// essays //
Fall 2006
Burmese Border Days
Geoff Aung
"The reliefs sculpted on the southern section of the eastern gallery represent the 'Churning of the Sea of Milk,' a popular episode from Vishnu lore. The Gods (northern part) and the Demons (southern part) use the serpent Vasuki as a cord wound around Mount Mandara, emerging from the Sea. Pulling alternately on either end of the serpent, together they churn the Sea of Milk in order to extract the nectar of immortality. Seizing the nectar as it is formed, the Gods are victorious, and thus thereafter immortal."
—inscription describing Angkor Wat's most famous bas-relief carving
—inscription describing Angkor Wat's most famous bas-relief carving
The stillness of a Cambodian sunrise is astounding. In the early morning hours at Angkor Wat, the central—and largest—temple in a 60 km radius of temple ruins, the pillars of its eastern galleries throw broad shadow-stripes across some of the most ancient bas-relief carvings extant today. I knew I should not have done it, but I could not resist extending a hesitant hand to the gi-ant wall, tracing the meticulous lines in the rock—the fingers of the gods, the muscular legs of the demons, the intricate scales of the serpent. The carving depicts the immensity of struggle, but in the silence of sunrise on an August morning in Angkor Wat, there is no trouble in the world.
Of course, this picture of peace is an illusion: ours is a world of conflict, and Cambodia is still living with its tragedies. More broadly, the whole of Southeast Asia, from Burma in the west to Vietnam in the east, has been a crucible of war for most of the last fifty years. Through an accident of bloodlines and a grant from SIPA's Weatherhead Institute, I have come to know the history of one of these countries reasonably well. Burma, childhood home of my father, was the focus of my summer work with a local nongovernmental organization (NGO) on Thailand's western border. There, in a provincial town called Mae Sot, I had the opportunity to acquaint myself with the Karen people—a Burmese ethnic minority—and their struggle for independence against the Burmese military dictatorship. The civil war between the two is just one part of Burma's deeply complicated history.
The numbers describing the Karen struggle are overwhelming. The US Campaign for Burma talks about "millions of displaced people;" a new offensive by the military junta has, since April, burned at least 3,000 villages to the ground. While the number of (mostly Karen) refugees in Thailand stands officially at an alarming 143,000, the addition of unofficial refugees—that is, migrant farm workers and sweatshop laborers—swells the number to greater than one million.. A recent report released by Dr. Cynthia Maung's Mae Tao Clinic, a cost-free medical clinic serving migrant workers and refugees in the Mae Sot area, cites numbers on par with the worst conflict regions in Africa. Voravit Suwanvanichkij, a physician and researcher from Johns Hopkins, calls the situation in eastern Burma a "humanitarian crisis." He says, "The mortality rates...are more like Angola, Rwanda, Somalia, and other disaster zones."
Ironically, the sheer gravitas of numbers like these threaten to efface the human toll of humanitarian tragedies. The numerical procession—a regular, and not unwarranted, feature of human rights journalism today— obscures the individual such that faces and names are lost in the midst of mass, undifferentiated suffering. My months in Mae Sot impressed upon me how crucial it is to recall the existence of local people in states of war; too often, crisis narratives capture broad, world-historical events at the expense of the actual people who experience them. Of course, I don't know all of the faces in Karen state, I don't know all of the names, and I never will. But over the course of my work this summer, I did come to know a few of these people, all of whom I proudly call my friends. Than Htet, Eh Doh Doh, and Nant Shan Hsar Pound, are some of the students who form the core of the exiled Burmese democracy movement. In Mae Sot, the history of this movement, which in large part is the story of modern Burma, continues to influence the present work taking place within it. The Karen struggle in particular is inseparable from the questions of colonialism and independence that continue to haunt the modern Burmese nation-state today.
A Living Past
As Faulkner said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." In Burma, the shadows of British colonialism and the military dictatorship that ultimately succeeded it create a present situation in which the monstrosities of modern militarism consume the national glories of days past. Once romantically known as the Golden Land, now Burma is better known as the Land of Silence. The State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), he latest incarnation of the Burmese military dictatorship, is the central cause of this infamous silence. Having inherited the insatiable oppression of its predecessors, the SPDC continues to commit countless atrocities, even ramping up its human rights abuses in the past few years.
Like so many former colonies, Burma's contemporary instability has grown out of the experience of imperialism and the gargantuan task of shedding it. Amidst the chaos of World War II, the 1940's provided the setting for Burmese independence. The Burma Independence Army, under the command of General Aung San, first fought alongside the Japanese to expel the British from Burma. Then the Burmese army turned against the Japanese, driving them from Burma as well. July 1947 saw the assassination of Aung San by political rivals, but nevertheless 1948 brought to Burma the same "tryst with destiny" Nehru articulated in regards to India: independence. Like India, Burma's fellow British subject to the west, Burma was free to establish its own independent state.
Shedding British rule proved a difficult task. Suddenly the colonial apparatus, expunged by Aung San's army, was gone. In its place, a functioning but infirm government established Burma as a republic in which my grandparents proudly took their place. Throughout the 1950's, my grandfather, U Thant Gyi, served as educational attaché of the Union of Burma: he oversaw Burmese students' studies abroad and the subsequent integration of their knowledge in Burma. In 1962, however, his life and the lives of millions of other Burmese citizens took a sharp turn. In a then-bloodless military coup, General Ne Win's army seized power, thus laying the groundwork for the decades-long dictatorship that persists today.
It was in 1962, that my young father, fourteen years old at the time, arrived in the United States, a beneficiary of his parents' cosmopolitan foresight and generous diplomatic connections. As he enrolled in public high school in the suburbs of Washington D.C., Burmese on the other side of the world—"at home," as my father still refers to Burma—watched with horrified awe as General Ne Win quenched protests with guns and entrenched the Burma Socialist Programme. Meanwhile, my grandmother, Mya Mya Thant Gyi, took a studio apartment on Capitol Hill, walked everyday to her job at the Library of Congress, and over the years has assumed responsibility for much of the transliteration of Burmese texts that has taken place in the United States.
