34, Shan State Army-South soldier, foreign relations officer
ETHNICITY: Shan and Pa-O
BIRTHPLACE: Muang Kueng Township, Shan State, Burma
INTERVIEWED IN: Loi Tai Leng, SSA-S army base, Shan State, Burma
We interviewed Philip on the front porch of his home in Loi Tai Leng, headquarters of the Shan State Army-South (SSA-S), as the rain pounded down on the roof and engulfed the verdant mountains surrounding us.11 Philip is a soldier and foreign relations officer in the SSA-S, one of the ethnic armies still in active opposition to the State Peace and Development Council. Philip spent eighteen years living as a monk, but was unsatisfied with his capacity to work for an independent Shan State. The fighting between the SPDC and the armed opposition groups creates dangerous and unstable conditions for villagers living in areas where there are conflicts with non-state armed groups. As part of the war against opposition groups in Burma, the SPDC uses the notorious four-cuts counterinsurgency strategy, which aims to weaken the opposition armies by cutting off their supplies of food, funding, recruits, and information. They do this by forcibly relocating local populations, burning down houses and entire villages, detaining, torturing, and/or killing those suspected of having contact with opposition armies, and stealing or extorting food, crops, money, and livestock from villagers.22
According to estimates from the exile news organization Mizzima, there are twenty-four armed ethnic groups in Burma—nineteen have signed ceasefire agreements with the regime, while five remain in active opposition. Many of the ceasefires remain tenuous. Altogether, tens of thousands of armed opposition soldiers remain under arms.
I grew up in the center of Shan State, in Muang Kueng Township. The mountain there is very well known, because it’s the second tallest mountain in Shan State—about 8,000 feet tall. My parents were farmers; we grew tea, rice, and vegetables. My father is Pa-O and my mother is Shan. Pa-O people are also from the mountains of Shan State.
The summer I was twelve, I came back to the village at five o’clock in the evening after taking care of my neighbor’s buffaloes and cows, and I saw fire and smoke. I heard shooting noises and people screaming; the village was overwhelmed with the smell and crackling sound of burning houses.
I had no idea what to think. Whenever and wherever there was fighting between the Shan rebel soldiers and the Burmese soldiers, the villages would be burned. But usually when the Burmese government military burned villages, we had time to escape with a bag of clothes.33
This time, the Burmese soldiers had burned down the whole village.
Most of the people had gone into hiding for their safety. My family members were working on the farm, and when we went back to the village and saw that it had been burned, we ran into the jungle for safety just like the others. We had to keep moving from place to place through the jungle, until we reached a place were we could establish a new village.
My parents were really sad that we were not treated like human beings. This event had a big impact in my life—it made me care about human rights and want to fight for justice where there is injustice.
Three different villages I lived in were burned down, and my family had to run all three times. Most of the time, we would run straight to the jungle and then move to another village. The Burmese soldiers wouldn’t tolerate a new village being set up in the same place.
I FIGHT FOR MY HOMELAND
I am a soldier in the Shan State Army because I want to work for my country, and because independence is the best way forward for the Shan people. English speakers call me Philip, but my Shan name is Yawd Muang. I don’t fight for myself, or for my family—I fight for my homeland. I have been a soldier in the Shan State Army for ten years. Before that, I was a monk for eighteen years.
When people talk about Burma, normally they only talk about two things: first, democracy and Aung San Suu Kyi; and second, about the drugs and the Golden Triangle.44 For international people to truly understand what the deep problems in Burma are, they have to come here and observe. In Shan State, everyone knows that Burmese soldiers go to the villages and commit human rights abuses. They take everything, rape girls and torture people. When the SPDC kills people, it’s like they’re killing mosquitoes. They don’t care, they just want to keep their power.
Mahatma Gandhi fought the British by protesting only with his hands—no weapons, nothing. He went into the streets and boycotted everything, with millions of people in India supporting the fight for independence, until the British left. But if you oppose the SPDC, you need to have a gun to protect yourself and protect your country. If not, they’ll kill you. If they catch a monk with a flower in his hand saying “Please forgive me, please don’t kill me!” they don’t care—they will kill you. They have even tried to kill people like Aung San Suu Kyi, because she’s very popular and the leader of democracy. They have guns; they have power.
