On 12 August 1950 the Karens suffered their first major setback when their leader, Saw Ba U Gyi – their equivalent of Aung San in terms of inspiration – was killed by the Tatmadaw, along with his chief lieutenant Saw Sankey. Saw Ba U Gyi, born in Pathein in 1905, had studied at Cambridge University and qualified as a barrister before returning to Burma to work as a civil servant. In his leadership of the KNU, he established what became their enduring motto, known as the ‘Four Principles’: ‘surrender is out of the question; we shall retain our arms; the recognition of the Karen state must be complete; we shall decide our own political destiny’.5
The Karen struggle then continued through the following decades, until today. Consumed with numerous internal divisions between left and right, it regained strength in the 1960s under the leadership of General Bo Mya, who dominated the KNU for the best part of four decades. Born in the Papun hills in 1926, Bo Mya was a Second World War veteran who fought with Force 136. He became a Seventh Day Adventist under the influence of his wife, and developed a staunchly anti-communist position. Supported by Thailand until the 1990s, Bo Mya, along with Generals Hla Htoo, Taw Hla, Tamla Baw and others rebuilt the KNU and provided a robust resistance to the Burma Army for many years. In the early 1990s, after students from the pro-democracy uprising of 1988 and Members of Parliament elected in 1990 fled to Karen State, the KNU headquarters at Manerplaw became in many eyes the alternative power-base to Rangoon. Bo Mya welcomed the students and NLD members, and an alliance among different ethnic nationalities and the Burman-dominated democracy movement began to develop. By 1994, however, Manerplaw was under threat and the regime’s divide-and-rule tactics were, once again, bearing fruit.
U Thazana, a Karen Buddhist monk, arrived in Manerplaw in 1989. He was the cousin of KNU Forestry Minister Padoh Aung San, who defected to the regime in 1998. Over the following years, U Thazana gathered several hundred followers and began to construct a pagoda at the confluence of the Salween and Moei rivers. The KNU’s armed wing, the KNLA, objected, suspecting that it could be used by the Tatmadaw to launch attacks on them. Tensions between Christian and Buddhist Karen mounted.6
In 1994, tensions boiled over when a group of disaffected Buddhist soldiers from the KNLA deserted and joined U Thazana. On 21 December 1994, U Thazana established the Democratic Karen Buddhist Organisation (DKBO), and the DKBA, its armed wing, was formed a few days later.7 The regime’s agents provoked disaffection within the KNU, deliberately exacerbating the split, and the Tatmadaw provided the DKBA with military and logistical support.
Divide-and-rule policy, says Zoya Phan, daughter of the assassinated KNU General Secretary Padoh Mahn Sha Lah Phan, is the regime’s ‘most effective tactic’. Yet the KNU leadership in 1994 could have taken more action to prevent a split. ‘We did have weaknesses in the leadership, and we need to learn from that experience and correct mistakes,’ argues Zoya. One key problem was that while the front-line KNLA troops were predominantly Buddhist and Animist, the leadership was overwhelmingly Christian. Indeed, the KNU had emerged from the Karen National Association, established in 1881 by Karen Baptists. From the beginning of the Karen struggle, Christian individuals and organisations played key roles in developing expressions of Karen culture, ethnicity and politics. A perception arose that foreign donors, often Christian themselves, gave gifts to the Christians in the KNU which were not shared among the Buddhists and Animists. These may not have been entirely fair perceptions, but the KNU leadership were not proactive in reassuring their critics and minimising any potential for religious tensions. The regime took advantage of this, and deliberately exacerbated the divide.
Zoya’s father was sent to negotiate with those who were forming the DKBA, the armed wing, but it was too late. As an Animist he was well positioned to mediate between the Christian and Buddhist communities, but the DKBA refused to listen. Instead, they arrested him and held him captive for over a week. ‘The DKBA was aggressive. My father was almost killed there,’ she recalls.
Since the fall of Manerplaw in 1995, the KNU has steadily lost ground and now retains barely a foothold in its old territory. With the significant advance of the Burma Army has come dramatic displacement of Karen civilians, desperate to flee the military’s abuses.
