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Akha Chronicles Deported The Rumors German The Consulate My wife and warnings Maesai detained The Van Embassy denials Jail The cell was made up of two rooms,
one large, and then a second much smaller room with a closet for storage,
next to the bathroom. It had green
painted barred windows along the hallway side and a door. Here it was that the cell boss lived with
others. I was soon invited to here and told that I could pay a fee to sleep
in this room, have my own space and blankets, coffee, tea, whatever, and of
course conversation. One man was just
leaving. An older fellow. So I paid
500 baht for my rent, and took his place under the pic of a model out of a
magazine that was glued to the yellow smoke stained wall above my spot on the
floor. There were no beds, just spots.
There had been beds, but the police took them all when one new
prisoner said his money had been stolen, which was rather dubious. There were about 75 prisoners in the
cell, called cell #2, in the I was in one corner at the back on
the right side, the room measured about 12 feet by 12 feet. The boss, a chinese fellow covered with
Tatoos from Later a scruffy dirty Japanese hippy
came. He smoked non stop and I got a cold.
All the smoke from him went to me and up the wall, couldn't miss it.
He chain smoked. But he was funny, off handed. He spent his time reading
japanese comics and books that we had there.
Funny I was reading a book on the bombing of The only scenes in this place were
the ones in our heads, so we shared them all around. Asked each other
questions, told stories, when visiting across the sea of bodies to someone
else, like we were going to town. There was no view out since the barred
windows were up high, and on one side
there was a second wall, the other side, two sets of bars and a few open
windows and a building to look at where the night shift of guards worked on
computers, or hung out. The boss took a rag and wiped the
floor down. He took great care to the room, asked often what I wanted to
drink or if I wanted some more food. Kept handing me another magazine when I
got done, but there weren't many. When I left he asked me for my spare razor,
a pen, this and that which I was more than glad to contribute, I had already
given all my spare food away. Somehow he always kept his sense of humor.
Humor should require that they deduct years off one's sentence of give them
cable and airconditioning. Anyone who could keep humor in a place like that. He had a mattress once, but when that dip
came into the cell and took a shower and then said that the prisoners stold
his thousand dollars, the police took everthing nice away, and we all were
sleeping on a single blanket or two on the floor for padding. The boss made
up each bed roll in the room, making sure that you had it comfortable, and
for this care and service one was more than glad to pay a little rent. He was
no chiseler or shark, that was how I felt. He had a bunch of chinese emblems
above his pillow glued to the wall, a few pics cut out of magazines, a
drawing of himself that someone made, they were like icons that marked him as
the king of the place. He had certain kinds of canned food and noodles, the
raimen kind that I could buy. I bought the noodles now and then to sprinkle
the spices on and munch to keep my mind and taste buds busy. He stayed up all
night, slept in the day when it was cooler. Someone brought a paper, the day
before's. The Embassy woman left me two recent time magazines with articles on
strokes. I felt like a stroke had figuratively hit my life, but had no
regrets. There were big stakes in this play. It was more than just my family,
my in laws, the village, but all the villages in Sometimes there was a fight, but
then the boss would go out into the bigger room and look serious and
arbitrate and it didn't go far, not like the white people fight. It wasn't
meanness, it was more like results of stress kind of fighting. People trying
to cope, not what I sensed with the two white guys down in the other cell.
They reminded me of real dogs. Scrags who had burned up every good thing that
had come by in their life and now were satisfied to abuse people in their
cell, their souls and faces dark, darker than the skin on the Burmese men,
dark like black mud, like you were looking into the soot of hell. The heat was immense, the building
wasn't intended as a jail, but looked more like an office building of two stories
that got converted. So the building was hot, and stayed hot, as the concrete
cooked off all night. Wasn't till 2 am that one dared try to sleep. Breaking out into a sweat, the overhead
fans swirled the air, but little fresh air came into the room or cell. The
prisoners smoked a lot, was a likely spot for TB, and the food was bad unless
you ordered and bought something from the really cute Thai girl that brought
bags of different cooked dishes in the Thai street food tradition. This food
was ok, but after a while, even it got boring, and the rice was horrible that
was brought to the cell, nearly rotten. So the fans swirled, the lights
never went out, the big long room was so abstract that even the TV with
movies didn't do much. The TV only played whatever the guards were watching.
