live in Burma anymore didn’t by any means make them immune to intelligence efforts. Even the Thai government had to contend with spies from Burma. At a 1997 National Security Council meeting, a Thai army general speculated that Burma was spending 20 to 30 percent of its military budget on intelligence. Two years later an initiative to issue green cards to qualifying immigrants from Burma was said to be postponed due partly to concerns that Burmese soldiers were disguising themselves as workers to obtain documents to stay in the country. In 2003, the number of Burmese spies slipping in as workers was continuing to increase, to the point that a report to the prime minister recommended involving villagers near the border in security efforts—calling, essentially, for turning Thai civilians into spies to spy on the spies. In December 2008, Thai authorities in Mae Sot arrested ten armed Burmese nationals, who admitted they’d been sent by the Burmese military. According to Thai army intelligence, there are two types of spies from Burma in Thailand: those who collect information about the neighboring country, and those who watch people like The Blay.

  Other pro-democracy organizations on the Thai side of the border had warned BA of the schemes the latter type used. There was a story that the phones of such an organization rang late one night. “I’m a refugee and I need help,” the voice on the line said in Karen. “Please, can you help me? Can you come pick me up?” The sympathetic listener went to meet the caller. He didn’t come back. Though it sounded like an urban legend, a refugee’s scary story to tell in the dark or around a campfire, it certainly wasn’t unheard of for Burmese soldiers to enter other countries and then abscond back across the border with unwilling expatriates in tow. The DKBA was well known for kidnapping refugees in Thailand, and well known to be a pawn of the regime’s. Not that the SPDC was above doing the work itself. Burmese soldiers killed one Karen refugee and injured another on Thai soil in 1997, then forced several dozen others back across the border into Burma. In 1999, the Burmese military found two students, leaders of the All Burma Democratic Students Front, who had been living in exile in southern China. The activists were abducted and taken back to intelligence headquarters in their home country. In January 2009, a dissident monk who was hiding in the sanctuary of Thai monks was interviewed by a reporter. “Please don’t name the monastery,” he pleaded with the writer. “There are Burmese government agents everywhere.” A month later, an intercepted 42-page report compiled by the Burmese Southeast Regional Military Command that detailed the activities of the KNU, dissident groups, aid groups, and NGOs on the border further confirmed what the monk and Thailand and everyone else had known for years.

  BA included spy awareness as part of new staff training. Just a few nights ago, The Blay had told Sheh Reh, the guy who’d just been to jail and didn’t like my burned potatoes, why he should be cautious about answering the phone. “A spy could call the office,” The Blay had explained as they were sitting in his room talking before bed. “They will tell you they need your help, but even though you’re worried about them, you must be careful.”

  Sheh Reh had already been wary enough of his new job with BA. He hadn’t really wanted it, but had gotten so bored sitting in the same dirty refugee camp for ten years, teaching for six hundred baht, or about $15, per month after he graduated. And he couldn’t go home to Burma, because when he lived there, he’d often had to run away with the other three hundred people in his village to avoid being conscripted as a porter. The SPDC had eventually made them leave the village entirely, forced them into a relocation labor camp a four- or five-hour walk away with no sanitation or education, and burned their village down, so he’d recently applied for and undergone BA’s five-week village-organizing training. He didn’t particularly want to go inside Burma to do that job, either, because it was dangerous, and he was scared, and he knew that if he got caught there he’d be killed.39

  And then, the very night that The Blay had warned him about the phone, someone called at 3 AM. Though he was sleeping closest to the phone, Sheh Reh froze. How would he know if it wasn’t really a refugee? Would he turn down someone in actual need of help? Would he break, and endanger his friends, his coworkers, his people by answering the call for assistance? The phone rang more than a dozen times before Htoo Moo got up off the floor and crossed the living room into the computer room to answer it. Sheh Reh panicked as he heard his coworker ask “What?” several times. Maybe Htoo Moo wasn’t sure whether to believe the caller and was asking him to repeat himself. After a moment, Htoo Moo put down the phone while Sheh Reh involuntarily held his breath and listened. It was, it turned out, a friend of mine who was too excited about having finally negotiated her international calling card number, PIN number, and the correct sequence of country code, area code, and phone numbers to check the time difference when the call finally went through. Htoo Moo went upstairs to wake me, and Sheh Reh lay there in the dark heat, surrounded by mosquito netting and a layer of guilt and fear.

  But despite the incessant, irritating warnings; despite Abby’s having just read an article by a BBC reporter who’d visited Burma only a few weeks earlier and been watched by a guy pretending to endlessly read the same single page of an upside-down week-old newspaper; despite my having recently trudged through an academic treatise on how the government fed, via swarms of informers, its obsession with knowing about every movement and conversation that occurred within its borders, Abby and I were still somehow surprised when we were dropped off at the Burma border, just three miles from our house, on a lucid Sunday morning and had taken but a few steps onto the Friendship Bridge before becoming host to our very own Burmese spy.

  In 1997, a bridge spanning the Moei River was opened in the presence of Burmese dancers, Thai spectators, and officials from both countries. The road between Mae Sot and Burma’s Myawaddy is a link in the Asian Highway, a ninety-thousand-mile UN dream connecting the continent from the Korean peninsula to Turkey. After years of negotiation, Thailand had talked the reclusive regime into letting the Royal Thai Government build and pay for the 80 million- baht ($2 million) bridge that would, incidentally, allow the junta improved control over Burma’s thriving, insurgency-funding black market. And after years of delays—nearly two, as Burma halted construction in a dispute over riverbank sovereignty—the pathway to better cross-border trade40 and tourism was complete. And here Abby and I were, nine years and some fourteen hundred feet of concrete later, accepting greetings from a friendly Burmese stranger.

  “Hello!” he said, trotting quickly to get ahead of our long American strides. He took his place just in front of us and turned his body at a ninety-
degree angle to ours, walking sideways to facilitate conversation and acknowledge our polite hellos back. “Where are you from?” he asked.

  “The United States,” Abby said.

  “Very good!” he said, nodding. The man was attractive, with small, shiny eyes and shiny white teeth in a thin face. He had a traditional cotton longyi tied around his slim waist, but he was wearing expensive-looking black leather slides and a fancy watch. His short black hair was immaculately trimmed, the clean line at the back of his neck exactly parallel to his clean collared shirt. At that point, he could have been any enthusiastic native, I guess, a stunningly put-together and well-dressed plebeian in one of the most poverty-stricken countries in the world who’d just happened to be hanging around the bridge checkpoint when we showed up. We put on our appropriately affable faces. Then he said, “You work with refugees?”

  We didn’t look at each other and immediately shook our heads.

  “We’re tourists,” I said.

  “Really?”

  We told some lies about sightseeing and, at the man’s prompting, how long we were staying in Thailand. He asked if we were tourists, and we said again that we were.

  Our trio approached the other security gateway, at the other end of the bridge, a large edifice with a walkway through the middle and guards hanging around outside. The roof connected the two-story buildings that stood on either side of the bridge’s width, all modern-bunker looking and white paint, and the man ushered us into the structure on the right.