Giants of the Monsoon Forest

by Giants of the Monsoon Forest- Living

  The Burmese state bureaucracy, by contrast, has a proven track record of directly managing elephant-based labor in the forest, through its unique system of teak-harvesting villages. But the future of the government elephant logging villages is also uncertain. As Burma’s economy opens and becomes more susceptible to global market forces, the Burmese timber industry seems likely to become more mechanized. If elephants no longer contribute to the industry’s profitability, then industry profits will likely stop flowing toward elephant welfare, instead going toward better machinery and improved hard infrastructure. In such a future, logging will not be able to support the human-elephant working relationship in the forest. As we’ll see in the next two chapters, a different model, built on the use of elephants for transportation rather than for logging, may be more promising.

  Chapter 8

  PENCIL LINES ON A MAP

  THE WORLD’S LAST BUREAUCRATICALLY ADMINISTERED system of elephant-based transportation is run by the Kachin Independence Army, or KIA, in the far north of Burma. Here dozens of elephants link camps, villages, secret manufacturing sites, and other strategic locations otherwise separated by seasonal flooding and roadless forest. As we’ve seen, the presence of “fugitive” peoples avoiding powerful states helps explain the persistence of elephant domestication in this part of the world. The KIA’s elephant transport convoys illustrate this dynamic in an especially pronounced way.

  The KIA formed in response to the Burmese military takeover of the country in the early 1960s. A quasi-government (the governing counterpart is officially called the Kachin Independence Organization, or KIO), the KIA has controlled significant swaths of the Kachin Hills for the past half century. As of the 2010s, its elephant teams are still very active. Sending elephant convoys through the jungle allows the group to move supplies beyond the view of the Burmese army, or Tatmadaw, whose ground vehicles can travel only on the region’s sparse network of roads. I came to think of these furtive routes, which elephants and rebels follow together in the forest, as like so many erasable pencil lines on a map. While the Tatmadaw’s jeeps and trucks have to follow the map’s inked-in permanent thoroughfares, the paths of elephant convoys are always flexible and movable, leaving hardly any trace of themselves.

  The KIA’s use of elephants for transportation, rather than for logging, is significant. As we’ve seen, elephant logging presents a serious limitation: by definition, it is destructive of forest cover. In order to be profitable, especially in the short term, logging has to be ecologically destructive. But elephants who carry cargo and passengers across rivers and forests do not present this problem.

  This means the KIA has unique knowledge about how to organize environmentally friendly elephant work. In turn, its elephant system ought to be of great interest to governments throughout the Asian elephant’s natural range: in India, Indonesia, Thailand, the rest of Burma, and so forth. These governments might bristle at the more subversive aspects of the Kachin militia’s logistical network, but they all administer territory that suffers a paralyzing monsoon season, when roads become flooded or obstructed by mudslides. Indeed, the severity of monsoon is precisely what turns the Kachin forest into the KIA’s political refuge, inaccessible to the Tatmadaw’s motorized transport. Elephants’ off-road abilities are strong regardless of what makes the roads impassible, be it weather or warfare. So why shouldn’t governments throughout South and Southeast Asia institute their own departments of elephant-borne logistics?

  Thus far, governmental authorities have overlooked the KIA’s elephant system—and so, for that matter, has the international elephant conservation community. But knowledge about what exists in the present shapes our assumptions about what is possible in the future. I had a notion like this on my mind when I traveled to Myitkyina, the main city in Kachin State, in 2015. There I spoke with a KIA colonel, Nan, who had several decades of experience leading the KIA’s elephant transport convoys. In part, I wanted to better understand this “half-wild” transport system that elephants and rebels have created together over the last six decades. Do the elephants have freedom in the forest each night? What cargo are they carrying? How have the secret elephant trails interlocked with the region’s wider geopolitics? In addition to piecing together this picture of what the elephant transport teams have been doing, I hoped to gain a better sense of what they could be doing—that is, of their potential.