We want the international community to know that here in Shan State, we have a country. We have over 60,000 square miles of land and millions of people here. The Shan people are the second largest population in Burma. We have the same religion as the Burmans, but a different culture and a different language. Before the Burmese occupation, we had our own king and our own land. The British occupied Burma for about sixty years, and after the British left, there was the Panglong Agreement in 1947.55 The Burmese government made an agreement with Shan, Kachin, and Chin leaders to establish a federal union. They agreed that after ten years, the Shan people could decide whether to continue in the federal union or to have a separate government.
But then in 1962, General Ne Win took power in a coup d’état. He soon sent troops into Shan State. When they entered the villages, they beat villagers, forced porters to carry their belongings, arms, and ammunition. They stole rice, pigs, hens, and cows. They assassinated many Shan leaders or sent them to jail. Some were tortured and died in jail.
Since General Ne Win destroyed the Panglong Agreement by doing this, we should have automatically become independent in 1962.
We are fighting until the SPDC leaves. I believe we need to have our own country and our own government. I have told many people, “We have only two choices—you either become a servant of the enemy, or you become their leader and rule over the country. If you don’t fight, you become a servant forever. You have to fight—we all have to fight.”
I ONLY WENT TO SCHOOL ONCE
There were twelve children in my family—ten boys and only two girls. One of my brothers joined the army of the Communist Party of Burma (CPB) and two other brothers joined the Shan State Army-South.66 One of them died fighting against the Burmese army.
When I was young, my family never had much time to stay at home in the village because of the fighting between the Burmese and the Shan. There were three groups fighting in Shan State when I was growing up—the Shan Army, the Burmese Army and the army of the Communist Party of Burma. Many times I saw the Burmese army, and the Shan army fighting inside and outside the village. When there was fighting, we had to run into the jungle for safety so that we wouldn’t be arrested by SPDC soldiers or tortured and killed by them. It was horrible.
When I was six years old, I developed an illness that made me lose the ability to walk, so when there was fighting, my father would have to carry me into the jungle. I wasn’t able to walk until I was ten or eleven years old. Since we lived in the jungle at the top of a mountain, there was no chance for me to go to the hospital or get medicine from a doctor. Two of my younger brothers died when they were young because they got sick but there was no hospital nearby.
I only went to school once, for two hours, and then I never went back again. I had to leave school after those two hours because my family had to work together. I had to take care of my younger sisters, take care of the buffaloes, and get rice and food. But I always wanted to study.
At twelve years old, Philip decided that he wanted an education. He was ordained as a novice monk during the Poy Sang Long festival, and then he went to study at a monastery on the Thailand–Burma border.77 Philip describes his time there as being “surrounded by the resistance,” with Shan resistance soldiers always present and providing the monks with all their food. It was at this temple that Philip learned why the resistance soldiers were fighting the government army for an independent Shan State. After five years at that temple, Philip spent the next five years at a monastery in Bangkok, studying Pali and Thai language. He then spent a year studying at a monastery in Rangoon, and finally became fully ordained as a monk at twenty-one years old. Philip was a monk for eighteen years.
WE HAVE TO TAKE RISKS FOR OUR COUNTRY
It was around 1996 when I went from being a novice to becoming a monk. At that time, from 1996 to 1998, the situation in Shan State was especially bad for the people. There was forced relocation, villages being burned down—the four-cuts policy.
I decided to help the Shan State Army. As a monk, I started working more in politics so I could help the people, but I didn’t think I would eventually become part of the army.
The Chairman of the SSA, Sao Yawd Serk, called for a gathering of Shan monks, civilians, and soldiers in 1997.88 We gave the promise that we would not give up our responsibility to fight for our homeland. We had to end the conference when the Burmese army started an offensive in our area.
For the next six or seven years, I continued helping the SSA with diplomacy. I traveled around and attended meetings about forming a Shan government, and I worked with the Chairman and with the civilians. My family didn’t know what I was doing at the time. But we have to take risks for the benefit of our country and future generations.
I DON’T WANT TO DIE TODAY
In 2000 I decided to officially join the SSA as a soldier instead of just helping as a monk. By that time, I had already worked with the SSA as a monk for six or seven years before I made the decision.
