The Karenni and the Shan suffer similar abuses. Twenty-five thousand Karenni have been exiled to refugee camps in Thailand. More than twice that many are stranded in the jungle on the run, and we know what their odds are like out there. A Thai intelligence officer has found leaflets on the bodies of dead government soldiers that identify the Shan race as the enemy that has to be destroyed. Another intercepted document promises raises to soldiers “who are successful in possessing Shan women” for “the purpose of admixture of blood”:What our noble and numerous Burman comrades of a great racial lineage must particular adhere to and practise is to take victory by absorption of humanity by humanity. It is only through absorption of racial groups who are not Burman so that the victory of the Burman comrades in the Shan State will be stabilized for a long time.
Any UN resolution that charged genocide—or any other atrocity crime—against a country would bring that country under the responsibility to protect. And a draft resolution that compellingly charges genocide against a country is a draft resolution that’s likely to get passed—no nation wants to be the one that vetoes that. But the 2007 Security Council draft resolution to declare Burma a threat to international peace and security didn’t contain the word—or the evidence for—genocide. Nor ethnic cleansing, nor crimes against humanity, nor war crimes. China and Russia vetoed it.
Now a case to again bring a Burma resolution to the Security Council table is gaining momentum. This time, some advocates say, it’s possible they’ll fight for the charge of crimes against humanity, because the phrase is both more inclusive of the abominations than genocide and, because it’s less politicized, easier to prove—the United Nations Human Rights Commission didn’t adopt an official report acknowledging the Armenian genocide of 1915 until 1985. And there’s more backup this time: In 2009, the Harvard University International Human Rights Clinic issued a report by five leading international jurists that identified the situations in Rwanda and Darfur as precedents for Burma. The authors admonished that “the world cannot wait while the military regime continues its atrocities against the people of Burma” and that “there is a prima facie case of international criminal law violations occurring that demands UN Security Council action to establish a Commission of Inquiry to investigate these grave breaches further.” The next month, more than fifty US congresspeople were signatories to a letter to President Barack Obama urging him to lead the establishment of a Security Council Commission of Inquiry into crimes against humanity in Burma.
Possibly further helpful to this cause is the publication of a report from one of the world’s foremost human-rights-law scholars asserting that the junta is perpetrating crimes against humanity targeting the ethnic Rohingya in western Burma’s Arakan State, as well. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya have been driven out of Burma by the military, which argues that that race doesn’t belong in its country. “Rohingya are neither Myanmar people nor Myanmar’s ethnic group,” the Burmese consul general has explained. “You will see in the photos that their complexion is ‘dark brown.’ The complexion of Myanmar people is fair and soft, good-looking as well”—not, like the Rohingya, “ugly as ogres.” Among those who do still live there, 25 percent suffer from acute malnutrition. Forced labor and wrongful imprisonment are rife. The Rohingya aren’t recognized as citizens and can’t leave their state. A hundred who were caught trying to get to Rangoon to find work in 2008 were arrested and sentenced to six months in prison. Within their state, they can’t do anything—walk out of their own village, get married—without permission. A couple hundred thousand squat in Bangladesh, about sixty thousand in squalid camps. Many try to flee to Malaysia. They drown in leaky ships or are arrested when they wash up on the shores of Thailand. The minority made big news recently when the Land of Smiles got caught towing a bunch of them back out to sea. The reason this report could help change the game is that it’s meant to draw the attention of world players outside of the West. The Rohingya are discriminated against for being, aside from darkies, another hateful thing: Muslims. The hope is that some of Burma’s neighbors, particularly Malaysia and Indonesia, will help make some serious racket once it’s out that Muslims are being so fatally oppressed.
“The US government and the international community must do something to assist the people of Burma and stop the brutality,” said Representative Joe Pitts (R-Pennsylvania) in a speech to the House in 2003. “Otherwise, we will all be responsible for the successful genocide campaign ethnic cleansing going on by the vicious military of the SPDC.” The sanctioning Freedom and Democracy Act, which is US law, notes very simply and clearly, “The SPDC is engaged in ethnic cleansing against minorities within Burma, including the Karen, Karenni, and Shan people, which constitutes a crime against humanity.” But even after we settle this quibble over semantics and decide that the living hell of Burma is genocide or crimes against humanity or both or what, relief for the people on the ground there could be a long time coming. Even if the UN draft resolution is brought—and in 2006, a proposal just to talk about one was rejected by China, Russia, and Japan—and then does pass, and does contain some of the magic words, and does bring Burma under the responsibility to protect, then the Security Council will still have to agree on what “timely and decisive” measure is appropriate, whether coercive actions like putting peacekeepers on the ground or establishing criminal tribunals—and the secretary-general is a big advocate of noncoercive measures—then find the resources to do it, then actually do it. Such UN action would be unprecedented, and redeeming. At the current pace, getting to only the point where the Security Council votes on a resolution, someone involved in the process has estimated, will take two or three years. Which, in the scheme of this war, is not so long. Though in a village where inhabitants have been buried up to their necks and bludgeoned to death with a shovel, it’s a fucking eternity.
