(This post is direct translations of articles from the KachinDaily News
site.)
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| Traffic stood still at a KIA road-block arbitrarily set up to rob the travelling public, vehicles, and motorbikes. |
Instead of confronting
better-armed and more numerous Burma army, various KIA units have been cowardly
and violently raiding the villages whether they are Shans or Burmese villages
for money and food and fresh recruits and young women to rape, and thus scaring
the local people from travelling even on the wide Irrawaddy River.
Cash Collection on the Irrawaddy River
KIA officer Bo Lawan from
KIA Fifth Battalion Second Brigade and about ten of his armed-men were last
seen violently collecting money from the travelling boats on Irrawaddy at one
of its narrows called Pashaw Narrow between Myitkyinar and Bamaw towns.
From September 25 to October
3 Lawan and his men had taken positions on both riverbanks at the Pashaw narrow
and threatened the passing boat traffic and collected 4,000 kyats from each
boat.
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| A narrow of Irrawaddy in Kachin State. |
A crew member of a regular motorised-boat bitterly said, “Once they saw the boat the motherfuckers levelled their 4 or 5 guns at us and the river there is so bloody narrow we couldn’t speed off without getting shot at. Four thousand kyats for every boat we had to pay every day. They took in at least 100,000 kyats every day. Both coming down from Myitkyinar and coming up from Bamaw there must be at least 30 boats a day going through that narrow. They’d never done it before. Since we have to pay at the gates and now also on the way on the river, it’s so hard for the business.”
The KIA mob disturbing the
unarmed travelling civilians had fled from that very profitable spot only when
a mobile column of Burma army reached the area in the early morning of October
4 as the KIA cowards didn’t dare to fight an army unit.
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| KIA men forcing motorists to part with their cash. |
They shot a Shan
motorcyclist dead when he refused to pay them and tried to speed off. They left
the area on September 26 only when a mobile army column approached them to
engage.
On October 7 another KIA
unit led by another KIA sergeant also had set up a road block on the
Myitkyinar-Bamaw Road at about two miles north of U-htan-yan Village of Myithit
Village Tract in Moumauk Township. They then forced the travelling vehicles and
motorcycles to pay 3,000 kyats each vehicle or 1,000 kyats for each motorcycle.
Forced Collections from the Loggers
and Gold-miners
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| An illegal gold-miner squeezed for cash by KIA men. |
That unit was heavily-armed
with heavy weapons and coming direct from the KIA HQ at Laiza and their purpose
was to collect so-called Protection Fees for the KIA big shots back at the HQ
on the Chinese border.
The rates they asked from
the various loggers and gold-miners were 400,000 kyats for a shop, 400,000
kyats for a small gold mine, 60,000 kyats for a timber-mill, and 20,000 kyats
per person.
According
to a truck driver who was forced to part with his 20,000 kyats cash the area
has roughly 20 gold mines and 15 timber mills and the KIA men got almost 20
million kyats from them. It was just a daylight robbery as the KIA men had
threatened to kill anyone refusing to
pay.
KIA gang-rapes of Burmese and
Shan girls and Women
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| A roaming KIA unit of robbers, rapists, and murderers. |
The KIA men were there to
grab the Kachin and Shan male workers as recruits for KIA. But the men had fled
and only one young Burmese girl and one Burmese woman working as the caretakers
for the ruber farm were found by the drunk KIA men. They then violently
gang-raped both Burmese females and almost killed the two in the process.
A mobile army column had
chased them away and also captured a criminal KIA private named Khauzone aged
19 and the son of U Kikhaw after engaging them. He painfully confessed to the
police after a session of severe beatings that they were there to grab new
recruits and found only two Burmese and gang-raped them.
He also admitted that they
were all seriously drunk when they committed the heinous crimes of gang-raping
the young Burmese girl and the mother with two babies.
In last May a KIA unit had grabbed from the Pinlone Shan Village in Moenhyin Township 15 boys and 7 girls
as new recruits for KIA. But on their way back to the camp the drunken KIA men
gang-raped and killed two most pretty ones out of 7 young Shan girls they have kidnapped
from the Shan village.
On October 9 a group of KIA men led by Major Khaung Lun of KIA Brigade 5 raided the Thea-Waing area on the east bank of May Kha river near Myitsone and captured 21 farmers and gold-panners including 5 young women.
The captured men and women were then taken against their will to the Brigade 5 base camp to be trained as forced recruits as the KIA HQ has been forcing the Brigades to recruit at least 250 recruits a month for each Brigade.
But most young Shan women especially the pretty ones end up as mistresses of high-ranking KIA officers if they are lucky. Unlucky ones usually end up getting gang-raped and killed by the brute KIA men in the jungle of Kachin land.
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| A KIA women squad. |
The captured men and women were then taken against their will to the Brigade 5 base camp to be trained as forced recruits as the KIA HQ has been forcing the Brigades to recruit at least 250 recruits a month for each Brigade.
But most young Shan women especially the pretty ones end up as mistresses of high-ranking KIA officers if they are lucky. Unlucky ones usually end up getting gang-raped and killed by the brute KIA men in the jungle of Kachin land.