One Day the Soldiers Came (10 page)

“When he came with the paramilitaries,” Alice continued, “the minute they came, my mom gave them ten thousand Deutschmarks, rolled in a tube like a cigarette. She told him it was for all the other houses, too. But he didn’t care. He burned our neighbor’s house with twenty-four people hiding inside.”

The people got out of the house, and saw that the paramilitaries had killed one of their other neighbors. They were looking for all the men.

“Captain Death came back a second time. He took my mother’s hand and said, ‘You survived because you could pay.’ My mother doesn’t remember this because she’s traumatized,” Eric told me matter-of-factly.

“He came back a third time and asked to see the basement because he thought someone might be hiding there. People had been hiding in other basements, and he wanted to find my father because he was rich. He was marked for execution.”

The children understood that it was not just that they were Albanian that put them at risk, but that they were wealthy. They knew that they had survived because they had money—their mother’s bribe to the captain—but they understood that their wealth might also endanger them.

“When they came back that third time, my dad and my uncle were on their way to hide on the roof. When Captain Death and the other Serbs came through the door, my aunt was closing the attic, so my mom came clomping down the stairs, making as much noise as she could to hide the sounds upstairs. Death asked my mom, ‘Where are you going?’ ‘Leaving,’ she said. ‘Oh no,’ Death said. ‘Not yet.’

“Then he lined us up.

“Right there,” Eric said, pointing out of the living room into the foyer at the base of the stairs. “There were my cousins there too. Thirteen people he lined up.”

Captain Death put a gun in Eric’s mother’s back, and she told him that she had a Mercedes in the garage. He could take it if he wanted. Captain Death replied that he already had some Mercedes and didn’t need another one, but that they would go inspect the garage together. He shoved her there with the gun in her back, in case someone was hiding to ambush him.

“Once he saw it was all clear, he left again,” Eric told me. He did not know how long they spent in the garage, and I did not want to push the question. Whatever happened in that garage was none of my business. I knew what the paramilitaries did to Albanian women.”

Some time passed in our conversation. This was not an uninterrupted narrative that Eric gave me. I have edited down a conversation over several hours with the usual asides, meanderings, even a discussion about a popular Spanish soap opera. In that time Alice left the room to go watch television and gossip with her cousin. Eric continued.

“The people from the burning basement came out and saw our dead neighbor. They were screaming and yelling. At the same time, we heard gunfire somewhere. We thought we were all dead. My oldest sister went out to check what had happened. She saw that our neighbor was dead, shot. She called out and everyone came and saw. They wrapped him in a blanket and buried him in the yard.

“We stayed up all night. The men patrolled the area. Early in the morning the next day, we got some things to leave. My father and uncle argued about the Mercedes. My father wanted to leave it, my uncle said we needed another car. So he drove it and my father disguised himself and drove in the Peugeot.
During the drive to Montenegro we were stopped many times by the Black Gloves—a paramilitary group, mostly armed volunteer thugs and criminals under the loose command of the military—the unit wearing ski masks, the executioners, poked my father with their guns and demanded money. He was using a fake name until we got to Tirana, in Albania.”

Eric’s memory for the details is astounding. He also remembers when there was artillery fire near their house early in the war, and his mother picked him up to carry him, she slipped, and he fell. His father carried him the rest of the way. Eric thought it was important for me to hear this story too, to have a complete picture of his experience. He wanted to make sure I knew as many details as possible. He searched out and showed me a photograph of the neighbor who had been shot. I should see it, he said, and I could keep it if I needed to. I told him I didn’t, but I wondered why he was so insistent on every detail, on remembering events so precisely. He had been correcting his sister when she spoke, which might have been why she left the room.

Other children showed the same attention to detail.

In the village Lubeniq, a fourteen-year-old boy, Leo, told of walking with his mother and siblings to Albania.

“The police came early in the morning, at six
A.M.
, and made the whole village come out of our houses. They sent the women and children to Albania. They made the men stay. If we stopped walking to rest, the Serbs would say, ‘If you don’t get up in five minutes, we’ll kill you.’ They burned all the identification papers they found so we could not come back. When we left, I heard shooting. They killed eighty-four or eighty-six men.”

Human Rights Watch reports that “between March 24 and June 10, more than eighty villagers were killed by Serbian forces.”

Leo wanted to be very precise about the numbers—and his accuracy impressed me. The numbers must have come from adults around him, if not directly told to him then from his own active assimilation of information he overheard. Most of the children I met in Kosovo had this same impulse, get the numbers right, get as much information as possible about what happened, tell the names of the dead. It seemed to be a trend: The countryside is filled with memorials to fallen KLA soldiers, to civilians massacred. At a school in the mountains near the Montenegro border, a plaque commemorates an eighth grader who was killed in a mortar attack. The students I met, even the ones who were very young at the time of the war, knew his name and what had happened to him. Telling their story, for these young people, for this nation, seemed a way to validate their past, to prove they could not be expelled or exterminated. The story of individuals and the story of the people as a whole were bound together.

