ISLAMABAD: Some 10,000 Burmese citizens have fled to Thailand to escape fierce fighting between the military and units of a powerful ethnic group since Wednesday, Thailand authorities said.
The BBC said they were fleeing from Shwe Kokko town, controlled by a pro-military militia and home to Chinese-owned casinos.
This is one of the people’s most significant cross-border movements since the military coup two years ago. The military hasn’t released a statement yet about the fighting.
It is the latest civil war ever since the military coup in February 2021. Two years on, the military junta has failed to impose its authority on significant places in the country. It was battling established ethnic armed groups in border places that have been at war with the military for decades and recently formed anti-coup militias call themselves People’s Defence Forces in much of the country.
Thousands of citizens have been killed
Thousands of citizens have been killed, and some 1.4 million have been displaced since the coup. According to the United Nations, nearly one-third of the country’s population needs aid.
The new fighting broke out after the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) and its allies attacked military outposts and the gate camp near Shwe Kokko on Wednesday. Over 80 people had been killed on both sides, KNLA told BBC Thai.
Aid workers and labourers in the border regions – Thailand’s Mae Sot and Mae Ramat areas – urged urgent humanitarian assistance as refugees seek shelter in schools, monasteries, and rubber farms.
“In the long run, we need donors,” said Kay Thiland Htwe, a Burmese volunteer at a Mae Sot monastery hosting 500 refugees.
The KNLA has closed the Myawaddy-Kawkareik Asia highway, one of the major roads to the border, for two weeks starting on Friday.
In Shwe Kokko, the military-aligned Border Guard Forces that control the enclave, protect the casinos and warn residents to stay indoors.
The military continues to suppress civilian resistance, targeting educational institutions, clinics, and several villages.
Earlier this week, the military said it had rounded up 15 teachers giving online classes for a school supported by the exiled National Unity Government.
The teachers were taken from their homes in Mandalay, Saigang, and Magway, a member of the General Strike Committee of Basic Education Workers told the BBC. About 30 teachers were arrested in July because they worked for a NUG-recognised online school.
From the initial, education has been a battleground in Myanmar. Teachers were among the first, along with health workers, to walk out in protest against the coup, and were on the front line of the enormous protests called by the Civil Disobedience Movement in the first weeks after the military takeover.
When that was crushed, most still rejected orders by the military junta that they should return to work, and in May 2020, around 150,000 teachers and university lecturers were suspended from their jobs. Several decided to go underground, joining schools and clinics where communities had begun the armed struggle against the military government.
The military views the start of independent schools and clinics as an existential threat. Official figures suggest that the number of students taking the 10th-grade matriculation exam in state-run schools is now only one-fifth of the number before the coup. Teachers working outside the state sector had been branded as terrorists.
