Winding Ledo Road. |
Just the night before, our company was told of the battalion’s
radio-intercept report of that resettlement village defended by a 20 strong
people-militia unit was being raided by a roaming KIA unit and our platoon was
sent straight away there that night to aid the village.
We have no motorized-transport and so we walked about 15 miles
on the jungle paths intentionally avoiding unsealed Ledo Road to avoid possible
KIA ambushes as some times KIA attack on a village was just to draw the
reinforcing army-column into their ambush.
Blood Bath in a
Kachin Resettlement Village
The village was one of those nameless government villages
with just a number. All these villages are called Pa-la-na (1), Pa-la-na (2),
Pa-la-na (3), etc and we didn’t even know how many of these Pa-la-na
villages were in that vast remote area as there were so many of them along the famous
old Ledo Road from Myitkyinar all the way to Hugaung Valley.
Probably they thought their Kachin brothers from KIA would be
lenient on them. But they thought wrong and they paid with the lives of many of
them. When we got there it was too late. The whole village under the pale dawn
light was lifelessly silent. Even the normally barkfull dogs were nowhere to be
seen.
The fearful survivors, some hiding under the houses and some
hiding in the nearby fields, slowly came out once they saw us Burmese soldiers.
From them we discovered the whole slaughter.
The village Chief who was also the chief of the militia had a
young Shan wife he met and married while he was serving his last few years as a
sergeant-major in the army in Shan State. She was gang-raped and finally
stabbed to death. They then ate whatever villagers had for their dinners and
left the village at the nightfall.
A roaming KIA regular unit that raids government villages. |
Even after well over 40 years I still remember the headless
bodies and the faces of weeping men and wailing women and crying children from
that slaughtered village, and still wonder about those brave people who dared
to resettle in a dangerous jungle just to work on a measly 50 free acres each
family got from the government.
And whenever I saw those cowboy movie scenes where American settlers
in the Wild West were brutally raided and slaughtered by the red-Indians that
bloody memory of mine came up into my mind again and again.
American Railway
Bonds
An old US Railways Bond. |
Most interesting part of the story was how American railways
barons like Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt - who built that famous New York’s
Grand Central - and Thomas Scott had obtained massive amount of money to build
their railways by borrowing from mainly English banks and some other European
banks.
How did they borrow that vast amount of money? They sold
railway bonds worth billions of dollars in today’s money to the English bankers
and rich people back in mother England. Growing up in Socialist Burma I didn’t know
what exactly was a bond first. So I looked for it in the old dictionaries and
finally learned what a bond really is.
“A bond is just a
loan. When you buy a bond, you're lending money to the organization that issues
it. The company, in return, promises to pay payments
to you for the length of the loan.
How much and how often you get paid interest depends on the terms of the bond. These interest payments are usually doled out semi-annually, but they can also be sent out annually, quarterly or even monthly.
When the bond reaches the date of maturity, the issuer repays the principle, or original amount of the loan.”
How much and how often you get paid interest depends on the terms of the bond. These interest payments are usually doled out semi-annually, but they can also be sent out annually, quarterly or even monthly.
When the bond reaches the date of maturity, the issuer repays the principle, or original amount of the loan.”
So to sell the English their railway bonds American Railway
companies must have capacity to pay regular interest payments to their
prospective bond holders. But laying thousands and thousands of miles of tracks
into the wild interior is a very expensive work.
Till the time the tracks are laid and the locomotives built
and the railways start running and money flowing in from carrying freights and
passengers the American Railway companies then had no capacity to pay the
regular interest to their English bond-holders.
So, How did US
Railways manage to borrow money?
An old US railway bond. |
Almost 90% of North American continent had been already settled
for tens of thousands of years by the native Indian tribes, but the late
arrivals from Europe the white Americans - who settled only about 10% on then
the heavily populated east coast on the Atlantic coastline - had refused to
accept their claims and US Congress declared the whole continent vacant and
claimed the Indian land as publicly-available land for settlement.
Settled by whom? Not Asians, not Indians, not Mexicans, but
only the white Europeans!
Yes, the racist US Congress wanted only white Europeans to
settle their new America and to just do that they had to wipe out the hostile
Indians first with the active cooperation of the railways companies.
So the US Congress happily granted the railways companies
millions of acres of fertile Indian land along their proposed railway tracks
and sent US Army to clear the Indians for the railroad beachheads. The rest the
railways companies had done themselves with the help from new settlers they
themselves brought in on their trains.
US Land Bank
Following is a good explanation of the way US Congress
resettled the Indian land with new arrivals, impoverished landless peasants
from the Western and Eastern Europe in the whole 19th century.
