*All photographs of artwork or students are the property of Kaw Seng and may not be reproduced or republished without her consent.

MYITKYINA, KACHIN STATE, NORTHERN MYANMAR
Most of the artwork hanging on the wooden walls of Jubilee Café is painted with rudimentary strokes and bold colors. Haunting figures hover ghostlike within the frames. Faceless and emotionless, the subjects face the viewer as if to deliver a final message to the living before the past fades from memory.

The images emerged from the minds of children, and each is illustrated with disturbing symbols of enduring trauma and heartache. The Prussian blue background we see is not the darkening evening sky of dinner time, but a sea of corrugated roofs provided by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees to shelter survivors from the penetrating sun, the monsoon rains, and the sight lines of those who wish them harm. The circles, squares and diamonds sketched in pencil are not random constellations of stars. They are bullet holes.

Jubilee Café sits atop a promontory overlooking the Irrawaddy River surrounded by clumps of bamboo, tropical flowers and mango trees. The coffee shop-gallery sits off Munkhrain Road in a quiet neighborhood of two-story residences—an unassuming sanctuary in a city whose future feels destined for discord and political violence. For the past two weeks, the café has hosted this exhibition of artwork painted by Kachin children who for seven years have managed to survive in IDP camps clustered along the Myanmar-China border. 

Beneath one of the paintings a caption reads: “The broken is not someone, but everyone. The broken part is in everyone. Light comes through the broken part into everyone.”

In Kachin State, where nearly sixty years of civil war and systemic disenfranchisement has left more than 120,000 ethnic Kachin refugees scraping out an existence in squalid, desperate conditions, hope can not be separated from heart-break.

Within hours of arriving in Myitkyina, we are informed that a meeting scheduled for later that evening would be postponed, and we're told to stay off the streets after 10 p.m. A spate of assaults, robberies, stabbings, rapes, and murders have taken grip on the city, and a soft curfew is in place.

During the day there are few signs of Myitkyina’s dark underbelly: the streets are lively in the commercial center, young people gather in Manau Park to practice traditional Kachin line dances, and the tree-lined city’s ubiquitous guard posts sit unmanned. But at dusk—as the smoke from burning leaves and trash wafts through the alleyways and night descends—checkpoints are set up along the city’s main roads and motorists are stopped, questioned, and ordered to go home.

Although Myitkyina has been spared the bombing raids of the resurgent war between the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and Tatmadaw (Myanmar’s armed forces), a wave of refugees from war-torn regions have descended on the ostensibly tranquil provincial capital of Kachin State. Mass exodus from rural war zones has led to staggering rates of unemployment, drug addiction, HIV/AIDS, and other manifestations of psychological trauma in the capital of Myanmar’s northernmost province.

In 2011, as the military junta prepared to relinquish control and transition toward democratic reforms, the seventeen-year ceasefire between Tatmadaw and KIA forces disintegrated. Bombs and mortars strafed the countryside as battalions maneuvered for control of strategic targets, sending tens of thousands of villagers fleeing toward the relative safety of Myitkyina, rural churches, and the IDP camps strung along the Myanmar-China frontier.

As the tenuous peace in Kachin State dissolved—reigniting one of the world’s longest-running and least-publicized civil wars—the Tatmadaw instituted its long-standing doctrine of “Four Cuts” designed to disrupt critical links between ethnic civilians and the armed wings of resistance movements by cutting off access to food, funds, intelligence, and recruits. 

In the case of Kachin State, the Tatmadaw’s strategy of attrition created the conditions to exploit the strategic humanitarian crisis.

The roots of the Kachin conflict can be traced back to the end of colonial rule and the 1947 Panglong Conference, where representatives from various ethnic groups gathered in an effort to unify the country under the banner of the newly-independent Union of Burma. Kachin chiefs, along with representatives from Shan, Chin, and Karen ethnic nationalities in Upper Burma, agreed to join the unified republic led by Burmese national hero General Aung San, provided that stipulations were included to ensure their political legitimacy and future autonomy. Foremost among these conditions were the “Principles of Equality,” which promised the voluntary right of secession to participating ethnic groups after a ten-year period. The negotiations failed, however, to include Arakanese, Wa, Mon, and Rakhine leaders, among dozens of other ethnic groups, which stoked resentment and gave rise to nascent ethnic rebellions.

The hopes of General Aung San (father of Aung San Suu Kyi) were short-lived, and he would not live to see independence. Just months after negotiating the Panglong Agreement, General Aung San was assassinated by agents of U Saw, a political rival and the former Prime Minister of British Burma. His death left the newly-formed Union of Burma without a unifying leader and gripped by fear that Britain would attempt to retake control of its former colony.

The Kachin conflict officially began fifteen years later in 1962, when General Ne Win led a successful military coup d’état against the democratically-elected government. He disbanded Parliament, declared Buddhism the national religion, ceded part of Kachin territory to China, and formed a military junta that would rule Burma for the next 50 years. In response to this abrogation of the Panglong Agreement, a group of Kachin students and young political leaders banded together covertly to form a rebel insurgency to fight the junta. That protracted war against the Tatmadaw continues today.

Kachin State is home to around one million members of the Jingpho Wunpong (Confederation), six tribes (Jinghpaw, Maru, Lashi, Rawang, Zaiwa, and Lisu) who have ancestral claims to the land. Until recently, the Jingpho lived mainly in upland agrarian hamlets, divided along clan lines and tribal affiliations.

“There are, strictly speaking, no Kachin tribes,” noted Reverend Ola Hansen in his seminal 1913 ethnology, 

. “They recognize only different families and linguistic traditions.” He explains that, for convenience, “we may call the group of families that speak the same dialect a tribe or a clan while we employ the name Kachin for the people as a whole."

Inhabiting a region of almost mythic obscurity, the Kachin dwell in the vast northern reaches of Myanmar, hemmed in by the frontiers of China to the east, India to the west, and the precipitous wall of the Tibetan Plateau to the north.

