Burma: A War of Attrition (1)

Daniel Pedersen Journalist

As the world’s focus shifts tentatively once again towards Burma, the spectre of myriad ethnic minority armies at war with the ruling junta and, at times, factions of their own races, there is an alarming human rights tragedy playing itself out. Dan Pedersen spent much time with the Karen ethnic minority and communicates with the leaders to this day. He says any solution for Burma must involve the ethnic minorities intimately, otherwise the fighting will continue, regardless of who holds the country’s reins. And this is why. Part 1 is drawn from articles written for The Courier Mail and the South China Morning Post.

Northern Thailand, Christmas Eve, 2000.
EACH morning the young Burmese men’s commander delivered a diatribe about the Karen people and how it was critical they be killed to a man. He would shake with fury as he shouted that horns grew from their heads and they were nothing more than animals.
The two young Burmese soldiers of the State Peace and Development Council, or the Tatmadaw, believed him, they knew no better. But since they have deserted their battalion – Light Infantry 549 – the Karen at Thailand’s Mae La refugee camp have fed and clothed them and tried to find them jobs.
Their former commander used to tell his troops the Karen wanted only to kill all the Burmese on the face of the earth.
On the night they fled, November 11, 2000, they still did not know whether their commander was right.
But they opted to risk it and make for Thailand. They had decided even death was better than continuing to work for the ruling junta, the SPDC, as foot soldiers.
“I left because of what we were forced to do to the Karen people,” said 17-year-old Kyaw Khaing.
“We would go into the Karen villages and demand chickens from the people and round them up to use them as porters – if they didn’t cooperate we had to yell at them and beat them.
“I thought it was wrong and I told my friend that we shouldn’t do it, but he told the commander what I had said and I was beaten very badly, that was the day I knew I had to get out,” he said.
Kyaw Khaing was roped into military training at 12 years of age.
He had been working in Rangoon to raise money for his family because his upcountry village was poor.
But when he received news that his father had died he began walking home.
On the second day of his journey the police arrested him, because he did not have an identity card.
In Burma identity cards are issued only to people 18 years and older.
The police took him to a military unit and he began five-and-a-half months’ training.
Shortly after his 13th birthday he became a fully-fledged soldier of Burma’s armed forces.
He never made it to his father’s funeral and has not seen his family since he was 12.
It is unlikely he will ever see them again.
His only aspiration is that he might find a job in Thailand.
But if he can’t he will return to the Burmese jungle and take up the fight against the SPDC with the All Burma Students Democratic Front, one of many ethnic minority guerrilla armies fighting the ruling military junta.

HTUN HTUN is now 19 and joined the armed forces more than five years ago; he is a hardened soldier and has been repeatedly involved in close contact fighting with the KNLA.
“I used to beat the Karen villagers if they wouldn’t cooperate with us, those were my orders,” he said.
“If they attempted to run away, we were supposed to shoot to kill, but I used to shoot at the ground to scare them into stopping . . . then I would beat them and arrest them.”
Both the soldiers are Buddhists, and Htun Htun recounted religiously inspired attacks on villages.
“We walked into Ka La Ner, a Muslim village, and told everyone to leave for three days.
“First we burned the mosque, then began forcibly relocating those who refused to leave, we established the village as our base and then took control of 25 others surrounding it.”
He said the villagers were immediately used to harvest more than 200 hectares of rice they had grown to carry them through the coming dry season, also known as the “hungry” season.
With the battalion’s food supplies refreshed, the villagers were then used as porters.
Tatmadaw (Burmese nationalist forces) move constantly, and when they had finished using the village as a base they set fire to it. More than 100 families’ homes were razed to the ground.
Htun Htun said the use of forced labour throughout Karen state was rampant and prisoners were a common source of labour for road construction.
He believes what the Tatmadaw is doing is wrong and that is why he fled.
But when he was a soldier if he was told to beat villagers, he beat them – those were his orders and a soldier follows orders.
As he recounts his tale the younger Kyaw Khaing begins to weep.
They are not the tears of a child, but of a man wracked by the misery of five years of constant war.
While Htun Htun believes what he did was wrong, he now wants to make up for it.
His decision to join Burma’s armed forces was a bad one, he said.
Yet at least he had the opportunity to make a bad decision.
Kyaw Khaing did not.
And that is why he is crying.

