Children at the shell of the schoolhouse in Huay Ke Lok, a Karen refugee camp near Mae Sot, a few days after a cross-border attack by SLORC-supported guerrillas. (Click for full sized image)
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Children at the shell of the schoolhouse in Huay Ke Lok, a Karen refugee camp near Mae Sot, a few days after a cross-border attack by SLORC-supported guerrillas. (Click for full sized image) |
"Up there is SLORC," said WC, the Burmese rebel adjutant general in the passenger seat.
I looked out the driver's side window, across the Moei River from Thailand into southern Burma, and peered up at a steep, jungle-covered mountain. I couldn't see any SLORC soldiers, so I pulled the truck over to get a better look. Several of the rebels and their family members hastily jumped out of the back--and headed for the bushes to relieve themselves. We had been driving for about three hours from Mae Sariang.The mountain was dark green, and brooding. I imagined its underbrush seething with SLORC troops. They would be small and hunched, with darting eyes, pointed ears and mangy orange hair. Certainly impossible to spot at this distance.
As we continued south toward Mae Sot, Chris DeBurgh was on the tape player. There is no land worth fighting for, he sang. WC described where the SLORC had dotted the border with bases and artillery emplacements. He and the few thousand rebels in the student forces have been fighting the SLORC in zones along Burma's borders since 1988, when thousands of students fled from massacres in the capital to form the student rebel force.
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Read Burma's Student Rebels Can't "Visit Myanmar 1996", an opinion column that appeared in The Cambodia Daily on May 2, 1996. |
Farther down the Moei, the town of Mae Sot is a microcosm of the 50-year war. It's dotted with Burmese tea shops, and many stores are staffed by Karen refugees. Its high, narrow sidewalks and crooked streets reminded me of Biella, the town of my father's family in northern Italy.
We were there to buy supplies for the student rebel camp, hours north near Mae Sariang. Prices for rice, potatoes and other staples are lower in Mae Sot, where smuggled Burmese goods keep the prices low.
We dropped off two passengers at Dr. Cynthia's clinic, a ramshackle two-story building in which a staff of 50 gives free treatment to Karen refugees from the camps in the region. On the ground floor are low-ceilinged examination rooms, illuminated dimly by daylight streaming between the boards that make up the walls. The dirt floor is uneven, but well-swept. In a courtyard children are getting haircuts and what appears to be de-lousing treatment.
The most serious cases go to the Thai hospital in Mae Sot, which is willing to take them from Dr. Cynthia's because the clinic lightens the load on the hospital. That day, there were two extra cases: rebels injured in the fighting inside Burma.
Tun Tun, a student rebel, was hit in the stomach by shrapnel from an 81-mm shell as the KNU's 3rd Division was forced out of Sekhen Thit.
Htoo Roh lay one row over, with blood seeping from his heavily bandaged foot. He's a Karen who has been fighting since 1988, when he was 18. Neither one has a lot to say to this foreigner, but Memen Oo, a member of the same student group as Tun Tun, wants me to take pictures. The Burmese discreetly formed a wall to block the Thai nurses from seeing the camera, nervous because they have claimed they can pay for the medical care, and can't.
That night the rebels take the small stage at Crocodile Tears, Mae Sot's answer to the Checkerboard, for a blues jam. It's WC, along with the student rebel representative in town, who is hobbled with a leg injury he got in battle years before. It's now clear that at bottom, these guys are students. They like to play guitar and drink beers, in a bar. They might be fighting in the jungle most of the time, but this bar with its wooden tables, low ceiling, mixed Thai and Western crowd and cheap draft beer is as much their element.
The next day it's time to load the truck with provisions for the rebel camp. After a long and circuitous drive around town looking for a place to park that is not too obvious to the Thai police, KT and I go wander around the market, and then the town. We buy for a jacket for me--it's cold in the camp at night--and stationery for her to use in her English-teaching classes there.
When we get back to the truck, MO, KT's fiancé, and the others are ready to load up. I read the Bangkok Post on the hood. It says that a new form of robbery has been invented in Pattaya, a Thai resort town. It works like this: Two guys engage you in conversation, and then a third guy behind them lunges up and over and plants a knife in your upper chest. Then they take your money and walk off. It's not so odd to go hang out with Burmese rebels in the jungle, if that's the alternative.