Only a handful of all-season roads exist in Kachin State, colloquially known as Kachinland, and they are mainly connected to Myitkyina, international borders, and strategic development projects. Vast swaths of the region are covered in dense jungle and are almost completely inaccessible for six months of the year. In 1942, construction began on the only “road” ever built across Kachin—the Ledo-Stilwell Road: a supply route carved out of the wilderness between British bases in Assam, India and allied positions in Yunnan, China during the dark days of World War II. Its purpose was to supply munitions, medical supplies, and provisions to desperate Allied fighters in western China to resist the Japanese invasion from Burma. When the Japanese took British Burma in 1941, the Allies lost their main supply train via the Burma Road and so devised an improbable plan to transport goods overland from India across loosely-patrolled Kachin territory to Yunnan. The U.S. parachuted a dozen soldiers into the Kachin jungles to make contact with local tribes and foment a resistance movement. In the ensuing months, thousands of Kachin joined the war effort as spies, saboteurs, and soldiers. Without the Kachin Rangers, as they would be known, China may well have become a Japanese colony.

The Ledo-Stilwell Road project was a notoriously brutal endeavor undertaken by a ragtag band primarily comprised of Kachin natives, Chinese laborers, and African-American soldiers. General Lewis A. Pick, who commanded the road-building effort, called it “the toughest job ever given to U.S. Army Engineers in wartime.” It took 50,000 men three years to complete and cost the lives of more than 1,100 American soldiers as well as countless thousands of Kachin and Chinese. The road was never utilized for its intended purpose, as advances in military aviation saw cargo planes able to ascend the Himalayan peaks, known as “The Hump.” Today, some portions of the Ledo-Stilwell road have been maintained and repurposed by the government, while others are impassable, having been reclaimed by the jungle.

Isolation has been a blessing and a curse for the Kachin. The unforgiving terrain has historically presented a deterrent to invasion, helping local clans resist the advances of powerful colonial neighbors: China, India, Lower Burma, and Tibet. Conversely, the vast expanses of wilderness, a dearth of infrastructure, and internecine conflict among the various sub-tribes has limited the Kachin’s ability to mount a unified defense of their land. External observers are rarely granted access to conflict areas, leaving the international community largely unaware of the war in Kachin. The consequence of inaccessibility has meant that the mist-shrouded mountains and dense rainforests have provided a perfect cover for the horrors of war.

There are no celebrated cultural monuments or glittering ancient capitals in Kachin State, and virtually no foreign tourism. For thousands of years, traders on the Southwest Silk Road steered clear of the malarial jungles and the “fierce Kachins" in favor of well-trodden paths connecting China to the Mogok gem mines and the cities of Lower Burma.

For all its mystique, it would be inaccurate to cast Kachin State as a remote, tribal hinterland. It is among the most coveted and contested repositories of natural resources on earth, possessing mineral wealth that holds the power to change the fate of nations.

The land is endowed with vast deposits of jade, gold, amber, teakwood, and rare earth elements valued in the tens of billions of dollars annually. Bananas, opium (processed into heroin), and hydro-electric power generate billions more. The promise of staggering profits has lured a cabal of government ministries, armed ethnic factions, drug cartels, and transnational corporations to descend on the land and invest in large-scale operations. Only a fraction of these commodities are taxed—the majority are neither reported nor intended for domestic consumption. They are instead smuggled across the Chinese border using a sophisticated web of shadow companies, corrupt agents and military-protected checkpoints.

Kachinland is marked by a resource curse that has borne fifty-eight years of ethnic violence, economic repression, land seizures, and cultural genocide. Still, it remains a symbol of independence, armed resistance to military rule, and opposition to Sino-Burmese suzerainty.

“The villagers were commanded to clap while the bulldozers destroyed their land,” says Tu Hkawng, a pastor from the Myitsone area.

Painfully, he recalls the sight of people from his village gathered near the banks of the Irrawaddy river in late 2009 for the “opening ceremonies” of the Myistone Dam project. Three villages were “invited” under threat of violence to celebrate the inauguration of the US$3.6 billion project that would ultimately destroy their livelihoods and transform their homeland into a bleak reservoir. They were obliged to feign enjoyment while their ancestral burial grounds were desecrated, their houses razed and their families sent into exile.

The villagers can only imagine the scene taking place inside the nearby dam headquarters: company men, government officials and military personnel sit around tables littered with bottles of beer and baijiu (Chinese liquor), platters of grilled Kachin delicacies and ashtrays overflowing with expensive Chinese cigarettes, while outside thousands of Kachin are organized in rows like prisoners awaiting their grim fate.

“Afterwards, they were ordered to leave their homes and march with the elders in front,” says Tu Hkawng. They were instructed by soldiers to walk in rhythm—right foot or left foot first—and told not to look back. “It didn’t matter if they were sick or too old to walk.”

Before the “ceremony,” villagers scrambled to pack all the possessions they could carry, stacking them on motorbikes, trucks, and boats along with their children, the elderly, and their cattle. Amid the chaos, much was left behind and families were separated.

“I heard a man packed everything he could move from his house onto a boat and made it downriver to the resettlement camp, only to realize he had forgotten his son,” says Tu Hkawng. “When he couldn’t find him, he ran back upriver many miles to his old house to search for his son and found him terrified hiding under a bush.”

Construction on the Myitsone Dam has been suspended for seven years, but the impact on the local population has already been catastrophic. “Of course, we need electricity,” he says, “but we do not need the dam. How can we believe this is good [for us]?”

Tu Hkawng’s concern is the ability of Kachin people to cope with the destruction of their spiritual center and the loss of their traditional way of life. He asks: “How do we account for the reversible and irreversible? The tangible and intangible things that could be lost?”

As animist traditions of worship, the “duwa” chieftain system, family structures, and farmland vanish—replaced by Christian dogma and Burmese customs—the cultural foundations of the Kachin also crumble. The loss of age-old traditions helps elucidate the spiritual connection to the river. To many, including Tu Hkawng, the Irrawaddy represents the last pillar of Kachin culture. Tu Hkawng speaks of the Irrawaddy river in sacred terms: “It is Myanmar’s treasure, lifeblood, sentimental value.” The Kachin believe their progenitors migrated from the Tibetan Plateau into the lowland basins of the Irrawaddy’s tributaries and settled in four ancestral villages. From these ancestral villages, familial lineages proliferated and clans were born.

