New Year, Same Pain for the Shan State Army

The recruits march in lines of five, to the snap of snare drums and singing songs of war, trailing long shadows in the early morning sun.

Training camp graduation is still a week away for these new recruits of the Shan State Army, one of Burma’s last armed resistance groups, but their drill sergeants are looking for a perfect performance during the festivities of the Shan New Year, on the first new moon of December.

The soldiers are a disheveled crew, once farmers and monks, wearing worn out boots and dusty uniforms and carrying Vietnam War-era M-16s and Chinese AK-47s. Their bodies are a canvas of traditional tattoos; snarling tigers, dragons, crossed spears and ancient Pali scriptures they claim will deflect bullets and ward off hunger and cold. Their faces are vacant, their footsteps hollow.

They march to the parade grounds, past the bamboo and thatch houses of Loi Tai Leng, the mountaintop headquarters of the Shan State Army, on the border with Thailand. They will practice their routines repeatedly for the rest of the day in preparation for Shan New Year.

The celebration of the New Year for the Shan, Burma’s largest ethnic minority, is the biggest event of the year in Loi Tai Leng, an otherwise quiet fortified village of 2-3,000. It is now year 2102 for the Shan, and year 46 of the SSA’s armed struggle against the Burmese military government. But as the calendar quietly turns in this forgotten corner of Burma, the future of this rebel army and their people isn’t looking any brighter.

Each year the Burmese consolidate their control by building supply roads that snake around the SSA’s shrinking pockets of territory and carry troops and artillery to jungle outposts. The SSA soldiers, who live off of broken rice and soybean cakes and have been paid only $12 this year, resort to guerilla tactics to ambush Burmese battalions on patrol.

“They are many and we are few,” says one veteran soldier. “We shoot them and run. We kill them and run.”

Despite admitting his army is outnumbered by at least 40 to 1, Colonel Yawd Serk, the bespectacled leader of the SSA, remains confident.

“It depends on your heart, not only your gun,” he said. “It depends on your morale, your spirit. Hitler had many soldiers, but he lost.”

At the end of his speech on New Year’s Day, Col. Serk silences a crowd still snickering from the missteps of the recruits by pulling a pistol from his belt and firing it into the air. On cue, a volley of missiles and mortars whizz off in plumes of white smoke from the forest below, sending thunder across the valleys on impact.

Col. Serk later boasts about the theatrics with a challenge to the Burmese military. “We showed the enemy today,” he said. “If they turn on their T.V.s, they will see the pictures. If they want to come fight, we welcome them. If this year they don’t come, then next year we will go to them!”

But sitting in the crowd are a group of civilians from Burmese-controlled areas of Shan State who walked for weeks through landmine-littered jungles under the cover of darkness to see the festivities. They live a much different reality than the military bluster of Loi Tai Leng.

These civilians have recent, firsthand accounts of Burmese troops terrorizing their villages for information on the SSA, stealing livestock, burning down houses and raping women.

Among them is Khun Thaw, 43, who three months ago escaped four years of forced labor for a Burmese military battalion. The beatings rendered him nearly deaf, and one of his ribs is still broken. He lived on the banana tree trunks the Burmese troops fed him – an edible stalk often given to pigs. He said the Burmese troops would use the porters as human shields during firefights with rebels, shooting over their shoulders for safety.

His wife and four children have had no word of him since the Burmese soldiers took him captive, and it’s too dangerous for him to go back and find them.

“I have no family anymore, no clothes. I am hurting,” he said.

Hsai Aung Nyat, 26, is another civilian who arrived at Loi Tai Leng two weeks ago. He said a Burmese battalion came to his village last month and “arrested, beat and tortured” the headman on suspicion of being an informer for the SSA. He said it’s a common occurrence in many villages.

“I don’t know if he’s alive or dead,” Nyat said. “No one wants to replace him. It’s too dangerous.”

The civilians said their situation has worsened after the military crushed September’s democracy protests in central Burma, but that the repression has been decades-long in the remote areas of eastern Burma where foreigners are not allowed to travel and there are no cell phones or internet bloggers to document it.