  Warfare has caused much human suffering in Kachin State. In recent years, the conflict has accelerated, as the Tatmadaw has surged into the forest to bring more territory under its control. Between 2011 and 2018, over one hundred thousand people, mainly rural Kachins, have fled the violence and destruction, either to other countries or to displaced-persons camps inside Burma.1 I owe a great debt to those who, despite the surrounding circumstances, kept me out of harm’s way and found time to speak with me. The elephant culture of the Kachin Hills is one of many aspects of life here that deserves to last. Hopefully, the near future will bring the people of this region peace, justice, and survival.

  “MY FAVORITE MAHOUT WAS a Hkamti, actually, not a Kachin,” Colonel Nan, who led the KIA’s elephant brigade in the Hukawng Valley during the 1980s, told me through our talented translator, Nkumgam. The three of us were having tea. The rain had let up outside, and the sun was momentarily peering in through the window.2

  “His name was Mong Shwe,” the colonel continued, “the apple of my eye. He was the most careful with the elephants and always knew what to do when they were sick. The elephants always had a good relationship with him. He’s since passed away.”

  The colonel paused and drank his tea, reflecting on this part of his life.

  “Are there still Hkamti mahouts in the KIA?” I asked.

  “No, it’s all Kachin now. The Hkamti mahouts today are all in civilian work. It’s not like before. Some of the Hkamtis are very good mahouts, but our mahouts are good too. Not all the brigade mahouts are soldiers—some are civilian mahouts who help us during certain times of the year.”

  Nan had grown up in an area of southern Kachin State where there were relatively few elephants. Like Xuan Thieu of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, he had never worked with elephants before, when he suddenly found himself leading a rebel army’s elephant brigade. In the early 1980s, the KIA’s high command decided to expand its elephant-based transport operations through the Kachin forest country. One look at a map would explain why: Kachin State was the most heavily forested region of Burma and had relatively few year-round roads. Nan was assigned to the largest elephant brigade of all, which ranged in size from twenty to thirty elephants. This group’s main area was in the Hukawng Valley, where the best mahouts were either Hkamtis or from a Kachin tribe called the Jinghpaws.

  The Hkamtis and the Jinghpaws historically alternated between friendship and violence. Nan had likely been picked for the assignment because he was neither Jinghpaw nor Hkamti but hailed from a smaller and less powerful Kachin tribe in southern Kachin State. Furthermore, while the Hkamti mahouts in his brigade were Buddhist, and the Jinghpaws mostly Baptist, Nan was from a smaller Christian denomination. He was well positioned to serve as an arbiter, a neutral force in a potentially polarized situation. Certainly, the command hadn’t sent him to the transport brigade for his elephant skills.

  I had many questions but let the conversation pause so Nan could rest. We had more tea. Nkumgam, brilliant with languages but poor in geography, looked with some confusion at a map I’d brought, onto which Nan had been penciling in various routes taken by convoys of elephants carrying food and arms. We were in the main Myitkyina office of the KIA’s governing counterpart, the KIO.

  It felt odd to me that this office existed at all. It had been set up as part of a treaty between the KIO and the Burmese government.3 But the treaty had collapsed, and the Tatmadaw and the rebels were currently fighting. I’d been stuck in Myitkyina for over a week, waiting for the fighting to subside.

  Across the street was a large grassy area, the Manau park. Manau is a
n important Kachin cultural festival, and at the center of the park was a colorful performance stand built in front of six large decorated poles, each around thirty feet high. These high poles were painted in bright reds, yellows, and blues, and capped by a carving of a stylized hornbill or crossed swords. The aesthetic called to mind the totem poles of the Pacific Northwest. The park had been constructed recently, on a spot where an old river oxbow, long since filled in for paddy fields, met the Irrawaddy. Upstream was the leafy Shatapru neighborhood and a restaurant on the water specializing in delicious spiced satays and ginger sautéed with chilis and mountain herbs. Downstream was the city’s main market area, which was shaded beneath hundreds of rainbow umbrellas. River fish were for sale, as were snails and periwinkles. A hunter was selling deer skulls and bear claws. Shan seamstresses were fitting and selling clothes.

