"Better than Burma"

Yesterday I visited the rubbish dump on the edge of Mae Sot, a Thai town across the river from Burma. The dump itself was a predictable reflection of the consumption of a medium-sized Thai city. Plastic bags, decrepit toys, batteries, tin cans and the occasional ruined soccer ball stretched out for hundreds of meters.

But what's trash to some is the livelihood of others. Atop the garbage pile, more than 300 illegal Burmese immigrants have built small huts and call the dump home. They spend their days combing through the rubbish for a meager harvest - plastic and glass bottles and aluminum cans that they can cash in for petty change. Some have lived here for nine years.

"It's better than Burma," one mother told me as flies swarmed around her face. "We don't have work in Burma. Here we earn forty to sixty baht a day ($1.30-$2). There are many problems."

She told me that three huge bags full of plastic bottles will only earn her 30 baht, about a dollar. With that money she buys vegetables to cook for her family with rice. Sometimes they buy a fish.

The hardships aren't only economic; the work is dangerous. Last week as rummagers dug through the plastic, a bomb exploded wounding 14. Rumors suggest that the bomb was planted outside a rebel leader's house and was taken to the dump by accident where it was detonated by the scavengers.

It's another twist in a spate of blood-letting in the town. Two weeks ago, Padho Mahn Sha, the leader of the Karen National Union, carrying out an ethnic insurgency in Burma, was gunned down in his own house. I interviewed Mahn Sha in that house three months ago. He was a man respected for his wisdom and diplomacy.

Back at the dump, a Burmese monk has come to give stuffed animals to the children and food to the families. He took part in the protests in Burma last September and is now exiled from his homeland. I asked him about the future of his country and he looked around at the garbage for an answer.

"The poor is not forever," he told me. "And the rich is also not forever."

Recently published

A piece I wrote about Burma's underground political art movement and its burgeoning but censored hip-hop scene was recently published at Newsweek.com. You can find that article here.

It was not accompanied by this cartoon by Kaung Htet, which ran instead in the military government's propaganda mouthpiece, the New Light of Myanmar.

The new issue of Wend Magazine should be in REI and Barnes and Noble within a few weeks. In the meantime, here is a web preview of my article on Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor.

A Dangerous Palette for Burma's Artists

It’s only mid-morning, and sitting in his simple studio in the shadow of some of Rangoon’s wealthiest mansions, Thein Soe is already exhausted.

Soe, not his real name, is bone-thin at 61, with smoke-yellowed hair, and a face like the Scream. An artist for most of his life, Soe was 16 when General Ne Win took power in Burma in a military coup. He’s since weathered the military junta’s 46 year-rule on his country, watching it crush pro-democracy demonstrations, turn one of the wealthiest Southeast Asian economies upside down and quash all freedom of expression.

He may be tired, but Soe is not a beaten man. From the studio in his quiet home, he still tries to capture the truths of his country in his paintings, installations and performance art. It’s not always a truth that’s savored by the government.

“I suffer,” he says, “It’s very difficult to show our inner sense, our expression. There are many censors for art here.”

Every painting hung publically in Burma must first pass the scrutiny of the Ministry of Information’s Censorship Board, and any sign of discontent, disloyalty to the government or unseemly political message can shut down the gallery and land an artist in jail. Just a month ago, the government shut down a gallery opening of Soe and his friends just before it began.

“They were sending us a message,” Soe says.

Soe is surrounded by canvas. The nature of his work has always been sensitive, under a government that is deeply suspicious of the arts. Many of the paintings that surround him, spilling from the walls to his desk to the floor, are potential prison sentences. Dozens of Burmese actors, comedians, writers and artists have spent time in jail for work that was considered critical of the government. After the brutal crackdown on the monk-led demonstrations last September, the arrests are more frequent.

“We paint what we suffer and what we feel,” Soe says of the group of 10-15 master artists that make up Burma’s underground political art movement. “The majority of this is sadness.”