Over the next 26 years, General Ne Win's military junta steadily drove Burma's economy into the ground as sporadic uprisings were violently suppressed. By the mid-1980's, discontent had threatened to erupt into wide scale uprising several times, and in 1988, just after I'd begun pre-school, students finally took to the streets. On August 8, 1988—"8888" has since been a major rallying cry of the democracy movement—students from Rangoon University organized tens of thousands in a peaceful call for democracy. General Ne Win followed through on his threat to "shoot to kill" all demonstrators opposing the dictatorship. By the end of the uprising, the military had claimed upwards of 3,000 lives. Video footage of the massacres depicts a war zone: running students are shot down; writhing, bloody bodies litter the streets; monks with bullet wounds cry for medical attention; a voice, frantic, reports soldiers ransacking a makeshift hospital and shooting six doctors when they refuse to turn over the wounded.
Eventually, as anger turned to resolve following the 1988 uprising, a new national hero emerged to give form to a movement that had until the uprising been largely decentralized. Her features were firm, her voice unrelenting, and her name was familiar: Aung San Suu Kyi—daughter of General Aung San. Rising to prominence in the aftermath of the 1988 uprising, she founded the National League for Democracy (NLD) as the primary opposition party to the military dictatorship. In 1991, Suu Kyi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but she could not be on hand to accept it in person; she was already under house arrest, where she remains to this day-, the only imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize laureate in the world.
The Oldest War in the World
Just one of Suu Kyi's many brilliant political achievements is her ability to unite, at least officially, the country's splintered ethnic groups. The political leaders of Karen State, for example, count themselves among the many ethnic minorities supporting the NLD. Officially, Burma has more than 135 ethnic groups, most living in the perimeter border areas of the country; these states ring the central region, home to the ethnic Burman majority. Karen State is one of these ethnic states, sharing a border with Mae Sot. In 1948, before many of my Karen friends and co-workers were born, the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) took up arms against the central Burmese state in a fight for independence. Concern about political rights (historically the Burman majority has subjugated the Karen) fueled this decision, and the conflict persists to this day, making it the longest running civil war in the world. It is a dubious distinction, to be sure; and yet the prominent sign announcing the headquarters of the KNLA's Seventh Brigade suggests a proud intransigence: "The fight may be long / but triumph is sure / And rest comes at last / To those who endure."
The conflict in Karen State is arguably the primary source of the refugee crisis afflicting the Thai-Burma border. As a result, Mae Sot has become home to scores of local and international NGO's, including the one I interned for: the Burma Lawyers Council (BLC). Like most groups on the border, the BLC balances its efforts between working in the short-term to assuage the refugee crisis and planning in the long-term for freedom and democracy in Burma. The BLC also runs a Peace Law Academy, intending to educate students in questions related to law, since Burma currently is a country without rule of law. To this end, students learn in two years most of what an American law student would learn in three: constitutional law, customary law, torts, property law, contract law, etc. Neither a lawyer nor a law student, I was somewhat limited in what I could offer this group of lawyers. Nonetheless, I made the most out of the most objectively valuable of all Western exports: the English language. I helped write grants and project proposals, conducted correspondence with other offices in Mae Sot, Bangkok, and internationally, and I taught English. In the morning I taught at the Peace Law Academy and in the afternoon taught the staff of the BLC.
Teaching was tremendously rewarding. The relationships I developed with the students of the Peace Law Academy, were particularly meaningful. They were perhaps better teachers than I, for through them I was able to gain an understanding of the civil war in Karen State. The Peace Law Academy consists of 24 Burmese students, all of whom are between the ages of 18 and 26. In a small village outside of Mae Sot, the men live in one house and the women live in another. Classes are conducted at the women's house, where a small building in the back yard serves as a classroom. The students hail from a wide variety of Burmese ethnic minorities, a result of a conscious decision by the BLC to create as inclusive a program as possible.
The Local Consequences of War
After spending the first month of my internship in a guesthouse, I decided, upon their invitation, to move in with my male students for the second month—a decision based as much on the pursuit of a more meaningful, hands-on experience as the need for affordable housing. They were happy to have me as their guest, and of course I was honored they welcomed me. Each night, I would return to the house from the BLC office. After a consistently wonderful dinner of home-cooked Burmese food, I would try to embrace a bucket shower, a nightly ritual with which I grew increasingly comfortable as the weeks wore on. Then, donning a t-shirt and longyi (something akin to a gender-neutral skirt commonly worn by Burmese men), I would take a seat at the table in the common, downstairs living area, and commence to either write postcards or continue my Melville reading. These were some of the best hours of my summer. I can see Khun Saw Oo next to me, diligently attending to the homework I'd assigned the class that day. He's wearing his light blue KNLA t-shirt with black soccer shorts. Across from him, long-haired Kaung Set sits in a tank-top, furrowing his brow over the thick, blue Burmese-English dictionary. On the other side of the room, Zawlatt and Linn Htet, advanced enough in their English to be excluded from my class, watch Karen karaoke and the occasional Thai news broadcast.
Saw Moo Kler—"Mr. Mook" as we called him in class and as he signs his emails now—preferred to wander somewhere between the television and the reading table. Too restless to concentrate on homework (his grades were not good) and too social to sit for long in front of the TV, he was perhaps my most affable student, and probably the person I talked to most. Our most common topic of conversation was girlfriends: who had them, who they were, the status of ex's, etc. Rarely did we speak of political issues. One night, though, the conversation turned serious. With his characteristic bursts of laughter thinly masking the gravity of his story, he told me of the teenage years he'd spent with the KNLA. I became speechless as he described to me the life of a guerrilla soldier: weeks in the jungle without food rations, the constant fear of ambush, the crushing pain of separation from one's family and friends. Bamboo shoots become food, he told me. "Yes, sometimes there is no hope," he said. "And so friends of mine, they—" and here he puts his hand to his head in the shape of a gun, unable to find the right word. English teachers, of course, do not often teach the word "suicide."
