One August day, Roger P. Winter, director of the US Committee for Refugees, surveyed the Karen refugee situation on the Thai border. “The spirit in the camps,” he said, “is a strange mixture of hopefulness with vibrations of a fading dream.” I could write that same description now. Only Roger P. Winter said that in 1986. Htan Dah and his wife recently had another baby, their “American baby”; as far as that kid’s welfare is concerned, they left just in time. No shit, Htan Dah’s wife didn’t want to wait around Southeast Asia for a sea change. Her new baby could be in college by then. Or freebasing meth in a Thai containment camp.
IN THAILAND, Mae Sot Office One still has cool tile floors and the warm earthy smell of constant rice. It still teems with young Karen men.
Most of my former comrades in Chang aren’t there, swept up in the tide of Burmese resettlers currently leaving Thailand at a rate of three hundred a week. Htan Dah lives in the type of American place described by a word I recently taught him: suburbs. Htoo Moo joined his brother in England. Eh Soe moved to Sydney, but not before impregnating his girlfriend, and is working three jobs and trying to get her and the baby to Australia. Ta Mla lives in Milwaukee, where he can go outside whenever he wants. Kaw Ku, who returned to Mae Sot from inside shortly before I left, so didn’t spend much time with me, started calling me after he was relocated to Lakewood, Ohio. I offered him a lot of useless apologies, for his crushing poverty and loneliness and the weather. “It’s okay,” he replied. “You can never find a good place to live in the world. Only in heaven.”
But some of the faces still at BA are familiar. Saw Kaw has been transferred to another city but remains in the organization. He sends me emails with the subject line “Don’t forget.” (To which I reply in the subject line, “I never forget.”) Walt has been promoted to a more intensive role at BA and says he’ll stay in Thailand no matter what. He has not filled out any resettlement applications. Lah Lah Htoo has moved on to an organization that handles the refugees’ education. He’s considering resettlement. There are lots of new faces, too, guys rushing or milling about in jeans or longyis, pressing back a little, however thorough the spirit breaking and insurmountable the pile of obstacles.
These new recruits seem to have chosen wisely from among their other options in Southeast Asia—forced laborer, IDP, KNU soldier, camp dweller—even though they’re in hiding. Despite the dangers of being on the run in Mae Sot, they’re in better shape than their people and families in camp. The effects of the world financial melt-down have managed to smack into the packed UN settlements. Since donations are down and commodity prices and the Thai baht are up, the Thailand Burma Border Consortium has been forced to reduce food rations. “Luxuries,” such as soap, have been cut entirely. The Burma Forces Welfare Association of the Royal Commonwealth Ex-Services League no longer has enough money to distribute small stipends to the hundred surviving Karen in camp who fought for the British.
Even being in the KNU wouldn’t afford them the protection it once had in Thai border towns. The guerrilla organization—having lost more territory and trade routes and money and men—is of increasingly limited use to its neighbor. Its old enemy is now one of Thailand’s major trading partners, and its new enemy, the DKBA, now runs a bulk of the cross-border trade and is therefore a much more valuable ally to the Thai police. After decades of complicity, cooperation, and sanctuary, Thailand has told the KNU, which has long been largely based there, to get out, and go back where it came from.
IN BURMA, the junta is conducting evil business as usual, even in the face of some unusual business: In 2008, it announced it would hold elections in 2010. These would be the first Burmese elections in twenty years, which is a slight improvement in the thirty-year gap between the previous two. But obviously no one in the world believed they were going to be free or fair or legitimate. Under the junta-drafted constitution, which took thirteen years to write, and which the populace supposedly overwhelming supported—it passed with 92 percent yeas! And in a vote held in the middle of Cyclone Nargis’s chaos!—the military is basically its own sovereign entity with total immunity.79 Anyway, we know what happened after the 1990 election. We know, too, what happened during 2007’s massive uprising in Burma, when thousands of maroon- and saffron-robe-clad monks and dissenters marched through the streets peacefully, until the military started shooting at people and killed a Japanese journalist and at least one monk and a couple dozen other Burmese. The Internet was shut down. Some citizens braved videotaping it and blogging about it, which kept the death toll down, many believe, and a lot of citizens were arrested. Whether the people of Burma overcome the obstacles to rising up—cell phone prices kept at more than four times the per-capita gross national income; government surveillance of all text messaging; oppression and censorship so thorough that Burmans and minorities throughout the country don’t know that, just like in ’88, they’re all on the same side; having no unified opposition group, since the members of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy have been mostly jailed or exiled or buried, and even within the NLD there are warring factions, too; the plain fact that, as Dr. Cynthia has pointed out, it’s really hard to muster the time and strength to get involved in politics when your family is starving—Burma’s leaders are no doubt counting on the same old outcome. Dissent will be crushed by the monster military machine. Cronies will be installed. And the brief international media blitz won’t cover the aftermath—like it didn’t cover the doubling of the political-prisoner population or the locked-away monks or the 104-year prison sentences for peaceful dissenters last time. Or the junta’s exporting all its rice on the cheap even though its country is in a state of food emergency post-Cyclone Nargis. Or the imprisoning of Burmese aid volunteers who tried to distribute relief to Nargis’s victims.
