One Day the Soldiers Came (11 page)

The first person to speak with me was a Thai performance artist who worked with refugee children. “I will do what I can for you,” he said. “I can try to help you, but now is a difficult time. The government is cracking down on the migrants. I will talk to people.”

He could not arrange anything for me because he was leaving the country the next day to perform abroad. He referred me to a woman who provides assistance to the migrants on construction sites. Call her P——. No real names can be used here, since operations to assist the refugees are under constant scrutiny and might be put at risk. On July 15, 2002, the Thai National Security Council declared martial law on all northern border areas with Burma, banning foreign journalists and NGOs. P——, an affable British woman, is under constant threat of being shut down.

P——met with me over a soda.

“Now is a difficult time,” she said.

“How so?”

“The Thais want to reopen the border with Burma. They make a fortune off the trade. The refugees are an embarrassment to the region, especially because the Burmese suspect many of them of trying to undermine the military authority. Often they are accused of involvement in the Karen National Union or one of the other insurgent armies. Usually they are farmers who could not support themselves in Burma anymore.”

The Karen National Union (KNU) is one of the largest ethnic armies in Burma. Since 1949, when disputes over the drawing of the border for the new Karen state led Karen officers in the post-colonial Burmese army to mutiny, the KNU has been fighting for autonomy in areas dominated by the Karen people. The KNU leadership, according Burma scholar Christina Fink, was a mix of university-educated dissidents and experienced soldiers. Boasting thousands of members and income from smuggling and improvised border tolls, the KNU remains a formidable foe to the Burmese government over fifty years after its founding. The KNU enjoys popular support along the Thai-Burma border.

P——continued: “The work that the migrants do on the construction sites is dangerous and they get injured sometimes, but that is not the worst problem. They have to remain hidden or else they lose their jobs and they can be arrested. They are very afraid of strangers. I do not think I can bring you out to see them. It would draw too much attention.”

I asked, naively, if the children could be brought to meet me.

“I don’t think so,” P——answered. “These people have seen children taken away for one reason or another and never return. They would not be comfortable with that, and it would scare the children far too much. Even if I could arrange for you to meet them, they might not say anything at all to you. The fear runs very deep.”

I tried many more avenues. None worked. While I met with
one local NGO, a field office called the headquarters in a panic. The police were raiding the office. They demanded identity cards from everyone, they searched files and looked for information about any activities supporting the “illegals.” Luckily, the Burmese woman talking to the police had Thai identification papers. A wave of relief went through the headquarters. Though these local NGOs operate on shoestring budgets, they must use encryption on all their computer files. The police and the National Security Council threaten to shut down their operations every few months.

Later that day, most of the organizations aiding the Burmese destroyed or encrypted their files. One woman was asked to shut down her operation by the Thai National Security Council because of her involvement with the “terrorist” ethnic groups in Burma. She also learned on the same day that there was a price on her head. Someone did not like what she was saying about the military junta. The SPDC sees aid to the refugees as aid to their enemies, and this threatens trade with Thailand, which cannot be seen as harboring its neighbor’s enemies. Powerful people want the refugees to vanish.

The children on the construction sites
are
vanishing. They live in hiding. With the few exceptions Siha mentioned, they do not go to school. They have little contact with the outside world.

In Bangkok, I had more luck talking to some of these hidden children. An NGO agreed to take me to see some families in their homes, provided the families were willing. We would have to travel very low profile. Of medium height, white, and not speaking a word of Thai, I was not sure how I would maintain a low profile in the slums of Bangkok, but early on a Tuesday morning I found myself on a narrow street beneath a massive concrete building. A variety of smells overwhelmed me: sandalwood, sweat, excrement, exhaust fumes.

We walked through a shop of some kind. Two men and an older woman followed me with their eyes as I passed, bowing my head respectfully. A blind dog rested by the door. An old television blared. A shrine to the Buddha sat next to the television, its face partially obscured by the rabbit ear antenna. As in most Thai businesses, a photo of the king hung on the wall. They turned back to their television as I walked out the back door without a word.