In February 2007, I visited a camp for internally displaced people (IDPs) just inside Karen State. It had only been established less than a year before, and already accommodated 3,000 people. I met one woman who had walked for over a month to reach this camp, having fled her village after it had been attacked and burned down by the Tatmadaw. Seven villagers had been shot dead. She told me how three years previously, her husband had gone to the nearby town to buy food. He was caught by Burma Army soldiers, who tied his hands, dragged him through the jungle, tied him to a tree upside down, gouged out his eyes and then drowned him.8 As soon as I finished hearing her story, I met another woman. She came from the same village. Her fifteen-year-old son had been arrested by the Burma Army, tied to a tree and tortured. He was then beheaded. A third woman told of her husband’s death in 2006. He had been on his way home from his farm, when soldiers caught him and carried him through the village. The soldiers then tore out his eyes, cut off his lips and chopped off both ears. Then they let him go, and he died alone in the forest.
These are by no means isolated incidents – and in recent years, the Tatmadaw has developed a shoot-on-sight policy. ‘When the Burma Army sees people, they don’t arrest them any more. They shoot,’ one man told me. ‘They even kill children and babies.’ Another man, who had been severely tortured, said that at least 1,000 troops from thirteen Tatmadaw battalions occupied the area in which he lived. ‘They come hunting people,’ he remarked. ‘Whatever they see in the jungle, they steal, burn and destroy. They steal pots, clothes, everything from people’s homes. I dare not return to my village. There is no hope, no place for me for the future.’9
Rape is used as a weapon of war by the Burma Army, and is widespread and systematic – and not limited to women. On 27 December 2008 the body of a seven-year-old girl was found near her home in Ma Oo Bin village, Kyauk Kyi Township in Nyaunglebin District, northern Karen State. She had been raped and shot dead. Villagers reported seeing a soldier from the Burma Army’s Light Infantry (LI) 350 entering the village shortly beforehand. They heard the girl’s screams – and then rifle shots.10 The military campaign against the Karens was particularly intense between 2006 and 2010. In the worst offensive for a decade, within the space of just a few weeks in 2006, over 15,000 civilians were displaced, and at least twenty-seven Burma Army battalions were poised to destroy hundreds of villages in Papun District. As the Karen Human Rights Group described, these were ‘attacks against undefended villages with the objective of flushing villagers out of the hills to bring them under direct military control so they can be used to support the Burma Army with food and labour’. The group added: ‘Please note that this is not an offensive against Karen resistance forces, and there has been very little combat.’11 On 27 March 2006, a nine-year-old Karen girl, whose name is Naw Eh Ywa Paw, which means ‘The Flower that Loves God’, was shot. She survived, but her father and grandmother did not.
The Free Burma Rangers, a humanitarian aid group working in the conflict zones of eastern Burma, described the events surrounding the attack in which Naw Eh Ywa Paw was shot. ‘The people had fled the attacking Burma Army who were sweeping the entire area … They did not know the Burma Army was waiting for them … The shock of having a line of troops open fire at point-blank range must have been tremendous,’ the group reported. One of the survivors said: ‘The Burma Army waited in a prepared position to kill villagers. They waited until they were only ten yards away and opened fire on a man carrying his mother, as well as the families and children behind him. What kind of people, what kind of system, can do this?’ Another observer summed up the situation: ‘The Burma Army soldiers shot at the families who were slowly climbing up toward them … This was not a case of startled soldiers shooting wildly at peopl
e by mistake. This was not a case of soldiers shooting at a large group of people from hundreds of yards away. On a different occasion, Burma Army soldiers shot at a father, carrying his sick grandmother, and walking with his nine-year-old daughter, from point-blank range. And they continued to fire at the other people as they ran away …’
Such attacks expose the lie that this is simply a counter-insurgency campaign. Children, grandmothers and teenaged girls do not count as insurgents – and raping and mutilating them, or shooting them at point-blank range when they are fleeing, are not legitimate tools of counter-insurgency. As the Free Burma Rangers conclude, ‘these attacks reflect the ongoing effort of the Burma Army to break the will of the people and control them. The murder of porters and the laying of landmines to terrorize and block food to a civilian population are two of the tactics used in the strategy of the Burma Army to dominate, assimilate and exploit the ethnic people of Burma … What is clear is that the Burma Army is slowly attempting to expand its control, that people are under great danger and there is already a shortage of food.’12
The attacks have continued since 2006. Two years later, more than 30,000 Karens were displaced in the north of the state alone. Villages were mortared and shelled. The Free Burma Rangers claim that those who flee are ‘hunted and shelled like animals’ with the Tatmadaw ‘seeking out villages and pockets of IDPs and destroying homes, food and property’.13
Many of the places I have visited are now under the Tatmadaw’s control. In 2009, I attended the sixtieth anniversary of the start of the Karen struggle, at the headquarters of the KNLA’s Seventh Brigade. I was struck by the extraordinary pride and dignity which the Karen displayed, despite being beleaguered and bombarded by the regime. Disciplined military parades were followed by beautiful traditional dancing and singing, in a celebration of Karen culture expressing a quiet determination to fight on to the bitter end. Surrounded on three sides by Burma Army troops, this tiny enclave was almost all that remained of ‘Kawthoolei’, a Karen homeland controlled by the Karen. Within six months, it had been overrun, a small remnant of KNLA soldiers driven back into the jungle to fight as guerrillas, the civilians fleeing to Thailand, and the very existence of Kawthoolei in peril. Padoh Mahn Sha Lah Phan was buried at the Seventh Brigade headquarters, and his elder daughter was married there. Now, his children cannot even return to visit their father’s grave or the site of his daughter’s wedding.
