Voice of Witness is still raising money to complete this important book- to make a donation, please click here. You can support Women in Prison by clicking the ‘Donate’ button or support Voice of Witness throughout the year by becoming a monthly sustainer!

The organizations- CAIR, the Council on American Islamic Relations of California, San Francisco’s Arab Cultural and Community Center, and MPAC, the Muslim Public Affairs Council- will assist Voice of Witness in advisory roles and with community outreach and fundraising for the forthcoming book. Edited by author Alia Malek (A Country Called Amreeka) with consulting support from journalist/playwright Wajahat Ali (The Domestic Crusaders), the project addresses the rise of hate crimes and discrimination against men and women from Arab, Muslim, Middle Eastern, South Asian and other communities in the US after 9/11.

Editor Alia Malek describes the importance of this project, saying:

“As we approach the 10 year anniversary of 9/11, the country will inevitably pause to reflect on what this decade has meant for us — as a people, as a society, as a nation. It is essential that these commemorations and reckonings include the experiences of a complete range of people whose lives have been impacted by this turning point in US history.”

Voice of Witness co-founder Dave Eggers discovered the need for this type of project through his own writing, he explains:

“Though I’d been aware of it through the news and other means, I learned firsthand, while researching Zeitoun, the intense scrutiny, prejudice and misinformation that plagues Arab- and Muslim-Americans. Their stories need to be told, and Alia Malek’s Voice of Witness book will be an essential tool in the process of American self-education about the lives of the innocents swept up in the War on Terror.”

Voice of Witness’ collaboration will enable the forthcoming book to be adopted as a primary outreach and education resource for partnering organizations. Upon completion, the book will be used as a tool for cultural competency trainings for businesses, social service organizations and healthcare providers, as well as in educational programs in schools and in advocacy work.

Of the partnership, CAIR San Francisco Bay Area Program and Outreach Director Zahra Billoo states, “CAIR-CA is excited to be working with Voice of Witness on this project as it will create an avenue through which to tell the personal stories of American Muslims whose civil rights have been violated in the wake of 9/11.”

About the Participating Organizations:

CAIR is America’s largest Muslim civil liberties group. Its mission is to enhance the understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding.

MPAC is a public service agency working for the civil rights of American Muslims, for the integration of Islam into American pluralism, and for a positive, constructive relationship between American Muslims and their representatives.

The mission of the Arab Cultural and Community Center is to serve both the Arab-American and the greater Bay Area community through cultural programs, outreach, and social services. The ACCC serves over 6,000 people annually and seeks to educate and inform the larger Bay Area community about Arab culture and the contributions that Arab-Americans make to the social and cultural fabric of the Bay Area.

We are still looking for narrators and funders for this crucial project. For more information on the book and how you can help make it a reality, click here.

Alice was a grassroots political organizer for the Movement for Democratic Change, the opposition party in Zimbabwe. Now in her 40s, she lives undercover in a neighboring country while she waits to find out if she will be granted asylum. Here, she relives moment-by-moment her experience in 2008 of abduction and rape, sexual violence as political retribution.

My neighbor said, “I heard they are coming to get you today.”

I said, “I’m tired of running. If they want to come and get me they can come.” Less than an hour later, they came. In winter it gets dark early. It was some time after 6 pm when three cars full up with people arrived at my house. This was the 7th of June, 2008.

When I heard the sound of cars, I looked through the curtain and saw that it was bad. There was nowhere to run. They were wearing camouflage, the Zimbabwean army uniform, and they were armed with guns.

They all got out of the cars. Some jumped over my gate and some went round to my neighbors’ house where I used to go to hide. My house is a typical ghetto house – each one is attached to the neighbors’ houses. In one bedroom, they found my stepson and his wife sleeping. I’d given my stepson the spare keys to my bedroom but he could not get the door open. He was trying to insert the key but I was inside holding the other key. When I realized that they were beating him, I unlocked the door. I said, “Please don’t beat up my son. I am the problem because I am a member of MDC.”

