Shan (Tai)
Shan State since 1962
One of the strongest resistance armies still operating in the 1990s was the Shan State Army (Southern). Finding it difficult to flush the Shan troops out of the mountainous area where they operated, the Tatmadaw imposed the Four Cuts policy over an area covering 7,000 square miles. According to the Shan Human Rights Foundation, between 1996 and 1998, the Tatmadaw ordered over 300,000 people from 1,400 villages to leave their homes. Anyone caught returning to his or her village or field would be assumed to be contacting the Shan resistance and immediately shot. The human population was literally erased from the landscape, with communities and families dispersed in all directions. With nowhere to go and nothing to eat, many villagers hid in the forests or slept on the outskirts of towns, but secretly returned to their land to recover stored rice. On several occasions, Tatmadaw soldiers massacred groups of villagers found hunting for food near their old homes.
[* Four Cuts = Cutting off supplies of food, water, electricity and other requirements for livelihood
Tatmadaw = Burma Armed Forces]
“Living Silence” by Christina Fink
A century later, the town one foreign overlord had built was occupied by another - the Burmese army – and the pacification of the Shan continued with unprecedented ferocity. For, while foreign tourists took day trips on beautiful Inle Lake, and enjoyed Kodak moments with long-necked Kayan women, less than twenty miles away at Ho Pong – a village very close to Taunggyi – people were being burnt from their homes. Less than sixty miles away, in the green valley of Nam Zarng, people were being raped, shot and beaten to death. They were all victims of an ongoing counter-insurgency campaign waged by Burmese troops – a campaign of such scope and savagery that I was amazed the world knew so little about it.
It had been well documented. Both Amnesty International and the Shan Human Rights Foundation in Chiang Mai had produced reports based on interviews with Shan refugees in northern Thailand. They were two of the most disturbing documents I had ever read. Tens of thousands of families had been driven at gunpoint from their ancestral land as part of a Burmese military operation known as the ‘Four Cuts’. The purpose of this operation was to cut off supplies of food, funds, intelligence and recruits to the Shan State Army. What it amounted to in practice was a systematic campaign of terror against an unarmed civilian population, in which mass killings, gang rape and torture by Burmese troops were routine. Many of the worst atrocities had been committed by the Taunggyi-based eastern command, whose soldiers had demonstrated beyond a doubt that they were NEVER HESITATING ALWAYS READY TO SACRIFICE BLOOD – just not their own.
The first round of mass relocations had begun in March 1996 after troops loyal to Sao Yawd Serk, the Shan commander, launched guerilla attacks in Central Shan State. Villagers were usually given only a few days to abandon their homes by the Burmese Army. Those who could moved in with relatives; those who couldn’t scraped a living at army designated sites at the roadside. Thousands poured across the border into Thailand with reports of friends and relatives being beaten and shot by Burmese soldiers. By the end of 1996, it was estimated; over 100,000 people had been driven from their homes.
The following year the programme intensified. This time, in many cases, no notice was given. Troops simply swept through and burned down houses with people still in them. Following the mass relocation in Laikha, a prosperous region famed for its fertile land, Shan human-rights workers reported ‘scenes of social chaos in the town itself, with countless people begging in the streets, and camping in temples and under trees by the roadside.’ In a matter of days 40,000 people were made homeless in Laikha alone.
As many as 100,000 villagers were herded into relocation camps situated near Burmese army bases. Nothing was provided there – no shelter, food, water, or sanitation. At one overcrowded camp, forty people died of illness in the first month. Families arrived exhausted and hungry, only to watch helplessly as soldiers confiscated their precious stores of rice. This was supposed done to prevent them from secretly supplying the Shan resistance; the real reason was to provide food for Burmese troops, who preyed on Shan farmers for basic supplies. Once inside the camps, forced labour was inescapable. Villagers were ordered to grow vegetables, gather firewood, and fetch water for the soldiers. They built barracks and other military buildings, as well as the walls, trenches and barbed-wire fences that protected them. Both men and women were drafted as army porters, carrying their own body weight in ammunition through dense jungle littered with anti-personnel mines – unimaginably gruelling and often fatal work. Relocated villagers were slaves for the Burmese army. They were also sitting ducks for military reprisals. One night in February 1997 a camp at Kho Lam was shelled by Burmese troops in retaliation for an SSA raid in the area. Two Shan families sheltering in a ditch were killed; three of the dead were children. Less than two months later shells rained down upon another camp at Tard Mork, killing three people.
