One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [38]
The State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), which the military junta renamed itself in 1997, continues to clash with ethnic minority armies and political parties fighting for autonomy, such as the Karen National Union (KNU) and the Mon State People’s Army, who, in turn, fight with each other for control of lucrative smuggling routes into Thailand.
Cease-fire arrangements with SPDC—the military junta—do little to stop the violence. During a cease-fire with one of the ethnic armies, I was told about military buildup and forced displacement of civilians in that region. Villages are razed and civilians are raped and killed to force their relocation, often to make way for lucrative infrastructure projects like dams and railroads or to cut off the militias from any source of income, support, or recruits. Civilians are forced into government-controlled relocation centers or are displaced internally in Burma. There are no precise figures for internally displaced persons inside Burma, but some estimates put the number around 500,000.
I visited one migrant school near a cease-fire region and worked with all the children at the school on a large drawing of their village. They elected two artists to draw on the board (democracy in practice!) and they told the artists what to include in the picture.
“Houses,” they shouted and the artists drew houses.
“Ox,” and the artists drew an ox.
“Clothes on the line and flowers.”
“No,” one of the artists said. “That’s not interesting.”
“I’m interested in that,” I said. “Everything is interesting for me. There are no wrong answers.” Everyone laughed that there were no wrong answers. The children usually learned by rote memorization. Even the teachers, who gathered around the edges of the classroom, enjoyed seeing the students shout and get excited describing their village. They allowed the shouting to go on, much to the disbelief of some of the students. The teachers were laughing among themselves, walking back and forth to get a better of view of the kids, of the board, and of me. I was excited, pointing at kids to make sure they got a chance to speak. Some chickens wandered in to investigate, but the teachers chased them out. The artists drew the flowers and the clothes on the line and some chickens.
“Soldiers,” one of the girls said. No one disagreed. The teachers grew quiet. The artists drew soldiers. They drew airplanes dropping bombs. They drew bullets coming from the soldiers’ guns.
I left the village after some tea and a conversation with four of the students. They didn’t talk much about the drawing on the board or the soldiers. They told me a joke that took a long time to tell and, via the translator, wasn’t very funny. It went like this:
Monkey was eating a piece of fruit and he told Tortoise to go with him to the riverside to get some more. Monkey told Tortoise to climb the tree and get the fruit, but Tortoise said, “I can’t climb trees,” so Monkey climbed the tree and ate the inside of the fruit and gave Tortoise the empty husk. Tortoise went off and found his own fruit tree and ate perfumed fruit. Both of them went before the king who liked the smell of Tortoise. Monkey asked where he got that nice smell and Tortoise sent him to a different fruit tree with stinking fruit. When Monkey came back, he smelled terrible and so the king exiled him forever.
We all stared at each other for a while, thinking about the joke they had just told, and then we burst into laughter at how hard it was to tell a joke through a translator. One of the girls said it would be better if we acted it out. One of the boys asked where she would get all that stinking fruit. The translator joked that he was a preacher by profession, not a comedian.
Three days later, I learned that the village was attacked, despite the cease-fire in the area, and that all the children, all the inhabitants of