For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question

by Mac McClelland

  17 The filters are effective indeed, though very low tech: 87 percent clay, 13 percent rice husk, pressed and fired and painted with colloidal silver. Though they cost less than ten bucks to make, water that has passed through them is safe enough for even my pampered North American gut. Perfected, based on a pre-Columbian American design in the ’80s and distributed internationally by US-based Potters for Peace beginning in the ’90s, the filters have eliminated diarrhea in test households in Thai refugee camps and been spread worldwide through UNICEF, Doctors Without Borders, and the International Organization for Migration to curb the death toll of the four thousand people a day killed by diarrhea from unsanitary water. The NGO Burmese Youth Project had given BA these two filters for free, before its initiative to mass-produce them for refugee camps was shut down for lack of funding.

  18 It was the cause of some sectarian territorialism. As one Boston pastor wrote, emphasis his, “This field belongs appropriately to the American Baptist churches.”

  19 A Muslim also visited a Karen village in 1816 and gave them a book he said contained writings about the true God, but he didn’t stay long, and he wasn’t so much a white guy.

  20 I asked Htan Dah once how tall he was, and he responded, “Who knows?” The practical answer was that he was a little bit shorter than I. But I said reflexively, stupidly, “You should know how tall you are.” For what? So he could get on a roller coaster? Get a driver’s license? Tell a doctor at an annual checkup?

  21 It was a small but consistent form of resistance, reminding yourself and anyone who heard you that the government that changed the name is illegitimate, and sometimes giving you an excuse to explain the existence of that illegitimate government when someone asked why you called it Burma instead of Myanmar. The United Nations and The New York Times may have adopted the name change, but The Washington Post and even the United States government had not. Most important, our housemates—and the organization we were working for—called it Burma, and if that was their call, that was the call for us.

  22 Which is to say KNLA-friendly. Though technically the KNU is the political wing and the KNLA is the armed wing of the KNU, KNU leaders are commanders in the KNLA and have guns, and KNLA soldiers are in the KNU, so “KNU” is used colloquially to refer both to the political wing and the army.

  23 See?

  24 “Girls, girls; these Karen are lovely, hair bunned with pins comely, so fair, decked with pins richly, at great cost. Their faces talced, they’re so, so demure.

  “Frisky dances; the girls’ glad steps whirr. But, if you approach, bad odour—robed in homespun smocks.”

  25 Like Htan Dah’s, That Khaing’s is a less-simply-transliterated name: The pronunciation is fast and sounds like the “Tha” in “Thatcher” plus “Khai” (rhymes with “lie”).

  26 I wasn’t the first white person with this idea. And the volunteer who’d carried through had just been frustrated when the guys had insisted on eating their pizza and spaghetti over rice.

  27 In a survey of the Burmese refugees in camps on the Thai-Burma border, the percentage of respondents with “no religion” was zero.

  28 The minimum standard of calorie consumption set by the UNHCR and World Food Bank is twenty-one hundred per day. The rations provided by the TBBC provide twenty-one hundred and two. As an adult in camp, in one month you’re given to eat exactly 15 kilograms of rice, 250 grams of fortified flour, 750 grams of fish paste, 330 grams of salt, 1 kilogram of mung beans, a liter of cooking oil, 40 grams of dried chilies, and 125 grams of sugar. Unless you’re pregnant—in which case you get a little extra produce and eggs—or a severely malnourished child—in which case you also get milk powder.

  29 Ta Eh Thaw’s was a cheap, jangly incarnation of “Another Saturday Night.” Eh Soe’s was “Jingle Bells.” “Nice ringtone, dude,” I said the first time I heard it. He, missing my sarcasm, had smiled eagerly and lifted his eyebrows and asked, “Do you like it?” “No.” I felt bad later when he changed it.

  30 Eh Soe admitted also that his job was at least better than Htoo Moo’s, because, he said, laughing again, “If you go into a village with a camera, the SPDC will kill you.”

  31 They even fell prey to one that killed two soldiers inside a week. After the first man died, his comrades set a trap and waited in a stalking platform in a tree for the man-eater, which did show up, but only to eat one of the hunting soldiers’ heads right there in the little tree house they’d built.