Like many things in Burma, the art scene has been set back by the country’s isolation from the world. A lack of access to current art magazines, grinding poverty and the frequent closures of Rangoon’s art universities – breeding grounds for activism, the government fears – have worked to hold back the Burmese art scene. Most of the paintings sold in the few galleries of Burma are realist portrayals of monks and pagodas which a tourist can roll up as a memento of a trip to the country.

But among artists across the country, portraits of the detained democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi are bought and sold in secret and Burma’s underground political art movement is growing with every young artist joining the fold.

But traditional materials are expensive and hard to come by, and some youths are turning to performance art to speak their minds. One young man recently walked a busy street with a birdcage on his head, before dropping it and fleeing.

“I worry for them,” one of the older artists says. “What they are doing is very dangerous.”

“Artists have a responsibility to their people and country to express what happens,” says Moe Lwin - also not his real name - one of the leading contemporary sculptors in Burma. “(My work) is the record for my period; what I have seen and what I have suffered.”

When Lwin and his friends give an exhibition in Rangoon, they must apply for permission from the censorship board two weeks in advance. They offer snacks to the censors when they come to inspect and explain the meanings of the obscure works.

“Sometimes they are worried,” Lwin says. “If they give permission, they have responsibility for the show.”

For the artists, the dangers are not exaggerated. Burmese poet Saw Wai remains in jail after publishing a hidden message, that read “General Than Shwe is crazy with power” in what was ostensibly a love poem in a Rangoon daily in January. Lwin’s own brother spent 11 years in prison for his political poetry. His uncle died behind bars for his writing.

Still, despite the dangers, Lwin says his fellow artists and writers will persist. “We are not angry, we are sad,” he says. “All of these years have been wasted time.”

“Artists will express themselves whatever happens. We are not politicians, we are people. We feel like people, we suffer like people.”

Voices from Burma

The prostitutes come out at night, powdered and preened, to sit in the dark corners near the cinemas and under Rangoon’s bypasses.

“They’re hungry,” my driver says, passing a group of them in short skirts and heels.

You mean horny?

“No, hungry. For food.”

It is almost five months since Burma’s military government brutally crushed uprisings of monks and civilians, leaving at least 31 dead and many more missing, and Rangoon looks like a city at war. The potholes in the streets and the upturned pavement of the sidewalks were not caused by explosions, however, but rather decades of neglect. Razor wire lines the perimeter of government complexes and the houses of the wealthy, and sandbag outposts hide rifle-toting soldiers outside military buildings.

Rangoon’s streets are back to status quo, congested by day and quiet by dark, swept clean of the defiance of September. But the grinding poverty that brought the Burmese into them in September, and also in the uprisings of 1988, remains unchanged. There is anger in the teashops, and the sense that the country is simmering just below boiling point.

“In your country, you work two days and you have food for a week,” says Maung Lwin, a welder taking a break for tea after lunch. “Here, you work for one day and you eat for one day.” Lwin supports his family on an average daily wage of $2.30, the same salary the government pays a specialized doctor. Money is so tight that even sitting down for a 15 cent cup of tea takes careful consideration.

“You are human, I am also human,” he tells me. “But my luck is not the same as your luck.”

None of it makes any sense. Blessed with wealthy deposits of gemstones, teak forests, agricultural land, natural gas and oil, Burma has the potential to be the wealthiest nation in Southeast Asia. Burma produces 90 percent of the world’s rubies. Every night, scores of trucks carry massive old-growth teak logs – some as wide as the hood of a car – from northern forests to the docks of Rangoon. Burmese exports account for 30 percent of Thailand’s natural gas.

But in an economy run by the whims of the generals and their select group of friends, in a country ranked the world’s most corrupt by Transparency International’s 2007 index, none of that money trickles down to the rest of the population. Most of the profits are stored in banks in Singapore, as no one trusts Burma’s banks, 20 of which closed overnight in 2003 when their money dried up. The disparity between the rich and the poor, the connected and the rest, is vast.

