Five years after Suu Kyi’s Hague moment
When nationalism trumped humanity.
Late June, 2024, in southern Myanmar.
With two resistance fighters – I’ll call them Thura and Min – I waited in the rural lodge of an old judge, who was tackling a surge in local meth dealers.
No buses ran these hills, which were held by the Karen National Union; here, transit often meant waiting for a passing motorist to offer a ride.
Thaboreik was our destination, a mining town where we’d meet a Muslim Company administrator.
Min flagged down a chubby Muslim driver. Swigging Chang beer, one can nearly drained, another lined up, he notched down the western rap and waved us into his truck.
“The military detained me for two weeks in Myeik,” he said. “They found my pistol at a checkpoint and beat me with a cable. We used military contacts from selling livestock to Thailand – my release cost us US$31,000 and my car. And the pistol, obviously.”
He stopped to assess a muddy incline, stepping out barefoot. Raising a florid umbrella, he stuck out an arm for balance in the water-logged ruts.
Thumbs up.
Few could afford such a bribe. But he ran a lucrative mine, transporting tin to Myanmar’s northern border and selling to China.
Now, with checkpoints and fighting everywhere, he bribed troops in Mawdaung town to move tin across the Tenasserim Hills and into Thailand for Chinese buyers.
“Checkpoint soldiers are usually old and illiterate in the countryside. They’ll let you pass with a bribe, especially without officers around. Everyone is tired. But it depends on the soldiers.”
He recounted a recent incident: a People’s Defense Force checkpoint confiscated a driver’s rice bags. Yet regime soldiers at an earlier checkpoint had already clocked the rice, so the guy was arrested on his return for helping the resistance.
“I heard he got a life sentence,” he said.
As we reached a smooth stretch, conversation drifted to Aung San Suu Kyi and her father Aung San, the independence hero.
“She treats the military like it’s her father’s army,” he said. “She doesn’t understand their ruthlessness, cunning and cruelty.”
Just over a year before the coup, Suu Kyi traveled to the Netherlands to defend the military against genocide allegations. Allegations of mass killings, torture, sexual violence and expulsion of the Muslim Rohingya, made at the International Court of Justice.