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When I was in my early 20″s I worked at an Internet Cafe in Venice Beach. At the time my father served as chief legal officer for a company doing business in Burma.

The coffee shop i worked at was owned by four engineers. One was an actives working with Free Burma. He brought a refugee to the shop and told him who I was - the son of an executive doing business with an illegitimate government who overpowered democratically elected rulers.

He looked at me with hatred. I’ve never seen an angrier face - someone that wanted to kill me with so much focus.

….

From Science Blogs “Traveling From Kansas”

Eventually we arrive at a burned-out building in a clearing. Laborers in rags are squatting in the mud in front of the building. Using machetes, they’re hacking long bamboo poles into three-foot spears and hardening the points over a campfire. …I realize that this is exactly what I’m not supposed to see. This is why northern Burma is closed, why so many remote regions of Burma are closed. According to the Free Burma Coalition, … most ethnic minorities across the nation have been viciously persecuted; more than 600,000 have been removed from their villages and forcibly relocated. By interviewing refugees, Amnesty International has documented forced-labor camps hidden throughout the country.

I wait for seven hours, tearing engorged brown leeches off my legs and watching the blood run down into my boots.…

I am pushed up the mud steps. Seated against the building, I could see only the laborers and the rolling jungle. WHen I reach the top of the mud steps, I truly confront the world I have entered. It is medieval, something from the Dark Ages.

Before me is a 400-foot-high hill, stripped naked. Cut into the base of the slope, circling the mountain, is a trench, 20 feet wide and ten feet deep. Two-foot bamboo spears, sharpened pungee sticks, stab upward from the bottom of the trench. Just beyond the pungee pit is an eight-foot-high bamboo wall. The top and outer face of the wall are bristling with bamboo spikes.

Past this is a strip of barren dirt too smooth and manicured to be anything but a mine field. Beyond that is another lethal bamboo wall. There are five walls and four strips of mined no-man’s-land ascending the hill in concentric circles.…

I try to imagine some purpose for this surreal jungle fortress. It lies on a forgotten, forbidden border and would be a ridiculous target for any combatant. It can only be protecting the Burmese soldiers from the local people they have enslaved.

Hat Tip - TKC