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Kaw Moo Raw by Myint Shwe



ERRORS-TO:INET:strider@xxxxxxxxxxx
FROM:NBH03114@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Burmese Relief Center--Japan
DATE:March 14, 1995
TIME:10:43PMJST
SUBJ:Kaw Moo Raw by Myint Shwe


"Behave like deadly fire upon the enemy.  Behave
like a sweet flower toward the people"
          An old Burma Army song

In the old days, the Psychological Warfare Unit of
the Burma Army composed this song and it was
aired frequently by the Burma Broadcasting Service. 
While it is still is sometimes heard on Radio
Myanmar, it is now cruelly ironic, because the forty-five million living, brea
thing souls in Burma, except
for those of the military, are no more classed as
"people" but are treated as enemies or under-cover-agents by the junta that st
yles itself the "State Law
and Order Restoration Council" (SLORC).  

One of the most effective ways to maintain law and
order inside the country (said by many to be an
internal affair of Myanmar) is to poison the very air
the enemy breathes if he is so stubborn as to refuse
to submit to the army's reign.  The SLORC fought
to control even a tiny patch of land held by the
opposition side as its last visible territory inside
Burma and willingly paid the price of more than a
thousand of its soldiers' lives.  When that didn't
suffice, the Burmese Army stands suspected of
resorting to its last weapons, nerve gas, in the battle
for Kaw Moo Raw.

While biological and chemical weapons in Iraq have
been destroyed, SLORC again stirs our memories of
Nazi gas chambers.  As a variation on the neo-Nazis
theme at the bend of Moei River on the Thai Burma
border, unlike the old Nazis of the Rhine valley,  the
SLORC Army used gas and germs on the rebels to
speed up their so-called national reconciliation
process. To the outside world, this "Final Solution"
remains the same for all Nazis old and new.  In the
nearly half century old Burmese civil war even the
powerful yet conventional weapons such as G-3 and
G-4 Assault Rifles designed by German Fritz Werner
Co., and Howitzers seemed useless in subduing the
Karens, Rakhines and Burmese student fighters at
Kaw Moo Rah.

As early as late 1993, reports about the use of
bacteria germs parachuted by Burma Air Force
planes over the sparsely inhabited areas deep inside
Karen State appeared in some NGO newsletters in
Thailand, but no proof beyond circumstantial
evidence was offered.  After the fall of Kaw Moo
Rah, however, the Karen Human Rights Committee
(KHRC), led by an active Canadian, accused
Rangoon of apparent biological warfare.  In August
last year, in the Donthami-Yunzalin watershed area
in the Southeastern part of Burma, SLORC planes
dropped dozens of strange devices consisting of
two-meter long parachutes with white boxes and
balloons attached underneath.  Shortly thereafter,
inhabitants of the area began suffering severe
symptoms of cholera-like diarrhoea and shigella. 

Most of the people living in these areas are Karen. 
The Government has ordered these indigenous
people to evacuate their villages and move their
homes to new locations which are well under its
control in order to alienate the Karen National
Union (KNU).  At the same time SLORC has been
pushing the KNU and its allies (the Democratic
Alliance of Burma or DAB) forces towards the Thai
border.  All the while, Burma watchers have been
kept off guard by the talk of cease-fire talks and
deals.  During that time skirmishes and small scale
engagements took the place of major fighting and
thus escaping outside attention.  

By September, just a month after the air drop, a
mysterious malady spread as far as Bilin in the east
on the Sittaung River and Ka Ma Maung in the
north on the Salween River.   The KNU received
reports of an inordinate number of deaths in the
area, with 185 local villagers having died from the
an unknown disease with symptoms similar to
dysentery, including nausea, vomiting, dizziness, and
dehydration, ending in death in some cases after only
two or three trips to the toilet. 

The government's apparent intention in using the
germs against the local Karens seems to be to
intimidate them by a pestilential epidemic after it has
failed its forced relocation of them by other means. 
The epidemic is in the same area where SLORC sent
fresh combat troops, particularly the notorious 99th
Light Infantry Division, in its attempt to drive all
villagers out of the area so that KNU troops cannot
operate.  Most of the region had been declared by
the SLORC Army as a Free Fire Zone (i.e. anybody
found there must be shot dead without further
questioning) yet the native villagers stayed on there
by hiding in the forests or staying in camouflaged
villages.  SLORC's last  resort was to clear out the
whole area by decimating the population and driving
out the survivors by spreading fears of a genocidal
epidemic.  All this was well underway before KNU
was weakened by its own troubles, a mutiny in the
Buddhist ranks.

