Tuesday, November 24, 2015

Far from Home: 20 Years in Exile.


BOOKS FROM AND ABOUT BURMA

I should mention that those books presented were/are printed in small editions only and are more or less available in Mae Sot and Chiang Mai only. Good places to buy them are Myat Thu's Aiya Restaurant and The Best Friend Library in Mae Sot, also the Best Friend Libraries in Chiang Mai and Nu PO Refugee camp. One can also try any used book store in Thailand. And finally: You can contact the publishers or the authors of the books, for I added all available information below each book.

Legal note: all excerpts on this page are published with explicit permission of the authors and/or publishers.

Sorry, von dieser Seite gibt es diesmal keine deutschsprachige Version, da von den Büchern keine deutschen Übersetzungen existieren.

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Far from home: 20 years in exile



In this book the author Htet Aung Kyaw tells us about his personal experiences as a rebel fighter for the All Burma Students' Democratic Front (ABSDC), which he joined after the military crackdown on the uprising against the junta in August 1988, and of his life as a reporter. He describes the inner conflicts between the different Burmese opposition groups as well as between the several social classes, eg. the problems and conflicts between those who decided to stay in Burma and to fight the military regime and those groups of educated people who fled the country and were accused of enjoying a happy life outside Burma (mainly in the US, Norway and Australia) and just waiting for the others to topple the government. The book also offers several analyses and appraisals he has written over the years for several newspapers and magazines.

The first excerpt I chose is a little bit unusal for the book. Why? Because it describes the clash of two different worlds when the rebel camp, where Htet Aung Kyaw was living at that time, was visited by an official of the International Refugee Committee (IRC). This woman had obviously no idea about the situation of these rebel fighters and their struggle to survive in a civil war area. One can only hope that this incompetence and stupid behavior by this IRC official is an exception and is not the rule!

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(first chapter, from page 5 to 7)
...with an official from the International Refugee Committee (IRC). We passed the beautiful beaches and the popular Ban Laau Waterfall and finally reached the last Thai village, Khauung Yai (The Big Mountain) before our jungle camp. As we walked along the stream to our camp, the lady from the IRC, seeing the paper, plastics and food waste the students had thrown into the water, began complaining to me that we did  not respect the enviroment.

When we stopped for lunch along the way, we washed our hands and dishes in the stream as we did every day. But the IRC official complained again and again that the ABSDF were not respecting enviromental law. As a burmese rebel, I had never heard of enviromental law so I just smiled and paid no attention to her complaints. Once we arrived at the camp the, the IRC official exclaimed loudly when I offered her monkey curry for dinner. "You guys are killers. You have killed innocent wildlife. You are destroying the enviroment and nature," she shouted and spent the whole night crying.

We had no idea why she was so angry. The next morning, some students shot a monkey in a big tree just beside the camp and others used the monkey's hand bone as a tool to make Yazin (cigarettes). "How can you complain? If you don't want us to kill monkeys, you should provide us with proper food, meat and milk - you are the donor," I told her.

She was really upset now but we just laughed as we didn't understand her feelings. I heard later that she wrote an official letter of complaint to the ABSDF headquarters saying that battalions 201 and 203 were destroying the enviroment and forest wildlife. If we did not stop, she wrote, the IRC would cut our aid...

...It was only when I arrived at Norway that I truly understood her feelings. There are many ducks in the public lakes and beaches but no one tried to catch them. I learned that there are many regulations to protect wild animals, but more importantly, no one thinks to kill these animals as no one is hungry here.

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The second excerpt I chose is in strong contrast to the ivory tower views of the IRC offical and the brutal reality the rebel fighters were confronted with in their fight against the military government forces. (Still one can observe a lot of those so-called experts and starry-eyed-idealists running around at the Thai-Burmese border (and now also inside Myanmar) who have absolutely no idea what's going on.)

(second chapter, page 11)
...I don't know the exact number of casualities on our side, but I am certain that it was only one or two percent of those suffered by the Burmese troops. With my own eyes I saw hundreds of bodies, hand granades, helmets, ID cards, guns and knives of Burmese soldiers scattered in front of our frontline bunkers, in a place we called the killing ground...

...Soldiers from the ASBDF's battalion 211 and the Karen National Liberatioon Army (KNLA) Special Batallion 101 led by colonel Taw Hla built heavily fortified bunkers along enemy lines while a number of normal bunkers were built along the river. We built three barbed wire fences in front of the fortified bunkers and three rows of bamboo traps...

...But unbelievably, although everything was in our favour, hundreds of Burmese soldiers tried to advance on the killing ground in wave after wave while their comrades ordered artillery shelling of our bunkers. Most of the fighting took place in the early morning and evening. All we needed to do was sit and wait in our bunkers until the enemy reached the last line of barbed wire, then pull the triggers of our AK-47s. It was so hard to understand why the waves  of Burmese soldiers kept on coming in the killing ground even though they had seen hundreds of their comrades killed before them...

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About the author:
Htet Aung Kyaw, a freelance journalist  and writer, was born 1964 in Tavoy in southern Burma. After the crackdown of the 8.8.88 democracy mass movement in Burma he joined the All Burma Students' Democratic Front (ABSDF). Later he worked as a field reporter for Oslo-based Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB).  He still lives in Oslo, Norway.
Momentarily he is working on his new book about his life in the ABSDF , this time in Burmese, and prepares to publish it in Myanmar (or Burma, as he prefers to call his country). He also writes for the Irrawaddy Online Magazine.

Published by:
Htet Aung Kyaw

Contact:
Tel:+47 97 15 50 74 (mobile)
e-mail: winhtein201@gmail.com
http://www.htetaungkyaw.net/
http://facebook.com/htetaungkyaw201

twitter: @hak201

Copyright:
December 2008
Htet Aung Kyaw

Layout and Design:
Irrawaddy Publishing Group (IPG)

This book review is from .....
***(Copy from http://yanawa.blogspot.no/2013/03/books-from-and-about-burma.html)***


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