Restless Souls provides an eyewitness account of the world’s longest running civil war being fought by the Karen tribe against the Burmese military junta which has largely been forgotten by the outside world
“Betrayed by the British, the Karen of Burma have been locked in a titanic, sixty-year struggle for survival against the Burmese military regime, their story ignored by the rest of the world. Journalist Phil Thornton spent five years on the Thai-Burma border, crossing illegally into the Karen State scores of times to find the families, freedom fighters, teachers, and medics resisting the regime.
Restless Souls is a tragic, sometimes amusing journey through the war zone and the underbelly of the Thai border town Mae Sot, where refugees, ‘mercenary’ adventurers, migrant workers, gem dealers, prostitutes, scavengers, rebel soldiers, corrupt officials, and drug dealers inhabit the shadows.”
So runs the back cover blurb for Restless Souls, a book written by Australian journalist Phil Thornton that was published in Thailand last year by Asia Books Publishing to wide critical acclaim and respectable sales. Unfortunately Restless Souls is not available to buy online to the rest of the world through the likes of Amazon.com – the only real way you’re going to be able to get a copy is if you come to Thailand on holiday or get someone to post a copy to you. (That said, it’s available online at Australian bookshop Abbeys.com.au and from AsiaBooks.com – but only if you’re prepared to pay a staggering $US 36 in shipping charges on top of the $13 cost of the book itself!)
There is a sad irony in this, as Restless Souls covers a war that has been almost wholly forgotten by the outside world and Thornton’s whole motivation for writing the book was to try and bring attention back to the appalling way in which the Karen people are treated. That said, the book has sold over 2000 copies in Thailand and gone into a second printing already, so despite its depiction of the harsh realities of life on the Thai-Burmese border, there is clearly an audience of interested readers who want to understand more about this complex situation.
This is enhanced by the fact that Restless Souls is an excellent book. It takes a difficult, obscure and quite horrific story and manages to not only give a previously unaware reader a good grasp of the situation, but also shoot it through with humanity and a little hope too. Thornton is a good writer, using accuracy and brevity to keep the pace of his prose moving and the reader hooked into the stories he tells of the different people he encounters. What is most engaging is Thornton’s own honesty in his writing: most books are written (and read) from an assumption that the writer is an expert or authority in their field. Thornton admits that he knew nothing about the Karen and their situation when he arrived at the Thai town of Mae Sot which borders Myanmar and is the locus for Burmese-Thai trade, both legal and illegal. Therefore his book is a journey of sorts of how he came to learn about the Karen families on the other, Burmese side of the river, forced to live in the jungle to avoid the Myanmar military who would kill them on sight.
By making numerous illegal and dangerous incursions into Burmese territory to talk to the Karen and interview some of their leading figures, Thornton began to build a first hand knowledge of Karen history and their desperate situation, all the while seeing scores of journalists and NGO staff come and go in Mae Sot and seemingly leave behind only a large bar tab rather than anything of lasting help for the Burmese refugees. Because the book is necessarily one sided, Restless Souls is an unashamed polemic which makes a concerted effort to highlight the plight of the Karen.
The book certainly generated a lot of interest on its publication – there are some thoughtful reviews at the Far East Economic Review, Irrawaddy.org and a particularly lengthy one at The Oxonian Review of Books [direct link to PDF file] that provide a much better summary of the political situation and Thornton’s survey of it than I can. There is also a brief interview with Thornton at Mizzima.org and a lengthy profile of him and Restless Souls in the Thailand English language newspaper The Nation.
Thornton writes at one point: “Journalists struggle trying to adjust their already mentally written stories to the complex reality confronting them.” Restless Souls is a superb attempt at trying to understand and capture that reality and present it to the reader in a way that can be both understood and empathised with.
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