Saw P's Choice

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

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By SAW YAN NAING

 

Saw P's son, “Saw G,” in a photo taken on Jan. 1, 2011. Saw G's mother was shot dead 45 minutes after he was born. (PHOTO: KHRG)

They say, “All is fair in love and war.”

But for Karen civilians trapped in the jungle between Burmese government forces and Karen rebels, there is very little sense of fairness in either matter.

Take “Saw P,” a 37-year-old villager who recently arrived at a temporary refugee camp in Thailand after leaving his home in Papun District in northern Karen State, which has turned into a war zones in the last few months.

On the night of Oct. 13, Saw P was tending to his wife who was nine months pregnant with their third child. He tended the fireplace inside the family's humble wooden house while a neighbor acted as midwife.

No other neighbors or friends were around. Almost the entire village had fled in the preceding days when they heard that the Tatmadaw, or Burmese army troops, had set up a camp nearby.

Saw P's 24-year-old wife gave birth to a baby boy. She had the chance to hold her child and name him before she was shot dead.

“About 45 minutes after she gave birth, the troops invaded our village and opened fire,” Saw P said in an interview with Karen Human Rights Group (KHRG) in Thailand. He said a spray of bullets penetrated the house. One hit her in the neck and one in the thigh. She died almost instantly.

“She had already lost a lot of blood giving birth,” he told KHRG. “At first, we didn't realize she had been killed.”

In the two months after his young wife's death, Saw P fed the newborn with rice water mixed with sugar. Like other villagers, he had no money, and decided he would have to leave the village to seek support.

Neighbors and relatives offered to adopt his children. After much deliberation, he made the painful decision to hand his two elder children to relatives, but to carry the newborn baby with him to Thailand.

It was a six-day walk through inhospitable jungle to the border, during which time he had to camp on the ground while holding onto his son.

The shocking thing about Saw P's story is that it is not unusual in the refugee camps along the Thai-Burmese border where more than 140,000 refugees, mostly ethnic Karen, currently shelter.

Civilians, most of who are simple rice farmers, have suffered for generations caught in the crossfire of a six-decade-long civil war.

Last year, the attempted implementation of the regime's plan to transform armed ethnic armies into border guard force units under Burmese army command pushed uneasy cease-fires to boiling point. When a renegade faction of the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA) broke ranks, the situation quickly turned bloody.

The renegade group, Brigade 5, is led by Brig-Gen Saw Lah Pwe, also known as Na Kham Mwe.

On Wednesday, his unit confronted a Tatmadaw battalion at one of the many makeshift front lines in Karen State. Fighting was reported in Kyauk Khet in Myawaddy Township. Some 200 local villagers had little option than to flee to the Thai border.

Col. Kyaw Thet of DKBA Brigade 5 told The Irrawaddy that fighting started at 7 a.m and continued into the evening. He said his unit had killed 14 government soldiers and injured nine. He also accused the Tatmadaw of crossing the border onto Thai soil in order to a launch an attack, and said the Thai authorities were complicit in the tactic.

But between the front lines, the army bases, the patrols and the landmines, hundreds of Karen villagers like Saw P are tortured, killed or forced to work as porters or landmine sweepers, while many women are raped.

“I couldn't stay in the village, because I was constantly reminded of my wife and what happened to her,” Saw P told KHRG. “Whenever my baby cries, I see my wife's face.”

Irrawaddy News