Condemnation of the Myitsone Dam project, however, is not limited to the Kachin people. The Irrawaddy is the only major river located entirely within Myanmar’s borders, and an estimated forty million people living in the river basin depend upon it for sustenance, transportation and survival. Due to Myanmar’s complex demographics, the Irrawaddy is one of few unifying symbols of national cohesion, independent of the predominant Burman-Buddhist ethnoreligious identity.

Criticism is becoming widespread in large part because the economic, ecological, hydrological, and cultural ramifications of the Myitsone Dam leave too many unanswered questions, according to Professor Maung Maung Aye, Chief Advisor of the Myanmar Environment Institute (MEI).

There has been only one comprehensive environmental impact assessment on the Myitsone Dam. Known as the BANCA (Biodiversity and Nature Conservation Association) Report, the study was commissioned by the China Power Investment Company (CPI) in 2009 and conducted by a joint team of eighty scientists and experts from Myanmar and China. Although the 945-page report has never been released in its entirety, excerpts became public in 2011. Those excerpts recommended the Myitsone Dam be scrapped in favor of building two smaller facilities with equivalent combined generative power on tributaries upriver.

The Myanmar central government in Naypyidaw nevertheless insisted on moving forward with the project, imperiling the seventeen-year ceasefire between Kachin and Tatmadaw forces. Border skirmishes broke out in 2010. Then, in March 2011, the KIA issued a warning to the Chinese central government in Beijing directly, stating that construction of the dam would sever peace in the region and result in the resumption of civil war, insinuating that conflict would reap disastrous results on Chinese investment. Three months later, Tatmadaw forces attacked a KIA stronghold near the Dapein (Taping) dam, a Chinese-funded hydropower facility on the Kachin-Yunnan border, officially ending the ceasefire.

China’s stake in the Myitsone Dam goes well beyond electricity. It is part of a larger tactic called “debtbook diplomacy” in which China uses “strategic debts to gain political leverage with economically vulnerable countries across the Asia-Pacific region.” Sri Lanka and Pakistan have already been forced to cede military bases and ports to China, while in Kachin, debt leverage has allowed China to gain unrestricted access to critical natural resources. Furthermore, by forcing the government to acquiesce to the Myitsone project, Beijing receives tacit assurance of Naypyidaw’s willingness to capitulate to its future demands. This strategy is a critical aspect of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, an estimated US$1 trillion global trade route involving seventy-one countries and organizations that will “enhance regional connectivity” and fortify China’s economic supremacy in the eastern hemisphere.

The Myitsone Dam is a striking example of Beijing’s ambitions—and hubris—in Kachin State, where Myanmar’s government and Chinese companies have agreed to cooperate on eighteen joint venture hydropower projects.The Myitsone Dam is considered the crown jewel. It would be Myanmar’s largest hydroelectric facility to date, and the tenth largest in the world. Producing an estimated six thousand megawatts, it would have a greater capacity than any hydroelectric plant in Canada, and rank second only to the Grand Coulee dam in the United States.

There are no estimates as to how much, if any, of the energy or profits generated by the dam would be allocated to Kachin State. China Power Investment Company has reported that 90 percent of the electricity generated from the project will go to China, while 10 percent will be transmitted to the Myanmar power grid. China will receive 70 percent of the annual profits, 20 percent (USD $500 million annually) will go to the Myanmar government, the remaining 10 percent distributed as brokerage fees to development subcontractors, namely Asia World.

Despite the obvious benefits, however, Beijing seems to have been ill-prepared for the refugee crisis precipitated by the reignited war in Kachin. Villagers, whose homes became military targets, streamed across the border in search of safe haven in Yunnan Province, threatening Beijing’s delicately engineered neutrality. Shortly thereafter, in mid-2011, Myanmar’s Prime Minister Thein Sein officially suspended construction on the dam. That moratorium remains in effect today.

Although Beijing’s official position advocates peace and dialogue in Kachin, in early 2019, China’s ambassador to Myanmar, Hong Liang, stated: “If this issue [Myitsone] fails to be resolved…it will seriously hurt the confidence of Chinese entrepreneurs to invest in Myanmar,” going on to claim local political and religious leaders held a “positive attitude“ toward the project.

Semi-veiled threats may cause the government in Naypyidaw to balk, but the ambassador’s attempt to rewrite the narrative has been met with incredulity among Kachin leaders. “We oppose the project now and forever,” responded Gumgrawng Awng Hkam, President of the Kachin Democratic Party. “However, China refuses to give up and keeps trying [to build the dam]. They are giving the reasons that Chinese investors are hesitant to make new investments [in Myanmar] due to the failure of the Myitsone Dam.” KIA leaders have stated that they support the will of the people, who overwhelmingly demand the project’s permanent suspension.

When evaluating the proposed dam site from the banks of the river, the question that immediately comes to mind is: “Why here?” Few natural features suggest an ideal basin for a reservoir or the 500-foot-tall dam itself. The contours of the valley are rung by broken, low-lying mountains and rolling farmland. The area’s geographic features tell you this isn’t the place.

Perhaps even more problematic is the site’s proximity to the Sagaing Fault, which lies just fifteen miles to the west. A significant earthquake and subsequent breach of the dam could result in a catastrophic incident, potentially releasing a wall of water that would engulf Myitkyina with the force of a tidal wave.

Professor Muang Muang Aye’s team from the Myanmar Environment Institute found that “the conditions of the Myitsone area and its environs are actually not suitable for the construction of large dams and dam-cascade.” They point out that the area in question is largely composed of serpentine, which when exposed to water from the reservoir can become dangerously unstable.

Although Tu Hkawng advocates for Kachin State’s self-sufficiency, he agrees with the BANCA and MEI reports that call for a network of micro-dams to be built on tributaries of the Irrawaddy instead of one mega-dam project. As noted by CPI-commissioned scientists, this strategy would mitigate safety concerns surrounding the Myitsone Dam’s ecological and social impact.

