The Colors of the Revolution

It was the end of September and the Burmese military had just used guns, sticks and tear gas to smother nationwide democracy protests, when Surrinder Singh Karkar, 43, knew he had to leave Rangoon.

While other activists lay low, changed their appearance, or went underground, Karkar faced a few setbacks. There was his dark skin and prominent nose, his long beard and sorbet-orange turban.

Karkar is a Sikh, of Indian parentage, but born in Burma. As one of the organizers of the uprisings, he says he was the only Sikh activist in the streets, pumping his fist for a revolution.

“Everyone knew me, I was there from start to finish,” he said. “The government wanted me, dead or alive, they didn’t care.”

On Oct. 4, Karkar, a used car salesman and father of three, made his escape. In a four-day journey to the Thai border, Karkar walked on the road, caught lifts on busses and slipped through the jungle to avoid checkpoints. He stayed a night in a village controlled by a pro-government militia, telling them he was a trader, and then snuck across the border by what he calls the “water road” – across the Moei River.

Now in Thailand, Karkar stays inside the compound of an exiled Burmese political group in Mae Sot. He came to escape the police roundup of protest leaders and to tell the international media what is happening in his country. He’s also waiting to have a doctor look at his back, where he was hit by a policeman’s bamboo stick. More than a month later, it’s still giving him pain.

But Karkar is not a broken man. Sitting down for a recent interview, he smiles broadly and sports a yellow shirt that says “Free Aung San Suu Kyi.” Karkar says he was the only Sikh but not the only ethnic Indian to join the protests – thousands of Muslims and Hindus did as well. There were many different colors in Burma’s Saffron Revolution.

The ethnic Indians of Burma, which make up two percent of the population according to the latest official census in 1983, have long been discriminated against and denied citizenship. They are likely a much larger population than the junta will acknowledge. Karkar said the Indian religious minorities saw the democracy protests as a chance to change their long history of persecution.

“They don’t give us Indians a chance,” he said of the military junta. “In Burma, the government has no interest in Indians. For this reason, we were happy to protest.”

Karkar, a veteran of the 1988 student uprisings, said many thousands of Hindus and Muslims participated in the protests in Rangoon and Mandalay. He said the deteriorating economic situation and the lack of rights pushed many into the streets.

“We live there, we work there, it is our home, but the military makes it difficult to eat and drink, to come and go,” he said. “We have no money to drink tea. What more can you say? If we Indians can’t buy tea, what can we buy?”

Many Indians are denied a passport in Burma, even if they were born there. Karkar says it takes a “black money” bribe of 100,000 to 300,000 kyat ($70 to $214) for an Indian to get one. In a country where the majority of the population lives on less than a dollar a day, to most, this is simply unaffordable.

Karkar describes the city he left in bleak terms.

“There are so many poor people, so many beggars,” he said. “It’s very difficult to live. There’s no food, it’s not safe. Daily we see the police take people away.”

Karkar said the situation is bad enough that people will not stay silent for long.

“For sure, more protests are coming,” he said. “Before the end of December, for sure they’re coming.”

Karkar’s wife and child are on their way out of Burma to meet him in Thailand. They will stay until his back is healed and they can safely return to their home. He said he’s not worried about finding his way back to Rangoon safely.

“This is in the hands of the man upstairs,” he said, looking skywards. “There are many roads in Burma, and many jungles. I will get back.”

Karkar said the diverse population of Burma will remain united against the government as they were in the September protests.

“In Burma, Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Sikhs and Buddhists, they all mix,” he said. “There is no problem. But the government is a problem for everyone. They make the chaos, they make the confusion.”
The fighting peacock - symbol of the democracy struggle in Burma.

A Day in Burma

I crossed the bridge to Burma two days ago, to renew my Thai visa. A bored official took my passport on the Burmese side - you have to leave by 5 p.m. - and told me to enjoy the sights.

It's amazing how much can change in 200 meters. On the Burmese side of the bridge, the roads are dusty and pot-holed, the noodle bowls cheaper to remain affordable for a much-poorer country. There are spies and pro-government militia soldiers walking the streets. Instead of the big diesel 18-wheelers you see in Thailand, there are cheap Chinese contraptions - a sputtering engine strapped to a steel-frame with wheels - for transporting goods.

I visited several monestaries and a school. Here is a slideshow of some of the pictures. It's as far as I can get into Burma right now: http://www.flickr.com/photos/14504395@N07/sets/72157603161362268/

The Artist

Maung Maung Tinn is an unlikely philanthropist.

