“Why are we doing this?”
“It’s fine. We’re doing a great job. People are going to give us trophies when they realize how thorough we’ve been.”
“Yeah, because anyone will ever even notice that we did this, and they totally give trophies for fact-checking.”
“You’re doing a great job. It’ll all be worth it when we get the trophies.”
It was worth it, actually. I wrote, for example, a long and exciting description of some freaky shit a certain Burmese hill tribe did during a certain world war. I won’t go into who the source was or the possible sourcing mistakes made, but the upshot is that if I hadn’t omitted and you had repeated this story at a cocktail party, at worst a scholar of any of several disciplines would’ve recognized it as a complete load of crap. At the very least, you’d have been going around spreading freaky lies. And that’s how Leigh and I comforted ourselves during the aforementioned marathon reviews, comparing three hundred pages of single-spaced notes from more than seven hundred paper and electronic and human sources while I made changes on more pages than not.
“I can’t believe how much money and how much of our lives this has cost.”
“You can’t put a price on truth.”
“You’re right. We’re heroes.”
In one chapter, I riffed, based on what I’d read, on how the KMT used Dodge and Ford trucks—Dodge and Ford trucks!—and how that was further evidence of how ridiculous the United States’s denial of assisting the Chinese rebels in Burma was. But you won’t find that in the book, because a foreign-relations scholar pointed out to me that anyone could get mass-produced American vehicles anywhere, there were parades of them on the Ho Chi Minh Trail during Vietnam, did I think the United States was also assisting the Viet Cong? I constructed, and then had to thoroughly de- and reconstruct, a story about ancient Burmese race relations after reading a mountain of history books—books that apparently every archaeologist and Southeast Asian history specialist (we consulted five) knows are based on long-discredited colonial theory riddled with “sheer fantasy” and “Orientalist cliché.” I wrote an entire chapter based on a first-rate historical account of some stupid and misguided action on the part of the United States that oh, man, did I want to be true. One expert corroborated that it was. Three others said it wasn’t, exactly. A declassified State Department memo settled the dispute in favor of the nays. It’s cool; there was plenty of equally stupid and misguided action to take its place. See chapter six.
“No matter how hard we work, we’re going to miss something. All this work and we’ll still know that there are mistakes we didn’t catch. It’s so futile.”
“No! Trophies!”
We terrorized the United States Department of Homeland Security, the World Health Organization, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the history and epidemiology departments of several universities, the authors of dozens of books, the staffs of countless NGOs, lawyers and doctors and soldiers and refugees and multinational corporations and activists. And so on. I’d be swimming in debt without the research support that was provided by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute and the Fund for Investigative Journalism. But no matter how much time and money went into reporting this story, and digging up obscure and untold details (see the stats comparing eastern Burma with Darfur, chapter twelve), and then making sure they were right—no matter how many months Leigh worked (ten, if you really want to know, so you can imagine how long it would take to fact-check a book in which half the narrative isn’t recounted conversations about socialism and blow jobs81), she still could’ve misinterpreted information herself, and the information could still have flaws, and though the changes we made were hundreds, the mistakes we caught were certainly not every one, and never could be, even if we had unlimited resources and lived in the Library of Congress.
So. Herewith, the sourcing. This isn’t every annotation. For most items, we had several sources and interviews beyond what’s listed here that went into corroborating and quadruple-checking, and to keep this relatively clean I didn’t include all of them here. The Smithsonian Department of Botany research botanist and curator Leigh contacted to confirm that coconut palms are indeed common in a certain area of Burma, for example, is not listed, nor a hundred other unsung experts. But often, I’ve provided sourcing even for important stuff that’s pretty well documented, as a jumping-off point for anyone who wants to learn more. At this point, I’d feel pretty confident breaking any tidbit in this book out at a cocktail party full of Southeast Asia wonks. But now you can decide for yourself, and if a scholar or skeptic you’re drinking with questions your source, you can say, you know, “Report E/CN.4/199⅚5 of the United Nations Economic and Social Council, Commission on Human Rights.” Or “Knowles’ 1829 Memoir of Mrs. Ann H. Judson, Late Missionary to Burmah; Including a History of the American Baptist Mission in the Burman Empire. No, no, the second edition.”
