One Day the Soldiers Came (12 page)

Their father looked at the drawing and smiled, his own eyes growing moist. His children were being erased from the earth, disappearing from reality in their fluorescent little room, and he was helpless to stop it happening. He looked at the drawing of Burma for a long time without speaking. The whole family looked quietly at the serene pictures of home, drawn from imaginations battered and bruised by loneliness. The whole family was homesick for the land in their imaginations, homesick for the land of pictures.

Another family I met later that day found themselves in an even worse situation. They were not registered with UNHCR and were running out of time. M——and his wife worked for a pro-democracy organization in Burma, fighting for freedom of expression and the people’s right to self-determination. They are members of the Burmese ethnic group, the majority group in Burma. When economic conditions became too harsh and the threat to his family due to his political activities became too great, M——fled Burma and arrived with his wife and two chil
dren in Bangkok. They lived in a windowless eight-by-ten room, also under the harsh glow of fluorescent lights. The neighbor’s television blared through their walls. It sounded like a violent action movie was on. The family had lived in Thailand for five months.

“I can’t play too loud or the police will come,” M——’s ten-year-old son, Caleb, said. M——explained that just the day before, one of his neighbors was arrested and sent back to Burma with his family because the Thai neighbors complained to the police. The children were playing too loudly, shouting during a hiding game, which annoyed the older people on the floor who just wanted to watch television in peace.

“I do not know what will happen to them now,” M——said.

“I’m afraid of the police and the Thais,” Caleb said as he played with the toys his parents brought with them. “I want to go to school.” Even if it was legal for him to attend a Thai school, even if he spoke Thai, he could be arrested if he ventured out onto the street, or even lingered in the hallway of his building for too long. An aid agency that provides help to these families told me that of the 160 children under their care in Bangkok, they have successfully managed, with the help of UNHCR, to get two enrolled in school, with no guarantees for the children’s security from the police.

Caleb’s only forays into the outside world involved going across the street to the market with his mother. He did this about four times a week. The trips lasted about forty-five minutes. They were his only time in the sunlight. His skin had grown sallow.

“We leave the light on all the time because there are no windows and it is so dark in here. There is no ventilation. I worry about the health of my sons. We have moved four times already, to avoid the authorities,” M——said. “The children do
not feel safe, as they know we will move again very soon. We are always moving.”

M——cannot work in Thailand so his family relies on the assistance of NGO’s illegal operations to help them. These programs can be shut down at any moment. Their offices, like all the NGO offices, are watched. The families receive cash assistance for food and health care, but there are no programs to help the children, no opportunities for the illegal children in Bangkok to socialize and interact with other children. They live in fear and in hiding. Now, after five months, M——can no longer receive assistance as an unregistered migrant. UNHCR, at least, must recognize him so his family can continue to receive aid. For now, he has to try and find work, where he will most likely be exploited. If he is not paid, if the conditions are unsafe, he has no recourse with the law. There is nowhere he can turn.

For these children there is little hope for the future. Their parents fear returning to Burma, yet Thailand will not accept them. Of the twenty children I interviewed in Bangkok, not one felt safe in their new surroundings and every one wanted only to go to school and to play with other children. They have no homeland, no community. Their parents are nearly helpless to support them. The outlook for their future extends only as far as the four walls of the rooms in which they try to survive. Their drawings all look the same: dream worlds of home, as it probably never was, with the peaceful hills of Burma gently fading into the sky (Figure 11).

Outside of the cities, in the areas near the Thai-Burma border, the problems faced by the children were similar but the mechanisms for survival changed, and support from a larger community of migrants strengthened them. In border areas, entire economies have developed around the refugees, economies that support the police, a variety of smugglers, border guards, and gangsters.