Meanwhile a fellow with a bicycle-driven, front-end-loaded cart comes out with 50-kilo sacks of rice (animal-feed quality). Then it's 20-liter cans of cooking oil. Then 50-kilo sacks of potatoes and onions. Then bags of pickled tea leaves, beans, inexplicable vegetable nuggets. By the time five or six loads have come out, the truck is sagging on its springs. It's as low to the ground as a cruiser in the LA barrio. I look at it doubtfully, and try to rock the truck, but it won't budge. There's no seeing out the back window of the cab. This is the load the truck is supposed to carry over the mountains and through dozens of river crossings, with who knows how many passengers on top. Might as well get my money's worth from the rental, I guess.
Later that day we found out that a protest was scheduled for the next morning at the Huay Ke Lok refugee camp, which had been partially burned down by DKBA attackers from across the border. We decided to go. At the crack of dawn we unloaded the ton and a half of supplies for the drive out to the camp. You can read my article about the protest. Just over a year later, in March 1998, the camp was attacked again, and completely destroyed.
A few kilometers from town, the "Thai-Burmese Friendship Bridge" arches across the river. At least, most of it does, as construction on the modern span was halted in early 1995 in a dispute over some islands in the river. Newspaper reports say that negotiations between the new Thai government of Chavalit Yonchaiyudh and the SLORC could result in the bridge's completion. It's likely that much of its traffic will be made up of Karen refugees fleeing from the SLORC, unless they are caught by the Burmese regime or turned back by the Thais.
For now there is no bridge. A small road lined with shops leads under the incomplete bridge and south along the Moei for a few hundred meters, to a dusty construction site where a new embankment for the river is underway. A tiny crooked pier a few planks wide reaches out about a quarter of the way across the river. A wooden boat goes back and forth from there to the muddy bank on the Burma side, while those who can't or won't pay the fare simply wade across, carrying goods on their heads. Little kids, old women, nobody is stopping them. The Burmese village on the other side looks nice enough.
About ten kilometers outside of Mae Sariang, the dirt road was blocked by a red and white crossbar. On the left, at the bottom of a slope rising up to the left, was a small wooden guardhouse. Halted next to the house, before the gate, was a pickup truck. Its driver and passengers were off the truck, talking a group of men armed with semiautomatic rifles.
We headed for the gate, and I planned the smile and nod that would make the gate go up just fast enough that we wouldn't have to stop. One of the Thai police stepped out into the road, and motioned us over, behind the truck that was already there.
The three Burmese student in the truck did not have any papers, real or forged. They had been in Thai border prisons before. Conditions inside were harsh; they included daily beatings, and being forced to sit in the yard under the blazing tropical sun all day. They could be kept until enough bribe money was paid for their release--always with the possibility that they could be sent back to the SLORC in Burma, which would mean near certain death, or perhaps years of imprisonment and worse. The last time some of them were held there, KT paid more than a thousand dollars to get them out. One of them was MO.
Usually this checkpoint was a simple wave-through. Something was up, but we didn't know what it was. As we pulled over I muttered to KT that as far as I knew, she and I were just travelers and we met these guys and agreed to help them transport food supplies.
We were ordered out of the truck. There were three or four Thai border police who surrounded us, wearing street clothes and pistols. On the bank, near the guardhouse were a few in uniform with heavier weapons.
A thin Thai with a hard face asked KT and I for our passports, or so we guessed, as he spoke no English. He looked over her New Zealand one and my US one, and handed hers back. The Burmese stayed in the back seat of the truck, and one of them started speaking with one of the police. KT and I stood near the back of the truck, trying to look relaxed and casual, with a note of innocent concern, as in, "What could possibly be the matter, no doubt we'll be on our way in no time."
Another Thai, with a friendlier face and a black shirt, tried to speak with us. KT extracted a Thai-English phrase book. We tried to amuse him with inexpert pronunciations a few minutes of random phrases. Eventually he ran across the phrase "illegal immigrant". Much as I was impressed by how comprehensive the phrase book was, I would rather not have seen that.
By now the other truck had been allowed to pass, and Hard Face was giving the Burmese a hard time. They were alternately discussing and cajoling him, it sounded like, but it was made more difficult because none of the Thais knew Burmese, or vice versa. One Thai, however, knew Karen, and so did some of the Burmese. Since none of the Burmese who knew Karen knew English as well, KT and I could find out nothing, except what little came through the Thai-Karen-Burmese-English conduit.
The language barrier didn't stop us from understanding what happened next. Hard Face held up two photos he had found in the truck. In one, KT stood atop a rock with MO. She wore fatigues and held an M-16. The innocent, helpful travelers story started to seem less workable. It was becoming clear that the police knew exactly what was up. Nobody was fooling anybody else, and everything became a preliminary exercise that could only end in a heavy bribe--with any luck.
Want more of the Burma border story? Remind me to finish it!
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