Karen State, Myanmar – Thaw Hti was a tiny speck among a march of hundreds of thousands who marched through the streets of Yangon in 2021, demanding a return to democracy after Myanmar. the army seized power.
“We had billboards and they had guns,” she said, bitterly recounting the events of March 2021.
In the past four years, a lot has changed for Thaw Hti and her generation in Myanmar.
After the army killed hundreds in a bloody crackdown on those protests for democracy, young people fled to lands controlled by ethnic armed groups in Myanmar's border regions with Thailand, India and China.
Thaw Hti went, too.
As an ethnic Karen, her choice was obvious.
She sought refuge with the Karen National Union – Myanmar's oldest ethnic armed group, which has been fighting for political autonomy for the Karen people since the 1940s in eastern Karen State in Myanmar. also known as Kayin State.
Speaking in an interview with Al Jazeera in Karen State recently, Thaw Hti told how she was so angry at the army for seizing power that she wanted to become an entrepreneur. a rebel soldier.
Everyone who entered the KNU area had to go through a survival course, which included military training, marching long distances in rough terrain and basic self-defense.
Firing a gun, Thaw Hti remembers, gave her a sense of strength after watching helplessly at the military massacre of her fellow activists.
Now, she has a big smile on her face when she says: “I like guns”.
However, being short and small, she struggled to complete even the basic survival course and knew she would not pass the KNU's actual military training.
“I came here to join the revolution but as a woman, there are more obstacles,” she said.
“Mentally I want to do it but physically I can't.”
Lessons in oppression
With a background in education and the ability to speak Karen, Thaw Hti and her husband opened a school accredited by the KNU where they teach more than 100 children displaced by conflict.
The school is hidden in the forest in eastern Myanmar because of the military's tendency to launch airstrikes on Karen parallel public services – including schools and hospitals. The bombing aims to destroy the emerging administrative structures that legitimize Karen independence.
Unlike schools controlled by the military, Thaw Hti explained that her school teaches children in the Karen language and teaches the Karen version of Myanmar history that includes the decades of oppression that is the opposite of Karen, who is often left out of official reports.
The Karen have been fighting for their independence for decades, but as newer, anti-democracy forces join ethnic armed groups, the Karen's long-running conflict with Myanmar's military – majority, ethnic Bamar force – engaged in intense.
Especially in the past year, the military has lost large areas of territory – including almost all of Rakhine State in the west and northern Shan State in the east – as well as large parts of Kachin State in the north, and also more. from Karen State.
But as fighters take more and more land, they face a new challenge: managing it.
Parallel administration
Captured from the army in March, Kyaikdon in Karen State has been devastated by the devastating airstrikes that have affected other towns won by defense forces.
When Al Jazeera visited Kyaikdon recently, the town's restaurants were filled with Karen civilians and soldiers eating Burmese curry. Shops were open selling household goods and traditional Karen clothing, and traffic backed up the main road.
Soe Khant, the 33-year-old KNU-appointed city administrator, said he had big plans for the free area.
“I would like to finish public works, get electricity and water running and clean up the plastic and overgrown areas,” said Soe Khant, who was officially named interim administrator. with an election planned after a year.
He agrees that he will eventually be elected at large, rather than appointed.
“If that's what people want, I'll take the position. If they choose someone else, I will give it up,” he told Al Jazeera.
Soe Khant said that the military regime “completely neglected the people of this village”.
Growing up in Kyaikdon, Soe Khant told how he used to walk to the top of a mountain near the town with a friend.
From there they would sketch a cluster of buildings around the dusty main road, the meandering river that feeds the farms, and the nearby mountain range that forms the border with Thailand.
When he got older, he turned to photography, making a living from wedding shoes.
But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit Myanmar in 2020, he answered another call, launching a social welfare organization.
After the military coup, the situation worsened.
“The health care system broke, so my friends and I volunteered to help take care of people,” he said.
Although Soe Khant is relatively new to the business of running a parallel administration, the KNU has been doing this for decades – albeit usually in smaller rural pockets.
'Going so fast, but we're not going too far'
Kawkareik village secretary Mya Aye was a village field director for 12 years before being elected to his current position, the third highest in the village.
He told Al Jazeera how years of war and lack of human resources had hampered the local economy and weakened the KNU's ability to provide public services.
“There are no factories, there is no business, you cannot work here to support your family,” he said, explaining that young people would move to live in Thailand near on hand because of the conflict and hardship.
But military cruelty is often its own worst enemy.
It has fueled more resistance and drive human resources into the arms of his enemies.
Former Myanmar police officer Win Htun, 33, joined the KNU rather than follow orders to arrest and abuse anti-democracy activists.
“I always wanted to be a police officer since I was young,” said Win Htun.
“I believed the police were good and I tried to help people,” he said, adding that the reality was a culture of corruption, discrimination and impunity.
Win Htun, who is a member of the Bamar ethnic majority in Myanmar, said that the police authorities treated their Karen colleagues very unfairly.
“If any of them made a small mistake they gave them a very severe punishment,” he said, describing how one Karen officer returned to the barracks an hour late and was put in a prison cell for 24 hours.
Win Htun said he submitted resignation letters several times during his 10 years of police service. Every time they were rejected.
After the 2021 coup, he fled with his wife and daughter to Karen-controlled territory, where he underwent a thorough background check and a “trust-building” search period.
Now he is fully integrated into the KNU police force.
Dealing with military brutality and a sense that the revolution is close to victory, younger educated professionals, such as Thaw Hti, and people with years of government service, such as Win Htun, have come to fill human resource gaps in the administration of the newly liberated areas.
But most believed that the fight to overwhelm the army would only take a few months or, at most, a few years.
Despite a series of hedges and other unprecedented obstacles, the military has continued.
“It's like running on a treadmill,” Thaw Hti said of the revolution's benefits but ongoing shortcomings.
“We feel like we're going so fast, but we're not going far,” she said.