They said, “Are you showing off with your MDC?”

I said, “No, I’m not. You are hurting someone who has done no wrong.”

They said, “Ok, open your bedroom. Why were you locked inside?”

I said, “I was afraid. I’ve never had visitors bring guns before.”

They went into my bedroom and started searching. They found twenty Morgan Tsvangirai  posters and two posters for my MP, and flyers and The Zimbabwean newspaper – I had piles of them for distribution. They searched my house and took some money that I was saving, 300 US dollars and 150 South African rands.

They told me to carry all the stuff out of the house and they took me in their open truck, a cream-colored Mitsubishi. I was sitting in the back, in the middle, and they were surrounding me, sitting on the sides. They were kicking me and hitting me with sticks and fists. Some wanted to throw me into a dam. Another car stopped and someone inside said, “Did you find her?” and they said, “Yes we did.”

They wanted me to tell them where the MDC MPs lived, the MDC youths’ houses, the councilor’s house. I refused to tell them. They said, “So you are being like Jesus who died for others? Are you going to die for those people?” I said, “No. Whoever showed you my house should have shown you all the other houses.” They said I was rude. They beat me up so badly. After that they said, “Take off your clothes.”

When I removed my clothes, just before we got to the Methodist church, they stopped the car and started taking pictures of me, naked. They carried on beating me as they were driving around. Then they stopped somewhere else in the dark and there they raped me.

There were many soldiers. I don’t know how many raped me because I passed out.

I think they threw water on me because I became conscious when we got to the police station. They said, “Get off and carry your stuff.” I got off the back of the truck but I couldn’t even walk. I fell down and they said get up and I did.

Inside, when they got behind the counter in the police station, they threw a bullet at me and said, “Kiss it” and I did and they said, “That bullet is yours.”

Visit the site to learn their thoughts on the power of storytelling, human rights in Burma, and more. Click here to read the article.

After the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, millions of Hutus fled the country in the fear that Tutsis would seek retribution against them. Whether or not they had participated in the killings, Hutu people sought refuge in neighbouring countries like Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Jean Luc, whose mother is Tutsi and father is Hutu, was only fourteen when his family left Rwanda for Congo DR.

In 1996 the Rwandan army invaded the Congo and they started advancing, destroying all the refugee camps along the border. They took Bukavu, the town I was staying in. In the classroom we started hearing boom, boom and we looked and it was bombs falling on the next hill and smoke going up. Oh my God, you saw people running crazy, you saw people going through the window. I ran and I got home and I saw my mom was getting ready, carrying my brother who was nine months old, and so it was like, “Okay, it’s time to go.”

So, that’s when we left Bukavu and we went to this area where there was a big refugee camp called Kavumu. That’s where we stayed for three weeks until we realized the Tutsi army had surrounded the refugee camp—one morning in the camp there were bullets flying. Oh my God, imagine, a hundred thousand people immediately moving in all directions. It was nuts, people running in all directions, people losing their kids, and the kids crying and screaming, calling their moms, and bullets flying. There was no protection; all of the houses were made of plastic. It was insane, bombs suddenly flying on both sides.

That is where I lost my mom. How could I tell if she took this way or that way? I couldn’t tell if she went to the right or to the left. So I was stuck with my grandmother and I told her, “Grandma, let’s go.” We hit the road walking in the day. We were trying to go to Goma but somewhere in between, we came to a gigantic parking lot. We met people who had come from Goma because there was war there. Refugees had come from that way, and couldn’t go anywhere. We met my uncle there, who was stuck like everyone else. There was war in Goma, there was war where we were coming from, and we were right on the lake. People had their cars and couldn’t go anywhere.