Lots of sports, the occasional movie. The perfect recipe for being brain
dead. There were few books, no effort to hold classes and prisoners crowded
to just enough space for their blankets and a small bag or too. When it got really crowded disputes broke
out about all the stuff that prisoners had which had been there many years. The traffic to thebath room was
endless, the sanitation awareness of the prisoners very low, spitting, stuff
like that. There was however a big open tank full of water, and several
people were always splashing water over themselves at any time, three to four
showers a day this way in order to cool down. Different visitors came on different
days, the missionaries, and the humanitarians who tried to take care of some
of our needs. The people were mostly Chinese. One man from It really was a mottley sad and
tragic crew. Some people had been there for
years. Some had no papers. Some didn't dare go back home, and some couldn't
even remember who they were. There were a couple Algerians. They didn't
want to go back home. And then there were some from Kazikstan up that way.
Many people from many places, caught between two large moving rocks of life
and nearly ground to a powder. The Algerian man was waiting for
someone to bring his passport from He was a devout Muslim and prayed
every night. He was glad to share food. The man from She was going to be one shocked
woman. I bought food for some of the
prisoners, and tried to comprehend all that had happened and all that I was
going to do now that I was being thrown out of It had happened fast. I wasn't
surprised, but more surprised with the timing. After a bad year in 2003 where
there were so many killings to report, now 2004 seemed more mellow and I told
my Akha wife that I hoped for a more peaceful year. But the human rights work was
catching up with me in a kind of way, there were people who didn't like the
light on what they were doing, there were the missionaries who didn't like my
photography and reporting, investigations into sexual abuse, and here I
was. Proof of effectiveness and that
it was time to move on to bigger events, for the Akha people. The bathroom had little stalls with
plastic doors, I went and hung my clothes over one and took a dip bath. The water was cool and plentiful. The visitors came to the bars that
lined the one wall in the passage. Near our room the bars were in windows,
not the whole wall, so one could hang on the bars, rest their arms on the
frames of the opening, and try to get some air. But that was also the designated
smoking area just there at our small room, so that was no fun either. The North Koreans played cards
endlessly. There was one fellow, at least fifty, half his teeth missing. He
was half crazy. Chinese, but no one knew where he came from. Then there was an
old man, all his teeth gone, smoked tabacco rolled in a paper like a chimney,
and he didn't even know his name, let alone where he came from, but the
inmates told me he was a chinese man living in One younger fellow picked on him a
lot till the two Algerians told him to stop and one fellow who was half Akha
and half Chinese kicked him in the back and told him to quit. The joking and
teasing was making the old man crazy. I gave him cookies and candy and fruit,
things that my visitors brought me, to try to make some kindness for him. Since I bought food for the
Vietnamese guys, they would come and walk on my back, sleeping so much made
real problems, the heat, the thin blanket on the floor, and the extreme
boredom. I took notes, wrote things down, but
I felt like I had it all written in not too long. Boredom can eat your brain
like a worm. I figured if I was going to be there
for very long I would start to teach english, work on learning chinese,
vietnamese, what ever I could. But no destractions would alter one's
awareness that the place killed the soul in people. Jails, I hated them, I
didn't believe in them, they were cruel, in human and a bad solution. The guards acted as if this was some kind of sporting
event. A couple trustees, prisoners
themselves, helped move us around, get us out of cells, take us here and
there in the small confines that never went far. Fingerprints, pictures, go
here, sit there. The Thai guards had guns, did their paper work moving prisoners
through the process, men one by one got called out of the cells to go, or
faxes were brought up with different stages of their national documents
arriving. I had so many visitors that the
guards weren't sure who I was or why I had been brought there. I read in the
paper that I was considered a threat to national security. I thought that was funny. Hurting people was not near as dangerous as
someone talking about who they were hurting. Guards walked me out to the ATM
machine to get money for the ticket which I gave to the Embassy worker. He had a folder on me. The immigration guy
