Giants of the Monsoon Forest

by Giants of the Monsoon Forest- Living

  Other groups in Burma were unsettled in their loyalties. The Japanese relied on ethnic Burmese, Karen, and Mon mahouts for their elephant-based operations, which included logging, railroad construction, and the invasion of Manipur. But these mahouts changed sides as soon as the war’s tide changed, as was the case in late 1944. Aung San (the father of Aung San Suu Kyi), one of the principal leaders of the Burmese independence movement, was able to shift the movement’s allegiances just when the Allies’ fortunes were beginning to turn. The switch and its impeccable timing reflected Aung San’s political cunning and proved highly effective in positioning his own anticolonial faction as the natural heir to national power.7

  In 1948 Burma achieved independence from the British Empire. This would prove a pivotal historical moment for Kachins. Some British statesmen proposed to the tribal leaders in Kachin State that the area remain a British protectorate rather than joining independent Burma. However, the new Burmese state’s constitution offered good terms to ethnic minorities like the Kachins. In addition to establishing a parliamentary democratic system, the constitution declared that country’s seven major ethnic minority areas could hold a referendum within a decade, to determine if they wanted to stay in the Burmese union or not. The excitement of independence was in the air, and just as Aung San had anticipated, the British Empire’s panicked retreat out of the country in 1942 had cost it a tremendous amount of legitimacy. The Kachin leaders chose to join the union of Burma.8

  In many ways, the 1950s were a golden age for Burma. In addition to having democratic elections, it was, during that time, the most economically developed country in all of Southeast Asia. Simmering beneath the surface, though, were intractable tensions, especially between the country’s majority-Burmese ruling elites and the ethnic minority areas. Such tensions kept the country’s fledgling parliamentary system in a perpetual state of dysfunction. Burma’s hopeful but crisis-prone postwar period came to an end in 1962, with a coup and the installation of a military junta. The referendums on ethnic minority independence never took place.9

  In response to the coup, numerous insurgencies broke out in the country’s peripheral highlands, lasting in several cases through the 1980s, and in Kachin State’s case to the present day. Several of these insurgencies, especially in the Shan Plateau, one of the world’s major poppy-growing areas, were partially financed through the opium trade. Frequently, the central government’s counteroperations were financed this way as well. But much of the financing for the Kachin insurgency came from jade. The jade, though mostly borne by truck, is essential for understanding why, to this day, the Kachin militants are so reliant upon their unique convoys of trained elephants.10

  VIRTUALLY ALL the world’s high-quality jade comes from Kachin State’s Hpakant mining region, which lies at the headwaters of the Uyu River (and just a few hills over from Mong Cho’s elephant camp). Hpakant jade is in great demand in China, where it holds enormous cultural value. Jade has nowhere near the same significance in the West as it does in China, and so for many Westerners, the scale and intensity of Chinese demand for Kachin jade, and the ways this demand shapes the region’s geopolitics, may be hard to imagine. A 2015 study, reported on by the BBC and the Guardian, estimated that $30 billion worth of black-market jade flows from Kachin State into China annually. The number is astounding. For comparison, Burma’s formally reported, non-black-market GDP in 2015 was $60 billion.11

  The jade mines are geographically immense: mile after mile of once hilly, forested landscape has been turned inside out by great fleets of bulldozers and backhoes. The operation is at the scale of Chinese industrialism in the twenty-first century and stands in disorienting contrast to the traditional agrarian and forest-based livelihoods just a valley over. These mines are mostly owned and controlled by Burma’s ruling military circles: generals and former generals and generals’ family members and so on. Much of the jade wealth flows to the new Burmese capital of Naypyidaw. Some of the mines, however, are owned by Kachin people, and so a significant amount of wealth also flows toward Myitkyina, which explains why, in spite of the fighting, the city’s economy has remained relatively strong.

