MAINICHI ARTICLE ON THE KAREN (r)

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Mainichi Daily News 
August 12, 1999, 

Burma's anonymous rebels fight on 

Features on Asia from Japanese magazines, by Michael Hoffman 

'The Burmese soldiers came to my village. It was last August. I was five
months pregnant. I couldn't escape. I had my 2-year-old son with me, and I
was suffering horribly from morning sickness. They took me away with
nothing but the clothes on my back. They were rounding up villagers to work
as porters. They tied my hands in front of me. On my back I carried
military hardware, and my son." 

A 32-year-old Karen woman named Muk is talking to photojournalist Shuko
Ogawa, on assignment for Sapio (8/11). 

"The army advanced slowly. We only walked a few hours a day. But even when
we stopped, they made us keep the baggage on our backs so we wouldn't run
away. They gave us nothing to eat. I picked green bananas growing wild by
the side of the road. When my son cried I gave him some." 

It was three days before the party reached their destination, a village
called Wamiklaw. "The Burmese soldiers robbed every village they came to.
They took food, clothing. When they caught me they took the 100 chickens
I'd been raising. They took longyis, they took pots ..." 

Muk never learned the purpose of the army's march, or was too distracted to
care. They stayed four days. Then began the trek back. Ill and
half-starved, Muk collapsed. They left her. Some local villagers took her
in and nursed her to health. As soon as she was able to walk, she and her
son plodded on toward her home village. They found it a smoldering ruin.
They kept going. 

Muk has an aunt living across the border in Thailand, and she may have been
thinking of going there. Instead she ended up at a Karen refugee camp
called Melaptaw. She found her husband. Her son came down with malaria. The
baby was born, very small and weak, but alive. Muk's breasts give no milk.
Powdered milk is unavailable. She must feed the baby rice gruel. 

Melaptaw is in Burma's Karen State, on the Moei River that marks the border
with Thailand, 500 kilometers east of Rangoon. The first refugees began
straggling in last August, around the time the pregnant Muk was being
marched with weapons, ammunition and her little son on her back. In the
year since, writes Ogawa, the camp's refugee population has swollen to some
5,000 -- Karen villagers, most of them, whose villages have been
incinerated by government troops come to quell rebellion, forage for food,
and recruit forced labor. 

Revolt against the military regime that rules in defiance of a humiliating
1990 electoral defeat is not, Sapio points out, limited to Aung San Suu Kyi
and her National League for Democracy. Suu Kyi may be the most compelling
symbol in the world today of
resistance to the illegitimate government, and she is certainly the
sharpest thorn in the junta's side, but the Karen, the only ethnic group
the government has failed to woo into its fold, are as persistent as she is
-- and less committed to nonviolence.  

They battle on, however, under pathetically adverse circumstances. The
separate peace agreements the junta negotiated with other disaffected
ethnic groups gave it more firepower to aim at the Karen. The capture in
1995 of the Karen "capital" of Manerplaw highlighted the odds the rebels
face. Bo Mya, the notorious 71-year-old leader of the Karen National Union
(KNU) guerrilla force, remains triumphantly defiant. That may keep the
fight going, but it seems unlikely to win it. 

How deeply his buoyant optimism penetrates the rank-and-file is hard to
say. It is not in evidence among the people Ogawa talks to for her Sapio
report. Samuu, 23, was, like Muk, impressed as a porter. Unlike Muk, she
says she was raped every night by as many as four soldiers at a time. After
supper, Ogawa hears from a Karen refugee worker who spoke to Samuu, the six
or seven female porters would be dragged at knifepoint to separate places,
where they could hear each other scream. Samuu escaped after 10 days with
some male porters and slipped across the border. At a Karen camp in
Thailand, she was given a medical check which found her three months
pregnant. She soon miscarried. An AIDS test, Ogawa adds, was not
administered. 

The nine refugee camps on the Thai side of the river are supported by
nongovernmental organizations and international aid agencies. Even so, the
subsistence level is bare minimum. The nine Thai camps have a combined
registered population of 86,000 -- compared to 10,000 15 years ago. In
Burma, there are an estimated 300,000 refugees. 

Melaptaw, a two-hour walk from a Burmese Army base, is a refuge of doubtful
security. Still, Ogawa writes, many Karen prefer it, and others like it, to
the safer camps in Thailand. Muk and her husband are among them. Thai camps
are run along lines entirely removed from traditional village routines.
"And here," Muk says, "there are people from our own village." 

There is a degree of independence and self-sufficiency that Ogawa says the
Thai camps don't allow. At Melaptaw, residents gather food in the
mountains, and even clear land for fields.  

"The reason they don't want to go to Thailand," says a Karen refugee
worker, "is that in the Thai camps there is no freedom. You can't go into
the woods, you can't grow crops. There is no work. Some people have
actually slipped back across the border into Burma because they couldn't
get along with the Thai camp superintendents." 

>From Melaptaw, Ogawa proceeds to a nearby KNU base where she sees two
children -- "fighters" -- bent over their automatic rifles, assembling and
disassembling them. It's part of their training. They are brothers, aged 14
and 12. They arrived in January 1998, refugees from a torched Karen
village. Their mother, a widow, was killed in the gunfire that accompanied the
torching. 

The boys work with the single-minded concentration of children -- or of men
with a mission. They attend lessons at the camp school, and dream of
growing up to be soldiers. "The Burmese government soldiers set my village
on fire," says the elder boy. "That's no lie. There are photos. Ask the
commander to show them to you. It's true." 

Sapio is right. Burmese resistance is not just Aung San Suu Kyi. It's also
this 14-year-old child, and thousands of others like him, determined some
day to make somebody pay for their suffering.  
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