  32 The pilots were also advised to avoid Burma natives because they are unfriendly and “superstitious and suspicious,” but if forced to interact with them, try to win them over with string tricks like cat’s cradle rather than threatening them with “terrorist methods.”

  33 Dave’s wife, having found the Karen to be incredibly generous regardless of their situation, wouldn’t have it any other way. “The gifts they gave were of themselves,” she explained in an interview. “Their time, energy, and love. In my experience in the West it is easier to go to the store and buy a trinket as a gift. For this reason I have chosen to raise my children in this war. The influence of these people is something I have never experienced anywhere else.” Sometimes the girls go on the missions, but the lifestyle isn’t all rough: Dave has implemented the use of pack animals, and subsequently kept the girls in ponies. Also, they got to learn to swim the fun way. You can see Dave chucking the youngest daughter into a raging river by the seat of her underpants in a video the family made to submit to the “Postcards From You” segment of PBS’s Arthur cartoon.

  34 “Burma is a country that has never known, and can never know, famine,” posited colonial administrator James George Scott, “except as a direct result of civil war and misrule.”

  35 “Superstitious” is not a pejorative in Burma; it is, true to the Air Force survival guide’s assertion, a way of life. Even in the early centuries, prosperous cities featured twelve gates, one for each sign of the zodiac. Said Scott on the Burmese’s preoccupation with astrology and luck, “Tuesday and Saturday are bad days to do anything. If you commence an extensive work on either of these days, you will soon die. . . . Beyond this, men born on certain days are exposed to dangers in particular months. Children born on Wednesday or Friday ought to be very careful what they do in the months of May, September, and January. The best thing is for them to do nothing, and in Burma they act on the precept with great zeal.”

  36 To their credit, the colonialists didn’t always handle Burmese rabble-rousing so ignominiously. Students launched major protests, for example, in response to the Rangoon University Act of 1920, which made higher education less available to the masses. At times throughout the early 1900s, citizens were able to peacefully organize, rally, and protest. It’s a right they haven’t had since, for nearly a hundred years.

  37 The same year that the name changed, a couple of Burmese companies known to be strongly connected to, if not straight-up part of, the junta hired Washington PR and lobbying firms, causing speculation that the switch was the work of American image-make-over ingenuity. When I asked a senior vice president of one of the firms, Jefferson Waterman International, he insisted that though JWI published newsletters about how Burma is totally swell and contracted to set up meetings with US government figures, his firm’s consultants “don’t change names. We wouldn’t tell a government to change their name.” (In case you’re wondering, the adverb that would best describe how this information was asserted to me is “angrily.”)

  38 Not that the journalists themselves are necessarily free from the danger. One American magazine columnist who was secretly (he thought) interviewing villagers in 1999 woke up drugged and naked in an alley, beaten and covered in urine and feces.

  39 “But,” he added as he was telling me about his reservations, “we must work or it won’t change.”

  40 Thailand reportedly earns a billion baht ($28 million) a month from the trade between Myawaddy and Mae Sot.

  41 Legally, it has to. Burmese movies can’t contain any footage
that might make the country look bad. Scenes that depict poverty, for example, are against regulations.

  42 Rambo would be an appropriate metaphor for the junta, too, so it’s the ultimate clash of the titans when he goes up against the Tatmadaw in part IV. (Spoiler alert!) It turns out to be kind of a draw, really, since Rambo saves a couple of abducted missionaries and Karen civilians and cuts a few scores of Burmese soldiers into so many disgusting pieces with a giant machine gun but neither ends the Karen war nor upends the big bad regime. Still, the movie was banned inside Burma, where, naturally, it became an underground hit.

  43 In 2009, Than Shwe was down one spot from No. 3 the year prior, outranked by Zimbabwe’s Mugabe, Sudan’s Omar Al-Bashir, and North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il. But he still held evil reign over King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, Hu Jintao of China, Sayyid Ali Khamenei of Iran, Isayas Afewerki of Eritrea, Gurbanguly Berdymuhammedov of Turkmenistan, and the terrorism-funding and torture-loving Muammar al-Qaddafi of Libya.

