Innocent Karen villagers are a target because they are the foundation upon which an insurgency is built. The relatives of the guerrilla soldier who live in the village, provide important refuge for battle weary men. They are a source of food, information, and inspiration. Villagers provide essential information on government troop movements, and form the tax base vital to guerrilla operations.
The Regime must attack this relationship between villager and guerrilla in every way possible in order to be successful in combating the insurgency and the SPDC has been creative in developing a number of cruel and ingenious methods for doing this. They have launched large scale campaigns to burn and destroy villages, hunting down the fleeing villagers in the forest and shooting them on sight.
The SPDC military intelligence is ubiquitous in Burma. There are agents everywhere, and they provide information that is acted on by much feared death squads known among other names as Sa Thon Lon which is the Burmese equivalent of SSS. Even Burmese army regulars fear this special unit whose members are recruited based on their capacity for violence and answer directly to Lt. General Khin Nyunt, director of Burma's dreaded secret police. The primary objective of the Sa Thon Lon guerrilla retaliation force is to cut the connection between the resistance fighters and the people. They are given a list by Military Intelligence, and their job is to seek out individuals who have helped the guerrillas in any way shape or form in the last 20 years, visit them in the night and execute them.
As I lay awake in the predawn hours listening to the birds chirping outside my window, the hollow sound of monks chanting drifted up from a nearby temple, and two groups of prowling street dogs met in snarling battle in the lane behind the house. Today I would be heading up the border to investigate the fate of the villagers who had been burned out at Mae La Puta. I had made arrangements with a contact who said that he would be traveling up the border to Becklo refugee camp as he had some business there, as well as in Nobo Village, the Thai village located opposite the ashes of Mae La Puta. Atheya was a Karen who spoke excellent English, and who also happened to have been born in Thailand, which meant we would have no problems with the police. He invited me to come along, hinting that he could "introduce me to some people".
A few hours later we sped north on a rented motorcycle with Atheya driving, as he considered my conservative, Canadian habit of following the rules tiresome and vaguely sissy. The first of the monsoon rains had arrived, and raindrops stung our eyes and soaked our clothes as we made the two hour trip. When we arrived at his grandfather's house in Becklo the family rolled out the red carpet, and I was welcomed with a dry shirt and a cup of hot tea. The fact that harboring a foreigner was illegal did not seem to worry anyone in the least. As with most Karen households there were 3 or 4 generations of cousins, aunts and uncles and a handful of adorable children. One of the nieces who was about three, plopped herself in my lap and the rest of the children gathered around to gaze at me in the candlelight, whispering and giggling and tugging at the hair on my legs as if to test if it were real. We turned in early as we had to be up at dawn the next morning.
