One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [32]
On their own, children cannot pay the bribes; perhaps they join or are forced to join the soldiers; perhaps they are turned back by the soldiers and sent home. The Thai authorities regularly round up the Burmese refugees (they are seen as illegal migrants), and send them back to the border areas. Unaccompanied minors would be easy targets for these roundups. They would also be easy prey for the flourishing sex industry in Thailand. On the streets of Bangkok, one can see countless young male and female prostitutes. Due to all these conditions, it is harder to find the Burmese youth who are living on their own. Neither the pimps nor the Thai police nor the Burmese military or rebel groups are inclined to give researchers like me access to the children they control. Though these children may exist in Thailand, I would not have the opportunity to meet them.
Among the Burmese children I met, most of whom had at least one member of their family with them, the troubles of the journey, of the violence witnessed or experienced, were mitigated by the support they received.
“Sometimes I don’t sleep well, and my mother comes to me. I tell her I’m having bad dreams and she tells me it’s okay. We’re here now and we are safe. But I don’t always feel safe,” Nicholas confided in me. We were in a city near the Thai-Burma border, a place where police corruption is rampant and smuggling flourishes in diamonds, drugs, weapons, and people. Burmese children are particularly vulnerable, and these stresses bother Nicholas as much as the memories of his village.
“One day the SPDC”—State Peace and Development Council, the name of the military junta—“came and burnt my village, so I wanted to draw this,” he said, showing me the picture he produced when I asked a group of school kids to draw anything they liked. “I don’t know why they did it, burnt my village. I ran with my family into the mountains and crossed into Thailand. The army would have arrested us if they’d caught us trying to leave, but we snuck out through a secret way.”
His drawing captivated me.
Nailed to a cross, a young man cries out as soldiers fill his body with bullets. To the right, a soldier climbs a flagpole and takes down the unmarked flag. Bodies fall from the sky, dropping from an exploded airplane. On the far left, easy to miss at first glance, is a little form in purple, a boy hiding behind a tree (Figure 7).
Nicholas’s blank flag, the flag of the defeated, shows a keen awareness of his situation. He is an illegal migrant hiding in Thailand, unable to attain legal refugee status and clearly unable to return to his homeland. He doesn’t speak Thai. He has no nation. The blank flag is central to his picture. Even as his little purple form—he shrugs when I ask if that is him—witnesses terrible violence, he also witnesses the political struggle occurring around him. He cannot verbalize the politics of the fighting, but he has a sense of them: it has something to do with that flag; the reason he and his parents fled is connected to that flag.
Violent forced migrations, political struggles robbing children of their homelands, are not unique to the developing world. In the Serbian province of Kosovo, in the last years of the twentieth century, a policy of ethnic cleansing filled the roads with terrified people running for their lives and killed hundreds of fathers, brothers, and uncles. The violence displaced nearly one million people.
One of those was a young girl named Nora from the village of Zahaq. She was about eight years old at the time she had to flee the country.
It was in May. It was a sunny day. I was playing in front of my house where there were fruit trees. Serbs were hiding behind those trees. They came into our yard and asked for money and jewelry, asked where the men were. My father was in Albania fighting with the KLA [the Kosovo Liberation Army]. My grandfather was at my uncle’s house. So I lied to them. I told them they went out for cigarettes. They believed me, but they asked my mom about where my dad was.
She told them