  44 JENNIFER ANISTON (to aide, outside a movie-lot trailer, frustrated): I’ve been waiting in there for over two hours, this is costing us way too much money, please, what does he need? A soy maté latte, what? What, are there chemicals in there he can’t breathe? Okay, you got the AC off, what, so then tell me what the problem is. WOODY HARRELSON (throwing open trailer door): I’m not coming out until Burma is free!

  45 “Nineteen years ago, the Burmese people chose Aung San Suu Kyi to be their next leader. And for most of those 19 years she has been kept under house arrest by the military junta that now runs the country. She is the world’s only incarcerated Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. . . .

  “We must not stand by as she is silenced once again. Now is the time for the United Nations and the entire international community to speak clearly, and with one voice: Free Aung San Suu Kyi.

  “In support, George Clooney, Sec. Madeleine Albright, Wes Anderson, Drew Barrymore, David Beckham, Bono, Matthew Broderick, Sandra Bullock, James Carville, Michael Chabon, Daniel Craig, John Cusack, Matt Damon, Robert De Niro, Dave Eggers, Peter Gabriel, Jake Gyllenhaal, Václav Havel, Helen Hunt, Anjelica Huston, Scarlett Johansson, Nicole Kidman, Ashton Kutcher, Norman Lear, Madonna, Mary Matalin, Sen. John & Cindy McCain, Rose McGowan, Orhan Pamuk, Sarah Jessica Parke [sic], Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Robert Rodriguez, Salman Rushdie, Meg Ryan, Liev Schreiber, George Soros, Steven Spielberg, Meryl Streep, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Naomi Watts, Prof. Elie Wiesel, Owen Wilson”

  46 In 2008, despite the jobless and prospectless migrants flooding back into the country after being laid off in Malaysia and Thailand, Burma’s prime minister insisted that the new global recession would have no effect on his homeland. State media echoed the claim, in an article titled “We Remain Unperturbed,” that the Burmese would fare far better than the Americans, who “are a people who are extravagant and do not hesitate to buy an elephant if it is available on credit.”

  47 Then-Assistant Secretary of State of the Bureau for International Narcotics Matters (and “Just Say No” architect) Ann Wrobleski thought that raining the chemical—which was under EPA review at the time—all over Burmese hill tribes was the best way to get rid of poppies. Incidentally, you may remember the Washington PR firm Jefferson Waterman International, which had ties with the State Law and Order Restoration Council when it became the State Peace and Development Council in ’97. That’s where Wrobleski went on to work, first as a lobbyist from ’91 to ’97, and then as the firm’s president.

  48 The current dam projects, for example, are causing rampant displacement and abuse and environmental destruction. And Daewoo was the subject of a complaint that it condones human rights abuses around one of its gas projects, in violation of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development code it’s sworn to. Although, “less conscientious” is still sort of relative: In 1996, with the help of EarthRights International, fifteen villagers from Burma sued Unocal—now part of Chevron—for being party to government soldiers’ raping, murdering, torturing, and enslaving civilians, tens of thousands of whom were displaced, during the construction of the gas line. It was the first non-Holocaust international human rights case charging a corporation with complicity in foreign-government brutality that ended in a cash settlement. (Though the actual amount was confidential, it was, according to one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers, “more money than these people will ever know what to do with.”)

  49 “To all town and village thugyees [leaders], heads of cavalry, heads of the Daings, shield bearers, heads of jails, heads of gold and silver revenues, mine workers, settlement officers, heads of forests, and to all royal subjects and inhabitants of the royal empire: Those heretics, the English kalás [barbarians], having most harshly made demands calculated to bring about the impairment and destruction of our religion, the violation of our national traditions and customs, and the degradation of our race, are making a show and preparation as if about to wage war with our State. They have been replied to in conformity with the usages of great nations, and in words which are just and regular. If, notwithstanding, these heretic kalás should come and in any way attempt to molest or disturb the State, his Majesty, who is watchful that the interests of our religion and our State shall not suffer, will himself march forth with his generals, captains, and lieutenants, with large forces of infantry, artillery, elephanterie, and cavalry, by land and by water, and with the might of his army will efface these heretic kalás and conquer and annex their country.”