While the Karen have suffered perhaps the most severe offensive over the past decade, the other ethnic groups in eastern Burma, particularly the Karenni and the Shan, have endured similar atrocities. The Karenni, sometimes known as the Kayah or the Red Karen, have been fighting a struggle for survival for as long as their ethnic cousins, the Karen. Historically the Karenni, who number no more than 250,000 today, were never part of Burma. Until the twentieth century, the Karenni inhabited five different sub-states, each ruled by a king known as a ‘Saophya’. In 1835 the Burmese king ordered his troops to attack Karenni, but they were expelled by Karenni forces. Diplomatic relations were established between the Karenni rulers and the British, and in 1875 Britain and the Burmese King Mindon both recognised Karenni independence. During colonial rule, the Karenni States were never incorporated into British Burma, but upon independence in 1947 the Karenni found themselves forced to become part of Burma. To resist this, they formed the Karenni National Organization (KNO) and a series of demonstrations were held. At 4 a.m. on 9 August 1948, Burmese military police attacked the KNO headquarters, and the Karenni launched their armed struggle. In 1955, the organisation which today is the major Karenni resistance group, the Karenni National Progressive Party (KNPP), was formed.
Today, Karenni State is one vast concentration camp. At least three-quarters of the population live under the Burmese military’s control in relocation camps, where they are used constantly as a source of forced labour. Moe Bu was just ten years old when her entire village, Teetankarloe in Dee Moe Soe Township, was forced to relocate. ‘We were surrounded by Burmese soldiers, and we could not go out of the relocation camp,’ she recalls. ‘We had no school, no clinic, nothing. We could not go out to work in the fields. We just had to stay in our houses.’
One seventeen-year-old Karenni woman told me she fled to Thailand from a relocation camp because she ‘was tired of having to undertake forced portering’. A forty-eight-year-old Karenni Buddhist man, from Loikaw Township, said his entire village of over 1,000 people was forcibly relocated in May 2002. Villagers were forced to cut down trees and bamboo to provide materials to build houses for the military, and to carry packs of rice. At 8 p.m. one night, soldiers came to the relocation site, arrested all the villagers and took them to the headquarters of Light Infantry Battalion (LIB) 250, where they were beaten and forced to work as porters. They were also forced to dig trenches for the army, working from 8 a.m. until 4 p.m. with only a half-hour break. They had to provide their own food, and were forced to speak Burmese. They were tied together by their hands in groups of three or four. During the year he spent in the Nwar La Poe relocation camp, he claims he heard reports of rape, including a case in August 2003 when five girls were raped by seven soldiers.
