Civilians in Kachin state flee Myanmar’s forgotten war

DANAI Seng Moon grabbed her day-old baby and fled into the thick jungle, joining thousands of villagers escaping fighting between ethnic Kachin rebels and Myanmar’s army, now reinforced by a unit notorious for its brutal “clearance” operations.

The insurgency in Myanmar’s remote northeast has festered for six decades, but unlike the Rohingya crisis in the far west of the country, it has garnered few global headlines.

Fighting has surged dramatically this year, displacing 20,000 people since January, adding to the legions already uprooted by one of the world’s longest-running civil wars.

Often called the “forgotten war”, the Kachin conflict is a messy struggle over autonomy, ethnic identity, drugs, jade and other natural resources between the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and the Myanmar state.

On April 11, with the sound of gunfire and fighter jets closing in, the villagers of Danai township sought refuge in their paddy fields.

Three days later shells started falling on their village and leaders took the decision for the 2,000 inhabitants to flee.

Seng Moon, 22, had given birth to her daughter only the day before.

“I was still bleeding (from the birth) and I felt like I was dying,” she said at a camp in Danai town.

For the group that included many young children, as well as the sick and elderly, progress through the arduous jungle terrain was slow.

But they were lucky to encounter local elephant handlers – known as mahouts – who helped ferry the most vulnerable across a chest-deep river to a displacement camp in the grounds of a small, wooden church.

Ethnic Kachin are mainly Christians in a nation that is overwhelmingly Buddhist.

International focus has been on the crisis in Rakhine state, from where some 700,000 Rohingya Muslims have been driven into Bangladesh by a relentless military campaign the UN says amounted to “ethnic cleansing”.

An army unit accused of atrocities against the Rohingya has now been redeployed to Kachin.

While the scale of violence in Kachin does not match operations against the Rohingya, experts say the deployment of the unit is an ominous sign for civilians.

Human Rights Watch accuses the unit of “multiple massacres” in northern Rakhine while Amnesty International has recorded “violations” against civilians on previous missions to Kachin.

The insurgency in the northeast is one of two dozen ethnic minority rebellions that have plagued Myanmar since independence from British colonial rule in 1948.

Civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi said forging nationwide peace was her main priority after her government assumed power two years ago, ending decades of military domination. But the army still retains control over security issues.

The Kachin conflict reignited in 2011 after a 17-year ceasefire collapsed. Clashes have intensified since 2016, displacing more than 100,000 in Kachin and the north of neighbouring Shan state. — AFP

( Myanmar):