(Matt Davis’s article from the ABC NEWS AUSTRALIA on 18 August 2022.)
Bullets whizzed overhead as Dr Amos Dawt Za Hmung
stepped out of his clandestine health clinic in Thantlang — a town in the hills
of north-western Myanmar — into a street gripped by chaos. Moments earlier, he
had finished performing surgery alongside his wife, Rebecca, a nurse, when the
sound of powerful weapons struck him numb with terror.
The Myanmar military, known as the Tatmadaw, had burst forth from their hilltop barracks overlooking the town and was now shooting, looting and setting buildings ablaze. Now Dr Amos was standing in the streets, weighing up an impossible choice.
Rebecca was
heavily pregnant and their infant son was at home on the other side of town. Their
only means of reuniting the family was a perilous dash through the gunfire and
flames. “In my mind, I have to go to home — I have to see my son,” Dr Amos
recalls. “But, on the other hand, my wife is still pregnant and would have to
ride on the back of my bicycle.”
The young
parents mounted the bike and set off into the heart of the battle to find their
son. However, as they rode through the centre of town, their path was blocked
by two Tatmadaw soldiers, guns drawn.
“I just thought:
‘Wow, we’re dead’,” Dr Amos recalls. Whether it was a rogue bullet or a shot
aimed with intent by an unseen protector, Dr Amos still doesn’t know. But,
suddenly, one of the soldiers fell down dead, struck by a bullet to the head.
The other
soldier, turning to see his comrade fall, wheeled around and looked directly at
the fleeing couple. “Don’t come any closer,” he warned them. “Just hide, get
out of here,” the soldier yelled. Moments later, he too was felled by a bullet,
dead. “He could easily have shot us,” Dr Amos says. “I don’t know, maybe he saw
that Rebecca was pregnant and let us go?”
Their story of
escape from Thantlang is just one of thousands of tales since the attacks began
in September 2021. Today, nearly all of the town’s estimated 12,000 residents
have fled. The town’s destruction has inspired a youth-led rebellion against
the military.
To locals, it was known as the “golden town”, a peaceful place of churches and colourful homes that hugged the thin ribbon of a road winding through the green undulations. The onslaught in September 2021 set at least 18 homes and a government building ablaze, according to local media.
Terrorised
residents fled the chaos, abandoning their homes and leaving Thantlang
virtually deserted. But the destruction didn’t stop. As fighting escalated in
October, more than 160 buildings were burned down in the empty town centre. Satellite
images from March this year show entire sections of the town have been
completely wiped out.
An ABC analysis
of satellite imagery from December found 500 damaged buildings in Thantlang,
many of which had been completely destroyed. The Chin Human Rights Organisation
(CHRO) believes the real total could be more than double that. They say many
homes have been targeted as part of a campaign of deliberate arson waged by
Tatmadaw troops.
Before fleeing
Thantlang, Dr Amos was already an “enemy of the state”. Months earlier, while
he was living in Myamnar’s former capital, Yangon, with his wife and infant
son, the military junta decreed that all doctors and nurses would have to work
for the regime, or face arrest.
It awoke a
mutinous streak in the young doctor. He joined the outlawed Civil Disobedience
Movement instead, known in Myanmar simply as the CDM, a nationwide strike aimed
at crippling the military government by tanking the economy.
“I didn’t want
to work under the military government,” he says. “I want to stop all the
functions of government control.” Now he’s been driven even further from Yangon
and more firmly into the arms of the anti-junta resistance that inhabits the
hills along Myanmar’s north-western border with India.
Dr Amos runs
Tikir Hospital, consisting of three squat concrete buildings huddled at the top
of a mountain. Today it’s shrouded in mist. It’s the only hospital caring for
the people from the more-than 50 villages scattered across this remote and
rugged corner of Myanmar. In recent months, this area has seen some of the
heaviest fighting yet in Myanmar’s 18-month civil war.
ABC’s Foreign Correspondent spent two weeks inside the growing resistance movement, with civilians such as Dr Amos aiding the war effort and the — mostly — young soldiers waging guerilla war against the military junta.