It was a personal choice to resign from being a monk to join the army. As a monk you cannot do anything about protecting yourself, so how can you protect your land? You are only speaking, meditating, and praying. I don’t think that’s enough, so I decided to work for the people. I don’t support fighting, but I support defending our country. I don’t want to die today; I want to die tomorrow.
The first year I joined the SSA, our headquarters was built in a place we call Loi Tai Leng—loi means “mountain,” tai means “Shan,” and leng means “life”—like “the mountain of progress.” I lived there and I worked in diplomacy with the international media and the Thai media for the first few years. Then I went to the front line in 2003, for four years.
On the front line, we had to sleep, eat, and do everything in the jungle. We slept under trees, but once in a while, we could stay in a village. Whenever we encountered the Burmese army, we had to fight. We had to be careful all the time, because if you lose the game, you die. I stayed in the jungle four years. Sometimes we didn’t see other people for two or three months.
I had to get up in the early morning, around four or five o’clock, and call all the soldiers to get up. Sometimes we didn’t have time to take off our shoes for three or four days. Sometimes we had to go a day or two with no food to eat. When you’re hungry, your stomach gets hot inside, so I would take a handkerchief, put it in water, and rub it on my stomach. That would stop the hunger a little bit. It’s not easy in the jungle; you have no food, no bed, and no friends waiting for you, as you do in the village.
You had to carry your gun and always be listening. Every hour we had to figure out where the Burmese army was, where they were staying. We only had two choices: we fight or we move. If we thought we could win, okay, we decided to fight. But if there were more of them or the situation was not good, then we told our soldiers to split up or move far away from them.
I was in combat, but my main responsibility was to build good relationships with civilians, so that our people could understand how we could work together for freedom. I would tell the people that they did not need to be afraid of the Shan soldiers, as their duty is to protect our people and the country.
We call for the men in each family to join the Shan State Army, but some men come on their own, with their own heart and spirit. They have two choices: they can join for five years or forever. However, we cannot give a rank to a soldier who is staying only five years.
I came back to Loi Tai Leng in 2007 for a training. When the training finished, the chairman called me to work in the office here. Now I’m like the general secretary for foreign affairs. I’m working in diplomacy and on relations with the Thai and international media.
UNTIL WE HAVE OUR HOMELAND
I think the conflicts in Burma are increasing more and more—political conflict, economic crises, social crises, everything. The people are getting poorer and poorer, but the SPDC is getting rich because they have the power. The SPDC takes everything from our land—gemstones, gold, wood, and oil. They are developing their country by taking our resources. The SPDC also gets the benefit when foreign countries do business here; it’s money in their pockets.
The Burmese army gave permission to businessmen to cut down the trees here. We couldn’t protect our land, we could only get the tax. The SSA earns money from natural resources and from taxing foreign businesses that do business in Shan State. This is the system of every country; if I go to the United States to do business, then I have to pay taxes to you. If you come to our country to do business, you have to pay a tax to the SPDC and you also pay a tax to us. But this year we ordered our soldiers to stop the Burmese businessmen from taking wood from Shan State, because the people have been suffering from the land being destroyed. The benefit was only going to the foreign companies and the SPDC. What’s more, the SPDC gets electricity for Rangoon and lower Burma from the hydropower projects in Shan State. But the local people in Shan State living near the dam can’t afford any electricity—it’s too expensive.
If you visit Burma, you can see in the villages and in the townships that people in Burma are very poor. The SPDC is developing Naypyidaw for themselves, with electricity and power lines, but people in the rest of the country don’t even have candles for light.99
The SPDC is preparing for the 2010 elections, but it’s an election only for themselves. Even if some civilians do support them, it’s not from their spirit—it’s by pressure, by the gun. They wrote the constitutional amendments alone—the people and the minority ethnic groups didn’t have the chance to participate or give suggestions. The junta doesn’t care. Their political road map is only in theory, not in practice.
