The Guardian - Two little boys

The generals: An exclusive interview with the 12-year-old twins who lead the most desperate guerrilla army in the world.

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Two little boys

Johnny and Luther Htoo are fighting a hopeless war. The small band of guerrillas they command is up against 21,000 troops of the Burmese army who have wiped out or displaced most of their people. But the war is really about a gas pipeline - and the company behind the pipeline is British. By Maggie O'Kane

The Guardian - Thursday July 27, 2000

There is a crunch of bamboo stalks underfoot and the first of four bodyguards appears, wearing a black judo guerrilla uniform and a black headscarf. He scans the clearing. Then the 12-year-old commander of God's Army of the Holy Mountain arrives.
Luther Htoo is dressed in a short-sleeved khaki shirt with an Airforce One badge on his right arm. On his forearm is the tattoo of a fish pierced with a spear. He nods to one of the bodyguards, who passes him a lit cheroot, then he spits and climbs on to his bodyguard's knee. His special protector is called Rambo, a 28-year-old fighter who has been with him for three years. He likes playing with Rambo's long, thick, black hair.

Luther, the leader of the youngest and most desperate guerrilla army in the world, accepts a chocolate biscuit. He says his younger twin, Johnny, second in command of Burma's God's Army of the Holy Mountain, might be along later. Or he might not.

The meeting with the twins has taken two months to organise. The final part of the journey began in the middle of the night with a nervous, greedy taxi driver who could be bribed to drive to the jungle, but who played the Best Gospel Album in the World over and over to comfort himself. As he raced against the dawn to pass the last military checkpoint while its guards were still sleeping, a young Vera Lynn-like voice belted through Soul of My Saviour again and again.

Then, mosquitoes and steamy jungle heat along a path that went up and up. A mountain jungle blocked by fallen trees, sprinkled with giant anthills and odd, empty cartons of UHT milk chucked into the bushes by passing guerrillas.

God's Army of the Holy Mountain was born three years ago when the Burmese army moved in to swamp the route of a multi-million pound gas pipeline and clear thousands of people before them. For 50 years the Burmese army and the Karen, one of Burma's three main ethnic groups, had skirmished, but in the early 90s the Burmese army launched opera tion Spirit King. Its aim was to wipe out the Karen and secure the route of the pipeline. A hundred thousand Karen fled to refugee camps across the Thai border.

The British consortium Premier Oil began pumping gas through Karen land in April. The UK energy consultant Wood McKenzie estimates that the pipeline will earn Premier Oil - which includes Japanese and Thai oil companies and the brutal Burmese regime - almost £500m over the next 25 years.

The roof of the jungle is webbed in a fine green net from the ferns of the bamboo trees. Today, there is a wind rattling the stalks of bamboo. When the wind stops there is complete silence. There are no birds: the people have eaten them, as they have eaten most of the jungle cats and wild monkeys.

Luther and Johnny were discovered three years ago by a television crew who went looking for the Burmese students who had fled after taking over the Burmese embassy in Bangkok. The cameras found the students in the camp of the twins, who were nine years old at the time, and the myth of the guerrilla children who smoked cheroots and were scarcely big enough to hold an M16 rifle was born. In Canada, prompted by the TV pictures, a retired Playboy bunny offered to adopt them. A website, johnnyandluther.com, was registered.

Then the twins disappeared in the jungle. Now, they keep disappearing in the middle of a question to slide down the river banks with the other boys in their group on the back of a cardboard box with the words "Instant Noodles in Sour Shrimp Paste" written on in black ink. Their army is an army of orphans, their camp a mobile foster home for the remnants of the Karen people's 50-year fight for independence against the Burmese.

Two years ago, at the end of 1998, God's Army had 500 soldiers and Johnny and Luther were reported to be working miracles: landmines were jumping up in front of them and soldiers who fought with them were able to brush off bullets like a jungle shower. The Baptist preachers who had brought Christianity to the Burmese jungle from Salem, Massachusetts, 100 years ago had also brought the cult of deliverance to a destroyed people. The Karen needed saviours.

