TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/061890/0618008.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 12.1 KB | 245 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 41

COVER STORIES

BURMA

Junior Rambos


By Alessandra Stanley


    The Karens may be the most civilized guerrillas on earth.
At army headquarters in Manerplaw, deep in the jungle of Burma,
enlisted men maintain neat parade grounds, teak officers'
quarters, even the occasional flower bed of marigolds and
roses. Bugles sound morning reveille, and new recruits march
to target practice under a gatepost that carries a
black-lettered sign, GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH. Even in
Komura, a muddy labyrinth of trenches and bunkers 100 miles
south, where some 500 Karen soldiers have been trapped in battle
for months with the Burmese army, the men are high-minded. The
only pinups on the walls are chaste photographs torn from Thai
mail-order catalogs of ladies in bridal gowns and taffeta tea
dresses.

    Forty-one years of fighting for independence have worn down
the rough edges of revolution like a well-pumiced stone. The
largest of half a dozen tribes that rebelled against the
republic of Burma in 1948, Karen insurgents have spent the past
four decades waging war against Rangoon to establish an
independent state in the southern part of the country. Of the
3 million ethnic Karens living in Burma, one-fourth have fled
to jungle villages in the south, where the 5,000-man Karen army
is based. Ignored or forgotten by most of the world, the
anticommunist Karens rate attention only from a few evangelical
Christian charities and Soldier of Fortune magazine.

    Spread throughout the jungles that straddle Burma and
Thailand, the rebels have settled into a life of well-ordered
predictability. They subsist on teak logging and farming,
attend church, send their children to school and adhere to a
strict penal code (adultery carries the death penalty). Though
there is no electricity at Manerplaw headquarters, a generator
supplies power for that most prized necessity, a VCR. The
leaders tend to be melancholy idealists, sad-eyed dreamers who
pass evenings drafting and redrafting a Karen constitution for
use in the improbable event that independence will be achieved.
Gentle in gesture and speech, the Karens do not seem capable
of nurturing hatred. Nor do the guerrillas seem capable of
dispatching their children to the front lines to fight, and
die, alongside the men. But they do.

    It is noon, and another round of shelling has begun in
Komura. As the earth shudders, men drop into bunkers near a
thick stand of bamboo trees. Nobody talks, but with each blast,
the muscles in the men's faces tighten. Saw Klee Moo's face,
however, remains smooth. When a rocket explodes nearby, shaking
the ammunition crate where Saw Klee Moo crouches, he smiles.
Saw Klee Moo is nearly 15 and certain that he will never be hit
by a bomb.

    When the shelling subsides, soldiers stretch out in their
shelters, supine and seemingly impassive. Only the incessant
chewing of betel nuts hints at stress. When they are not
chewing, the men smoke cheroots. And when their tobacco runs
out, they smoke rolled-up pieces of newspaper. Saw Klee Moo
dangles a stick of paper out of the side of his mouth like a
fat cigar, but he keeps it unlighted. The children fighting
alongside their elders are too young to have developed nervous
habits.

    A week earlier, Saw Klee Moo was part of a 15-man
reconnaissance patrol that was ambushed in the jungle by a
six-man Burmese platoon. The Karens out-numbered the Burmese
but, taken by surprise, didn't have time to seek cover. Saw
Klee Moo and the others just froze and shot at the enemy,
raking everything in sight with automatic fire. He doesn't
remember how long he stood there, firing madly, but eventually
the Burmese withdrew, dragging their wounded with them. It was
the first time Saw Klee Moo had encountered the enemy face to
face. Asked if he was frightened, he shrugs.

    Major Than Maung, 54, the reserved and dignified officer in
charge at Komura, could not be more insistent. Soldiers are not
drafted until the age of 15, he says. When children show up in
war zones, most are sent back. But why not send them all back?
Pause. "It depends on the situation," he says.

    Sometimes the situation requires taking on anyone willing
to fight -- and even those less than willing. Two years ago,
a Karen brigade sneaked into a refugee camp in Thailand at
night, rounded up all the males ages 14 to 40 and marched them
back to camp. The remaining villagers grew hysterical, and
leaders of a small group of Seventh Day Adventist and Baptist
missionaries, who supply refugees with school books, Bibles and
food, protested to General Bo Mya, president of the Karens. The
next day the conscripts were returned, and the missionaries
received a note of apology from the brigade commander.

    Stress takes its toll on civility. A brutal assault by the
Burmese troops that September left 40 Burmese and two Karens
dead and made something in Major Than Maung snap. A few days
later, a journalist visited Komura and found the major resting
quietly in his bunker, surrounded by dozens of skulls mounted
on stakes and planted in tidy rows. When a young Karen soldier
playfully stuck a cheroot in the grinning teeth of one skull,
the major chased him away. Then he grew quiet again and didn't
want to be disturbed.

    Kyaw Lin, 11, is so tiny that the barrel of his M-16 rifle
is sawed in half so he can carry it. It is still almost as long
as he is. He has a florid tattoo on his right arm -- a
premature badge of manhood that also serves as an animist charm
to ward off evil. Sometimes Kyaw Lin is shaky and feverish
because, like most of his comrades, he suffers from bouts of
malaria. Nobody is there to wipe his brow or take his
temperature; he just lies in his bunker until the fever
subsides and he can return to fighting the Burmese.