Currently: US policy only imposes sanctions on a country of breathtakingly impoverished citizens. It does not involve calling for the Security Council to invoke the responsibility to protect, or referring Burma to the International Criminal Court. It does not address Burma’s committing the sorts of crimes the international community has sworn to prevent. Burma gets less than a tenth of the aid money Cambodia does; people living with AIDS must wait until someone else with AIDS dies so they can take their place on the very short list of people getting AIDS meds; the relief money coming in comes out to less than $3 a person, while in Sudan, each person gets about $50. American policy involves ignoring our old Karen allies. It involves disregarding the Wa,50 though they’re flooding the world drug market with heroin and meth.51 It doesn’t involve significant dialogue with the Shan and Mon and Kachin, though they’ll be crucial to eventually rebuilding the nation and building a more inclusive national identity in a country with seven major and a dozen subnationalities, where the minorities collectively are not so minor, where a settling of the ethnic-war score precedes even so much as a distant dream of a functioning democracy. The US isn’t asking, even nicely, its pal Thailand to—in the long, continuing meantime—grant the displaced Burmese within its borders the right to work and walk around, to make them less subject to the whims of a police force that is, as one DEA agent working in Bangkok put it, “so corrupt it turns my stomach,” to recognize and protect them as refugees—people with “a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion”—even though the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants ranks Thailand one of the seven worst countries in the world in which to be a refugee. Even Iraq and Afghanistan didn’t make that list. Or as Collin put it in his workshop essay:There has been a civil war in Burma and it becomes a poorest country in the world. The civilian has been faced with many difficulties and became refugees. Numbers of people have fled to neighboring countries to seek asylum. My family and I fled to Thailand and live in a refugee camp. Thai authorities do not recognize us as legal refugee.
Life in the camp is like bird i
n the cage. The camp is surrounded by the barb wire and you can not go out of the camp. No freedom, no choice to have high education. There are many refugee camps in Thai Burma border. I live in the Mae La camp with my family. Approximately there are more than 40 thousand people live in here. We receive our supplies from BBC (Burmese Border Consortium). We get our ration twice a month. We get rice, fish paste, chili, salt, yellow bean, cooking oil, charcoal and clothes. We have hospitals, schools in the camp.
It is very difficult to have a job to earn money for the family. Few people have job. Some work in the hospital and some are teachers but these people receive very few allowance. Many of the refugees would like to go out of the camp and look for job for their financial. Thai authorities who control the camp do not allow them. Sometime they become black sheep and leave the camp. Many times Thai police arrest them and charge them. Some were sent back to Burma to the SPDC military campaign.
Day by day too many people live life with no hope. Children go to school up to tenth standard and then finish their study. After they have finished tenth standard they have nothing to do accept hang around with friends. Their free time makes bad habits for them.
Every day people have to live with worried life. We are part of DKBA and SPDC target enemy. They try to destroy our camp. DKBA (Democratic Karen Buddha Army) is different political group who separate their self from Karen National Union. SPDC (State Peace Development Council is Burmese regime. Many times they come and destroy our camp even though we live in other country. They had destroyed many refugee camps and we have to relocate our camp many times. These are part of the life in the camp.
Lives in the camp need more security and freedom as human being. We need to recognize as a real refugee.
But there’s no popular call for a different policy, because no one’s ever heard of this particular genocide, partly because we’re not calling it a genocide. There’s no mass movement behind the cause. And what’s perhaps most heartbreaking about our unawareness of Burma’s people is their hyperawareness of us.
The Karen have a story. It’s about how, when man was created, the Karen and the European, like all the other nationalities, were brothers. As the first created, the Karen was the oldest brother, and as last the European was the youngest. The two brothers adored each other, and so traveled together when Buddha sent them to settle in the world after bestowing upon them gifts of rope and knives and knowledge and, to the Karen brother, a betel box and forbiddance from opening it until he reached Burma. But the younger brother wanted to see what was inside, and persisted through all the Karen brother’s insisting that they shouldn’t look until, finally, they did. It was the Karen’s land and literacy, which spilled wide and far from their container. They couldn’t get them back in the box, and they couldn’t carry them as they were, and were forced to move on without them. “That is why the Karen are the orphans of the world and must live from swiddens cut on mountainsides belonging to other peoples,” goes the story. But it doesn’t end so hopelessly. “One day, our European brother will return to us and make up for the hardship he has caused us. One day we shall have a land of our own.”
