In the Danger Zone (29 page)

Peter invites me to join him in the camp leader's hut, and I eat a plate of rice mixed with rotten fermented fish sauce (a bit like Thai fish sauce, but complete with fish-heads, bones and tails) and searing-hot vegetable curry. He shows me the food store, where a small supply of rice, fish paste and chillies is handed out to the refugees. Outside it I meet Ing Ling Wa, a nervous young mother who has recently arrived, having spent 17 days trekking with her family with no food other than foraged vegetation. I ask what forced her to make such a dangerous journey, and she explains that the Burmese army had taken control of her village and imposed forced labour.

'The army told the villagers to put a fence around the village, and if you were seen outside the village in the jungle you would be shot.'

This meant that she couldn't visit her fields so her crops were all ruined. I ask what threat she poses to the junta and what the army hope to achieve by doing this, but she just laughs: 'I don't know. I don't understand why they did it.'

Burma's military leaders have a deliberate policy of starving the Karen villagers, but I find it bizarre that they bother oppressing these people when nature has been doing a fine job of oppressing them for centuries. The Karen rebels are under-equipped and relatively small in number, and the Karen people are generally poor subsistence farmers living in an area of mountainous jungle, little of which can realistically be cultivated.

The answer might lie in the nature of the Burmese army, which, although it's big, is also under-equipped and poorly-trained. Armies are a great way of handing out patronage, maintaining corruption and keeping a network of paid lackeys to oppress the rest of the country, so it's in the junta's interest to keep them busy. In addition, the army has now been ordered to become self-sufficient, so it has to steal and confiscate from the locals to survive.

• • • • •

Just as in Uganda, I find Ei Tu Ta camp strangely beautiful – like a Hollywood re-creation of a simple Burmese village, complete with beautiful kids, smoke gently rising from houses made entirely out of bamboo, bare-breasted women washing in streams, young girls giggling flirtatiously, and men sitting around on their haunches chewing betel nut. There are chickens running around everywhere and puppies scampering at our feet (no, really there were). There's even a rudimentary football pitch.

Peter explains that the camps offer people a better life than their own villages: there's free (if basic) education, healthcare and some food rations, and many people own their own small plot of land to grow vegetables.

I meet the Tu Pa Lai family who arrived three months earlier. There's a tired, submissive sadness to them, and they tell me that their youngest son died from diarrhoea soon after they arrived. They explain that life is better here than in their old village where they were used as forced labour by the army. Despite the fact that here in the camp they have no prospects, no work, no land, no independence and no long-term future, at least they are free from the persecution they suffered at the hands of the army.

They are cooking lunch: rice with fish paste and a few greens they've grown beside their rickety shack. It is a decent meal in sheer calorific terms, but woefully lacking in nutritional basics – vitamins and minerals. They make enough for me too, and I'm very grateful. Marc, however, refuses to touch it for fear of losing control of his bowels. I've eaten so many dodgy meals by this stage that I have nothing left to lose, but Marc eats a bag of Boots nuts and raisins and looks bashful.

As always, it feels strange talking to people about their misery and then walking off to find someone else to interview. This is the journalist's conundrum, I suppose: you dip into people's misery and move on, trying not to feel too grubby.

The sun sinks like a stone at around 7 p.m. and I head back to the camp hut for supper, which is exactly the same as breakfast but bigger. Marc opts to sup from our survival rations again.

I want to call Georgia; I always miss her like crazy when I'm in the more remote and difficult places. We have two satellite phones and a couple of spare batteries, which we have to use sparingly because there is no way of charging them whilst we're here. I call her anyway, I need to let her know I got over the border safely. She's relieved, but still stressed that we're here – she knows that the real danger has barely started.

In places like this there's nothing to do after dark – most people can't afford food, let alone candles, so they just go to sleep after the sun sets. I stay up and chat with Peter and Black Tom, and then call it a night.

Although I'm still exhausted from the journey, I find it impossible to sleep. Our hut-mates all snore like dragsters and I'm essentially lying on a pile of logs with legions of busy little insects living busy little lives, swarming and chewing.

The camp rises before dawn with the sound of banging and shouting. I lie listening to the cacophony until 7 a.m. and then drag myself out of bed for a wash in some freezing cold stream water. Wow, that wakes me up.

