In SLORC's official usage, Burma is now Myanmar, Rangoon is now Yangon, Karenni is now Kayah, and so on. But most of the people I spoke to used the old forms. As I was rising to leave, I asked Suu Kyi to resolve the dilemma; since she is effectively the country's elected leader, she had as good a right as anyone to decide what it should be called.
"I think it's very foolish," she said. "The excuse [that the authorities] gave was that Burma was a colonial name and referred only to the Burmese people, and Myanmar included all the other ethnic groups. This is just not true. Myanmar is a literary form of Bama, which means Burmese. So what it is all about I do not know. Some people say it is yedea—a propitiatory rite, something to prevent bad fortune. The authorities believe a lot in astrology."
"Would you rather I used the old names?" I asked.
She laughed. "Yes, please use the old forms," she said. "As support for a sensible way of looking at things. I do not like narrow-mindedness. Even if these names were given by the British colonialists, so what? After all, India is called India and not Bharat, and China is China. I think if you have enough confidence in yourself, you should not worry about what you are called."
Among the Insurgents
Two days after my meeting with Aung San Suu Kyi, I heard that fighting had broken out between the Burmese Army and a contingent of Karenni insurgents. The Karenni were supported by a regiment of dissident Burmese students, and the fighting was concentrated in a remote and mountainous border region adjoining northwestern Thailand. The official Burmese media had listed the Karenni among the groups that had been brought back into the legal fold through SLORC's ceasefire policy. There was no mention of any fighting.
I found myself wondering, What is Burma (or Myanmar, for that matter)? Who are the Karenni insurgents? What has driven them to fight for so long, with such tenacity? Are the two aspects of Burma — the areas under the control of Rangoon and those claimed by the insurgents — really so distant from each other? I recalled an anecdote told to me by a senior diplomat in Bangkok, about Thailand's immensely revered monarch, King Bhumibol, who had personally overseen his country's passage to democracy. The king had remarked that an overhasty transition to democracy in Burma might produce a situation similar to the one in Bosnia, only worse. If this was so, what were the prospects of democracy in any multiethnic society?
When the Burmese offensive was in its second week, I flew to the border town of Mae Hong Son, in northwestern Thailand. It was a clear day, and I watched in awe as the red riverine plains of the south changed into jagged, densely forested mountains, a pristine landscape of misted valleys and towering ridges. I could see no sign of any habitation until Mae Hong Son itself appeared suddenly in my window, a string of teakwood buildings nestled in a deep valley.
At first glance, Mae Hong Son seemed to be a quiet and prosperous frontier town. It was hard to imagine that a war was being fought in the surrounding mountains. I was surprised by the number of hotels on offer. I picked a Holiday Inn. From my room I glimpsed a turquoise swimming pool ringed by European tourists sipping vividly colored drinks in umbrellaed glasses. Within half an hour, my contacts in Mae Hong Son, members of a Burmese student group, sent a guide to take me back across the Burma border into a Karenni-held area that was currently under attack.
We rented a motor scooter and went rattling off down a dirt track that ended at a village near the foot of the mountains. We waded across a stream and started climbing. It was about five in the afternoon, and the sun had already dipped behind a ridge. Following a steeply ascending trail, we stepped from twilight into the darkness of a densely canopied forest. Neither my guide nor I had thought to bring a flashlight; he was wearing rubber sandals and I a pair of thin-soled leather shoes.
I began to regret my precipitate departure from the Holiday Inn. Clawing at the undergrowth to keep from falling, I feared I would end up with a snake in my fist. By the time we stumbled into the students' base camp, hours later, exhaustion had erased every thought from my mind. It was all I could do to stay on my feet.
Half a dozen young guerrillas dressed in camouflage fatigues were squatting around a campfire by a bamboo hut, playing guitars. A heavyset, thickly bearded man detached himself from the group and stepped over to meet me. He introduced himself as the commander of the regiment. He looked me over as I sat panting on a rock. After a moment's hesitation, he asked, a little shyly, "Are you Indian?" I then noticed that his spoken English sounded oddly like my own. I nodded and, through a veil of exhaustion, took another look at him. Suddenly I sat up. "And you?" I asked.
"My parents were Indian," he said with a smile. "But I'm Burmese."
After my ordeal in the jungle, I was not quite prepared for such an eminently postmodern encounter. My astonishment must have been evident in my face, for the commander began to laugh.
He was called Ko Sonny, but his given name, I learned, was Mahinder Singh. He was in his early thirties and had been "in the jungle" almost eight years. His family had been settled in Burma for three generations. His parents were born there; his father was Sikh and his mother Hindu, both from families of well-to-do Indian businessmen.
I was disconcerted listening to Sonny in the flickering firelight. I was sure that our relatives had known one another once in Burma; his had chosen to stay and mine hadn't. Except for a few years and a couple of turns of fate, each of us could have been in the other's place.
I spent the night on a bamboo pallet in Sonny's hut. The next day I was jolted awake before dawn by the sound of a Burmese Army artillery barrage. After groping for a match, I stepped outside to find Sonny talking into a walkie-talkie. The Burmese Army had launched an assault on a Karenni position in an adjoining valley.
The fighting was a good distance away, but the sound of gunfire came rolling up the misted mountainside with uncanny clarity, the rattle of small-arms fire clearly audible in the lulls between exploding artillery shells. The noise sent flocks of parakeets shooting out of the mountainside's tangled canopy.
With daybreak I had my first look at the camp — a string of thatched bamboo huts arranged along a mountain stream. A great deal of thought had gone into the camp's planning. The plumbing was far from rudimentary: water was piped directly into bathrooms and showers from the stream. There was a dammed pond teeming with fish and, nearby, a pen full of pigs.
Next to each hut was a vegetable patch. Once Sonny had ascertained that the fighting was not headed our way, he picked up a watering can and waded into a patch of bok choy. Following his lead, the others put aside their battle gear and disappeared into their pumpkin trellises and mustard beds like a troop of Sunday gardeners.
"Growing food is as important to our survival as fighting," Ko Sonny explained apologetically. "We do this before we go on patrol."
We set out an hour or so later, a detachment of half a dozen student fighters, with Sonny in the lead. Once we had crossed the border, an unmarked forest trail, Sonny and his men reclaimed a cache of aging M-16s and slung them over their shoulders.
We climbed onto a ridge, where I found myself gazing at a majestic spectacle of forested gorges, mountain peaks, and a sky of crisp, pellucid blue. The shelling was sporadic now: occasionally the forest canopy would silently sprout a mushroom cloud of smoke, the accompanying blast climbing leisurely up the slope moments later.
Mae Hong Son was clearly visible, a smudge in the floor of a tip-tilted valley. While Sonny counted off the caliber of the exploding shells—120mm, 81mm — I turned his binoculars on the town and spotted my hotel.