SALON

Monday, Jan 29, 2001 9:00 AM UTC

The Htoo twins come in from the cold

Myanmar's legendary child rebel leaders are like toxic cherubim, confusing our moral senses.

By

Topics: Children, Thailand, National security,

The Htoo twins come in from the cold

The image itself (splayed across virtually every newspaper in the world) was uncanny, the caption more unsettling yet: Dec. 6, 1999, a pair of 12-year-old ethnic Karen twin brothers, the Htoos, Johnny on the left (that’s a boy?) and Luther (Luther!?) on the right, leaders of a beleaguered Myanmar insurgent group known as God’s Army, whose members credit them with mystical godlike powers that “render them invulnerable during battle.”

In the photo, they look like Renaissance cherubs gone badly wrong (specifically like those two clichéd angels propped at the foot of Raphael’s Dresden Sistine Madonna): toxic putti. Raphael’s cherubs, that is, gone upriver, deep, way too deep into Conradland — miniature Brandos bestriding their own demented cargo cult. Their aura is all the more unsettling in that, in this photo anyway, they actually look, if you’ll pardon the expression, like Siamese twins. Johnny seems to grow right out of Luther’s back, his tremulous innocence hitched helplessly to the latter’s age-old, gimlet-eyed world-weariness: seen it all (toke), seen it all (toke), should never have seen any of it.

The inhaled stogie lends the image a certain sulfurous air, as does word that their followers have now gone and attacked a hospital, of all things, and are holding hundreds of hostages. Is there no bottom to the world’s demented evil?

Of course, this is all so much Orientalist claptrap: feverish white Western fantasies about the metaphysical debauch of endlessly inscrutable colored folk, the convenient Other. In fact, the attack on the hospital itself undercuts such smug and easy projections: They’ve raided the hospital and are holding all those hostages to advance their demands that the Thai army stop shelling their positions and that the doctors there treat their own ragtag wounded. There is no Primordial Evil here, only all-too-human desperation.

But the fantasy of the first allows us to screen out the palpable reality of the second — no need any longer to trouble ourselves over the plight of Karen minorities wedged in a tightening vise between those Burmese and Thai generals. No call to keep paying attention.

And so we don’t (pay attention). Time passes, and then suddenly, last week, here they are again, those wacky Htoo boys, come in out of the cold (or rather the jungle dank). After turning themselves in to Thai border guards alongside a clutch of their followers, they are whisked to a police compound in the nearby town of Suan Phung, where (according to the dispatch by Time’s Robert Horn) they soon find themselves exchanging bewildered stares with the Thai prime minister and several of his top generals. The prime minister “gently stroked the boys’ lice ridden locks. ‘He totally demystified them,’ says Sunai Phasuk of Forum Asia, a human rights group. In Thailand, where people still crawl before royalty, ‘you don’t pat a god on the head.’”

So that, see (another comforting dodge, an obverse reassuring fantasy): They’re just ordinary kids after all. Decked out there in their fresh soccer frocks, straddling nothing more fearsome than everyday puberty, they’re just like the boys next door (though it would be nice if somebody could get that Luther kid to stop smoking).

This too, of course, is all wrong. Thirteen years old, they look like they can’t be more than 7 or 8. And that’s not charming mumbo jumbo, that’s severe extended malnutrition. These aren’t just ordinary kids. They’ve seen things, they’ve lived through hells that the world (which is to say the rest of us, swaddled in our comforting illusions) had no business allowing.

Lawrence Weschler is the author of, among others, "A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers"; "Calamities of Exile"; "Vermeer in Bosnia"; and most recently, "Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative." More Lawrence Weschler.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 0 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: Chekhov's story mirrors Russia's own

Recommendations