People were just saying, “So this is where everything ends,” and then, “What are we going to do?” And we knew we were going to have to climb through the forest to this gigantic chain of mountains. It was a 3,044-foot elevation, and we had to hike that thing. It was so steep, I remember, I told my grandma, “I can’t take you there, you go stay with your son.” I hooked up with a family I knew from Rwanda. They were good friends with my dad, and I knew them in Bukavu. I went to school not far from where they lived so we hung out and played basketball—we were really good friends. So people left their cars and we started walking through the forest, and I started walking with the family.

It was a pretty bad forest—you had to walk all day and there were mosquitoes, red ants, and quick sand. We had to cross rivers because there are no bridges, so we had to cut a tree on both sides so the trees fell in the river and you could walk on the branches. They weren’t so strong, some people fell in, like women and kids. The water carried them and there was no way to save them.

The family I was walking with, there were four kids and the mom and the dad, and there was the housekeeper—she didn’t carry anything. They had three bodyguards but I was the guy who had to fetch the water. It was hard because I was young and I was naïve, so the family used me. I had to carry baggage; I basically became their slave. I was the one who got water, wood, and stuff. It was something that really broke my heart, to see how people treat each other.

The next day we had to move again, because people were saying the soldiers were coming. We had to climb this mountain. From the bottom, you couldn’t see the top. At the top, because that family was sort of a family of soldiers, the soldiers were like, “You can’t stay here. It’s too dangerous.” So we started back down. People started drinking water and all the refugees were passing by, passing by. There was a bamboo forest down the hill. Suddenly we started hearing machine guns—that was the first time in my life I’d ever been shot at really close. The machine guns were on the other side—there was a mountain opposite to us, so they were shooting at us from there, bullets flying over your head like zoom, zoom, zoom. Everybody fell on the ground. People were crashing—women, kids, falling all over the place.

I think on the top there were more than sixty people that were hiking. Because of the machine gunfire everybody ran back down. They cut in half the whole mountain, I’m sure. People on the side of the mountain died—when they fell, the bullets were in their backs. On the top, when we fell, the bullets were flying above our heads. So we get in the bamboo and lay on the ground and they keep shooting. When it’s time to change the ammunition you stand up and run, and they start shooting again and you fall. The leaves and the bamboo—when the bullets go through the bamboo it is an explosion because of the intensity. The bamboo explodes and the leaves and the branches fall on your head. Oh my God, I lost my mind, I lost everything I had in my hands; I had something to sleep in, and I just lost it. I was just running, running, running. After maybe five kilometers I had to catch my breath and had to sit and wait for the others to come—those who survived—and I was thinking, “Yeah, I’m here.” It was insane. At the age of fifteen that makes you go, “Wow, what is this life?”

I tried to survive and tried to get out of the thing. It was really nasty for us because it was mountains and the mud, and every morning there was the fog and it was cold and rainy. And you don’t have proper clothing and you’re hungry, and you have to walk every day and carry things for the kids.

So, after that, we reached the road—the family that I was walking with—and we crossed this bridge and started walking to Walikale. When we reached Walikale we stayed there for a couple of days. After the first day, we met some people who said, “Yeah, I saw your mom passing by. I think she went up to the refugee camp in Tingy Tingy.”  The family paid for the bus there, but said, “We can’t pay for you,” and they abandoned me. So, I had to walk two hundred kilometers to get to where my mom was.  For those two hundred kilometres I was just crying and sobbing—I was really sad.

On the way I met my niece, and she said, “Yeah, lets walk together, can you carry my stuff?” And I said, “You know, never in my life am I going to carry anybody’s stuff again.” And she said, “Yeah, I understand. It’s okay.”

This and future Voice of Witness excerpts are available on the McSweeney’s iPhone app The Small Chair.

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Lai Pa
34 years old, male, Chin
Former Prisoner and Army Porter
Kuala Lumpur

Lai Pa is an outgoing Chin man—a Burmese ethnic minority—who works for the Chin Refugee Center. It is a clear that he has a lot to say; he is passionate about telling people of his experience as a prisoner of the State Peace and Development Council (the military junta that rules Burma), as he believes the issue must be exposed.