In a purely pragmatic sense, the SSA can rely on the abuses of the Burmese military as a failsafe recruitment strategy. Many of its 10,000 soldiers are fighting with a painfully personal chip on their shoulder.

Sai Shwe, 18, is one of the recruits who graduated on New Year’s Day. He still has the full cheeks of a child, and his voice shakes when he tells his story. Shwe had left his home in central Shan State to become a novice monk when he learned of a Burmese attack on his village. He returned to find his aunt raped by Burmese soldiers.

“I wanted revenge,” he said, blinking hard. “I think only one thing now that I’ve graduated. I want to go back inside and take revenge for my aunt.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by Sai Yawd Merng, 32, a monk for twenty years and now a second lieutenant in the SSA.

“Here, if you have no gun it’s like you’re sticking your neck out for them to cut it,” he said. “Civilians have become the victims of war. Now, without a gun, you will not see peace in Burma.”

Col. Serk concedes that the dedication to pacifism of Burma’s democracy icon, Aung San Suu Kyi, is a brave strategy, but finds little relevance in it for the Shan. While enjoying international fame, Suu Kyi’s support isn’t universal in her country’s tribal peripheries, largely because she is ethnically Burmese – the 60 percent majority of the country which has historically lorded over the minorities.

“It’s a different situation in a different country,” Col. Serk said. “She is working for the Burmese, not for the Shan.”

And so, after the debris of the Shan New Year’s celebration is cleared away, and the village headquarters of Loi Tai Leng returns to business as usual, the next year looks to be more of the same for Burma’s largest minority and the rebel army fighting for its freedom.

In these haunting mountain ranges, stacked slate blue against the sun, the sounds of celebration fade fast.

Recently Published

My story on controversial hydropower in Laos ran in the San Francisco Chronicle on Dec. 17. Have a look at that story and photos by clicking here.

And the story about Jackie Pullinger and her life with Hong Kong's heroin addicts, gang members and prostitutes ran in the Chronicle on Dec. 14.

Also, for a feature and photos from the New Year's celebration in Shan State, take a look at the travel section of the San Antonio Express-News in the first week of January.

And keep an eye out for the next issue of Wend Magazine, due to hit the racks in Barnes and Noble and REI in January. My story and photos on traveling Afghanistan's remote Wakhan Corrdior will be published in that issue.

With the Rebels

Follow this link to see a slideshow and descriptions of the lunar New Year's celebration of a dying culture and the rebel army that vows to protect it.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/14504395@N07/sets/72157603457593751/

Clean energy, messy consequences in Laos

In dense tropical jungle, the playground of wild elephants and endangered animals, the spirit lands of 28 distinct ethnic groups, one mountain of Laos' remote Nakai Plateau is groaning from within.

Deep inside it, teams of workers in threadbare shirts, hard hats and rubber boots clang hammers on steel as they gauge a three-kilometer hole through the earth that will serve as the drain pipe for the reservoir of Laos' biggest development project ever. Machinery shudders from the depths. Shrieks of steel on steel and distant thuds sound like an advancing army of orcs.

It's called the Nam Theun 2; a $1.45 billion, 1,070 megawatt dam that is projected to bring $2 billion into Laos over the next 25 years. Over 90 percent of the electricity it generates will be sold to Thailand. For the first 25 years, the revenue will be split between four investing companies from France, Thailand Laos and Italy. After that, all the profit belongs to Laos.

The Communist Lao government hopes the Nam Theun will help turn the country into the “battery” of Southeast Asia. Laos doesn't have oil or an ocean, but it does have the Mekong and its tributaries. Currently 10 dams are being built, and 70 are being considered. The Nam Theun 2 is the biggest.

“This is a commercial project and a development project,” says Vilaphone Vilavong, Director General of Energy in the Ministry of Energy and Mining. “It’s a good thing for Laos. One hundred percent of Laos supports it. Ask anyone you like.”

The World Bank, which has put $130 million into the project, says it will alleviate the poverty of Laos, where 80 percent of the population lives off the land and the average income is less than $2 per day. A doctor in a state hospital earns a monthly salary of about $40.

But the dam has its detractors. Activist groups say it will flood one of the most biologically and ethnically diverse regions in the world, and destroy the fisheries and fields of over 120,000 people living in two river basins.

