Burma - Karen controlled area 1991

Burma

Kawthoolei - an area controlled by the Karen

January  1991 

I remember that Sigmund Freud wrote that: “There is no such thing as biographical truth”. So whatever I post now and later is my memory, but others may remember things quite differently.

I remember my visit for Health Unlimited to our project with the Karen people in Burma across the border with Thailand in early 1991. I was accompanying our South East Asia Manager, Liz Lewis. South East Asia was unknown territory; the closest I’d been to the region was a few days at a meeting in Madras a decade earler.

I remember arriving in Bangkok in the early morning with the sun and heat rising through the mist. We held a couple of meetings and then went to check in at the Peachy Guest House, somewhere near the river and the UNESCO offices which we were to visit. The Peachy had a variety of rooms, but Liz liked to save money and, I think, wanted to impress me with the toughness of the HU assignments. The “room” was more like a cell – no glass in the barred windows, thin matrass on a concrete base, toilets down the corridor with a communal concrete water tank, a pail and an area to splash down. Liz compensated by taking me to a small local restaurant next to the river. But sleeping was not easy, though a few buckets of cold water in the morning seemed like a blessing as the heat rose. Of course I didn’t say a word about the accommodation.

I remember that I never stayed at the Peachy Guest House again. I came back on my own and, for about US$5 more a night found a small but comfortable hotel in the Sukumvit area. Later on we took to staying at the Federal Hotel, originally a haunt of the CIA during the Vie tnam War and then of NGOs.

I remember that we got up early the next morning to catch the bus to Katchanaburi – a state of the art effort with TV showing Thai boxing films for the whole four hour trip. It felt very foreign but not poor. We passed through endless rice paddies coming right up to the road, not a square metre wasted and people busy everywhere.

I remember that in Kachanaburi our local contact was a Thai pharmacist who had an interest in minority people. While we went to see the River Kwai war cemetery, he made contact with the Karen National Union/Karen National Liberation Army to come and collect us. We were officially working with the civilian side of the Karen liberation movement who had been at war with the Burmese government since 1962. But it was nonetheless a military “state” engaged in a struggle for independence.

I remember coming back from the cemetery and waiting for several more hours. Then suddenly an army jeep appeared with a couple of Karen soldiers. We threw in our bags and headed off for the border, high in the hills. A complicated journey ended with some narrow roads through the jungle, a border crossing where our escorts picked up their WW2 vintage rifles, and on to the headquarters of the army and civilian administration a mile further on.

I remember that we had a meeting with health officials and an army Colonel at the military headquarters of, I think, the fifth brigade. Then we clambered back into the jeep and drove slowly down into the valley to the small village Htee Hta where the project was based.

I remember being deeply impressed by the two HU staff members, Graham Mortimer, a lab technician who was training local people to identify malaria and TB, and Maggs McGuiness, a nurse who was running a basic nursing course. There was, of course, no doctor in the areas and serious cases were taken to Thailand for treatment. As someone with no experience in health programmes and an almost entirely urban background, travelling to areas of deep rural poverty scarred by conflict as well as deprivation, was a revelation.

I remember that it was a desperately poor place, though a Thai family had set up a general store which also served simple meals of noodles and rice for locals and visitors. We took chocolate, cheese and whisky as a gift for our people. Even though the tropical heat melted both chocolate and cheese in transit, they were, I discovered what our expat staff really missed. The whisky was an added extra, and one which Graham rationed carefully, storing the bottle in a metal trunk. Graham seemed a bit severe, but he was one of the most committed people ever to work for the organisation.

I remember that years later, when the area was finally overrun by the Burmese army, a huge number of Karen people escaped to Thailand where they were confined to refugee camps along the border. Graham married a Karen woman and continued to work with in camps and then for the Karen cause from the UK for many years. I do hope that he, Maggs and others who worked on the project will write more about their experiences on the ground.

I remember that in the late 1990s we got a letter from the pharmacist in Kachanburi to say that some Karen nurses had been in touch with him. They had lost their HU health manuals in the flight across the border and wondered if we had copies. We dug about in the archives, found them, made more copies and sent them off. We often had more effect than we believed and it is a pity that nobody has the money to follow up on projects after five or ten years.

I remember going down to the river to bathe on the first evening. Looking along the river you could see the smoke from the Burmese army camp about a mile away at the bend. Everyone was ready to leave at short notice if fighting started. “What”, I wondered as I gazed down the river, “is a nice South African boy doing in a place like this?”

(A footnote: I have only a few photos of this and other projects. It would be great if anyone can locate more and post them. I’m also looking for some help with reorganising the HPA archives which have been somewhat disrupted and where I know there are a lot more photos that both I and others took).

                                         liz with out supplies at Bangkok bus station

                                       Tha pharmacy in Kachanaburi

                                          Liz talking tothe team in Kawthoolei

                                                       Jungle trail from Thailand

The view down the river. The Burmese army camp was on the other side as the river curved to the left.