Villagers are typically ordered to move to relocation camps with just a few days’ notice, according to the former KNPP General Secretary Rimond Htoo. ‘They can only take what they can carry on their backs. They live in a space within a fence, controlled by the army.’ On 25 December 2003, for example, the commander of the Tatmadaw’s 55th Division held a meeting in Maw Chi, in which he ordered villagers to move to a relocation site at Mahntahlaying within ten days. Anyone failing to move would be shot. Three days later, however, troops came to villages and ordered people to move immediately. Some escaped, and over 3,000 ended up hiding in the jungle. Those who went to Mahntahlaying were forced to repair the road and provide their own food. Those who escaped remained constantly on the move. ‘They have to run, in order to stay alive,’ said a Karenni spokesman. ‘They are fed up with moving all the time. They have no homes, no health care, no food and no education. If this is not ethnic cleansing, what is?’14
In the relocation camps, villagers are forbidden from going out without permission. There is little education and no adequate health care. Those who attempt to flee the relocation sites and are caught face dire consequences. On a visit to the Karenni refugee camps near Mae Hong Son, Thailand, in 2004, I met a twenty-four-year-old woman who told me how her family escaped, along with twenty other families. One family, however, was caught. The soldiers tied the father to a tree and beat him to death with a rice pounder. They killed the rest of the family as well.
After two years in a relocation camp, Moe Bu and her family were allowed to return to their village. However, there they faced regular attacks from the Tatmadaw. On one occasion when she was thirteen years old, her school in Pruso Township was attacked, although Burma Army soldiers made sure they took their own children away from the school in advance. ‘They came with a truck and took all their children away, and half an hour later a bomb exploded in the school. All I could see was smoke, and people running around crying. Almost every day was like that, hearing gunfire, shooting, bombs,’ she recalls.
When she was thirteen, Moe Bu’s mother died and she had to look after her younger brothers herself. Three years later, her father decided the situation was too dangerous, and sent her to the refugee camps on the Thai border for safety. Escorted by Karenni resistance soldiers, Moe Bu walked for three months through the jungle. ‘We walked at night and slept during the day,’ she recalls. ‘To avoid landmines we had to follow the Karenni soldiers, and only step where they stepped. When we were close to the border, we had to walk through the river, because there are landmines everywhere. The Karenni soldiers saved my life. They believe in freedom, that is why they are fighting the Burma Army.’
As in the rest of Burma, torture is widespread in Karenni State. A thirty-one-year-old man fled to Thailand in February 2004, having endured severe torture. In June 2003,
he was held captive by Tatmadaw soldiers, and tied up and tortured for ten days. On one particular day, from 11 a.m. until 6 p.m., soldiers rolled a log up and down his legs, sometimes stamping on the log with their boots. That same night, he was subjected to water torture. He was forced to lie down while soldiers poured large quantities of water into his mouth until his stomach swelled, and then they stamped on his stomach. They then smothered his mouth with a cloth, and continued to roll a log up and down his legs. He was unable to walk for five months as a result. ‘I thought I was going to die,’ he told me.15
On several occasions, the Karenni have engaged in peace talks with the regime, but each time the regime has reneged on its promises. Rimond Htoo joined the KNPP in 1975, and between 1991 and 2007 at least nine rounds of talks were held. On 1 March 1995 a ceasefire was signed, but three months later, on 30 June, the regime broke the agreement. According to Rimond Htoo, the sixteen-point agreement included an end to portering, an end to extortion and no increase in Tatmadaw troop presence in Karenni State. ‘But before the ceasefire, there were ten SPDC battalions, after three months it had increased to twenty battalions. The SPDC also increased their outposts,’ recalls Rimond Htoo. A statement issued on 28 June 1995 by Aung Than Lay, the Karenni ‘prime minister’, claimed that on 15 June the Burma Army started rounding up porters and demanding portering fees, and two days later two battalions crossed into KNPP-designated areas. ‘KNPP desires peace. It does not want a resumption of hostilities. It deems SLORC hostile activities highly deplorable,’ Aung Than Lay wrote. ‘Should SLORC continue breaking the ceasefire agreement, and should it refuse to withdraw the troops it has moved into KNPP areas, it will be SLORC, and not KNPP, that will have to assume the responsibility for the outbreak of hostilities.’ He ended with an appeal: ‘Karenni is a small nation under siege. It has been fighting for survival for decades, and will continue doing so in spite of the heavy odds against it. If SLORC should use its military might to attack Karenni – which KNPP believe it will – KNPP expects and requests all sympathetic and democratic forces the world over to extend humanitarian assistance to the Karenni people.’ Two days later, fierce fighting broke out. The Karenni reported that Tatmadaw troops numbering between 4,000 and 5,000 were ‘poised for an all-out onslaught on Karenni bases.’
Burma- a Nation at the Crossroads Page 10