Shan people have tried different things for political reconciliation. First, we have a political party, the Shan National League for Democracy, that was elected in 1990. But they never had a chance to work; they were arrested and put in jail.1010 Second, there is a ceasefire group, the Shan State Army-North (SSA-N).1111 They signed the ceasefire because they didn’t want the people to suffer, but twenty years later they’ve never had any political benefits from the ceasefire. The ceasefire agreement may have lessened forced portering, forced relocation, and human rights abuses in the ceasefire-controlled area, but it has not eliminated them. The SSA-N now must either remain as a ceasefire group or be transformed into a home guard force or border guard force working for the SPDC. If the ceasefire groups don’t accept to join the HGF or BGF, the SPDC will fight them.1212 Now the SPDC is sending reinforcement troops to the ceasefire areas and opposition areas. I’m sure that war will happen in Burma in the future.
We’ve sent many letters to General Than Shwe and the SPDC asking for negotiations and peace talks, but they reject our proposals and say we must surrender first. No, if we lay down our arms for them, then they will cut our necks—we can only have negotiations if it’s even. I don’t think the military is the best way to solve the problem because we’ll have more people dying and the country suffering. But they rejected our proposal and they don’t want to talk anymore, so this is our last resort. We have to fight.
The fact that the SSA wants independence doesn’t conflict with the Burmese democracy movement. Once we get democracy, we can have discussions in the parliament, and there’ll be no need for fighting in the jungle.
If we kick the SPDC out of Shan State, we will be independent and have our own government. Now it’s time for the regime to be gone; I think their rule will end. In Shan State, we have Pa-O, Palaung, Lisu, Akha, Kokang, and Wa people—an independent Shan State would be for all of us. We have different cultures and different languages, but we stay together like one family. Only with unity can we work together and forgive each other.
I am sure we will win our independence because we are not fighting alone now. But whether or not we’re fighting alone, this is our job—we have to fight until we get back our homeland and until all the Burmese soldiers leave our country. We need to have SSA soldiers. If a person has no bones, you cannot stand, you cannot walk, you cannot do anything. Soldiers protect the country and the land.
I want to see my country peacefully building a democracy. I will be in the SSA forever—until we get independence, or until I die.
1 The Shan State Army South (SSA-South) is an armed opposition group in Burma’s Shan State, with posts along the Burmese–Thai border. Unlike the Shan State Army-North (SSA-North), it has not signed a ceasefire agreement with the government and continues to seek Shan state autonomy though active armed resistance.
2 From 1992 on, tens of thousands of civilians in ethnic minority villages along the Thailand–Burma border have been forced by the Burma army to relocate to army-controlled areas, with a significant increase in the scale of relocations after 1996.
3 The military regime’s four-cuts policy regularly removes inhabitants in border ethnic areas where the military regime has been at war with armed ethnic opposition groups. For more on the four-cuts policy, see appendix pages 461-462.
4 The Golden Triangle is located in the mountainous region where the borders of Burma, Thailand, and Laos meet. It is one of the world’s largest heroin production regions.
5 The Panglong Agreement was an agreement between Aung San’s government and the Shan, Kachin, and Chin peoples on February 12, 1947. It granted autonomous administration in the ethnically controlled areas. See appendix IX for further detail.
6 The Communist Party of Burma (CPB) emerged in the mid-1930s, among anti-British fervor and impoverished peasants who were hard-hit following the collapse of the international rice market and heavy taxes. Although banned by Ne Win’s one-party state, the CPB controlled large swaths of land in north/northeastern Burma until an internal mutiny led to its collapse in April 1989.
7 Poy Sang Long is translated to the Crystal Sons Festival, a ceremony among the Shan people where young boys participate in a parade, take monastic vows, and study Buddhist texts for a period of a few weeks.
8 Sao Yawd Serk is the leader of the Shan State Army-South and Chairman of the Restoration Council of the Shan State.
9 Naypyidaw is 200 miles north of Rangoon, and has been Burma’s new capital since March 2006, when the government built it specifically to serve that purpose.
10 For more information, see the “1990: The Election” section of the “A Brief History of Burma” in the appendix, page 465.
11 In the 1990s and 2000s, the Burmese government negotiated ceasefire agreements with the majority of the ethnic non-state armed groups.
12 In preparation for the 2010 elections, the SPDC asked all ceasefire groups to incorporate into a Border Guard Force or Home Guard Force under SPDC leadership. Many of the groups have resisted this call, leading to rising tensions between ceasefire groups and the government.