In March 1997, in the Htaw Maímaw district of eastern Burma, a local pastor brought two illiterate nine year olds to the military chief and said the Lord had spoken to them and they would save the Karen people. News of the visitation passed through an area where the Burmese army was cracking down hard after the Karen had killed eight workers on the pipeline.

The military chief gave the children a "pistol complete with bullets and everything", says the pastor, Thah Hpay, who also went with the twins into their first battle.

"That morning there were 20 enthusiastic men there and our commander Luther shouted 'God's Army!' and everyone in the cart shouted back 'God's Army!' At 6.20pm at the Manderlay church where the enemy was we selected eight from among us to serve as commandos and we named them 'Jesus Commandos'. We attacked the enemy at Manderlay and shot dead 24 of them. For the next battle, at Aímlat, we started to fight at 3pm and the battle lasted for two hours. Those that attacked were 16 but the enemy were hundreds."

So the beautiful myth of divine salvation for a desperate people was born and the cult of the twins began to grow. The old Karen military had become corrupt, and the twins represented purity. Hovering in the background at the camp, dressed in loud Hawaiian shirt, is the twins' dwarf uncle, a man called Mr David, who reminds them of the rules: "No duck, no pork, no eggs, no swearing, no womanising."

Johnny doesn't smile much. He is dressed in a black judo suit and his long chestnut hair just covers his shoulders, where a badge reads: "Number One Military Commander".

Luther does the talking from his bodyguard's knee, swatting at a yellow butterfly that comes again and again to settle on his head.

"I shoot the Burmese army because of what they do to our people," he says. "They beat and rape Karen women, they steal from us and burn down our houses. Some holy thing touched my heart and I became a soldier."

"How did the holy thing touch you. Did it come in the night?"

"No, in the day."

"How did it touch you?"

"I don't remember."

"Would you like to go in an airplane and see the world outside the jungle?"

"No, I want to stay here with my people. In my homeland, in my own area."

"What do you do all day?"

"I play - at fake battles, shooting birds. We use real guns."

"When was your last real battle?"

"A month ago. We were gathering chillies in the field and we saw a Burmese army patrol and we killed two of them."

"Do you miss your mother?"

"Yes." She is in a refugee camp on the Thai border. "But I love my people more."

Luther is bored now with questions and wants to play with the tape recorder.

"Give it to me and I will take it into the battle. I will tape the sounds of fighting on the battlefield and when we capture a Burmese soldier I will ask him questions and give it to you."

There was nobody with a tape recorder to tape the sounds of the Burmese army arriving at the village of Ler Per Her 10 days ago. The only sound there now is the plop, plop, plop of giant raindrops dripping through the holes in the roof of the schoolhouse that the army burned down.

The remains of Friday's lesson are still on the blackboard. The senior class was doing multiplication; the juniors were learning a song in English: "I'm a little teapot short and stout. Pick me up and pour me out."

Now, like the other Karen villages that once lined the route of the pipeline, Ler Per Her is near-deserted. Its only remaining inhabitant, a woman named Wah Wah, is cooking rice in a hut in the afternoon downpour. She is tired of running: over the past 10 years she has been driven from four villages by the Burmese army.

This time, she says, the attack came at 3pm. "It was a Sunday. Everyone panicked and started running for the river. There were nearly 2,000 people in this village, but we had only three canoes. People were throwing their children on to them and loading them down to within an inch of the water. Some people didn't wait for the canoes, they just panicked and started swimming."

Wah Wah had five children, but in the decade she has spent on the run from the army, four of them have died.

"They died from illnesses that I couldn't get medicine for because we were hiding in the jungle," she says. "Do you know what age they were? One was eight, two were four and the other one was one and a half."

Across the river that marks the Burma-Thailand border, Dr Bill Greiser of the Christian fundamentalist group Strategic World Impact is one of the few aid workers treating the Karen who have escaped. "These people are mostly suffering from exhaustion and stress from being continually on the move," he says. "There's malaria, there's malnutrition, but mostly they are chronically depressed - they've been running like this for years."

