by David Eimer
Bamar migrants from inland Burma are also a presence in the towns. But they are far outnumbered by the 100,000-plus Burmese troops stationed here, around a quarter of the entire strength of the Tatmadaw. Opposing them are an estimated 70,000 men and women serving in a variety of different ethnic armies, a figure that doesn’t include the former soldiers who act as reservists.
The Second World War precipitated the struggle between the Bamar and the minorities, heightening tensions which had begun to fester after the British made the fateful decision to administer the borderlands and their peoples separately from the rest of the country. Two competing visions of what an independent Burma would look like emerged. The Bamar envisaged a nation controlled by them, with the other ethnic groups suitably subservient. But the main minorities – the Shan, Kachin, Karen, Rakhine, Chin and Mon – wanted a federal state where they would have autonomy over their areas and affairs.
Only after Aung San recognised the right of the minorities to rule their homelands at the 1947 Panglong Conference did they agree to join what would become the Union of Burma after independence. But Aung San’s assurances were soon forgotten and in January 1949 the Karen people rose up against the Bamar. By 1961 Shan and Kachin armies had rebelled against the state, too. With the militias of the smaller ethnic groups joining them and communist insurgents roaming inland Burma, the country was gripped by civil war.
Now, northern and eastern Shan State and the south, west and north of Kachin State are the front lines in the conflict. Four armies battle the Tatmadaw in these regions: the TNLA, the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), the Arakan Army and the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA). Standing on the sidelines, refusing to sign ceasefires and occasionally clashing with the Tatmadaw, are another three armies: the Shan State Army – North, the National Democratic Alliance Army, and the United Wa State Army, the most powerful of all the ethnic minority forces.
Among the four armies involved in full-time fighting, only the TNLA and MNDAA are native to Shan State: the Arakan Army is a unit of Rakhine separatists and the KIA represents the people of Kachin State. But since 2016 the four armies have joined forces in what is known as the Northern Alliance, a rare outbreak of unity between different ethnic groups in Burma.
One of the reasons the conflicts in the borderlands appear deeply confusing to outsiders is the long chain of alliances made and broken over the last seven decades. The many armies and militias formed over the years have fractured into different organisations, often violently opposed to each other. China, whose border with Burma runs partly through areas controlled by the minority armies, plays a disruptive role, too. Beijing maintains an influence with some of the groups that arouses suspicion and fear in the other militias, as well as with the government in Naypyidaw.
This failure of the minority armies to combine effectively under one banner has only aided the Tatmadaw, who have enthusiastically adopted the divide and rule tactics once employed by the British in their empire. Some of the ethnic forces have signed truces with Naypyidaw and now act as proxy government units, which allows the Tatmadaw to keep more of its troops in the safety of their barracks in the towns.
These new allies are also paid to protect the rubber and banana farms and mines in the frontier areas which are clear of the rebel armies. Owned by Chinese companies in conjunction with local elites and sometimes the Tatmadaw, they operate on land taken from the minorities. ‘There are gold and tin mines around Mantong and Kyaukme. Those are our resources and they are going to China. We don’t think that is right,’ Major Robert told me.
While some of the ethnic armies have downed arms because of a genuine desire for peace, the prospect of getting a cut of the huge amount of revenue generated by the border trade in Shan State is perhaps a bigger motivation to agree ceasefires with the government. Apart from the legal commerce, everything from mobile phones, DVDs and motorbikes to endangered wildlife species, precious gems, timber and drugs is smuggled in both directions across the boundaries with China, Laos and Thailand. Around the world, only Iraq and Libya see a greater amount of illegal trade than Burma.
So-called ceasefire capitalism has had a calamitous impact on the Ta’ang people, whose homeland sprawls across the mountainous far north-west of Shan State towards the borders with Kachin State and Yunnan. The symbol of the TNLA, worn by every soldier on the left arm of their uniforms, is three mountains ringed by tea leaves. A twelfth-century ce legend has it that a nat spirit bestowed tea seeds on the Ta’ang. Tea cultivation has been their principal occupation ever since then.
