Feature
Burmese rebel motorcycle club
by Tze Ming Mok
Some democracy campaigners who manage to escape Myanmar’s poverty and oppression find it too hard to go back. Others feel compelled to return to a situation they call “genocide”. TZE MING MOK reports from the front line.
Naw Htoo Paw returned to the Myanmar military Black Zone this year, straight from Mt Roskill’s quaint community complaints and what she fondly describes as the primary-school-like argy-bargy of Parliament.
After finishing a “democracy internship” in Phil Goff’s electorate office, she returned in late January to her Karen
Women’s Organisation (KWO) offices in the Thai town of Mae Sariang – then crossed the border secretly to visit her home village in Myanmar’s neighbouring Karen State. There, Htoo Paw was distraught to find conditions worse than ever.
Earlier this year, the military government of what used to be Burma launched a major new offensive in the Karen National Union (KNU) areas of eastern Myanmar. In the “Black Zone”, says Htoo Paw, “no villagers can go out of their village or they will be shot. That kind of order used to happen when I was there, but for only three months.”
She laughs. “Yeah, only three months. Now they decided to do for six months, so the people will starve to death … They have concentration-camp orders. They planted landmines on the only road for transporting food from the city.”
Although, she says, the international community seems “confused” about the issue, “we say it is genocide”.
She gives me some handicrafts made by displaced Karen villagers to take back to Phil and the gang.
The informal ceasefire struck in 2004 between the KNU and Myanmar’s military junta – the State Peace and Development Council – has all but evaporated. Karen exiles say the “gentlemen’s agreement” to step back and negotiate allowed the junta to launch opportunistic offensives in Karen State that look remarkably like ethnic cleansing.
Htoo Paw says the usual Karen relief organisations in Mae Sariang are swamped this year by displaced people, far beyond their usual capacity. Even displaced villagers who have been hiding and surviving for 20 years in the jungle have reached their limit and finally crossed over.
But the Myanmar border populations of Thailand aren’t all refugee camp-dwellers, waiting for salvation from UN third-country resettlement and foreign NGOs. Htoo Paw, a 23-year-old KWO democracy trainer, is one of the border activists with no thought of resettlement. Experiencing the democratic luxuries of New Zealand made the return to her starving village a more starkly disturbing experience.
“I could not accept it. I could not accept it,” she says with a quiet anger.
But rather than propelling her towards resettlement, it made her more determined to dig her heels into the border and work for change.
A few hours south, the Thai border town of Mae Sot is dominated by a Burmese migrant worker population and bedecked with political and labour movement acronyms. Sure, UNHCR resettlement camps are just outside town, and New Zealand sounds like a nice place, “but people think you can go to the third country, make lots of money and support the struggle from there”, says SuSu Htet, a young feminist democracy activist and migrant worker advocate. “I know it’s not so easy. I will never go to the camps; I will not go to the third country. My work is here.”
The armed resistance in Karen State has been on the back foot since the KNU splintered and their Mannerplaw base on the Thai border fell to the government in 1994. In Thailand, many former fighters have moved into community development, social service provision and medical administration, often supporting armed groups indirectly or directly. There’s a blurry boundary between the NGO-friendly groups and the armed rebels operating under the funding radar.
Even Htoo Paw, one of the poster girls of the internationalised, conference-
hopping, potential “government in waiting” generation, is still technically outside the law: she has had to travel illegally and supports the KNU.
Thein San, on the other hand, is unashamedly old-school and unendorsable – a hardened but oddly twinkly ex-jungle commander on the radical wing of the All Burma Students’ Democratic Front. In his mid-forties and still camo-clad, he’s of the original generation of intellectuals who fled the university towns for the “liberated areas” of Karen State in 1988. His mud-splattered bike sputters in stark contrast to Htoo Paw’s glossy KWO Honda and its well-fed purr.
He’s trying to get to his farm in the jungle to check on a small group of revolutionary protégés in ideological training, but mud is mounting up, his engine keeps dying and his cellphone chimes every few minutes with migrant worker appeals for help over divorce settlements, factory grievances, police complaints and PTA meetings. “I have no time to make my movement!” he cries.
From them, he needs a revolution. From him, they want a de facto local government. An exasperating conflict of priorities.
What he definitely needs is a new motorbike, but funds are elusive. Thein San loves saying, like so many others in the town: “We must stand on our own feet!” His “under the radar” addendum: “We must not rely on NGOs!”
Pado Mahn Sha, general secretary of the KNU, is in the same boat. In dampening down the latest splitting sounds between the group’s political and armed wings, he acknowledges the KNU’s decline but says with resigned pride: “We stand by our own, ourselves. The international community doesn’t like the armed struggle. Just our people support. We stand on this support. If our people cannot support our armed struggle, we cannot stand.”
Page 1 2 
