57 And I would remember that poignantly, dreadfully, oh yes I would, after I got back to the States and a hard fever brought me shaking and tearing my clothes off and pressing my chest to my bathroom floor, against cold winter tile, intermittently vomiting and hallucinating and hoping it wasn’t long-incubated cerebral malaria so that I would wake up alive.
58 Dr. Cynthia Maung, a rumored 2005 Nobel Peace Prize nominee, fled to Thailand after the ’88 demonstrations, carrying a stethoscope, traveling at night to avoid capture, setting up a wood-scrap safe house for student activists in Mae Sot. Karen leaders soon started sending their sick there. Now, twenty years later, she and her clinic treat more than ninety thousand cases a year, half migrants and refugees, half people who’ve just come all the way over from Burma to go to the doctor because the health care there sucks so bad. The clinic is a somewhat haphazard collection of buildings and hospital beds operating illegally and at the beneficence of the Thai government, swarming with gunshot victims and the malaria-stricken and women recovering from $4 Burmese back-alley abortions. I visited there once. There was a girl hobbling around on two prosthetic legs; she’d stepped on a land mine on her flight out of Burma with her boyfriend and had been hanging around the clinic for years. There were Western doctors come to assist for a while during their vacations. Also, there were cartoony public-service posters depicting AIDS as a menacing-looking purple monster and a strapping, personified condom with arms and eyes punching it in the face.
59 The greater likelihood of the educated and English-proficient to successfully complete the application process also causes serious brain drain in the Karen’s Asia-based population. Keeping camp schools staffed with qualified teachers is difficult, since 11 percent had already left by 2008, and an additional 65 percent said they were considering following them.
60 For a while, DHS agents were flying back and forth between Bangkok and Mae Sot to avoid the eight-hour, $8 bus—a matter of no small derision in Mae Sot’s rough-and-tumble and cash-strapped NGO community.
61 This, also, was a matter of no small derision among NGO workers.
62 Eh Soe’s potbelly was getting to him that day. He’d told me at breakfast that he was on a diet. “I’d like to reduce my weight,” he’d said. “I eat only few. And I will not drink any more beer.” He’d mistaken the disbelief on my face for disappointment. “Except for your party.” As an additional part of his new weight-loss regimen, and because, he told me, he was afraid that being inactive would cause him to get diseases, he also went and played soccer that night with Htoo Moo. I was sitting at the table on the front porch when they returned. “How was it?” I asked, and Eh Soe shook his head brusquely. He had mud on his shoes, whereas Htoo Moo was covered in it from waist to toe, his legs coated like an elephant’s. “That is a very terrible place,” Eh Soe said while Htoo Moo, disgusted, shook his head at what a pussy he was.
63 The UNHCR and Committee for Coordination of Services to Displaced Persons in Thailand report that the refugees’ endless boredom and confinement breed drug and alcohol addiction, as well as violent crime. DARE has some eighty employees trying to handle the drug problem in the camps, but unfortunately, no real legal body is responsible for the stateless camp dwellers, so KNU members can serve as de facto law. Sexual and gender-based violence generally go unpunished. The leaders are allegedly unfair to the very small minority of other minorities—Shan, Mon, for example—and Burmans in the camps. The UNHCR charges that in extreme cases the rebels have punished individuals by dragging them back into Burma and executing them. For the most part, Thai authorities don’t get involved, but when they do, it can be just more bad news: Thirty percent of assaults on refugees in camp are perpetrated by Thai security guards.
64 This, for the record, is true.
65 The KNU claims, and Walt corroborated, that it doesn’t recruit child soldiers—anymore. But back then, at least, if a kid wanted to take up arms and fight after he’d, say, seen his mom raped, he certainly wasn’t turned away, and there have additionally been rare reports in the past of children pressed into KNU service. (The Burma army, by contrast, was estimated to have seventy thousand child soldiers in 2002. Many of them, like the one Htoo Moo interviewed who’d been picked up at a bus stop, are conscripted.)
66 “Wait a minute,” Abby, who was sitting nearby when Walt told me this story on the front porch one day, had interrupted. “You know those crazy brothers?” “Yes, I know them,” Walt had said. “I stayed with them. I worshipped with them morning and night.” The crazy brothers were Luther and Johnny Htoo, tough, barefoot, lice-ridden, illiterate nine-year-old Karen twins who smoked a lot and were rumored to be magical and bullet-proof. The pair, fundamentalist Christians, started commanding the Soldiers of the Holy Mountain—“God’s Army” was a media construct—in 1997, when they led a victorious battle against the Burma army, supposedly at the behest of the Lord’s coming to them in a vision. They made huge news in 2000 when a group of their soldiers reportedly stormed a hospital in Thailand and took several hundred hostages before being slain by Thai commandos. Except that that was a media misstatement, also, as the attack was actually led by a (Burman) fringe group of the All Burma Students Democratic Front. But that was all later, anyway, after Walt left them.