The Cultural Impact of War
Over the course of the summer, my interaction with my students led me to consider-—and reconsider—what kind of impact war has on particular cultures. For culture, defined minimally as the literary and artistic practices of one group of people, does not appear well suited to the survival of civil war. In some ways my experience this summer supports this idea. Two of my Karen students, September Paw and Jucy Anneds, were born in Thai refugee camps. Few, if any, of my students had finished the Tenth Standard—the equivalent of our high school degree—inside Burma (most completed it in Thailand). The woman I worked for, Elza Wai, spent much of what would have been her high school years on the run from the SPDC, fleeing on foot through the jungle with her family. In such circumstances how is knowledge passed on, if education is so difficult to attain inside the state? Where is the literature, if there are no libraries? Where are the festivals, if villages are being burned?
The most illuminating document pertaining to the contemporary struggle to maintain Karen culture may in fact be a twenty-year-old pseudo-ethnographic portrayal of one Karen community in Thailand. Kirsten Ewers Andersen's essay "Deference for the Elders and Control over the Younger among the Karen in Thailand" features deeply problematic methodologies (its labeling of the Karen as a "forest society" flags it as anthropological antiquity), but an interesting idea emerges nonetheless. Andersen argues that respect for the older members of a Karen community in Thailand is uniquely useful to maintaining community and its culture in wartime. "Deference and social control are two sides of the same coin," Andersen writes, "both resting on the fact that the socially most valuable knowledge in Karen society is an attribute of old age." The most valuable knowledge is not in fact related to means of production or ecological know-how. Instead, it is understanding of "ritual and magic" that is most important to a persecuted people. Noting that this particular community arrived in Thailand "some 200 years ago on the run from their Burmese oppressors," Andersen begins, perhaps unwittingly, to hint at a key concept. Being "on the run" seems to privilege the knowledge of "ritual and magic" over what Westerners might call "traditional literature." The Lah Ku Kee Su ceremony, hta song-poems, and dong dancing are all forms of cultural expression particularly oriented to surviving persecution, warfare, and migration, all integral components of the Karen experience. So while these traditions help sketch out war's ability to inspire a kind of resistance culture, they also point to the reality of a sort of cultural survival of the fittest: those practices able to adapt to the contingencies of war survive, whole those less compatible with war become increasingly obsolete. Oral traditions are well-suited to survival, while less mobile practices like written literature and history are not.
One of my Karen students, September Paw, helped me understand just how rigorous this process of natural cultural selection is. In an interview I conducted a few days before I left Mae Sot, she began by saying, "My name is September Paw, and I can say I'm from Mae La camp." (Mae La is the largest of the nine refugee camps along the Thai-Burma border.) "I've been in Burma only once," she continued. "I would like to go there, to live there." When I asked her about Karen State, she said she "knows little about the culture." Her only sources have been secondary. "I have read from the books," she says. "They describe Karen State as a beautiful place." She regrets learning little about Karen culture in the refugee camp, particularly at her high school, the Eden Valley Academy. "They mostly talk about the Bible," September explains. Eden Valley Academy, a large school in Mae La camp, is run by missionaries and missionary-trained Karen. In fact, the balance of written Karen history, I was told by one NGO worker in Mae Sot, has been written by missionaries. Even the Burmese script used for writing the Karen language is a product of an Australian missionary taking it upon himself to create a written language. In September's experience as a refugee, the few cultural manifestations that she's encountered have been mediated by missionary influences, certainly a disheartening situation.
Under these circumstances of constant war, it is difficult to discern what Karen literary and cultural traditions actually persist. In my conversations with my students and my contact with other people and organizations in Mae Sot, I was often told what was lacking, but I was never told what existed. The past sixty years of civil strife has ravaged the state in every way, making it challenging to find and understand the traditions that do survive. Indeed, the whole of Karen discourse seems oriented towards the war and its accompanying atrocities. The Online Burma Library, for example, returns 228 links for "Discrimination Against the Karen," while a search for "Karen (cultural, historical, political)" yields a paltry 29. War, and the ugly cornucopia of issues attendant upon it, seem poised to usurp culture's place in Karen State. Next to the struggles of daily survival, questions of literature, song, dance, and poetry appear as the frivolous pursuits of the materially comfortable. But perhaps, in a time of war, the very act of clinging to culture is a sort of resistance.
Towards the end of my stay in Mae Sot, I sent yet another mass e-mail to my friends at home, describing my dread of saying good-bye to my students. My mother, ever the discerning ear, forwarded my message to one of the managers at her translation agency, Cathy Bokor, who then wrote to me about her family's experience during the Holocaust. "My mother-in-law and my father," she wrote, "told me that they quoted Goethe and Schiller in the concentration camp to remind them of the German culture that Hitler could not erase." Culture, Cathy explains, can be marshaled against war, providing a defiant mentality in times of crisis. In the same way, she encouraged me to offer, in parting, similar solace to my students. I was to councel them to their your pride in culture, for its seal is hermetic and its durability eternal. In her words, culture is "the sweetness that the present regime should not be able to corrupt."