I.
Burma spends .3 percent of GDP on health care: Watkins et al., p. 296.
Russia, Pakistan, North Korea have sold weapons to Burma: Russia: Amnesty International 2, pp. 62-70; Pakistan, North Korea: Lintner.
Gatherings of more than five people illegal: Steinberg.
Torture tactics awful and weird: Testimony of activist and torture victim Ko Aung, quoted in Rogers, pp. 123-124. “My skin was shredded by the pecks of those birds, and covered in blood ...”
30 percent of Burmese children under five devastatingly malnourished: UNICEF, p. 123; Hansford.
10 percent of Burmese children die before age of five: UNICEF, p. 119.
350,000 soldiers actively deployed in Burma army: Selth 2, pp. 11-12. Although this is the best estimate going, it is, Selth acknowledges, rough (interview).
100-pound porter loads: Escaped porters interviewed on tape, video, and paper by Htoo Moo; other human rights documenters regularly estimate the weight of the carry as up to at least fifty kilograms.
Rape of little girls/gang style/involving mutilation/preceding murder: Shan Human Rights Foundation and Shan Women’s Action Network (SWAN). In this one survey of sexual violence by Burmese troops, 61 percent of incidences were gang rapes, 25 percent ended in murder, one of the victims was five. Additionally: “In many of the incidents documented, the women were not only raped, but were also physically tortured in other ways, including being beaten, suffocated by having plastic put over their head, and having their breasts cut off.” Story of rape victim being shot through her vagina recounted in Rogers, p. 26.
More torture tactics used on Karen: Rogers, pp. 242 and 207; Thornton, p. 66.
China is Burma’s ally: See chapter 12.
Sino-Tibetan sounds: Watkins. Karen dialects—there are about twenty—fall under the Tibeto-Burman grouping, a subset of Sino-Tibetan languages.
“peacefully, quietly, unobtrusively”: Quoted in Tucker, p. 14.
Average annual Thai income: UNICEF, p. 120.
Wet season/dry season weather patterns: US Army Air Forces Tactical Center, Arctic, Desert and Tropic Information Center.
Death by Thai motorbike: Thailand Public Health Ministry statistics, Chiang Mai Mail.
Thailand not signatory to 1951 UN refugee convention: UNHCR 8.
Thailand formally accepted assistance from UNHCR: Lang 1, p. 8.
UNHCR has no right to grant refugee status: McKinsey.
157,000 refugees in nine camps: Registered plus unregistered, as of July 2009. Thompson.
Bangkok classifies refugees as “displaced persons”/illegal immigrants: Lang 1, p. 3.
“running away from soldiers”: ZOA Refugee Care Thailand 1, pp. 15, 50.
UNHCR-registered refugees deported: Human Rights Watch 3, part III: Expulsion to Burma.
Prison for bamboo-collecting refugees: US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants 1, p. 86.
II.
Background on the Pyu: Moore; Lieberman.
The Pyu’s legendary devotion
to love and Buddhism: Thant Myint-U, p. 52.
Mranma = Bama = Burman: Lintner 4.
For a brief but excellent slice of old-school ethnopolitical life and strife in Burma, see Lieberman.
Some people who think the Karen got there first: Dun, p. 2; Harvey, p. 3.
The Karen came from the north: Barron et al. speculate that the Karen migrated south from Tibet and Yunnan, p. 29. Lieberman concedes that though it’s impossible to know for sure, “linguistic and racial data are at least consistent with a north to south movement of considerable antiquity” (interview).
“on almost inaccessible heights”: Mouhot quoted in Falla, p. 18.
Translations of the Karen lunar calendar: Moffatt.
“The houses of these strange people”: Snodgrass, p. 141.
Shit-poultices can be more problematic than you might think. Thornton, p. 90, describes the calf-size, festering hole in the thigh of a man whose traditional healer applied plants, poop, or both to what started out as a pimple.
Disparaging Burmans: Lieberman, p. 469, and interview.
Magnificence of sixteenth-century Burma and all the goods you could buy (“notwithstanding the constant wars”): Scott 1, pp. 16-17.
20th-century writer quoted on the reports of those who’ve witnessed it: Clifford, pp. 84-85.