Ta’ang tea is highly prized and once found its way all around Burma in the shape of the tea-leaf salads that are a national dish. But in 1991 the Ta’ang signed a ceasefire with the then ruling junta. Soon, pro-government militias were formed, like the one I encountered on my way to Namhsan, while farmland was confiscated for oil and gas pipelines that run from Rakhine State to China via Shan State. Worst of all, the local tea industry was reorganised into a cartel who have kept the price of tea low.
By the time the truce ended in 2005 Ta’ang farmers were also facing fierce competition from tea imported from Yunnan. Just as the East India Company’s sales of untaxed Chinese tea to America prompted the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution, the Ta’ang are driven to fight partly because they see China launching an economic takeover of their homeland. ‘Chinese tea has driven the price of our tea down even further. That’s why we don’t want the Chinese in our areas,’ said Major Robert.
Unable to make a living out of growing tea, farmers started cultivating opium instead. ‘From 1993 poppy started being grown again because the tea price declined,’ said Major Robert. Opium has long been a cash crop here. Shan State is the epicentre of the Golden Triangle, a region that stretches into southern Yunnan, north-west Laos and northern Thailand and which is notorious as an abundant source of heroin and methamphetamines.
Burma is the world’s second biggest producer of opium, after Afghanistan, and most of it is grown in Shan State. Along with the illicit traffic in jade from Kachin State, the trade in illegal drugs is by far the country’s most profitable industry, worth £20 billion annually, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. And those figures are a conservative estimate.
Local farmers can only dream of such riches. They get paid around £160 for a kilo of dry opium. It is the Chinese gangs who buy the opium who make the big profits. Once that same kilo has been refined into heroin and put on sale in China, or exported from there to other parts of Asia, it is worth almost £50,000. For the villagers in Shan State growing opium is simply a means of staying alive for another year.
With drugs present throughout Shan State, and available at lower prices than elsewhere in Burma or abroad, more and more people have fallen victim to them. Every village and town in the Ta’ang region has its addicts. In May 2016 over a thousand people in Namhsan were left homeless when 500 houses and shops burned down in a blaze started by the candle of a local heroin user who had nodded off after injecting himself.
TNLA troops know all about the temptations of narcotics. ‘Many of our soldiers are former addicts because it’s such a big problem. Up until recently, I’d say the majority of Ta’ang men were taking drugs, heroin especially,’ Major Robert told me. I asked if I could talk to some of the soldiers who had been drug users. He took me over to another shelter, inside which four men were hunched over their phones.
Expecting to meet an ordinary soldier, I was introduced instead to the brigade commander and taken aback to discover that he was just thirty-four, the same age as Major Robert. Tar Maw Shan was jovial and informal, arms covered in crude tattoos, combat trousers rolled up to his knees as he relaxed for the night. He joined the TNLA eight years ago and now commands two battalions, the sort of speedy ascent to high rank only possible in guerrilla armies.
The son of a tea farmer from a village outside Namhsan, Tar Maw Shan was introduced to drugs as a teenager. ‘I started smoking opium when I
was sixteen and carried on taking it for ten years. I had no job, no life really. So I took drugs, like most of the boys in my village,’ he said. I asked if the other men in the shelter were ex-users. ‘Yes. Heroin and opium. But yama is more popular with the youth now.’ Yama is the local term for the methamphetamine pills produced in their millions in Shan State and exported all across Asia, even reaching North Korea.
A common refrain in the borderlands is that, where the Tatmadaw goes, drugs follow. Many of the minorities believe that their homelands are being swamped with cheap narcotics by the military and its cohorts as part of a deliberate campaign to debilitate their communities, so they will no longer be able to resist government rule. Some go further and insist that the easy availability of heroin and methamphetamines is a calculated attempt at genocide, the aim being to wipe out the minorities altogether.
Tar Maw Shan was no different. For him and his brigade of reformed addicts eradicating drugs from the Ta’ang homeland is as crucial as achieving freedom, a goal shared with the rest of the TNLA. The principal targets of their ire are the Tatmadaw-backed Panhsay Militia and the Restoration Council of Shan State (RCSS), also known as the Shan State Army – South, one of the largest of the ethnic armies.
