Burma’s forgotten nation now paying the price of peace
Source : Paul Dillon, Scotsman(U.K)
THE dusty streets of Hsipaw, a bustling Burmese market town, overflow with children, animals and cheroot-smoking grannies lounging in the shade against baskets of vegetables. Hawkers flog everything from plastic machine-pistols to cheap Chinese-made soap outside the tent where rice farmers line up to pay 10 kaht (15p) to view the three-legged chicken, sad-faced monkeys and a dozing python as thick as a man’s thigh.
Caught in the crush beneath the Ferris wheel and magician’s tent are several expensive, late-model Isuzu four-wheel drive trucks, creaking Fifties-era army Jeeps and converted mini-buses bristling with smiling, heavily armed members of the Shan State Army (SSA).
The Shan’s annual harvest fair is about to begin but the real high-wire act is occurring behind the scenes. The SSA’s arrival in Hsipaw, 750km north-east of the capital, Rangoon, was preceded by the withdrawal of the equally well equipped Burmese national army. The hated tatmadaw, who occupy towns throughout the resource-rich Shan state, retired to their bases 5km to the north in the interests of maintaining a precarious ceasefire negotiated between the SAA and the government 11 years ago.
Both sides profit from the lucrative, cross-border trade into China and Thailand of opium, precious stones and human beings, but tensions are high and it is the kind of peace that might not survive a couple of litres of cheap Mandalay rum in the belly of a trigger-happy teenager.
"Generally, we have good relations with the other side; we move around without interference from the army, we fly our flag, we keep our weapons and they don’t try to stop us," Sao Hso Hten, the 64-year-old chairman of the SSA told The Scotsman during a two-hour interview at a well guarded safe house outside Hsipaw.
"Of course there are problems. They force the people to work like slaves without paying them. They terrorise the people. But, at this time they are too strong. We cannot fight them head-on because the high tide of armed struggle would fall on us and we are not ready."
For 30 years the Shan and more than a dozen other ethnic groups fought guerrilla wars against the Burmese. They claimed the government had betrayed the spirit of the agreements negotiated before independence from Britain in 1948 between Rangoon and various ethnic minorities, most notably the Kachin, Karen and Chin.
Among the first Shan to flee into the dense forests in 1958 to fight the Burmese was Sao Hso Hten, then a 22-year-old mining engineer with no military training. Today, he claims to have 10,000 armed followers. "We are much stronger today than in the past," he says, flicking the Rolex on his wrist as he reaches for a cup of tea. He claims his force has grown three-fold in the past decade. "Our men are very well trained, we have good weapons and we have structures right down village level.
"But the Shan people still have no human rights [and] we cannot match the army. They are 400,000 men with helicopters. As I said, we cannot afford full conflict at this time."
The State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) government and its predecessor, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), have been accused of everything from arbitrary arrest, torture and murder to forced relocation of civilians, forced labour, drug trafficking and sexual slavery. It is widely believed that the army, in co-operation with local warlords, smuggles opium, gold, silver, rubies, teak and other woods across the border. Another commodity, say human rights workers, are Shan women, bound not for promised manufacturing jobs but servitude in border brothels.
Human rights activists have also documented the forcible relocation of upwards of 300,000 Shan - from a population of eight million - out of SSA-controlled areas in the past three years. The use of forced or unpaid labour for everything from road construction to agriculture remains widespread. And, as Amnesty International reported in early December: "Torture has become an institution in Myanmar [Burma], used throughout the country on a regular basis. Police and the army continue to use torture to extract information, punish, humiliate and control the population."
While the day-to-day fighting in Shan state between the SSA and Burmese army may be a thing of the past, there are regular skirmishes between the two armies and suggestions of more to come. The SSA’s southern command was recently "invaded" by the tatmadaw who killed eight of his men and stranding several hundred SSA fighters in the mountains, Sao Hso Hten said.
On 25 November, upwards of 150 people (many of them innocent villagers) died during a battle in the town of Mong Koe between Burmese soldiers and a Shan faction in what Sao Hso Hten said was a power-play for control of local opium fields.
There is anecdotal evidence to suggest that the SSA has begun to receive military aid from Thailand. A flourishing trade in amphetamines manufactured by the Rangoon-supported United Wa State Army and shipped into Thailand has strained the rocky relationship between Bangkok and Rangoon. While the Thais may have turned a blind eye to much of the opium trade, they cannot ignore the surging use and availability of amphetamines on the streets of Bangkok.
In late November, a 40-man Shan unit attacked an amphetamine storage facility in a UWSA-controlled area, seizing 200,000 pills and arresting a dozen Burmese soldiers. It is widely believed that Thai soldiers participated in the attack.
Questioned on the source of his funding, the smile on the Sao Hso Hten’s face, which does not reach his heavily lidded eyes, never falters. Only when pushed hard on the issue - and the SSA’s alleged involvement in the drug trade - does his voice sharpen. The SSA collects "taxes" from companies mining in Shan state, and donations from local citizens, but does not smuggle opium.
"There are no poppies grown in this area," he claims. "We are not involved in this. If there is a poppy here, it is the [Burmese] army growing it. We grow sugar cane and corn, and we harvest teakwood in the forest. We are not like the Wa [Shan’s northern neighbors are considered the most powerful drug lords on the Burmese side of the border], who are getting fat and lazy living a good life in the city, driving in their big new cars."
If the SSA is not involved in the drug trade, then it is the only group in Shan state without a stake in the poppy fields. On a hillside less than 10km from Hsipaw, men in military dress carrying assault rifles are posted around empty fields. It is impossible to tell from a distance whether they are regular army.
Sao Hso Hten claims he is a democrat, that he wants an autonomous Shan state with its own constitution within a larger Burmese federation. How he expects to play out this end game is unclear, particularly as Rangoon has said his attempts to form political alliances violate the terms of the ceasefire.
"This is a very serious challenge to the ceasefire," he says. "We want to have a political voice and we are looking again at the ceasefire. The government is strong militarily but politically very weak."
Earlier this year, the SSA and the Shan State Peace Council agreed to support a South African-style truth and reconciliation commission that would grant amnesty to the Burmese military and the cadre of generals that has run the country for most the past five decades.
It is a dangerous new tack because it sets SSA on a collision course with popular sentiment here that the military must pay for the excesses of the past at the hands of a civilian government. While he supports her party, Sao Hso Hten believes Aung San Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy campaigner and Nobel Peace Prize winner who remains under house arrest in the capital, was "naive" to promise before the 1990 elections that the generals would be brought before the courts.
"This was the wrong tactic," said Sao Hso Hten. "The military have a crushing control over the country and they enjoy the power. I do not believe they will turn over that power if they believe they will be punished. They saw what happened to [the former Indonesian strongman] Suharto and now they are more scared."