  Between 1994 and 2011, when the Tatmadaw and the KIA observed an official cease-fire, the Burmese and Kachin interests in the Hpakant jade mines coexisted uneasily. During the 2000s, though, the Burmese regime started asserting more control over Kachin State development projects financed by Chinese companies. These included proposed oil and gas pipelines that would link China to the Indian Ocean, partially by crossing through Kachin State. Most consequentially, the projects included a proposal to build a huge dam at the headwaters of the Irrawaddy River, at Myitsone. This dam, if built, would flood a portion of the Triangle region, displacing a large number of Kachin villages. The Kachin Independence Organization (along with many Burmese people throughout the country) protested the project, and shortly thereafter the cease-fire between the Tatmadaw and the Kachin rebels fell apart.

  As the cease-fire disintegrated and the Kachin conflict started anew, the ruling regime’s powerful military families grasped for greater control over the lucrative jade mines. In 2014, after a Kachin mine owner found an extremely rare thirty-seven-ton slab of jade, the military temporarily closed off the entire mining valley and placed the Kachin owner in custody.12 And yet despite such tactics, the central military is in a poor position to control the flow of jade out of these mines—mostly because the Kachin mine owners, unlike the Burmese generals, have elephants.

  In 1996 an American specialist in rare gems, Richard Hughes, visited Hpakant and was impressed by the number of times elephants were required to drag his ride, a cargo truck, out of the mud.13 The main road to Hpakant has been improved since then, but the severity of the monsoon conditions, and the unwillingness or inability of the military government to direct jade wealth toward infrastructure, has preserved the elephants’ fundamental usefulness for transporting the gems to their eastern markets. Most of the gem tonnage still travels by truck, but the elephants’ ability to dislodge trapped gem trucks and to carry the jade off-road makes them strategically important for embattled Kachin mine owners.14

  Elephants carry other precious gems as well: amber from the Hukawng Valley and gold panned from Kachin mountain streams. These resources, as well as the elephants themselves, give Kachin elites clout in the region. These elephant-owning elites have unusually strong political and economic incentives against destroying forest cover. Thus, Kachin State remains the most heavily forested region in Burma and one of the most heavily forested zones in all of South and Southeast Asia, despite all these mining operations.

  Both “civilian” elephants, like Mong Cho’s tusker Neh Ong, and KIA elephants have hauled cargoes of the precious gems. To get from Hpakant to the big jade markets in Laiza, on the Chinese border, Colonel Nan said his convoys would pass by the plain of Indawgyi Lake and then walk through the mountain pass at Japi Bum. They then had to cross a railroad and highway corridor, which required caution and good timing to avoid being seen by a patrol. Then they’d enter the large Kaukkwe forest country, more or less following civilian elephant logging routes. But rather than turning southward toward Shan State, as Mong Cho might do in search of teak, the rebels’ elephants would proceed eastward, swimming across the Irrawaddy River around Sinbo, sometimes with huge, valuable jade rocks strapped on their backs. They’d continue through the eastern hills to Laiza, where buyers from all over China, as one journalist has written, have “made the KIA one of the richest rebel armies in Burma.”15

  “IF YOU GO a different way from the jade mines,” said Nan—that is, not southeast toward Laiza but northeast—“you can get to our elephant training camps.” I had returned to see the colonel once the violence in the south of Kachin State had calmed down earlier in the week. On a coffee table in the common room of the Kachin Independence Organization’s Myitkyina office, I had unfolded my map. Nan rattled off a number of village and river names for which the map showed no corresponding
labels. Poor Nkumgam, the translator, clearly taxed by the geographic turn the conservation had taken, looked exhausted. As a geographer, I relished the details. The trails the brigade would use were sometimes cut in deliberately mazelike patterns, a device aimed at confusing the Burmese military. Such patterns rendered my map at this particular spot, between the Hpakant jade mines and the KIA elephant training camps, a confusing tangle of pencil scratches.

  “From Hpakant we head toward the Hukawng Valley, usually along the Nam Jan Hka. We ford the Mogaung River and approach the Ledo Road. But rather than follow the Ledo Road toward the main part of the Hukawng Valley, we cross the road and go through some other hills toward the uppermost section of the Tanai River.”

