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[Special] original full essay "ON THE BORDER" by Jack Picone
When I met Panyuk he was sitting outside his hut on a seat made of fat tubes of bamboo. Panyuk, a member of the Karen ethnic group from Burma, lost both his arms and was blinded in both eyes in a landmine explosion five years ago. He has lived in Mae La border camp on the Thai-Burmese border ever since, exiled from his home, his family and his people. He spends his days singing songs and telling traditional Karen stories inside the camp. “I like telling stories,” he says simply. “I’m very good at it.”
Here is Panyuk’s story.
Ten years ago, when he was 19, Burmese government soldiers attacked his village in Burma’s Karen State as part of a brutal campaign against the nation’s ethnic minorities. The soldiers, young men barely older than himself, killed his father and his uncle, and raped his mother. They destroyed the rice crops and burnt his village to the ground. Panyuk escaped into the jungle and joined the rebel Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA.) “After what I had seen, I knew I had to take action to protect my people. I had to take up arms,” he told me. He fought with the rebels until he stepped on a landmine planted by the Burmese military. He almost died.
For my photograph, Panyuk struck a proud pose with an umbrella – his weapon against tropical downpours - hooked over the stump of his left arm. Along with 45,000 others in the Mae La camp, mainly Karens who have fled Burma, and up to two million other displaced people from various ethnic groups along the Thai-Burmese border, he is a casualty of one of the world’s longest standing and bloodiest military dictatorships. Burma’s mountains rear up invitingly on the horizon right behind him, yet ongoing ethnic cleansing by the ruling junta means that Panyuk’s homeland is as remote to him as another planet.
This state of displacement and exile, of being so close to home and yet so impossibly far away, was one aspect I wanted to explore when I began to document the lives of people on the Thai-Burmese border. Fleeing armed attack, as well as abuses such as forced labour, conscription of child soldiers, and rape and torture by government troops, those who escape to Thailand must endure weeks or months of arduous trekking. The 2,100-km border is a vast, densely jungled wilderness of rugged mountains and snaking rivers. For most of its length and width thereare no houses, no roads, no visible pathways or signs of human life. Landmines, malaria and food shortages kill many migrants long before they reach a crossing point.
Some end up in ramshackle border camps with no freedom of movement. Some take their chances as migrant workers, scraping an underground living in factories, sweatshops, rice paddies and brothels. Others live rough in muddy riverside encampments, picking through garbage to survive. Once they arrive they are trapped. Their only route back to Burma is the fate they dread most: being rounded up and deported in cattle trucks by the Thai authorities to face certain imprisonment or execution back home.
In the border town of Mae Sot, behind a grimy doorway guarded by Thai heavies, I found a young sex worker named Su who was confined in an airless wooden room. I entered the building by walking in when the guards weren’t looking, but Su was too terrified to attempt to leave by the same means. A mother of two young children, Su is one of around 10,000 Burmese women and girls each year who are sold or lured into Thai brothels and forced to work in conditions of medieval slavery.
Su came to Thailand after a Burmese military attack drove her from Karen State destitute and in fear of her life. She has two children to feed but receives only a fraction of the US$3.50 she earns per client; the rest is pocketed by the brothel’s middlemen. At only 18, she has the depleted body of a middle-aged woman and the quiet stoicism of a veteran of misfortune. She was eager to be photographed despite the risk of being caught by her minders. “I am not ashamed of myself. I want the world to see the way I have to live, that I have to sell my body because I have no other choice,” she said. She added nervously: “Please don’t show my face.”
Thai Buddhist abbot named Khru Ba who is battling another iniquitous border trade. At the Golden Horse monastery, Khru Ba provides refuge for around 50 orphaned boys from Burma’s Shan State, many of whose parents died due to the area’s massive drug trafficking activity, in which the Burmese government colludes. A muscular man draped in an elaborate tapestry of tattoos, Khru Ba accepts the boys as novice monks and trains them in kick-boxing and horsemanship. Then he rides with them back into the jungle to wage a non-violent war against the drug trade.
The prime traffickers in this area are members of the ethnic Burmese Wa tribe. Once in rebellion against central Burmese rule, the Wa army remodelled itself into one of the world’s largest drug producing organizations. Khru Ba and his novices bravely attempt to confront armed Wa caravans laden with heroin and methamphetamine to prevent the smuggling. “I use my powers of faith and persuasion rather than weaponry,” Khru Ba told me. “I pray to the Lord Buddha, and I ask the traffickers to consider how they’d feel if their own children died from opium addiction.”
The abbot admits he is not sure if his efforts are successful. But for him it is a spiritual quest, an attempt to counter the savagery of border life and restore some peace. His monastery, with its incense-scented air, softly chiming temple bells and roaming wild horses, is one of the rare oases of tranquility in the region. But Khru Ba is quick to dispel any romantic notions. The orphaned boys must adhere to strict Buddhist doctrine and accept the gruelling ascetic regime he imposes. “It is very tough here. My mission is to teach the novices to accept fate and not to fear suffering,” he says.
As well as Buddhists, the refugees comprise Muslims and numerous
Christian denominations, and most also worship “nats” or animist spirits. Burmese tribes believe nats inhabit the trees, wind, water and earth of their villages, and will protect the people from disaster if they are given offerings of prayers and fruit. In many villages the Burmese regime has already ensured that the nats are no match for military force, but shrines to the spirits are dotted all over the border area — tiny symbols of hope that one day the nats will help the refugees to return home.
Everywhere I went along the border, with all its complex layers of misery, subterfuge, exploitation, brute authority and everyday survival, I wondered how people could live here without going mad or simply giving up. Chances of improvement in their stateless plight or of regime change in Burma are currently almost nil. Yet I rarely saw self-pity or outbursts of strong feeling of any kind. Part of it, I guessed, was due to the Asian culture of saving face, of not showing weakness or excessive emotion.
But it was more than that too. In a rundown border clinic I saw a
14-year-old boy having his leg amputated with a blunt saw and a local anaesthetic. The boy had stepped on a landmine during his flight from Burma. He didn’t utter a sound during the operation, but his eyes had the glazed expression of someone who is in such agony he’s incapable of feeling any more pain.
I realized then I’d seen the same expression many times before.
ends
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Burma|ON THE BORDER - all images and text are copyrighted to Jack Picone
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