One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [49]
Categorizing most Burmese as economic migrants denies many of the rights to which children are entitled by international refugee law, such as education and healthcare equal to the standards of the host country. While on the surface it seemed that many families had come to Thailand to find work, protracted discussion with children who had arrived recently revealed the danger of life caught up in the Burmese conflict: Nicholas’s drawing of the attack on his village, Siha’s drawing of the dangerous border crossing, the families who have chosen to live in isolation in Bangkok rather than face the dangers of Burma or the border areas.
One look at their drawings showed the deep impact the political turmoil has had on their lives. In one drawing by Win, an eleven-year-old boy who also suffered nightmares of the violence in Burma that he had witnessed, a detailed representation of a machine gun points at the flag for the Karen National Union (Figure 12). Violence and flags were linked in his imagination.
Many young people expressed their allegiances through the flags they represented in their drawings. These children were not neutral in the conflict. When asked why war tears at their homeland, Win said simply: “The Karen are fighting for freedom from the Burmese.”
Many other children added their voice of agreement to his. They agreed with the cause of the KNU. Few children I met said they knew the reasons for the war, but all who are members of a minority ethnic group knew what side they were on. Kin Wa, a fourteen-year-old girl who wanted nothing more than to go back to Burma—“Thailand is not my country. I was born and raised in Burma and want to return”—wanted to work in an office when she grew up. Not just any office. She wanted to be like her father and work for the Democracy Movement for Burma, his job, of course, being the reason he’d left for Thailand in the first place. She admired her father and wanted to follow in his footsteps.
“If Burma becomes a democracy, we can go back,” she said, repeating, I imagine, what she often heard at home. For the world in which she lives, family affiliation or ethnicity is enough for her to have a side in the conflict. Her family life and her political views are tied together, and politics plays a role in her worldview as much as any other lesson she learns from her parents, such as respect for elders or how to do her chores. Politics is not separate from her childhood; it is part of her childhood.
In her drawing, underneath a gentle sun and blossoming trees, she drew a monkey hanging from branches, children playing soccer, and a bright and colorful schoolhouse (Figure 13). The flag of the KNU flies next to the schoolhouse. In black and white, two houses burn, a third house, still in color, is engulfed by monochrome flames. Soldiers with machine guns fire on the village—she chose to use pencil and not markers to represent the violence disturbing the colorful lives of her people. Even the monkey is not safe from the soldiers Kin Wa added to her drawing. Soldiers pump the monkey full of bullets.
“The monkey dies too,” Kin Wa said. Along the road there are black and white stick figures, none of them wearing the hats she drew on her soldiers. “Civilians,” she said. She did not say whether or not they were dead along the road or if she had just left them uncolored, but it looked to me as if all that was lifeless or destroyed was depicted in black and white. By putting the civilians in color, the KNU flag in color, and the SPDC soldiers in black and white, Kin Wa gave clear representation of her political point of view.
Given their indiscriminate targeting of villages, if you are not on the side of the junta you are on the other side, and the exiled children of Burma could not help but take a side. Some of these children will grow up to join one of the revolutionary forces, while others,