Tu Hkawng believes opposition to the dam is growing across Myanmar and that the government should permanently suspend construction and allow local villagers to return home. Such a gesture could have a unifying effect politically and might help improve Myanmar’s global image. “The NLD [National League for Democracy led by Aung San Suu Kyi] is our elected leadership. If they refuse to listen, it will break trust and cause doubt among the people who voted for them [in 2015]. This will become a big problem for them [NLD] in the 2020 national elections.”

“We need the right to mandate it [micro-dam project] ourselves,” he continues. “But Kachin are not ready for this while we are still transitioning to a democratic system. It is not conducive to peacemaking.”

As the suspension of the Myitsone Dam continues into its eighth year, thousands of Kachin languish in IDP camps and resettlement colonies. Stripped of their land, livestock, and livelihoods, they live without political agency or viable economic opportunities. A grave, suffocating despair has settled upon these displaced peoples, and Tu Hkawng explains that the damage wrought upon the social fabric of Kachin culture is difficult too exaggerate. “One-third of the youth in the resettlement camps are drug addicts,” he says.

The entrance to the Aung Myin Thar resettlement village appears suddenly on the side of the main road that runs north out of Myitkyina. The shady two-lane road winds around green hills and past quaint hamlets marked by church steeples, tracing the contours of the Irrawaddy River toward the Tibetan Plateau.

A freshly-painted public health clinic situated upon a recently shorn lawn appears on the left, marking the entrance to the government-run displacement camp. Beyond the clinic lies a broad, flat, dirt plain and the hundreds of row houses where two thousand displaced Kachin villagers have been relocated, including Tu Hkawng’s brother and family.

Seven years ago, the government announced the mandatory relocation of six villages near the Myitsone Dam construction site, and subcontracted Asia World to build a makeshift town to house the displaced. The site has been constructed haphazardly with substandard materials, resembling little more than a Potemkin village built for show.

“The houses look almost identical to the traditional houses in our old villages,” Tu Khawng explains as he swings the car onto one of the side-streets of the gridded community. He drives past blocks of empty, lifeless houses until we approach a bamboo storefront framed by a clear-cut mountain in the background.

The two-story houses were constructed with poor quality wood and sit atop mounds of debris and loose clay soil that wash away in the rains. Built to last only three or four years, they leak during the four-month-long monsoon season. When the winds drive across the treeless floodplain, the houses sway and lurch. Fearing that they will topple over, families huddle together on kitchen floors, prepared to run should these shelters fail them during a storm. During the windy season, no one dares sleep upstairs.

There is little space between the houses and no room for vegetable gardens, nor land to graze livestock. No one in the camp actually has a deed to the land, nor do they have rights over their houses. They are forced to live here, but they are not permitted to truly set down roots.

“We are prohibited from building new structures,” says Seng Hkawn, a young mother of three. “The government only allows us to modify existing structures.” Lacking resources and viable sources of income, locals have few alternatives but to make their way back to their villages to collect materials from old homes to brace the new houses before they collapse.

Should gusting winds cause these structures to buckle and crush families, the news could tarnish public support and thrust the controversial Myitsone project into the global spotlight. This might compel the international community to pressure the government in Naypyidaw to take a harder stance against one of Myanmar’s signature infrastructure projects. Mitigating negative optics makes it critical for the government to maintain the veneer of humane living conditions in Aung Myin Thar, if suspension is to be lifted and the Myitsone Dam to receive final approval.

“Twice a year, representatives from the China Power Investment Company arrive to hand out rations,” Lahtaw Jan, an older mother with ten children explains. “For every six family members they give us three, 20-kilogram sacks of rice.”

There is no commercial life in Aung Myin Thar, just a smattering of corner stores stocked with the few precious commodities that make life here bearable: eggs, cigarettes, ramen noodles, alcohol. No one walks by the store during the hour we are there, nor does a single car pass. Sitting around a flimsy, low-lying plastic table, drinking tea, cartoons play on the television in the background. “People [here] don’t know what to do. They are wandering,” says Lahtaw Jan.

One can imagine parallels to the Biblical exodus being drawn during Sunday sermons in Aung Myin Thar, where ninety-nine percent of the population is Christian. Though the Kachin may wander like the Israelites, their prayers seem destined to fall on deaf ears.

Tu Hkawng believes that the mentality of the Kachin people is changing. “We used to work together, to help each other.” But as people are forced into unfamiliar terrain, “they struggle and don’t know how they will survive.”

Seng Hkawn explains that she lost her husband to a heroin overdose two years ago. “He did not use drugs when we lived in our village,” she laments. “It only started when we were forced here.” After he died, she found herself dispossessed, with no livestock, farmland, income, or support. To make ends meet, she runs a noodle shop in one of the twenty or so bamboo shacks set-up on a sandbar next to the confluence of the Irrawaddy during the dry season.

Each morning she leaves Aung Myin Thar around 4 a.m. and rides her bicycle an hour to work: she exits the resettlement camp, pedals over a series of small mountain passes, passes her ancestral village—taking stock of the house she once shared with her husband in better times—and makes her way to the riverside tourist destination popular with domestic tourists. Kachin clothing and textiles are valued highly throughout Myanmar, fetching exorbitant prices in the retail shops of Mandalay and Yangon. And so, to supplement her income, she rents traditional Kachin dresses to tourists who want to have their pictures taken dressed as locals with the source of the Irrawaddy in the background.

During monsoon season, when the sandbar vanishes beneath the river, Seng Hkawn packs up shop and moves to the semi-annual restaurant she runs near the headquarters of the Myitsone project. Concrete offices now reside atop villages that some of her neighbors in the resettlement camp once called home, while the burial grounds, churches, and gardens now buried under assembly halls and restrooms remain fresh in the peoples’ memories.

Imagining what comes next for the residents of Aung Myin Thar leaves little room for optimism. Will these displaced Kachin ever be allowed to return to their land? And if so, what will remain and how will they afford to start over?