And it’s not just the Karen. The citizens of Burma have followed recent American presidential races closely,52 sure that, given the idealized bullshit the US government spouted in the run-up to the Iraq War, we’ll invade and depose their dictator, too. With each impotent visit of the UN envoy, tea leaves are sifted for signs of impending change. Like the minorities who thought we’d honor our promise to protect them after that great war, like the minorities who now believe that FBR’s Dave must be CIA sent to redeem them, like the rebels and activists waiting for us to reinforce them in the jungles after the demonstrations of ’88, like Eh Soe, who danced in his computer chair when BBC Burmese reported that Bush had pledged some tiny bit of money to the country for AIDS relief, however much I insisted that it didn’t mean we were about to take interest and action, like even the junta, which went through that exorbitant expense and trouble to move its capital far inland, the Burmese as a whole simply cannot believe that no one is going to come to their country’s rescue. In May 2008, US Navy ships arrived in the waters off Burma’s coast, after Cyclone Nargis killed 140,000 people, who were given no warning of the storm’s landfall by their government. The ships—which the junta turned away—were full of aid supplies, not invading soldiers and weaponry. Still, excited citizens crowded the phone lines of an embassy in Rangoon.
“You’re coming to save us,” the callers asked the diplomat who answered the phone, “aren’t you?”
XIII.
THE MAE Sot gongs broke the nighttime silence, in darkness still thorough but thin-feeling. I guessed it was 4 AM when the shallow tinning struck, and I listened to the distant shimmer and the dogs that caught it and spread it through the city, the far-off barking and howling coming closer and louder in a wave with the ringing at their backs until it smacked against the house, our street’s dogs in a sudden frenzy, and echoed still by the woofing and tolling from the temple where it started. The monks were awake, and I was, too.
Downstairs, Htan Dah and I sat at the table preparing breakfast before daybreak was complete. The hours peeling and slicing acidic onion and garlic twice a day had peeled the skin off the tips of my fingers. Left index and thumb. Right index, thumb, and middle. Pink and raw. I showed Htan Dah, who looked at me skeptically and checked his own intact hands. I laughed at him when he scratched his head, showing me why he kept long nails on his pinkies and thumbs. “Also,” he said, then pantomimed cleaning out his ear.
Soon a visiting administrator from BA’s Bangkok office joined us, a round Australian with a pale, pretty face, walking through the open dining room/garage door and plopping down at the table on the bench opposite mine in the yellowing light. We said hellos. Though she’d walked from her temporary room in town in the early chill, her face was sleepy, and she watched us groggily as we slowly slid heavy knives through vegetables and into cutting boards.
“I tried to give Sheh Reh a hug,” I told Htan Dah. Even though Sheh Reh had criticized my burned potatoes. “He wouldn’t let me.”
Htan Dah chuckled. “Really?”
“Yeah. He came up to me yesterday and told me he was leaving this morning, at four in the morning or something. So I said, ‘Oh, well it was great to meet you. Can I hug you?’ And he said, ‘That’s okay.’” I had learned, quite slowly, that “That’s okay” didn’t mean what it meant to me, which was “That would actually be great, but don’t trouble yourself,” but was a euphemism for “Absolutely not,” so I’d stepped back from him. “He said, ‘Just say, Thank you very much.’ He said, ‘Our cultures are very different.’”
I wasn’t totally shocked by Sheh Reh’s rejection, since Htan Dah had already asserted that there was no hugging in Karen culture. Period. (“You don’t hug your parents?” I’d pressed. Negative. “Or your girlfriends?” Never. “Ever?” No. When I’d insisted, “But you like, wrap your arms around each other when you make out,” he’d looked at me like something radically unexpected had flown out of my mouth, like a cockatiel, maybe.) But though the action didn’t exist in their personal lives, my coworkers had seen it in movies, and most of them were amenable to the performance of it if the occasion called, the same as I wai’d, or bowed with prayerful hands, at Thais I interacted with. Htan Dah, for example, had been hugged before. Once in his life. By a Canadian.
Htan Dah seemed more surprised than I was that Sheh Reh hadn’t acquiesced to my friendly request. “That is strange,” he said, his mouth screwed up as he tried to think of an explanation. “Maybe because he is animist.”
The Bangkok administrator turned on him. “What do you mean?” she asked, her blue eyes rounder and more awake now. “What would his being animist have to do with anything?”
Htan Dah shrugged. “I don’t know(!). Maybe animists don’t like to touch people.”
The Australian made a face of great doubt. “Well they have to touch each other at some
point, don’t they? Since they haven’t died off and must make more animists sometimes?”
Htan Dah giggled, embarrassed. Some of his excessive othering of Sheh Reh—after all, Ta Mla was animist, and Htan Dah knew he didn’t live in a physical isolation bubble—was due to Sheh Reh’s being Karenni, or Red Karen, a subgroup of the Karen ethnicity. The Red Karen had their own language and traditional clothing (you could probably guess the primary color) and ceremonies and state, Karenni State, a small piece of land just north of Karen State. In Thailand, they had their own two refugee camps. They also had various subgroups within their ethnic subgroup—specifically, Sheh Reh’s traditionally wore short longyis and wrapped their knees in thick black cotton. Even within the White Karen, to which all my housemates belonged, there were several subgroups, Sgaw and Pwo and Pa-o and Padaung. Even within my housemates, two of these groups were represented, which I hadn’t even realized until Eh Soe told me. He was, for example, unlike most of the guys, Pwo Karen, which had its own dialect and traditional dress and even script.
For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question Page 20