The border town of Mae Sot is a rough and tumble place. According to the
Lonely Planet
guidebook, there used to be a billboard in the center of town that read: “Have fun, but if you carry a gun, you go to jail.” The illegal gem trade flourishes. In a café where I liked to spend my afternoons sipping beer and pretending to be a tourist, I watched many packages of gold and jewels change hands. Men were always coming and going, drinking a beer or eating quickly while they juggled cell phone calls and exchanged glances at the street.

During the day, the town was charming. Twenty-foot-tall golden statues of the Buddha rose from the jungle, their heads jutting out above the tree line and glistening with beads of water. It rained every day in September. The white minarets of the Masjit noor-ul-Islam mosque rise behind the low buildings. Every day I would hear the muezzin issuing the call to prayers, which echoed through the streets, through the trees, and drifted to the hills in the distance.

Allah-u-Akbar Allah-u-Akbar! Hayya ‘alas salah Hayya ‘alas salah.

The municipal market sat behind one of the three mosques in the city. On my way into a narrow alley that opened into the market, a group of street kids surrounded me, poking and pulling at my clothes. I love markets because they tell you secrets about a new city, and they are always filled with eager children. This market was no exception.

Their faces were smeared with sandalwood powder, a traditional Burmese practice. The powder has many functions: it’s good for the skin, it keeps one cool, and it’s a fashionable thing to wear. It also expresses certain cultural affiliations. In Bangkok, the Burmese could not have worn it on the street, even if they spoke Thai. It would have been a dead giveaway and gotten them thrown right into jail or deported. In Mae Sot,
I noticed the Burmese walked openly on the streets, speaking their language without fear. I gave the kids a little candy that I kept in my pocket, made a few faces that they didn’t think were very funny, and turned into the market. The kids were having a great time laughing at me as I walked away, though they quickly returned to the main street where they had more room to kick around the ball that one of them held under his arm.

In the market the smells were overwhelming. The tables overflowed with roasting meats, raw fish, fried fish, salted fish, raw chickens, live chickens squawking and pooping in baskets. Women shoved roti and chapati in my face, ladles full of curry, buckets of live eels. They offered T-shirts and cassettes and sandals. The street burst with shops, tables, stands, and carts. People squeezed between them, bikes dodged through the crowd. Everyone cleared the way for a passing police motorcycle, keeping his or her head down until the bike got through.

“Security service,” a boy selling T-shirts said to me in English, making a little gun with his hand and laughing. “Boom-boom,” he said for some reason. His T-shirts intrigued me. They bore hagiographic images of Thai and American pop stars and beatified pictures of Osama bin Laden. The boy behind the table wore one of the Bin Laden T-shirts, perhaps oblivious to its meaning to me. He made a peace sign. It happened to be September 11, 2002, exactly one year since the terrorist attacks. When I walked away, the boy shouted after me, still in English, “Have a nice day!”

Everyone I passed gave me a once-over. There were a few beggars, but mostly the shops bustled with loud commerce and peals of laughter. Over half the people I saw wore face powder. Discussions cascaded over each other. After Bangkok, I was shocked to see so many people living unafraid. It was not until
nightfall when I saw the security services again that I understood the way the town really worked.

Two colleagues and I were crowded onto the back of a little motorbike. I was the most junior of the group, so I hung precariously off the back. We set out to get a drink at a local bar popular among expatriates. The roads in Mae Sot all seemed to be one way. I marveled that the same malicious urban planner that made driving in Boston impossible had found his way out to this Southeast Asian border post. In order to get where we wanted to be, we had to go down the main road past our destination, turn onto a small side street, and cross to the other main road that went the opposite direction. The side streets were unlit, and our hearts froze for a moment when we saw a group of uniformed policemen standing in the middle of the small bridge that we had to cross. My mind raced back to the checkpoints of the Congo and unscrupulous soldiers with submachine guns. Checkpoints can be the most dangerous places in the world. In the Congo, a few wrong words at a checkpoint had nearly landed me in jail.

