AFP, 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 told AFP at a camp in Danai town. “It was so difficult and we had to cross a river.”
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-the 33rd Light Infantry Division-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.
“Yes, they are here,” Kachin state minister for security and border affairs, Colonel Thura Myo Tin, told AFP without giving any further details about their mission. 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.
“Kachin civilians… have little hope of divisions like these changing their behaviour,” HRW Myanmar researcher Rich Weir said. 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.
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 told AFP at a camp in Danai town. “It was so difficult and we had to cross a river.”
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-the 33rd Light Infantry Division-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.
“Yes, they are here,” Kachin state minister for security and border affairs, Colonel Thura Myo Tin, told AFP without giving any further details about their mission. 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.
“Kachin civilians… have little hope of divisions like these changing their behaviour,” HRW Myanmar researcher Rich Weir said. 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.