When the local
rebel militia asked Dr Amos to establish a hospital here, there wasn’t much to
work with — “just the building”, he says. Along with his wife Rebecca and a
small team of nurses, he has since established two hospital wards: one for
local villagers and another for resistance fighters.
There’s little
inside to comfort the broken and the bleeding from the battlefield, beyond a
surgeon’s practised hands. With transport routes in Myanmar mostly cut off, Dr
Amos has been relying on medical supplies smuggled along the treacherous roads
from the Indian border. “The hardest bit has been getting medicines and
operating equipment,” he says.
In July last
year, the Tatmadaw began blocking international humanitarian aid from entering
Chin State, creating dire shortages. Supplies might be running low but there’s
been no lack of patients. On the operating table, a young soldier who caught a
burst of shrapnel on the frontline lets out an anguished groan, as nurses in
blue surgical gowns and flip-flops clean his lacerated flesh.
There’s little
inside to comfort the broken and the bleeding from the battlefield, beyond a
surgeon’s practised hands. Another soldier is recovering in the ward from a
similar injury, his once youthful face now scarred and pockmarked after a
homemade bomb detonated at close range.
He was the lucky
one: A friend standing next to him didn’t survive the blast. And yet he’s
itching to return to the frontline to join his comrades fighting to wrest
Thantlang from the Tatmadaw’s grip. He has no home, except in the company of
the soldiers he fights alongside.
Since the
violence broke out, more than one million people have been internally displaced
in Myanmar, according to UN figures. Many have been forced to seek refuge in
border areas, where food, shelter and medicine were already scarce.
Not far from
Tikir hospital, 150 households who escaped the carnage in Thantlang have
settled in the village of Salen. Makeshift homes of rough timber and plastic
sheeting have sprung up from the red earth, bracing for the coming wet season. Soon
they will float above rivers of mud that will flow through here when the rains
arrive.
Near Salen
village, I meet Emily Van Siang Zi, a high school student whose home was
destroyed by fire in another attack on Thantlang in February. She’s now one of
Myanmar’s million “IDPs” (internally displaced persons).
She lays the blame for her family’s predicament at the feet of the Tatmadaw, saying the soldiers burned down her home, along with a hundred more that day. “I was so afraid of them,” she says. “They were shooting their guns at night. Every day, every night. I was so scared, so scared.” Her life is now on pause. A talented student, she hasn’t seen her school friends in months. “I miss them so much,” she says. “I am alone.”
It was Myanmar’s younger generation who grew
up nursing the flickering flame of democracy only to see it snuffed out in a
military coup 18 months ago. The country’s decade-long experiment with
democracy was ended with Min Aung Hlaing, commander-in-chief of the Tatmadaw,
re-establishing military rule and jailing civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
Determined not
to see the dark decades of military rule return, millions of young Burmese took
to the streets in protest, clashing with junta troops, who retaliated with
lethal force to quash the uprising. As images of protesters being killed on the
streets began to circulate, their rage flared.
The world
condemned the killings from afar, but with no promise of outside intervention,
the young took up arms, joining local resistance groups to wage war against the
military regime. Cung Hlei Thwang, a 28-year-old Chin fighter, remembers how
his mother begged him not to join the revolution, fearing he would be killed,
and she would be left alone.
“My father had
already passed away,” Cung says. “I apologised to my mother, ‘Please understand
that I must fight because we are not safe, I am not safe, and you are not
safe’.” He quit his job with an agricultural NGO and became a recruiter for the
Chinland Defence Force in Thantlang, an anti-junta militia the locals call the
CDF.
Armed with
little more than single-shot rifles and homemade explosives — “tumee” in
Burmese — the CDF established hidden jungle camps where new recruits could
learn how to make bombs and fire a weapon. They were students, farmers,
journalists, “anything but soldiers”, says Cung.
What many knew of warfare they learned playing video games. Now, 18 months on from the coup, Cung has become the commander-in-chief, leading the Thantlang CDF battalion into real combat: with real bullets, real fear, real consequences. His ragtag army is poorly equipped, but they say their intimate knowledge of the landscape is an asset. “This is our land, this is our place,” he says. “They can’t defeat us, the only thing they can do is burn our homes, our churches. We hunt them like wolves.”