“There were nine survivors that day,” Leo told me. “They were wounded, the rest were executed. Only twenty of the bodies have been recovered.”

Leo, Karl, Valerie, and Nora, as well as many of the other youths I met, were bothered by the bodies that had not been buried, even if they were not the bodies of their family or friends. The unburied, missing bodies are a constant reminder of the horror these communities experienced. The wounds heal over time, but without the ability to properly mourn their dead, the scab leaves some painful grit underneath that never stops itching, will never stop until the missing dead can be put to rest and proper healing can begin. The stories they tell, five years after the war, are fresh and vivid in detail. I believe this is due, in part, to the fact that the story is not complete. Kosovo still does not have its independence from Serbia, though the UN
administers it as a separate territory and NATO forces defend its borders with Serbia. No war criminals have been indicted in connection with the massacres or “cleansings” in Kosovo. This leaves the young feeling uneasy about the future. Their vivid memories are not “flashbulb memories,” moments burnt into their minds the way some Americans remember where they were when Kennedy was shot or what they felt, saw, and heard on the morning of September 11, 2001. They are survivors’ narratives; in a way, reminders that they lived through such things once, and that they could survive it again. They are, in all their horrific detail, celebrations of life for these young people, continuity of their experience, assurance that though some have died others go on. The children take the stories of their people forward.

Telling their stories helps to create a sense of community. The children in Zahaq were eager to tell their stories, supported each other’s stories, asked each other questions to learn more about the escape from Kosovo, and filled in the gaps in each other’s memories.

Barika, the Congolese to whom I gave a copy of
The Little Prince
, participated in a performance group that put on scenes about refugee life, that encouraged the youth to write poems about their experiences, and performed pieces about their history. Continuity of place is disrupted when the young are forced to flee their homes, but by sharing their stories they can maintain the narrative of their lives, both as individuals and as communities. Inviting willing young people into the process of telling can help them to heal, can help them to integrate their own suffering into a larger picture and, perhaps, combat the isolation so many of the young survivors of violence feel. Of course, the nature of this narrative matters too. The story can stir nationalism and ethnic hatred as much
as it promotes psychological healing, as the Kosovo Serbs and Albanians taught me.

“Everyone was in the same position after the war,” Nora told me toward the end of our discussion in Zahaq. We had left the classroom in which we had been speaking, and the five of us walked around the school. They wanted me to see the ways in which their building was broken. They were very concerned that I understand the present conditions, not just talk about the wars of the past.

“No one could talk about what happened,” she said. “There was too much hurt. Everyone was in shock.”

“How can I explain it to you?” Karl interrupted, looking around at the schoolyard, where a group of children were playing soccer and others were laughing and staring at us. “One day I lost my father and my grandparents.” He looked at me in silence.

“But life continues,” Valerie added. The others concurred. “Life continues.”

Migrants and Refugees in Hiding

S
iha suggested that maybe I didn’t see the fear.

“The children don’t say it, but their parents are afraid and they are afraid.” He had stopped drawing a picture of himself flying a jet in order to tell me about the fear that permeates the lives of the Burmese, then he returned to his paper. We were sitting on the floor of his aunt’s house. As I had noticed was his habit, he poked his tongue out of the side of his mouth when he drew. His aunt told me that he would rather be playing video games than anything else.

Siha denied it instantly. “My favorite game is soccer. I love to play sports. I don’t just play video games.” He feigned anger at the false accusations against him, but smiled widely at his aunt. Everyone in the room laughed loudly, Siha, his aunt, my translator, and me.

Siha’s aunt sat in her chair and listened to our conversation. I sensed she was something more than curious about the interview. When I suggested we play soccer for a bit to pass the time,
the aunt urged us to stay inside, smiling all the while, pointing at the drawing material I had. She wasn’t suggesting we stay inside; she was demanding it as politely as possible.

Times were dangerous for the Burmese migrants living in Thailand, and the attention brought by a foreigner could mean harassment, prison, or deportation back to Burma. Playing soccer with me was not an option. Lying low demanded keeping discreet company, even for a little boy in soccer shorts. As the only foreigner in this part of town, far from any plausible tourist attraction, my visit demanded a level of secrecy.

Siha’s aunt sat nearest the door to the sparsely furnished room and glanced out the window over my shoulder. The shades were drawn, and she had to brush them aside with her hand to look outside. Her own son, a boy in his mid teens, paced in and out of the room, looking to the door every time a dog barked. Siha was right. Everyone was afraid.