The dearth of research material available on Karen cultural traditions makes it difficult to verify whether or not the phenomenon Cathy so poignantly describes—the strengthening of culture in opposition to persecution—is underway in Karen State. The available sources make little more than a vague sketch of contemporary Karen culture possible, and even this sketch is hard to discern. However, an article in the Irrawaddy, an English-language magazine based in Thailand, affirms a basic mentality of resistance, a condition in which cultural solidarity becomes a response to a time of war. Shah Paung, the author, writes of the Lah Ku Kee Sue wrist-tying ceremony, "Much of it is rooted in ancestral beliefs in spirits—one Karen interpretation of wrist-tying, for instance, declares that binding a white thread around the wrist of a sick person will cure or alleviate the malady by attracting back to the body a spirit whose absence caused the problem in the first place." Shah Paung argues that what's important is not the festival itself as much as the simple act of fostering a shared cultural experience. Saw Nay Kaw, a Karen living in Thailand, echoes Shah Paung: "It's good for Karen culture for Karen people to come together and celebrate once a year like this." The reason for the festival is somewhat arbitrary; Saw Nay Kaw claims it is in the basic act of celebration that the value of the tradition lies. This mindset, this belief that resistance is foremost and the means are secondary, is, on one hand, an expression of the power of culture as a form of defiance. On the other hand, it is also a subversion of culture, for the practices themselves are not the point. They exist and are reproduced only in their relationship to war, not for their own intrinsic value.
The situation in the refugee camps reinforces the resistance mentality suggested by the Lah Ku Kee Sue ceremonies. In another Irrawaddy article, Min Zin reports on hta song-poems and dong dancing, two uniquely Karen traditions that continue to be practiced in Mae La refugee camp. Dong dancing, a form of collective expression usually convened to condemn some wrongdoing by someone in the community, is an old way of establishing "social and cultural control," according to Mahn Sein Tin Aye, a 64-year-old dong master who lives now in Mae La camp. Hta song-poems, on the other hand, have historically been used as means to articulate the abuses Karens have suffered at the hands of Burman oppressors. "The misery they describe," Min Zin writes, "would be almost unimaginable if it were not still a part of Karen experience to this day." Some hta song-poems recount instances of forced labor, depicting instances of "ropes being strung through holes pierced in the ears of Karen porters, and Karen babies being thrown up in the air by soldiers and cut in half with their swords." The two traditions Min Zin describes seem slightly more valuable for themselves than the Lah Ku Kee Sue ceremony, at least the careful treatment of these practices' details suggests as much. It seems important to note, however, that September Paw's commentary about the lack of cultural knowledge in the refugee camps challenges Min Zin's analysis. The conditions of cultural pride Min Zin describes were absent in September Paw's recollections. Is Min Zin's portrayal accurate? Regardless, the setting of the refugee camp prevents these traditions from disengaging from their wartime context, placing them relative to war in much the same way as the Lah Ku Kee Sue ceremony. Indeed, these three traditions all share some element of the resistance mentality Cathy described to me this summer.
In response to the reality of this sort of cultural selection brought on by war comes efforts like my work this summer for the BLC. Such efforts complicate. One of the project proposals I worked on aimed to provide for the construction of libraries and the circulation of journals and pamphlets in Karen State. Elza, my supervisor, insisted on the construction and maintenance of libraries in Karen State as a cornerstone of my work this summer. Viewed in light of the last sixty years' impact on Karen literary tradition, it is tempting to disparage the BLC's library emphasis as a quixotic ideal soon to be crushed by the next SPDC offensive. However, this idealized notion of the library-—the hope invested in the power of the written word—is a commentary on what has gone missing throughout this war, and what Karen people would like to see return. The romantic hope that books can turn back guns—that, after all, is what this project proposes—suggests a moment of cultural renewal, the very essence of resistance. That these hypothetical libraries are likely to be stocked not with long-lost Karen epics but with political books and legal journals is besides the point: no matter their contents, the circulation of books throughout the state would begin to overturn the decades-long trend of sending learning, not to mention cultural practices, abroad. The relationship between war and culture becomes a dynamic interaction. War pushes; culture pushes back. Karen State suggests the conditions of war, rather than uniformly serving to obliterate cultural forms, also create the impetus for greater cultural solidarity.
Self-knowledge in an Unstable World
I didn't know it at the time, but I took part in the Lah Ku Kee Sue festival this summer. One day towards the end of my stay in Mae Sot, Elza called me into her office. Normally one of the most talkative people I've ever met, on this occasion, she was quiet. Sitting in front of her desk, I watched as she produced a thin, white thread. She walked around to me and, signaling for me to stand up, wrapped the thread around my wrist. She tied it several times, and she told me it would be strong. In a nearly inaudible tone, I asked "What is it?" It was evident enough I was participating in something of importance. She said, simply, "It's okay. I don't need to say anything. It has already been blessed." I was left speechless and wondering. For Elza, there was no need for explanation. The sharing of Karen culture, the roots of spirit worship, the idea that the bracelet could protect me from unknown maladies—all this went unsaid. For Elza, it was enough, at the time, that I should share, however unknowingly, in one of Karen State's longest standing traditions. Slightly bewildered but nonetheless moved, I simply returned to my office, aware that I had taken part in something larger than myself.
A few days later, I left Mae Sot, beginning a hectic and thrilling two weeks of travel that culminated in my visit to Angkor Wat. One morning I witnessed the sunrise, an experience of peace I may never know again, as I wandered the temple in the silence of dawn. Eventually I took a seat on a ledge in the highest part of the temple, where I wrote in my rain-soaked, wine-stained traveling journal a series of clipped phrases no longer comprehensible. What I recall most is a sense of awe—not only in the temples' unspeakable majesty, but even in the idea of their very existence. What, I asked myself, will endure in contemporary Burma? One thousand years from now, will Burma inspire awe in future generations? The resistance culture of Karen State is so poignant today, but alas it is mired in struggle. Nearly all of the great monuments of our contemporary civilizations were products of peacetime. Egypt's temples, Angkor Wat's ruins, perhaps even America's National Mall—the people of our world place a lot of pride in monuments. That morning in Cambodia, I could not help wondering how Karen people conceive of pride, how they imagine they will be remembered. Perhaps the other sign at the KNLA headquarters provides a clue: "Never, never, never, never give up."