We emerged onto another street below an even more ominous concrete building. A whole gang of mangy dogs waited by the front door. Their skin hung off their faces; their ribs were visible and their fur was matted and bald in patches. One of them looked up at me with bloodshot eyes, raising its muzzle from the dirt and growling as I passed the entrance to their building. The way their thin limbs twisted and splayed together made me think of Cerberus guarding the gates of Hell. This building was not our destination either, and the dogs did not bother to follow us. We slipped into a narrow alley. There was a small Buddhist shrine at the entrance to the alley, decorated with flowers and burned-out candles. Just beyond it, two red-faced Americans in dark blue jackets were speaking to a man about the Book of Mormon. They must have sweltered under their blazers. I nodded at them, acting as if we knew each other and creating a credible alibi if someone became suspicious of my presence.

Through the alley was another building, more decrepit than the two before it. This was our destination. Again, sickly dogs acted as sentinels. A woman standing in the shade of the doorway came over to us. My guide and translator, himself an illegal refugee, spoke to her very quickly. She joined her palms together in front of her lips in greeting, and I did the same. Then she shuffled us inside and up to the twelfth floor. It was very quiet.

The last door on our left opened to an unfurnished room
lit by buzzing fluorescent lights. We removed our shoes in the hallway and entered. There were mats on the floor to sit on, and I could see a small kitchen and bathroom. Compared to the privations of Africa, this urban refugee setting seemed almost desirable. Five children assembled in front of me with their parents. Their father’s right leg was made of plastic. Very quickly, soda and crackers were brought in. The family welcomed me gracefully. No one seemed too fearful. Then the door was shut firmly and locked from the inside. My translator introduced me, explained that I would like to speak with the children about their lives and their perceptions of refugee life, and have them draw some pictures. The father and mother joined their palms in front of their lips, and I did the same in return. Then the children and I returned the gesture. The kids giggled hysterically, and the father and mother shot them a glance. It seems I had joined my hands together at the bridge of my nose, a sign of respect reserved for monks. The children thought it was one of the funniest things they had ever seen. When I smiled at the explanation from the translator, the parents relaxed. They would not want me to be offended.

The children were eager to draw and the parents were eager to talk. The family had not left the building and had hardly left the room in several months, not for school or work or play. I rapidly learned of the slow torture that this life entails. While these kids are not in the combat zones of Congolese child soldiers or even the children internally displaced in Burma, they have their own battle to fight, against depression, silence, and disappearance.

“A few days ago our neighbor threatened my oldest daughter,” the father said. “She was singing too loudly, and the neighbor threatened to call the police and send us back to Burma or to the border area. This cannot happen, of course.”

The children remained quiet while their father spoke, concentrating on their drawings, signaling each other with looks to exchange colors.

“We are at the mercy of our neighbors because we are not recognized by the government. We registered with UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), but they said that the government was not recognizing any more refugees at this time. I am not legally allowed to work, but that matters little….” He gestured at his leg, shaking his head. “None of us speak the Thai language. The children cannot learn it. They cannot go to school.” He rubbed his eyes with weariness. “They do not leave the house. It is too dangerous. If they play too loudly and annoy someone, we can be arrested.”

I felt lost here in a world without play. There was a chasm of experience between these children and me. I wanted to leap it with a game, if not soccer something quiet, something mindless and fun that we could do together, but no one felt much like playing.

My translator, who drives around the city for one of the aid organizations delivering monetary assistance to the illegal Burmese refugees, leaned over and told me that this family would have to be moved.

“People complain that they have too many children and they cannot pay their electricity bill. We give them some money, but it is not enough. We have to be careful, because our assistance program is also illegal. No one here wants these people to be helped. No one wants them to stay.”