  50 In case you want some background info on this ethnic-group-to-watch—and trust me, you do: The Wa are former headhunters (official open season was March to April) who claim as their ancestors not, like most peoples, gods or majestic sea creatures or rainbows or whatever, but slimy tadpoles and ogres. In colonial times, one European visitor to this mountain-dwelling collection of tribes said that they were so dirty that the only thing that kept them from getting dirtier was that more dirt couldn’t stick to how much dirt was already on their bodies. They were naked. They were pretty much the closest existing things on earth to actual bogeymen, and the British were terrified of them and left them largely alone, as the Wa couldn’t guarantee they wouldn’t kill white people who wandered into their territory, their towheads being quite the catch on the headhunting scene. In the late ’60s, they were enlisted by China and the Communist Party of Burma to help wrest a bunch of Burmese territory from our old buddies the KMT. With these fierce warriors on their side, the commies took and held thousands of square miles—all the way until 1989. Now the Wa just have the biggest nonstate army in Burma, which they fund by running probably the biggest drug army in the world, a commander of which is wanted by the US government for druglording. So if you want to collect $2 million from the State Department, find out where Wei Hsueh-kang is.

  51 Not to be entirely outdone by Afghanistan, in 2007 Burma cultivated 29 percent more opium than it had the previous year. Since Burma is also one of the world’s largest amphetamine producers (which the State Department says could turn the Golden Triangle into the “Ice Triangle”) and the second-largest producer in East and Southeast Asia of a key raw material in ecstasy—which, unbeknownst to most people, comes from Southeast Asian trees—the regime was recently honored by the United States as one of only three governments in the world that “‘failed demonstrably’ to meet its international counternarcotics obligations.”

  52 Though most papers weren’t allowed to run President Barack Obama’s inauguration speech. One that was couldn’t put it on the front page and had to cut some of it, like this part: “To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”

  53 “I speak Sgaw Karen, Pwo Karen,” Eh Soe said to me once, counting the languages on his fingers, “Burmese, English, Thai. . . . How many languages do you speak?” When I said one, plus a little French, he shook his head sadly and said, “Oh, you a
re very stupid.”

  54 Also into proverbs: FBR’s Dave. As he once told an assembly of ethnic leaders from Burma, “One small dog cannot fight a tiger. But many dogs can do something.” He also has a knack for metaphor, once comparing Burma to The Lord of the Rings: “Mordor is the SPDC, and guys like us are hobbits. We’re just little guys trying to do some good. On the surface it seems like Mordor has all the strength and power and might. But if our fellowship of hobbits stays united, good will defeat evil in the end.”

  55 This is particularly true as far as electricity is concerned, as Burmese say their country is the blackout capital of the region. Even in Rangoon, residents often get only a few hours of electricity a day. Outside the old capital, some cities don’t receive any state electricity at all, but buy it from private companies for reportedly more than ten times government prices, and still only for a few hours a day. The only place in the country that receives reliable round-the-clock power is the crazy new deserted capital in the middle of nowhere, which even boasts a zoo, and with a climate-controlled penguin habitat.

  56 This sort of country-crossing was what kept regional malaria workers on their toes. These days, the hardworking staff of the Shoklo Malaria Research Unit—the ones who determined that transmission happens in the early evening—annually treats thirty to forty thousand cases of malaria in the political badlands of the Thai-Burma border, plus NGOs treating half that again inside the camps, those cases mostly due to back-and-forth like Eh Kaw’s. On an annual budget of $2 million, SMRU keeps the transmission Burma breeds and does nothing to combat way down, preventing the epidemic from spreading. And it’s a good thing, because this malaria is the most drug-resistant malaria in the world. And because this is where malaria comes from: Genetic testing has shown that a resistant strain plaguing Africa was carried there from here, and has gradually spread across the entire continent.