I clung to the back of the motorcycle and held my breath, each bump threatening to knock me off. We slowed, but did not stop as we passed. The officers looked us over but made no move to halt us. Thailand relies on tourism. We continued on.

We missed the bar and had to double back again. None of us were happy about crossing paths with those policemen again. I held on tight and we approached the bridge. That was when I saw what the policemen were doing. They had stopped a Burmese man walking at night with a sack over his shoulder. For a Burmese man, coming from a land of military oppression and vanishings, to encounter a group of uniformed men on a dark bridge is a harrowing experience. As we passed, the soldiers circled the man, blocking him from our view. They were shaking him down.

“The police,” my colleague told me, “request to get stationed here. They’re all getting rich.” If the Burmese can’t pay up, they can be arrested. The family must come up with money to pay off the police and retrieve their relative. Otherwise, the unlucky migrant will find himself or herself deported, or worse. We learned from a local NGO that the slave trade is flourishing, with over a hundred Burmese sold into slavery every single day. Children were certainly not exempted from this and were all forbidden by their families to go out at night. Every Burmese child I met said that they did not go out a night for fear of criminals
and
fear of the police.

The next morning I went to a migrant school outside of town. The school sat in the middle of a field. My guides were a group of students who arranged human rights education and democracy training for the exiled Burmese.

It was crowded and stuffy inside the one-room school building, which was made from leaves and bamboo. There were too many students in too little space. The headmaster and his two teachers greeted me at the door. They offered me a seat outside in the shade of the building. The sun shone, and we thought it would be good to take advantage before the rain came. So my translator and I sat and waited for some students to be brought to us. Through the openings in the bamboo, I saw children’s curious fingers and wide eyes peering out to get a glimpse of me. Most of these children’s families had been subsistence farmers in Burma, and they had little exposure to the world beyond the distant hills. There was a lot of excitement in the air, especially when I brought out markers and paper to draw on. The school had few supplies and everyone, even the teachers, was eager to make use of the new materials. A group of children were sent out. Before anything could begin, I distributed paper all around.

Eleven-year-old Nicholas had wide almond eyes and wore soccer shorts and a frayed jersey. We looked at his drawing—the frightful crucifixion of a villager, bodies falling from the sky, a little boy in purple hiding behind a tree. Nicholas told me about the SPDC attack on his village and his recurring nightmares in Thailand. He had trouble sleeping because he was afraid. His mother tried to comfort him when he couldn’t sleep, he said. She told him he was safe now, that it was okay.

Her assurances were not entirely true.

Nicholas said he still had bad dreams, “but not for a while when my mom comforts me.” It was hard to ignore the tension in the air, and the children, like the adults, seemed very alert to it. Every child I met mentioned how it was not safe to go out in the town on their own, not safe to go out at night. I imagine the strain can be very tiring for a child and that the bad dreams will not go away until Nicholas is secure, his future stable.

He said he wants to be a teacher when he grows up. He liked his teacher, who told the children about their history and their language.

Nicholas is a member of the Karen ethnic group, which shows little sign of ending its fight against the SPDC in Burma. The Karen have been fighting for an autonomous region, off and on, since the 1950s. The military cracks down on the Karen areas, on the civilian populations, as part of what is called the Four Cuts Policy. The policy aims to cut rebel factions off from food, money, intelligence, and recruits, the four factors that allow them to continue their war against the military junta. When the junta suspects rebel activity in an area, they will enter and forcibly remove the civilians. Anyone who stays behind is considered an insurgent and will be shot. Karen villages are often burnt to the ground, heavily mined, and the inhabitants moved into resettlement areas that, by some accounts,
resemble concentration camps more than villages. Some of the resettlement areas are better than others, and sometimes, even after the military allows them to return home, people stay in the resettlement areas because they have nowhere else to go. People who do not go into the resettlement areas find themselves internally displaced in the jungle, with little or no access to aid, vulnerable to disease, starvation, and forced recruitment into either the government army or the rebel army.