For a dramatic account of the wicked series of wars for Burma’s dominance, start reading Thant Myint-U on p. 63.
Alaungpaya made a huge pile of Mon heads and sent it to them: It was on a raft. He “sent it up with the flood tide; the watchers on the city walls saw it float by and read their own doom, while the vultures rose and fell.” Harvey, p. 232.
Mon and Burmans enslaved the Karen: Lieberman.
Alaungpaya destroyed their villages: Pascal Khoo Thwe, p. 35.
“These people appeared heartily glad to see us”: Snodgrass, pp. 141-142.
Description, costs of the first Anglo-Burman fight: Thant Myint-U, pp. 113-125.
British looking for another fight: Former vice-chancellor of the University of Rangoon and chairman of the Burma Historical Commission Maung Htin Aung writes that even the British recognized that “the War of 1852 was an act of unprovoked aggression” in Trager, p. viii; the details of how the excuse was that Rangoon had fined some ships over some customs something-rather, though Rangoon immediately rescinded the fine, can be found in Thant Myint-U, p. 133.
Burmans go on Karen-killing rampage post-Shwedagon capture: Harry Ignatius Marshall, p. 306; Luther, pp. 86-91.
Warring revolutionaries and loyalists: Thant Myint-U, p. 134.
King Thibaw’s paramount titles: Scott 1, p. 5.
King Thibaw’s bloody ascension: Andrew Marshall, p. 41; Thant Myint-U, p. 158.
English newspapers touting royal massacre drama: Pascal Khoo Thwe, p. 13.
Kengtung’s tigers(!) headlines: Andrew Marshall, p. 187.
The ill-fated affair of Pierre and Mattie Calogreedy, and aftermath: Thant Myint-U, beginning p. 10.
III.
Martus human rights violation database: See last note of chapter 9.
Frontline interviewee served seven years in prison: “Burma: State of Fear.”
BBC interviewee gets 25 years: Burmese Women’s Union.
Burma’s rank in Press Freedom Index: Reporters Without Borders.
Third most journalists in jail: Committee to Protect Journalists 2.
The exile newspaper with the misquoted Napoleon tagline is the New Era Journal.
International guidelines recommend six feet square (3.5 square meters) of hut floor per refugee: TBBC 10.
IV.
Iraq War of the 1800s: Thant Myint-U, pp. 22-23.
British having a hell of a time with/being brutal during the Burmese occupation: Thant Myint-U, pp. 28-29.
“wiped out the village and shot everyone we saw”: Quoted in Andrew Marshall, p. 175.
Any literate Karen would be shot: Falla, p. 142.
Karen were a fifth of the Burma Rifles: Harry Ignatius Marshall, p. 314.
Minorities are majority of Burma army: Thant Myint-U, p. 195.
“oppress them or suffer them in any way to be oppressed”: Quoted in Tucker, p. 38.
Quarter of a million incoming Indians: Tucker, p. 31.
Immigration riots, British smackdown: Thant Myint-U, pp. 210-216.
Burma Independence Army wreaking havoc on Karen civilians, eventually demobbed by Japanese: Thant Myint-U, pp. 230-231.
Mighty fighting Kachins wreaking havoc on the Japanese: Webster, pp. 49-52.
Karen WWII heroics and loyalties: Morrison.
“Karen are no fair-weather friends”: Quoted in Falla, p. 24.
Japanese pressing Burmese into forced labor: Seekins.
British swore Karen independence as their eventual reward: There are many accounts of this, but you can read the corroboration of both one former Karen Allied fighter and one British soldier in Rogers, p. 80; see also Tucker, p. 121.
“staunchest and bravest defenders of British rule”: Smeaton, p. 1.
Karen killed 12,500 Japanese at the end of the war there: Morrison, p. 164; Seekins.
Japan’s casualties in Burma: Allen, p. 640.
Casualties in Hiroshima: Radiation Effects Research Foundation.
Karen delegation to England took a soap-factory tour: Lintner 2, p. 69.
Karen got some money: Morrison, p. 169.
“All loyalties have been discarded”: Hansard 1.
Aung San’s independence agreement was quick/not about minorities’ independence: Atlee-Aung San Agreement, quoted in Tucker, p. 120-121.