After agreeing a ceasefire with the government in 2012, the RCSS moved some of their 8,000 soldiers north from their bases near the Thai border in southern Shan State and now fight the TNLA alongside the Burmese military. The Panhsay Militia operate in the hills between Mantong and the border with China in the far north of the Ta’ang region, an area remote even by Shan State standards and long associated with opium production.
‘Our number-one enemy is the RCSS. They kill our people and block the roads so that our people in the hills can’t get out to buy or sell anything. The number-two enemy is the Panhsay Militia because they make heroin and yama. The Tatmadaw is our number-three enemy,’ stated Tar Maw Shan. A few days before I arrived there had been intense firefights between his units and the RCSS in the hills west of us. ‘We lost two dead and six injured. But we forced the RCSS to retreat back towards Hsipaw,’ he said.
Every February, the time of the annual opium harvest in Shan State, the TNLA launches an offensive against the Panhsay Militia. ‘We have to stop the Panhsay Militia bringing drugs into our areas. The only way to do that is to go to the hills to burn the poppy and the yama labs and to fight them. They are friends with the Tatmadaw and the RCSS. They all want the money from drugs,’ said Major Robert.
No one doubts that the Panhsay Militia is linked to the Burmese military. Its leader is Kyaw Myint, a local tycoon of Lisu and Yunnan ancestry who is also a member of the Shan State parliament representing the Tatmadaw-backed USDP. Alleged to have first made a fortune trafficking timber from Shan State to Thailand, Kyaw Myint was elected to the state parliament in 2010 after promising the people in his future constituency that they would be able to grow opium under his protection.
Many of the government-sponsored militias in Shan State are thought to be involved in the production, sale and smuggling of drugs and, of course, the Tatmadaw takes a cut of the profits. Nor is the RCSS the only ethnic army implicated in the narcotics trade. The MNDAA, one of the TNLA’s comrades in the Northern Alliance, has a long history of producing heroin and methamphetamines in its enclave in north-east Shan State.
Of all the minority armies, though, it is the United Wa State Army (UWSA) in eastern Shan State who are most infamous for their role in drug production. The United States has cited the UWSA as Southeast Asia’s biggest drug-trafficking gang, and its leaders remain on the US Treasury Department’s sanctions lists. If any one group can be said to control the Golden Triangle, it is the UWSA who have the best claim.
Money made from heroin and methamphetamines has enabled the UWSA to establish themselves as the largest of the ethnic armies, with 20,000 full-time soldiers and another 30,000 in reserve. The UWSA is also the major supplier of arms in the region, sometimes made in its own factories or passed on from Chinese sources. Despite the TNLA’s hatred of drugs, Major Robert admitted that the vast majority of their weapons come from the UWSA. There is an ethnic bond between the TNLA and UWSA, too. The Ta’ang and Wa peoples are distant cousins.
Manufacturing and selling drugs has been the major source of finance for the armed struggle against the Burmese state since the 1960s. But the narcotics-averse TNLA has to find alternative means of income. Major Robert told me that the TNLA garnered financial support from the Ta’ang who live across the border in China. But I knew that the TNLA demanded involuntary contributions from the people in their homeland also, as well as ‘taxing’ the smuggled goods that move through the areas it controls on their way to and from China.
Compared to the UWSA and RCSS, though, the TNLA is a shoestring operation reliant above all on the extreme loyalty of their soldiers to the Ta’ang cause. Many are still teenagers, joining up at the age of eighteen and sent to the front line after only two months’ training. ‘There’s no more time, we need the fighters,’ said Tar Maw Shan. Ordinary soldiers are paid just 10,000 kyat (£5.50) a month, while officers like Major Robert earn 30,000 kyat (£16.50). ‘We do this for our people, not for the money,’ he stressed.