KHRG has even suggested that this could be an
experimental operation for the more widespread use
of bacteriological agents possibly in the area further
south in the Tenneserim Peninsula where KNU still
maintains a territory and where the offshore
Andaman Pipe Line is planned to carry gas to
Thailand.  But what has increased the danger and
urgency is the possibility of the disease spreading far
beyond its initial areas.  While it could spread deeper
into the Burmese heartland, it has also shown signs
of spreading towards Thai Burma border and even
into Thailand with the latest influx of Karen
refugees.  Such a disease will respect neither
Thailand's border line nor its border patrol police.

KNU has been able to gather some of the devices
dropped by SLORC planes. The manufacturer's
logo revealed that they originated in Philadelphia,
Penn. USA.  This shows how adept the SLORC
army is at turning anything into military apparatus. 
In the 1970s the army adapted the helicopters given
by the United States which were intended to be used
in anti-drug campaigns into helicopter gun ships and
used them in Burma's civil war.  Now they have also
transformed weather balloons into deadly germ
carriers.  

KHRG is offering blood, urine and fabric samples of
the Kaw Moo Rah gas victims to any international
scientists interested in making their own independent
experiments.  It accuses the Burmese Army of using
four types of chemical weapons, at least one of
which violates the Law of Land Warfare as codified
by the Geneva Convention.  The charges of chemical
weapons use date from 1992, even before SLORC's
unilateral cease-fire began.  In the 1992 offensive
against Manerplaw, the Karen H.Q. that fell into
Rangoon's hands last December, several Karen
soldiers in front line positions were injured from
suspected chemical weapons in SLORC air attacks. 
The same year in Kachin State the Kachin
Independence Organization (KIA) claimed that
chemical shells were being used against them as
well.

These statements are supported by events which
happened in 1988 in Rangoon.  During the 1988
August national uprisings, ordinary civilians were
ruthlessly shot and killed on the streets.  Dozens of
girl students were gang raped in prisons and police
lock ups by the paramilitary Lone Htein.  Despite
the brutal use of force, the uprising grew.  Finally
the military used its "final solution"  It freed
convicted criminals from jails, selected and trained
them.  Injecting these operatives with stimulant
drugs, the army set them to their tasks of sabotage. 
They were to poison the public drinking water tanks
in Rangoon, to set fires in proletarian
neighborhoods, and to shoot activists with guns
equipped with silencers.  The army injected poison
into boiled eggs and mixed it into other snacks
which were then offered freely to demonstrators,
causing symptoms of food poisoning and spreading
confusion and fear.  Some of the criminals were
caught red handed and executed by angry mobs.

KHRC mentioned the fact that West Germany alone
trained at least fifteen Burmese Army officers for
chemical and biological warfare from 1978 to 1989
despite the international condemnation of the junta
for its gross human rights violations in 1988.  The
Fritz Werner Co. initially famous for its arms and
ammunitions industry has now also built a
"fertilizer" and a "bottling" factor for SLORC inside
Burma in secret locations.  What kind of fertilizer it
has been producing and what it has been bottling are
unknown.  Those matters also remain Burma's
internal affair. 

Once established, dictatorships always use
intimidation and terror to cling to power.  They use
plain old methods such as street massacres, night
arrests, torture and long prison terms as well as
poisoning the public mind with racial hatred,
xenophobia and the lies of false promises ranging
from "National Socialism" as in Germany and
"Burmese Way to Socialism" as in Burma.  But
usually, the subjugated masses become disillusioned
before long and rise up.  When conventional
methods prove to be inadequate, the tyrants have to
resort to new techniques. 

The new methods include rape on a large scale of
women from the opposing social or ethnic minority
groups plus forced relocation or forcing the
troublesome population out of the country as
refugees.  When everything else fails, the
dictatorship resorts to the "final solution" to kill
with gas or germs.  What has been seen in Burma is
typical of a fully grown dictatorship.  

It must be obvious even to those who have
embraced the new mind set of underrating it by
flimsy excuses, claiming  that Burma has changed a
lot for the better, that SLORC will never show
restraint.  The junta will do whatever it deems
necessary to retain the power it illegally holds. 
Moreover it may dare to extend its brutal practices
without limit, taking advantage of others' timidity
and indecision.

It must be admitted that the ethnic opposition has
had shortcomings and made mistakes.  Nevertheless,
they stood for democracy and federalism for a future
Burma and they fought for these goals until the last
minute at Kaw Moo Rah.  They deserve great honor
because they were defeated by the far larger and
stronger enemy who had no compunction about
using any tactic to win.  Glory is theirs, not the
victors.  

On the other hand, it is feared that the memory of
Kaw Moo Rah may remain a scar forever in the
history of the struggle for a real reconciliation in the
Burma Union.