Word: karens
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Karens may be the most civilized guerrillas on earth. At army headquarters in Manerplaw, deep in the jungle of Burma, enlisted men maintain neat parade grounds, teak officers' quarters, even the occasional flower bed of marigolds and roses. Bugles sound morning reveille, and new recruits march to target practice under a gatepost that carries a black-lettered sign, GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH. Even in Komura, a muddy labyrinth of trenches and bunkers 100 miles south, where some 500 Karen soldiers have been trapped in battle for months with the Burmese army, the men are high-minded...
Forty-one years of fighting for independence have worn down the rough edges of revolution like a well-pumiced stone. The largest of half a dozen tribes that rebelled against the republic of Burma in 1948, Karen insurgents have spent the past four decades waging war against Rangoon to establish an independent state in the southern part of the country. Of the 3 million ethnic Karens living in Burma, one-fourth have fled to jungle villages in the south, where the 5,000-man Karen army is based. Ignored or forgotten by most of the world, the anticommunist Karens rate...
...school and adhere to a strict penal code (adultery carries the death penalty). Though there is no electricity at Manerplaw headquarters, a generator supplies power for that most prized necessity, a VCR. The leaders tend to be melancholy idealists, sad-eyed dreamers who pass evenings drafting and redrafting a Karen constitution for use in the improbable event that independence will be achieved. Gentle in gesture and speech, the Karens do not seem capable of nurturing hatred. Nor do the guerrillas seem capable of dispatching their children to the front lines to fight, and die, alongside the men. But they...
Sometimes the situation requires taking on anyone willing to fight -- and even those less than willing. Two years ago, a Karen brigade sneaked into a refugee camp in Thailand at night, rounded up all the males ages 14 to 40 and marched them back to camp. The remaining villagers grew hysterical, and leaders of a small group of Seventh Day Adventist and Baptist missionaries, who supply refugees with school books, Bibles and food, protested to General Bo Mya, president of the Karens. The next day the conscripts were returned, and the missionaries received a note of apology from the brigade...
Stress takes its toll on civility. A brutal assault by the Burmese troops that September left 40 Burmese and two Karens dead and made something in Major Than Maung snap. A few days later, a journalist visited Komura and found the major resting quietly in his bunker, surrounded by dozens of skulls mounted on stakes and planted in tidy rows. When a young Karen soldier playfully stuck a cheroot in the grinning teeth of one skull, the major chased him away. Then he grew quiet again and didn't want to be disturbed...