Episode #281: Running Up That Hill
“If I have one knife with me, I can survive for a long time, because with a knife, you can make your own weapon in the jungle. You don't need much. I mean, you cannot hunt big animals, but you can still hunt a lot, like fish and small animals. Sometimes you don’t even need to eat animals, because there’s plenty of other food in the jungle.”
Lartar, the daughter of a Karen National Union (KNU) commander, was born in 1983 in a remote village in the mountains, where tiny, far-flung hamlets were connected only by animal tracks. Nonetheless, conflict found its way even there, and marked her life from an early age. In fact, some of her earliest memories are from when she was just three, and involve fleeing for her life because the military was targeting her father. “This is our family life reality,” she says grimly. She adds that just a few years later, her mother gave her a choice: “‘You have to decide what you guys want.’ It's pretty hard at seven years old to make a decision for your own life! My mom asked, ‘Do you want to go to school or you want to work, farming or running, and stay with the family. If you stay with the family, this is how you need to move around and get ready. You can never have things stable. You always need to move around.” Lartar chose school, and since in her village there was just one, very small, monastery school, was sent to Karen-held territory.
There, her teachers were mostly KNU soldiers who taught part-time, constantly rotating in and out as they took time away from the front lines. Lartar lived with several other children, but with no one to properly care for them. Food was scarce, and during the rainy season, flooding rivers cut off access to her family for months. After a year of hardship, Lartar decided to return home to attend the monastery school back in her home village.
But the military harassment didn’t stop, forcing them to relocate frequently. Lartar vividly recalls one particularly scary raid not long after she had returned to her village: Burmese soldiers looking for her father kicked in the door with their heavy jackboots at 2 a.m.! She, her mother, and two younger siblings were inside; her older brother had already gone into hiding to avoid being seized for forced labor—which usually meant being a porter for the military carrying their equipment, often across long distances. Frustrated by the fact that the father was not there, the military pointed guns at her mother’s head and stomach, and questioned her aggressively. Her mother lied, claiming her husband was merely a manual laborer for the KNU. Though informants had already betrayed his true role in the KNU, the chaos of the raid and her mother’s quick thinking sowed just enough doubt that the soldiers left. Fearing another attack, the family fled within hours, abandoning their crops and most of their belongings.
All this highlights the way the Myanmar military views the Karen, along with many other ethnic groups in the country. Simply put, entire minority populations are seen as enemies, and the military treats them as inherently suspect, undeserving of rights or legal protections. Arbitrary detentions, beatings, sexual violence and dispossession are commonplace. For this reason, Lartar recalls getting some military training at an early age, for example, becoming well-versed in using both the M16 and AK-47. “I learned pretty well about the weapons. My dad brought weapons in the house. There's always guns, so we are very familiar playing with it,” she says. “If I see the military attack my family again, I think I will probably use it.”
It is not just the people, but the land, itself, that is heavily exploited by the military. Lartar describes how extensive logging and environmental devastation often follow the military's takeover of border regions. Syndicates, operating illegally but under military protection, extract riches from the land as they please. This leads to massive ecological damage and chronic water shortages, which pose a serious threat to those without access to running water, especially during the summer months. “They were destroying the natural resources, and the rich forest by logging,” she says. “In my childhood, we never had the water dry out in the river. In 1999 I came back the first time, and I saw the river has so little water! I was so sad.” Lack of water became such a concern for rural Karen that in ensuing years, villagers had to drive long distances to seek new places to fill up, or had to find a way to dig wells around their homes.
Years of constantly needing to be on the run from the military make schooling an impossibility for Lartar, which began to frustrate her. So she again moved to a larger town under KNU control, which provided a relative level of safety and stability, as well as protection from the Burmese military. She stayed with the family of a KNU soldier. and was able to attend school and experience a sense of normalcy that had eluded her up to then.
However, in 1996, this fragile sense of safety was shattered when the Myanmar military seized control of the border region, including the area where Lartar was living. Forced to flee once again with her family, they returned to their village, at great personal risk, to gather food supplies. But on arriving there, she discovered that the military had laid landmines around the food stores (a topic addressed at length by Yèshua Moser-Puangsuwan), which had led to several villagers losing limbs. Lartar warned her family to not approach them, while disarming some of them by throwing rocks, something she had once been taught during her military training. This harrowing experience marked the end of her brief respite, thrusting her back into the dangers of a life on the run.
When she was 14, Lartar somehow became separated from her family during their frantic attempts to escape the military. For several months, both she and the rest of her family survived separately in the jungle. With limited resources and a constant fear of capture, Lartar navigated the treacherous terrain, relying on the survival skills she had developed over the years, fleeing from village to village. She was careful not to impose on any family or community, as an earlier memory continued to haunt her: once, while fleeing with her family as a young girl, a kind woman hid them on her farm; the military arrived soon after, and found them, but the woman was able to negotiate the family’s safety … in exchange for giving her livestock up to the soldiers. This moment was pivotal for Lartar’s family, emphasizing the need to keep apart from others, fearing that just their presence could bring harm to those around them.
