Report from a conflict zone in Kawthoolei

Saw Htee Cher (စီၤ ထံဆၢ) appeared recently on a podcast episode to discuss the conflict in Karen and Karenni State. He shares this essay submission, written on April 23, 2024, to update the most recent developments.

“Bombing hospitals, schools, and religious buildings is an international war crime; it is also a Burma army tradition.”

— Saw Htee Char

For decades Papun town was an island of Burmese military control in a district mostly under indigenous Karen control. It could only be maintained through a heavy army presence, consisting four battalions holding off the Karen National Liberation Army that ruled the rural areas. Then on March 27, 2024, after months of preparation, Karen forces stormed the town, overrunning the vast police barracks and driving occupation troops back into their fortified camps south of town.

Then began the hard work of wearing down and eclipsing those battalions. The first of those, Battalion 19, fell relatively quickly, only three days after the town was liberated. What Karen drones and mortars hadn’t destroyed during the battle, junta airstrikes finished off afterward. Not a single room of any building remains intact. Roofs are collapsed, furniture and supplies are splintered and thrown around randomly. Locally-made Karen rocket shells lie among the ruins they helped create. The place is quiet, with the red, white, and blue Kawthoolei national flag flapping high on a pole above a sign in Burmese that reads, “Morale and discipline must be maintained,” meant to inspire the troops in their occupation of the Karen town.

Now the battle has progressed a short distance south to the next battalion camp. The battalions are arranged in a tight sequence along the paved road that leads south to Kamamaung, a smaller town on the border of two neighboring districts. Under the protection of a concrete bunker, a forward Karen command post has been set up. About a dozen soldiers and commanders occupy mats and furniture brought for the purpose. One of them operates a drone control console. Gunfire very close by is from enemy soldiers shooting at the Karen drone that flies over their position, pinpointing the exact location of everything and everyone in it. Just then two enormous booms shake the ground, signaling that another Karen drone has loosed its bombs on the enemy camp. A column of smoke rises among the buildings of the camp.

The crack Federal Wings drone People’s Defense Force (PDF) is operating here, as it has alongside the Karen army in Dooplaya and other districts. Federal Wings flies large drones that can drop 120 mm mortar shells with impressive accuracy. These produce enormous explosions that splinter infrastructure inside the enemy camps. The local Karen battalions have drones of their own, but these carry a single 60 mm shell per sortie, and are not as accurate.

All day, each day, and into the evening, the explosions of drone bombs on the enemy camps can be heard even from many kilometers away beyond the far side of town. Night time is also punctuated by occasional blasts. There is no “safe hour” when the Burmese troops can move without worry around their camps or beyond. They live under siege, hiding in bunkers at all times. Water tanks are riddled with shrapnel and sniper holes. It is difficult to cook, sleep, excrete, or bathe in the dirt trenches. Existence for the occupation troops is no life. Their army can drop supplies to them by parachute from helicopters, but those parachutes are just as likely to drift to the Karen. Sniper fire makes landing the helicopters dangerous. On January 29 Karen snipers shot down a helicopter in Dooplaya District to the south, killing five senior junta officers on board.

Day by day the Karen forces bomb, watch, and carefully position their soldiers, gauging the propitious moment to seize the next camp. It has been three weeks since the last one. Karen commanders are in no rush. Wearing down the enemy, reducing its numbers, destroying its supplies and infrastructure, depressing its morale, is preferable to the heavy losses likely if the assault is launched too soon.

*The Karen national flag flies over a destroyed junta battalion camp.*

Meanwhile, a couple of kilometers behind the lines, the town shows the signs of the junta’s strategy of destroying places it cannot control. Large 500-pound bombs dropped by jets have leveled whole sections of downtown, particularly the commercial district. In a row of former shops, all the brick walls fell in one direction, but then at a certain point they all fell the opposite direction, indicating the shop in which the bomb hit. They are all equally flat now. Other shops across the street had their doors blown off, and someone has helped themselves to the merchandise inside.

A destroyed monastery marks the place where pro-junta civilians thought they would be safe from the bombing from their own side. They were wrong, eight of them were killed, others injured, and they have all now fled to the jungle alongside their Karen and Muslim neighbors who felt no such privilege.

Outlying residential streets appear deceptively peaceful and normal, except for the fact that all doors are locked and nobody is home. They have all moved to the jungle north of town to be safe from the airstrikes. Civilians return individually on their motorcycles to retrieve supplies and items from home, then return to the jungle.