  I knew the upper Tanai was a tiny valley that crept through the Kumon Mountains. The valley was well positioned but also very secluded: the epicenter of the great swirl of mountain ranges formed by the Kumons, the Patkais, and the Kachin Hills. Local Kachins sometimes called the Kumons the Maji Bum, “Mountains of Quiet Hunters.” Other locals called them, simply, the “bad mountains.”16 This was heavily forested country, full of gibbons and macaques. The headquarters of the Second Brigade were usually located somewhere in this vicinity, nestled beneath the tree canopy, changing location two or three times per decade.

  This small valley was also where the Second Brigade trained its newly caught elephants. Two Western journalists passed through here in the 1980s in separate voyages, both escorted by Kachin soldiers. Each saw the rebels’ elephant training camps. Shelby Tucker, an American writer who was being escorted from Kachin State’s eastern border west to the Indian frontier, noted at this spot that KIA mahouts, along with one khoonkie elephant, were training a baby. The small elephant was being marched up and down a sandbank, and the elephant trainers were singing lullabies to “allay the baby elephant’s fears.”17 Bertil Lintner, a Swedish journalist who became a leading expert on Burma’s armed ethnic conflicts, was escorted in the other direction, from India toward China. He had more time to spend with the rebel elephant trainers and kept his notes from the encounter. KIA fandis were mixing the inner part of a banana plant with water and salt—a treat for elephants in training. The fandis were Kachins. One of them explained to Lintner that historically the Kachin people didn’t have elephants; they learned their elephant skills from the Hkamti Shans many generations ago. Originally, the Kachin fandi went on, the Kachins caught elephants using the pit method, but as their skills improved, they embraced the superior lasso method, or mela shekar.18 The camp area was called Tanai Yang, which in Kachin means something like, “Clearing on the Tanai.”

  During our discussions in 2015, Nan confirmed for me that the militia was still doing elephant training around here, though likely not at the exact same spot. The camp would change locations periodically, not only for security purposes but also because the camp’s swidden garden clearings needed to shift every few years.19 In 2018, the KIA appeared to withdraw from the vicinity, due to a Tatmadaw assault there.20

  During my travels in Kachin State, I happened upon a map showing two types of armed bases in the Hukawng Valley: the rebels’ and the government’s. The rebels’ bases follow a roadless chain perpendicular to the Ledo Road, the Hukawng Valley’s only thoroughfare for motor traffic. Some of the bases on this chain could possibly be linked by riverboat, but many of them would have to be linked by porters walking on foot—or by convoys of elephants. By contrast, the Tatmadaw’s bases were all on the Ledo Road, linked by jeep or by truck.21 This road is, of course, the one built by the Allied forces during World War II, to link British Assam with the Chinese resistance armies by way of the Pangsau Pass. After the war, the road became dilapidated, an ugly scar of mud, gravel, and tar slicing across the forestlands of the Hukawng Valley. The military’s control of the road has enabled it to award lucrative sugar plantation contracts along the corridor. These plantations erase forest cover and spill into an area that, at least on paper, is supposed to be the Hukawng Valley Tiger Reserve.22

  The experience of another journalist, an Indian, Rajeev Bhattacharyya, indicates where many of the KIA’s elephant trainers have been catching their elephants in recent years. In 2011 Bhattacharyya was engaged in an intensive months-long project to meet with and interview the leader of a different rebel militia, the National Socialist Council of Nagaland. Though Nagaland is in India rather than in Burma, there’s a substantial Naga population in the Burmese Patkais, between Homalin and Pangsau Pass. This Naga area is claimed, and mostly controlled, by Naga militants, who refer to the area as “Eastern Nagaland.” Eastern Nagaland is very close to the KIA’s westernmost territories. They meet in the isolated Taro Plain.

