Daniel Pedersen

Restaurant bombing kills two

Daniel Pedersen

Mae Sot

Burma’s Myawaddy has again become an urban theatre of war, with two people killed in a bomb blast on Wednesday night near the Thai-Burma Friendship Bridge.

And witnesses said throughout the day on Tuesday they had heard sporadic gunfire from the Rim Moei Market, nestled on the riverbank directly opposite Myawaddy.

The Burmese frontier trading town became famous overnight on election day – November 7 – when soldiers of the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army revolted against their Burma Army overseers, sparking pitched battles in the town’s streets.

Since then, the situation has deteriorated along the border as the junta’s troops seek retribution.

There are more than 10,000 refugees spread along both sides of the Moei River, human minesweepers are being driven ahead of Burma Army troops and hostilities are regularly spilling onto the Thai side.

Said a Thai military intelligence officer: “They’re [both Karen and Burmese troops] using Thailand like a guesthouse.”

Burma’s ruling military junta, the State Peace and Development Council, has ordered its army to embark on a major offensive to secure the border area in a concerted effort to open it up for trade.

The Burma Army has introduced 110mm GPS-guided cannons to the border area and is regularly plying ethnic army-held areas with as many as 200 120mm mortars a day.

It is firepower the ethnic armies of this region cannot match and significant base camps have fallen like dominoes in recent weeks.

Landmines, the main defensive apparatus used to protect their villages, have been detonated by mortar and cannon fire.

To protect themselves against landmines that have not been detonated by heavy artillery, the Burma Army imported 600 prisoners taken from state-run jails to walk in front of them, essentially as mine fodder.

Some sustained serious injury and were hospitalised in Thailand, their stories were corroborated by three escapees who fled across the border.

Soldiers of the ethnic armies, the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army and the Karen National Liberation Army, have been left on the run, sleeping rough in the bush with few supplies.

The DKBA has so far borne the brunt of the Burma Army’s latest offensive.

Until the ruling junta’s November 7 election, the DKBA and the Burma Army had been considered allies.

But a revolt on that day by elements of the DKBA resulted in heavy fighting in the Burmese border town of Myawaddy, opposite Mae Sot in Thailand.

The ensuing onslaught in areas to the south of Mae Sot could be viewed as the Burma Army looking to teach its former ally a lesson.

But things have not gone so well for the Burma Army and it has still not managed to wrest control of the contested areas, according to interviews with former soldiers conducted by the Karen Human Rights Group.

One 17-year-old Burma Army deserter told KHRG: “Our camp was attacked and the ones who got injured the most were us, but the DKBA soldiers did not get injured a lot.

“There were around 500 to 600 soldiers when we started operations but the total soldiers who died by landmines or got shot were over 200,” he said.

He fled the fighting to save his life, he said.