He fled his village in eastern Burma 13 years ago; after his parents died and when, as he tells it, he could no longer handle the sadness. He wandered into the jungle. Some KNU rebel soldiers found him there, crying and singing, alone.

“Singing doesn’t always mean you’re happy,” he says.

The KNU soldiers helped him cross the border into Thailand where he worked in a clinic for refugees and started devoting himself to painting.

Now 39, Maung Maung finishes a painting about every month. He has a style of his own, soft, understated watercolors, always of people, always precise in expression. He sells some of them, to NGO workers or travelers, and uses others for exhibitions.

He puts together calendars and just printed a book. He uses the money he earns to pay for schools for Burma’s displaced children, to fund orphanages or to pay the rent for H.I.V. patients who can no longer work.

“I try to help wherever I can,” he said. “I can’t run a big project, I’m not an NGO, but if someone needs something and I can help, I help.”

Maung Maung’s next exhibition will be in Italy. But the artist won’t be attending. Maung Maung has no passport, and with the reputation he’s earned with his work, has little hope of the Burmese government issuing him one. At this point it’s too risky for him even to go back into the country.

“I am not political,” he told me. But his paintings – of displaced Burmese villagers, deported migrant workers and children sleeping on the streets – would beg to differ.

Maung Maung led me into his sparse home yesterday, on the side of the highway to Burma. We sat on the floor, and he told me pieces of his life.

He looked a fragile man.

His face was thin, his skin sallow and his eyes pained with history – his, and that of his homeland. Sometimes they misted over when he stared into space. Sometimes they flashed with color when he talked about his home. Sometimes they drained of feeling entirely.

He gets homesick. Mostly at night, he says, when he’s alone. Sometimes at big parties when everyone is with their families and happy.

He’s been encouraged by various NGO workers and friends to resettle as a refugee in a third country. But he probably never will. He says he couldn’t stand to put any more distance between his heart and his home.

Instead he will stay to try to paint a better future for his country. His goal is to spread awareness, he says, so that the world will know and be shocked by the realities of life in today’s Burma.

But more immediately, Maung Maung’s aim is to help the refugees coming daily across the border, to whom life has been anything but fair.

He boils it down to a concentrate of kindness.

“I want to do something good – it doesn’t matter, big or small – before I die.”

Click here to see a gallery of Maung Maung Tinn’s work: http://www.burmesepaintings.org/index.htm
Maung Maung Tinn

Made in Thailand (with some help)

Last week I plucked up the courage to pay a visit to a small sewing factory in town. I’d been directed to it by Lwin, a Burmese man who has spent the last 12 years quietly working to organize the 100,000 or so illegal Burmese laborers in Mae Sot.

In my interview with Lwin, I had asked him if he could arrange for me to visit a factory and meet some of Thailand’s 2 million illegal Burmese immigrant workers.

“There’s one near your guest house,” he told me. “Why don’t you go yourself?”

It was a challenge.

So one quiet day at noon, I did. I approached a man sitting outside the small, gated room that was chattering with sewing machines, and asked him in Thai if the owner was in. He looked uncomfortable, even more so when the young manager came out. They spoke to each other in Burmese. Then the driver turned to me and pointed to a rusted Chevy pickup.

“Get in,” he said.

I piled in with the driver and the manager jumped in the back. We rattled off along a road that led us to the outskirts of town. Half of me was still wondering if they were going to take my camera and wallet and dump me in a rice field, when the driver pulled into an unmarked drive.

A guard opened the gate, and we drove up to a long building humming with the zip of sewing machines.

There was a pile of sandals at the door. Inside were their owners – about a hundred of them, mostly young girls, and all Burmese working in Thailand illegally. Their fingers were moving at a fevered pace, flying under machines that stitched together baby skirts, frilly brown blouses and pinstriped designer shirts with labels that read ‘Christian Dior.’ The manager told me they were knockoffs.

I started taking photos. I learned the workers made $3.80 a day, for a nine-hour shift, less than half Thailand’s minimum wage for their class of labor. They worked six days a week. The clothes that they made would be trucked to Thailand and then shipped around the world to be sold for many multiples of their wages. The labels on the clothes said ‘Made in Thailand,’ but the truth was a lot more complex.

Aung Baing Soe, 23, was one of the few men in the room. He didn’t have much time to talk between hemming shirts.

“The work’s good,” he said. “We work from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and on Sundays we rest.”

Compared to what Aung Baing left behind in Burma, the work’s certainly better.

