Self Help against the Vices of Power in BURMA 2011

Asia Times

Southeast Asia      Feb 18, 2011

PHOTO ESSAY Rangers to the rescue in Myanmar By Tony Cliff KAREN STATE, Myanmar - Saw Maw Nam spreads his dental instruments over a plastic sheet on the spongy ground of a vast but untended durian plantation cleared from Myanmar's northern Karen State jungle. With the help of a camper headlamp, he vigorously pulls at a tooth from a puzzled woman. "Here most of the people get their teeth rotten by the betel nuts they constantly chew," smiles the 38-year-old Karen, himself a regular chewer. Besides Saw Maw Nam, who also goes by the nickname of "Superman", a group of women with their young children and a few elders from a nearby village sit on a tarpaulin. Some have lived here since birth, others have come more   recently, forced to leave homes which were burnt down by government soldiers. Settled amid the small crowd, young medics take blood samples from screaming babies and test the breathing of their mothers with a stethoscope. Photos by Tony Cliff "Malaria is a big killer here," says Saw Hser Doh, a 25-year-old Karen medic. "Many people suffer from dysentery, anemia and other diseases which can be easily treated." A female assistant will then distribute medicine and dutifully write down the details in a log book. Moving around this little theatre, Sai Khur Harn, a 28-year old Shan, is filming with a compact video camera. Later he will record the testimony of two villagers, detailing how they were forced to work as porters on trails infested with landmines by the government army - they all say "SPDC", the acronym for "State Peace and Development Council", the ruling military junta's official name since 1997. Pictures and reports of atrocities perpetrated by soldiers against civilians will be processed on portable computers and sent with satellite equipment to a mailing list across the globe, including to international human rights activists and a handful of United States congressmen. A short distance from the medical makeshift facilities, squatting near a fire with their guns within reach, other young men wash cuts of red meat for lunch. They are Naw Naw La Pang, a 30-year old Kachin, and Kya Bon, a 36-year old Lahu, both security volunteers. They are all members of the Free Burma Rangers (FBR) relief team who reached the plantation the day after a tough walk through remote mountainous jungle. They were accompanied by some 20 porters carrying medical supplies, blankets, cloth and other emergency items. The FBR were founded in 1997 by a then 37-year-old former American Special Forces officer who had grown up in Thailand and a handful of young Karen from a refugee camp. They were horrified by the displacement, disease and death of a brutal and large scale offensive along the Thai-Myanmar border launched by the government army against Karen insurgents. "Refugees arriving on the border were more or less accommodated in camps in Thailand but we realized that there were huge needs in the jungle and the mountain where scores of displaced people were hiding in terror, nobody was helping them", says a FBR founder, who for security reasons asked not to be quoted by his real name but rather by pseudonym Tha-U-Wa-A-Pa, or "the father of the white monkey" in the Karen language. It took a few years before the FBR established itself as a humanitarian force to reckon with and become the only organization of its kind not directly affiliated with an ethnic resistance movement to actually work deep inside Myanmar's vast ethnic territory. In many ways, the FBR have reactivated in Myanmar what pioneering international non-governmental organizations (NGO) such as the French Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) or Aide Medicale Internationale (AMI) were doing in the 1980s in war-torn countries like Afghanistan before switching to more cautious strategies. Then, humanitarian groups frequently worked without governments' authorization to send medical relief teams in war zones, often by passing through clandestine border crossings. Today, with the vast network of humanitarian organizations all over the world, the FBR are one of the few that have maintained this risky, life-saving approach. Most FBR missions take place in Myanmar's so-called "black zones", a term used by the junta to describe ethnic territories with intense underground activities. They are also where soldiers have a free license to kill suspected guerrillas as well as civilians. The ongoing offensive in ethnic territories is not new but rather the continuation of a massive counter-insurgency strategy launched in the 1960s under a policy known as the "Four Cuts". The objective then was to push the insurgents from central Myanmar to more remote mountainous areas and cut their links to food, money, intelligence and recruits with the local and mostly sympathetic population. That move also had an economic motive: the exploitation of these lands vast and rich natural resources. The policy has over the years amounted to an endless and efficient ethnic cleansing campaign which is still ongoing. The "black zones" in particular have become a setting for daily tragedies. Government soldiers, driven by a system that insures total impunity, have engaged in a myriad of abuses: murder, rape, torture, destruction, looting, forced labor, child conscription. FBR and other organizations estimate that there are currently over one million internally displaced people in Myanmar's ethnic areas. Some are forced to flee fighting and abuses for a few days, others for months or even years. FBR volunteers are young people selected by ethnic leaders for their motivation and aptitude. They are generally trained from a one to two month period in secret camps set up in ethnic territory. They learn the basic techniques of medical emergency, psychological counseling, media reporting, map reading, landmine removal and physical training before signing up for at least four years with the organization. A new "Ranger" has to make the fundamental commitment "to be with people under attack and to stand with them if they cannot flee".                                                      