Series 2010 | Episode 5 | Inside Burma’s Secret State-Unreported World gets a rare glimpse into the Karen region of Burma.
Reporter Seyi Rhodes and director Simon Phillips spend two weeks trekking through forests to reveal the devastation the Burmese army is inflicting as it intensifies its war against the Karen people.
The team are smuggled across the Salaween river from Thailand in a small boat, covered by tarpaulin. On the other side, the few roads in Karen State are controlled by the Burmese military, so the only safe route is over mountains and through dense jungle.
The Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) scouts acting as the team’s guides have been part of an army that has been fighting the Burmese for 60 years. The Karen are one of Burma’s hill tribes who see themselves as culturally distinct from the Burmese, with their own language, and unlike the Buddhist Burmese, they are predominantly Christian. The Burmese army has stepped up its offensive against the Karen people, who are confined to mountainous jungle and encircled.
One Karen guide, Saw-Sun, claims that the Burmese army forces Karen villagers to do their most dangerous jobs, such as walking through minefields to clear a path, and that in the latest round of fighting the army burnt Karen villages to the ground.
After four days’ trekking, they find signs that they are near the scene of these attacks; hundreds of people – most of them women and children – are sleeping rough in the jungle. A village elder claims the army has driven nearly 3,000 people in the area from their homes, and they are now living in temporary camps.
One woman tells Rhodes that she and her four young children have been in the camp for two months since their village was attacked. Mu-Si-Kpoh says she only had two hours to pack and get out of her house before the Burmese soldiers arrived.
The team accompanies Mu-Si-Kpoh back to her destroyed village. They find nothing left, with the whole village reduced to a series of patches of black soot. All around there is evidence that this once-thriving village has been attacked and systematically burnt to the ground. She says she’s been forced to move home 10 times and this was the third time her house had been burnt down. Each time, she says, she moves as far away as she can from the Burmese soldiers but it keeps happening to her over and over again.
At an abandoned village that has become a KNLA base, the team are shown a series of photographs dated from the day before. One shows the dead body of a small child who has been shot in the front of the head. Another shows what one KNLA officer claims is the child’s mother, who was shot in the back as she was running away. He claims that the previous day Burmese soldiers had marched into the village and opened fire. He said he and his men had been too outnumbered and poorly equipped to stop them.
Rhodes and Phillips are taken to meet two men who claim they deserted from the Burmese army after being forcibly conscripted. One claims he worked as a recruiter for the army and was forced to conscript children. He claims that 50 per cent of the soldiers in the Burmese army are recruited that way.
Finally the team arranges a meeting with Major Saw Kleh Doh, one of the most senior KNLA officers. He tells Rhodes that the Burmese army is attacking in small groups, scattering Karen people and preventing them from organising a counter attack. He also claims that the regime is being increasingly supported by the Thai government, which wants to profit from the country’s abundant natural resources and has recently been stopping the flow of arms across the border to Burma.
The Karen are no longer fighting for independence; they want self-rule within a democratic Burma. But in a military dictatorship where opposition is banned, resorting to politics isn’t an option.
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/unreported-world/episode-guide/series-2010/episode-5