In Burma the majority of the population lives on less than a dollar a day. Currently, 12 percent of the population has malaria. Only half of the country’s children finish primary school, and a third of them are malnourished.

It seems the Burmese that flee their homeland for the opportunity of Thailand are less interested in just wages and humane working conditions than they are about survival.

But working illegally in Thailand has its price. To go outside is to risk arrest, fines and deportation back to Burma, a country in which it is considered treachery to leave. Instead, most of the workers stay inside, locked into an economy where businessmen turn a profit on the relativity of suffering.

They work in the sweatshop, they eat in the sweatshop and they sleep in the sweatshop’s garage; 10 per tin-partitioned room, right next to the owner’s tinted windowed BMW sedan.

“Thai employers, they like the Burmese,” Lwin had told me in our interview. “Burmese workers are oppressed already and seldom demand their rights.”

There are about 400 factories operating in and around Mae Sot, tapping into a continual supply of cheap and quiet labor fleeing the dictatorship next door. They make everything from Maidenform bras to Marlboro jackets to Walt Disney apparel.

Many in Thailand realize the country’s economy needs Burmese labor. Some say this is why the Thai government offered to build the Friendship Bridge to Burma at its own expense.

I spoke to the Mae Sot police and the Ministry of Labor, and the number of illegal workers in town is no secret. But it’s a tenuous system, where timely bribes keep authorities’ heads turned until a publicized crackdown proves even timelier. The driver told me the owner of the sweatshop I visited paid 20,000 baht ($570) a month to keep the police from prying.

But even when workers are caught and sent back to Burma, they find a way to return.

“We cannot control it,” the local police captain told me. “If you send them away one day, tomorrow they’re back.” He denied any police involvement in the illegal labor economy.

“The police’s duty is to keep security,” he told me. “Their duty is not to check on workers.”

But raids are still common. The captain told me the police had sent 5,000 illegal workers back to Burma this year. Still, each year the number of Burmese crossing the border increases.

Millions have already fled the abuses and economic mismanagement of Burma ruling junta by crossing into Bangladesh, India, China and Thailand.

Before human rights or justice or peace, the majority of these evacuees are looking for the most basic thing they can no longer find in their homeland: a livelihood.

Click here to see a slideshow of images from the sweatshop: http://www.flickr.com/photos/14504395@N07/sets/72157602999644422/

The Next Movement

My contact was a man of few words, and when the expected call to my mobile came, our conversation was predictably brief.

"I'm outside your guest house," he said. "There's a car. Come out and get in. Bye."

I picked up my notebook and walked out in time to see him zip off on a motorbike. I got in the waiting sedan. Its windows were black.

Inside I met Zue Hlaing Hten, 27, and Min Youn Thwe, 23, two Burmese student activists who were involved in September's uprisings in Rangoon. My contact had arranged the meeting, but in this edgy border town of spies and mercenaries, security was paramount.

We exchanged names, and then were silent. I didn't know how much the driver knew, or should know. He was wearing sunglasses. He followed my contact at a distance through the backstreets of Mae Sot. Spaghetti parlor piano spilled from the speakers.

On the outskirts of town, we pulled into the parking lot of a nice restaurant. I was about to open the door when the driver stopped me and said in clear English, "Wait." He kept the car running. Still, not a word was spoken.

Twenty minutes later, my contact pulled up beside us, and the driver told us to get out. We walked through the restaurant to a secluded table in the corner. Finally we could talk.

Zue Hlaing and Min Youn, who fled Burma just last week, told me about the state of fear currently gripping their country.

“The government set up many roadblocks to check on people and ask what they are doing,” Zue Hlaing said.

These two activists passed more than 10 police checkpoints in their bus journey from Rangoon to Myawaddy, before escaping across the border last Thursday into the relative safety of Thailand. But unlike many Burmese seeking a better life in this town, they aren’t planning their exile.

Zue Hlaing and Min Youn came instead to enroll themselves in an underground, four-day course on political defiance. The course is based on previous movements in Poland, Chile and Serbia, and teaches organization, operational strategy and leadership of mass protests. It is taught by a member and ex-rebel fighter of the All Burma Students Democratic Front, a militant group that formed after the Burmese military put the student uprisings of 1988 to a brutal end.

The course has been taught for 10 years now, and its teacher estimates 2,000 monks, students and teachers have been taught and sent back to Burma. Five students enrolled in the latest course, which finished today. Three of them have already returned to Burma. Zue Hlaing and Min Youn are waiting for word from inside on when it is safe to return.