  Surrounding the market area were several large religious structures: a Buddhist monastery, a Baptist compound, a Roman Catholic church, a gated mosque, and a large Hindu temple overlooking the water. I was told that due to the fighting, the city’s economy had stalled, but everywhere people seemed busy shopping for groceries, phones, and motorcycles. There were more women out in the streets than I’d seen in other cities in this part of the world—puttering along on scooters, going to work or school or running errands. Many of the men were somewhere else. There was clearly some additional input of wealth.

  “There are three elephant groups,” Nan continued. “One is with the Second Brigade, in the Hukawng Valley. Then there’s the First, which is near the Chinese border, and the Fifth, which is to the south. There are maybe fifty or sixty elephants overall, I don’t know the exact number these days. The Second always has the most elephants. At any given time, most of the elephants are around the Hukawng Valley and the Hpakant jade mines, or else they’re near Laiza.” Laiza was the Kachin Independence Organization’s de facto capital, on the Chinese border.

  The colonel explained the organization of the transport missions. Each mission usually consists of three or four elephants. A brigade has fifteen to thirty elephants total, but never assigns a large number of elephants to a single convoy, for fear of attracting attention. Occasionally a convoy has to cross a busy road, like the Ledo Road in the Hukawng Valley, and waits until nightfall to slip across, one elephant at a time.

  Nan recalled some memorable brigade elephants from his youth. “One of my favorites was Lah Ong, a Kachin name. He’d been donated by a villager near Shadazup, at the entry to the Hukawng Valley, in 1965. He was sensitive to human words and always knew to be extra careful and diligent when he was told that the enemy was approaching. Even with a huge amount of ammunition on his back, he could be incredibly quiet while moving in the forest.” My mind drifted to Pak Chan, the elephant who moved ammunition on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. “Lah Ong’s prime was when I was brigade leader, in the 1980s, but he stayed with the brigade until he died, in 2009.”

  The dangers and challenges of the terrain were manifold: fast-moving rivers, steep slopes, landslides, mud, quicksand, mosquitoes, and leeches. “Some of the places we go in the independence army, the things we do, we really couldn’t do it without the elephants. There are a lot of villages in the Hukawng Valley area and elsewhere that you can’t get to by jeep or even on a dirt bike. And the number of inaccessible places like that only expands during the rainy season.”

  The brigade elephants carried an impressive array of cargo items: Nan mentioned clean water, tent supplies, rice, clothes, arms and ammunition, forest gems like jade, gold, and amber, medical supplies, papers, appliances such as radios, and construction materials. They gave rides to civilian passengers sometimes, from village to village. Nan remembered an incident where, wishing to be helpful, a brigade had tried to carry a sick villager on elephant-back toward Tanai, the one real town in the whole Hukawng Valley, so this man could find a clinic there. “The rocking back and forth of the elephant made him feel even sicker, so he had to get down,” the colonel recalled. “We had to be careful about that—some people get motion sickness on elephants.”

  Like all the mahouts of the Trans-Patkai and the Burmese logging forests, the mahouts of the KIA brigades release their elephants into the forest each night. I asked Nan if it ever worried him, watching the brigade’s logistical lifeline wander off into the jungle every evening. “What if an elephant ran away? Couldn’t the brigade become stranded?”