A preacher, a tall American in his 30s, calls on these wet, miserable people who are covered in jungle muck to stand up and "take the Lord into their hearts". Under the leaking bamboo shelter, he shares out anti-malaria pills with his big, warm, white American hands, then raises them towards the roof and cries: "We thank the Lord for bringing us home to you."

It was in a heaving, overcrowded refugee camp that Luther's bodyguard, Rambo, found God three years ago. He wears his Bible around his neck in a green silk purse. His only other valuable possession is a Burmese passport carefully wrapped in plastic that tells him he is a citizen of a country he is not allowed to live in.

"Other young Karen men like me are trying to get out, to go to Australia, but God has told me to fight for my country and to follow Luther and Johnny." It is Rambo's job to translate the scriptures that the illiterate Luther can't read. He opens his Bible and in a halting, reverent voice reads from the Book of Corinthians.

" 'But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.'

"That's one of his favourites," says Rambo, searching again through his Bible wrapped in paper with pale pink roses. "He likes this one as well. Timothy, chapter 6, verse 12: 'Fight the good fight, lay hold on eternal life, where unto thou art also called.' "

When Luther is faced with a diffi cult question he turns to Rambo. On philosophical matters he is vague.

"I say my prayers and the Lord inspires me."

"What prayers do you say?"

"I can't remember them."

"Why did God choose you and your brother?"

Luther looks puzzled and Rambo fills in: "God chooses the weakest to do his best for the people. It matches with what God says in the Book of Corinthians, chapter 1, verse 27."

On military matters, Luther is more precise. "We have lost 13 of our God's Army soldiers. They sacrificed themselves in the battle. Two of them were children. No, I am not afraid. I am serving my people."

"Have you been wounded?"

"No, the Lord has protected me."

Beneath his eye is a round scar. "We were playing with bamboos," he says. "Someone scratched my eye."

Johnny, who is in charge of food supplies and logistics, sits beside his brother and plays with a catapult.

Even with God behind them Luther and Johnny Htoo can't fight the gas pipeline that brought 10 Burmese infantry battalions to their land. By January this year there were 21,000 troops in an area where there had once been 1,500. "Economically, the gas pipeline had to go through at all costs," says Sister Mary Roberts, a Catholic nun from California who arrived in the area from China in 1951.

"The military used forced labour to clear the forests, people were kidnapped to work as porters and build the military security camps. They were being wiped off the land and nobody was helping them. In the daytime, the women were taken to work as porters for the army and at night they belonged to the soldiers.

"The oil companies were very clever. They let the Burmese military do the dirty work and then pretended they didn't know anything about it."

Premier Oil, the British company running one of two pipeline consortiums cutting through the Karen area said that they knew there were human rights abuses by the military and they condemned them. Chief executive, Charles Jamieson also said: "We're satisfied that human rights abuse aren't taking place in the area we are respon sible for. If we come across them we report them to the relevant authorities.

"Premier believes in constructive engagement with the regime - not empty rhetoric," he added.

The Jubilee Campaign, the human rights organisation based at Westminster and and campaigning for the Karen says: "Its is a nonsense for Premier to report abuses to the 'relevant authorities - the 'relevant authorities' are the Burmese military. Premier should admit they are working with mass murderers." The Jubilee Campaign claim that at least 30,000 Karen have died in the military's secret genocide against these people.

Johnny and Luther have tired of sliding on the cardboard box and now the saviours of the Karen people are splashing in the river with other boys, just a little older, all lost in oversized military shirts from Thai army surplus shops. Their old Vietnamese guns lie abandoned on the river bank.

"For me there is no reason not to believe that at a time when people are being exterminated God should send someone to fight at their side," says Sister Mary Roberts.

But over the last two years, the soldiers of God's Army have began to drift away to find work in the fishing ports in Thailand that nobody else will do, supporting the Karen women and children who now permanently live in the refugee camps.

"There are about 20 of us now," says Luther. But most of those 20 are children.

"If the army finds Luther and Johnny they will kill them," says Rambo. He looks like a man who would die trying to stop that happen. And he may have to.