Book Review - Zoya Phan's 'Little Daughter'

Many readers will remember Zoya Phan, a Karen refugee from Burma, whose moving address at the 2006 Conservative Party Conference brought delegates to their feet with tears in their eyes. The following year, she was invited back to speak at the Party Conference.

If you are looking for something to read this Christmas break, and want a break from British domestic politics before the General Election campaign, I would recommend Zoya's book, Little Daughter: A Memoir of Survival in Burma and the West. Launched earlier this year in the House of Commons at an event hosted by Stephen Crabb MP and addressed by the Shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague, Zoya's book is a moving and poignant personal story of struggle which cannot fail to challenge and inspire.

While much of the early part of the book provides an innocent and charming account of life growing up in the jungles of eastern Burma, there are inevitably many grim moments in the book. Zoya recounts how at the age of six she and her brother and sister were playing by the river, when "our happy games suddenly turned very dark". As they splashed about innocently in the water, suddenly they were confronted with a bloated, floating corpse. "All of a sudden we were screaming in horror," she recalls. The man had been killed by the Burma Army and dumped in the river, left to decompose.

As she grew older, Zoya encountered the horrors of war more regularly. The bodies of wounded or dead Karen resistance soldiers were often brought to Manerplaw, the Karen headquarters where she grew up. "I remember looking into one of those hammocks," she writes. "I saw a face bloodied, swollen and pockmarked with shrapnel, the gentle brown eyes all but gummed shut with congealed blood. But worst of all was the young man's hands that ended in stumps wrapped in bloody rags."

Zoya's father, Padoh Mahn Sha Lah Phan, was a senior leader in the Karen resistance, and ended up as General Secretary of the Karen National Union (KNU). When she grew up he was often away for weeks at a time, involved in political activities and, on one occasion, kidnapped and imprisoned. "My father was kept in the pitch black of the dungeon as his captors took away his fellow KNU leaders and executed them," she describes. "At one point they had put a gun to his head and acted as if they were going to kill him."

The most dramatic moment in Zoya's childhood came when Manerplaw, where she had grown up, was attacked by the regime's troops. Her description is charmingly down-to-earth. "The first time the aircraft came to drop their bombs on us I was in the loo," she recalls. Her family were forced to flee into the jungle, and walk for days without adequate food, shelter or medicine to reach the safety of the Thai border. Describing her emotions at the time, she is refreshingly honest. "I found myself unable to cry. I was crying inside, but I felt as if I should be strong. So I kept the trauma bottled up inside me," she writes. In the jungle, the family were constantly on the run. Her mother knew that they must always keen their bags packed - "and be ready to move at a moment's notice".

That was not to be Zoya's only experience of running from bullets. Two years later, they were attacked again:

"People were running in every direction shouting and screaming. Animals were bellowing or screaming in panic. Children were screaming and crying, the crackle of the gunfire rose above the uproar, and then there would come the crack-BOOM of the mortar bombs landing, as if every glass window in the world had been shattered at once .... The dust got so bad it was almost like night. I couldn't breathe, I couldn't see, my legs were aching with running, my lungs burning, my whole body shaking with fear. I just knew I had to keep going or I'd be killed."

While this was going on, Zoya began to ask questions:

 "Why did the United Nations and the international community allow this to happen? And where especially were the British? We had been their allies. We had fought and died beside them in the Second World War. Why had they abandoned us? I dreamed that they would come and rescue us. But they never did."

Zoya then spent several years in the refugee camps across the border in Thailand. There she learned some English and gained some basic schooling - enough to win a scholarship to study in Bangkok. Part of her studies was business administration - but adjusting to this, and to city life, from where she had come from was a challenge:

“It was so alien to me. I didn’t understand many of the most basic concepts. I had no idea about the practices of international business. As to the relative benefits of Kimberly Clark’s logo versus that of Toyota or Tesco – I was completely lost. What was a logo? What was a superstore? Who were Tesco, Toyota and the rest?”

From this point on, her life took an extraordinary turn. She did an internship at Telecomasia, and was offered the chance of a corporate career. However, several factors convinced her to take a different course. First, her mother was seriously ill, and she returned to the border to visit her. She then decided to make a visit inside Karen State, to try to help her people and particularly to "get into those areas that the media and human rights workers were seldom able to visit.". She went with her father's blessing, and his hammock and mosquito net. On that visit, she met people who were terrified of imminent attack, suffering from cholera, chronic diarrhoea and malaria, and who had no opportunities for health care or education at all. “They were so poor and destitute that even the clothes they stood up in were in shred,” she recalls. “They had nothing; nothing. No pots and pans; no blankets; previous little to eat.” It was this situation, she explains, that began to turn her away from “a soft, moneyed and easy future” and back to her people and their struggle. Some of those she met turned to her and said: "Please do something about the suffering here. Go and tell the world."

Her mother died in 2004, and Zoya accepted a place at the University of East Anglia to study for a Master’s in Development and Politics. Ten months after starting her course, she attended a demonstration in London, where someone handed her what she describes as "a funnel-shaped device" which was "very heavy". She was told: "It's a megaphone. Press that button and speak into this end and everyone will be able to hear you - even the people inside the embassy." She did, and her activist's life was born. “All my life I had been a victim,” she writes, “but today I had felt what it was like to fight back.” Within a few weeks she was doing interviews on the BBC, leading protests outside the Burmese Embassy and 10 Downing Street, and addressing audiences around the country. She has shared a platform with William Hague several times, spoken to Gordon Brown personally on the phone, met the Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street and shaken hands with David Cameron.

 

On 14 February, 2008 Zoya's family - which had already endured so much - was struck by further tragedy. Her father was assassinated by agents of the regime. I had been with him three days previously, and had sat with him on the very veranda where he was shot dead. Zoya had been aware of the plots, and is herself on a hit-list now, but no amount of awareness could have prepared her for the shock. "My father was killed because the Burmese regime feared him," Zoya writes.

 

I had just landed in Kuala Lumpur, on my way to visit Burmese refugees there, when I received news of Padoh Mahn Sha's assassination. I had known him well, always visited him when I went to the Thailand-Burma border, and his children, including Zoya, are friends of mine.  Eerily, it was almost exactly a year later that, landing in Kuala Lumpur again, I finished reading Zoya's book. It draws to an end with the account of her father's death - and with typical defiant courage:

"They killed my father because they wanted to kill what he stood for. I was determined not to let that happen ... And whilst they may have killed my father, they could never kill my father's dream. That the Karen, and all the people of Burma, will be free."

And it closes with this challenge, which is one for us all to consider this Christmas:

 

"Maybe you will feel sorry for me after what I have been through in my life. Don't. I am one of the lucky ones. I am lucky I am still alive. I am lucky I haven't been raped. I am lucky that I am not still in a refugee camp that is like a prison camp, with no work, no freedom .... And I am lucky to be able to work to help my people. I don't want you to feel sorry for me, I want you to feel angry, and I want you to do something about it."

 

One of the ways you can do something about it is to support organisations working on Burma, either The Phan Foundation 

 which Zoya and her brothers and sister established in their parents' memory, or The Burma Campaign UK,  where Zoya works as International Co-ordinator, or my organisation, Christian Solidarity Worldwide.Have a look also at the Change for Burma campaign.