Since 1962 Burma has been under military rule. A coup staged by commander-in-chief General Ne Win in March 1962 created a military junta, which has since controlled the nation of Burma. Their tactics are propaganda, fear, violence, and oppression.

In 1988 pro-democracy demonstrations turned into bloodbaths all over the country, when troops were sent to crush the student-activists who agitated for democratic reforms. In the following days, hundreds of unarmed youths died in clashes with the military police, either as a direct result of violence or through drowning or trampling in the chaos. Many dissenters and suspected dissenters fled the country to Thailand, where they called on the international community to recognize their struggle for democracy.

In 1990, under intense pressure from the population, “free” elections were held. Those in exile hoped the results would al
low them to return home. The National League for Democracy (NLD) won in a landslide and their leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, was promptly arrested, as were her supporters. Rather than cede power to the elected NLD, the military junta renamed the country Myanmar, renamed their party the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), and upheld the authority of military rule. Freedom of opinion and freedom of expression are stifled. Dissidents are jailed, tortured, and murdered.

Though Aung San Suu Kyi had not been involved in politics for most of her life, when the opportunity came to restore her father’s legacy, to unite the country, which had been under threat of breaking apart along ethnic lines since its founding, she could not refuse. Not only did she become Burma’s elected prime minister, a champion of nonviolent resistance, and a Nobel Peace Prize winner, she became Burma’s most prominent political prisoner. She has remained under house arrest or in prison for most of the years since she was elected leader of her country in 1990.

Since she has been incarcerated, the military has jailed, tortured, and murdered many members of the NLD, using them as examples to discourage others from joining. The director of information for the NLD, Myint Aung, was arrested in December 2000, along with his assistant. They remain in the notorious Insein prison, where reports of torture during interrogations have leaked out over the years. Aung Tun, an historian of the student resistance movement in Burma, was arrested in 1998 and charged with aiding terrorists. The courts sentenced him to over a decade in prison. In Burma alias Myanmar, peaceful student protests are considered terrorist acts. For this reason, the University of Rangoon is closed more often than it is open.

In May 2003, after one year out of detention, Aung San Suu
Kyi was arrested again, and the military junta resumed a harsh crackdown on democracy activists. As of August 2006, they continue to ignore international pressure demanding Suu Kyi’s release. She was forty-five years old when she was elected prime minister. She celebrated her fiftieth and sixtieth birthdays in prison, never having taken office.

In the wild jungles along the Thai-Burma border, a guerilla war is ongoing. The military government blames the violence in remote areas alternately on rebel ethnic minority groups who want the right of self-determination and on supporters of democracy who want to destroy Myanmar’s “stability” and “prosperity.” But for those who do not recognize the authority of the junta, these rebels and dissidents are freedom fighters. It depends entirely on whether one considers the country a place called Myanmar or a place called Burma and to which ethnic group one belongs, the Burmese majority, or the Karen, Shan, Chin, or Mon minorities.

The State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), which the military junta renamed itself in 1997, continues to clash with ethnic minority armies and political parties fighting for autonomy, such as the Karen National Union (KNU) and the Mon State People’s Army, who, in turn, fight with each other for control of lucrative smuggling routes into Thailand.

Cease-fire arrangements with SPDC—the military junta—do little to stop the violence. During a cease-fire with one of the ethnic armies, I was told about military buildup and forced displacement of civilians in that region. Villages are razed and civilians are raped and killed to force their relocation, often to make way for lucrative infrastructure projects like dams and railroads or to cut off the militias from any source of income, support, or recruits. Civilians are forced into government-controlled relocation centers or are displaced internally in Burma. There are
no precise figures for internally displaced persons inside Burma, but some estimates put the number around 500,000.

I visited one migrant school near a cease-fire region and worked with all the children at the school on a large drawing of their village. They elected two artists to draw on the board (democracy in practice!) and they told the artists what to include in the picture.

“Houses,” they shouted and the artists drew houses.

“Ox,” and the artists drew an ox.

“Clothes on the line and flowers.”

“No,” one of the artists said. “That’s not interesting.”

“I’m interested in that,” I said. “Everything is interesting for me. There are no wrong answers.” Everyone laughed that there were no wrong answers. The children usually learned by rote memorization. Even the teachers, who gathered around the edges of the classroom, enjoyed seeing the students shout and get excited describing their village. They allowed the shouting to go on, much to the disbelief of some of the students. The teachers were laughing among themselves, walking back and forth to get a better of view of the kids, of the board, and of me. I was excited, pointing at kids to make sure they got a chance to speak. Some chickens wandered in to investigate, but the teachers chased them out. The artists drew the flowers and the clothes on the line and some chickens.