“Burma, as all the world knows, was fought over twice during World War II and now almost forgotten by the outside world though it had been a principal theatre of war a year ago and was once one of the two countries besides China, the other being the Philippines, which notably organised resistance movements against militaristic Japan. Moreover its inevitable importance in the strategy of the Far East and South East Asia, apart from its no mean economic potentialities, though the country is small and population not considerable, merits or rather demands much more interest and active attention from the outside world, especially from those vitally interested in the maintenance of creative peace in the East and the world. It is necessary for them to know what Burma is, has been and will be, what it can offer and receive from the outside world.”
Aung San, Rangoon, July 15, 1946

Burma, January 2001.
A soldier with no hands passes a cigarette from his stumps to his mouth and admires the shine on the barrel of his freshly polished AK-47 through his one good eye.
He is one of almost 300 soldiers of the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) Sixth Brigade’s Battalion 201 who have mustered to provide security for a massed gathering on the 52nd Karen Revolutionary Day.
The Karen is a Burmese ethnic minority, numbering about seven million, and populates the western region of the country.
The Karen people took up their fight little more than a year after Burma received its independence from Great Britain on January 4, 1948.
It was on January 31, 1949 that the Karen declared they would fight for their own political determination and to this day remain the only ethnic minority that has not signed a peace deal with Burma’s ruling military junta, the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC).
On January 31, 2001, they gathered in the Burmese region of Wah Lay Kee, about 100km from Thailand’s northern border town of Mae Sot.
The 201st commander Ner Dah, nursing his nine-month-old daughter, spoke quietly on the eve of the celebrations about the need to negotiate with the ruling military junta.
He is the son of the late General Bo Mya, a British-trained soldier who had, until his death in 2007, fought in the armed conflict since its first day.
Ner Dah is also one of the future leaders of the Karen people.
At all times he is flanked by his most trusted men, one of whom proudly wears a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “I need you like I need a hole in the head”.
“Sometimes you can be too proud about your national identity,” said Ner Dah, and urged a distinct separation between nationalist ideals and xenophobic pursuit of an unachievable target.
“The question now is how can we compromise, how do we approach this issue with mutual respect?”
He believes, should there be a genuine attempt at negotiating the Karen goal of freedom and peace within a democratic federated union of Burma – long advocated by Nobel laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, peace will be forthcoming.
Suu Kyi is the daughter of Burmese national hero Aung San, who founded the first Burmese army.
He was assassinated in July 1947 – his murder is marked on the Burmese calendar as Martyrs Day, respected all over Burma.
The Karen National Union (KNU), the political overseer of the KNLA, was made privy to “secret” talks during 2000 between Rangoon-based National League for Democracy leader Suu Kyi and some of the SPDC’s leading generals.
“We must be flexible, there must be a measure of give and take,” says Ner Dah.
The KNU at that point had not yet been invited to participate in the development of the SPDC’s new constitution, but was keen to enable such an invitation.
That was something of a turnaround from past years, when the KNU headquarters was inside Burma, at Mannerplaw, and large signs branded the entrance to KNLA headquarters with the force’s slogan: “Give me liberty or give me death”.
Today there are troops scattered along both sides of the Thai-Burma border and Thailand is a refuge that enables the KNU to continue its fight.
While increased pressure for reforms from the international community is having some effect, Ner Dah believes there is no indication of a major shift in direction from the ruling junta.
“Currently there are 300,000 IDPs [internally displaced people] in Karen state alone, human rights abuses are continuing and we are attempting to protect the populace, there has been little improvement,” he said.
“It is my personal point of view that the SPDC believes they can control us [the KNLA] militarily, but they cannot.”
In the distance, behind Ner Dah, a continuous line of people led by candlelight walks down a hillside in Thailand and crosses the stream marking the Thai-Burma border.
By mid evening the crowd numbers more than 1000 people, present to commemorate 52 years of conflict.
They have come from areas within Karen state and the numerous refugee camps in this region of Thailand; for many families and friends it will be the first time in 12 months they have seen each other.
The stream people cross to enter Burma did not always mark the border, a sliver of Karen state on the other side was lost during demarcation negotiations between Thailand and Burma following British withdrawal.
On the eve of Revolutionary Day a Burmese man accused of spying on the KNLA is tethered in the camp’s compound.
It was alleged he infiltrated the headquarters of the 201st brigade almost one year ago, and had been reporting their activities to SPDC troops operating deeper inside Burma.
He was discovered just two days before the celebration of Karen Revolutionary Day and spent that day – as he had the previous two – under intense interrogation.
Possibly loaning some urgency to the desire to enter negotiations with the junta is the deep concern within the KNU leadership about Thailand’s ever-shifting alliances.
For the KNU and the KNLA to survive logistically would be impossible without at least Thailand’s grudging acceptance of foreign forces’ presence on its soil.
But political change in Thailand is constant and often comes when least expected, the KNU walks a tightrope.
It is with good reason the Karen are concerned, in late 1999 the SPDC attacked the 201st headquarters from its only land entry not blanketed by land mines – from the Thai side.
That attack was repelled, but the SPDC maintained a major base of 300 men at Ka New Lay, about an hour and a half’s walk from the Wah Lay Kee camp, and a smaller contingent of 70 men within mortar range.
The only way the SPDC could have mounted that attack was with the acquiescence of the Thai military.
The Burmese forces brought truckloads of troops along the border inside Thailand, most likely enabled by hefty bribes to selected Thai military commanders.
Such an event for the time being is uncommon, but it remains a dangerous precedent – it is unlikely a wave of sustained attacks could be fought off by the KNLA.
As young men and women perform traditional Karen danced on a makeshift volleyball field during revolutionary day celebrations the badly mauled soldier with no hands, La Muang, had me light him another cigarette and explained how he lost his hands, one eye and sustained serious leg damage.
“I was setting a mine; it was in 1991, as I connected the batteries the thing just exploded.”
Such stories are common – the KNLA’s mines are primitive devices consisting of bamboo lengths packed with unstable explosives and any available shrapnel.
Unlike many wounded soldiers La Maung did not seek refuge at a hospital in one of the Karen refugee camps scattered along this border.
“I stayed with the KNLA as I healed, which took about a year, and I re-trained myself to handle a weapon,” he said.
A worn cleft in his right stump enables him to engage the trigger and, during the past decade of life in the front lines of this dirty war he has developed remarkable dexterity when handling his weapon.
He is just 30 years old and yet a veteran of 15 years’ fighting, he estimates he has killed more than 30 Burmese soldiers since his accident.
For how much longer he will have to fight is a question that is beyond his comprehension to answer.

