Guerrillas in the Mist

The dense mist swirls, then parts, revealing one man, then 10, then an entire platoon of guerrilla soldiers, all armed and battle-hardened. Their tattered fatigues are muddy and cover tattoos they believe will ward off cold and deflect enemy bullets. This apparition is part of the Shan State Army (S.S.A.), one of a handful of rebel outfits still fighting the Burmese government. The S.S.A.'s goal—an independent homeland for the Shan, Burma's second largest ethnic group—is all but impossible to achieve. But this is still rebel country, with steep, jungle-clad mountains and plunging ravines, where for years the S.S.A. has used hit-and-run tactics to deter—but never defeat—the ill equipped and dispirited Burmese army.

The S.S.A. possesses between 500 and 2,000 troops—no one knows for sure. Ask a rebel spokesman how many, and he tersely replies, "Enough." Many of the S.S.A.'s fighters were previously loyal to former opium warlord Khun Sa, who surrendered to Rangoon in 1996. Today they answer to plainspoken commander colonel Yawdserk, himself a former Khun Sa man, who vehemently denies any current S.S.A. involvement in the drugs trade. On these remote hills, poppies are still grown and opium is still traded, along with millions of methamphetamine pills called yaba, or crazy medicine.

The penalty for an S.S.A. soldier caught dealing is execution, and a senior rebel source claims credibly that the S.S.A. now collaborates with Thai border authorities on some drug busts.

More than 3,000 wretched civilians live near the five S.S.A. camps along the Thailand-Burma border. One-tenth of them are orphans. Many others are dazed and traumatized, or missing limbs from land mines. These are all victims of a slow-motion genocide. To cut off popular support for the rebels, the Burmese army drove hundreds of thousands of Shan, Lahu, Pa-O and Akha villagers from their homes across Shan state in an orgy of looting, burning, torture and massacres. Human-rights monitors have documented the rape by Burmese soldiers of hundreds of women and girls, some as young as five years old. Thousands of families fester in military concentration camps, and depopulated areas are designated "free-fire zones," where rampaging Burmese troops shoot anything that moves, including famished villagers returning to salvage what's left of their crops.

The Shan have an uneasy relationship with their ethnic cousins, the Thais. (Siam, the old name for Thailand, is a corruption of "Shan.") Unlike other ethnic groups fleeing persecution in Burma, the Shan who cross into Thailand are not granted refugee status, and easily fall prey to disease and human traffickers. To appease Burma's generals—who would like nothing more than a rebel-free Shan state—Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra ordered his army to expel the S.S.A. from the group's headquarters, which straddles the border. But that hasn't happened yet and, despite public pronouncements to the contrary, probably won't. Operating deep inside Burma, the S.S.A. shares vital intelligence on the movements of Burmese troops and drug smugglers alike—the latter still Thailand's true foes.

With another insurgent group, the Karen National Union, now in historic cease-fire talks with Rangoon, pressure on the S.S.A. to sit round the negotiating table with its sworn enemies will only increase. For now, however, it lurks in the mountain mist, a ghostly army for a haunted people.