“Soldiers,” one of the girls said. No one disagreed. The teachers grew quiet. The artists drew soldiers. They drew airplanes dropping bombs. They drew bullets coming from the soldiers’ guns.

I left the village after some tea and a conversation with four of the students. They didn’t talk much about the drawing on the board or the soldiers. They told me a joke that took a long time to tell and, via the translator, wasn’t very funny. It went like this:

We all stared at each other for a while, thinking about the joke they had just told, and then we burst into laughter at how hard it was to tell a joke through a translator. One of the girls said it would be better if we acted it out. One of the boys asked where she would get all that stinking fruit. The translator joked that he was a preacher by profession, not a comedian.

Three days later, I learned that the village was attacked, despite the cease-fire in the area, and that all the children, all the inhabitants of the village had fled into the jungle. I could not find out who was responsible, why fighting had erupted there, or where the children were. I knew only that everyone had run off into the jungle somewhere in Burma. Some weeks later they returned and rebuilt the school, rebuilt the village. This time the school is made of stone and concrete, not so easy to knock down as the wooden stick school they used to have. I wonder if these children know the story of the three little pigs, if they would find it funny or nod knowingly because they live in a world where the big bad wolf often comes knocking.

Land mines litter the regions where members of the minority groups settle, and internecine fighting displaces thousands
into the jungle. In addition, the military levies a heavy tax from the people, as a soldier’s wages are not adequate. To keep the war going, civilians are conscripted into forced labor, acting as porters or builders for military projects without pay. Many of the porters who are sent with units into fighting are killed. If they cannot carry their loads they are beaten and abandoned. Often, their bodies are left where they lie when the soldiers move on.

According to a recent Human Rights Watch report, the Burmese army recruits more child soldiers than any other army in the world. The report, “My Gun Was as Tall as Me,” puts in the number of soldiers under eighteen in the SPDC ranks at around seventy thousand. The children fight, cook, clean, and carry for the army. As economic conditions in the country continue to decay, families are left with fewer options and more children join the armed forces, on one side or another. It can be a method of protecting one’s family to have a child in the army, though children are sometimes taken and forced to join as well.

To escape these dangers, many Burmese of dissenting opinions or from minority ethnic groups flee to Thailand. In stable, prosperous Thailand, the Burmese hope to find work, safety, and a future for their children. They find none of these.

Current Thai policy creates arbitrary guidelines for classification of Burmese into various categories, such as “economic migrant,” “person of concern,” and “temporarily displaced persons.” These classifications can be misleading and dangerous for the refugees, as they determine their legal status and level of assistance. Often, the classifications deny the underlying causes of migration to Thailand: civil strife, persecution, and human rights abuses.

The Thai government recognizes some 138,000 “temporarily
displaced” persons, mostly from the Karen and Karenni ethnic groups, whom the Thais have determined were “fleeing fighting,” ignoring the nearly 2 million from various ethnic groups that live as registered migrant workers or illegal migrants in the country. Those illegal “migrants” are an embarrassment to the Burmese government, which passed Law 367/120-(b) (1), making it illegal to travel to Thailand without authorization. In the eyes of the Burmese government, all these “migrants” are criminals, and the Thais are quick to agree.

In an attempt to improve relations with their profitable neighbor and avoid a massive refugee influx, Thailand discourages the Burmese from migrating. Given the economic boom in Thailand and the need for unskilled labor, a registration process was initiated for Burmese workers, but the process was expensive and the burden fell largely on the employers, who benefit from illegal and frightened employees. The registration process became a way to crack down on the migrants rather than protect them. Police extortion of the refugees is overlooked, as evidenced by a set of brutal murders in the town of Mae Sot in the summer of 2003.

Migrant children are not given access to school or health care (unless provided by the migrant community themselves), even though these are promised rights under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to which Thailand is a signatory.

Siha, his aunt, his mother, his cousin, and my translator are all illegal migrants from Burma, members of the Shan ethnic group. They fled consequences of the civil war and human rights abuses by the government, though they cannot establish that they arrived in Thailand directly “fleeing fighting.” They cannot attain refugee status. They have lived without documentation in Thailand since 1998.

“My mom’s not afraid anymore, so I am not afraid anymore. The other children’s parents are,” Siha said. His own mother, who was out of the country at a human rights training at the time we met, I was told, is politically engaged and a confident, fearless woman. Siha seemed proud of his confidence, glad that he had conquered his fears. In conflicts, children often take their cues on how to react from their parents. The level of stress they feel is directly connected to how the adults around them react and can bear little relation to the amount of violence they have actually experienced.

Siha’s warning about how fearful other children’s parents were was played out in the following days. I tried to arrange visits with families living on construction sites. I saw the level of fear in which the refugees in urban areas lived.