  Escorted by Naga rebel soldiers, Bhattacharyya had spent five or six weeks hiking from India into Eastern Nagaland, hoping to meet with the Naga militants’ head commander. One day in late December, while walking along the mountain trail, he and the Naga soldiers had to step aside for a “convoy of five elephants steered by olive-clad Kachin Independence Army mahouts.” The men were chopping tree branches to clear the path ahead of them. Bhattacharyya noted that “the mid-sized elephants seemed suited to walking the narrow hill trails.” These were the KIA’s fandis, its elephant catchers. The Kachin and Naga militants had a friendly rapport, and the two groups shared a meal. “This place is swarming with elephants,” one of the Kachins explained to the Indian journalist as they ate. The two rebel groups had an arrangement: the Kachin fandis were permitted to catch elephants in this area but had to split their haul with the Naga militia.23

  Civilian fandis told me the same thing: that this particular stretch of the mountains has been a very good spot, in recent years, for catching wild elephants. The area is lush with bamboo, watering holes, and salt springs. Also, opium production in the area is quite lucrative, which tends to direct locals away from hunting and ivory poaching.24

  In 1987 Bertil Lintner followed the route from this elephant-catching zone back toward the KIA elephant-training camps. He entered Burma through Eastern Nagaland with his wife, a Shan reporter named Hseng Noung, and their newborn baby, Ee Ying. They were traveling with a KIA escort. The militia leadership hoped that the journalists’ trek across the region would make the Kachins’ struggle better known to the outside world. The following year Shelby Tucker found himself with a similar escort, for largely the same reason.

  On the way from the Eastern Nagaland Patkais to the upper Tanai, Lintner and his party followed a mountain stream called the Taka, which merges with the upper Chindwin River at the Taro Plain.25 British and American forces retaking Burma in 1943 noted that Taro “is like a small closet adjacent to the long narrow room of the Hukawng and the Mogaung valleys. He who wishes to enter the long narrow room from its northern door must be sure no one is lurking in the closet.”26

  A dugout canoe was fetched for Lintner’s party, and they drifted downstream, passing by rare species of waterfowl. They disembarked at Wan Phalang, a small Lisu village on the riverbank that appeared to survive by trading with gold panners in the nearby hills. The party then proceeded on foot (they had no elephants at this stage) across an especially difficult hill range, “a vast natural labyrinth of dense jungle streams and sharp ridges.”27 They slept in abandoned gold panners’ huts. Partway through the trek across these hills, Lintner’s health declined due to blood poisoning. The culprit was leeches. Wading across the streams in the hill region had exposed his legs to constant attack. A leech bite was becoming infected. Seeing his health worsen, the Kachin escorts determined that the party needed an elephant, to keep him out of the water.28

  Tucker, though never injured like Lintner, faced similar problems with leeches in the forests of this region. In a single day, he later recalled, he had to remove 241 leeches. A friend traveling with Tucker, a Swede named Mats, found a leech in his nostril. Mats developed a blood poisoning ailment similar to Lintner’s and was in similarly poor condition by the time he and Tucker limped into India.29 Though passengers on elephant-back in t
hese hills are not impervious to leeches (some of which drop from the trees), riding elephants does significantly reduce the severity of the problem and minimizes the likelihood of infection from trail-kicked dust.30

  The KIA’s elephant came to retrieve the injured Lintner at a riverside area where the rebels had set up a large secret fishing camp. Fish were caught from the river and then dried out and sold to miners in Hpakant, one valley over. Lintner marveled at the scale of the operation, just one among many covert industries the Kachin independence fighters had established under the cover of the forest canopy. From here the party proceeded toward Tanai Yang, following the narrow gorge of the secluded upper Tanai, where “hundreds of fish swirled around my mount’s massive legs,” Lintner recalled. At Tanai Yang, Lintner’s foot finally began to heal.31

  ONE ELDERLY Kachin mahout told me about another important branch of this clandestine network, from the area around Tanai Yang into India, by way of the Chaukan Pass. The elephant convoys retrieve supplies from a mountain hamlet on the Indian side of the mountainous border. This had been occurring, the mahout said, for many years, and it was still occurring during the period I was conducting my research.

  I knew of this remote hamlet nestled in the Indian Patkais. Just a few thousand people lived there, mostly Lisus, growing dry rice and vegetables for subsistence, and cardamoms and ginger for cash. It was extremely isolated, with no all-year road or airfield. The Indian military did an occasional airdrop. A dirt jeep trail that went toward the village was unusable for many months due to rain and mud. For parts of the year, the only way to reach this remote outpost was on the back of an elephant. Indian mahouts from Miao brought regular supplies there this way: bags of rice, farm appliances, concrete blocks, iron rods, corrugated iron sheets, and so on.