THAI SIEGE
WILLIAM BARNES
True - up to a point. Two twin brothers - Luther and Johnny Htoo - do appear to possess unusual power over the army's 100 to 200 fighters after what their followers claim are uncanny tactical prophecies.
This is, in essence, merely a more flowery example of the deep superstition that many hill people steep themselves in to try to cope with a difficult, unpredictable and often irrational world.
Like many fighters on all sides of this nasty civil war, the Karen are often deeply superstitious, whether Buddhist or, in this case, Christian. Many wear amulets and tattoos they think will protect them from enemy bullets.
It is therefore no coincidence that reports of the twins' fantastic powers started to spread at a time when the group found itself faced with the nightmarish prospect of being harried into submission by a much larger, remorseless army of often-brutal ethnic rivals.
If Luther has a "1,000-year stare" and, like his more playful brother Johnny, smokes constantly, then he is probably aping the adults he sees around him in the sometimes disconcerting way that small children can.
The twins' legend began in 1997. According to refugee accounts, government troops were staging a major offensive and killed Karen men in front of their families, raped the women and torched villages.
When the army came to Johnny and Luther's village, the story goes, the twins said that seven men with seven weapons must attack the oncoming forces at a certain place. The Government troops were repulsed, and the twins' status was assured.
The Burmese military regime, for its part, has claimed that God's Army is merely an offensive offshoot of the more mainstream Karen National Union (KNU).
The junta blamed them - in part - for arming and sheltering the students who seized Burma's Bangkok embassy for a night last year.
In a statement issued in December, God's Army said it was sheltering the men because their actions were designed to trigger revolt against the junta and were not acts of terrorism.
Even in the murky world of border politics it seems unlikely that the KNU would want to risk provoking its vital links in Thailand with a provocative embassy siege - let along the callous taking of a hospital.
Critics of Burma's military regime will argue that it does not really matter whether the decision to seize the hospital was taken by 12-year-old twins, desperate former Karen villagers or frustrated Burmese ex-students.
Said one member of the opposition in Bangkok: "Ultimately this happens because these people have no redress. They can see no way out except death or dictatorship. That's the real sadness in all this."
THAI SIEGE
WILLIAM BARNES
That 53 years after independence a Karen rebel faction has found it necessary to be so bold as to seize a Thai hospital shows how wrong that view was. It has turned out to be one of the world's longest-running guerilla wars.
It was an anomaly of the independence constitution hammered out hurriedly with the nationalists before the British left that the Karen - though sturdy war-time allies of the British - were not presented with their own even theoretically autonomous state.
This proved to be a bad, even disastrous, omen. Bitter suspicions between the Karen and the Burmese who had been on opposite sides during the Japanese war erupted into open warfare soon after independence.
Karen militia and deserters from the Burmese Army raced through the country and reached the outskirts of Rangoon before they were stopped, and eventually rebuffed.
The terrible falling out between the powerful Karen and the ethnic Burmese nationalists did more than anything to set the pattern of insurrection and distrust that pervades the country to this day.
The modern Burmese Army might have been founded by opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi's father but its esprit de corps, its self-belief and its sense of mission were forged in those early post-war battles against ethnic minorities - principally the Karen.
This history of betrayal and revenge continually breathes life into the still bitter fighting that usually erupts every dry season as Rangoon tries to extinguish the remaining pockets of active Karen resistance.
No one should imagine that the Karen are angels: far from it they are tough, ruthless fighters.
But on balance the Karen's recent history would appear to show them more sinned against than as sinners.
It will merely be another tragedy if this latest action causes the media - in Thailand at least - to paint even the mainstream Karen rebels as renegades and misfits.
THAI SIEGE
WILLIAM BARNES
The rebels' desperate - probably foolish - actions appear to have been prompted by unusually Machiavellian and opaque manoeuvring by both Thai and Burmese soldiers along their shared border.The little Karen band who describe themselves as God's Army had managed against all the odds to hold on to their modest enclave in the face of fierce attacks by the Burmese army that captured most of the surrounding area three years ago.
But unfortunately they have had their backs to a Thai border patrolled by the relatively unfriendly Thai 9th Infantry Division.
For reasons that sometimes escape even veteran border watchers, this Thai army division has been notably rough in its handling of any Burmese they bump into.
"Something ugly has been going down at the border. There has been some dirty business going on," one informed observer said.
Whenever reports come from the border of men separated from their vulnerable families or refugees rebuffed back into a war zone, it is usually in an area where the 9th division is operating.
The brutal and efficient, but under-motivated, Burmese army appears at least partly to be driven by a desire to punish the God's Army for giving refuge to five former students who humiliated the ruling generals by seizing the country's Bangkok embassy last year.
Yet over the past few days the God's Army has not only been trying to hold off the Burmese - they also appear to have been forced to defend themselves from the Thai army.
The Thai military has shelled the area occupied by perhaps 3,000 Karen in the God's Army area, officially as a warning to both sides not to let the fighting spill over the border.
The Thai armed forces in this area appear unusually close to their Burmese counterparts across the border - probably partly because of long-standing business relations between the two armies in the area.
Embedded Content: Godsarmy4.jpg: 00000001,00000001,00000000,6efb28be