Escape From Burma

The world's longest-running civil war has forced 400,000 refugees into neighboring Thailand. But Thailand has had enough. Now 80,000 Burmese -- including two girls who've endured the unimaginable -- are headed for the U.S.

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Memories of Her Mother

Moo Nay Paw has only fleeting memories of her mother. She remembers her long, dark hair and the faint outline of her beauty, unblemished by the labor of raising three children in the rugged jungles of Burma. She remembers the sweet treats her mother prepared from yellow pumpkins and roots, steamed and sugared to become a young girl's treasure. And Moo Nay Paw remembers the night when she was seven and her fingers felt the bullet hole in her mother's back.

Of the years before and since, she has other memories. She remembers brutality-at the hands of Burmese soldiers during their periodic sweeps of the mountain villages along the country's border with Thailand. And death -- of her brother and others from fever. And still more murders -- of her father, her family's friends, and countless others by the junta's soldiers. But amid all this, as clear as yesterday, is the memory of the night ten years ago that set in motion the destruction of her family.

It began with a journey. Moo Nay Paw belongs to the Karen, a tribe whose desire for an autonomous homeland has triggered relentless and brutal attacks by the government's military (which changed the country's name to Myanmar in 1989). To escape the danger, her parents gathered their children and belongings and forded the Moei River to Thailand, settling with other refugees in a small fishing village where they thought they'd be safe. But an international boundary proved as inconsequential to the Burmese army as it had to the fleeing Karen; from a hilltop across the river, troops shelled the village. Moo Nay Paw's family and two friends set out again, this time back across the river to her father's childhood village, Hta Oak, in Burma's misty mountains.

The trek took the family through dangerous territory, but her father and his friends were careful. They stuck to well-worn paths cleared of land mines, and when they came to one of the handful of roads the regime had built for troop deployment, the men strained to detect signs of soldiers nearby. Resting high against the side of a hill, they were sure they were safe. "But the Burmese army was on the other side of the hill," recalls Moo Nay Paw. "They heard all, they were so close." As the group came upon a telltale boot print on the trail, the soldiers opened fire.

Now 17, Moo Nay Paw speaks softly in the cautious English she learned in a Thai refugee camp. Her features-dark olive skin, a wide, round face, and black hair-are unmistakably Karen. She has large, serious eyes that suddenly melt into liquid when she smiles, often at the oddest moments in a conversation. She speaks of death, heartache, and misery with almost clinical detachment, as if this weren't her story at all. And in a way it isn't; it's a communal story among the Karen, in which only details differ.

Moo Nay Paw's family was caught in the world's longest-running civil war. For almost 60 years, the Karen -- one of Burma's largest ethnic minorities, totaling some 7 percent of the population -- and a handful of other tribes have struggled for freedom from the Burmese majority. That freedom once seemed within their grasp. The Karen helped the British administer their colonies starting in the late 19th century and fought with the Allies in World War II against the Japanese, with whom the Burmese sided. In return for their loyalty, the Karen were led to believe the British would grant them autonomy. But when Burmese independence came in 1948, Britain forgot its promise. The commander of the Burmese army, Ne Win, launched an offensive to bring the tribes under central rule, an effort that only intensified when, in 1962, he staged a military coup and became the country's dictator. He died in 2002, but dictatorial rule continues today.

The Karen National Liberation Army insists its soldiers are holding their ground. But with just 4,000 fighters and weapons from the Vietnam War era and earlier, the guerrillas are outgunned and outmanned. The junta's strategy, meanwhile, is simple: to force submission by attacking villages and cutting off the food and supply lines that feed the resistance. Its tactics: enslavement, torture, rape, execution.

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Chatting with my mother-in-law I asked, "Have you heard of this company that takes the cremated ashes of your loved one and then compresses the carbon into a diamond?" "Yes," she said, smirking. "It brings a whole new meaning to the phrase 'family jewels.' "

-- Cathy Witbeck, Salt Lake City, Utah