Word: shanlis
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...Getting to the S.S.A.'s headquarters involves a four-hour trek through fields of maize and forests of dripping bamboo, led by Shan guides who stop only to flick leeches from their boots. They sneak past Thai army border posts in darkness while thunder booms off the mountains, then begin the long final ascent of the cloud-raked ridge to which the S.S.A. headquarters clings. More than 2,000 people live here, mostly in bamboo shacks with thatched roofs. A tenth of Loi Tai Leng's population are soldiers at arms, claims the S.S.A., while the rest are dependents...
...Some of the children watched Burmese soldiers kill their parents," says Hku Hseng Lu, a fragile beauty with an indomitable air on which her young charges depend. Others died as porters, like Nang Nang's parents, or simply perished from disease. Medical treatment is either primitive or nonexistent in Shan state, which is also hardest-hit by the country's unchecked AIDS epidemic. Chris Beyrer, a leading AIDS expert at Johns Hopkins University, estimates that a staggering 9% of Shan men are HIV positive. "This is among the highest rates reported in Asia," he notes...
...Thai army has given the school and orphanage until the end of June to move. The other displaced Shan families are already building new homes on a denuded hillside, which is nearer to fortified enemy positions. "I'm very scared because now we're closer to the fighting," says Nang La, 40. "But where else can we go?" Armed with a hoe and a machete, she and her husband, Ka Ling, 38, are leveling a patch of earth on which to build their third house, mostly from materials salvaged from their second, which they dismantled when they had to leave...
...Southeast Asia's largest drug-trafficking organizations, according to the U.S. Justice Department, which in January indicted eight senior Wa officials in absentia on narcotics charges. By forcing its impoverished people to migrate, and through military action, the U.W.S.A. has greatly increased its influence over other parts of Shan state, particularly the area in which the S.S.A. now operates...
...That includes the Shan stronghold at Loi Tai Leng, where almost every resident is a victim of the Burmese military or a witness to its savagery. Wi Ling, 34, stands outside his newly rebuilt shack on one good leg and one bad. Two years ago he was living with his family near Taunggyi, the Shan state capital, when Burmese soldiers dragooned him and 14 other villagers as porters. Three were shot dead, while Wi Ling was forced at gunpoint into a suspected minefield. A month after he was conscripted, he stepped on a mine, which blew most of his left...