Uprooted by fierce fighting, Kokang's displaced mull their future

Myanmar's worst clashes in years have civilians fleeing and wondering what comes next.

A Shan Buddhist monk oversees displaced people lining up to collect donated food at the Mansu monastery in Lashio

Myanmar:  When rebel fighters came looking for a leading member of the government-backed Kokang administration that had run Laukkai town since 2009, they discovered he had already fled.

Instead, they came across a group of Myanmar army troops. Bullets began flying in the streets of the town.

“The shooting was really close,” recalled Ma Khine, who witnessed the skirmish. “All nine members of my family hid under the bed.”

Laukkai township, with a population of almost 95,000, is part of a self-administered zone of the Kokang, an ethnic Chinese group in Myanmar. Since February 9, the area has seen some of the country's heaviest fighting in recent years, with dozens of Myanmar troops killed and frequent airstrikes targeting rebel forces.

The Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), led by a former Communist Party of Burma leader Peng Jiasheng, is attempting to retake the territory abutting the border with China that he lost in a government offensive in 2009.

The morning after the street battle, 36-year-old Ma Khine and her three children, piled onto a single motorcycle and set off, with her sister carrying her own children on another bike.

“We were so scared so we just kept going,” she told ucanews.com. “We didn't stop at all.”

They rode all day and all night across northeastern Shan state’s plunging mountain landscape, she said, reaching the safety of Lashio town at about 5am the next day.

“On the way, we passed so many [Myanmar army] troops coming the other way, but they didn't stop us,” she said.

Ma Khine, her young son and two daughters are now housed in a dormitory in Lashio’s Mansu monastery. The Shan Buddhist monastery has served as a way station for more than 10,000 people, mainly migrant workers, who have fled the fighting. Most come from Myanmar’s majority Bamar ethnic group.

Ma Khine said she had been unable to make direct contact with those family members — her father, brother, sister and brother-in-law — who stayed behind in Laukkai. But the Myanmar Red Cross Society (MRCS) had managed to confirm that they were safe in a shelter run by aid workers, she said.

“I’m still worried,” she added, “and we can’t get any news from there.”

State of Emergency

State media has a near-monopoly on what information comes out of the Kokang region, with aid workers and journalists prevented from visiting the area since two convoys — marked with MRCS flags — came under attack last month. A 90-day state of emergency was issued on February 17, and judicial and executive powers were handed to the military’s regional commander Colonel Saw Myint Oo.

What is clear is that a massive deployment of the Myanmar army has been sent to crush the Kokang rebellion. A number of people thought to be well over the official Chinese estimate of 30,000 people have fled into China, where humanitarian access to refugees has reportedly been limited.

Yanghee Lee, the UN’s envoy on human rights in Myanmar, said in a report issued Monday that all parties must remember “the need to protect civilians and to facilitate humanitarian access”.

“The State of Emergency declared by the [Myanmar] Government in the Kokang self-administered zone must be accompanied by strict accountability and safeguards for human rights,” said the envoy.

The Myanmar government is now reporting that its soldiers have cleared Kokang rebels from major population centers and are now “combing” the hills for insurgents. The state-run Global New Light of Myanmar on Tuesday reported that “fierce fighting” was ongoing in battles to take control of a strategic hill near to the access road to Laukkai.

However, Tun Myat Lin, spokesman for the MNDAA, claimed that the group’s numbers have swelled with new recruits — now about 3,000 in number — since the conflict began.

“We have opened the door for peace talks but the government has rejected it,” he said. “We see it as a political problem that needs to be negotiated in a political way.”

Despite some official reports that the displaced have begun returning home, relief workers in Lashio and Kunlong said more people each day are still making their way out of the conflict zone to escape the fighting. On Saturday, another 33 people arrived at the Mansu monastery to take shelter.

Information Blackout

“People here don’t have any accurate information,” said Maung Maung Than, a volunteer at the Mansu monastery. “We just have the information from the government’s statements. Although some information is leaking out through people's contacts in Laukkai.”

The information blackout is fuelling speculation about the treatment of civilians in the conflict zone, especially given the Myanmar army’s record of human rights abuses in conflict areas.

One woman interviewed by ucanews.com in Lashio said that before fleeing Laukkai she had come across the bodies of four men. “They had just been covered by rice sacks and were lying in the street,” said the woman, who asked not to be identified. “They were young men, but they weren’t wearing [military] uniforms.”

Photographs posted on social media — the veracity of which could not be confirmed — purported to show the dead bodies of civilians in Kokang, and some media outlets have reported claims that civilian casualties have been buried in mass graves.

A statement issued by the Shan Human Rights Foundation on February 27 said Myanmar army soldiers had gone from house to house looting and destroying property in villages in Laukkai township, citing accounts from people who stayed behind to protect their property.

But despite this grim picture of the situation, some of the displaced still hope to return to Laukkai, where strong business links with China mean that living conditions are markedly better than in their native central Myanmar.

Almost 140 people, including 29-year-old Thin Thin Myat and her two children, are staying at the Mansu monastery, waiting to return to their jobs in Laukkai.

Originally from Monywa in Sagaing Region, Thin Thin Myat has worked as a cleaner in Laukkai for more than a decade. She said she tried to stay for as long as possible when the conflict began, but when she heard that a woman was stabbed to death with a knife by looters, she decided to leave.

Thin Thin Myat is eight months pregnant, and hopes that it will all be over soon. "I have no idea where my child is going to be born," she said.

Source: UCAN