The Burmese military has been accused of mass rape against ethnic minority women and girls. But this is a culture in which both the ruling junta and its opposition think nothing of using children to fight their war.
ITS MUZZLE TO his toes, Saw Yo Ba’s M16 reaches just shy of his armpit, where the stock disappears into the folds of his adult-sized fatigues. His gun is a standard metre long — one of half a billion small arms in circulation.
At 13, Yo Ba is one of 300,000 child soldiers worldwide. He is about 4ft 9in (1.47m) tall. In early June, he joined the armed wing of the Karen National Union (KNU) for the same reasons that child soldiers join militias the world over: a place to belong, a chance for revenge, a thing to do. Both Yo Ba’s parents were killed by the military junta that has been in power in Burma since 1988 (the country was renamed Myanmar the following year). His father was shot dead in their ancestral village when Yo Ba was three; his mother’s body was found hacked to death in a field when he was 11. Why were they killed? “Because we are Karen,” he says with a smile and shrug.
Yo Ba is more mascot than mercenary. The elders in his unit look after him. He is fed three meals a day — more than most of his fellow Karen, an ethnic group of seven million in eastern Burma along the Thai border, get to eat. Unlike the child soldiers enlisted by the military junta in Rangoon, Yo Ba is not forced to walk across an unmapped minefield. He can go home whenever he wants. Except, or course, that he has no home.
In Karen State, known to its inhabitants as Kawthoolay, or “land of the flowers”, death comes freely. It is as cheap as the Chinese landmines that seed these muddy hills and as expensive as the anti-malarial medicine no one can afford. Here, killing breeds familiarity and, ultimately, acceptance. Yo Ba acknowledges, rather absent-mindedly, that he enlisted in the KNU because he “wants to kill SPDC”, using the English acronym for the junta’s State Peace and Development Council. But to Yo Ba killing doesn’t mean the same as it does to people in the West. For him killing is a way of surviving.
Yo Ba’s attitude — a combination of nihilism and cheeriness — is common among the Karen fighting for survival inside Burma. In the week I spent with them around their 7th Brigade headquarters across the Moei River from Thailand, stories like his became familiar. One of the medics who nursed Yo Ba back from malaria described how she found her pregnant sister face down in the family rice paddy, her traditional Karen skirt — the longyi — partially removed, suggesting rape. A recent US State Department investigation has corroborated claims that Burmese military officials have systematically raped ethnic minority women. The medic’s sister’s body lay next to that of her brother-in-law, whose neck was almost severed from his torso, as were his arms. Yet the medic tells her story without emotion or anger.
At 13, Yo Ba was the youngest child soldier I met, though there are stories of even younger warriors. Thirteen is also the age that the Karen’s leader, General Bo Mya, took up arms. Now well into his seventies, he has been at war all his life. When Japan invaded colonial Burma, the ethnic Burmese sided with the Japanese while the Karen stayed loyal to the British. Then, in the aftermath of the Second World War the British, in search of the easiest solution, cut a deal with the Burmese, and left their erstwhile allies without a home, and without protection.
It was during the Japanese occupation that a young Bo Mya, and a generation of Karen, learned their guerrilla art. Those skills have allowed his people to survive decades of persecution by various regimes in Rangoon in what may be the world’s longest-running war, beating the conflict in the Middle East and Kashmir by a few years. Indeed, the shooting stops only when rain starts to fall, as it does for three months starting in late June.
Perhaps it is the noncombatant civilians who are the hardest hit as, according to Karen refugees, their land remains undeveloped. More than 100,000 of these refugees live in camps in Thailand. For more than 50 years the conflict has continued in varying degrees of intensity. Like the jungle itself, it is a constant struggle between genesis and decay. By some estimates, annual casualties are similar to America’s losses in the early stages of the Vietnam War — in the low thousands. High, but not high enough for UN intervention.
Some have called this “Burma’s forgotten war”, but that implies that the war was once remembered. If the Karen are known for anything today, it is for their child soldiers. Four years ago, Johnny and Luther Htoo, leaders of God’s Army, an offshoot of the KNU, made spectacular advances into territory that the SPDC was clearing of ethnic minorities. The twins made gripping headlines and sensational photos: the angelic Johnny juxtaposed against the cynical Luther. Their pictures and the story of their people’s plight spread around the world. For a moment, the international community showed some interest in the Karen. Then the twins fell out of international favour three years ago when God’s Army laid siege to a Thai hospital, demanding that their wounded be treated. A year later, Johnny and Luther surrendered to the Thai authorities.
The Htoo twins were nothing more than a sideshow to the ongoing conflict in Burma, say KNU regulars. They were more interested in tempting fate by dancing on landmines and exploring the superstitions of their religion — a conflation of animism and Christianity — than in fighting for Karen autonomy. Today, the twins live in relative obscurity under house arrest in Thailand.
