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.
Another
camp, set up in the courtyard of a Buddhist monastery, was over a month old.
Composed of rows of long bamboo platforms with tarp coverings, this camp was a
mix of Shan, Palaung, Lisu, and ethnic Chinese. Basic food supplies had come in
from local donations, so there was no starvation or malnutrition here, just the
ennui and lassitude endemic to refugee camps: whole families sitting dully at
the front of their platform spaces, with no work, no property, no engagement
with their environment and sustenance, no school for the many children, nothing
of what we think of as life. It was the time of rice harvest, and the refugees
were stressed and anxious to be away from their fields—without harvesting their
rice they would have nothing to eat in the coming year. One woman broke down weeping as she recalled that her husband had
gone back to their village to retrieve something, and had been shot dead by
Tatmadaw soldiers.
Most days
in Wan Hai, I rode along dirt roads in the back of pickup trucks amid a crowd
of young soldiers holding automatic weapons, belts of bullets forming Xs across
their chests. We passed old Shan women in blue tunics, children playing in
yards in front of bamboo houses, pretty girls in intricately embroidered
sarongs riding by on motorbikes, and farmers driving water buffalo or cattle
down the road.
At a
hilltop outpost with dug-out trenches and a .50 caliber anti-aircraft gun, I
sat with the commander of the post in the lee of a stupa, a domed Buddhist
shrine. We looked across long valleys to far mountain ranges as we lounged in
the dappled sun next to the machine guns and boxes of ammunition and the
inevitable strewn trash of army camps. Below us, jigsaw-sectioned rice fields
spread across the valley floor, with a few farmers out cutting grain with hand
sickles, and beyond the fields a government army outpost was dug in on the
opposite hill.
At
another Shan outpost I met Major Han Kham, who a few days before had led a
counterattack that repelled Tatmadaw forces from the tactically critical
village Mon Ark, about three miles south of Wan Hai. He sat beneath a sprawling
banyan tree near a golden-topped Buddhist temple along with a rubbery old
colonel who grinned and lifted up his shirt to reveal a long branching scar
that looked like something routed out with an ice saw. Out across the valley
floor a work party that included a couple of monks in pink and orange robes was
taking advantage of a lull in the fighting to gather dried rice stalks and
mound them into tall blonde haystacks.
It was
too late in the day for any attacks to be launched by the Tatmadaw, so Major
Han Kham said to me, “No fighting today, so let’s have a drink!” He pulled out
a bottle whiskey and poured me a shot in a white porcelain tea cup embossed
with a blue dragon. He wore an SSA-N cap with a red, green, and yellow SSA-N
emblem, combat fatigues, and had grenades lashed to belts on his chest. He
offered me a tin of Danish Christmas cookies, saying his wife had sent them up
to him from town, and told me about the battle to retake Mon Ark: “They shelled
us with mortars, then attacked with helicopter gunships strafing and shooting
rockets. We had to withdraw when the air strikes came, and their ground troops
took the village. But then we counterattacked, and they had to retreat. We
cannot retreat, this is our land; we’re fighting to protect our families.” With
families a few miles away, the Shan were fighting for their survival in ways an
imported army could never do.
We walked
down to the Mong Ark’s ancient stone stupa, a twenty-foot tall stone monument,
weathered and bleached with age, listing slightly on a raised mound of earth,
surrounded by trees that had been mangled by mortar explosions. Tatmadaw
soldiers occupied several hilltops in ridges surrounding the valley, the
nearest about 200 meters away. Villagers had fled during the fighting, but some
had returned for the day to work. They had brought their animals to graze, and
water buffaloes wandered among the pale gold stalks of harvested fields, their
cowbells slowly sounding.
During
the offensive, there were negotiations in Naypyidaw, the Myanmar capital, for a
local truce, in which the government demanded the Shan withdraw from their
positions.
Major Sai
Su, spokesman of the Shan State Progressive Party, told me in Wan Hai, “Our
policy is to defend our territory; we do not attack offensively. The government
attacked us, now they demand that we withdraw from our positions. In the past
we have given up territory to support peace negotiations, but that did not lead
to peace, only to further demands and more attacks by the government.”