Seng Hkawng tells us she hopes that the IDPs who fled to the camps far along the Chinese frontier can return to their villages. She dreams of the dam project failing—of returning home with her children to her land and the house she once shared with her husband. Perhaps there, the man who boiled up his despair and shot it straight into his veins can be buried with some dignity. And she can begin to heal.

Nkhum Brang stands before an awning-sized canvas outside the Manau Park Cultural Center. He is working with a group of assistants to create a live painting depicting the headwaters of the Irrawaddy from a photograph he took in the 1970s. Inside, dozens of high school-aged students pose for selfies in front of his paintings, while well-to-do locals peruse the cavernous hall filled with dozens of paintings propped up on easels. Nkhum Brang has displayed his work in Yangon and abroad, but this is the first time he has exhibited it in his home town.

The following day, we are driven to his house to meet him in his studio. Nkhum Brang’s son informs us that his father has gone back to the exhibition hall. He does not carry a cell phone, so he walks over to Manau Park where we find him at the end of the hall speaking with colleagues.

As his wife, a stately former Member of Parliament, brings us tea and sunflower seeds, Nkhum Brang explains his artistic motivation: “I see beauty in people and nature. But the beautiful things in my eyes are disappearing.” He points to the massive mural he co-created with students the day before, which now dominates the back of the exhibition hall, and speaks of lost ways, lost memories, lost youth, which he refers to as “rivers of no return.”

His works are vibrant, exotic reflections of a bygone era in Kachinland. He hopes that by sharing his art with young people “they will see and feel beauty and understand how people used to live and what nature used to look like.” Amid the harsh realities of life in Myitkyina and the difficult decisions facing Kachin youth today, Nkhum Brang sees engaging young people with creativity as his contribution to their “moral development.”

The erudite elder Kachin artist doesn’t conform to ethnic tropes: he is neither a resistance fighter nor a political artist. Nkhum Brang is simply a painter—one whose collection of work makes it clear he is desperate to ensure that what has been lost is not necessarily forgotten.

Nkhum Brang tells us he never became involved in the conflict, or with the KIA, because of his singular desire to create art. Thirty years ago, in the aftermath of the 8888 revolution, he watched his father get beaten with the butts of rifles by the military for speaking up on behalf of the Kachin. His father fell sick for five years and eventually died. He is well-aware of the consequences that come with armed revolt, and the risks of speaking out against the Tatmadaw.

“Many people in Myanmar want to make art or poetry. But it’s dangerous,” he says. “You can touch the government, but not the military.”

The future in Kachinland feels bleak to Nkhum Brang. “I have no idea what will happen tomorrow; I can’t tell what comes next. I feel like I’m in a box and it’s exactly the same size as my body. There is absolutely no space above my head. It feels narrow, heavy, dark.”

“In Myanmar, we cannot speak freely yet. In Myanmar, it takes time to reach the truth.”

In the meantime, he paints the vanishing touchstones of days gone by: a Rawang mother in traditional dress with her child strapped to her back looking over her shoulder; a feather-clad Lisu warrior holding an opium pipe with an impenetrable stare; elephants crossing a narrow tributary of the Irrawaddy.

East of Myitkyina, in the lowlands near the Chinese border, where farmland and forests stretch as far as the eye can see, agricultural communities have been reduced to ghost towns by bombings and landmines. The resurgent war has depleted the local populace in the border areas to the extent that once-thriving villages are now unable to resist the illegal appropriation of their land caused by a lucrative and growing black market trade in bananas.

Some of those who fled sought shelter in the nearby Zai Awng and Hkau Shau IDP camps, only to flee again after being bombed again in 2017. The few who have remained on the land do not have the manpower to cultivate the vast fields, even if they had the basic material resources.

In 2010, representatives from the New Democratic Army—Kachin (NDA-K), a communist faction of the KIA that broke away and allied themselves with the Tatmadaw as part of the Border Guard Force (BGF), began arriving in these villages. They struck a deal with Chinese fruit companies to profit from the vacant land. Villagers were handed seeds to plant in their quarantined fields, while farmland that had fallen into disuse, as a result of the disappearance of their owners, were allocated to Chinese investors. To sweeten the deal, the villagers were assured that everything they grew would be purchased.

In less than a decade, the eastern Kachin borderlands have been transformed into an ocean of bananas. The plantations are located almost exclusively in areas controlled by either the Tatmadaw, the KIA or the NDA-K, and the rule of law is lax, at best. Deserted villages have resulted in vanishing marketplaces. Debt and economic desperation have made ripe the conditions for forcible land seizures. Add to this, the constant threat of imprisonment or violent reprisals by BGF soldiers should villagers refuse to grow bananas, and it is hard not to see the eastern Kachin frontier as a post-colonial banana republic.

Kha Dau is a Project Coordinator for Metta Development Foundation, an NGO that provides social services and advocates for the Kachin people. He explains the mechanics of the industry: Chinese investors create dummy corporations based in Myanmar as front operations to conduct business. They pay off the BGF to coerce local land owners into ceding control of their farms. Forests are razed and subsistence crops eradicated to expand fields for banana cultivation, which cuts off villagers’ access to critical wild food supplies and destroys their source of firewood. This means villagers must travel even further to collect wood for cooking or to heat their homes during cold winter months. The land is mono-cropped, leaving no alternative source of income other than the sale of bananas to the Chinese companies who provided the seeds.

Once the bananas are harvested, they can be loaded and transported in trucks across the border to China in around nine hours. The “laundering” process takes place in Ruili, where the bananas are labeled Chinese-grown and shipped to markets in eastern China and exported to Europe. Masking the true origin of Kachin “conflict bananas” solves a few problems by eliminating tariffs, environmental regulations and labor laws. Chinese banana companies operating in Myanmar are never officially registered, so they leave neither a paper trail nor are they accountable for human rights abuses or public health violations.