It is a grim irony of this war that the Karen’s opposition has even more of a reputation for enlisting child soldiers. Defectors from the SPDC tell how Burmese youngsters are routinely kidnapped in Rangoon, forced into the army and then plied with yaa-baa (amphetamines) to fortify their courage. Along with unwilling porters (many of whom are “released” from Rangoon’s crowded jails) the child soldiers are used as sappers and ordered to lead a pack of men through unmapped minefields.
Stories about drug-addled child soldiers, like other reports of the SPDC’s outrages, regularly seep across the Thai border, but rarely make it much further. A recent Amnesty International report was an exception, concluding that “the situation for civilians in the east of Myanmar is cause for grave concern. The Government needs to show it is serious about human rights improvements throughout the country by taking urgent steps to protect civilians from forced labour, extortion and land confiscation at the hands of its armed forces”.
Official spokesmen in Rangoon dismissed the Amnesty report, suggesting — in a brash attempt to borrow the anti-terrorism language of the White House — that it “emanated from armed ethnic terrorist groups”. Either way, no one seemed to notice and Burma looks as if it will be a casualty of neglect in the world order. That leaves its fate in the hands of the armed insurgencies along the border and the non-violent movements in Rangoon.
Aung San Suu Kyi, the head of the National League for Democracy and 1991 Noble Laureate, and Bo Mya have spent their lives fighting for self-determination in Burma. And yet they have never met. They probably never will. When asked if he has ever spoken to her, Bo Mya shakes his head dismissively. “She doesn’t dare contact our armed groups,” he explains. Bo Mya doesn’t seem keen on breaking the ice. That’s because the Karen never trusted Suu Kyi’s father, a prominent independence leader (and ethnic Burmese) who was assassinated in 1947.
Shortly after Suu Kyi was released from her latest house arrest — this one lasting 20 months — the junta persuaded the Thai authorities to exile Bo Mya from his headquarters in Thailand, the first official exile of his 50 years of guerrilla insurgency. As he snaked back into a KNU stronghold inside Burma, Suu Kyi became relatively free.
Suu Kyi has spent much of the past decade under house arrest and is no stranger to seclusion. Educated at Oxford, she follows in the non-violent tradition of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. For many Burmese, she is the only bright spot in Burma’s bleak future.
By contrast Bo Mya’s classroom was the jungle: ceasefire is not in his vocabulary. Even in the monsoons of early August, the KNU holds training exercises, firing off M16s, mortars, and that staple of all Third-World wars, the rocket-propelled grenade. By any definition, it is a ragtag guerrilla army: barefoot or in flip-flops; short on supplies and long on morale.
Bo Mya claims to have 10,000 troops (the number is probably half that, say independent sources) and insists that victory will come soon, even as he sits in front of a poster of Rambo and an old yellowed newspaper clipping from one of Thailand’s English dailies that reads: “Against all odds the Karen continue their struggle.”
In many ways Burma’s ethnic tribes are similar to Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance. They control a fraction of the country’s border regions, are outnumbered and outgunned and, save outside intervention, face imminent defeat. A perpetual stalemate is their best hope. Some groups are unsavoury (mostly because of their drug trade) and others — in particular, the Karen — aren’t so bad. Many have known famine, war and drugs for generations. And just as the Tajik and Uzbek warlords of Afghanistan distrusted each other, as well as moderate Pashtuns from the south, the leadership of Burma’s ethnic tribes are not inclined to trust each other, nor a moderate from Rangoon like Suu Kyi.
Since assuming power in 1988, the junta has been efficient at exploiting these differences. In 1995, when a split in Karen leadership gave birth to Christian and Buddhist factions, the junta was quick to form an alliance with the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army. Now, these two groups of Karen are at war with each other, just as they once were united against the SPDC.
Some ethnic leaders hope that these disparate groups will unite against Rangoon instead of each other. But they also admit that their best chance lies more with Suu Kyi’s non-violent approach than with guerrilla insurgencies.
That may be a matter of practical realisation. Having signed ceasefires with 24 ethnic armies, the junta can concentrate its 400,000-strong army — which has increased from 180,000 since 1988 — on the holdout groups, most notably the Karen and the Shan. Meanwhile, the junta is making a play for international support, with an eye towards lifting the sanctions, by releasing political prisoners like Suu Kyi, in addition to some 300 others. But an estimated 1,400 dissidents remain under lock and key.
Bo Mya is now back in Thailand, planning operations for the dry season. He may not get the chance, as there are signs that the new Thai Government, eager for improved relations with Rangoon, is growing tired of hosting the Karen. Like Suu Kyi, Bo Mya may have to adjust to a life of seclusion — an exile in his own land. If that happens, his best hope for freedom may be Suu Kyi, a woman he doesn’t trust.
I ask Yo Ba if he thinks that peace will come to Burma. My translator, who up to this point has performed admirably, stumbles over “peace”. I rephrase: “Will the fighting ever end?” Yo Ba smiles and shakes his head. He “hopes not”. He still wants to shoot some SPDC.