Not long after my morning at Angkor Wat, I found myself in a taxi to Bangkok's airport. Once I arrived at the gate I took out my computer and spent hours going through photos from the summer. I even had a few video files of my students, singing songs and making presentations. About to leave, and finally given the chance to reflect, I was overcome with the reality of my departure. What would become of my students? I must have been a strange sight to that woman sipping the iced coffee, watching CNN. There I was, sitting on the floor of a lifeless airport, my eyes brimming over with tears and my mind lost in recollection. On my wrist, the thin, white thread remained.
There was one memory, in particular, that burned in my mind. Just before I left Mae Sot, Deborah, one of my students, approached me at breakfast. "Can I ask one more question?" she asked. I looked up. She paused, then said, "Don't forget us."
Of course, this picture of peace is an illusion: ours is a world of conflict, and Cambodia is still living with its tragedies. More broadly, the whole of Southeast Asia, from Burma in the west to Vietnam in the east, has been a crucible of war for most of the last fifty years. Through an accident of bloodlines and a grant from SIPA's Weatherhead Institute, I have come to know the history of one of these countries reasonably well. Burma, childhood home of my father, was the focus of my summer work with a local nongovernmental organization (NGO) on Thailand's western border. There, in a provincial town called Mae Sot, I had the opportunity to acquaint myself with the Karen people—a Burmese ethnic minority—and their struggle for independence against the Burmese military dictatorship. The civil war between the two is just one part of Burma's deeply complicated history.
The numbers describing the Karen struggle are overwhelming. The US Campaign for Burma talks about "millions of displaced people;" a new offensive by the military junta has, since April, burned at least 3,000 villages to the ground. While the number of (mostly Karen) refugees in Thailand stands officially at an alarming 143,000, the addition of unofficial refugees—that is, migrant farm workers and sweatshop laborers—swells the number to greater than one million.. A recent report released by Dr. Cynthia Maung's Mae Tao Clinic, a cost-free medical clinic serving migrant workers and refugees in the Mae Sot area, cites numbers on par with the worst conflict regions in Africa. Voravit Suwanvanichkij, a physician and researcher from Johns Hopkins, calls the situation in eastern Burma a "humanitarian crisis." He says, "The mortality rates...are more like Angola, Rwanda, Somalia, and other disaster zones."
Ironically, the sheer gravitas of numbers like these threaten to efface the human toll of humanitarian tragedies. The numerical procession—a regular, and not unwarranted, feature of human rights journalism today— obscures the individual such that faces and names are lost in the midst of mass, undifferentiated suffering. My months in Mae Sot impressed upon me how crucial it is to recall the existence of local people in states of war; too often, crisis narratives capture broad, world-historical events at the expense of the actual people who experience them. Of course, I don't know all of the faces in Karen state, I don't know all of the names, and I never will. But over the course of my work this summer, I did come to know a few of these people, all of whom I proudly call my friends. Than Htet, Eh Doh Doh, and Nant Shan Hsar Pound, are some of the students who form the core of the exiled Burmese democracy movement. In Mae Sot, the history of this movement, which in large part is the story of modern Burma, continues to influence the present work taking place within it. The Karen struggle in particular is inseparable from the questions of colonialism and independence that continue to haunt the modern Burmese nation-state today.
A Living Past
As Faulkner said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." In Burma, the shadows of British colonialism and the military dictatorship that ultimately succeeded it create a present situation in which the monstrosities of modern militarism consume the national glories of days past. Once romantically known as the Golden Land, now Burma is better known as the Land of Silence. The State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), he latest incarnation of the Burmese military dictatorship, is the central cause of this infamous silence. Having inherited the insatiable oppression of its predecessors, the SPDC continues to commit countless atrocities, even ramping up its human rights abuses in the past few years.
Like so many former colonies, Burma's contemporary instability has grown out of the experience of imperialism and the gargantuan task of shedding it. Amidst the chaos of World War II, the 1940's provided the setting for Burmese independence. The Burma Independence Army, under the command of General Aung San, first fought alongside the Japanese to expel the British from Burma. Then the Burmese army turned against the Japanese, driving them from Burma as well. July 1947 saw the assassination of Aung San by political rivals, but nevertheless 1948 brought to Burma the same "tryst with destiny" Nehru articulated in regards to India: independence. Like India, Burma's fellow British subject to the west, Burma was free to establish its own independent state.
Shedding British rule proved a difficult task. Suddenly the colonial apparatus, expunged by Aung San's army, was gone. In its place, a functioning but infirm government established Burma as a republic in which my grandparents proudly took their place. Throughout the 1950's, my grandfather, U Thant Gyi, served as educational attaché of the Union of Burma: he oversaw Burmese students' studies abroad and the subsequent integration of their knowledge in Burma. In 1962, however, his life and the lives of millions of other Burmese citizens took a sharp turn. In a then-bloodless military coup, General Ne Win's army seized power, thus laying the groundwork for the decades-long dictatorship that persists today.
It was in 1962, that my young father, fourteen years old at the time, arrived in the United States, a beneficiary of his parents' cosmopolitan foresight and generous diplomatic connections. As he enrolled in public high school in the suburbs of Washington D.C., Burmese on the other side of the world—"at home," as my father still refers to Burma—watched with horrified awe as General Ne Win quenched protests with guns and entrenched the Burma Socialist Programme. Meanwhile, my grandmother, Mya Mya Thant Gyi, took a studio apartment on Capitol Hill, walked everyday to her job at the Library of Congress, and over the years has assumed responsibility for much of the transliteration of Burmese texts that has taken place in the United States.
Over the next 26 years, General Ne Win's military junta steadily drove Burma's economy into the ground as sporadic uprisings were violently suppressed. By the mid-1980's, discontent had threatened to erupt into wide scale uprising several times, and in 1988, just after I'd begun pre-school, students finally took to the streets. On August 8, 1988—"8888" has since been a major rallying cry of the democracy movement—students from Rangoon University organized tens of thousands in a peaceful call for democracy. General Ne Win followed through on his threat to "shoot to kill" all demonstrators opposing the dictatorship. By the end of the uprising, the military had claimed upwards of 3,000 lives. Video footage of the massacres depicts a war zone: running students are shot down; writhing, bloody bodies litter the streets; monks with bullet wounds cry for medical attention; a voice, frantic, reports soldiers ransacking a makeshift hospital and shooting six doctors when they refuse to turn over the wounded.