Tard Mork had been set ablaze by the by the Burmese army to punish occupants for supposedly harbouring Shan rebels. There was the young woman whose sick grandfather had been burnt to death in their home, and whose uncle had been shot; there was a crippled girl with the Wellington-boot prosthetic. Tard Mork had been deliberately torched more than once. On one occasion 200 houses burned down and at least four villagers died in the inferno. Incinerating what few possessions these wretched people had left was regular sport for Burmese soldiers.
Faced with the horrors of the relocation camp, many villagers decided to hide in the jungle. This was a perilous option. Depopulated areas were designated ‘free-fire zones’, and civilians who ventured into them to fish, collect honey or cut bamboo were shot on sight by Burmese patrols – or stabbed to death or blown up with grenades. On one occasion twenty-six villagers were caught foraging for food and decapitated; their headless corpses were left at the roadside as a grim warning to others.
A Shan teenager described how his family and four others hid in the jungle for a year. ‘We stayed under trees and moved around all the time,’ he said. ‘If we stayed too long in one place, the paths we used became too obvious, and we were afraid the Burmese soldiers would find us. Finally, though, we found a cave, where we felt safe. So we stayed there.
Some villagers were granted military passes to cultivate their fields for up to five days at a time. But these did not guarantee their safety. Villagers at a camp in Kun Hing had passes to retrieve food and other supplies from their houses, and on 16th June, 1997 they set out in two convoys of ox carts. The first group was stopped by Burmese troops on its way back from the village. The villagers produced their passes and ID cards. To show their contempt, the soldiers rubbed these against their crotches and threw them in the dirt. Then they ordered the villagers to squat by the roadside, and shot them. Twenty-six of the thirty villagers in the convoy were killed. The carts were burnt, and the oxen slaughtered for meat.
The second convoy that set out from Kun Hing that day was stopped by soldiers not far from the village, where they had retrieved some rice. The villagers were detained for an evening – enough time for the soldiers to check the villagers’ passes by radio, if they’d been so inclined – then taken to a forest, tied up, and executed. Twenty-nine people were killed.
In Burma, as in Bosnia and Rwanda, rape was a key weapon. It was shockingly common in Shan State. In one in stance Burmese soldiers raped a group of Lahu women whom they accused of cooking for the Shan soldiers. Rape was institutionalized in the Burmese army, and published interviews with defectors suggested that Burmese soldiers were encouraged to regard the violation of ethnic minority women as a racial duty. ‘Your blood must be left in the village,’ they were told.
By 1998 over 300,000 people had been moved from an area covering 7,000 square miles – a ‘conservative estimate’, reckoned Amnesty International. This was like evacuating a city the size of Belfast, or depopulating an area almost as large as Wales. Possibly a third of this number had fled through malarial jungles into neighbouring Thailand. There a new set of dangers awaited them. While not considered refugees, Karen, Karenni and Mon people escaping war in Burma had at least some status in Thailand as ‘displaced persons’, and could receive assistance from international aid groups at official camps. The Shan, however, had no status – and no rights. It suited the Thai authorities to regard them at best as migrant workers. Many Shan refugees fed their families by taking low-paid jobs on construction sites, farms and orchards in Thailand’s northern provinces. They were routinely harassed by Thai police, and women and girls were easy prey for six traffickers.* And when the Thai economy stumbled, as it did catastrophically in 1997, they were rounded up and booted back into Burma. Fugitives from ethnic terror in Shan State were expected to be thankful for this capricious hospitality.
And this was ethnic terror – an all-out assault by a Burman-dominated army on the Shan and other minority peoples. When you commit acts with intent to destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, or cause them serious bodily or mental harm; when you deliberately inflict upon them conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction – well, the civilized world has a word for that. The word is GENOCIDE.