The four principles of the Karen revolution:

* We shall decide our own political destiny.’

Laid down by the founder of the Karen National Union, Saw Ba U Gyi.

The Karen people constitute the second most populous race in today’s Burma,
KNU population projections put the total number of the Karen at about seven million.
A 1931 British census, the last official attempt at accurate population estimates, had the Karen race making up about nine percent of Burma’s total population.
The Burmese race at that time was thought to constitute 65 per cent of the population, however even those figures are debated to this day, because it is believed Buddhist Karen would have been counted as Burmese.
During the 1800s much of the Karen population, some say as many as half, were converted to Christianity.
The Karens belief in a single god and a single religious script led some American missionaries to mistakenly believe they had discovered a lost tribe of Israel.
The Karen maintain their origins lay in Mongolia and that they first arrived in what is today Burma in 739BC.
The first official proposal to create an independent Karen state came in 1928, the year the man widely regarded as the “father of the Karen nation”, Dr San C. Po, had his book, ‘Burma and the Karens’, published in London.
He wrote that the Karens sought “to have a country of their own, where they may progress as a race and find the contentment they seek”.
He compared the union between the English, Welsh, Scots and Irish with the complexity that Burma and its ethnic minorities presented. The Karen, he wrote, were like “Gallant little Wales”.
During World War II the Karen fought alongside the British, while Aung San’s Burman nationalist forces initially placed faith in the Japanese forces’ concept of the “Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere”.
Aung San’s forces, however, performed a turnabout on March 8, 1945 and began fighting against the Japanese.
Following the allied victory in Burma, Aung San’s forces made a point of entering the major population centres before the allied forces were able to do so.
And there remained much resentment among nationalists of the role the Karen had played during the conflict – and they were to pay dearly for their choice to back the British.
In the years of rapid transition that followed, British colonial forces could barely keep pace with the changes occurring in areas under their control.
The Karen repeatedly received mixed signals from their colonial administrators and allies.
By 1944, the precept that Burma should in some way become self-governing, was accepted.
In the first unofficial policy document created in November 1944 a “reconstruction period” of as long as six years was recommended.
But the document recommended the “frontier areas”, which included areas to which the Karen had laid claim, “should not form part of the proposed Burmese dominion until such time as they clearly express a desire to join it”.
Then head of the Frontiers Areas Administration, HNC Stevenson, warned as early as June 1946 that there was the serious possibility of a Karen rebellion.
He said if the Karens were to go “all out” in pursuit of their demands, and backed by their four years’ experience of guerilla warfare supporting the British during World War II, they would take up the fight to the Burmese.
He said the Karen believed their years of loyalty would be repaid with a home state, but added that without realization of such: “When we go, if go we do, the war for Karen state will start”.
The Karen National Union was formed in 1947 by Saw Ba U Gyi.
When it became clear that the British were going to have no part in the establishment of an independent Karen state, in 1949 he led his charges underground.
Saw Ba U Gyi was killed fighting for his homeland the following year.
The fight for Karen state, ominously forseen by Stevenson in 1946, continues to this day.