Kachin

YANGON, MYANMAR—I was awoken at 7:00 a.m. on February 1st, 2021 by my wife Haymar and her younger sister whispering that the internet and phone lines had been disconnected. My sister-in-law had been staying with us in a small, rental apartment in the capital city. I was out picking up some breakfast snacks for everyone at Nya Zay market, when I overheard some shopkeepers saying that the military had taken over the government early that morning and arrested President U-Win Myint and “Mother Suu,” as the shopkeepers referred to State Chancellor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. When the internet connection came back on around 9am, my phone was flooded with messages from friends outside Myanmar warning me that there had been a coup.

We later discovered that in the early morning hours of February 1st, General Min Aung Hlaing, Joint Chief of the Burmese Armed Forces (Tatmadaw) ordered troops to occupy the parliament residence quarter, where newly-elected Members of Parliament were sleeping. He ordered the arrests of dozens of ministers and party leaders from the National League for Democracy (NLD), as well as prominent activists and artists throughout the city. At 9am, just as I was reading texts from friends outside Myanmar, General Hlaing unilaterally announced a yearlong State of Emergency. I whispered to myself: “Oh fuck, another '88 is coming.”

Haymar and I were born in the 1990s. Our generation had been taught the histories of 1962, 1988, and 1991 coups, but we weren't prepared to respond. On February 1st, Haymar, then three months pregnant, marked her 30th birthday. One friend bravely showed up. It turn out to be a day we would never be able to forget. Instinct told me to withdraw all the money from our bank account from the ATM nearby, which proved wise because it soon became nearly impossible to access money.

The nation was in a collective state of shock. No one expected that an event like this could occur after ten years of transitioning towards an albeit limited democracy. Before the coup, my wife and I had been living in Rakhine State for the previous two years, working with civilian aid organizations responding to the 2017 Rohingya humanitarian crisis. We'd left behind our chaotic lives in Myanmar’s most socially and politically unstable region and moved to the capital Yangon, expecting to settle into a cozy, urban life. Instead, we had found ourselves targets of a military insurgency.

On February 2nd, the nation erupted in a din of iron and brass and stainless steel as protesters flooded the streets in a mass “pot banging” ceremony aimed at mobilizing public resistance. Traditionally, “banging the pot” is believed to drive out evil spirits. That night at around 8pm—at precisely the moment that my wife, sister-in-law, and I were discussing how our neighbors might respond to us banging pots in our apartment—a deafening, metallic explosion echoed down our street. We ran out to the balcony and couldn’t believe our eyes: the streets were full of people, everyone was holding a pot, and it felt like the entire world was making noise. Where there had been silence and fear was now a scene of solidarity and opposition to the military coup. I can still hear the banging pots in my mind.

The coup was particularly difficult on civil servants, who found themselves forced to engage in subversive forms of civil disobedience. Teachers, doctors, bus drivers, civil administrators, and bank employees refused to work, sacrificing their futures to march in the streets. Two days later, a wave of protesters led by female industry workers from the outskirts of Yangon descended on Hledan Square, one of city’s busiest junctions. Their courage and brazen act of dissent sparked protests in every city and village across Myanmar, catalyzing millions to take to the streets. Demonstrators shut down traffic. Revolutionary slogans were draped across buildings. For three weeks the architecture of Yangon was a canvas for the resistance movement.

In mid-February, a brutal crackdown by the military culminated with mass arrests and clandestine murders of demonstrators. But it did little to quell the demonstrations. On March 27th, 2021, the military escalated the violence. Hundreds of protesters were massacred in major cities across the country in a single day. Approximately 80 people were killed in Pegu. 30 people were killed in Kalay. And countless others were targeted and murdered in Yangon and small towns. The urban resistance movement was forced to go underground as war broke out between the military and armed ethnic militias across the country, who had been fighting the Tatmadaw for decades.

During these chaotic weeks, my wife and I spent our time mobilizing our cell and responding to the political turmoil to support the resistance. At the time, my wife was involved with a group called 

 (“Let’s get out of the darkness”), which provided financial support to civil servants participating in the civil disobedience movement. I was involved in organizing protests outside Yangon until mid-March, when it became necessary to focus our energy on urban resistance within Yangon. Our world changed on April 26th, when most of our network were arrested in Pago, an hour north of Yangon. Our cover was breached; we couldn't go back to the city. Among those arrested were Ar-ker and BK, my closest friends.

At that time, we were in my wife's hometown Thaton, not far from Myawaddy, which has a border crossing to Thailand. When Ko Thin, a fellow activist and supporter of our group, called me the following morning and confirmed the news, he told me: “I'm running and you should too.” I knew it was risky, but the gravity of the news—the fear I felt for my brothers—filled me with terror.

We had two options. The first was to migrate to liberated areas along the border controlled by ethnic militias, primarily the Karen State Army. Many people targeted by the military made this choice. The second option was the clandestine route into Thailand. We choose to leave our country in large part because my wife was nearly eight-months pregnant at the time and there were no adequate medical facilities in the jungle. We contacted our network and found a way to cross the border with the help of an old colleague we knew from our work years before with the Rohingya in Rakhine State. She put us in touch with an activist, Mya Nandar Thint, who ultimately orchestrated our escape.

On 29th April 2021, we left Haymar’s hometown and drove to Pha-An. Mya arranged for a man and woman to meet us at a secure location in town, and then drive us to a safe house in Myawaddy, a town on the Myanmar side of the border. There we met many politicians and activists whose lives were in imminent danger. We stayed only one night. Later we would discover that our driver, an amputee who had lost her leg to a landmine, was arrested two months later for helping people like us escape.

We left the safe house the following afternoon and were driven the short distance to the border, which is basically a narrow river, on two motorcycles. We got in a boat that was attached to the Thai side of the river by a rope and were pulled across to the other side. An older woman escorted us to the Border Guard Force (BGF) base located in the no-man’s-land between Myanmar and Thailand. Although the BGF is officially affiliated with Myanmar’s military, their primary interest is profiting off human trafficking, illegal casino operations, illicit cross-border trade, and kickbacks for looking the other way while people like Haymar and I escape political violence.