I was a porter for nearly six months.

I stayed in Moulmein (the third largest city in Burma) prison until the day I became a porter. At the time, I was about thirty years old. One night they yelled for me to get out. They made me line up with other prisoners, and they chained us all together, one by one. They put us in a military car, but they didn’t tell us anything. But as soon as they had called us that night, we knew we would be made porters. All prisoners are afraid to become porters. We were afraid, because we had heard that most porters die. Only the prisoners who have money can pay to not become porters.

The government doesn’t have much money, but they have many prisoners. So for them, it makes sense to use us for army porters —if we die, they lose nothing. But if they use horses or helicopters to carry their loads, the government loses money if the horse dies or the helicopter breaks. But it’s easy to take a prisoner and make him a porter. That’s how the SPDC thinks about it.

That night, they brought us to Bahloat, which is in the area of the Karen National Union [The KNU is a political organization that represents the Karen ethnic minority in Burma. The KNU also has an armed group called the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA).]  There were 185 porters and 250 soldiers. Most of the soldiers were Burman, but maybe about thirty of them were ethnic minority people. The porters were mostly ethnic minorities—Rohingya, Karen, Rakhine, and a couple Chin, like me.

The head of our tama [abbreviated version of “tatmadaw,” the Burmese name for the SPDC military] was Bo Mu Choke [Brigadier General] Cho Kway. We left Bahloat on January 28, 2006, and began walking to the Au Dou Rai army camp. We started our journey around three p.m., and slept that night in Seven Mile Village along the way. The next morning, we continued walking. We followed the stream, but it was hard because there was no trail. Sometimes a few porters would walk ahead to clear a trail, and we would follow. We were carrying so much—machine guns, ammunition, and rations for all the soldiers and for ourselves.

Some machine guns were so big that eight people had to carry them. We hadn’t gone through training, and we weren’t allowed to rest, so some porters couldn’t handle it. If one of us couldn’t walk any farther, the soldiers would just kill him. They didn’t want to leave any prisoners behind alive. And if someone tried to take a rest without permission, the soldiers would beat him with their guns. They would beat him so much that he couldn’t walk anymore, and they’d leave him there to die. People kept dying. My friends kept dying.

On that trip from Bahloat Town to Au Dou Rai, my leg became swollen. I thought I could not carry my load any longer. But, I knew that if I didn’t carry anymore, I would die. I told one of the soldiers that my leg was swollen and asked him to give me less weight. “What do you say now—what, porter?” He beat me. He shoved at me and beat me. “No, here, here, here, I cannot carry this!” I told him again. He beat me again. But when they only hit us with their hands, we were not so afraid because we could recover again. If they beat you with their guns, you wouldn’t recover.

When we walked through combat areas, the SPDC soldiers would make the porters walk in the front. In the forest, it’s easy for KNU soldiers to shoot the SPDC soldiers. But if the porters walk in front of the army, the KNU soldiers don’t dare shoot. They don’t want to shoot porters. So whenever we were walking on a path with the SPDC soldiers, the porters were always walking in front. Everywhere we went.

Sometimes there were landmines. One time, I saw a porter step on one and lose both of his feet. But another time, it happened to a captain.  As always, we were walking with the porters in front of the army. But the porter didn’t set off the landmine, and the captain behind him did. Two soldiers lost their legs.

But most of the time, I didn’t think about the landmines. I just walked. The load was so heavy, and we were always very tired. No time to think about the landmines, only about how we could carry on and get to rest. After the first village we stayed in, other villages we passed were empty. We saw no one. The SPDC had cleared the villages.

It took us five days to walk to the Au Dou Rai army camp. By the time we arrived, only 147 porters remained. Thirty-eight people had died on the journey to the camp. When we made it to the camp, near the Daneeta River, we could finally take a rest. We were very, very tired. But after a week, another bad thing happened. Four porters who were sick tried to flee, and the army caught them. The soldiers killed those four people very brutally. They broke their arms, and cut their tongues. Then they hanged them from a tree, and they made the rest of us watch. They wanted us to be afraid so no more porters would try to run away again. After that, we were so afraid.