“After the American
Revolution and the ratification
of the Constitution of the United
States for the United States of
America, the United States
Treasury Department was placed in
charge of managing all public lands until 1812 when the General Land Office was created to assume that duty.
In accord with specific Acts of Congress, and under the
hand and seal of the President of the United States of America, the General
Land Office issued more than 2 million land grants made patent (land patents)
passing the title of specific parcels of public land from the nation to private
parties, etc.
Some such land so granted had survey costs, etc. that had
to be paid and the patentees paid those fees for their land in cash, others homesteaded a claim, and still others came into
ownership via one of the many donation acts that Congress passed to transfer
public lands to private ownership.
Initially-moneyless
US Land Office basically was a land bank owning the so-called unsettled land in
the whole West. And the land bank made money by subdividing that unseen-land
and selling (mostly mortgaging out) individual blocks of land to the settlers. Typically
only ten dollars first instalment and four more ten dollars for approximately
500 acres of land mortgaged over five years. Only condition attached was that
the land owner must grow a crop or build a homestead on his land within a year.
US Railways Invented
Very First CDO: Railway Bonds
2008 Financial Collapse in US and the rest of the developed
world was said to have been caused by the so-called new financial instruments
the CDOs – Collateralized Debt Obligations. CDO basically is a bond based on many
home mortgages as collateral and the corresponding mortgage payments as
interest payments.
Even though every so-called expert claimed the CDOs are the
newly-invented financial tools, the US Railways companies invented CDOs in the
19th century. They mortgaged out the free land around their railway
corridors granted by the US Congress to the settlers the same way US Land
Office mortgaged out to the free settlers and homesteaders.
The railway companies
then repackaged the mortgaged land and the mortgage payments by the settlers as
railways bonds and sold them to the English. The very first CDOs were born back
then.
But to make the whole grand scheme work railway companies
needed to find the settlers first and then bring them in to settle their lands.
Their problem was unless the Europeans were really down and out on their lucks
they wouldn’t be too inclined to abandon their ancestral homes, cross the
Atlantic Ocean, and work some Indian-infested land middle of nowhere called
America.
But the American Railways Barons were called the Robber
Barons for no small reason and they had cunning schemes to bring the whole
Europe onto their knees and create countless millions of totally broke white
Europeans so desperate to abandon their ancestral homes, cross the Atlantic
Ocean, and work some Indian-infested land middle of nowhere called America.
And their not-so-secret weapon was wheat! Plenty of cheap
wheat grown and harvested out of dirt-cheap American lands and grossly flooded
on the European markets that caused the collapse of Europe main industry and
eventually the collapse of European banking system.
Same Ship for Wheat
Exports to Europe and Human Imports Back
US Export-Wheat unloading. |
From there the wheat
was exported to Europe by the huge steam ships owned by the very Railway
companies. Once these cargo ships finished unloading their cargo at any
European port the cargo holds were refitted for cheap human cargo the white
settlers from Europe.
The human cargoes were immigrants already signed-and-sealed
by the agents of the US Railways. It would typically cost only ten US Dollars
for the across-the-Atlantic and the continuing train journey to the Promised
Land in the wild west of the United States.
In the 19th century the growing of high-valued
wheat and milling it into many different grades of quality floor was the main
industry in Europe except England where the industrial revolution and invention
of steam engine had created the whole new manufacturing industry based mainly
on cheap US cotton from America’s South.
The sudden flooding by the cheap US wheat basically collapsed
that wheat industry of Europe first and eventually causing the collapse of
European banking system overly extended on that sole industry. And the final
result was the creation of the massive underclass of landless and penniless
Europeans.
Millions and millions of them had no choice but crossed the
Atlantic as the cheap settlement offers from the commissioned-agents of US
railway companies became so-attractively irresistible.
They arrived at their
promise lands, settled, killed native-Indians, and grew more wheat and thus stoked
further the insatiable fires of the vicious circle that brought them to the United
States in the first place. Till the Indians and the millions of buffalos were
forever gone and every square-inch of the land was occupied.
The rest is the modern history of United States as the American
descendants of those migrants later wrote it.
European immigrants embarking on empty wheat-export ships back to US. |
Our Burma could learn a lesson or two from that part of US
history. Like United States in the 1800s Burma has plenty of unsettled lands on
the vast hilly fringe but the main Irrawaddy valley is densely over-populated.
And these so-called
unsettled lands – even though vigorously claimed by various armed ethnic groups
like KIA (Kachin Independence Army), SSA (Shan State Army), and KNLA (Karen
National Liberation Army) – are where all the insurgent armies and gangs of terrorists
and dacoits roam not unlike the warlike nomadic tribes of native-Indians in the
wild west of USA.