67 Luther and Johnny Htoo ultimately gave up their arms as well and settled in Thailand, where they enjoyed playing guitar.
68 Although the British colonialists mocked the Burmans for also being submissive to women, they were, on paper, at least, not so much so. According to the Attasankhepa Vannaná Dammathát , or Institutes of Burmese Law, of 1882, “Of the three kinds of wives that may be put away”—wife like a murderess (?), wife like a thief, and wife like a master—“and the four kinds of wives that may be cherished”—wife like a sister, wife like a mother, wife like a slave, and wife like a friend—“the one that is like a slave is the most excellent.” Further, wives who were not good wives “may be corrected by beating or abusing them within the hearing of the public.”
69 I was, according to the above Burmese laws, exhibiting two of the kinds of blemishes of a woman: “taking intoxicating drinks” and “finding fault or quarrelling” with a man. (The other four are “failure to take an interest in household affairs and in her duties towards her husband, and idleness”; “frequenting the houses of others”; “intimacy with another man”; and “habitually sitting in the doorway of the house and looking at other men.”)
70 “The eight kinds of husbands whom the wife has the right to abuse are—
one who is excessively lascivious;
one who is ill for a length of time;
one who is very poor;
one who is very stupid;
one who is infirm;
one who is very old and sluggish;
one who is very lazy;
one who is physically incapable.
If the wife loses patience and abuses or reviles any of the said kinds of husbands, let her have the right of doing so.”
71 When Yale researchers released a sexual-behavior study of 190 societies in 1951, it reported that 4 percent didn’t kiss. The Balinese, for example, instead brought their faces close enough to breathe in each other’s warmth and smell. Some South African Thongans who caught sight of Europeans kissing a few decades earlier had exclaimed, “Look at these people! They suck each other! They eat each other’s saliva and dirt!” So though tonguing is older than Vatsyayana, it’s not universal, and my acting like everybody had always been doing it all the time wasn’t exactly justified. Even Kinsey, in his 1953 Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, found that as few as 80 percent of American women who’d had premarital sex had Frenched—which is to say that as many as 20 percent of them had had premarital sex without ever Frenching.
72 The Yale researchers had observed a similar foreplay among the Filipino Tinguian. FYI.
73 Tongue kissing, say behavioral scientists, is a modification of “a ritualized feeding gesture handed down to us by our primate ance
stors.” Which doesn’t sound that erotic, either.
74 Ta Mla was an animist, not a Christian. But in his own religion, if, say, an ancestor spirit or nature spirit is angered, even by accident, the defendant has to figure out what he did, which may require chicken bones and/or a shaman, and then fix it, which may require sacrificing an animal, and/or a shaman’s calling Ta Mla’s soul back to his body and quickly securing it there with bracelets made of string. That sort of spirituality required a lot more work, and resources he didn’t really have anymore. So sometimes, Ta Mla went to church.
75 “Supporters” and even victims of plenty of other terrorist groups are still liable for contributing to them, voluntarily or otherwise. As of late 2009, the Sri Lankan fisherman who gave the Tamil Tigers money for his own ransom had yet to be granted asylum.
76 Here both families were exhibiting one of the classic symptoms of culture shock laid out in the Comic Sans text of the English-translation cultural orientation book: “Withdrawal and avoidance of contact with people from the new culture.”
77 That’s another symptom: “Glorifying the native culture and emphasizing the negative in the new culture.”
78 Burma’s response, per usual, was to trash-talk: Other countries, the government said, “should refrain from interfering in internal affairs that will affect peace and security of the region” or else “possibly affect mutual understanding and friendly relations.”
79 Adopting that constitution through a national referendum was step four of the junta’s “Seven-Step Roadmap” to democracy, which it unveiled in 2003 to calm people down after its thugs seemingly tried to assassinate Aung San Suu Kyi. The fifth step is the upcoming election. The final destination, of course, is the bliss of “a modern, developed and democratic nation.”
80 Ditto The Washington Post, which I have additional affection for because they clearly make an effort to cover Burma. And The Irrawaddy, the Burmese exile paper, does work that, in addition to filling a critical reporting void, is incredibly reliable.
81 FYI, those were fact-checked against only my own notes. As for interviews with the BA guys, though there was no reason to disbelieve anything they said, when possible we still checked the details of their stories against other survivors’ interviews or published accounts. They always matched up.
Copyright © 2010 by Mac McClelland. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McClelland, Mac.
For us surrender is out of the question : a story from Burma’s never-ending war / Mac
McClelland.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-593-76378-7
1. McClelland, Mac. 2. Women political activists—Burma—Biography. 3. Political
activists—Burma—Biography. 4. Americans—Burma—Biography. 5. Burma—History—1948
6. Burma—Politics and government—1988- 7. Ethnic conflict—Burma. 8. Social conflict—
Burma. 9. Burma—Social conditions. I. Title. DS530.53.M37A3 2010
959.105—dc22
2009043448
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