In the Danger Zone (28 page)

I finally take my leave of Lupe and head for the border crossing point. It takes ten minutes with my UK passport and I'm in the USA. The difference is apparent from the moment I emerge from the border crossing: it's clean, wealthy, high-functioning, smart and civilized. It's also boring, faceless, generic and corporate, but that's hardly the point. It's easy to romanticize rural Mexico with its beauty and simplicity of life, but I know which lifestyle the emigrants prefer.

I visit groups of migrant workers standing by the roadside at a large intersection, next to a fast food joint. They come here every morning to wait for work, and stay until I p.m. before giving up to go home. Often they'll get a couple of days' work in a week, three if they're lucky. Few of these people are willing to talk to us, worried that they'll just attract more attention from the police and from a semi-vigilante group called the Minutemen. These are people who try to highlight illegal immigration, and have recently been accused of attacking and harassing migrant workers.

I find a group of luckier workers who've been given work for the day. They are exhausted from working on a tomato farm, and they are slumped by the roadside eating cheap pseudo-tortillas from a food van. None will say if they are working legally or illegally, but those who will talk all say the same thing: America hates us, but needs us.' Do they sympathize with the Zapatistas and their aims? 'Of course. No one else is prepared to stick up for us against the Americans.'

The truth is that the Zapatistas are a long, long way from here, busy occupying land in a place that these men have abandoned.

They get up and trudge back to the tomato farm to continue living their dream.

I hope that all this border crossing has prepared me for my next trip, which looks like being the most dangerous one of my life. Burma.

POPULATION:
49 million

PERCENTAGE LIVING BELOW THE POVERTY LINE:
25%

UNDP HUMAN DEVELOPMENT INDEX:
130/177

CORRUPTION PERCEPTIONS INDEX POSITION:
160/163

GDP (NOMINAL) PER CAPITA:
$230 (173/179)

FOOD AID RECIPIENTS:
n/a

MALNUTRITION:
5% of the population

I'd make a crap spy: I get excited way too easily. And right now my shabby attempts at nonchalance could have catastrophic consequences. It's 4 a.m., and I'm about to spend the most dangerous night of my life trying to cross the border illegally from Thailand into Burma with Marc, my producer and good friend. We're standing in a pitch-black hotel car park in Thantend somewhere near the border surrounded by several conspicuous-looking bags of kit. We've just been dropped off by C_____, the BBC's International Man of Mystery and Risk Assessment, and our high-risk consultant for visits to dodgy places, with instructions to wait until our contacts arrive and not to draw attention to ourselves.

We could get caught by the Thai army and be deported, or we could get caught by the Burmese army, in which case heaven knows what might happen. Hopefully, though, we'll slip through unnoticed and spend the next two weeks living with the Karen rebels and refugees, trying to find out how they survive whilst the Burmese government uses food as a weapon against them.

I've been lucky over the last few months of bullet- and dystentery-dodging not to have had any major accidents, not to have got shot or kidnapped or brought home a vicious bout of the runs to share with the kids. I hope to God that this isn't the trip where I screw up.

A pick-up truck rolls into the car park and a group of gnarled, baseball-capped guys jumps out. No one says anything. After a tense stand-off, I can't bear it any longer and I say, 'Hi. I'm Stefan.' One of the guys comes forward. 'I'm Black Tom.' You couldn't make this stuff up.

We throw our kit into the back of the pick-up and jump in. Black Tom grins at me, and it's a real smile. Thank God for that.

• • • • •

Before I carry on, let me tell you a little about Burma and the Karen rebels.

Alongside North Korea, Burma is one of the most repressive, corrupt, brutal and undemocratic regimes in the world, which, until very recently, has had little significant censure from the international community. They've been having a whale of a time repressing all manner of Burmese people and pissing all over democracy, but they've reserved some of their most vicious treatment for the Karen people.

The Karen rebels have been fighting the Burmese regime for 60 years, making this the world's longest-running civil war, and for the most part, the Karen have been losing. The Burmese army has invented some fantastic ways of screwing up life for the Karen, and most of them involve the use of food as a weapon.

The military is trying to starve the Karen out of existence by laying landmines in their fields, cutting off access to farmland and confiscating crops. These guys really know how to repress. As a consequence, the Karen people (who don't really need the junta's help in making their lives miserable as they are already desperately poor) are often forced off their land through hunger, and become refugees in their own country (some have escaped over the border to camps in Thailand, but this is currently illegal). They are liable to die of starvation, and even if they survive, they and their children are at risk from malnutrition, mineral and vitamin deficiency, dysentery and high infant mortality.