You can see it in Rangoon’s nightclubs, where white shirts under black lights turn the realities of Burma upside down. On New Year’s Eve, Pioneers Dance Club is thumping with heart-shaking bass and the haute coutre heels of the children of the privileged, who paid the $10 door fee – four days' work for a government surgeon – to lose themselves in a night in booze and beats.

The room is filled with 20-somethings, clutching cigarettes and cell phones. The Burmese government has so regulated mobile phones that it costs about $2,000 to buy a sim card on the black market.

“You don’t worry, don’t worry! Everything is on me!” Jarem, a drunk Nepali ruby dealer shouts in my ear. He is dancing in front of a neon green felt poster of the London Bridge, and flashes me a practiced American gang-symbol, and a few words of what he considers appropriate ghetto slang.

“2007 was shit, man, SHIT!” he shouts. “But it’s over now, here comes 2008, forget it. FORGET IT!”

But for most of Burma, 2008 offers little more hope than the year gone by. In regulations that would not affect the night-club revelers, the government frequently decrees commodity price hikes and rations. On Dec. 30, taxi drivers were only allowed to buy one canister of compressed natural gas to power their vehicles – not nearly enough to turn a livelihood. The next day, the government lifted the ration, worried it might spark protests like last September’s fuel hikes did.
In early January, the government raised the tax on satellite television from 6,000 kyat ($4.60) a year to 1 million kyat ($769) – a 166-fold increase. It later reneged on the price rise, as dissent mounted.

But figures remain which the government’s daily games of brinkmanship cannot go back on.
More than 360 children under 5 die of avoidable diseases in Burma every day, according to Save the Children statistics. According to the UN, a third of Burma’s young children are underweight and 1 in 5 do not live beyond the age of 40.

Despite the daily struggle to get by - or perhaps because of it - many Burmese keep abreast of international news, via proxy internet servers and shortwave radios. They’re keeping a particular eye on the upcoming U.S. presidential elections.

“You like George Bush?” the owner of a teashop asked me on my first day in the country. I readied myself for my canned defense that not all Americans support their government. I needn’t have.

“I love George Bush,” he said. “He thinks something and he does it. He didn’t like Iraq, so he fights Iraq. I hope he’ll fight a war with my country.” He was thumbing through a worn copy of Chicken Soup for the Soul, and told me he wanted to write an edition of his own one day.

In the streets of Rangoon, I found out, George Bush enjoys perhaps his highest approval rating outside of Crawford, Texas. The heart-breaking reason is that the Burmese are still hoping America will use its military to oust their government and restore democracy to the country.

The U.S. election came up in another conversation I had with an English literature university student at Rangoon’s Shwe Dagon Pagoda.

“In America, it takes a lot of money to be a president,” he told me. “Here, you just need to have a gun and be a good shot. After you’re president, then you get a lot of money.”

I asked about his favorite writers, and he told me he had an affinity for the existentialists.

Several days later I was sitting in a tea shop watching buses that were built before WWII growl down the streets. I noticed a man at the next table was watching me. I took a sip of tea and smiled at him. He looked like he had something to say and was forming the words in his mind. Finally, he got up and walked over to me.

“In Burma, human rights, no,” he said quietly, crossing his arms at the wrists, as if they were hand-cuffed. “All people like Aung San Suu Kyi,” he said of the democracy leader who has been under house arrest for 12 of the last 18 years.

Then he put a finger to his lips.

“But talking... danger.”

And then he left.

Back from Burma

Apologies for the long period of radio silence, I just got back from a month-long trip to Burma. It was an interesting journey, and I'll be posting some of the stories here shortly.

While I was there I had a piece run in the San Francisco Chronicle about the Shan State Army and their role in fighting the increasing opium trade in the Golden Triangle. That story can be found here.

I'll be back with more soon.

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.