Eventually, as anger turned to resolve following the 1988 uprising, a new national hero emerged to give form to a movement that had until the uprising been largely decentralized. Her features were firm, her voice unrelenting, and her name was familiar: Aung San Suu Kyi—daughter of General Aung San. Rising to prominence in the aftermath of the 1988 uprising, she founded the National League for Democracy (NLD) as the primary opposition party to the military dictatorship. In 1991, Suu Kyi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but she could not be on hand to accept it in person; she was already under house arrest, where she remains to this day-, the only imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize laureate in the world.
The Oldest War in the World
Just one of Suu Kyi's many brilliant political achievements is her ability to unite, at least officially, the country's splintered ethnic groups. The political leaders of Karen State, for example, count themselves among the many ethnic minorities supporting the NLD. Officially, Burma has more than 135 ethnic groups, most living in the perimeter border areas of the country; these states ring the central region, home to the ethnic Burman majority. Karen State is one of these ethnic states, sharing a border with Mae Sot. In 1948, before many of my Karen friends and co-workers were born, the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) took up arms against the central Burmese state in a fight for independence. Concern about political rights (historically the Burman majority has subjugated the Karen) fueled this decision, and the conflict persists to this day, making it the longest running civil war in the world. It is a dubious distinction, to be sure; and yet the prominent sign announcing the headquarters of the KNLA's Seventh Brigade suggests a proud intransigence: "The fight may be long / but triumph is sure / And rest comes at last / To those who endure."
The conflict in Karen State is arguably the primary source of the refugee crisis afflicting the Thai-Burma border. As a result, Mae Sot has become home to scores of local and international NGO's, including the one I interned for: the Burma Lawyers Council (BLC). Like most groups on the border, the BLC balances its efforts between working in the short-term to assuage the refugee crisis and planning in the long-term for freedom and democracy in Burma. The BLC also runs a Peace Law Academy, intending to educate students in questions related to law, since Burma currently is a country without rule of law. To this end, students learn in two years most of what an American law student would learn in three: constitutional law, customary law, torts, property law, contract law, etc. Neither a lawyer nor a law student, I was somewhat limited in what I could offer this group of lawyers. Nonetheless, I made the most out of the most objectively valuable of all Western exports: the English language. I helped write grants and project proposals, conducted correspondence with other offices in Mae Sot, Bangkok, and internationally, and I taught English. In the morning I taught at the Peace Law Academy and in the afternoon taught the staff of the BLC.
Teaching was tremendously rewarding. The relationships I developed with the students of the Peace Law Academy, were particularly meaningful. They were perhaps better teachers than I, for through them I was able to gain an understanding of the civil war in Karen State. The Peace Law Academy consists of 24 Burmese students, all of whom are between the ages of 18 and 26. In a small village outside of Mae Sot, the men live in one house and the women live in another. Classes are conducted at the women's house, where a small building in the back yard serves as a classroom. The students hail from a wide variety of Burmese ethnic minorities, a result of a conscious decision by the BLC to create as inclusive a program as possible.
The Local Consequences of War
After spending the first month of my internship in a guesthouse, I decided, upon their invitation, to move in with my male students for the second month—a decision based as much on the pursuit of a more meaningful, hands-on experience as the need for affordable housing. They were happy to have me as their guest, and of course I was honored they welcomed me. Each night, I would return to the house from the BLC office. After a consistently wonderful dinner of home-cooked Burmese food, I would try to embrace a bucket shower, a nightly ritual with which I grew increasingly comfortable as the weeks wore on. Then, donning a t-shirt and longyi (something akin to a gender-neutral skirt commonly worn by Burmese men), I would take a seat at the table in the common, downstairs living area, and commence to either write postcards or continue my Melville reading. These were some of the best hours of my summer. I can see Khun Saw Oo next to me, diligently attending to the homework I'd assigned the class that day. He's wearing his light blue KNLA t-shirt with black soccer shorts. Across from him, long-haired Kaung Set sits in a tank-top, furrowing his brow over the thick, blue Burmese-English dictionary. On the other side of the room, Zawlatt and Linn Htet, advanced enough in their English to be excluded from my class, watch Karen karaoke and the occasional Thai news broadcast.
Saw Moo Kler—"Mr. Mook" as we called him in class and as he signs his emails now—preferred to wander somewhere between the television and the reading table. Too restless to concentrate on homework (his grades were not good) and too social to sit for long in front of the TV, he was perhaps my most affable student, and probably the person I talked to most. Our most common topic of conversation was girlfriends: who had them, who they were, the status of ex's, etc. Rarely did we speak of political issues. One night, though, the conversation turned serious. With his characteristic bursts of laughter thinly masking the gravity of his story, he told me of the teenage years he'd spent with the KNLA. I became speechless as he described to me the life of a guerrilla soldier: weeks in the jungle without food rations, the constant fear of ambush, the crushing pain of separation from one's family and friends. Bamboo shoots become food, he told me. "Yes, sometimes there is no hope," he said. "And so friends of mine, they—" and here he puts his hand to his head in the shape of a gun, unable to find the right word. English teachers, of course, do not often teach the word "suicide."
The Cultural Impact of War
Over the course of the summer, my interaction with my students led me to consider-—and reconsider—what kind of impact war has on particular cultures. For culture, defined minimally as the literary and artistic practices of one group of people, does not appear well suited to the survival of civil war. In some ways my experience this summer supports this idea. Two of my Karen students, September Paw and Jucy Anneds, were born in Thai refugee camps. Few, if any, of my students had finished the Tenth Standard—the equivalent of our high school degree—inside Burma (most completed it in Thailand). The woman I worked for, Elza Wai, spent much of what would have been her high school years on the run from the SPDC, fleeing on foot through the jungle with her family. In such circumstances how is knowledge passed on, if education is so difficult to attain inside the state? Where is the literature, if there are no libraries? Where are the festivals, if villages are being burned?