Part of the Election Day preparations involve the military’s trying to reinforce control over those always troublesome minority militias. Most major insurgent groups have been in cease-fires on the fringe for decades, and the government is trying to bring them into its fold, to achieve complete, cohesive national militarization, ordering that they turn their armies into border guards under the command of the Tatmadaw. The DKBA has happily agreed to report for Burma-army-assisting duty. They’ve even started conscripting villagers to serve in that capacity. Plenty of other troops had already been forced into the militia of six thousand, of course, whether physically or circumstantially. “If I didn’t go to the DKBA, my family would have starved,” one wounded soldier told an interviewer.
The chairman of the DKBA says the army’s decision to sign a cease-fire and join forces with the government has been “beneficial.” Seriously! Their alliance has granted them freedom from Tatmadaw attack and a cut of the border trade. Teak, gold, antimony, zinc, tin—the business interests that bankroll the junta continue to drive the war between the DKBA and KNU, as the former aims to capture all possible logging and mining territory. They’ve got education, and commerce, and don’t live in free-fire zones. And all they have to do to maintain the upper hand is continue to attack other Karen, some of whom are insurgents, and many of whom probably philosophically or physically support the insurgents, anyway.
Those KNU insurgents have never signed a cease-fire—not now that they’re down to four thousand troops, not in all this war’s sixty years. Maybe it doesn’t matter anyway. It’s not like life for the general nonwarring Burmese population is free from forced labor and portering and torture and oppression and starvation. And cease-fires haven’t stopped the Burma army from confiscating land and displacing villagers and continually expanding military presence in some other minorities’ areas. Cease-fire or no, war could still rage for the resources and territory in Karen State, whether between Burman and Karen, or Karen and Karen, or Karen and someone else.
The KNU and SPDC have talked about calling the war off a couple of times, but it just never works out. Once, while they were in the midst of peace negotiations, a KNU brigade stormed a Burma army weapons depot. Once, KNU
leadership rejected the proposed terms—like surrendering their arms—as, and I quote, “out of the question.” When the junta courted cease-fire talks with the KNU in 2009, the Burma army, together with the DKBA, launched a massive attack on the Karen insurgents about ten days later. So as I write this, the Tatmadaw and DKBA have captured several of the few remaining KNU bases and are shelling unprotected IDP camps, and thousands of refugees, having run out of places to run, are making their way over mountains and land mines with babies and diarrhea and no provisions, through soldiers, snake bites, and brumes of malarial mosquitoes, another refugee flood into Thailand. And after the assassination of the DKBA commander who was rumored to have orchestrated the assassination of the KNU general-secretary, the DKBA says it’s going to destroy Mae La, Thailand’s most populous Karen refugee camp, next.
Several groups have broken away from the KNU since the ’90s and agreed with the junta, in the face of interminable conflict with it, to stop fighting—or in the case of the DKBA, just start fighting other Karen. But Burma’s dystopia breeds new Walts and Ta Mlas and other troops who are looking for revenge or purpose every day. And not just in the hills; small bombs planted by unknown groups have started going off in Rangoon. Everyone in the world knows what some people will inevitably choose given the choice between battling for liberty and rolling over and dying. In the face of the demand to make their inactive militia part of the murderous Burma army’s border force, the Mon have said no, and that, further, if they are asked to disarm, they “will do something.” The Kachin who’ve been in a cease-fire since 1994 also said no, and are now actively recruiting. The still terrifying and now druglording Wa’s twenty-thousand-strong army is refusing to submit to anyone’s authority. To prove it, just in case someone wants to make them try, they are preparing for war. And the Kokang broke a two-decade truce with a firefight that sent thousands fleeing across the border into China. As a porter Htoo Moo interviewed put it, in a poem he wrote after he escaped:We have wounds on our shoulders and heads
We have to climb mountains and are beaten like cattle
We have to suffer from this powerlessness
They tortured us cruelly. . . .
We, the escaped porters, have hearts filled with hatred. . . .
When we escape we feel grief for the porters who cannot escape
When we think of this we want to fight back to the military
government. . . .
Together we will struggle from now on!
“To stop the war is to surrender,” General Mu Tu See, the KNU’s current commander in chief, once said. “The atrocities will go on because these people are not for democracy.”