Bangkok, September 2000.
The instructions came hard and fast through the telephone and the call was terminated.
“Three minutes black Toyota, registration 85362, in front of the lobby”.
And once again the clandestine world of the Karen National Union and its guerilla army took control.
The meeting’s location, with senior KNU leaders, had at the last minute been changed, and what followed was a wild car ride through narrow city streets flanked by food carts and karaoke bars which ended deep in an underground car park.
The vehicle’s driver, an overweight Frenchman with distressed grey hair uttered just one thing at ride’s end: “All the women are whores and Indians own all the hotels here . . . welcome, I am a friend of the Karen National Union”.
The meeting was with KNU general secretary Mahn Sha and Karen Youth Organisation president Htoo Naw.
The Karen people are fighting a very strange war indeed.
Many of the KNU leaders live in Thailand and the Karen National Liberation Army’s existence and its ongoing operations is widely accepted and supported by Thailand.
The KNLA was once used as a buffer force by Thailand to keep Burma’s ruling military junta, then the State Law and Order Restoration Council, at bay.
However, since Burma’s controversial acceptance as a full member of the Association of South East Asian Nations in 1997, the importance of such a force has somewhat diminished.
During the meeting Mahn Sha relayed a tale of horror.
The International Labour Organisation, the world’s watchdog for worker’s rights, had set a deadline for the State Peace and Development Council to prove an end to forced labour – that deadline had passed.
Yet Mahn Sha alleged there were more than 300 shackled prisoners from Burmese jails working in frontline regions in just one small section of Karen state along the Thai border.
Also, as many as 200 local villagers were being used to lug munitions and food for SPDC troops, he said.
Several Karen villages had been burned down, and the KNLA had launched a significant offensive against SPDC troops as a result.
Mahn Sha and Htoo Naw said 16 prisoners had recently escaped SPDC troops deep inside Burma and fled to a refugee camp in Karen state’s Mae Le Poe Ta region – about 150km north of Thailand’s Mae Sot on the banks of the Moei River.
The prisoners told Karen National Liberation Army soldiers that 65 of their number – of which there were originally more than 300 – had died in the past few months because of harsh conditions imposed by SPDC troops.
Mahn Sha said SPDC troops had received new orders to keep villagers who were being used as forced labour under ever-tighter security.
“Those working in forced labour conditions are now facing much harsher punishments, troops have been ordered to allow no escapes, because of the risk of sanctions by the international community,” he said.
The KNU had substantial evidence of continuing forced labour in frontline war zones, and was prepared to present it to the world.
KYO president Htoo Naw Than Aung said recent fighting in Karen state near Thailand’s Mae Sot had resulted in a large weapons haul by the KNLA.
The Karen also took one prisoner.
During interrogation the prisoner was said to have claimed the SPDC had threatened all soldiers with between seven and 15 years’ jail unless they achieved set military goals.
The captured SPDC soldier said during intense fighting in which the KNLA gained the upper hand, the Burmese staged an undisciplined withdrawal.
A base camp was lost and he abandoned his weapon and communications equipment.
He was ordered to retrieve his gun and radio or face 20 years’ jail.
He was captured while trying to get his weapon back.
The Karen war is one in which the general populace inside Burma is facing horrific living conditions.
Villagers are arbitrarily used as slave labour to lug ammunition and heavy armaments across unforgiving terrain.
Food is constantly demanded from them by roaming SPDC troops on seek and destroy missions in KNLA heartland.
The Burmese troops’ modus operandi is to beat to death – generally in full view of their families – anyone who refuses to cede to their demands.
The human cost for the Karens has been massive, strung out along Thailand’s border are more than 110,000 refugees.
But this is in Thailand; and they are watched from high points by the Thai military, allegedly protected from Burmese troops.
That is debatable; on January 28, 1997, two large Karen refugee camps, Huay Kalok and Huay Bong were razed to the ground by the Burmese military and their ally, the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA).
The two camps together housed more than 10,000 people, more than half of them were left homeless as a result of the attacks.
Under siege the following morning was Mae La refugee camp, then home to more than 25,000 people.
The SPDC and DKBA launched lightning raids from the surrounding mountains and pillaged the camps before setting them alight.
The questions to this day remain: How did foreign troops travel undetected for kilometres into Thailand; and why did the Thai military not act?
In Mae Sot, a sprawling border town, 19-year-old Naw Hellerpaw Bhutto handed over her education certificate.
Her headmistress Naw Moo Day Keh issued the certificate after the 1997 raid on her home camp – Huay Kalok.
The certificate explained that Burmese troops had burned down Naw Heller’s school and home, and thus her education had effectively ended in the middle of the night.
But the teacher assured that: “Naw Heller Paw is of sound moral character”.
The two destroyed camps were eventually consolidated into one site that was more secure, according to the Thai military, 6km inside Thailand, the merger created the high altitude Umpheim Mai.

“Unless there is rule of law in this country, unless there is a system of government which will guarantee the people the basic right to life, the very basic right to life, there will be a continuing stream of refugees fleeing across our border.”
Aung Sun Sui Kyi March 1998 address to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

This series, this evocative account of the Burmese tragedy, continues above