Thousands of people sporting traditional ethnic costumes and Karen rebel fighters showing off their guns marched, sang and danced last week to celebrate 70 years since the start of the struggle for greater autonomy from Myanmar.
Boasting more than 5,000 soldiers, the Karen National Union (KNU) is one of the most powerful and best-established of the country’s myriad militia groups that have fought the government since shortly after Myanmar gained independence in 1948.
The KNU’s parade served as a reminder that the biggest priority of Aung San Suu Kyi’s administration — ending decades of ethnic wars — remains elusive.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Aung San Suu Kyi has struggled to make progress with autonomy-seeking ethnic minority rebels, who have accused her government of a high-handed approach and ignoring their grievances and aspirations.
The celebrations took place at a remote base in the mountains straddling the Myanmar-Thai border.
“The history of the revolution for 70 years is a very rough one. As someone who has been involved in the revolution for 50 years, I can say it’s very tough and the sacrifices were very big,” Man Nyein Maung, one of the KNU’s executive members, told the Irrawaddy online news magazine.
The celebrations lasted several days and nights with a folk dance competition and theater performances before a military parade and speeches on a cloud-shrouded, dusty parade ground carved from the hills at the crack of dawn.
A banner hoisted above the grounds listed some of the group’s political demands, including calls to “retain our arms” and to “decide our own political destiny.”
One of the dance groups was made up of women wearing yellow scarves, with their hair tied in a bun and an exposed fringe. Their yellow shirts with green patterns contrasted with their white face powder and red lipstick.
The performers mingled with villagers and soldiers of the Karen National Liberation Army, the KNU’s armed wing. The men smoked cigarettes as they watched, some with heavy bullet belts draped around automatic rifles, and with insignia in red, white and blue displayed on their uniforms.
The KNU signed a ceasefire with the government in 2012 after more than six decades of conflict that had driven tens of thousands of refugees into Thailand.
Some have come back, although about 100,000 remain in the refugee camps on the other side of the border, according to the UN.
While major clashes have been avoided, the KNU’s relations with the Myanmar army remain tense.
Aung San Suu Kyi has struggled to secure peace elsewhere in the country and long-simmering conflicts in the north and the west have intensified in recent years.
In 2017, a military offensive drove out 730,000 Rohingya Muslims from the western state of Rakhine to Bangladesh, creating one of the world’s largest refugee crises.
Through a basement door in southeastern Turkey lies a sprawling underground city — perhaps the country’s largest — which one historian believes dates back to the ninth century BC. Archeologists stumbled upon the city-under-a-city “almost by chance” after an excavation of house cellars in Midyat, near the Syrian border, led to the discovery of a vast labyrinth of caves in 2020. Workers have already cleared more than 50 subterranean rooms, all connected by 120m of tunnel carved out of the rock. However, that is only a fraction of the site’s estimated 900,000m2 area, which would make it the largest underground city in Turkey’s
As Paris hosts the Summer Olympics, undocumented Chinese sex worker Hua says increased police patrols are threatening her livelihood. “I really feel under pressure, I’m constantly scared. Every day, there are police checks,” the 55-year-old said, using a different name so as not to be recognized. “So I go out less and less to work.” About 40,000 people — the overwhelming majority women — sell or are exploited for sex in France, according to government and charity estimates. Under French law, selling sex is allowed, but it is illegal to exploit someone or pay for sex, placing the criminal responsibility on pimps and
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has made what could be its most astonishing discovery to date: possible signs of ancient life on the Red Planet. The six-wheeled robotic explorer came across an intriguing, arrow-shaped rock dubbed “Cheyava Falls” that might harbor fossilized microbes from billions of years ago, when Mars was a watery world. Perseverance on Sunday last week drilled into the enigmatic rock to collect a core sample, as it traversed Neretva Vallis, an ancient river valley. The samples carefully stowed beneath the rover’s belly are destined to eventually return to Earth, where they would undergo more comprehensive analysis. “Cheyava Falls is the
Judith Monarrez crumpled onto her kitchen floor and wept when the news arrived in an e-mail: Gizmo, her pet dog missing for nine years, had been found alive. Monarrez was 28 and living with her parents in 2015 when Gizmo, then two years old, slipped past a faulty gate in the backyard of their home in Las Vegas. The decade that followed brought a lot of change. Monarrez, now 37, moved into her own home, earned a master’s degree in English and began her teaching career in higher education. Throughout the years, she never stopped trying to find Gizmo, Monarrez said. Now, she was