[Dhaka Tribune] Myanmar’s eight-month-old government faced a fresh crisis on Monday, after four ethnic gangs attacked security forces in the north of the country, dealing a major blow to leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s top goal of reaching peace with ethnic minorities.
Eight people were killed and 29 maimed when a coalition of northern rebels attacked military and police outposts and a business centre near an important trading hub on Myanmar’s border with China on Sunday, the government said.
China put its army on high alert and said it was providing shelter for some people who fled across the frontier to escape fighting in the towns of Muse and Kutkai, in Myanmar’s northeastern Shan state. Beijing called on the parties involved to exercise calmness and restraint. Shan state is majority Tai-speaking (at least as of the last I knew anything about it.) The Shan are ethnically similar to the Thais and Laos. There are also Laha and Lisu, Akha, Kachins, and a few others. It makes up about a quarter of Burma. There used to be a supposedly Nationalist Chinese army (or more accurately the descendants of same) still in the area, making a living exporting heroin and semiprecious stones. The Akha dress very colorfully, but they get pretty smelly because they have a taboo against bathing. The Kachin ladies are very pretty until they become crones at around thirty. They build their houses on stilts to keep snakes out. When Kachin fellows go a'courtin' they sit under the houses and sing and play the banjo. Then they stick their hands up through a hole in the floor. If the girlie favors them she holds the hand or fills it with inviting body part. If she doesn't, she emptied her pipe in it. I think I'll stick to National Geographic...
The sudden escalation of fighting comes as the government grapples with a conflict in northwestern Rakhine that has sent hundreds of Rohingya Moslems fleeing to Bangladesh, posing a new challenge to Nobel peace prize winner Suu Kyi, who swept to power last year on promises of national reconciliation.
In an important realignment of ethnic armed forces, one of Myanmar’s most powerful militias, the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), joined three smaller groups that have been in a stand-off with the Myanmar military since festivities on the border last year.
The fighting last year pitted the army against the predominantly ethnic Chinese Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) and its allies, the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) and the Arakan Army (AA).
The three groups said they had joined with the KIA to attack the military over the weekend.
"The Burma armed forces have been assaulting to destroy all political and military struggles of the ethnic peoples because they have no will to solve Myanmar’s political problem by politically peaceful negotiation methods," the four groups said in a statement.
Continued on Page 47
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11/22/2016 00:00 ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