in Maesai had a really big one. I think when your folder gets to three kilos
or something they kick you out of the country. Course, as my friend and I had
always said, if you didn't help a soul, just ran a business, or just had
money and got drunk and shouted obcenities at the police and screwed your
whore, you fit rightin in The years went darting through my
head, not so sad as promising of a whole lot more to come. The food if you could call it that,
came three times a day. I bought other food and snacks so I ignored it. Mostly
it was broth and over ripe cucumbers boiled, with a little bit of chicken
skeleton thrown in. The fellow with fungus on his face,
he was from I felt sorry for people like him,
and her, trying to have a life, and held apart with tragedy. Most of the people here, their only crime
was to be human, trying to live, trying to find jobs. And they were treated
badly. The cell, the boredom, that was
hot and cruel enough. I thought a lot of my wife and
children, there up on the mountain, my boy very young, all of them young,
wondering what had happened to me. The Thai government people, they
were a cruel lot. I was reminded why I helped the Akha, that the brutishness
of the Thais incited me. I took notes, determined to fight
on. To make the Akha case known in the world. Some of the prisoners gave me
addresses, asked me to write to them. I knew I was to be deported soon. I
felt for sure the US Government, the Maybe they knew I would investigate
if I knew too much. The UN Commision for Refugees came
and talked to the prisoners about their cases, volunteers, trying to find
them money for tickets and a means to get home or to some country which would
take them. But one of the volunteers told me
that mostly the other volunteers were lazy, didn't do anything, shoved
paperwork around, and really didn't care how awful it was in the barren room
with high windows that were a wall inside a wall, so that the air never
really made it to us. The only
horizontal fan was one, and it was broken. 13 years of work in The US Embassy people came to see me
about my air ticket, I would fly out Sat. the 24 of April. I had been there
since the 16. I had gone that day, the 15th, to
the Maesai immigration point quickly. I had seen that my passport expired on
the 14th, the visa in it, but as usual the woman got out the receipt book, I was
suppose to pay 200 baht for being a day late, but sometimes when I got there
early in the morning if I missed it, which I did on occasion, they would just
waive it. But this day she turned and picked
up the phone, and called, and then told me to wait. Soon a silver truck came
and a couple immigration thugs, with the chief of immigration, they told me
to get in the truck for a minute and come down to the office. I knew what the case was, that this was it,
that this was the day the Thais would kick me out and my work for the Akha
would take a new dimension. At the office one man went and got
my truck. I called a friend to come and pick it up. The immigration chief
told me that the Ampur of Mae Fah Luang had ordered me deported, it wasn't
his fault. But that I had to go, no more life in And then I got what books and notes
I needed out of the truck and my friend drove it away, my dear friend that
truck. A regular messenger and comfort to Akhas in so many villages. Two officials drove me to They stopped out in the middle of no
where and unloaded some ugly furniture for the one man's mother, at a large
all wood house, must have cost a fortune, selling all those women to pay for
it. Built in a flat land abandoned
place, no matter how much it was worth, it would never be worth too much. We drove on all night to Nine days in this cell seemed like
forever. I didn't know how the long time people survived. I thought about my small hut on that
beautiful piece of land. The wind, the breeze, the rain, the
sun and always my children right there playing. I didn't think I wanted to go back
to America. My parents were old and I hadn't seen them for nearly 7 years,
but still I didn't like the American dream. The Akha village, I could picture it
in my mind so clearly, living there so many years. The Chinese cell boss, from
Singapore, he was funny, joked a lot. He had been here three years. Was
waiting to get friends to get him a ticket to home. He really wanted to live
in Malaysia though. Another Chinese young fellow
couldn't go back, said he'd get a twenty year sentence if he went back to
singapore. He wasn't very strong in the mind, I didn't know how he was going
to get out of this jam. There was a couple sick guys, one looked
like TB or HIV. Then there was a guy from Bangledesh
but no one really knew for sure and he kept saying he wasn't from there. He
spit a lot. The cell population kept going up,
soon to 85. A slum near the jail burned, Suan
Phlu, and smoke filled a couple cells and they brought more over to our side.
