[lg policy] Burma: Fleeing Battle, Myanmar Refugees Head to China

[Harold Schiffman]

Fleeing Battle, Myanmar Refugees Head to China

By THOMAS FULLER

BANGKOK — After two decades of relative calm in northern Myanmar,
fighting has broken out between the central government and upland
ethnic groups, sending tens of thousands of refugees fleeing into
China and threatening a fragile patchwork of cease-fire agreements
that ended decades of civil war. The fighting began between soldiers
from the Kokang minority group and government troops, but it broadened
to involve at least two more groups, the Wa and the Kachin. All three
groups oppose the central government.
The official Chinese news agency Xinhua reported Thursday that
refugees were fleeing into Yunnan Province, which borders Myanmar’s
Shan State, where the fighting was. An estimate by the U.S. Campaign
for Burma, a nongovernmental advocacy group that uses the old name for
Myanmar, put the number of refugees at about 10,000. The office of the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said it had received
reports that 10,000 to 30,000 had fled into Yunnan Province since Aug.
8.

“We have been informed that local authorities in Yunnan Province have
already provided emergency shelter, food and medical care to the
refugees,” the United Nations agency said in a statement. The crisis
prompted China to make a rare comment about the internal affairs of
one of its neighbors. Jiang Yu, a spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign
Ministry, said that the government in Beijing “hopes that Myanmar can
properly deal with its domestic issue to safeguard the regional
stability of its bordering area,” Xinhua reported. Civil war raged
through much of the country after it gained its independence from
Britain in 1948, and Myanmar still does not control all of its
borders. Aside from the groups fighting now along the Chinese border,
there are Karen militants who occupy some camps north of the border
with Thailand.

The junta that has long ruled Myanmar has jailed its opponents,
crushed pro-democracy uprisings and clung to power through force,
justifying its actions, in part, as necessary to counter the
destabilization threatened by rebel movements. Now, it is pressing
more than a dozen armed ethnic groups to give up their weapons and
become border guards, an effort that appears to have galvanized the
groups’ opposition.“In my 30 years’ experience on the border this is
the first time I’ve seen such unity among the ethnic groups,” said
Aung Kyaw Zaw, a former soldier in the defunct Burmese Communist Party
who monitors the conflict from his home in Ruili, along the
China-Myanmar border.

Fighting between government forces and Kokang fighters took place
Thursday morning in the village of Yan Lon Kyaik, only a few hundred
yards from the border with China, Mr. Aung Kyaw Zaw said. It resumed
Thursday evening in the village of Chin Swe Haw, where three Kokang
fighters and several dozen government troopers were killed, he added.
On Friday, there were at least three clashes, according to the U.S.
Campaign for Burma.There was no way to independently confirm the
accounts of the fighting, which occurred in a remote area along the
border. The military moved troops into the area earlier this month,
saying they would crack down on illegal drug business, the U.S.
Campaign for Burma said.

If the military continues its advance, Mr. Aung Kyaw Zaw said, “there
will be so much bloodshed.” The central government, he said, has sent
reinforcements to the area.
Various ethnic groups control large pockets of territory in the
northern borderland areas and risk losing their control over the
lucrative trade in timber, jade, gemstones and, in some cases, heroin
and methamphetamine. The Kokang are allied with the most heavily armed
group along the Chinese border, the United Wa State Army, which has
about 20,000 soldiers and is known to have large-caliber weapons,
including field artillery and antitank missiles.

Farther north, the Kachin Independence Army has about 4,000 men under
arms. “This Kokang fighting is not only a Kokang problem — it has
become a wider issue,” said Brang Lai, a local official in Laiza, a
town on the Chinese border controlled by the Kachin Independence
Organization. “The border guard issue is unacceptable for all the
armed groups,” he said. “All the armed groups have a common agreement
to help each other.” The fighting comes as Myanmar’s military
government prepares to adopt a new and disputed constitution next
year.

“They want to show military victory before the elections next year,”
said Win Min, a lecturer in contemporary Burmese politics at Payap
University in Chiang Mai, Thailand. In early June, the government
launched a successful offensive against ethnic Karen insurgents along
the border with Thailand. The elections and new constitution would
nominally return Myanmar to civilian government after four and a half
decades of military rule. The junta is proposing a unitary state, but
the ethnic groups are loath to give up their hard-won autonomy, and
they fear domination by the majority Burman ethnic group, most of whom
are Buddhist and today hold power in Myanmar’s military junta. “My
sense is that the fighting will continue and could spread to other
areas,” said Aung Din, the executive director of the U.S. Campaign for
Burma.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/29/world/asia/29myanmar.html?ref=world


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