Having the Tatmadaw and its mercenary allies as enemies helps focus the mind of the soldiers as well. Burma’s military is an almost exclusively Bamar and Buddhist force, with Muslims banned from joining and the few Christians or members of the minorities who sign up unable to rise above the rank of major. It has never forgotten its Second World War roots as a unit trained by and attached to the Imperial Japanese Army. An unquestioning obedience to orders and a tendency to regard its opponents as less than human are the primary traits of the Tatmadaw.
Its recruits are mostly from inland Burma, far from the regions inhabited by the minorities they spend their careers fighting. Many Bamar display a distressing indifference or ignorance towards the other ethnic groups, able to perceive them only through clichés or prejudice. Others have a condescending attitude towards the minorities not dissimilar to the paternalistic view the British held of the peoples of the frontier areas.
Once Burma’s soldiers are on the borderland battlefields that casual racism and belief in the innate superiority of the Bamar can quickly turn into a contempt for their enemies that is expressed in the most callous manner. The 700,000 Rohingya pushed across the frontiers into Bangladesh, their villages destroyed and the women raped, can testify to that.
From the 1950s onwards the minorities were vociferous about the unwelcome treatment they received from the Tatmadaw units that passed through their areas, citing the way the soldiers were unable, or unwilling, to distinguish between fighters and non-combatant villagers. Worse was to follow in the coming decades, as the military implemented a new strategy to take on the communist insurgents and ethnic minority armies.
First conceived of in the 1960s, the ‘Four Cuts’ doctrine was designed to separate the rebel armies from the villages that were their bases and sources of support. By doing that the Tatmadaw could deprive them of the four things they needed the most: food, money, intelligence and recruits. It was a plan which echoed Britain’s response to the guerrillas who roamed upper Burma after the end of the Third Anglo-Burmese War, but was more directly inspired by the tactics employed by the British Army in combating the 1950s communist insurgency in Malaya. Then, half a million villagers were forcibly relocated to deprive the rebels of food and aid.
In Burma the strategy was taken much further. Entire villages in rebel areas were moved and surrounded by government troops, the villagers made to work for the Tatmadaw as forced labour. The empty villages left behind became free-fire zones, where anyone seen in them was assumed to be an enemy. People thought to be aiding the insurgents faced summary execution. Further terror tactics included using the locals as human shields, sent through minefields or ahead of advancing Tatmadaw units, while the rape of minority women became systematic throughout the borderlands.
Napalm was used,
too. The hills I drove through on my way to Namhsan were bombed with it in 1970. Over the years, hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced by the Four Cuts campaigns. Tens of thousands fled across the border with Thailand, where some of them are still confined in refugee camps. Confronted with such brutality it is natural that the minorities remain deeply distrustful of the military and the government.
Aung San Suu Kyi has asserted that bringing peace to Burma is her top priority. So far all she has done to promote that is to maintain the stance of the junta, who insisted that the ethnic armies must disarm and sign ceasefires before any talks about the political future of the borderlands could be held. But those who have agreed truces, as the Ta’ang did between 1991 and 2005, have seen little reward for their good faith. Surrender is now not an option for the TNLA and the other six armies still holding out.
‘We want the fighting to stop. We were happy when Aung San Suu Kyi and her government took power. We thought she would work for peace and a ceasefire. Now, we don’t think that,’ said Major Robert. ‘The Tatmadaw don’t want peace. She needs to talk to them about agreeing a ceasefire, not us. We can’t give up our guns. If the whole country is at peace, then maybe.’
Nothing disturbed our night on the hilltop. All that kept me awake was the relentless snoring of the second-in-command. Major Robert’s walkie-talkie was crackling while it was still dark, and the entire camp was out of their shelters before dawn. Below us the valleys were obscured by mist, a magic carpet of moisture that floated above them until the emerging sun burned it off.
Gathering around two smouldering logs, Major Robert and the other officers held a morning conference, discussing whether to stay on the ridge or move on. Everyone chipped in with a contribution, including unseen voices on the radios. ‘We’ll be staying here for a while, maybe a couple of weeks while we wait for fresh orders,’ Major Robert told me afterwards. ‘There will be more fighting soon. The Tatmadaw won’t pull back.’