The Border

This is the Burmese town of Miyawaddi, seen from the Thai town of Mae Sot across the brown and trash-clogged Rim Moei river. The two towns are distinct in name only. In practice, the river is a porous boundary, and the people and societies on either side are bound together in a complicated relationship of dependancy and dysfunction. It's a small-scale version of what happens along the border of the US and Mexico - both parties maintain the trappings of a border while simultaneously benefiting from its permanent rupture. Put a rich country next to a poor country and the poor will relocate while the richer profit from that relocation with the inexhaustibility and inevitability of a physical law. Look at these tracks worn in the no-man's-land of the riverbank by people making unofficial crossings. If I wanted to milk my metaphor I'd say they're like the trails that raindrops leave in obedience to gravity:

But unlike gravity, the process has its regional quirks. Take the Thai/Myanmar Friendship Bridge that connects the two countries:

Thailand drives on the left, Burma drives on the right, thanks to a unilateral decision made by General Ne Win in 1970. The internet thinks that the General took too literally a soothsayer's advice to 'move to the right' (economically), and while this is consistent with the General's well-documented stupidstition (to coin a portmanteau) I think it's more likely that left-hand driving was seen as a legacy of British colonialism. Thanks to sanctions and Burma's economic backwardness, most vehicles in the country remain right-hand drive, so buses have to discharge their passengers in the middle of busy roads, and drivers have to veer way out into oncoming traffic in order to overtake. Also, drivers have to switch lanes on the bridge, an operation that gets accomplished with two traffic lights and surprisingly little chaos.

"Let us all participate in realising the drug-free zone." This sign faces back towards Burma like King Canute. The four commodities that surreptitiously cross the river here in massive quantities are drugs, guns, gems and people. Walking along the riverbank I see a Burmese man openly selling a baggie containing two ya ba pills to a ragged, itching junkie. Ya ba (also known as 'Nazi Speed', supposedly because it was devised by German chemists in WWII to give stamina to their soldiers) is a mixture of meth and caffeine sold in round, brightly colored pills. Ya ba and and heroin are both substantial contributors to the Burmese GDP. The junta can put up all the bridge signs it wants, but it's an open secret that they tolerate and profit from the many labs that flourish in the east of the country. What they don't tolerate, however, is when the ethnic groups do it. In the lead-up to the "elections", the junta is trying to neutralise Burma's multifarious armed ethnic groups by inducing them to integrate into a so-called 'Border Guard Force'. Some groups have acceded, but the most bad-ass, the United Wa State Army (UWSA), continues to hold out. To fund their arms purchases and strengthen their position in advance of the inevitable government crackdown, they've ramped up their drug production to the point where the Thai Army estimates something like 400 million ya ba pills will cross the border this year, most of it from factories in Wa territory. Only about 1 percent of that will be intercepted, and the rest will be consumed by Thailand's wretched amphetamine junkies. The cops here have a wonderful tradition of holding press photo-ops where malefactors are posed like hunting trophies beside the incriminating evidence of their crimes, and the resulting pictures are a fascinating document of the Thai drug problem - dejected, skeletal Thais in shorts and flip flops, squatting beside some sad pile of aluminium cookwear looted from an empty house.

But the most obvious illicit cross-border traffic here is people. In the photo above, a ferryman pulls an inner-tube full of people across the river, in full view of the border guards lounging at either ends of the bridge. This goes on all day, as people cross for work, to see family, to go to school, to visit the clinic, to flee repression, or just to buy cheap Burmese cigarettes. Seeing this actually happen is shocking in the same way that it would be to see someone abruptly levitate. We take the inviolability of borders for granted like we take gravity for granted. When we see them so nonchalantly violated we are reminded that lines on a map are nothing before the forces of war, poverty, drugs and commerce.