The relocations in Shan State were still going on when I arrived in Taunggyi. One man told me how Taunggyi’s orphanages were overflowing with the children of parents who were now too poor to look after them. When these people are moved, they have nothing,’ he explained. They have no land. They are farmers. They can’t work any more. Then he gave me a report describing the plight of 25,000 refugees inside Shan State, over a third of them children. Malaria and flu were endemic. There were no medicines, clothes or blankets beyond what hard-pressed local charities could provide; Burmese soldiers often blocked even this meagre aid from reaching the needy. Forced labour on military projects left people with little time to find food for their own families.
Where did these people go? I asked. I had read that many now begged for a living, in Shan towns. ‘It is true’ said a man. ‘There are many people begging in the streets of Mong Pan. That never happened before. The military sometimes gives them a space in another village, but the people are often too scared (that the military will draft them as porters or slaves) to stay there. So they move to the nearest town or into the jungle.’ ‘There used to be so many villages,’ but now some people have fled to the Thai border, others to Mong Pan town. The people who have not yet moved live in fear.’
“Trouser People” by Andrew Marshall
Arbitrary arrest, arbitrary execution, arbitrary seizure of goods and property, widespread rape, forced labour, forced portering for the army, forced relocation, use of human mine sweepers, use as human defence shields, these are the hardships that have confronted the Shan people since the military took power in 1962. And these gross abuses of the rights of Shan people continue to this day.
In 1995 there were an estimated 100,000 Tatmadaw soldiers enforcing military policy in Shan State. The particular policy employed is known as the Four Cuts Policy and is designed to cut off food, funds, intelligence, and recruits provided by local villagers to resistance fighters. What this amounts to is the Burmese military mounting an offensive against the Shan people in a particular region. Troops are sent in and inhabitants of villages are relocated to areas under control by the Burmese army. In 1996 an estimated 100,000 Shan people from 600 villages were relocated by the military to 45 main sites. Between 1997 and 2000 a further 200,000 Shan people were relocated. Often the sites to which the villagers are moved are barren land where people must find their own food and build their own shelters. The only work is forced labour on SLORC/SPDC projects. Villages found returning to their homes or to farm their land are shot on sight.
After an area has been cleared of Shan people, the army moves in and builds barracks and access roads with Shan slave labour. Then, sometimes, Shan people are allowed to move back into the areas considered safely under military control. Upon returning, the Shan are further exploited as slave labour.
If there is any retaliation or resistance, villages are destroyed and villagers, including village elders, are executed arbitrarily as a deterrent. As an example, on 8-9 May 2000 the Shan State Army (South) ambushed a Burmese army convoy travelling between Kunhing and Takaw, southern Shan State. Some Burmese soldiers and officers were killed in this raid. On 23 May 2000 one hundred Burmese troops under the command of Captain Than Aung, Infantry Battalion 246 based in Kunhing surprised farmers who were working in the rice and sesame fields near the deserted near Kunhing town. Sixty-four were shot in cold blood. Such is life in a military-designated ‘brown zone’.
From “Welcome to Burma” by Timothy Syrota
The Shans situation remains the same in Thailand to this day – January 2007.
The Shans are still being persecuted, raped and killed to this day.
Shan State Army (South) are the defenders of the liberated area of Shan State and her people.
Please Read the Shan Human Rights Foundation reports at SHANLAND.ORG, and reports issued by Shan Women's Action Network, for updated reports.
“Welcome to Burma” by Timothy Syrota
Welcome to Burma
And enjoy the totalitarian experience
By Timothy Syrota
2001. 192 pp., b & w pl. illustrations, bibliography, index. 23.5 x 12.7 cm., Softbound.
ISBN 974-524-008-7 $23.00
ISBN-13 978-974-524-008-7
“Living Silence” by Christina Fink
Living Silence: Burma Under Military Rule (Politics in Contemporary Asia)
by Christina Fink
Binding: Paperback Publisher: Zed Books
Date Published: 2001-05 ISBN: 185649926X
“Trouser People” by Andrew Marshall
- Subtitle: A Story of Burma-In the Shadow of the Empire
- Author: Andrew Marshall
- Publisher: Perseus Books Group
- ISBN: 1582432422
- Format: Paperback
- Version: 2003
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