  The brigade mahouts tend to be more concerned about thieves than runaways, he explained. To discourage elephant thefts, the soldiers mark the elephants’ ears with a small hole, or with a star on their rump. “But our elephants aren’t so hard to track in the morning. They wear a long chain and a bell”—like those at the government logging camps. “I remember that sometimes, when we knew the Tatmadaw was nearby, we’d stuff the bells with mud and leaves to silence them. But”—he leaned back in his chair, holding his tea—“at night it would sometimes happen that a wild herd would cross paths with our route. This is what really created the problems with losing elephants. Our elephants would follow the wild ones, in search of a mate. But even this wasn’t the main problem, because they’d always come back. If they tried to join the wild herd, the herd would reject them.” The bigger issue, he explained, was that the brigade’s males would start fights with the wild males. “My mahouts’ feeling was that it’s good to let the males fight a little bit, because otherwise our own males would take out their aggression on us. But if the fight became too intense, we had to intervene.”

  Staying with the theme of mating, Nan turned to the issue of pregnancies. These could be inconvenient, he explained, because “a female who is well into her pregnancy can’t do the brigade work.” If she was a KIA elephant, she would go to the KIA’s elephant camps in the forest, where soldier-mahouts would raise the calf. But if she was an elephant lent to the brigade by a civilian mahout (likely from Hpakant or the Hukawng Valley) for a short-term mission, the calf belonged to the mahout and would receive tutelage in the mahout’s own village.

  Musth presented another inconvenience. As in the logging camps, the KIA mahouts give extra time off in the forest to adult males showing the “black tears” of hormonal aggression. Brigade mahouts tried to anticipate periods of musth so that males who seemed due were not sent on sensitive transport missions.

  I still had many questions for the colonel about KIA transport elephants, but he had office work to attend to. He finished his tea. We agreed to continue the discussion the next day over lunch. But that night the Tatmadaw shelled several Kachin villages in southern Kachin State, not far from where the colonel had grown up. He became busy and had no time to reminisce about elephants. Our follow-up meeting was delayed by several weeks.

  THE WAR BETWEEN the Tatmadaw and the KIA is nearly six decades old, by some measures the longest-running conflict in the world today. But the origins of the conflict date to the time of British colonialism in Burma. During the nineteenth century the British won all three Anglo-Burmese wars and brought the populous valley sections of the country under their direct control. They recognized early on, however, that the Kachin Hills would be difficult to seize through military force. In the 1880s, a geographic scout on a British expedition to the Kachin Hills described the road as surrounded on all sides by shadowy mountain fastnesses, full of bandits and intimidating tribespeople. Here, wrote the scout, “any three might make a new Thermopylae”—a reference to the ancient Greek battle where a small group of Spartans reputedly held off a much larger invading army of Persians in a narrow mountain pass. The geographic report noted that many of the people of the Kachin Hills had elephants and appeared to “breed” them.4 Such phrasing was typical of how British colonists described Burmese forest mahouts’ practice of letting their elephants roam at night.

  By the early twentieth century, British colonists had established friendly relations with the inhabitants of the Kachin Hills, mainly by ceding local authority and resources to tribal and clan leaders. The colonial government granted pa
rtial control of the region’s lucrative jade mines to Kachin duwas, or chiefs.5 British military and police had presence up the Irrawaddy to Myitkyina, but beyond this the only British military outpost was at Fort Hertz, in an area that was mostly Hkamti rather than Kachin. The main Kachin areas—the Hukawng Valley and a large hill range at the headwaters of the Irrawaddy called the Triangle—were left firmly in control of the Kachin elites.

  Christian missionaries also reinforced friendly Anglo-Kachin relations during the colonial period, though the missionaries were mostly American. In the decades preceding World War II, then, Kachins were redefining themselves around experiences with the missionaries and with the English-speaking world—and against the dominant Burmese culture associated with the lower Irrawaddy Valley.6 This trend all but ensured that, with the outbreak of war, the loyalties of the Kachin duwas were almost entirely with the British, not with the Japanese. In 1942 the leaders of Burma’s major anticolonial, pro-independence faction sided with the Japanese, while the Kachins remained aligned with the British. This Anglo-Kachin coalition was essential for the elephant-mounted escapes at the Chaukan and Pangsau passes. Rungdot and Maggie were both Kachin elephants.