The cell next to ours had 250 prisoners, only room to sit, none to lay down. They had to let them out into the
hall to make room enough to feed them. I gave a ten baht coin to the boss
and got a cup of coffee. In the evening we could get one hot cup,
another cell passed the cups down,
just for one or two of us. Small things, there weren't many
cockroaches and I saw NO ants. That
was good. I didn't notice any
mosquitos either, maybe one. Another blessing.
I could buy coke and in the evenings the ice came, that was cool. It was all gone by about 1 pm. The boss
gave me a second shirt and some cut offs to help fight the heat. I put my
other clothes in the corner. I had a
bible with me, so I read a bunch of that, book after book in the old
testament. I took notes on different thoughts
till the ink ran out in my pen. The last few hours before they
pulled me out, the guards moved me to a cell near the office. There were two
very strange foreigners there, they kept hitting the prisoners, and one of
them drug a transvestite into the toilets to mess with him. The floor was covered with Burmese
young guys, all trying to stay alive, trying to find a job, now being trucked
back to Burma. Whenever I got ready to leave to go
down the mountain or to other villages, my son Ah Tsah would come out to the
truck. I had to prepare him for it or he would cry, and then he'd come out to
the truck anyway, calling me, I'd always give him some money, tell him to go
stand with his mother and wave to him.
He was only a year and a half old.
But he would take the coin to his mother and then come back to get
another one, and that was our ritual every time. I missed him very much, and the
truck didn't come back any more. I wondered how my wife would cope,
how my other son would cope, not knowing what had happened to me, or
wondering if I would come back for them? I wondered if I would make it back,
if I would be able to get them out, or if other tragedy would step in the door
like all the people here had written all over their lives? What amazed me about Suan Phlu was
the kind of hope, resolution, that the men hung on to, coping with long years
and insurmountable problems, with no help at all, little to no one who cared. The guards took us down to the
phones. I didn't need to call anyone, cause where I came from there were no
phones. Some of the young guys didn't
have money for cards so I bought some phone cards for them. All the cells had
different race groups, so after they moved us out into the hall again, the
guards brought in a big group of muslim men. I felt like it was kind of an
international day in Bangkok. Back in our cell, there was a big
Australian guy there, had his shirt off, trying to cool down, parked in with
all the other men, some sleeping, others reading or playing cards and chinese
chess. He was in another near empty cell but when they needed it they
moved him. I think someone paid so he
could stay there. Then after the cell was empty again they moved him back to
that empty cell withone other guy. He
had been in the job selling business, people looking for jobs in other
countries, buying one, Thais. But the company had problems and he was a kind
of hostage till the government sorted the case with the company. The Immigration Detention Center
Jail was in Suan Phlu. Just a lot of
buildings, in a city, could have been in a city any where in the world. Jail was jail. I'd seen a few with a short
stint here and a short stint there, nothing serious but enough experience for
me to know how to cope with it, what the code was, how to keep problems to a
minimum, how to do good mental house keeping as to cope with it all. Keep the mind positive and busy, those were
the rules. Do good things for other people, most of them had it worse, from
whatever good you could draw on. Some people came from the National
Human Rights Commission of Thailand to take my case. The Thais, they are all so timid, even the
good ones, like someone is going to kill them if the blart out loud or look
cross eyed. I was sort of surprised that anyone actually cared. There had been a very good article in the
Nation, on the second page of the Sunday paper. While I waited to get hauled to the
airport, the guards brought out scores of women, some with babies, from
cells, and lined them up in rows, then went to counting them, big busses in
the early predawn darkness, sat there, barely visible, their red tail lights
glowing, their diesels rumbling, headed through time to a border and another
transition for desperate people. I
wondered what waited the women when they got there at the border with Burma? I couldn't see any Akha in the line
up. Time came to go, they let me get my
bag with all the books, journals, documents in it, they never inspected it,
they didn't know what it meant. I had
details there of every human rights abuse case that had been brought to me in
two years, right under their noses, documentation on what THEY had been up
to. They got me my phone, a man would
drive me to the airport, once there and checking me through, we skipped all
the lines, that was nice, and then he passed me over to another officer at
the airport and said goodbye, come back some time, he seemed kind of sad
actually. The old man took charge of me and
walked me to the plane, to get my boardin g pass and I got on and he was
gone. End Have a comment or question? Like to know
more? Send me an email at akha@akha.org |