America neglects a place of pivotal strategic importance.
BY MELIK KAYLAN
Sunday, February 18, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
ON THE THAILAND-BURMA BORDER--From the Burma side, refugees straggle in small groups across the Salween river or over misty blue hills, fleeing the Burmese army. Otherwise, it's all forest and silence. After dark, only isolated military outposts display distant lights.
In contrast, all along the Thai side, miniature border towns with gaily lit eateries play music and host sandaled tourists day and night. Many are real tourists, some are clearly pretending, and one soon learns to pick out the odd ones: huge Scotsmen or Russians with military bearing and unlikely rope bags, purposeful North Koreans, Chinese and Americans--intel operatives all, watching each other and the activity on the border, as the Thais watch the watchers, and the working girls solicit anyone who smiles. In these tropical entrepots straight out of Graham Greene, desire and paranoia spice the air in equal measure.
There's good reason to be watchful. Other smaller states aside, Burma sits strategically between China and U.S.-ally India; both countries vie for influence and access, through the ruling military junta, to Burma's raw materials and energy supplies, while human-rights groups go hoarse itemizing the regime's atrocities against its own citizens.
With $5 billion to date in trade agreements--and untold billions in loans and military aid to Burma--the Chinese are way ahead of India in the influence race. They are building deepwater ports for their own naval use on Burma's western coast atop the Bay of Bengal, and gas pipelines through the interior directly to China. The former threatens India strategically, while the latter finally liberates China from shipping all its fuel supply past the strategic threat of Taiwan and the U.S. navy.
Meanwhile, Burma itself exports narcotics and methamphetamine in vast amounts, sends officers for military training to Moscow and Beijing, and last year announced an interest in North Korean nukes. The recent U.S.-sponsored United Nations resolution calling for democratic change in Burma was vetoed by Russia and China. Seeing this, the Association of South-East Asian Nations (Asean) declared its support for the Rangoon regime against internal "insurgents," and the state newspaper has carried reports of "U.S.-backed" terrorist bombs on its soil.
Much of the world knows about Burma's pro-democracy struggle through the figure of Nobel Peace laureate Aung Sang Suu Kyi, or the student movement. Less known are their allies in the tribal resistance. Together they offer Western interests the last remaining hope of a countervailing strategic lever, one that a U.S. preoccupied with Iraq seems bent on ignoring despite the strategic stakes.
In jungle camps some miles inside Burma from the Thai border, I witnessed historic meetings of leaders from the eight main minority regional ethnic groups who make up roughly half the country's population--the Karen, Karenni, Shan, Chin, Kachin and others. Some walked for many days to get there. They decided, irrevocably, to settle differences and cooperate because the Burmese army is destroying them singly, state by ethnic state, displacing them wholesale while forcibly integrating them into the dominant Burmese identity.
The tribal populations have suffered acutely as the junta expropriated their lands for personal gain, drug-running, logging, mining, pipeline-building and the like, projects in which they are used as slave labor until they drop. To enforce this, the military piles depravity upon cruelty, raping children in front of parents and vice-versa, in places enslaving villagers to methamphetamine, in others using them as human shields or to walk through minefields. The number of refugees, internally and externally, is nearing a million, in a country of approximately 50 million that seems to be run, in much of the countryside, as a virtual organized-crime state from which only the military elite benefit.
Ethnic militias, therefore, serve as self-defense forces against the army--not as insurgents or separatists as the junta claims. One thinks of Darfur as a comparable model, with beleaguered tribes fighting a murderous government because not fighting merely encourages ethnic cleansing and genocide. What it doesn't resemble is Iraq: "Lift the lid and chaos ensues" does not apply here.
For one thing, opposition leaders (all Christian or Buddhist) have mostly stayed in-country. They know their populations and they admire the West. Since the 1990s, leading minority ethnic groups have mapped out democratic constitutions for themselves in tandem with a humane, federalist, vision for the country--all along Western lines with volunteer Western legal advice. They've thought through the tricky details of transition which can bring chaos in place of freedom, such as how to keep the army stable, and how to forge national reconciliation.
But as the regime attacks relentlessly, it has denied tribal leaders the logistical leisure to travel from the regions to meet all together. At the meetings I witnessed, they set about making practical plans for a united resistance while adumbrating postwar stability. The real danger of an Iraq-style free-for-all, one could argue, comes from within the regime itself because of cracks in the military and suspicion among top junta figures. The army, now operating its criminal projects year-round--even during the rainy season--is under such strain that some 80% of its troops are close to mutiny, according to what two foreign intel sources tell me on the border.
Yet almost no help from the U.S. reaches the ethnic alliance in a context where a little can go far, and where ethical foreign policy and realpolitik coincide naturally. What scant support there is comes mostly from individual or faith-based donations. Extraordinary, selfless characters make all the difference in such places. The Free Burma Rangers, a grassroots movement led by Western volunteers along with scores of locals, provide humanitarian and medical relief deep into the war zone. They also document atrocities. They are pretty much alone. Almost alone--now, there's also Greg Shade.
An utterly American individualist, self-financing and untiringly practical, he was last seen on Afghanistan's borders handing out picture-leaflets of al Qaeda suspects just before the U.S. invasion. (Crazy as it sounds, nobody had told border guards in nearby countries whom to watch for!) Mr. Shade last came to Burma in 1988 and brought out student leaders to testify before Congress. He is at it again, working this time to bring back ethnic leaders to rouse bipartisan congressional support. It seems astonishing that, but for the intervention of such lone idealists, American strategic interests--now so embattled everywhere--would go largely undefended in such a pivotal place.
Mr. Kaylan is a writer based in New York.
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