As we approached the base, our elderly escort coached us how to act like locals and instructed us walk to the Thai police checkpoint with a group of small children. We were terrified at this point. If we got caught, the consequences were unthinkable.

Fortune smiled on us in the form of a deluge of rain that suddenly shut down the police checkpoint, giving us a window to cross the unguarded border. Once safely on Thai soil, we quickly made our way to a side road where a taxi was waiting to pick us up and drive us to the boss, a skinny middle-aged man who soon began arranging our next move. We paid him $10,000 baht ($265 USD) and he handed me a “police card,” which is basically a receipt proving that we'd paid off the police. We were told to show the card to any Thai police officer if we got stopped, and we'd be let go. We were then driven to another safe house in a small tuk-tuk. The safe house turned out to be Mya’s home.

We spent two months in Mya’s safe house. There was nothing to do but stay inside and help with household chores while we waited on Haymar’s American friend to convey our situation to their contact at the US Embassy. It took seven weeks, but the US Embassy was able to broker a meeting for us with Thai Intelligence to tell our story. A couple days after that meeting, a US Embassy van picked us up and drove us and 13 others to Bangkok, where we spent three days waiting to obtain parole visas to enter the U.S. On June 15th, 2021, we flew from Bangkok to Boston, and then to Indianapolis, one of the largest communities of exiled Burmese in the United States. Ten days later, Haymar gave birth to Tsawm, our baby girl. She is an American citizen.

Our decision to leave Myanmar meant we had to abandon our lives, our professions, families, friends, and our communities. It’s uncertain if or when we can ever go back. We never imagined ourselves escaping from Myanmar or seeking asylum in Thailand or the United States. It has been more than a year now...we have so many people to thank for helping our family on this journey.

But the coup leader Min Aung Hlaing is still in power and terrorizing people across the country. War between the military and newly formed civilian militias, known as People’s Defense Forces, are taking place in many parts of the country. My two friends Ar-ker and BK were sentenced to three years in jail. Our amputee driver was sentenced to eight years in prison. My friend, Ko Thin, is in Karen State where anti-junta resistance is strong along the northern Thai border. Mya arrived in New York three months after we left Thailand. More refugees from Myanmar keep coming to Thailand legally and illegally, and it’s gotten much harder for them to stay there. This summer, the military sentenced four democracy activists, including a well-known politician, to the death penalty. Our dream to return home to Myanmar is slowly fading away.

*The illustrator prefers to remain anonymous due to potential retribution to family and friends.

Memories Of A Coup

Nyi’s story and the video montage that follows was told in his own words from an undisclosed location in Myanmar. 

Before graduating high school, I didn’t understand the meaning of art. Even now, I don’t know exactly what it means. After high school, I enrolled in Their Khar Institute’s teacher training program to study social sciences and art.

At that time, mobile phones were just becoming popular (and available) in Myanmar, and I brought mine to Taunggyi where I would be studying so I could take pictures of my new mountainous surroundings. Some of my classmates really liked the images, and that’s what encouraged me to go deeper into photography.

The knowledge I gained during that time helped me earn an invitation to National Geographic’s Photo Camp Myanmar, and later enter my work in the Yangon Photo Festival competition, where my photographic story won first prize for the Shan State region. I received a camera and I immediately went out and started shooting photographs around Mandalay.

I worked freelance for a while, hiring myself out as a photographer for print journalists. It was mostly just for fun. It gave me the opportunity to wander around taking street photography and to focus on photojournalism, which I came to prefer because it allowed me to document reality. In the following years, I produced two documentaries about human rights abuses in Myanmar.

After completing my fellowship in Taunggyi, I returned to Mandalay to continue my studies at the University of Foreign Languages. My life during that time was pretty normal. That was until the middle of my third-year exams, when the country went into lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic and suddenly all schools and universities were closed for a year.

In February 2021, the military coup took place. Although young people like myself had no idea what to do with themselves while schools were shuttered during a pandemic, the psychological shock of the coup was far worse. We nearly lost hope.

The coup occurred during the early morning hours of February 4th, and almost immediately afterwards protesters started mobilizing across Mandalay. These events would mark a turning point in Myanmar’s history, and I realized that we needed the world to see and hear people in Myanmar express the injustices they were facing directly.

After several days of strikes, it was no longer safe for me to stay in my apartment. My neighbors had become aware of my clandestine activities, so my friends and I decided to rent an apartment closer to town so that we could keep protesting and demonstrating without interference.

After soldiers began brutally cracking down on protestors, some friends decided to join civilian defense squads. Some even prepared molotov cocktails to counter the crackdown. It got to a point where we could no longer stay in town when the military police started targeting protestors young protestors, like us. After that, we realized we needed to fight back.

At first, we thought we could defeat the military using urban sabotage techniques. We organized short training courses on guerrilla warfare in the jungles around town, but the plan didn’t succeed. I joined one of trainings myself and it was a failure because we lacked weapons, in addition to several other factors. We finally came to the conclusion that a strong regular army was needed to defeat the junta. So we left the city and came to this region controlled by an armed ethnic militia.

I have two reasons for joining the revolution. One is to be a part of history; the other is to record this moment in Myanmar’s history for posterity.

When I left for this military camp, I wasn’t allowed to bring my camera. I just concentrated on doing the work that was assigned to me that was needed in the camp. When I managed to get my camera from back home, I started taking pictures again. I don’t shoot street photography anymore. I live next to a basic training facility on a military compound documenting our resistance and our rebellion.

As you read this, countless thousands of young people are training in jungle camps hidden in the forests of Myanmar's vast frontier lands preparing or currently fighting the military junta. Many more are joining them as a result of the junta's policy of forced conscription. Among them are the first female soldiers permitted to serve in a fighting force in Myanmar's history.

*All images are the property of Nyi Myo Set and may not be reproduced or republished without his consent.

Portrait of an Artist as a Revolutionary

The moment occurred in February 2021, not long after the coup, as the junta tightened its grip on Yangon’s seven million increasingly agitated citizens. One afternoon around 2 p.m., a group of political dissidents convened in the modest apartment that Hemant and I shared. They had been invited by a friend we knew from our time working with Rohingya communities in Rakhine State. Our thoughts burned with anticipation as our living room turned into a debate floor and those gathered argued and strategized ways to resist the police and the junta’s military and intelligence apparatus.

