Episode #106: The Karenni Resistance
Like many of his Bamar colleagues, Khun Be Du and his Karenni community first attempted to resist the military coup through non-violent means. Yet on May 21st, 2021, soldiers entered Demoso and began randomly shooting people who had gathered for a funeral. Since then, things have become much darker, and Khun Be Du no longer believes that non-violent resistance can be sustained. He banded together with friends to form a local defense force. Today, Khun Be Du is playing a leading role in the Karenni Nationalities Defense Force (KNDF), while also serving as Deputy Minister for Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation for the National Unity Government (NUG).
Unfortunately, Khun Be Du is all-too-well acquainted with Tatmadaw incursions into Karenni state. He recalls hearing about crackdowns following Ne Win’s 1962 coup, part of the military’s inhumane Four Cuts strategy, in which they attempted to deprive ethnic forces of food, funding, intelligence, and recruits. This led to entire communities facing starvation and becoming the focus of terror campaigns. Peace negotiations were finally achieved in the transition period, finally allowing much-needed development work to proceed.
But the Tatmadaw has rekindled the past horrors. They now station 3,500 soldiers in Karenni State--quite a large number for a rural ethnic state with only 300,000 people—and have strategically terrorized over 100 villages, specifically targeting vulnerable populations unable to defend themselves.
“So this is the clear message [being sent] by the SAC, but we cannot accept it, and we cannot just run away,” Khun Be Du says. “We have to fight it. I'm on the ground. We fight.” Since the coup, he has organized the KNDF into 19 battalions, and he estimates that for every local fighter killed, the Burmese military loses 30 men. In the face of such untenable losses, the Tatmadaw has taken a different tack. “Since they cannot fight very well on the ground, and rarely are able to take over different places, in order to recover their control, they use this mortar and artillery fire against our people.” In addition to airstrikes, the military has sent in a number of tanks with orders to shoot anything in their path… which often includes civilian non-combatants.
Thus, Khun Be Du paints a grim scene in which there is little they can do against armored convoys and fighter jets, even if his defense teams are largely winning against better-equipped ground forces. And given that the military has begun to specifically target schools, hospitals, IDP camps and other civilian centers, the sense of helplessness only increases. These attacks have decimated local infrastructure and forced thousands of people to be perpetually on the run. “Instead of killing the frontline soldiers, they are bombing the village and the city and make us retreat. So this is the happening, and nobody really helps us.”
As bad as the military’s repeated attacks on defenseless civilians have been, the real evil came on an otherwise sacred date for the largely Christian community within Karenni state: December 24th, 2021. On a seemingly random stretch of road, soldiers stopped vehicles and gathered passengers into a group, including two local staffers at Save The Children. They collected whatever money and other valuables the group had on-hand, and then proceeded to torture and kill them one by one, eventually burning the bodies. Khun Be Du was alerted to something strange happening from the first few minutes of the roadblock, when a farmer reported walking his buffalo near the area and running for his life when soldiers began shooting at him.
After the soldiers had finished their evil deed, Khun Be Du arrived on the scene, and assembled a team to try to determine what had happened. “We barely can distinguish the situation,” he recalled, “We took some DNA tests for the people so that one day we can show to the world that these people are burned to death and killed by the SAC on that day. This is the only evidence that we can recover.”
Because of the SAC’s extraordinarily brutal killing of innocent civilians, they have taken the rare step of responding to these charges, claiming that Karenni resistance groups intentionally disguise themselves to blend in with the local population. Khun Be Du vehemently denies this allegation, noting that local PDFs not only wear uniforms, but also agree to follow the international code of conduct regarding armed conflict, and intentionally avoid sheltering in towns and villages.
Khun Be Du asserts that those who do not take part in armed resistance still do not support the military, and so soldiers may be taking their aggression out on them as a result. “Of course the whole nation is not supporting the SAC and not supporting the coup! They are not supporting this kind of brutality and massacre to the people. So they all resist that, and they all support in this resistance movement.”
And while civilians bear the brunt of the violence, Khun Be Du says that none of them blame the PDF groups, and are in fact thankful for them. “They said, ‘Please fight as much as you can, and restore the freedom now! I cannot really care about my house. If I live under the SAC, I will not only lose my heart but also my life and my children, the whole generation! There is no hope, there is no incentive, under the SAC. So please fight.”
Given that the atrocities being perpetuated on a daily basis in Karenni state are equally as bad as the current Russian aggression in Ukraine, Khun Be Du is frustrated that the plight of his people isn’t gathering more international attention and support. He ponders, “I wonder how much we have to die so that the international community will take action.”