The 

The

Like ·  · 12 Janu

A curious route to Cambodia - January 1991

In February after Liz Lewis and I got back to Bangkok from Burma , the next stop was Cambodia where our first project was just being launched. Cambodia was still not recognised by the UN pending the elections which finally happened in 1993 so there were officially no flights to Phnom Penh. Of course, if there’s business to be done a way can be found. So, in the early morning we went to the domestic terminal at the old airport and were sent to check-in desk at the furthest point far away from all other flights, where a small group of people were checking in for a flight with a number but no destination. 

“What’s going on?” I asked Liz.

“Oh,” she said, “the plane sets off for an unspecified local destination then ‘loses’ its way and lands in Phnom Penh. It’s good business, so why shouldn’t they do it?” 

Certainly a lot less unsavoury than the continued recognition of the Khmer Rouge government by the international community. 

We duly boarded, took off, and flew pretty much in a straight line as far as I could make out, whatever the log book said. A little under an hour later we were in Phnom Penh. 

There was the ritual scrum at the visa desk and the passports went down the row of expressionless soldiers and were disgorged at the other end. The trick was to fill in your form as quickly as possible and force your passport on the first official. Then you just waited and hoped you’d recognise your name when it was called out. The basic procedure hadn’t changed when I left HU 15 years later.

We were looking for the luggage and wondering, given the amount we were carrying, whether customs would be happy. As we talked about it, our office manager, Agnes, who was the wife of the political attaché at the Hungarian Embassy, wafted through the customs barrier, helped us gather our things, had a few light words with the officials and out we went to load our luggage into the most unlikely car, a huge Bulgarian imitation of a fifties American saloon with a trunk big enough to take a tractor. Standard issue in the bad days, and there were very few cars. They came later with the huge influx of aid agencies after the election. Where people were the victims of conflict, we didn’t much care for those legal niceties. 

Clive Nettleton
Phnom Penh January 1991

Phnom Penh was an extraordinary place as it emerged from the Khmer Rouge Years. There were two working sets of traffic lights with very few cars and huge numbers of small motorbikes carrying goods and people. There were four western style restaurants each with the identical menu, though some far more interesting local places in the back streets serving local dishes. There was only one proper hotel – a Soviet-built monstrosity with little natural light and not much in the way of service. A lot of mosquitoes in the gloom as well. There were five embassies – Vietnam and some East Europeans including the Hungarians. Only about a dozen agencies were operating in the country. 

But the streets were bustling as people carried on living and making a living. The ubiquitous small motorbike carried people, sometimes whole families, and goods. For some reason there were an enormous number of photo shops, willing to develop films and print photos for very reasonable prices. You could change your money and get a huge wad of notes in a bamboo wallet for a few dollars. And, despite the Khmer Rouge, the central market had survived with trade in just about everything including gold and precious stones. Craftsmanship was not valued – jewellery was sold according to weight. One evening Liz and I had supper at a local restaurant in a back street, a kind of fondue with meat and vegetables boiled in a pot next to the table, encouraged and helped by the people who showed us both what to do and how to eat with our fingers (no Swiss fondue forks here). As we finished we decided to go to another place for a coffee. I glanced at the shelves of liquor from all over the world while we waited. Who was buying this stuff? How had it got here? And there, at the back, I saw some familiar looking tins of beer. “Surely not” I thought and got up to take a closer look. But it was what I thought: sanctions notwithstanding, South Africa’s favourite, Castle Lager. What was a nice South African beer doing in a place like that? I wondered.

But the bustle of the city as it emerged from the terror of the Khmer Rouge years, hid a darker side. Everyone you met had lost family and friends in the killing fields, though few at that stage wanted to talk about it. But as happened a few years later in Rwanda, it coloured everything and continues to do so to this day. A visit to Toul Sleng, the notorious detention centre where 20,000 people were tortured and executed was, and is, a painful reminder of the past which continues to haunt the country. It was the pictures of the thousands of victims, looking straight into the camera, surely knowing their fate, that shocks the most. Crossing the yard as you leave to walk into a quiet city street cannot free you from the feeling of evil.

But we were not planning to work in Phnom Penh. Rattanakiri in the hills on the border with Vietnam and Laos, was regarded by the government as a kind or wild west and the Ministry of Health were amazed that we would consider working there, particularly as it was the area in which Pol Pot had built up his original support and where Khmer Rouge gangs were still rumoured to be hiding in the forests. Negotiations had been tough and had completed by Pelham Roberts, our programme manager a few months previously. There is a good story attached to his work and I’ll hope he’ll join the group and tell it. Otherwise my version of the story will have to do.

My next post will describe the journey from Phnom Penh to Rattanakiri to see the early days of the project. 

(I hope to be able to post some photos of Phnom Pehn and the people, but my album seems to have gone walk about and some searching is required)