See, Au Dou Rai was a Karen village before, but now there are no more Karen people—only an SPDC army camp. All the Karen villagers in the area had to move to Thailand, because the SPDC cleared them out. The army would go into the area and kill everyone they saw, even if they were just civilians. The government sends ten battalions [200–600 soldiers per battalion] and five hundred porters to Au Dou Rai every year. But out of those 500 porters, only 70 to 100 return. So many porters die every year. The year I was there, it was also like this.

During the day, we would stay by the river. The soldiers made us stay in the sun all day, and it was so hot. If we moved, one of the captains beat us. We had to stay in the same position until evening, with no water. They wouldn’t even allow us to bathe for seven days. We were very dirty, and smelled so bad. On the seventh day, they finally let us bathe, and they fed us well. But after a month, many of the prisoners were sick. Since we didn’t get to bathe often, most of the porters were ill. Some of the weaker porters began dying, one by one, often from malaria. I kept wondering, “Is this how I will die?” At the Au Dou Rai camp, malaria was a big problem. When I got sick with malaria, I was shaking for three days.

When twenty prisoners had died, Bo Mu Choke Cho Kway became afraid that we would all die. We were also afraid, watching our friends die every day. So the soldiers gave us good medicine and good food for five days.  I finally recovered, but by then there were only about 115 or 120 porters remaining. We all grieved so deeply at the time, watching our friends die. We loved each other and took care of each other, because we shared the same lack of freedom.

Soon after I recovered from malaria, we started to work again as porters, travelling back and forth with rations from the Au Dou Rai camp to an army camp on the Thai border. During the rainy season, which begins in June, it takes one month to go back and forth to the border camp by climbing through the mountains. At that time, you can’t follow the river to the border, because it rises high and becomes too wide to cross. So, we climbed the mountains instead. Go up a mountain, go down, go up another mountain, go down again.

The rain was so heavy when we were climbing through the mountains. Heavy rain, morning to night. We got up at five in the morning, and started walking around six a.m. each day. We would walk all day, through the rain, with our 25kg bags of rations for the border camp. In the mountains, we used plastic to collect rainwater. We used the water to cook rice. At five in the evening, we would take a rest and find a place to sleep.

First, we had to make sure the rations did not get wet, so we made a tent to store them. Second, we made a tent for the soldiers. Since we were in a KNU area, we had to be on guard. But for us, the porters, there was no tent. We could fit only our heads and chests under the tent and had to leave our legs outside. Our bodies got so wet through the night. We woke up in the morning with our longyis [sarongs] so wet, and then we’d start carrying again.

The first time we climbed that mountain, I actually wanted to die, because I knew this was the first time, and that I’d have to go many more times. I know I will die, I thought, so let me die now easily. Let me not suffer in the future again. But then I remembered my father and mother, and how sad they would be if I died there. The only reason I could survive is that I’m from Chin State, and as a child I was always climbing in the mountains. Only because of that could I survive this mountain journey. Every time we took the trip, two people would die. All the time, we were walking through a KNU area but we saw no Karen people. Only destroyed villages.

One time, the captain told us that we had lost the way. It was the rainy season, so the path was very slippery. We made our way to a cliff near the river, and we set up camp there for the night. It was already dark, but since we were in the forest and it was a KNU area, the army didn’t dare make a fire. So we stayed in the dark, in the cold.

When we finally arrived at the border camp after losing the way, we were so hungry. We were very thin. Our hands were so sore. But when we arrived at the camp, we saw that one porter had been left behind. We hadn’t noticed before, because we could barely even take care of ourselves. It was so dark and rainy on that journey, so the army didn’t keep track of us either. We only knew that we couldn’t fall behind, or we would surely die. We had to get to the camp. So when we saw that we had left one porter behind, we went back to find him the next day. But he was already dead.

