One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [47]
Her assurances were not entirely true.
Nicholas said he still had bad dreams, “but not for a while when my mom comforts me.” It was hard to ignore the tension in the air, and the children, like the adults, seemed very alert to it. Every child I met mentioned how it was not safe to go out in the town on their own, not safe to go out at night. I imagine the strain can be very tiring for a child and that the bad dreams will not go away until Nicholas is secure, his future stable.
He said he wants to be a teacher when he grows up. He liked his teacher, who told the children about their history and their language.
Nicholas is a member of the Karen ethnic group, which shows little sign of ending its fight against the SPDC in Burma. The Karen have been fighting for an autonomous region, off and on, since the 1950s. The military cracks down on the Karen areas, on the civilian populations, as part of what is called the Four Cuts Policy. The policy aims to cut rebel factions off from food, money, intelligence, and recruits, the four factors that allow them to continue their war against the military junta. When the junta suspects rebel activity in an area, they will enter and forcibly remove the civilians. Anyone who stays behind is considered an insurgent and will be shot. Karen villages are often burnt to the ground, heavily mined, and the inhabitants moved into resettlement areas that, by some accounts, resemble concentration camps more than villages. Some of the resettlement areas are better than others, and sometimes, even after the military allows them to return home, people stay in the resettlement areas because they have nowhere else to go. People who do not go into the resettlement areas find themselves internally displaced in the jungle, with little or no access to aid, vulnerable to disease, starvation, and forced recruitment into either the government army or the rebel army.
Without a population to draw on for support, the junta hopes that the rebel armies will wither. The same idea was used against the Kurds in Iraq, the Albanians in Kosovo, the Dinka in southern Sudan, the Tutsi in Rwanda, and the tribes in Darfur. Kill all the people to eliminate the rebels that may or may not be among them.
The education system in Burma attempts to eliminate notions of ethnic identity from the young and to create loyal cadres for the central government. Ethnic minorities are forbidden to study their own language in state schools. Though approved in 1967, Karen language textbooks were not printed until 1980 and, even then, no new teachers were hired to teach the language. In classes, none of the history or culture of the minority groups is taught. The junta hopes to assimilate the minority groups into the majority Burmese culture, eliminating claims for regional autonomy. As with the political and social spheres, the junta wants to control cultural life of the people. The educational program of the central government serves as a kind of ethnic cleansing, aimed at erasing future generations of ethnic nationalists.
Nicholas’s ethnicity placed him in danger and, despite any ideas he may have formed on his own, aligned him with a particular side in the conflict.
I met a ten-year-old girl whose family had taught her to speak Burmese rather than Karen so that she could pretend to be a member of the Burmese majority, just as Melanie had learned to speak Swahili rather than Kinyarwandan so she could pass as an ethnic Hutu.
“I came here to stay with my grandmother and attend the school,” the little girl said. “My brothers and sisters cannot go to school in Burma. We have no money.” While she framed her reasons for leaving in economic terms, the causes of those conditions were the results of conflict and persecution. She is Karen and therefore vulnerable to the Four Cuts, to attack and forced labor, and to a hostile education system. Rather than await the destruction of their village, forcing them into resettlement