Coffee with Warlords

It begins, as any story might, with me absent-mindedly doodling a submachine gun in the margins of a notebook, after my weekly English tutorials with my tribal refugee neighbors in Thailand, only to hear from over my shoulder a rather delighted-sounding "Oh! My cousin's army could use such a gun! Can you make it for them?"

Now, for those of you just joining this story, a bit more needs to be done to properly set the scene. This is late 2006 or possibly early 2007, and I'm living and working as a missionary with this sort of tribal minority in Thailand, as well as with orphans and kids who couldn't be raised by their family- of those, approximately half were in the orphan/hostels because they had family members with HIV, and virtually all were tribal minorities who were in Thailand in the first place because they <or their parents> had either been involved in drug smuggling from Burma to Thailand, were refugees from ethnic cleansing that was happening there, or both.

Being a missionary, I saw my work as God's work, and was devoted to bringing peace and prosperity and Jesus Christ to these people- virtually all of whom were already Christian enough to be uninterested in being converted again. But I was clever, and figured I could at least materially assist the "peace and prosperity" stuff, since that's all physically possible and mostly just a matter of getting things done.

But it was around this time that I was formulating my early ideas of both what is possible and what is beneficial in terms of raising the standards of living for subsistence hunters and farmers, living under occupation and with the direct threat of violence on a day to day basis.

Much of this is still not widely known. What you can probably find out, via sources like Google and Wikipedia, is that Burma had been a British colony which was basically shoved out of the Empire after world war 2 and nearly a decade of war and occupation by the Japanese, whereupon it promptly collapsed and entered what is still the longest civil war in history- as I sit here writing this, I'm fairly certain that whether it has been declared finished or not, there are still nationalist movements among the tribal groups I worked with, and I very much doubt that they know or care that the Burmese soldiers technically no longer have legal orders to shoot them on sight- and I'd be very surprised if the Burmese soldiers know or care either, being that the majority of them were tribal children who were forced conscripts into the same battalions that killed their families. {Edit for clarity: the "most Burmese soldiers started out as child conscripts" statement refers specifically to how the Burmese army operated in the tribal lands it was trying to re-capture, and does not describe the Burmese army in general}

Footnote: If you want to get a good picture of the sort of news clipping I saw on a day-to-day basis, there is a missionary group called Free Burma Rangers which trains paramedics in the tribal groups on the Thai border with Burma to deliver basic medical treatment to all of the villages they can reach.

The Burman ethnic group has a long and bloody history as a military power, and this is particularly the view of the Thai people, who have seen their borders shift over the centuries as the Thai and Burmans squabble over the same land and towns, with the Burmese occupying much of what is now northern Thailand for nearly 300 years, including Chiang Mai- the city I lived in. And the end of occupation saw the revival of these traditions, with the aid of modern weapons.

So it should make perfect sense when I tell you that, as a policy of self defense, and with the aid of the US weapons that the Thai government was receiving as part of their compensation for the anti-communist collaboration with the American military during the Vietnam war, the Thai government began arming all of the tribal groups along the Burmese side of its' border as a way of denying the ability to operate freely, and ths threaten the Thai border, to the various centralized Burman governments that rose and fell from the same ashes.

Now that the stage is somewhat set, what happened to his cousin's army?

Well, as it turned out, it wasn't much of an army- at various times, numbers ranging from 50-300 were thrown out as estimates of the number of their soldiers.  The conversation was mostly bullshit- I was in no position to be offering material assistance to any military effort, and had nothing to tell them that was useful.  After that English lesson, me and this person- I'll call him "Andrew", because he had such an "English name" that he had given himself, although it wasn't this one- retired to his house for tea, Jesus music (he sang, and I listened), and a discussion of what materials, machines, and processes were needed to make guns if we were, hypothetically, up in the mountainous regions on the northern border of Myanmar, near China, where the Lisu people have lived for centuries.

It turned out to be an interesting problem, and one that I have spent years thinking about.  There is an abundance of raw materials- even scrap metal, often from things such as downed WW2 aircraft that have never been located or salvaged. But there are no tools, or the tools that exist are of poor quality, or are very rudimentary and largely unsuitable for the tasks that firearms manufacture would demand of them.

Some time after this, Andrew told me that he wanted me to meet "his friend" for coffee, because his friend was somebody important in the efforts to resist the crimes against humanity being committed by the Burmese military.

We took a Songthaew- a sort of modified pickup truck that serves as one form of public transport in much of Thailand- to a fancy hotel downtown, mostly so that we wouldn't get wet from the beginnings of the Songkhran festival that marks the start of the new year on the Thai calendar. We arrived a bit late and wandered in, two extremely out-of-place and mismatched characters, into a dark empty cold banquet hall with a few sleepy diners having breakfast in various corners of the room. 

The man we met was short, a bit stocky, beginning to bald, and dressed conservatively. We shook hands, and he announced that he wanted to begin with a prayer- and I think I might have prayed too, at his request, but I am not sure about this detail. It was clear that his faith was important to him, and that he wanted mine to be to me.

And then he introduced himself as a general in the Kachin Independence Army.

I can't say I remember the bulk of what was said very vividly- a lot of it was social niceties, especially to start, when he was trying to get a sense of who I was, and so on.

So I chattered away about "how X is made" and "if we could get y to your area, you could do guns AND z"- I think I was trying to sell him on the idea of industrializing these villages, which I'm fairly sure he wasn't interested in, and I'm more sure I wasn't coherently articulating.

But I do remember very clearly what the problem stopping the gun discussion was: there was no shortage of guns, but only of bullets, and the means to reload these.  I listened as he described how his soldiers would save spent ammunition casings- the {usually} brass tube-looking things that get spit out the side of the gun when the bullet (the actual projectile) is fired out the front. In his case, these were usually steel casings- nigh on impossible to reuse- and to compound the matter, the only available way to reload them was with homemade gunpowder, which caused the weapons to foul rapidly, leading to jamming.  I briefly described to him some of the ways we could go about making better powder, such as nitrocelulose-based smokeless powders- but I didn't know enough chemistry to describe how to get the ingredients necessary to make this.

The last detail I remember very clearly is describing the sort of minimum budget that might be needed to get basic production up and running- I cited the low thousands of dollars, describing the pricing I had seen on machine tools such as lathes and mills.

And this is where the conversation, for me, became unsettling, because money was no object- and my grasp of economics, at the time recently bolstered by my first 'reading' of the <excellent> book "Freakonomics", led me to rapidly conclude that there was no legitimate way that this guy had that kind of money that wasn't fucking somebody up somewhere, and that was something I was unwilling to play ball with. 

I am making an effort not to describe things more vividly than I actually remember them, but I remember probing at this gently in our conversation- or as gently as I could, given my very limited social skills, especially at that time- and the responses he gave were also unsettling. This was a man who seemed familiar with giving life and death orders without accountability, and who used his god's authority to do so.

Our business concluded, we exchanged social niceties- overall, it was a very pleasant conversation, although the coffee was terrible- and he gave me his phone number, telling me to call him if I needed absolutely anything.  I promptly added his number to my phone- and never called him.