After a year of practice, volunteer medics are invited to attend an advanced training program where they are taught more sophisticated techniques, including amputation. Western medical professionals often travel from overseas to volunteer and run training sessions. The most regular is with no doubt Shannon Allison, a 49-year-old American dentist. Every year or so, this former Special Forces officer and friend of Tha-U-Wa-A-Pa leaves his dental practice in Mandeville, Louisiana, his wife and their four children for the journey to the Thai-Myanmar border. Carrying his equipment, including a specially designed portable drill that works on solar energy, he often disappears for a month in the Myanmar jungle with a FBR team. Wherever the expedition stops, Allison, a gentle and always laughing giant, pulls and fills rotten teeth but most importantly imparts his dental expertise to young volunteers such as Superman. The FBR currently have 55 teams with a total of about 300 volunteers from 11 different ethnic groups, half of them Karen. Each team operates for spells or one to two months, and sometimes as long as four months, in conflict affected ethnic territories. The teams' security is usually provided by the local ethnic resistance movements that operate in those areas. For instance, the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) in the East and the Arakan Liberation Army (ALA) in the West organize the crossing of strategic and heavily mined military roads in their territories. The priority of FBR teams, who must move constantly to eschew entrenched SPDC positions and camps, is to avoid at all cost any encounter with soldiers. They can be painstaking maneuvers when, as it often happens at the start of a FBR expedition, a column of 150 people including a hundred unarmed porters has to be moved. Since 1997, however, only a few FBR members have been killed or captured by government soldiers. Others have perished from malaria or other diseases. The bulk of the FBR budget - about US$1 million in 2010 - comes from private donors, mostly American and European Christian networks, but also some European governments have discreetly provided the organization with equipment. Increasingly complicated administration and logistics managed outside of Myanmar are generally taken care of by Western volunteers, mostly from the US. The FBR also contributed, thanks to a large private donation from a couple of American citizens, to set up an early warning system in 150 Karen villages. These village headmen were trained and provided with communication equipment and solar panels. Any move by the Myanmar army in a given location can be quickly dispatched to the nearest KNLA rebel position who will send guerrillas to help villagers to flee and hide in the forest before the soldiers arrive. Because the FBR's core founders are Christian, it is often erroneously believed that it's a religious organization. "That's not exact," says Tha-U-Wa-A-Pa, himself a devout Christian. "Even if Christians like myself are motivated by the love God gives to the people, we have amongst our volunteers non-believers as well as people from Buddhist and animist background". Members of the team often gather children and women in a so-called "Good Life Club" program specifically designed for them. Under the direction of Daniel Dan Phone, a 33-year old Karen, the children will sing, dance and play for a couple of hours before receiving a pack containing toilet items, toys and baby outfits. For Dan Phone, this kind of jungle recreation afternoon represents a dramatic turn from a previous life. Indeed a few years ago he was making a living as a pianist playing Chopin and Bach in the lobby of Rangoon Sedona and Traders luxury hotels ... "I thought I was useless there and I decided to join the Karen resistance where I had some relatives and friends, and more recently I volunteered with the FBR". Currently FBR teams are at work in Mon, Karen, Karenni, Shan, Arakan and Chin States. In almost 14 years of existence, according to their own statistics, FBR teams have treated over 360,000 patients and helped over 750,000 people. Although difficult to measure, another upshot of FBR's work appears to be deterrence, judging by the decline in the number of villages raided and pillaged by government troops in recent years. "The KNLA told us that many times they intercepted messages by the SPDC telling their troops to be careful as human rights groups were in the area filming," says Tha-U-Wa-A-Pa. "We were told sometimes they mentioned FBR, other times they just said human rights groups." FBR teams also try to get as much information as they can about the Myanmar army officers and soldiers responsible for atrocities. Names, ranks, locations and other details have been reported, but so far it has been impossible to confirm whether this kind of exposure has directly changed their actions. The FBR's existence has been recognized at the very top of the SPDC's hierarchy. During a state visit to India in 2010, General Than Shwe, the junta's leader, reportedly asked Indian authorities to crack down on Tha-U-Wa-A-Pa and his volunteers because they "are trying to destabilize the peaceful border with millions of dollars from the American government". That's almost an official acknowledgement. Tony Cliff, a pseudonym, is a Bangkok-based freelance photojournalist. Since 1999 he has accompanied FBR teams in Karen, Karenni and Shan States for periods of two to five weeks. He may be reached at tonycliff7@gmail.com. (Copyright 2011 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)