The most illuminating document pertaining to the contemporary struggle to maintain Karen culture may in fact be a twenty-year-old pseudo-ethnographic portrayal of one Karen community in Thailand. Kirsten Ewers Andersen's essay "Deference for the Elders and Control over the Younger among the Karen in Thailand" features deeply problematic methodologies (its labeling of the Karen as a "forest society" flags it as anthropological antiquity), but an interesting idea emerges nonetheless. Andersen argues that respect for the older members of a Karen community in Thailand is uniquely useful to maintaining community and its culture in wartime. "Deference and social control are two sides of the same coin," Andersen writes, "both resting on the fact that the socially most valuable knowledge in Karen society is an attribute of old age." The most valuable knowledge is not in fact related to means of production or ecological know-how. Instead, it is understanding of "ritual and magic" that is most important to a persecuted people. Noting that this particular community arrived in Thailand "some 200 years ago on the run from their Burmese oppressors," Andersen begins, perhaps unwittingly, to hint at a key concept. Being "on the run" seems to privilege the knowledge of "ritual and magic" over what Westerners might call "traditional literature." The Lah Ku Kee Su ceremony, hta song-poems, and dong dancing are all forms of cultural expression particularly oriented to surviving persecution, warfare, and migration, all integral components of the Karen experience. So while these traditions help sketch out war's ability to inspire a kind of resistance culture, they also point to the reality of a sort of cultural survival of the fittest: those practices able to adapt to the contingencies of war survive, whole those less compatible with war become increasingly obsolete. Oral traditions are well-suited to survival, while less mobile practices like written literature and history are not.
One of my Karen students, September Paw, helped me understand just how rigorous this process of natural cultural selection is. In an interview I conducted a few days before I left Mae Sot, she began by saying, "My name is September Paw, and I can say I'm from Mae La camp." (Mae La is the largest of the nine refugee camps along the Thai-Burma border.) "I've been in Burma only once," she continued. "I would like to go there, to live there." When I asked her about Karen State, she said she "knows little about the culture." Her only sources have been secondary. "I have read from the books," she says. "They describe Karen State as a beautiful place." She regrets learning little about Karen culture in the refugee camp, particularly at her high school, the Eden Valley Academy. "They mostly talk about the Bible," September explains. Eden Valley Academy, a large school in Mae La camp, is run by missionaries and missionary-trained Karen. In fact, the balance of written Karen history, I was told by one NGO worker in Mae Sot, has been written by missionaries. Even the Burmese script used for writing the Karen language is a product of an Australian missionary taking it upon himself to create a written language. In September's experience as a refugee, the few cultural manifestations that she's encountered have been mediated by missionary influences, certainly a disheartening situation.
Under these circumstances of constant war, it is difficult to discern what Karen literary and cultural traditions actually persist. In my conversations with my students and my contact with other people and organizations in Mae Sot, I was often told what was lacking, but I was never told what existed. The past sixty years of civil strife has ravaged the state in every way, making it challenging to find and understand the traditions that do survive. Indeed, the whole of Karen discourse seems oriented towards the war and its accompanying atrocities. The Online Burma Library, for example, returns 228 links for "Discrimination Against the Karen," while a search for "Karen (cultural, historical, political)" yields a paltry 29. War, and the ugly cornucopia of issues attendant upon it, seem poised to usurp culture's place in Karen State. Next to the struggles of daily survival, questions of literature, song, dance, and poetry appear as the frivolous pursuits of the materially comfortable. But perhaps, in a time of war, the very act of clinging to culture is a sort of resistance.
Towards the end of my stay in Mae Sot, I sent yet another mass e-mail to my friends at home, describing my dread of saying good-bye to my students. My mother, ever the discerning ear, forwarded my message to one of the managers at her translation agency, Cathy Bokor, who then wrote to me about her family's experience during the Holocaust. "My mother-in-law and my father," she wrote, "told me that they quoted Goethe and Schiller in the concentration camp to remind them of the German culture that Hitler could not erase." Culture, Cathy explains, can be marshaled against war, providing a defiant mentality in times of crisis. In the same way, she encouraged me to offer, in parting, similar solace to my students. I was to councel them to their your pride in culture, for its seal is hermetic and its durability eternal. In her words, culture is "the sweetness that the present regime should not be able to corrupt."
The dearth of research material available on Karen cultural traditions makes it difficult to verify whether or not the phenomenon Cathy so poignantly describes—the strengthening of culture in opposition to persecution—is underway in Karen State. The available sources make little more than a vague sketch of contemporary Karen culture possible, and even this sketch is hard to discern. However, an article in the Irrawaddy, an English-language magazine based in Thailand, affirms a basic mentality of resistance, a condition in which cultural solidarity becomes a response to a time of war. Shah Paung, the author, writes of the Lah Ku Kee Sue wrist-tying ceremony, "Much of it is rooted in ancestral beliefs in spirits—one Karen interpretation of wrist-tying, for instance, declares that binding a white thread around the wrist of a sick person will cure or alleviate the malady by attracting back to the body a spirit whose absence caused the problem in the first place." Shah Paung argues that what's important is not the festival itself as much as the simple act of fostering a shared cultural experience. Saw Nay Kaw, a Karen living in Thailand, echoes Shah Paung: "It's good for Karen culture for Karen people to come together and celebrate once a year like this." The reason for the festival is somewhat arbitrary; Saw Nay Kaw claims it is in the basic act of celebration that the value of the tradition lies. This mindset, this belief that resistance is foremost and the means are secondary, is, on one hand, an expression of the power of culture as a form of defiance. On the other hand, it is also a subversion of culture, for the practices themselves are not the point. They exist and are reproduced only in their relationship to war, not for their own intrinsic value.
