BOOK REVIEW
Some heroes,
many villains Restless
Souls: Rebels, Refugees, Medics and Misfits on the
Thai-Burma Border by Phil Thornton
Reviewed by Bertil Lintner
Borders, Australian journalist Phil
Thornton argues, mean more to people than just
lines scratched in the dirt by politicians and
government officials. Borders can mark the point
between justice and injustice, freedom and
suppression of speech, protection from and
exposure to disease, persecution, torture, hunger,
poverty, imprisonment and the breakup of family.
This describes the Thailand-Myanmar
frontier, and Thornton arrived there in early 2000
at the request of an Australia-based Myanmar
democracy activist. His assignment was to write a
report about human-rights abuses by the Yangon
junta, the State Peace and Development Council
(SPDC). Six years later, he is still living in the
Thai border town of Mae Sot covering the
conflict
in
Myanmar, which he finds "tragic, sad, ironic,
pathetic, and funny all at the same time".
In Restless Souls, Thornton's tells
the stories of ordinary - and not so ordinary -
people living in or near the war zones of eastern
Myanmar: refugees, migrant workers, street
children, rebels, smugglers, barefoot medics,
foreign mercenaries and aid workers, or "the
villains and heroes of the civil war", as he calls
them; restless souls without permanent homes and
whose futures are, to say the least, uncertain.
While his writings reflect a
deep sympathy for the plight of the refugees and
other civilians caught in the crossfire, he does
not hesitate to mention that the rebels,
supposedly "freedom fighters"
and upholders of democratic values, have
committed atrocities, and not just government
forces.
In February 1992, soldiers from
the All-Burma Students' Democratic Front (ABSDF)
executed 15 of their own comrades accused, on
flimsy grounds, of spying for the military
government. And he quotes an officer from the
Karen National Union (KNU) as saying that his
group doesn't torture its enemies, "we kill them
on the spot or let them go. But maybe that's
because we can't afford to feed them".
While acknowledging that many NGO
(non-governmental organization) workers "toil
without a fuss", Thornton is critical of some
foreign "consultants" and United Nations
careerists, who charge up to US$1,000 per day,
plus expenses, while the total cost of looking
after and feeding a refugee is the equivalent of
30 cents a day. "Next to the consultants'
salaries, cars, and luxury accommodation, that
figure is obscene," Thornton says. The global
emergency-aid business, of which the scene in Mae
Sot is only a small part, "has grown into a giant
unregulated industry worth billions of dollars a
year".
At the same time, the generals in
Yangon use "a number of con games to dupe the
international community", such as claiming that
they are waging a war on drugs - when they
themselves are deeply involved in the trade - and
following some kind of "roadmap" to democracy,
while tightening their grip on power and
imprisoning or killing opponents to the regime.
Restless Souls has a very real,
human touch to it. Patients at a private clinic in
Mae Sot run by refugee-doctor Cynthia, a Karen
from Myanmar, tell Thornton about losing legs in
land-mine explosions, having their parents or
children killed by Myanmar's army, and what it is
like struggling to survive in a world of civil
war, disease, malnourishment - and occasional
threats by the Thai authorities to repatriate the
refugees into the hands of the Myanmar military
and its local allies, the breakaway Democratic
Karen Buddhist Army. In 2004, the Bangkok office
of the United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees (UNHCR) even openly backed such a plan.
However, some of the book's
historical-background sketches may not be entirely
accurate. Thornton quotes Karen rebel officials as
saying that they fought with the British against
the Japanese during World War II because they had
been promised their own state but were then
betrayed by the colonials. "Instead of honoring
these men," he writes, "the British government,
much to the disgust of some of its officers,
handed control of Burma to Aung San, the country's
nationalist hero" whose Burma Independence Army
(BIA) had burned and looted Karen villages during
the war. Thousands had been slaughtered and Karen
today "find it difficult to understand how the
British could have been so treacherous".
It is true that the BIA did butcher many
Karen villagers and that Karen guerrillas fought
valiantly against the Japanese invader. Some
individual British officers such as the legendary
Major Hugh Seagrim, affectionately named
"Grandfather Longlegs" by the Karen, may also have
been in favor of a separate state for the people
he fought with until he surrendered and was
executed by the Japanese.
But the British
government never promised the Karen anything. When
the Karen sent a "goodwill mission" to London in
August 1946 to present "the Karen's attitude
toward the future of political developments in
Burma", the British response, as stated in a
letter from the colonial administration in Rangoon
(now Yangon) to London at the time, was that they
"did not wish to get entangled with Karen
political demands" that would jeopardize the
delicate independence negotiations with Aung San.
A breakup of Burma (as Myanmar was known
until the junta renamed it in 1989) was never on
the British agenda, and when Aung San and leaders
of the Shan, Kachin and Chin signed an agreement
on February 12, 1947, in the town of Panglong to
form a federal Union of Burma, the Karen did not
participate. Two years later, they resorted to
armed struggle against the government in Rangoon -
a struggle that is continuing with no end in
sight.
Thornton concludes with some
speculation about the future of this tragic,
father-to-son-to-grandson conflict. In late 2003
and early 2004, negotiations were held between the
KNU and the SPDC, but it all came to an end when
Myanmar's prime minister, General Khin Nyunt, was
arrested on October 19, 2004. Khin Nyunt was by no
means a "moderate", as he was portrayed by some
Western media, Thornton argues. He headed the
country's dreaded military intelligence service,
the secret police, and was responsible for sending
death squads to the border areas to kill KNU
officers and Myanmar dissidents.
But at
least he was willing to talk to "the other side".
Now, the Myanmar army has launched yet another
offensive against the KNU - which undoubtedly will
lead to a new flood of "rebels, refugees, medics
and misfits" to Mae Sot and other border towns.
For a better understanding of this forgotten
war, read Thornton's book. Despite some
weaknesses, it is an excellent account of human
suffering and bravery in a conflict that otherwise
has attracted only scant attention from the
outside world.
Restless Souls: Rebels,
Refugees, Medics and Misfits on the Thai-Burma
Border by Phil Thornton. Asia Books, Bangkok,
2006. ISBN: 9748303918. Price US$11.54, 220 pages.
Bertil Lintner is a former
correspondent with the Far Eastern Economic
Review. He is currently a writer with Asia-Pacific
Media Services.
(Copyright 2006 Asia
Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us about sales, syndication and republishing
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and upholders of democratic values, have
committed atrocities, and not just government
forces. 