In the properties of the former Burmese administration, the Karen authorities are said to have given their permission for the appropriation of whatever has not been destroyed. It is a strategy meant to save materials from likely bombing. The middle section of the public hospital is collapsed by an airstrike, but it had been evacuated some time before. Bombing hospitals, schools, and religious buildings is an international war crime; it is also a Burma army tradition. Medical supplies, storage bins, and furniture have been carted away from the vacant hospital. Whenever the new Karen administration begins its governance, buildings will need to be repaired, and perhaps some of the removed materials will be returned; others will need to be replaced.

At the district government office bomb damage is light, but all manner of furniture and other useful items are being removed by organizations and individuals, leaving mostly thick files of papers. The Burmese immigration, public health, public works, and other departmental offices were here. Some of this copious paperwork was the occupiers’ means of controlling the civilian population. Its education system sought to replace the local Karen language with Burmese. Its public works extended roads into rural areas, over which its army could assert domination. The immigration department was actually a system of identifying and tracking the local people. The Burmese administration had made some effort at modernizing and beautifying the town, with concrete all-weather streets and attractive stainless signposts and large schools. It was hard for the population to appreciate these efforts, however, since they were part of a hated occupation. All the signs are in Burmese; the local culture was not recognized.

*Junta airstrike damage at the vacant city hospital in Papun*

Notably unscathed by the bombing are some Buddhist monasteries and temples on the western side of town. They are beautiful. Their tended gardens, golden stupas, and ornate buildings radiate peace amid the chaos of war. All the monks are gone, like the rest of the population, and locals call them “Burmese monks,” foreigners, as if they were part of the occupation. Most of the people of Mutraw District are Christian. The large Karen Baptist Church lies outside of town to the north.

Still further from the front line, in the rubber tree plantations and the jungles north of town, local refugees from the town are camped in temporary bamboo structures they have erected quickly. Some have received some relief supplies from Karen and foreign support organizations. All of these are small, however, and their means limited.

The big international aid agencies are prevented from working here in liberated areas by their formal relationships with the illegal military regime. The United Nations and well-known crisis assistance NGOs all sign agreements with the regime under which they agree to work where, and with whom, the regime directs. Naturally it doesn’t want them here or any other place it doesn’t control. A few international organizations have opted to work across the border from neighboring countries, through these local partner organizations, signing no agreements with the illegal regime, nor paying it any fees or taxes, and reserving their right to direct their resources to where the refugees are located.

One small cross-border agency has set up a rear base for assisting the local refugees, another has installed a field surgical unit that serves wounded soldiers from both sides as well as civilians with regular health needs. Still another hybrid foreign-local group maintains a cadre of trained medics closer to the town, ready for each battle. Karen organizations from both Kawthoolei itself and Thailand mobilize and send small shipments of food, rain tarps, and other supplies. Though limited in size and resources, these are the organizations that have kept the three million conflict refugees alive during the three-year-plus war, throughout Myanmar. The multi-million-dollar UN and multi-national agencies are no-shows.

Each day brings the possibility of renewed airstrikes and further destruction. Everyone still in or near the town needs a safe cover to run to when that happens. Bunkers have been dug, and ravines and culverts are used during dry season. At the moment the enemy jets seem to be diverted to faraway hotspots in Myawaddy, Kachin, and Sagaing. The only aircraft in the past few days has been a propeller plane that flies around dropping smaller bombs out the window, a relatively low-tech form of terror from above. Most of the explosions heard are from the Karen army’s drone-bombing.

This report will rapidly become out of date. The Karen capture of the remaining camps may take some time, but it appears inevitable. The Burmese junta is rapidly exhausting its once-vast army, and is reduced to forcing unwilling conscripts into brief, nearly meaningless training, then sending them off to face battle-hardened ethnic armies and Peoples’ Defence Forces against whom they stand little chance. The timing of the end is not clear, but the demise of the junta is. The persistence and patience of the Karen army’s Brigade 5 in Papun is like that of the many fronts across Myanmar on which the junta is being driven steadily backward. The other Karen brigades are doing this also, as are the Kachin, Arakan, and Karenni armies and the PDFs. Each force does its part, and their combined efforts add up to an unmistakable movement toward the eventual end of the dictatorship.