On a hazy
afternoon, Cung takes me to a CDF base on a bare hilltop overlooking Thantlang
that is strung across the ridge line to the east. A few white buildings jut out
of vast, blackened voids, like jagged teeth in a broken smile.
“We called it
the ‘golden town’,” he says, looking across the valley. “We would play in the
river; it is such a beautiful place.” Today, Thantlang doesn’t look so golden. Whisps
of white smoke rise from an unseen blaze shielded from view beyond the line of
the road.
Cung tells me
his CDF men killed two or three Tatmadaw soldiers this morning and the junta
soldiers are burning houses in the town in retaliation. “If we kill one
soldier, they burn five or 10 buildings with the soldiers’ bodies inside. This
is their tactic.”
I ask why they
would burn their own fallen soldiers. “Across Chinland, they do this,” he says
with a shrug, “perhaps to hide the true number of casualties.” It’s a
mysterious enemy the CDF battalion is preparing to face.
Cung’s troops
are gathering for an assault on the town — young men, their young faces glued
to mobile phones like kids swapping selfies in a shopping mall: They mostly
swap images of the frontline, the little moments of glory and horror.
War distorts
many peacetime pursuits. A former journalist who used to fly his drone to snap
photos for the local newspaper now uses it to hover over Tatmadaw positions up
and down the valley. Today there’s a rumour of enemy soldiers in the Van Thio
area, but the drone flights have failed to locate them. No-one knows where they
might be lurking.
Cung feels the weight of responsibility that comes with leading these young men into danger. Before setting off, he gathers the troops to pray. The Chin people are predominantly Christian, converted by Western missionaries who began coming to the region in the early 1900s. Cung hopes this group prayer session won’t be their last. “Listen to your leader … follow their orders and you will be safe,” he tells them. “Team work is very important, so we can defeat the Tatmadaw.”
Few places feel safe in this region of Myanmar: fewer still seem quite as dangerous as the road running south from Thantlang deeper into Tatmadaw territory. It cuts a twisted path down river valleys and up over high peaks, with each blind bend threatening to reveal some hidden danger just out of sight.
In places, it
narrows between a towering green wall above and a sheer void below, barely a
scrape in some great upheaval of the Earth.It’s a route frequented by Tatmadaw
convoys sending supplies and reinforcements to the frontline but, lately, they
have been taught to fear this road too.
We’re travelling
to Camp Victoria, the jungle headquarters of the Chin National Army (CNA). One
of many ethnic armies in Myanmar’s border regions, the CNA was established long
before the 2021 coup to protect ethnic Chins against Tatmadaw persecution.
It has supreme
command of most resistance operations across Chin State, including Cung and his
CDF battalion stationed at Thantlang. Its goal is the destruction of the
Tatmadaw. Before we can find them, they find us. We’re stopped by a CNA convoy
and asked to get into their truck: They tell us they have something they would
like us to see.
Riding next to
me in the truck, with a heavy weapon slung around his chest, is a young CNA
soldier who once waited tables in Malaysia before joining the war. Resistance
fighters have been planting landmines along this road, he explains, to disable
Tatmadaw convoys and trap them in the open.
Once the trucks
are stalled, they become easy prey for the CNA soldiers lying in wait, who rain
down gunfire from the hills above. We pass a group of CNA recruits digging
trenches in preparation for the next assault. One such ambush was executed only
weeks before our arrival, leaving a number of Tatmadaw soldiers dead, he says.
We arrive at the
place the CNA soldiers want us to see, a village where 16 homes were recently
burned down by junta soldiers. They say these homes were razed in a brutal act
of retaliation for their ambush on the Tatmadaw convoy.
Almost nothing remains, no hint nor clue to the shape of the buildings, nor the lives that inhabited this space until recently. The villagers whose homes were spared have little choice but to remain living here under the shadow of terror cast by the Tatmadaw’s vengeance. A young mother, a baby slung at her side, shows us the view of blackened earth now filling her open window, in place of her neighbour’s home.
Standing among
the ashes, I ask a CNA soldier if people here are afraid. “Of course,” he says.
“They are burning, murdering, killing people — killing people.” I ask what
would happen if a soldier like him was captured. “They will kill me, they will
cut my head off, they will make incisions into my neck,” he says.