We were always weak, because we never had enough food on these journeys. They only fed us twice a day—at eleven a.m and seven p.m. They gave us rice, and we would take banana shoots and crush them into it. We could only go on if there was at least something in our bellies.

If we tried to steal from the rations, the soldiers would beat us. The army checked what we had when we left Au Dou Rai and when we arrived at the camp, so we dared not steal. If we lost any of the rations, we were punished.

It was so hard in the mountains. The food they gave us was barely enough to survive, so one month when we were carrying in the mountains, five of our friends died from the hardship. If porters died while we were climbing through the mountains, we had to leave them there. We couldn’t bury them, because we had no tools for digging. But when porters died in Au Dou Rai camp, we buried them as much as we could.

One time in the forest, my legs became very swollen before we reached the camp. But I knew in my mind that if I didn’t keep going, I would die. Maybe because of this, I made it to the camp. But when we arrived back to our camp after trips in the rainy season, we’d all get sick. But the soldiers would feel fine. They were very fit from training, and they got better meals and more food than us.

Another time when we were climbing the mountain, one of our friends, a Mon man, was severely beaten by the soldiers. But he kept climbing. When we reached the top of the mountain, we left him to stay there while we continued on to bring the rations to the border camp. We stayed two nights at the border camp, and then we came back to find him. We found our friend sleeping there, with maggots crawling from his anus. But he was still alive. So all the porters, we said to the army, “Please, we will carry him. We will carry this man to our camp, and we’ll take care of him.” But the army didn’t allow it. “No,” they said. “How can you carry him?”

We begged the soldiers. We had already left the rations at the border camp, so we had no more to carry. We were about 50 porters, so we could carry him back to the camp and take care of him. We begged them, but the soldiers said no. And then the soldiers made us throw our friend off the cliff. They made us throw him off the cliff while he was still alive. We were so sorry for our friend, but as prisoners, we could do nothing. We had to throw him. We felt so much sorrow, all the prisoners. That day I told myself, Run away from this life.

For the first three months, the soldiers treated us badly like this—as if we were enemies. They watched us carefully, and we didn’t dare talk to them—we just carried the loads. But after three months, there was some mutual understanding with the soldiers, and they started to trust us more. At the same time, we prisoners would always try to please them. We tried to do whatever they wanted, because if we pleased them, they might give us some food. Especially while we were in the forest, we tried to please them because we could only get food from them.

Staying at Au Dou Rai camp was always so hard. The soldiers fed us very little, and we wore only the clothing we had when we first arrived at the camp. Our loads had been so heavy while walking to the camp, that we threw away our extra clothing. Six months in the same clothes.

One day, things started to change for me. I was assigned to cook for the prisoners. That day we were not given the full ration of food for the prisoners. The prisoners reported this to a major, and he came to check. He called me, since I was the cook, and asked, “Did you cook all the rice I gave you for the prisoners?” I explained that there was only a little left.

“Who left only this?” he asked.

“It was the sergeant,” I said.

“Where is the rest of it?”

I had to tell the truth. I admitted that the sergeant took the rice away. The major was angry about this, so he punished the sergeant severely. Then the sergeant got angry with me. “Oh, so you reported me?” he said.

“No, I didn’t.” He slapped me and told me I had no right to reply.

“If we travel together to carry the rations,” the sergeant said, “I will kill you.”

I was so afraid. In the Au Dou Rai area, it was very easy for the soldiers to kill porters. There were only 97 porters left at that time, so I was afraid. Many of our friends had died. My friends tried to encourage me to run away. They said that if we went to carry rations, they would accompany me and help me run away from the camp. So, I felt it was my chance to leave. I could not escape death if I stayed, so I had no choice but to try to escape. I thought, If I die, I will die. If I live, I will live.