Sadly, as the situation gets more and more desperate, the political leadership of the KNU (Karen National Union) appears to be suffering from an internecine power struggle, and the rebel troops are sometimes refusing to accept their orders. The future of the Karen looks bleak indeed, and over the last few months there's been a huge escalation in fighting, and the current offensive is the strongest in ten years. It's widely seen as an attempt to crush Karen opposition once and for all. I'm expecting to have a traumatic couple of weeks.

• • • • •

Back in the pick-up we chat with our hosts: they are friendly, wiry Burmese refugees who work the border smuggling supplies and information and, tonight, a couple of journalists from Britain. We are driving towards a weaker section of the Thai-Burmese border, and Black Tom warns us that we've got a long and tiring night ahead of us.

Several hours later, the pick-up stops halfway up a jungle road, and we all dive into the trees, following our leader, Tu La Wa, an old soldier of 50 or so who's small and absurdly fit, despite the fact that he smokes endless stinking cheroots. Our rucksacks containing all our kit are left in the pick-up, to be smuggled over the border posing as humanitarian aid (still illegal but less sensitive). I wonder if we will ever see them again.

We begin an interminable trek through the jungle, and it's bloody hard work. The jungle is extremely humid, we are sweating profusely and the mountainous terrain makes walking extremely difficult. Our legs strain at the ridiculous gradients, and we stumble continually on the loose rocks under our feet. To add to the discomfort, after a couple of hours, despite the fact that I wore them for two weeks solid before we left the UK, my new jungle boots have raised a small army of blisters on my feet. Who'd have thought that the mountains in Thailand could be so different from Sainsbury's in Islington?

Marc holds a small infrared camera so he can film the border crossing, but it makes life very difficult for him – the camera screen he stares at is so bright his eyes can't adjust to see where he's going in the murk, and he keeps tripping over. It's all rather exciting in a cowboys and Indians kind of way until Marc loses his footing at the top of a hill. Black Tom and I grab him just in case he falls and, looking to our left, we see a terrifyingly precipitous drop. It looks like we just saved his life so Marc and I start to take things a little more seriously after that.

Marc isn't very fit. He can hold a cripplingly heavy TV camera for hours on end and endure the burden of my constant teasing, but he simply isn't built for jungle mountain trekking. He has to ask everyone to stop for a break every 15–20 minutes or so. This has both good and bad aspects – it's not great that we are constantly losing time, but at least I get lots of opportunity to tease him. He gets very grumpy and, in his best scoutmaster voice, tells Black Tom, 'You should only go as fast as the slowest person in the group,' as though it's not him. I, on the other hand, am built for endurance rather than speed. I'm useless at sprinting or Herculean feats of strength, but I can swim, cycle or hike for hours on end.

It's now pitch black, and the atmosphere becomes tense. We have headlamps, but Tu La Wa tells us that we shouldn't use them in case the army spots us. Suddenly there's a big crash and I can't find Marc. I begin to panic and take the risk of turning on my headlamp, to see a huge hole in the path in front of me about 10 metres deep, at the bottom of which lies Marc, on his back with his arm stretched ominously to the heavens. It looks like a trap hole straight out of
Tarzan.
I scramble down to him and discover that the camera sits in his hand.

'Is the camera OK?' he croaks heroically.

Thank God. He's shaken, bruised and scratched, but generally unhurt. I suppress the urge to give him a big hug. He sits for a few minutes to gather himself whilst I scour the jungle floor for bits of camera. We put it back together and even though it looks slightly less camera-like than when we left, miraculously, it still works.

Finally we stop by a small track and collapse, exhausted. Black Tom takes this opportunity to reveal that this is only the start of the night's journey. Great.

We wait for an hour or so, until another pick-up comes along. To my delight, this one is carrying our bags. We jump in and speed off. I am way beyond tired now and the exhaustion, together with the impending fear, makes me extremely tense. My mood is not improved when Black Tom tells us that we still aren't anywhere near the border – we're taking a long circuitous route around army bases and checkpoints just to get to the crossing point.

Suddenly the pick-up skids to a halt, and once again we all jump out and run off into the undergrowth where eight ragged men, who have agreed to help carry our kit, wait for us. We share the stuff out between us and race off, with Marc bringing up the rear and protesting at the pace.

It's another crippling, hot, sticky, mosquito-ravaged walk, and after a couple of hours my legs are beginning to feel dangerously wobbly. There's also a grating sound coming from my knee (too much crosscountry running as a teenager). My blisters have begun to grow blisters and Marc has lost any remaining sense of humour he might have had. Tu La Wa tells us not to talk, which is just fine as it helps us preserve energy and contain our irritation with each other. I've long since given up teasing Marc for being unfit – we're both at the limit of our endurance, but needless to say our uncomplaining Burmese helpers are skipping along like mountain gazelles on heat.

