Lieutenant Su Aung Doi is lying face down on a
wooden table,
the back of his head sliced wide open from a mortar round that exploded
a metre from his foxhole on the frontline just hours earlier. Blood is
trickling down his neck and on to the hospital floor as a doctor
extracts the metal splinters from his skull and stitches the flesh back
together, with no anaesthesia and a single lamp to illuminate the
surgery.
In the same room, nurses tend to a stunned soldier with
shrapnel in his forehead, while in the corner an officer is screaming as
doctors rub disinfectant over mortar splinters in his feet and arms.
Up
the blood-stained stairs of Laiza's civilian hospital, soldiers whose
legs have been recently amputated hobble past a closed operating room
housing a soldier with leg wounds so deep that his thigh muscles are
spilling on to the
metal table. And in the car park outside, army-issue
pickup trucks
drop off still more soldiers straight from the battlefield, who are
carried in one by one and dropped on stretchers covered in other
soldiers' blood.
"Almost all of our battalion were hurt today.
There were hundreds of Burmese army shooting RPG [rocket-propelled
grenades] – it was just raining mortars," officer Sin Wah Naw, 34, says
from a hospital room shared with three soldiers from his company. "They
would stop shooting for a few seconds and I would run for safety and
then it would begin all over again."
It has been just a week since the
Burmese government initiated a ceasefire in Kachin state,
where armed ethnic insurgents, under the banner of the Kachin
Independence Army (KIA), have been fighting for greater autonomy for the
past 50 years.
The Kachin are a Christian-majority group in Buddhist-majority
Burma,
who say they have long been oppressed by the government. While rebels
have held pockets of territory throughout this mountainous terrain for
decades, they are struggling to maintain the last remaining stronghold
of their headquarters in Laiza, a jungle outpost called Hka Ya Bum,
which is under heavy attack by the Burmese military.
If that falls, which many fear could happen sooner than later, locals say that their only option will be to flee to China.
The
government's attacks on Kachin state, which began in July 2011 after a
17-year-ceasefire fell apart, have in the past month included heavy
artillery, as well as the use of helicopters and jet fighters. KIA
officials reckon that as many as 1,200 mortar rounds were fired in two
hours against Hka Ya Bum on Thursday, the most ever recorded in their
decades of war.
The escalating conflict has soured Burma's seeming
efforts for peace in a nation that only recently ended nearly 50 years
of military rule. The KIA, whose headquarters are in Laiza – a sleepy
town whose shops are mostly shuttered closed – is the only major ethnic
rebel group not to have reached a ceasefire agreement with President
Thein Sein, who came to power in 2011 and has since instituted a series
of economic and political reforms.
"Ever since the KIA started
this revolution, whenever we have had a ceasefire, it is the Burmese who
break it," says the KIA's spokesman, La Nan. "The ceasefire agreed on
18 January was made unilaterally by the Burmese and broken by the
Burmese," he said.
"From past experience, a 'ceasefire' means
preparation for future assault. But peace is not just the absence of
warfare. We are demanding the rights of our ethnic nationality. Once we
have that which is rightfully ours, then we have no reason to fight."
The
fighting has displaced as many as 100,000 Kachin, according to relief
agencies working in the state, most of which lack food, medicine and
other supplies because most roads to KIA-controlled territories have
been blocked by the Burmese government.
Doi Pyi Sa, who heads the
internally displaced people (IDP) and refugee relief committee of the
KIA's political arm, the Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO), says
that Kachin state is in the midst of a humanitarian crisis. "Many IDPs
have had to abandon their villages [all across Kachin state] and have
fled into KIO territory, which is a humanitarian crisis in itself, and
others have fled to stay with friends and relatives, so we don't know
how many they are.
"But the real issue is that we may one day have
to flee into China. The Chinese government has told us they've cleared
space to create refugee camps but they want us to build the camps.
That's not what we want. We don't want to have to go to China until it's
absolutely compulsory. But one day there won't be any option but for us
to flee into China. The issue is that the policy used by China is that
when they don't hear any fighting anymore, they push back the
refugees like they did in August [last year].
"But
if the Burmese soldiers take Laiza, there will be thousands of them in
the villages [all across Kachin state], so no one will want to go back
home. But staying in China will be hard, because we won't be allowed to
leave the camps, and that could make us vulnerable to human trafficking,
which has already happened [to Kachin people] in China."
At Je
Yang, Laiza's largest refugee camp, nearly half of the 7,300 inhabitants
are under the age of 15. Bamboo tents house three families at a time, a
small marketplace sells fruit and veg, and men are busy with hammers
and saws building a new school to replace the open-plan classrooms that
currently shelter 40 students at a time.
"This is no place for
children," says the school headteacher, Nawhpang Hkun San. "The Burmese
army has taken a post just up the hill here and there's often mortar and
gunfire. We're at risk here, and the children know it. Some of them are
too terrified to even come to school."
Some displaced people are
in highly precarious situations. Just past the military hospital outside
Laiza, two families have taken refuge on the side of the road in a
confluence of bushes where they sleep through the cold winter nights
under banana leaves and tarpaulins. Their meagre possessions – a
transistor radio, a wall clock and an old kettle – are scattered across
the dirt amid cow pats, smatterings of hay and a few floor mats. "We
left everything behind – all of our clothes, our farming equipment, even
our blankets – when the Burmese army burned our village down," says
Dashi Roi, 48, a farmer who fled by foot towards Laiza with her husband
and two cows last week. "Sometimes we have nothing to eat. We scavenge
for vegetables, but we don't always find them."
After Thursday's
heavy assault on Hka Ya Bum, the situation in Laiza is precarious. A
nightly candlelit vigil that snakes through the city is one way in which
locals hope for peace, but the real test will come from the Burmese
government itself – and whether it is prepared to enter into political
dialogue with a group that has promised to never back down.
"Even
if Hka Ya Bum is overrun, the Burmese army still can't come to Laiza
because there are still many posts to take," a defiant La Nan told the
Guardian. "The Burmese army has already spent millions of dollars and
many lives getting this far. Even if they come to Laiza, they are
entering a killing field … We will never surrender."
It's a
position to which many soldiers seem to hold strong. At Laiza cemetery,
where new graves are being dug, up at an uncomfortably high frequency,
mortar shells could be heard Friday landing on the mountain beyond as a
pickup truck carrying soldiers and the coffin of their colleague,
25-year-old Labang Tang Gun, roared up the road. The soldiers sang a war
hymn, shovelled dirt on to the freshly dug grave, and then sped back
off towards the explosions in the hills.
----------