As the war has
dragged on, the Tatmadaw are accused of resorting to increasingly brutal
tactics to bring the nation to heel. In June, gruesome footage of a massacre in
neighbouring Sagaing State was found on a soldierʻs lost phone.
The video, taken by the phone owner and first
published by Radio Free Asia, shows graphic images of 27 male villagers killed
in the village of Mon Taing. After the day’s brutality, the soldier and two
others can be seen chatting and laughing about how many people they killed, and
the gruesome methods they used.
International
and local human rights groups are accusing the Tatmadaw of perpetrating war
crimes across the country. “It’s deliberately targeted at the civilian
population. It’s designed to destroy livelihoods and lives that support the
resistance movement,” says Salai Za Uk Ling, of the Chin Human Rights
Organisation.
“If these are
not war crimes, I don’t know what is. The methods that they use to instil fear
in the population, be it the killing of a child, sexual violence against women,
getting rid of bodies, burning, destroying evidence: They knowingly commit war
crimes, and these are very well documented.”
Deep in the
mountains is Camp Victoria, the CNA’s sprawling military complex set on a low
hill at the base of a river valley. The number of people living here has
swelled over the past 18 months, so much so that the weekly church service has
been moved from the chapel to the Chin Revolutionary Hall.
While 90 per
cent of ethnic Chins are Christians, they themselves are a religious minority
in a country where 90 per cent — including most Tatmadaw soldiers — practise
Buddhism. “If we die, we die together. If we live, we live together, is what we
tell ourselves.”
Some arrive in
their Sunday best, others in military clobber. Smart shirts and machine guns
and little girls with pink ribbons on their dresses. Among the congregation is
Dr Sui Khar, the Joint General Secretary of the Chin National Front (the CNA’s
political wing), and the ranking officer in Camp Victoria.
For 30 years he
has been fighting for the rights of Chin State, and to push Myanmar along the
path towards a federal democracy. Despite repeated attempts by coup leader Min
Aung Hlaing to hold peace talks with the ethnic armed groups, Dr Sui Khar is
clear now is not the time to negotiate.
He says the
youth are willing to keep fighting for the restoration of Myanmar’s democracy. “Under
this military dictatorship … the youth have already convinced themselves that
their future is nothing,” he says. “And they don’t like to suffer, the younger
generation, so that’s why this is the once-and-for-all war, to eliminate this
military dictatorship.”
The young
recruits here firmly believe they can win this war. International law student
Emily, from Yangon, once dreamed of studying abroad. Now she fights in the hope
that such privileges will be available to the next generation, even if her
chance has passed.
“My parents
tried to stop me from coming, but I ran out with my friends,” she says. ″‘If we
die, we die together. If we live, we live together,’ is what we tell
ourselves.” It’s not just exuberant young revolutionaries who sense the tide is
turning against the Tatmadaw.
The top brass
here in Camp Victoria say the junta is beset by a war on all fronts and is
increasingly being forced to play defence as the resistance becomes better
organised. The execution of four democracy activists in late July has only
heightened resentment towards the regime, undermining support among the
Buddhist Bamar ethnic majority, the military junta’s most important support
base.
Meanwhile, the
National Unity Government (NUG), formed in exile after the coup, is positioning
itself as the rightful government-in-waiting, garnering international
recognition and building support among Myanmar’s diverse ethnic groups,
including the Chin.
“When we look at
this NUG, we can see their commitment to eliminate this military dictatorship,”
says Dr Sui Khar. “Their target is very clear … they want to hit the capital,
Naypyidaw, and restore democracy. We think that working together with them will
achieve our demands and goals.”
The NUG’s reach
is extending further into the country. Today, in Camp Victoria, the NUG’s
Ministry of Defence is opening a regional command post to ensure this remote
region, which has been engaged in some of the heaviest fighting, gets the
resources it needs.
“We have the
people but we need guns, we need money,” admits NUG spokesperson Daw Thant Wai
Kyaw from Kalay township. Many here feel the world has forgotten their war.
Everyone here says what’s needed is an international response. “With that we
can achieve our aim of creating a federal democracy that our citizens want.”