    Like the rest of the soldiers of the 101st Battalion in
Komura, Kyaw Lin is tired. A few weeks earlier, he and other
men in his squadron waded across the river into Thailand,
chasing a battalion of Burmese troops that had slipped across
the border to attack the Karen position from the rear. Karen
troops battled the Burmese in the Thai village of Wang Kauo;
by the time the fighting was over, twelve Karens and 70 Burmese
were dead, and the village was a charred ruin. Kyaw Lin
remembers stepping over dead bodies, but little else. He likes
to keep his mind, he says, on the present. That means thinking
about Komura, about dropping into trenches when the shelling
starts, and about waiting for his turn at the front line. Kyaw
Lin has a child's simple interpretation of rotation: "Sometimes
I go to the front to replace my friends."

    The front line is a classic stalemate, with Burmese and
Karen troops separated by only a 30-yd. killing zone of mines,
bamboo stakes and barbed wire. Kyaw Lin has been close enough
to spot the shovels of Burmese soldiers digging deeper trenches
across the way. Ammunition is scarce, and so the Karens rely
on mines handcrafted from bamboo and fuse-lighted grenades that
are no more sophisticated than the ancient British Grenadier
devices that gave them the name. Sometimes the Karens launch
the grenades by catapult, stretching thick rubber bands between
two stakes like a giant slingshot.

    Kyaw Lin hangs out with the other kids at Komura, doing
chores and waiting for the orders of Lieut. Brown, 38, a Karen
who lost his right leg to a mine ten years ago. His stump is
covered by an intricate blue swirl of tattoos. Unable to go out
on patrol, he trains the children and the volunteers from
nearby villages. Brown insists that the children are not forced
to fight, and he says he tries to keep them back. But, he
acknowledges reluctantly, sometimes they do go to war. He adds
that the children are mostly good fighters, but they are not
always careful. "When there is shelling," he says, "the younger
ones forget to take cover. They get too excited. They have to
be ordered to get down inside the bunkers."

    Khi Ha Won, 10, is one of the excitable ones who have to be
closely watched. He is small, with a sturdy chest and spindly
legs. In his shorts and faded Mickey Mouse T-shirt, he looks
as if he has just come from a playground. Khi Ha Won's parents
live in a Thai refugee camp, but he kept nagging to join the
soldiers. Eventually they let him. The last time he was rotated
forward, he could plainly see two Burmese soldiers on the other
side of the minefield reinforcing their bunkers with mud and
wood. He lifted his carbine to shoot but was sharply ordered
to hold his fire. He still seems incredulous about that; the
hardest lesson for the children to accept is that ammunition
has to be saved.

    He shares his carbine with two others, does not have a
uniform or even a helmet to show he is a soldier. As if to
compensate, he proudly wears mottled blue-black swirls on his
arms and chest -- make-believe tattoos. His commander drew them
with charcoal because no one in camp can wield tattoo needles
properly. Other kids tease him about trying to act like a
grownup and joke that he even has a girlfriend. But Khi Ha Won
shakes his head with shy dignity. "Oh, no, impossible." He
knows he is too young for that.

    Unlike the Afghans, Karens harbor mixed feelings about the
use of children in war, vacillating between denial and pride.
They revere childhood enough to try to preserve its innocence.
A wooden schoolhouse in a village near Manerplaw is a tidy
outpost of chalkboards, geography maps and tattered textbooks.
Students wear blue-and-white uniforms and recite their lessons
in singsong unison. They study math, history, Karen, English
and even Burmese, and there is no time for indoctrination or
propaganda. The war is only a few miles away, but little of it
intrudes into the classroom.

    To meet the demand for fresh troops at Komura, the customary
three-month training course at the Manerplaw headquarters was
speeded up to five weeks last year. On this soggy summer day,
more than 100 youths are in training, most of them between ages
16 and 18. But more than a dozen are no older than 14. All are
very raw recruits, children of farmers, sent to the army
because it is their duty -- and also because the army provides
clothes and two meals a day.

    Say Tu insists he is 14, and perhaps he is. But his sweet,
uncertain face, as well as his dirty undershirt and
blue-checked sarong, makes him look no older than eight. He
joined after a Karen officer went to his village on a
recruiting drive and his parents signed him up. He doesn't have
a tattoo because, he says, "I'm afraid of needles." He is
homesick but not so awed by his surroundings that he can't
dread what lies ahead. "I have to do my military service," he
says with a miserable smile, "but I'd rather be farming back
home."

    Ehtablay, 13, is there only for a refresher course and R.
and R. He proudly, ostentatiously skips the new recruits'
morning routine of calisthenics and rifle training so he can
help the other soldiers with cooking and camp chores. A veteran
of three battles, Ehtablay ran away from home to join the army
when he was twelve. He had never been to school, and says he
always wanted to be a soldier, just like his father and two
older brothers. He has only a vague notion of how long the war
has been going on, guessing "49 years." He acts tough around
the recruits his own age and rather grandly answers their
tentative questions about combat. "I got to use my gun," he
brags. Around adults he sneaks back to being a child; at one
point he grabs an older soldier from behind in a mock wrestling
hold that looks exactly like a hug.

    Before coming to Manerplaw, Ehtablay had never seen
television or a movie. He had not even known they existed. At
Manerplaw he got his first taste of both. As a special Army Day
treat, the recruits are permitted to watch Rambo III on the VCR
in the officers' barracks. Ehtablay sits on the floor, hugging
his knees, and stares, mouth open, eyes bedazzled, at Sylvester
Stallone's leading Afghan freedom fighters in a charge against
Soviet tanks.