So it was fortunate that Lartar knew the jungle well. She describes it as a natural refuge, offering not just a place to hide from the military, but also an escape from the constant conflict that plagued more populated areas. Though exile in the wilderness would seem daunting to most, filled with dangers such as wild elephants and venomous snakes, Lartar instead recalls the experience with a sense of fondness and abundance rather than hardship. In the depths of the jungle, she found a sense of agency and autonomy, relying on her survival skills and the jungle’s abundant resources for food, shelter, and essential needs. She says, “If you know how to hunt, you will never starve in the jungle, because this jungle is very rich. At night, we make a trap. In the morning, there’s food! You dig a hole, and then some animal falls in the hole, they cannot get up. And with frogs, you can just catch with your hand,” she says. “For fish, for the small stream, we block the river, and then there's a bunch of fish. Sometimes you don’t even need to eat animals. You have plenty of other food in the jungle.”
Drawing on the ancestral knowledge passed down from her parents and grandparents, she developed a deep understanding of the seasons and the kinds of vegetation that grew at different times of the year. “When you were a child, you followed your parents,” she says. “The parents will teach you what to eat, what not to eat, what’s the name; and this becomes our routine daily life.” Through these lessons, Lartar mastered the arts of hunting, foraging and preparing food. She also learned to craft shampoo and soap from tree bark and fruit, and skillfully utilized bamboo for numerous purposes—making cooking containers, using the leaves as plates, and even fashioning traps for hunting. “We grew cotton,” she adds. “And my grandparents taught us how to weave with a bamboo stick, so you can make everything.”
One of the more surprising aspects of jungle life for Lartar were its emotional and spiritual dimensions. Pre-Christian and pre-Buddhist animist beliefs still persist in Myanmar, often blending seamlessly with those later, more dominant faiths. Lartar’s family inherited from their ancestors a lived belief in natural spirits, and they maintained a deep respect for these spirits, striving to live in harmony with them. While the spirit world is often viewed as hostile and frightening in Western cultures, Lartar never faced any danger from those forces. To her, spirits are to be honored and respected. Although they do have the power to cause harm if offended, Lartar always approached the spiritual realm with reverence and mindfulness, and so had no misfortune to speak of. For example, before meals, she would offer a portion of food to the spirits as a sign of respect and to seek their protection. When alone or feeling vulnerable, Lartar would invoke the spirits' protection, asking them to safeguard her from harm. She found immense comfort in the spirit world during difficult times, knowing she could call on spiritual beings for guidance and protection.
So after several months, she finally was able to cross the border into Thailand, and found her way to a refugee camp. One day, while walking through the camp's market, a familiar voice caught her attention. Turning to investigate, Lartar was stunned to see her family, after their several month separation when neither knew the other was even alive.
Lartar managed to complete her high school education at a camp school run by the Karen education department, with support from NGOs focused on education. She wanted to continue her studies and was offered a chance to enroll in an English program outside the camp. Yet, her mother, fearful of her teenage daughter traveling alone, forbade it. Determined to pursue her education, Lartar made the bold decision to disobey her mother, and leave.
She spent the next three years completing the course and later doing an internship in the town of Mae Sot. Life during this period was difficult, but Lartar’s resilience, forged by her challenging upbringing, saw her through. She reflects simply, “I just lived wherever I found, because I’m already 16 years old, so I know how to take care of myself.”
After Lartar had spent years living as a refugee, Lartar’s luck took a positive turn when she stumbled upon an internship opportunity with the Karen History and Culture Preservation Society, which was looking for multilingual candidates. “I’m not smart in school, but in terms of languages, I’m pretty useful,” she quipped. The society required someone who could speak, read, write, and translate in multiple languages. As Lartar was by then fluent in Pwo Karen, S’gaw Karen, English, Burmese, and Thai, she was more than qualified.
As a refugee in Thailand, she had managed until then to survive without official papers, working odd jobs mostly with Karen groups, and not venturing beyond the camp. But now, to apply for migration status with the Thai authorities in order to be able to find full time employment, she needed to obtain official documentation from Myanmar—a significant and daunting task.
In her remote Karen village, no one had paperwork, such as national ID cards, birth certificates, driving licenses, or passports; personal connections and trust sufficed. People vouched for each other, and local authorities issued informal letters of authentication as required locally. So asking for any form of a national ID from an official, government authority would be viewed as an unusual and suspicious move for someone from such a remote area, particularly a region hostile to the military control.