Aung San preached “autonomous states”: Tucker, pp. 151-152.
Aung San signed agreement with minorities: Panglong Agreement of 1947. You can read the whole thing at burmalibrary.org if you Google it. It’s pretty short.
Biography, strategy of Ba U Gyi: Keenan.
Karen held their own conference: Martin Smith, p. 83; Lintner 2, p. 70.
KNU boycotted elections: Martin Smith, p. 82.
Aung San’s assassination: Thant Myint-U, p. 254.
Misty-eyed British wives: This scene is painted in fantastic detail in Thant Myint-U, p. 257.
New prime minister opposed to autonomous ethnic states: Tucker, p. 152.
Post-independence revolt/meddling British weapons-smugglers: Thant Myint-U, pp. 259-262.
Karen and Burmans started killing each other: Martin Smith, pp. 111-112.
Karen police stopped keeping and started disturbing the peace: Tucker, p. 164; Martin Smith, p. 112.
Christmas and civilian killing of Karen: For varying accounts of these battles, see Martin Smith, p. 117; Tucker, p. 164; Falla, p. 26.
KNU stormed the treasury/Ne Win burned down a school: Martin Smith, p. 117.
Karen settlements attacked with machine guns and mortars: Martin Smith, p. 118.
Siege of Insein: Martin Smith, pp. 117-118, 138-140.
Hundreds killed in first 112 days of fighting: Martin Smith, p. 140, citing an estimate from the Times (London) from May 23, 1949.
Could still go to Rangoon movies: Aung Zaw 1.
And shoot at Karen fighters: Thant Myint-U, p. 263.
“Ba U Gyi was no terrorist”: Martin Smith, p. 144.
For a pretty accessible breakdown of material support/immigration laws, see UNHCR 6.
For an excellent report on the absurd inclusions and insidious results of the material-support laws—including the fate of the two conspiring Albany Iraqis—see Umansky.
No exceptions from material-support made for those under duress: UNHCR 6, p. 2. “Litigation is pending as to whether the statute contemplates a de minimis amount of support for it to be considered ‘material’ support and whether the statute includes an implied duress exception for those who are forced to provide assistance under threat of harm to themselves or others.
DHS and DOJ take the position that there is no de minimis amount of support and that there is no duress exception.”
The
sad story of the Sri Lankan fisherman: Umansky.
“clear and convincing evidence”: Real ID Act of 2005.
Laws criminalizing material support: Umansky.
V.
Leo Nichols gets a fax machine/gets sentenced/gets tortured/dies: Amnesty International 1; Moe Aye.
Crazy computer restrictions: 1996 Computer Science Development Law.
Internet cafés raided like meth labs: Yeni 1.
Café workers also required to capture screenshots, info from customers: Min Lwin 2.
Burma worst place in the world to blog: Committee to Protect Journalists 3.
Blogger sentenced to 20 years in prison: 28-year-old Nay Phone Latt. See Saw Yan Naing 3, or just Google him.
Humanitarian geeks in India and Germany: Crispin and Blum, respectively.
VI.
Eisenhower’s speech was given to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 16, 1953.
Bad-news Burma bandits, etc.: Thant Myint-U, p. 269.
“Communist control of Burma”/“British and American officials generally agree”: Quoted in McMahon, pp. 53-54.
KMT loses in China/recruits Shans in Burma: Thant Myint-U, pp. 273- 274.
CIA’s first secret war: Lintner 1.
United States supporting 15,000 KMT soldiers/trying to aid Korea effort/ scare Burma/even The NYT knows it: Kahin and Kahin, pp. 10-11. For way more information on the KMT intervention, see Taylor.
“racial and geographic units”: From the papers of former secretary of state John Foster Dulles, quoted in Kahin and Kahin, p. 10.
White NYC and DC (or French Foreign Legion?) guys killed: Lintner 2, p. 113.
US ambassador to Rangoon was lied to, resigned: Kahin and Kahin, p. 10.
US admitted role in KMT invasion a decade later: Thant Myint-U, p. 301; US Department of State 2.
US military aid to Burma: McMahon, Appendix 3; US Department of State 1, p. 106.
For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question Page 32