The situation in the refugee camps reinforces the resistance mentality suggested by the Lah Ku Kee Sue ceremonies. In another Irrawaddy article, Min Zin reports on hta song-poems and dong dancing, two uniquely Karen traditions that continue to be practiced in Mae La refugee camp. Dong dancing, a form of collective expression usually convened to condemn some wrongdoing by someone in the community, is an old way of establishing "social and cultural control," according to Mahn Sein Tin Aye, a 64-year-old dong master who lives now in Mae La camp. Hta song-poems, on the other hand, have historically been used as means to articulate the abuses Karens have suffered at the hands of Burman oppressors. "The misery they describe," Min Zin writes, "would be almost unimaginable if it were not still a part of Karen experience to this day." Some hta song-poems recount instances of forced labor, depicting instances of "ropes being strung through holes pierced in the ears of Karen porters, and Karen babies being thrown up in the air by soldiers and cut in half with their swords." The two traditions Min Zin describes seem slightly more valuable for themselves than the Lah Ku Kee Sue ceremony, at least the careful treatment of these practices' details suggests as much. It seems important to note, however, that September Paw's commentary about the lack of cultural knowledge in the refugee camps challenges Min Zin's analysis. The conditions of cultural pride Min Zin describes were absent in September Paw's recollections. Is Min Zin's portrayal accurate? Regardless, the setting of the refugee camp prevents these traditions from disengaging from their wartime context, placing them relative to war in much the same way as the Lah Ku Kee Sue ceremony. Indeed, these three traditions all share some element of the resistance mentality Cathy described to me this summer.
In response to the reality of this sort of cultural selection brought on by war comes efforts like my work this summer for the BLC. Such efforts complicate. One of the project proposals I worked on aimed to provide for the construction of libraries and the circulation of journals and pamphlets in Karen State. Elza, my supervisor, insisted on the construction and maintenance of libraries in Karen State as a cornerstone of my work this summer. Viewed in light of the last sixty years' impact on Karen literary tradition, it is tempting to disparage the BLC's library emphasis as a quixotic ideal soon to be crushed by the next SPDC offensive. However, this idealized notion of the library-—the hope invested in the power of the written word—is a commentary on what has gone missing throughout this war, and what Karen people would like to see return. The romantic hope that books can turn back guns—that, after all, is what this project proposes—suggests a moment of cultural renewal, the very essence of resistance. That these hypothetical libraries are likely to be stocked not with long-lost Karen epics but with political books and legal journals is besides the point: no matter their contents, the circulation of books throughout the state would begin to overturn the decades-long trend of sending learning, not to mention cultural practices, abroad. The relationship between war and culture becomes a dynamic interaction. War pushes; culture pushes back. Karen State suggests the conditions of war, rather than uniformly serving to obliterate cultural forms, also create the impetus for greater cultural solidarity.
Self-knowledge in an Unstable World
I didn't know it at the time, but I took part in the Lah Ku Kee Sue festival this summer. One day towards the end of my stay in Mae Sot, Elza called me into her office. Normally one of the most talkative people I've ever met, on this occasion, she was quiet. Sitting in front of her desk, I watched as she produced a thin, white thread. She walked around to me and, signaling for me to stand up, wrapped the thread around my wrist. She tied it several times, and she told me it would be strong. In a nearly inaudible tone, I asked "What is it?" It was evident enough I was participating in something of importance. She said, simply, "It's okay. I don't need to say anything. It has already been blessed." I was left speechless and wondering. For Elza, there was no need for explanation. The sharing of Karen culture, the roots of spirit worship, the idea that the bracelet could protect me from unknown maladies—all this went unsaid. For Elza, it was enough, at the time, that I should share, however unknowingly, in one of Karen State's longest standing traditions. Slightly bewildered but nonetheless moved, I simply returned to my office, aware that I had taken part in something larger than myself.
A few days later, I left Mae Sot, beginning a hectic and thrilling two weeks of travel that culminated in my visit to Angkor Wat. One morning I witnessed the sunrise, an experience of peace I may never know again, as I wandered the temple in the silence of dawn. Eventually I took a seat on a ledge in the highest part of the temple, where I wrote in my rain-soaked, wine-stained traveling journal a series of clipped phrases no longer comprehensible. What I recall most is a sense of awe—not only in the temples' unspeakable majesty, but even in the idea of their very existence. What, I asked myself, will endure in contemporary Burma? One thousand years from now, will Burma inspire awe in future generations? The resistance culture of Karen State is so poignant today, but alas it is mired in struggle. Nearly all of the great monuments of our contemporary civilizations were products of peacetime. Egypt's temples, Angkor Wat's ruins, perhaps even America's National Mall—the people of our world place a lot of pride in monuments. That morning in Cambodia, I could not help wondering how Karen people conceive of pride, how they imagine they will be remembered. Perhaps the other sign at the KNLA headquarters provides a clue: "Never, never, never, never give up."
Not long after my morning at Angkor Wat, I found myself in a taxi to Bangkok's airport. Once I arrived at the gate I took out my computer and spent hours going through photos from the summer. I even had a few video files of my students, singing songs and making presentations. About to leave, and finally given the chance to reflect, I was overcome with the reality of my departure. What would become of my students? I must have been a strange sight to that woman sipping the iced coffee, watching CNN. There I was, sitting on the floor of a lifeless airport, my eyes brimming over with tears and my mind lost in recollection. On my wrist, the thin, white thread remained.
There was one memory, in particular, that burned in my mind. Just before I left Mae Sot, Deborah, one of my students, approached me at breakfast. "Can I ask one more question?" she asked. I looked up. She paused, then said, "Don't forget us."
// GEOFF AUNG (CC '08) is majoring in Anthropology, American Studies, and Human Rights. He also recently helped found the Burma 88 Coalition, a student group focused on Burma advocacy.