Over the
past few years, the negotiations for a National Ceasefire Agreement (NCA)
followed a similar pattern to these localized talks—ethnic armed groups were
invited to sign a binding ceasefire and lay down their arms as a precondition
for peace talks. Journalist and Myanmar analyst Bertil Lintner has written of the NCA
that “the entire ‘peace process’ is flawed because the government wants to put
the cart before the horse by insisting on an agreement … before any political
issues have even been discussed.”
Despite
proclamations that the ceasefire was a triumph, IHS Jane’s analyst
Anthony Davis has said that the
government had to display a positive result to justify “tens of millions of
dollars being thrown at the ‘peace process’ by Western governments eager to
declare Myanmar finally and officially open for business.”
Aung San
Suu Kyi had until recently “dismissed the ceasefire… as a pre-election stunt by
outgoing President Thein Sein,” (as Reuters put
it) but in mid-January she endorsed the process by speaking at the opening of
peace talks with the signatories of the NCA. In doing so she may help
legitimize a process of government land-grab, as Tatmadaw territorial gains
from past offensives have become de facto lines of control, the starting point
for negotiations.
The Shan
State Army-North, and other ethnic armed groups who have remained unswayed by
the military government’s overtures, face difficult and contradictory choices.
They are being demanded to sign the “National Ceasefire Agreement,” which is
neither national, nor a ceasefire, nor carries any certainty of agreement. This
would amount to forfeiting the autonomy which they have defended since it was
promised to them on the eve of Burmese independence in 1947 by Aung San Suu
Kyi’s father. But if they do not sign the agreement, they are subject to
further attacks on both civilian and military targets within their area of
control.
Towards
the end of my stay in Wan Hai, after two days of rain, a Tatmadaw deserter
surrendered to the Shan soldiers at one of the hilltop outposts I’d visited. He
was sent down from his own hilltop camp to fetch water, and instead of
returning he went over to the Shan side. The Shan gave him some pocket money,
asked him a few questions, and told him he could go wherever he wanted—back to
his unit if he chose, or home, or elsewhere. During questioning, the deserter
said Tatmadaw troops were told the Shan were “wild people”—culturally and
genetically inferior, subhuman— and so could be killed and dispersed like
animals. As difficult and painful as the reforms of recent years in Myanmar
have been, wrestled from a regime notorious for extrajudicial killings, torture, and the jailing of
writers and journalists, these reforms might prove to be easier than changing
the racial prejudice behind ethnic violence, or changing the realities of
administrative structure and ruling power in the government.
By the
time I had been at the SSA-N headquarters ten days, the fighting had come to a
stalemate. But more than four months after the start of the offensive, the
internal refugees it created are still living in limbo, unable to return to
their villages, depending on humanitarian donations for survival. Whatever
administrative vagaries emerge from the on-going political transition in
Myanmar, it’s unlikely that Tatmadaw encroachments during the
offensive—diminishments of Shan territory and self-determination, and
ultimately of cultural integrity—will be easily reversed. However her role in
power-sharing evolves, Aung San Suu Kyi has shown she is willing to sacrifice
the interests of marginal groups for the furthering of her own political
trajectory.
When I
left Wan Hai, I returned to Lashio over dirt roads made nearly impassable by
rain, and caught a bus south to Mandalay. Looking out the window of the bus as
we descended from the plateau down to the plains, I saw long lines of army
transport trucks pass by, heading the other way. They were filled with soldiers
holding automatic rifles between their knees, looking out from the canvas
covering of the trucks to the world they were passing through, perhaps
wondering what lay ahead as they left the haze and heat of the lowlands behind
and climbed into the hills.
Scott
Ezell is an American poet and multi-genre artist with a background in China and
Southeast Asia. For the past five years he has worked on a lyric-documentary
writing project about the relationship between state power and indigenous
communities in the China-Burma-Lao border region.
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