The junta's limited success with divide-and-conquer: The Pyu Saw Htees
The ethnic majority Bamar made to fight against themselves
The Burma army’s oldest tactic, even older than military attacks on unarmed civilians, is divide-and-conquer. It has successfully pitted subgroups of society against each other for its own advantage since Independence in 1948.
In the current war, that has been harder to do, as the population is almost universally united against the illegal regime after the coup. One exception is the Pyu Saw Htee terrorists, who are civilians mobilized by the military to kill and displace other civilians.
There is a small minority in Burma of people in favor of the regime, due to family or business ties to the military or its crony business empire. Others are susceptible to the regime’s extreme Buddhist-Bamar-nationalist propaganda. They are mostly in ethnic majority Bamar areas in central Burma, where the land is flat and villagers grow irrigated paddy (rice). There are smaller numbers of pro-junta people spread throughout the country, even including some co-opted ethnic minority lackeys.
Pro-junta villagers were ripe for recruitment into the Pyu Saw Htee from the beginning. The pro-junta population is too small, however, for the army’s needs, so it has forced neutral villagers, under extreme threat, to choose sides. Most villagers given the choice of fighting for or against the regime easily choose ‘against’, and join the People’s Defense Forces (PDFs) or flee as refugees.
Some, however, have been cowed by the threat of destruction of their homes and livelihoods, and have agreed to be trained and armed as pro-junta Pyu Saw Htee terrorists. Males between the ages of 18 and 55 are taken, and now some women are being taken as well. They are then deployed, under close military supervision, to the campaign of destruction of hundreds of villages up and down the central Burma rice belt. As such, these mobilized villagers attack, kill, and displace people like themselves, even related to themselves in some cases. In fact, the home villages of military officers and allies have fallen victim to this terrorist campaign.
In this war where the people of all ethnicities are overwhelmingly aligned against the junta, the Pyu Saw Htees are a rare example of the junta successfully using the divide-and-conquer strategy to pit citizens against each other.
Besides forced recruitment, the regime practices extortion in the communities, demanding “protection money” to help fund the militia members it forcibly signs up. It also demands food, assessing quotas of rice, cooking oil, and other food items that households are required to hand over. This is in addition to the food and livestock that troops steal while looting villages before setting fire to them. Troops and Pyu Saw Htee leaders steal all the cell phones in villages to keep news from circulating about their activities.
To carry out this campaign of coercion, the regime has help from extremist Buddhist monks, whose racist and religiously confrontational ideology fuels sentiment against ethnic minorities and other religions, especially Islam, which the extremists portray as threatening to take over the Buddhist, ethnically Bamar nation of Myanmar. This extreme form of Buddhist nationalism is called Ma Ba Tha, which in Burmese stands for the Association for the Protection of Race and Religion. It is led by a radical racist monk, U Wasawa, who was given a prison sentence under the civilian government, but released and promoted by the military regime after the coup d'état.
Once a village submits to conversion, it becomes a Pyu Saw Htee camp, ruled by junta troops who oversee training and field deployment of new militia members in the village. Regular life stops, and terrorism becomes the main occupation of the villagers. They are sent out to loot and burn neighboring villages, and to kill residents who fail to flee. After submitting to conversion, villagers-cum-terrorists find themselves committing atrocities such as burning people alive, chasing people into the bush as refugees, and destroying food supplies and farm equipment, all under the direction of junta troops.
Villages that become Pyu Saw Htee camps are attacked as nests of the enemy by People’s Defense Forces, who shower them with locally-manufactured mortars and gunfire. Pyu Saw Htee members on deployment in other villages are ambushed, blown up by landmines, and shot at by PDFs, just like their junta overlords. Due to their amateur military status, Pyu Saw Htee suffer disproportionate casualty rates; they are not prepared for battle, only for attacking civilians. Pyu Saw Htee villages are guarded by junta troops, both against PDF attack, and against attempts at escape or rebellion by converted Pyu Saw Htee militia members.
There is an exodus of youth from villages to avoid Pyu Saw Htee conscription. Their families, however, are subjected to harsh measures to coerce the youths to return and become Pyu Saw Htees.
Kantbalu and Kyunhla townships in northern Sagaing Region has been particularly subject to Pyu Saw Htee conversion, but Pyu Saw Htee camps exist in Tantse, Palay, and other townships as well. In Kantbalu there are reportedly 43 Pyu Saw Htee villages/camps with 800 armed members.
In previous iterations of Burma’s 74-year civil war, the fight was between the Burma army, mostly composed and exclusively led by the majority Bamar ethnicity, against the ethnic minorities around the periphery. This time the military has turned its savagery against its own rebellious ethnic base, and the Pyu Saw Htees are Bamars attacking other Bamars. It is significant that the junta has failed to divide the country ethnically, and has had to resort to dividing its former base of support against itself.
Compiled from various sources, notably The Irrawaddy and Ayeyarwaddy Times
- စီၤ ထံဆၢ