Among them is the Berkeley-based International Rivers, a social and environmental group that documents the impacts of large hydroelectric projects around the world. Their program director for Laos, Shannon Lawrence, has been visiting the Nam Theun 2 project site for four years and remains skeptical.

“This is not going to be the panacea to Laos’ development woes, the one golden ticket that gets them off foreign aid and makes them a self-sustaining economy,” she said.

Lawrence said Laos’ history of corruption doesn’t lend credibility to the government’s claim that the dam’s revenue will be used to “eradicate poverty by 2020.”

“In a country that does not have a track record of using central government revenue to really deliver those benefits… it’s a very risky proposition,” Lawrence said.

The reservoir will also flood one of the most bio-diverse regions in Asia. The jungles of the Nakai Plateau are home to 400 species of birds – 50 of which are endangered, and 35 percent of which are found nowhere else in the world. Of the last five large mammals to be discovered or rediscovered by scientists have been found in the Nakai Plateau. Among them was the Laotian Rock Rat, rediscovered last year. Scientists thought it had been extinct for 11 million years.

The Lao government has said that $1 million of the dam’s annual revenue will be set aside for conservation efforts to protect the remaining jungle from illegal poaching. Many villagers have forraged in these jungles to supplement their meager diets for generations.

With the reservoir slated to be filled in 2008 and electricity to be produced by 2009, Lawrence admits there’s little chance of stopping the project now. But she said International Rivers is still working on easing the consequences of the dam.

“We want to see that the commitments made to [resettled] villagers are met,” she said. “It’s important to keep a close watch and make sure villagers get what they were promised.”

The Nam Theun 2 Dam will relocate 6,200 villagers when it floods two-thirds of the Nakai Plateau – an area three times the size of Sacramento. Anthropologists have identified 28 distinct ethnic groups in the area, some of them which have not yet been classified. The relocated villagers are now transitioning into different livelihoods on less land.

Som Vang, 41, is the headman of one village that was relocated four years ago.

“Life is different,” he said. “Before I was a farmer, now I am a gardener. I sell vegetables to buy rice.”

Vang said living conditions are better for his village, they now have running water and electricity, but their buffalo are not adjusting easily.

“Now there’s not enough food for them to eat,” he said. “They’re all thin now.”

Before, Vang’s village survived on the highland rice they grew the livestock they raised, and the food they foraged in the forest. In their new location things are different. Forest food is harder to come by with the increased competition. And with no place to grow rice, they have now been told they should grow vegetables to sell in the market, a kilometer away. Their first introduction to the market economy has not been easy.

“Some days are good for selling, some are not so good,” Vang said. Down the road three ethnic women are walking back from the market, where they made “10 or 20,000 kip” selling their vegetables – about one or two dollars.

Nanda Gasparini, the World Bank’s media representative for Nam Theun 2, is nonplussed.

“They probably would have come into the market economy on their own,” she said.

Gasparini said in impoverished Laos, which has no oil or access to an ocean, options for development are few. Moreover, in a country where the hammer and sickle still flies fringe to fringe with the national flag, the Communist government ultimately calls the shots.

“The fact is, in this country, [the dam] is going to happen. The government is going to do it,” Gasparini said. She said the World Bank is involved to ensure that the project is carried through consultatively, transparently, and with minimal negative impacts.

The project has generated “6,000 to 8,000 jobs” for Lao nationals as well, she said. At the worksite, there were employees from Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines as well. Despite the dust-covered signs on the project site saying “Our Target is Zero Accidents,” International Rivers has been told of 11 workers dying, mostly in dynamiting accidents.

Gasparini said in a country with a small workforce of which very few are highly educated, “hydropower and mining are the most surefire options” for development.

But at least one Lao employee of the Nam Theun 2 Power Company, the consortium of companies building the dam, isn’t convinced.

“This is not development,” he said, asking that his name not be used to protect his job. “The government says it’s development, but it’s not. Development is bottom up. This is all top down.”

The employee made a funnel with a piece of paper.

“A lot of money goes in at the top, but not much comes out for the people at the bottom.”