Nonetheless, Lartar made the risky decision to return to Myanmar in 2008 to convince the military to issue her documentation. The main challenge was coming up with a justification for her request. She could not ask straight out for documentation to work in Thailand, because that would point towards her probably being a refugee, which would arouse unwanted suspicions about her identity, First off, she explains that for the military, those KNU-controlled regions were labeled as “black areas.” The military color-codes regions of the country according to their control: “white areas” are fully controlled by the regime, “brown areas” have contested control, and “black areas” are largely outside the junta’s authority and so are often targeted for military operations, and people from those areas looked upon with extreme suspicion. So being from a black area community would already be somewhat problematic. Moreover, she knew that she also could not give education as the reason for her request to be issued documentation or even give the appearance that education might be her real motive. “I can never say [to the authorities] that I have graduated high school; I can only say that I'm a graduate of primary school,” she explains. Plus, simply looking like an educated person would be problematic; she needed to come across as a poor, uneducated farmer, because “everybody’s pretty much farming there, and no one will smile [with] white teeth,” she says. “So I didn’t brush my teeth for ten days before I went to the government office to get my ID. And they checked my hands, because everyone who is farming, you can test the hands [to see if there is] a lot of damage there. So I had to work ten days to get a lot of blisters on my hands before I could get the ID.”
Another challenge was that she would need to provide a house registration—something her parents never had. Lartar had to ask an elder teacher in her community, someone with whom her family had a good relationship, to let her use their house registration for her application. Getting that paperwork was a double blessing for Lartar: not only did it enable her to get the documentation she desired, but it happened in a way that could not be linked to her biological family (which was still in the military’s crosshairs because of the father), or her relatives. Repercussions and collective punishment had been a recurring theme in Lartar’s life, so every action, no matter how small, carried the potential for unintended disaster.
All the years of abuse by the Burmese military, combined with a lack of opportunities, fostered a deep racial resentment in Lartar. While working in Thailand some time later, she struggled to get along with her Burmese coworkers, who she saw as privileged beneficiaries of the same oppressive system that had kept her and her people down for so long. “I hated her so much,” she says of one in particular. “Because when you are young, you just don't understand, you cannot control your emotions. And she had so much opportunity to study! She went to proper school, to university, and then I don't get to do this kind of thing.” While her employer was sympathetic of her feelings, it also became clear to him that Lartar’s resentment was a serious issue, especially when she demanded that her boss literally keep that other person out of sight. “I really hated her, and she didn’t understand,” Lartar says. “When I told the office that I cannot see this person, ‘Can’t you just hide her somewhere?!’, and [my boss] said, ‘This is getting really bad and really dangerous to you.’ And then I said, ‘Well, as soon as I see her, I want to stab her with a knife many times.’” As might be expected, this overt hostility caused her other coworkers to fear her.
Fortunately, Lartar recognized that her anger was toxic and misplaced. So she decided to take a leave of absence, seeking refuge in the isolation of the wilderness, where she meditated and learned to release her rage, which was not easy. She now sees her deep-seated anger as a reflection of the widespread suffering and abuses endured by millions under the military regime in Myanmar, based on her own experience: years of separation from her family, fleeing for her life, and struggling to survive just to obtain an education. Her earliest memories are filled with beatings, theft, and threats at gunpoint—all at the hands of the military. Ultimately, after much internal struggle, she was able to turn a corner and realize that her pain was inflicted by the Burmese military, not the entire Bamar community.
All this raises a poignant question: after so many years of violence and torment, can there ever be genuine peace within Myanmar? It's a topic that Lartar has reflected on deeply. In spite of her experiences, she still believes that peace within a unified Myanmar is possible. “We are not part of this Karen anymore,” she says. “We are part of the whole Myanmar! The citizenship is a Myanmar, as a Karen, as a Shan, as a Muslim, or as whatever you are, it really doesn't matter.” She rejects the notion that new borders need to be drawn, but insists that what Myanmar truly needs is “new people, new leaders, new ideas, a new constitution.” Myanmar, she points out, is a country rich in natural resources, with everything it needs to become a successful state for the benefit of its people. The problem has been that those in power exploit both the nation and its people for their own gain. That, Lartar asserts, is what must change for peace to be realized.
Today, Lartar advocates for a form of federalism. “Why don't we all live independently in the country? Getting independence and building something together?" she asks rhetorically. Yet, she emphasizes that empowering the youth is key. Many young people are already educated and capable of contributing meaningfully to the country's political future, but Lartar laments that many in the old guard are reluctant to hand over power to the next generation. This reflects a common dynamic in Myanmar and the broader region, where elders are venerated, and the youth are expected to defer and take a back seat. The downside of this approach, she argues, is that older generations often just recycle the past, driven by their own experiences. “History is history. We don't need to follow this history. And we create a better history in our life for young people,” she says.