Peter takes me on a tour of the camp. It's enormous and growing every week with new arrivals. As soon as a new family arrives, they are given a plot of land on which they start to build their bamboo house, which takes a couple of weeks. Everyone seems to have the basic skills to build a house – bamboo has a limited lifespan of around five years, so everyone has to know how to build and rebuild them on a regular basis. A couple of streams run through the camp, and we wander among allotments and houses of varying ages.

The Nao Gu Putu family are just about to eat breakfast and they wave me over. They arrived in the camp four months ago but weren't able to bring any possessions with them. La Puo, a woman of about 40, explains why.

'In October the army sent four battalions of soldiers into our area. Fighting broke out between them and the Karen soldiers and mortar shells landed on our village. When the army withdrew, we thought we'd return to harvest our crops, but they put landmines around the village so we dare not live there any more.'

They escaped their village and hid in the jungle, but hunger forced them to venture back. 'When my father-in-law returned to the village to find food he moored his boat and the Burmese army found it. They waited for him to return and shot him, cut off his head and took it back to the military camp. Later, they forced his cousin to kiss the head.'

La Puo tells this story without emotion, and I find it difficult to understand if she's angry, grieving, combative or simply relieved that her ordeal is over. The Karen aren't loquacious people, and they seem happiest answering direct questions. This makes interviews extremely difficult as I have to ask some uncomfortably probing questions: unless I ask if any of their family have died, they don't think to mention it. On top of the tragedy of La Puo's father-in-law it turns out that their two youngest children died of diarrhoea.

The Karen are friendly but unused to talking about emotions and opinions – in fact, Black Tom tells us that expressing emotions is a sign of weakness, and God forbid anyone should be seen crying. Crying in someone else's house is a big taboo because this curses the house, and you then have to pay the owner to make up for the impending bad luck. A therapist would have a field day here. It is horribly ironic that a people with such a negative attitude to emotion have experienced such misery. Maybe denial is the only way of surviving when life is so full of pain.

They aren't consumed by their pain, though: the entire family howl with laughter when, at their urging, I try the local bird's-eye chillies. A word of advice: don't eat these at home, unless you want to know how it feels to be punched in the mouth.

Jungle Trekking

We leave Ei Tu Ta in search of the Karen rebels. We're going to spend a week living rough in the jungle, monitoring Burmese army movements and checking on the remaining Karen villages.

After half an hour's walking we stop at a clearing and it takes me a few moments to realize that there are 20 or so heavily armed men lurking under trees and in the undergrowth. Tu La Wa introduces me to Major Ki La Wa, the platoon commander, who says that he will be responsible for our safety.

We walk out of the camp along a riverbed, wading through the water. Our jungle boots aren't waterproof – in fact they are exactly the opposite: they're designed to let water in, but more crucially, to let it out again. Jungle trekking involves stomping through endless rivers and streams in the fetid heat, so walking through the rivers isn't as unpleasant as it sounds – it's a great way to cool down.

The Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) has around 5,000 soldiers, all volunteers who spend much of their time fighting in the jungle. They are a ragged army of flip-flops and rocket-propelled grenades, and they're vastly outnumbered and outgunned by the half-a-million-strong Burmese army. But the Karen soldiers have the benefits of guerrilla warfare, the support of the villagers and 60 years' experience of living and fighting in the jungle. Our platoon travels light, each man taking with them little more than their weapons and ammunition, a small bag of rice, oil, a sleeping blanket, lightweight hammock and a machete.

Marc and I, on the other hand, have BBC health and safety rules to contend with, so we come complete with trauma packs (for major injuries), emergency food rations for eight days, insect repellent, cameras and microphones, batteries, sleeping bags and a set of clean clothing.

We hike off into the hills at a fair lick, stopping frequently to check for Burmese army patrols. Almost instantly I am bathed in sweat from the damp heat, and I start to feel tense and irritable. My mood isn't helped by the fact that the walk seems to go on forever, and I begin to despise the jungle with a passion.