It was the end of July when I ran away. By this time, we’d already been at the camp for six months. Somehow, the soldiers trusted that we would not run away. We usually had breakfast at eleven a.m., so everyone was there taking food. The guards were having breakfast, too. So I ran away, and made it to the stream. It took me three days to get to Bahloat town.

On the way to Bahloat, I slept on the ground, just like we always did as porters. And for food, I ate banana shoots. This kept me alive. Since I stayed in that area for almost six months, I knew the way to Bahloat. I didn’t dare walk on the path, but I stayed near it. During those three days of walking, I thought about how simple the life of a porter is, and also how easy it is for us to die. I thought about my friends who died. Some of them had good, strong muscles, but they died anyway. Maybe they died because they didn’t have strong minds or strong hearts. As I thought about what I’d faced in my life as a porter, I realized again that I had only survived because of my love for my mother and father. If I didn’t love them, if I didn’t have them to love and take care of me, I would have died as well. But I was still alive. I’d survived.

When I arrived in Bahloat town, a schoolteacher helped me and let me stay at his house.  He took care of me, and helped me get to Kaw Thaung, the southernmost town in Burma. In Kaw Thaung, there was an agent who sends people to Malaysia. The payment was nine lakh [about $900 USD], but I didn’t have it. So the agent paid for me, and agreed for my older sister to pay him back in Malaysia.

From Kaw Thaung, I fled to Thailand. It was August 2006 when I left Burma. I came by boat to Ranong, Thailand, which is near the Malay border. The boat ride was five or six hours long, and there were about twenty of us on the boat. There were Mon people, also Karen people. We were all going to Malaysia with the agent. When I was in Bahloat and Kaw Thaung, I was still afraid. But when I arrived in Thailand, something lifted in my mind. I felt like what I feared just flew away from me.

To pass through the Thailand-Malaysia border and into Malaysia, they put me in a car. They put two of us in back, on the floor behind the seats. And that’s how we entered Malaysia.

I decided to come here to Malaysia because there are so many Chin people here. Even before I was arrested I knew this. My elder sister and my younger brothers have been living here since before I was arrested.

*

The lives of porters are always unsafe. I believe one reason that soldiers treat the porters so badly is that most of the soldiers did not willingly become soldiers. Some people who are in prison, they know that if they join the army they will be released. So that’s how some people get out from prison. Some of the soldiers are very young, maybe fifteen or sixteen. Some of them don’t have a mother or father. The army tells them, “Ah, come. You join, and we will take care of you.” So they join the army. And if soldiers run away from the army, they are imprisoned. It’s the law of Burma.

Some of the officers joined willingly, but not all of them. The officer life is very different from the normal army life. The officer’s salary is one lakh [about $100 USD] but a normal soldier’s salary is only 30,000 kyat [about $30 USD]. You can’t survive on this in Burma. Also, the officers rule over the normal soldiers very cruelly. They can do whatever they want, and they have opportunities. But the normal soldiers are stuck. If they run away, they will be imprisoned.

When we were carrying the rations, the soldiers were also very tired. If a porter could not continue, the soldiers had to take care of it—they would just kill him. I think it’s the officers that made them do this. The officers told them, “Don’t look at the porters as your friends. They’re prisoners. Thieves, murderers. So don’t think they are like you. Don’t give them any chances.”  This was the officer’s command.

In actuality, many of the prisoners are arrested not because they are murderers, but just because they sold lottery numbers. The lottery is illegal in Burma. Just for selling a lottery ticket, someone can get one and a half or two years in prison, and be sent to porter.

My strategy to survive was to appease the soldiers and to make friends with them. I thought, if only we could make friends with these soldiers, then we would survive.

But porters can die at any time. For example, if a soldier got angry and just shot me with his gun, nothing would happen to him. I would just die, like a chicken or a rat. To Tanintharyi Division, they send 500 porters every year. Of the 500, only 72 porters make it back to the prison. If you survive, you survive.

Photographs courtesy of Chin Human Rights Organization.

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