Zue Hlaing, a petite young woman, with short-cropped hair, is nervous.

“When we came, they asked no questions. But when we go back, there will be questions,” she said.

They will tell the police they crossed into Thailand for the school holidays. But once they reach Rangoon, they will gather their friends and talk about Burma’s next uprising.

“We know that the student leaders of the movement were arrested. We wanted to come here, to learn, so that we could replace them,” Zue Hlaing said.

Zue Hlaing and Min Youn gave me a detailed account of the days of protest and its sudden bloody climax in Rangoon. Min Youn said when he heard of the government troops beating up protesting monks in early September in the central city of Pakokku, he was furious.

“The government calls themselves Buddhist. How can they treat monks like that?” he said.

On Sept. 23, when the protests were building in Rangoon, Min Youn was on his way back from a computer class when he rounded a corner and saw a small group of monks and lay people marching.

“I dropped to the ground, paid my respects to the monks and followed them,” he said.

Min Youn joined the protests each day after that. They were growing successively larger. He said he was thinking about the uprisings of 1988, which he had been told about by his parents who participated, and read about in smuggled books. But he could see no soldiers on the street, and he was proud and glad to march.

“I felt a tension release in my heart,” he said. “In Burma, there is so much tension because of the government pressure. We were not afraid. We were thinking we would get what we wanted.”

By Sept. 25 the protests had swelled to 100,000 people, including several prominent actors and writers. The crowd gathered around the Sule Pagoda, where a monk, a student leader and a member of the opposition party, the National League for Democracy, addressed the crowd.

“I couldn’t hear them,” Min Youn said. “I just heard we had to be disciplined and continue the struggle. We were so many people. It looked like a human sea. We were so happy to be taking action. We didn’t think the government could do anything.”

But that night, when the crowds had dispersed, government troops patrolled neighborhoods, announcing a curfew and banning groups of more than five people. Min Youn stopped in an internet café to chat with his friend in Singapore. She told him the international rumor that had been circulating.

“Be careful,” she said. “Tomorrow they will shoot.”

The next morning, Min Youn walked to the movement’s agreed meeting place, the Shwe Dagon Pagoda. Overnight, barbed wire had been rolled out in the streets. There were soldiers on the corners, and the gates to the Pagoda were locked.

Min Youn separated from the gathering crowd to look for a group of friends. As he was looking, he heard shots, and later found the crowd on the move, shouting ‘They killed a monk! There is blood on the Shwe Dagon!’ He joined them.

“At that time, all the people dared to die,” he said. “They didn’t care. They were not afraid.”

The crowd was followed by two trucks full of soldiers. At the Ahlone Dockyard they were stopped by another truck of troops in front of them. The soldiers shouted for them to stop. The crowd of about 300 monks and 200 lay people sat down, and started chanting prayers of compassion.

Suddenly the troops on both sides of the crowd shot their guns into the air. Min Youn and most of the others were able to flee in the chaos that followed, but 30 students were put in a truck and taken away.

The next day, Zue Hlaing said she saw the police beating protesters. She said she saw two people who were beaten to death and two that died from gunshots wounds. The protests continued over the next days, though smaller, and by Sept. 30th, they were finished.

After hearing news from their friends, Zue Hlaing and Min Youn estimate that in total, 50 to 100 people were killed in the Rangoon protests, and 5,000 people were arrested.

“I felt bad,” Zue Hlaing said. “I wanted to continue.”

But for these two students, who will return to Burma sometime in the next 10 days, the democracy movement is far from dead. Once back in Rangoon, they will use what they have learned in Thailand to start organizing the students for the next movement.

Zue Hlaing’s young face is proud and defiant.

“We’re not worried. We’re not afraid,” she said. “We will continue. We will try again.”

With that my contact cut in and said the car was waiting to take us home. I scribbled the last of my notes down and then quickly asked if they could give me false names that I could use in my story for their safety.

"Don't worry," they told me. "We already did."

Children of the Bridge

Aung Htu is seven years old. He has no parents and sleeps on the banks of the river separating Burma from Thailand. He begs for his food. Here he plays with a dead snake he found in the grass.


The Thai/Myanmar Friendship Bridge, from Mae Sot to Myawaddy, built with Thai money in 1996. Some Burmese pay 30 baht ($1) to cross it to find work in Thailand. Others take a boat to go around it for free.


Shaliman is a Burmese girl of Muslim, Indian origin. She likes to play with her friends under the bridge, beside the older boys and girls hawking bottles of smuggled whiskey and cartons of cigarettes.