Ei Tu Ti Village

After five hours of walking up and down steep valleys I am exhausted, but we have finally reached our stopping point near the Karen village of Ei Tu Ti just in time for nightfall. A few of the soldiers go to check if the village is free of the Burmese army whilst we set about preparing for our first night sleeping rough in the jungle. Ki La Wa helps us find a couple of trees from which to string our lightweight hammocks, then teaches us to clear the ground underneath to make sure that snakes and rodents don't hide there. If you're bitten by a snake it's a long, long way back to the camp, and they probably won't have the antidote anyway.

I set up my hammock, spray the end ropes with insect repellent to avoid the tree's legion of creepy bitey crawlies joining me in bed later, and attempt to get in. I'm swiftly and humiliatingly ejected from the other side. After an ungainly struggle, I finally manage to get in and stay there. The discomfort is a surprise – the hammock is tiny, precarious and wobbly, and it clamps you into a bowed posture designed specifically to bugger your back.

The major tells us that the village has an animist ceremony later and the villagers have invited us to join them, so we leave our new jungle home and pick our way up the hill as soon as night falls.

The village is a collection of 20 or so bamboo huts in the same style as those in the refugee camp. We're led into one of them where a dozen or so men, women and children are having a feast. The head of the house greets me with a huge smile, then ties red strings around my wrists as good luck charms whilst mumbling words of blessing. All your good spirits will come back to you,' he says. That would be nice.

'Ta blu,'
I say [thank you].

The villagers are fascinated – they've never seen Westerners before, and it's all they can do to stop themselves from poking us with their fingers. They are kind and welcoming, and they've been waiting for us to arrive before starting their dinner, which makes me feel very guilty. The major, Black Tom and I are given a meal of boiled pork – a huge privilege in a place where there is so little food, but after the offence I caused Sabra in Afghanistan, I have learnt that turning down food is a great insult, so I swallow my guilt. The pork is still covered in pig bristles, but it's the first meat I've had in ages, so I wolf it down.

The major explains the Burmese army's Four Cuts, a deliberate policy of starving the Karen. 'When they arrive at a village they loot it, taking all the food. Then they ask the villagers where the rebel soldiers are, and beat them if they won't say. And where they suspect there are landmines they make the villagers walk on the fields.' The army hope that if the villagers are starved out, the rebels will lose supplies.

The Ei Tu Ti village head relies on the KNLA for protection and says 'If they weren't here we wouldn't be here either.' But right now he doesn't want to talk about problems in case it brings bad luck on the village – he wants to sing and drink to bless the coming harvest. He passes me a small bowl of rough and potent rice wine; it warms me instantly. The cup is passed around over and over again, and the villagers all start smoking gruesome cheroots. They begin to throat-sing, a dirgey, moaning noise that no one could translate. After drinking enough hooch to ensure a swift departure into dreamland, I thank everyone profusely, wish them luck and stagger back across the soggy valley to our camp, from where I can still hear the throat-singing loud and clear.

The ominous drone of the singing, together with the discomfort of the hammock, the freezing cold and the constant rustle and scratching of Lord-knows what on the jungle floor below keeps me wide awake until about 4 a.m.

I awake at 6 a.m. with a throbbing headache and the sensation of having wet myself. I feel my sodden sleeping bag, and realize that it has been raining whilst I've been asleep. I'm soaked through. It has also been building up on the leaves above me, and then dripping down on my forehead, adding to the hangover. I look around to see that the soldiers had built themselves fires next to their hammocks, which they stoked every few hours throughout the night. Why didn't I think of that?

We pack up camp soon after dawn and head off to our next camp. I'm already exhausted and sleepy, and I hike in a daze. After four hours of zombiefied walking we stop in dense jungle next to a stream and make a more substantial camp. Two of the soldiers start hacking down bamboo to make utensils for a meal. They've brought a couple of pans with them, but use bamboo to make everything else: ladles, spoons, pans, cups. They pack rice into a piece of bamboo around 5 cm in diameter, top it up with water, put a stopper into it, and then lean it against the fire. The rice steams, and just before the young bamboo starts to burn, it's cooked. They also make a bamboo saucepan using the same principle – it sits on the fire and because it's green and tough, water inside it will boil before the pan burns. You can use each pan twice before throwing it away. This is how the rebels survive carrying so little – they make utensils every time they stop to camp, but leave them behind when they move on.