Since time immemorial peoples have been shifting from places
to places for a greener pasture and Burmese are no exception. But the
insurgency has been a serious deterrence in Burma. What a very long civil war has
created over last 60 years is continuous flow of refugees into the towns and
cities while the vast fertile lands deemed unsafe to work lie fallow.
Burmese military sees that problem since the early 1950s and
tries to repair it by building government-funded and army-guarded model
resettlement villages all over Burma especially in the most sparsely-populated Kachin
State. The bureaucracy doing that particular job is called People Manpower Placement
Department (Pyi-thu Loat-arr Nay-yar-cha-htar-yay in Burmese and acronym Pa-la-na) under the Ministry of
Interior.
I discovered that fact accidentally as a sixteen-year-old boy soldier when our 60 strong group
of graduating boot-campers were thrust into one such Pa-la-na village on the
famous Ledo Road middle of the night on our long 20 miles march as part of our
training.
The village was populated mostly by former army soldiers both
Kachin and Burmese and they had their owned armed militia unit defending the
village against the regular raids by the KIA.
Ledo Road and Burma Road connecting Burma & China. |
So army took the good accessible land by the Ledo Road and
allocated free to former soldiers if they were willing to populate the
army-built model settlement villages. Our army was so unimaginative these new
resettlement villages had no proper names but Pa-la-na (1) or Pa-la-na (2) or
something serial like that.
But the brute KIA was so upset by the Burmese army-sponsored
incursion into their territory they regularly raided these resettlement
villages. The tragic beginning of this post was the real story of one such Kachin-only
Pa-la-na village just beyond Ledo Road.
So I do not think that top-down militarised approach of
settlement villages does work as even after 40 odd years that region is still unsafe,
unstable, and unattractive for new settlers like land-starved Burmese down from
the neighboring Sagaing Division.
My own land-starved
Burmese Experience
My (ex-army officer/ex-Communist) father came out of a very poor Burmese
village called Short Tamarind Tree (Ma-gyee-bin-buu) in the draught stricken Ma-hlaing
Township of generally miserable Middle-Burma. I always think he was so sick of
his impoverished hard-working life he ran away and joined the BIA (Burma
Independence Army) at a very young age of 14 in 1942.
The bloody village was so poor and primitive even at 1984 the
village had not a toilet and to shit one had to do it outside in the bushes.
Anyway make the story short, in 1984 my grandmother his widowed-mother died and
I was basically forced to attend the cremation of her remains at her village.
My mother told me that, since My father passed away in 1980
and he was the eldest son, I the eldest son of my father had to be there to
witness the cremation as the tradition demands. The village is about 500 miles
from Rangoon where I lived then and the journey required two trains to get
there. But I went and as soon as I arrived there two days later I soon realised
I was required to participate in the biggest land transfer the large village
had ever seen in its history.
My great-grand father was one of the founding chiefs of the
village and because of him my grandma was the biggest land owner of the
village. She owns about 500 acres almost 20% of the total land owned and worked
by the villagers. She also owns a lucrative groove of about 100 productive toddy-palm
trees. She was the richest woman of that dirt-poor village.
Already Sub-divided
Clan’s Land
Of course all her fields and toddy-palm trees had been slowly
sub-divided and worked by ten or more children of her as they became adult with
their own families with ten or more kids. But she was still the traditional
owner, I thought. But I was wrong as I soon found out I was the legal owner of
all her properties.
They cremated her on a high funeral pyre next day after my
arrival. That afternoon after the funeral service at the village monastery the
whole clan sans the children (there might be at least 100-110 of them) sat down
cross-legged on the timber floor of the two-stories big brick house of my one
uncle who was also the Chairman of Village Peoples’ Council (aka) the village chief.
Only there they explained to me why I was needed there. They
said I was the legal and traditional owner of the clan’s land, and I was to
sign away all my land and toddy-palm trees among them brothers and sisters of
my late father.
As a village tradition when my grandfather died just after the
big war all the land and any other productive assets like toddy-palm trees were
inherited by my father as the eldest son. But my father’d refused to come back
and work the land and his siblings had been working the land with my father’s
consent since.
After my father’s death in 1980 I became the owner of all his
land as the eldest son of my father. But nobody never told me that. And while
my nana was still alive the clan treated her as the nominal owner and they had
been fine for a while. Now she was dead and they were in a possible legal
trouble.
