Living Harmoniously with the Wa

I felt sad as they disappeared down the winding path on the mountain. I was suddenly overwhelmed by that same feeling of loneliness that I remembered from when my father left Rangoon for the first time, just when I was starting university.  I had known my two colleagues since the beginning of our time in the jungle, and it was painful to part.

But my loneliness did not last, what with the excitement of being in a new place with many interesting things to learn and people from different backgrounds to meet.

We met Wa officers who had been to Manerplaw before. Some had traveled as far as the Mon area at the Three Pagoda Pass, near the Thai town of Sankhalaburi to receive training in military communications.
They shared with us amusing Mon jokes they had learned, mimicking the Mon but with a Wa accent. 

We also met a Burmese officer who was in charge of the communications department. He had chosen to remain with the Wa in the north after the Burman leadership of the Communist Party of Burma was expelled in the 1989 mutiny by Wa troops.

After the merger between the Wa in the north and in eastern Shan State, this officer was given the job to take over the communications department in the south. Clearly, the Wa trusted him for them to give  such an important job to a Burman.

Among my new friends was a group of young Wa officers who, just like us, had been students in 1988 and had taken part in that year's uprising.  They were from Mandalay University and Lashio College in northern Shan State.

One of them, Khun Lot, had studied Burmese at Lashio College. A joker with many stories to tell, he was happy to meet fellow university students who had shared common experiences.

But unlike most of us in the All Burma Students' Democratic Front, he was engaged in real combat, as a Wa officer. He and his group would always take a detour to visit us at the school and share a drink before going to the front line.

The front line, where they were fighting Khun Sa’s troops, was about two hours' march away. On the way back from a mission, they dropped by again at the school.  

Another person who stood out in my mind was a Sino-Burmese from Rangoon’s Chinatown. He was a captain in the Wa army and in charge of a huge food warehouse.

A real entrepreneur, he had taken advantage of his warehouse position to  open a small but lucrative liquor shop where he often played host to us and reminisced about his old days in Rangoon.

Indeed, in San Lou Yong, we met Wa, Chinese, Shan, Palaung, Lahu, Burmese, Akha and many others I cannot remember—a mix of   Buddhists, Christians, Muslims and animists.

I found the Wa camp, with a population of a few hundred, resembled Manerplaw—a microcosm of what Burma was and a reflection of a conflict with so many people from so many different backgrounds.

Indeed, they were a colorful group of people. Despite the drug trade and fighting that had ravaged their lives, even if temporarily, they all seemed to be living harmoniously in an atmosphere of mutual respect and religious freedom. San Lou Yong was under Wa control, but the Wa  seemed to respect everybody’s way of life.