By Scott Ezell
A first-hand account from the Shan State Army-North headquarters during a Tatmadaw offensive.
At the end of November 2015, I was smuggled through Myanmar army checkpoints beneath a tarp in the back of a car to the Shan State Army-North headquarters in Wan Hai, Shan State, in northern Myanmar. Wan Hai is set amid the rolling terrain of a roughly 1000 meter plateau, punctuated by rugged mountain chains, which stretches north into southwest China and east across Thailand and Laos to the highlands of northern Vietnam. I arrived amid young soldiers bristling with automatic assault rifles and grenade launchers, standing at guard posts or rushing to the front in the backs of pickups trailed by flumes of dust. The central square was filled with local Shan villagers and farmers in their traditional embroidered tunics, and Palaung women with solid silver bands around their waists. My driver, who had been silent and reserved the whole five hour trip from Lashio, broke into a euphoric smile and shook my hand repeatedly, making me realize he might have been jailed or even shot by the Myanmar army, known as the Tatmadaw, if they’d discovered me in his car.
A Tatmadaw offensive against the Shan State Army-North had been underway for almost two months, and the reality of jet and helicopter attacks, artillery shells lobbed into civilian homes and monasteries, and the government army driving villagers from their land stood in stark contrast to the collective euphoria within Myanmar and internationally in the wake of the national election a few weeks before. Although Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) holds a majority in parliament, by virtue of Myanmar’s 2008 constitution the commander-in-chief stands above the elected government and still controls the army, the police, and the General Administration Department (GAD), the backbone of national administration which exerts political control down to the most localized levels.
The morning after I arrived, I visited a refugee camp that was just days old, a collection of tents pitched next to piles of clothes and cooking pans, where women scraped at the earth with crude mattocks as men worked building bamboo structures. Tatmadaw soldiers had attacked their Shan village for strategic reasons—it sat on a flat space halfway up the flank of a mountain near the front lines. The villagers fled at gunpoint with whatever they could carry, and still looked dazed and bewildered. Old men sat wrapped in blankets by woodfires as children dragged branches to burn from a nearby stand of trees.
The offensive had created 10,000 refugees who had been driven from their land by shelling and air attacks, and their livestock and grain were seized by the Myanmar army in violation of the Geneva Conventions article against a military force seizing the property of civilians during conflict. Reuters reported gang rapes by Tatmadaw soldiers, and while rape and murder of civilians are typically dismissed as “rogue acts” by the government, they have been documented for decades as part of a systemic policy to terrorize and destabilize ethnic minority populations.
Read the full story at The Diplomat