Family Plots are Getting
Smaller and Smaller
Plots are getting smaller and smaller as the family lands get divided among siblings. |
My uncles and aunts had already worked out who got what and
the legal documents already prepared and what I needed to do was just sign the
papers. Since I had absolutely no attachment to the village and the land, I
didn’t say a thing there and just signed away my 500 acres of land and 100 toddy-palm
trees to them. Then I came home and since then I have never been there again in
my life.
The tragedy then was that 500 acres large parcel of land had
become ten 50 acres sub-plots of farmland belonging to ten brothers and
sisters. That day I was wondering what would happen once their 100 odds children
became adult and needed their own plot of land. I knew since then the family
land would be subdivided again and again till there is no land large enough
left to be sub-divided.
And that is what is happening right now in my grandma’s
village as more than two-third of village’s young adults are now being forced to leave
the village and work any manual jobs in city as there are no land for them to
work on in their own village. Proper
Burma as a whole is tightly occupied and nowhere else to expand.
Nowadays most of my 100 odd nephews and nieces are hopelessly working
in Rangoon and Mandalay. I still believe if they are given a good piece of land
in a safe environment anywhere they will definitely take the opportunity as
they are basically the rural people not city people.
(Some of them are now even talking about coming to Australia
and farm. Unfortunately Australia basically is still a racist country and as such they are
willing to bring in desperate white farmers fleeing places like Mugabe’s Zimbabwe
- former Rhodesia - and South Africa into Australia, but not dark-skinned,
brown-faced Burmese farmers.)
Too Many Land Disputes and Peasants are Revolting
Landless-farmers blocking trucks from the Copper Mine. |
At least 10 millions out of present 50 millions Burmese
farmers urgently need a space to farm and unless Burmese government responds quickly
another major uprising like 1930 Saya San Rebellion will blow up in the
government’s face and Burmese army will have to kill their own people again in
thousands like in that failed 8-8-88 uprising.
Burma needs to act and Burma must act quick before too bloody
late!
Burma Must Start a
Nation-wide Land Resettlement Program
Policeman wounded and later died in a violent attack by rioting landless peasants in Ma-U-BIn (Feb 2013). |
Say a fixed price of 900
kyats (about 1 US$) an acre and the basic mortgage should be set at interest
free with 10% down payment and the rest over ten years with a strict
(evict-able if not fulfilled) condition of growing a crop within two years or
establishing a homestead within a year.
Another strict condition must be the loophole-proof
state-ownership of natural resources underground. The private owners should
have only the agricultural and water and grazing rights.
Burma do not need a great deal of money to do just that.
Government will even make money, a great deal of money out of it. Sell so-called
Burma Bonds based on the regular mortgage payments from the new landowners. And
use that money to develop new infra-structure to develop more hilly lands.
Chittagong Hill Tracts in Eastern-Bangladesh. |
What Burma do need is strong political will to march ahead with the land reform program. There are examples in other countries such as Indonesia and
Bangladesh two massively-overpopulated nations in our region.
Indonesia forced tens of million of her peasants from the
over-crowded Java to other islands. It has moved at least 50 million people to other sparsely-populated islands.
Our Islamic neighbour Bangladesh has quietly forced its 160 million Muslims into the vast predominantly-Buddhist Chittagong Hill Tracts with such atrocious vigour within last 20 years the whole area is now 97% Muslims and the ethnic Buddhists are nearly extinct.
The Bangladeshi resettlement program is so bloody effective Bengali-Muslims are not only overwhelming their own native-Buddhists they are also spilling over the neighboring Burma. Of course, Muslims breeding like jack-rabbits is a big help for the program too.
That sort of similar resettlement program large-scale in Burma will clear the jungles, flatten the mountains, reduce drastically the population in Proper-Burma, and most important wipe-out all the ethnic insurgencies along the way like what early Americans did to the native Indians or what Bangladeshi Muslims have been still doing to their ethnic Buddhists.
Our Islamic neighbour Bangladesh has quietly forced its 160 million Muslims into the vast predominantly-Buddhist Chittagong Hill Tracts with such atrocious vigour within last 20 years the whole area is now 97% Muslims and the ethnic Buddhists are nearly extinct.
The Bangladeshi resettlement program is so bloody effective Bengali-Muslims are not only overwhelming their own native-Buddhists they are also spilling over the neighboring Burma. Of course, Muslims breeding like jack-rabbits is a big help for the program too.
That sort of similar resettlement program large-scale in Burma will clear the jungles, flatten the mountains, reduce drastically the population in Proper-Burma, and most important wipe-out all the ethnic insurgencies along the way like what early Americans did to the native Indians or what Bangladeshi Muslims have been still doing to their ethnic Buddhists.
Population Projection Maps of Burma (From views-of-the-world WWW site). |