Did he consider the war a success, given the staggering casualties?
“It’s a draw. Nobody is winning, and nobody will win.”
SOURCING
THE FIRST rule of fact-checking is that everything you read and hear is wrong.
Were you to be hired as a fact-checker, as I was in 2007, at Mother Jones—or the other remaining bastions of fact-check, like The Atlantic, or The New Yorker, or Harper’s—you would be taught that information cannot be trusted. It is, rather, presumed fallacious until proved otherwise. Statistics and news clips must be subjected to intense tests of verification. Don’t even think the word “Wikipedia.” In my first meeting, among new coworkers of startling cynicism and genius, the announcement that the source of some fact was a book set off a mighty wave of scoffing and eye rolling around the conference table.
In true fact-checking, literally every word of every factual statement must be traced to a primary source, whether a document or the corroborated accounts of independent experts or witnesses. “Primary source” means that if the story you’re fact-checking says some soldier was the forty-fourth Canadian soldier to die in Afghanistan since 2002, you’re calling the Canadian Army. Once, I heard one of our fact-checkers call a bar in Mexico to ask, in Spanish, whether its floor was metal, per William T. Vollmann’s assertion.
For the record, it was. But often, it’s not. People just get things wrong. They read them wrong, or remember them wrong or the way they want to, or the information they read right was wrong in the first place. You hear the same fact a thousand times, but if you track down its origins, you find out all the repeaters are using the same source, and source zero was just guessing, or citing a highly questionable source or study. Or misciting a highly questionable source or study. Or confusing the details, so that by now, everybody’s under the erroneous impression that a shot of espresso contains more caffeine than a cup of coffee.
So I wasn’t a week into my job before I, too, had undergone the completely life-changing installation of an irrevocable—and warranted—skepticism of everything I heard or read. So it’s life-ruining, also. Which is why I did something writers rarely do—which is subject their manuscripts to a Mother Jones-style fact-check—and that they rarely do for really good reason—which is that holy fucking shit is it hard.
Enter former MoJo research editor Leigh Ferrara, a fact-checking and multitasking wizard, and the hardest-working and most charming person you could hope to be stuck in a studio apartment with for twelve-hour fact-review marathons. The manuscript I gave Leigh had 1,240 footnotes, plus piles of sources noted haphazardly within the text, plus a bunch of sentences with no sourcing at all. So: I’d read and subsequently written that Burma had the fourth-highest child-mortality rate in the world, and Leigh had to figure out whether that was true or not. It’s not. Burma is thirty-sixth on that list, actually, which Leigh tracked down in UNICEF’s “State of the World’s Children 2009.” That took care of eleven words, out of more than a hundred thousand, probably at least half of which she was responsible for. And that was a pretty easy one.
For historical details, we unearthed and paged through colonialists’ reports and missionaries’ diaries, or cross-checked information with other historical accounts we’d made sure weren’t all using the same one original source—as is often the case—and/or vetted the minutiae and main ideas with scholars and specialists. We tracked down witnesses to and experts on subjects way outside the spotlight of popular scrutiny. We then evaluated those sources, trying to determine if they were reliable and where they were getting their information. One of Leigh’s experts helpfully eliminated a handful of questions from her long list of outstanding facts; then she realized the source of his expertise was a book we’d already determined to be mistake-tastic.
Further complicating the fact-checking process was the inconvenience that there’s often no such thing as “fact.” Another figure I’d cited was that trade between China and Burma was up to $2.6 billion in 2008, from $630 million in 2001. That turned out to be “true” (shout-out to The Wall Street Journal for its Burma info’s being totally solid80), based on data Leigh uncovered in the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Database. Mexicali’s 13 Negro bar either does or does not have a metal floor, but the trouble with this trade statistic is perfectly summed up immediately following it in the WSJ article where it appeared: “Analysts say the official numbers vastly understate the full extent of China’s investments in Myanmar.” Mmmm, analysts do say that. Knowing that—however meticulously we sourced our facts, and though every estimate we were working so hard to find and confirm was at least the best possible estimate in existence—“true” is often still kind of a relative concept . . . it’s demoralizing.
We both had dark moments while trying to keep a million little pieces needing verification up in the air. I had nightmares about working on the final edits and not being able to write any of the words I wanted because I didn’t have sourcing for them and there was no time for further fact-checking. Leigh started inadvertently holding her breath when opening emails from sources, because they might say that she was out of luck, or an idiot, because the assertion she was asking them to confirm—which I’d pulled from non-fact-checked books or articles—was absurd. We each went through a period of extreme temporomandibular pain, at which point we realized we
’d started clenching our teeth furiously. We took turns psyching each other up, holding up opposite sides of motivational conversation:
For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question Page 31