Jasmine, 6 years old, still does not understand why, on February 2, the sky fell on her school in the countryside of Demoso, a town in the northwest of Kayah (Karenni) state. Four of her little friends were killed instantly, she was seriously injured, as was a two-year-old boy. How can I explain to him that the lightning was triggered by a Burmese army fighter plane? Hearing the explosions, her father, Ko Yone Lay, rushed to the school on a motorbike, discovered his daughter with a bleeding abdomen in the arms of her teacher, then placed her in a pickup truck that took her a few hours away to Luke Hospital, hidden in the heart of the jungle. “She was affected in the stomach, pancreas and intestines, the doctors managed to stitch everything up but they had to remove a kidney,” he says in the emergency room where Jasmine is slowly recovering from her operation. “This is the cruelest thing the military can do, there are no words to describe it…”
Not far away, a young 18-year-old fighter is lying on a table. The shrapnel from a shell dropped by a junta drone passed through his right lung, causing internal bleeding. The two tables in the neighboring operating room are occupied, so we have to improvise in the emergency room. Dr. Vincent, a 36-year-old surgeon, inserts a drain into his side. The teenager is narrowly saved.
The hospital is the main establishment of a clandestine emergency care network: half a dozen hospitals and around fifty clinics and care centers, which extends in this region where armed opposition to military dictatorship is one of the most active. Funded through private donations, Luke includes an operating theater, emergency room and 60 beds. The patients are mostly resistance fighters and civilians victims of air raids, artillery or anti-personnel mines.
Interethnic rapprochement
The medical staff, 53 people, includes six specialists – surgeons, orthopedist, gynecologist, anesthetists -, 14 nurses and 11 volunteers, most from the majority Bamar ethnic group, who before the February 2021 putsch, worked in public hospitals and deprived of Yangon, Mandalay and other cities.
Multiple exchanges on social networks encouraged them to come together around a hospital project in ethnic territory. “At the start, remembers Kim – his ‘revolutionary’ name – a young man of 26 trained in medical imaging techniques and one of the founders of Luke, it was difficult, the villagers of ethnic minorities, oppressed since We always assimilated us Bamars to the army. They refused to cooperate with us, but we managed to gain their trust and convince them that we were fighting for democracy and a federal state.” An inter-ethnic rapprochement which has developed throughout the country and which the junta had not anticipated.
“In three months,” continues Dr. Kwee Paung, 29, another founding member, “we built the hospital out of bamboo, then little by little, thanks to external help, we reinforced it with cement and concrete.” . The buildings are built between two rock massifs and protected by the canopy and nets, but remain under threat from Burmese aviation and drones. Several similar establishments have already been destroyed by enemy shells. Today only Luke Hospital and another on the Shan State border are functional.
Loikaw, ghost town
Since the inauguration in May 2022, more than 1,500 patients have been treated at Luke Hospital, for 800 operations. Every morning, the doctors make rounds of the convalescents. The number of patients has increased significantly since the dazzling offensive launched by the main regional armed group, the Karenni Peoples’ Defense Force (KNDF), on November 11, 2023 and called 11.11. In a few days, the Karenni rebels dislodged the Burmese army from numerous positions, conquered three quarters of the town of Demoso, but above all took control of two thirds of Loikaw, the capital of Kayah State. Today Loikaw, once a college town with a pleasant campus, is a ghost town. Its 50,000 inhabitants have left to swell the countless camps for displaced people in the forest and the mountains. Several dozen Burmese soldiers, devoured by dogs, lie like skeletons, still dressed in their uniforms – in classrooms, at the bottom of a dry canal, on a lawn.
Maui, 30, an organic farmer who has become the charismatic commander of the KNDF and its 7,500 young fighters, guides us through this urban guerrilla terrain, where we have to run across streets to avoid snipers, follow in the footsteps of his predecessor to avoid mines, and advance through the rubble of houses and gardens under the threat of Burmese drones and artillery. A former geology student at the local university, he grew up in Loikaw. “That was my mother’s house,” he slips, pointing to a house of which only rubble remains. Little by little his men are eating away at the enemy. They know that the last 600 to 1,000 Burmese soldiers – the closest of whom are only about fifty meters away – are entrenched in the heart of strong defensive positions and that they will defend their skin dearly. Abandoning Loikaw would constitute a bitter failure for the Burmese army, after the multiple setbacks suffered in recent months throughout the country, notably along the Chinese border (north) and in the State of Arakan (west) where local guerrillas is poised to seize the strategic port of Sittwe.
While awaiting a total victory in which they increasingly believe, the armed and civilian groups of the Karenni State have established a provisional authority, the Interim Executive Council (IEC). “We want to create an administration with a view to a Karenni state which will be a member of a new federal union,” explains its secretary general, Khu Plu Reh, 48 years old. “We are doing it in accordance with our traditions and our geography.” The IEC’s objectives include enforcing the law, ensuring people’s safety and operating public services. A police force and courts are already set up to deal with cases of drugs, looting, or domestic violence. The IEC and the KNDF also manage a prison where several dozen Burmese soldiers, captured or deserters, are detained. Education is another priority for the future. Could this temporary body serve as a model for other regions? Maw Ree Re, a 29-year-old Karenni member of the IEC, who says she receives a lot of calls from organizations in other states, wants to believe it: “Here, in Karenni state we are ahead of the others regions, we will be the first to establish a federal democracy.”
A recent decree from the junta imposing conscription on all men aged 18 to 35 could hasten the outcome of the war. According to Nay Myo Zin, a former captain in the Burmese army who joined the resistance, “many people want to reach the liberated regions”. According to him, it is still very difficult because the soldiers have organized checkpoints, where they make arrests. In Luke’s emergency room, waiting for a new operation, little Jasmine watches cartoons on a cell phone that her parents have fixed above her bed. “She talks about the tragedy all the time, it will take time for her to heal from this trauma,” sighs her father. Only the advance of the rebel forces allows this battered man not to despair.
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