Hours passed before a consensus was reached to organize a fundraising campaign to support the civil servants who had bravely gone on strike in protest of the recent military takeover. Courageous workers from the transportation, education, health and postal sectors were in dire need of safe houses and food as they attempted to evade the junta’s soldiers and police patrols. The military was working ruthlessly to identify and arrest anyone involved in the strikes. As punishment for subversive actions, police were evicting demonstrators’ families from their homes.

Amid the fiery discussions, one figure stood out: a Burmese man in his 30s, bespectacled and bearded, his voice booming across the room like a clarion call to action. His name was Ko Tint.

Out of the shadows of that turbulent March—as police tightened their grip on the city, more people disappeared and the methods of interrogation grew more brutal—Ko Tint unexpectedly appeared on our doorstep one evening and asked to spend the night. We quickly welcomed him into our home, and later he told us that he no longer felt safe in his apartment. He’d been moving from place to place, sleeping on couches, never staying too long in one location.

I had seen him at public demonstrations before, fearlessly addressing massive crowds. But it wasn’t until I joined the General Strike Committee for Nationalities (GSCN) on the frontlines of the protests that I discovered his true importance. Ko Tint was deeply committed to any activity he believed would help end the junta’s rule of oppression. As co-founder of 

, (“Let’s Step Out From this Regime”) and a representative for Burmese youth in the GSCN, a prominent strike committee, he stood among the vanguard of the resistance movement.

By day, Ko Tint maintained a public personae. By night, he worked with the Yangon underground, preparing molotov cocktails and conducting sabotage missions on the military cordon that now encircled the city. A month after the coup, although demonstrators showed no signs of relenting, some within the resistance began questioning the effectiveness of non-violence. It had little effect on the military’s brutal suppression of dissent and a shift in strategy began to gain traction. The situation reached a boiling point in March when more than 100 protesters in several cities were murdered in broad daylight by junta soldiers. A cynical, cold-blooded attempt to intimidate protesters ended up galvanizing a collective sense of desperation and courage across Myanmar. For those in the resistance, it meant they must now fight the regime by any means necessary.

The following month, Ko Tint arranged for a group of student-rebels to travel to one of Myanmar’s liberated frontier regions, where they would receive military training, food, and shelter. They never made it. They were arrested before they left the city. Later that day, I received a frantic phone call urging me to flee immediately. I’d been sending money to one of the young men who’d just been arrested while hiding out in Yangon, and it was likely that my identity was now known to his interrogators. They must have had him under surveillance, and they wouldn’t hesitate to use torture to get whatever information they wanted out of him. In a matter of seconds, our situation had become perilous. We had to act quickly and decisively to have any chance of protecting ourselves or our loved ones.

For Hemant and I, that included our soon-to-be-born daughter. Hemant was eight-months pregnant at the time—our decision to escape from imminent danger in Yangon and seek refuge abroad meant we didn’t know if or when our parents would ever see their granddaughter. She was born two weeks after we arrived in the United States as asylum seekers. We were not the only ones who were forced to flee our homeland—to flee the fight—but there is little solace in knowing that others were forced to do the same.

Meanwhile, Ko Tint embarked on a very different journey. He made his way from Yangon to the Karenni (Kayah) State, a region with a reputation as one of the earliest and most formidable rebel strongholds in Myanmar. Its inhabitants had opted to take up arms rather than kowtow to Burma’s (Myanmar’s) seventy-year succession of oppressive regimes. It was within this hostile, volatile, rebellious environment that Ko Tint continued his obsessive pursuit of  justice and democracy for the people of Myanmar.

Beginning in October 2022, the conflict intensified between the junta’s armed forces (known as the Tatmadaw) and a defense coalition comprised of the Karenni National Defense Force (KNDF) and the Karenni Army. Sources reported that platoons of soldiers were attacking Karenni villages, massacring residents, and setting homes ablaze as punishment for supporting the rebels. Ko Tint went to help rescue the villagers who’d managed to flee the violence. A few weeks later, a mortar shell nearly struck his tent. He was wounded, but thankfully with non-life threatening injuries. In late March, just as this essay was about to be published, fighter jets strafed the rebel base where Ko Tint lives. He was wounded again, but he continues to fight. The trauma, he admits, will take much longer to heal than the wounds.

Late last year, the Tatmadaw shifted tactics and began bombing public spaces, hospitals, and schools from the air. They also target medics, like Ko Tint and his team. When they hear the roar of jets, they’re taught to rush toward the nearest bunker system, but often they must wait out the bombings as Air Force pilots decimate the surrounding tree cover and pin them down. Between air raids, Army forces fire a constant barrage of 120mm mortars and howitzers at the rebel base, but the ethnic militias don’t possess the long-range artillery to strike back. Every day, the Tatmadaw selects a different location to bomb. From Ko Tint’s vantage point, it all depends on fate. In the revolutionary areas, known as “Black Areas”, the junta doesn’t care about the public. Everyone is the enemy.

The committee that oversees Kayah’s Medical Division, on which Ko Tint serves, plans to open a medical college at the base that will receive training and support from doctors who studied at some of Myanmar’s most prestigious schools of medicine. The field hospital at the base is currently staffed with a general surgeon, a neurosurgeon, a trauma surgeon, and an OB/GYN, but it lacks critical medical equipment.

To those who know him, Ko Tint is an inspiration and a beacon of hope in the struggle against tyranny and oppression. In the last two years, he has launched Federal FM, a radio station that disseminates crucial news to villagers living in rebel-controlled areas of Myanmar. He also co-founded an educational institute for internally displaced people (IDPs), of which Karenni State alone has approximately 100,000. Today, Ko Tint and his colleagues are working tirelessly to establish an organization called 

 (“Masters of the Spring Revolution”) that educates and trains youth about democracy and civic engagement so that they may one day help steward Myanmar’s future.