Attacks by Rebels in Myanmar Leave Dozens Dead

Thirty people were killed during a rebel group’s attacks on a town in eastern Myanmar on Monday, the government said, in an escalation of a long-running conflict that had already forced tens of thousands of refugees to flee into neighboring China.

کد خبر: ۶۷۵۱۵۰

تاریخ: ۱۸ اسفند ۱۳۹۵ - ۱۵:۰۲

NYT - Thirty people were killed during a rebel group’s attacks on a town in eastern Myanmar on Monday, the government said, in an escalation of a long-running conflict that had already forced tens of thousands of refugees to flee into neighboring China.

The office of Myanmar’s de facto leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, said in a statement Monday evening that the rebel group, known as the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, had attacked a hotel, casinos and police and army posts in the town of Laukkai, in Shan State. The group is composed of fighters from the Kokang, an ethnic Chinese group that has strong linguistic and trading ties to China.

"Based on initial information, many innocent civilians, including a primary-school teacher, were killed because of attacks by the M.N.D.A.A.,” the statement said, using the rebel group’s initials. It added that 20 of the 30 bodies were badly burned and therefore unidentifiable, and that the other victims were civilians and traffic police officers.

In a separate statement on Monday, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi said, "I would like to strongly urge all the armed groups to abandon armed attacks that can bring about nothing but sorrows and sufferings on the innocent local tribes and races, and to join the dialogue for national peace.”

Video clips circulating online and in Myanmar’s news media on Tuesday showed burning buildings in Laukkai and rebel fighters exchanging fire with the military. Ashin Kaysara, a monk who lives on the Chinese side of the border, said in an interview on Tuesday that refugees had crossed into China since the fighting began and were staying with relatives or in religious buildings, including his monastery.

Ko Maung Kyaw, a witness in Laukkai, said in an interview that he had seen uniformed Kokang fighters attack the sites in Laukkai on Monday with rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons, destroying a hotel, and that the sounds of fighting had continued until about 7 a.m. on Tuesday. "I’m not staying here any longer,” he said.

Myanmar Army tanks were patrolling the town’s streets, he added, and bus tickets to Lashio, another town in Shan State, had risen overnight to about $73 from $6.

The attacks came as the government doubles down on an effort to broker peace with many of the armed ethnic groups that have long operated in Myanmar’s hinterlands. The next round of talks in a nationwide peace dialogue that began last summer in Naypyidaw, the capital, is scheduled to take place this month.

Myanmar’s previous, military-backed, government signed a cease-fire agreement with eight armed ethnic groups in 2015, but many questions were left unresolved, such as how the central government and the ethnic regions would share power. Another problem was that the agreement, which primarily included armed groups near Myanmar’s border with Thailand, did not cover groups in a wide stretch of territory along the Chinese border, including the Kokang rebels.

The Kokang conflict is especially delicate because it touches on Myanmar’s strained relationship with China, which once staunchly supported the junta that held Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest for 15 years. Wariness toward Chinese officials and investors now runs high across Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.

The Kokang rebels are led by Peng Jiasheng, who until 1989 received support from the Communist Party of Burma, a now-defunctoffshoot of the Chinese Communist Party. The rebels signed a cease-fire agreement with the Myanmar Army in 1989, after splitting from the Communist Party of Burma, but the truce ended when government troops overran the Kokang in 2009.

U Min Zaw Oo, a political analyst in Yangon who advises a government peace commission, said that he believed the rebel group currently had about 1,000 to 1,500 fighters and that it targeted casinos in Laukkai controlled by rivals in the Kokang community who are loyal to the Myanmar government.

On Tuesday in Beijing, a spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Geng Shuang, said that, to his knowledge, none of those killed in the recent fighting in the Kokang region were Chinese citizens. He said that some residents from the Myanmar side of the border had recently fled to safety in China and that the Chinese government had been helping them out of a sense of humanitarian concern.

"China is highly concerned about the military clashes recently in the Kokang region,” Mr. Geng said at a regular news briefing. He called for a cease-fire, adding that "the parties involved should resolve their differences in a peaceful manner through dialogue and deliberation.”

Mr. Min Zaw Oo, the analyst, said that the fighting on Monday appeared to have been less intense than a clash in the Kokang region in 2015, in which dozens of government soldiers and police officers were killed and many members of the Kokang ethnic group fled to China. As many as 60,000 Kokang refugees are said to live in the southwestern Chinese border province of Yunnan.

Mr. Min Zaw Oo, citing conversations with military sources, said Kokang rebels were now retreating on foot toward the Chinese border, a few miles from Laukkai.

But the attacks in Laukkai on Monday underscored how the Kokang rebels and other armed groups along the border with China were actively trying to subvert the peace process, he said, even as groups along the Thai border have actively engaged in it.

"I think that pattern may continue for a few more years,” he said.