Win Moe was standing outside the sliding glass doors of the pale pink Holiday Inn in downtown Fort Wayne, puffing on a cigarette. His free hand was jammed deep in the pocket of his baggy brown jeans, his shoulders were hunched, and a knit cap was pulled low over his ears against the chill of February 2001. Black stubble indicated he hadn’t shaved in days, the station wagon parked behind him suggested a degree of domestication. Only his black glasses hinted at a man who paid attention to style. Was this the look of a freedom fighter?
“This is the place in the U.S. where Burmese activism is most alive,” says Chan Aye, a Voice of America reporter on Burma who used to live in Fort Wayne. “They are totally cut off from older, more established Burmese communities.” One needn’t look hard to spot young men missing legs, arms, and eyes–the price of their years of struggle in the jungle. These members of the ’88 generation lead lives that are nothing like what they anticipated back in Burma, where they belonged to an educated, connected elite being groomed for promising careers. Most work factory jobs, and their years of sacrifice don’t seem to count for much.
He also showed an aptitude for chess. At 16 he became the Burmese national champion; at 17 he beat a Russian grand master and the Burmese government took him under its wing. Under the auspices of the ministry of transportation (run by the military), he made a middle-class salary to coach military personnel in chess. “It was the socialist system,” he says. “They grabbed you and put you in sports.” Most of his chess pupils were more than a decade older than he was; one eventually became his stepfather.
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He says he and the thousands of other students who fled the army and trekked to the Thai-Burmese border had no idea what they were getting into: “We were young and arrogant, and frankly, we were used to living like kings.” Their plan was to wage armed struggle in the jungle beside the thousands of ethnic minorities who’d been battling for decades against Burmese troops, but they were unprepared for the harsh terrain and hardened fighters they encountered. Hunger, malaria, and land mines became parts of everyday life.
Almost none of his university credits transferred because he couldn’t produce transcripts from home. He enrolled at Indiana-Purdue Fort Wayne, and also got a full-time job stuffing patio furniture at a local factory. Later jobs took him to a factory that made fiberglass skids (“The fiberglass made my nose bleed”), a foundry, and a Chinese restaurant. He lived in a run-down house full of young, single Burmese men from the democracy movement who were struggling to get by. “The house was so bad, we could hear the bugs in the walls at night,” he recalls. “But we were like family to each other. We kept each other going.”
This spring he and his wife’s younger brother, Joe Serrani, visited Belgium, where foreign parties can be charged with crimes committed in other countries (four Rwandan officials have been convicted under Belgian law). On April 25 a lawsuit they were instrumental in drafting was filed in a Belgian court. It accuses leaders of the Burmese junta of crimes against humanity–including torture, repression, forced labor, and forced relocation.