Four-and-a-half miserable hours later, we wait whilst a spotter goes ahead: we are nearing the border crossing point. When he returns we are urged to move on in silence and eventually we come to a large, filthy house raised about 5 metres off the jungle floor on thick bamboo poles. This is a safe house, owned by a Karen sympathizer, and we sit in his open-air, bamboo-floored room and gratefully drink his water and eat some small, sweet bananas.

We're late, Tu La Wa tells us, and we've missed the boat that was going to smuggle us across the border, so we'll have to wait until just before dawn for it to return. We sit down for a moment and fall asleep immediately.

The border between Thailand and Burma is a wide river, and to get across Marc and I will hide in the bottom of a boat. Thai fishing boats are allowed on this section of river, but either side can stop and search them. Tu La Wa says that there's a strange light scanning the river from the Burmese side that they've never seen before, and everyone is nervous. My hostile environments training taught me that the greatest dangers are presented by situations where you are tired and disorientated, and when carefully laid plans are changed at the last minute, but what can we do? We are in the hands of our hosts and they have 60 years of experience dealing with the Burmese army, so we have to follow their advice.

When Black Tom wakes us for our journey, we stumble out of the door and in his exhausted state, Marc falls down the stairs of the hut, twisting his ankle. It's still pitch black as we stagger off down the hill, shouting our thanks to the owner of the house. Tu La Wa tells us to keep quiet from now on, and warns us about a large riverbank that we'll have to climb over as quickly as we can when we reach Burma. This is when we'll be most vulnerable.

The night is absolutely black, and I'm blindly following Black Tom's footsteps. When I eventually hear the river it sounds scarily fast. Too fast for the long, thin, rather wobbly boat that is to be our transport. As soon as we're on our way I spot the light. It's small but very bright, and it's scanning the river from the far side. It looks like a laser, but I can't really tell. We duck our heads down, trying to look like cargo, and the boatman pushes on. The light seems to scan across us a couple of times and flickers green and red, but nothing happens. My heart beats like the clappers and I try not to think about what will happen if the Burmese army catches us.

We motor slowly up the river for half an hour just as dawn breaks, revealing a spooky, misty scene straight out
of Apocalypse Now.
We make it up the river without a problem and as we pull up at the water's edge, I can see a jetty and the infamous riverbank. The engine is cut, and we climb out of the boat in the terrifying silence. We scramble up the sand in a panic and jump over the edge of it to find a small bamboo hut. We're in Burma. We walk past more huts and pathways and stumble into the Ei Tu Ta refugee camp, sick from tiredness and nervous exhaustion. We're shown to a large open-sided hut where we're offered a cup of coffee. We sit there like zombies, and when someone mentions that this is the hut we are to sleep in, we drag out our sleeping bags and collapse.

Ei Tu Ta

I wake blinking into sunlight with a brilliant, sharp headache piercing my skull. I acknowledge the fact that I am alive, not visibly in custody, and uninjured, and fall back into a deep sleep.

Many hours later, I wake up to feel a throbbing, searing ache where my legs used to be. We'd slept the night on a big bamboo frame with just a roof of leaves and a floor raised a couple of metres off the ground away from snakes and bugs. It's home to a ragbag collection of charity workers, camp officials and a French would-be journalist called Roman who's cut loose from his job as a cocoa trader to explore the world.

Ei Tu Ta refugee camp is deep enough into the jungle and far enough away from Burmese interests for the army not to bother attacking it, but not far enough for its refugees to feel totally secure. These people, like the people in northern Uganda, have become Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). The Thai army across the border is primarily there to ensure that the IDPs don't cross into Thailand: no one wants the burden of refugees, but the Thais are keen on peace with Burma and want to avoid militarizing the area. The most that the Thais are prepared to do is to turn a blind eye to aid that's shipped into the camp from Thailand, but it's difficult to imagine the Burmese allowing any UN agencies or charities to help the Karen on any significant scale. So the 3,000 residents of Ei Tu Ta are trapped, most of them having been forced to leave their homes by the brutality of the Burmese army, they are unable to return, yet unable to escape into Thailand to start a new life.

We sit down for a cup of tea with Peter, the head of the camp. He explains that although the Burmese junta hates the Karen people, they love Karen refugee camps because they know exactly where the Karen people are, and that they are safely disenfranchised, hungry and powerless.