“Do you know where you will go next?” I asked.

“We will go where we find a place. We do not know where,” the father said. He leaned back on his hands, stretching his fake leg and rubbing the area above it.

“Why did you leave the border area? Is it not safer there?”

“I fought the Burmese government with the KNU. I disagreed with my commander and he tried to kill me. I was shot in the leg. I cannot go back to Burma because I am their enemy. I fought for democracy. I cannot go to the border area because of the KNU. I must seek shelter in Bangkok, even though we must live like this.” He gestured at the room around him. In the half hour I had been with this family so far, I felt the light squeezing my eyeballs more and more. The walls inched in around me from minute to minute. They were bare and white. This was a prison cell.

“I want to study,” said Thinzanoo, the oldest daughter, the singer whose song had put the family in a precarious situation. “Now I help my mother all day and raise my little brothers. I don’t see any other people. I want to have a good education.”

Education, schooling, the bane of so many children in the “developed” world, is Thinzanoo’s hope, as it is the hope of so many of the children I met in Africa who had been uprooted by war. School gave children companionship and a space to act like children. It represented their best hopes for the future and an alternative to their present suffering, exposed to the adult hardships around them.

A few days later, another girl Thinzanoo’s age drew a picture that illustrated the role school plays in the inner lives of these dispossessed children. May eagerly showed me her skills in English when she drew a picture of a girl named Susu and labeled it: “I am going to school.” Then she drew a picture of another girl, her hair done up, in nice clothes with a professional air about her, happy and pretty. This drawing said: “I went to school.” May looked like the first girl, Susu, but dreamed of the future in which she would evolve into the other girl in the picture, the one who had gone to school (Figure 8).

The kids in hiding want stability and opportunity. School
shows them a way into a good job, into security and comfort, and into the society that they see and hear other children entering every day and that they are forbidden to enter. When the days stretch out without any change, without any hope, the simple wish for education can become an escape route, a route that their parents can rarely provide.

Thinzanoo was ashamed of how her family lives. When I asked about the war in Burma, she gave no answer, and tears formed in her eyes. When I asked what she likes to do, what she wants to do when she is older, the tears burst.

“She weeps,” my translator whispered, “because she is ashamed. She cannot think of an answer.” Her attitude echoed the somber mood of her father, and I thought of Siha, how he took his cues from his mother, and I looked at Thinzanoo’s father. Her younger brother, Ostar, drew a picture of their father (Figure 9). In the picture, he has short, neat hair. He wears a tie and a clean pink shirt. The man sitting beside us looked nothing like this. His prosthetic leg was dirty and chipped a bit. His hair was long and tangled. He had heavy, dark bags around his eyes. The children, very hesitant to speak with an outsider, deferred everything to their father. They looked on him with respect and admiration. In his face I saw weariness. He was not the man in the picture anymore. Fleeing his homeland, he had left that man behind. Now he found himself helpless to protect his family, depressed and uncertain. His own fear of the border, of the outside world infected his children and made them extremely nervous as well. I wondered how greatly their outlook would improve if their father could receive counseling or an opportunity to restore some of the confidence he lost when he lost his leg.

The children have no future. They cannot go home, they cannot settle in Thailand. Their entire world has shrunk to the
size of the room on the twelfth floor of a Bangkok tenement, their worldview shaped by their melancholy and anxious father. They do not fear the mangy dogs outside or the crime in the bustling metropolis because they do not know it; they never experience it. They never experience anything outside.

I asked them to draw pictures of Bangkok as they saw it. The children’s drawings showed no resemblance to the city itself.

“I drew a mountain and the sun rising over clouds. I drew our house and a tree with a woman. The woman is growing a flower,” said Thinzanoo. She drew rural Burma, essentially, a pleasant scene from a life she desires, a life that has been closed off to her (Figure 10). Without the ability to assimilate into the new country, her only resource for images in her imagination is the memory of the past.