DOCUMENTATION
"I remember a time that I listened to someone’s testimony and my whole body began to shake. It was the most horrible thing I had ever heard. The wife of a revolutionary had been arrested in an attempt to get to her husband. The soldiers killed their baby and burned it, then forced the mother to eat it because the father didn’t come back." -Ka Hsaw Wa
Smith, Jeremy. "Tortured Soul." Ecologist 34.6...
The documentation was arduous work: all of the Burmese had to be translated to English, typed onto stencil paper, and then onto normal paper before it could be published to human rights agencies around the world, such as the Karen Human Rights Group. Not everyone was willing to share their stories either, so Ka Hsaw Wa directed and encouraged these people to speak up.
Kaneva, Milena, dir. Total Denial. MK Production, 2007. Yout...
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EXPERIENCES
"I got arrested four or five times in Thailand because I was illegal there. They’d put me in jail for seven days and then release me. It was extremely difficult. In the beginning, we were very poor. Finally we met a woman from France who gave us money for paper and mailing. I was so happy that we could finally do something. In Burma, I was arrested before the student uprising and tortured as well."
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"The junta-- the murderous Tatmadaw-- wants him dead. But the many ordinary Burmese who have been abused and seen relatives killed while working on the Tatmadaw's 1.2 billion dollar Yadana pipeline project see him as a hero. They called him 'Ka Hsaw Wa', which in the language of the Karen means 'white elephant'. For the indigenous Karen, the white elephant is a sign of hope." |
Ka Hsaw Wa risked his life documenting these stories. He and his colleagues even created a plan to end their lives if they were ever caught, rather than suffer the torture. In the beginning, his fear hindered him from his job, but after exposure, he explained that he wasn't emotionally phased anymore, just mentally conditioned.
Wa, Ka Hsaw. Videoconference interview. 9 Oct. 2014.
Wa, Ka Hsaw. Videoconference interview. 9 Oct. 2014.
"One day, as he was stumbling through the undergrowth, he came across the naked body of a dead woman lying on the ground. 'Seeing her body,' he remembers, 'changed my whole life.' There was a tree branch in her vagina. One breast was sliced. The other had its nipple cut off."
Smith, Jeremy. "Tortured Soul." Ecologist 34.6...
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Above Image: A village of displaced Burmese women
and children, typical of the type of people that Ka Hsaw Wa interviewed. |