Karen veteran Dwe Maung was among those who

helped the British to defeat Japanese forces in Burma

during the Second World War. Like many other Karen,

he now lives in poverty in the Mae La refugee camp,

on the border with Thailand, having fled the Myanmar

regime’s attacks against his people

During the Second World War, Burma’s Karen people fought alongside the British to defeat the forces of Imperial Japan. But after Burmese independence and amid British indifference, they began a fight against the ruling military junta that has gone on to become the world’s longest-running insurgency. Today, thousands of Karen – including many war veterans – who have fled the violence eke out a life

in refugee camps along the Thailand–Myanmar border, writes Denis Gray

War WIThouT enD: Burma’s forgotten veterans

overs have long been reunited, refugees and pris-oners long returned home, and memories of the horrors and heroics only flicker among most remaining Second World War veterans, medalled

and pensioned, as they await a bugle call at the last sunset. But out here, in jungle refugee camps perched astride the Thailand–Myanmar border, and inside their homeland, where a brutal insurgency still rages, the war has never really ended for the conflict’s Karen veterans. There were no parades, no bands playing, no happy tears by cosy firesides.

These ethnic-minority people, who fought bravely against the Japanese and were made promises by the British that were fatally broken, are forgotten by the outside world and largely unre-warded by their former comrades-in-arms. But they have mostly forgiven – and nearly seven decades later, they still remember.

brotherly bonds‘May I sing a song for you?’ asks one of the veterans politely after recounting the trials of his life. It’s a song of the broth-erly bonds between the Karen and British.

‘When you hear the sounds of the buffalo horn, the sol-diers will gather,’ begins the 90-year-old man. he belts out the words, like a young, eager trooper on parade. ‘our flag will rise. We will fight bravely for our king and country.’

as he sings the final verses, Dwe Maung – exiled, widowed, nearly blind and almost penniless – waves a soiled, rolled up towel over his head, a smile etched across his furrowed face.

at Mae La, where Dwe Maung lives out his days, in a string of other frontier refugee camps and within Myanmar, the thinning line of old warriors will regale you with war stories – some stark and vivid, others fractured by time and memory loss. They are studded with military commands – ‘Quick march! right turn! Quickly! Fire from the hip!’ – and

the names of British officers under whom they served. Lieutenant Colonel Galbraith (‘he loved me very much’), Captain Wilson (‘Too cautious’)… and most of all, one they affectionately nicknamed ‘Grandfather Longlegs’.

That was Major hugh Paul Seagrim, only in his early 30s but a lanky six foot, four inches (193 centimetres), who best exemplifies the special ties between the seemingly dispa-rate races. The son of a hampshire minister and a graduate of Sandhurst, Seagrim was serving in Burma when the Japanese swept the British army out of the country and into neighbouring India. along with a small group of other officers, he stayed behind, hiding in the jungle-clad hills of eastern Burma while organising Karen units and gathering intelligence on the Japanese. Like many Karen, he was a devout Christian and developed a deep empathy and affection for the tribals.

When, more than a year later, the Japanese discovered that he was being sheltered by the Karen, they rounded up nearly 300, killing some and torturing others to extract information about Seagrim’s whereabouts. The Japanese announced that the reprisals would end if he surrendered, but none of the Karen even hinted that he should give himself up. But in 1943, Seagrim walked alone into a Japanese camp.

wartime heroicsThe fabled Force 136, organised to back local resistance groups in enemy-occupied territory, continued to supply the Karen, who had mustered as many as 12,000 guerrillas, and in late 1944, operation Character was launched. ‘It was not difficult to get the Karen to rise up against the hated Japanese; the problem was restraining them from rising too soon,’ wrote the theatre commander, Field Marshall Sir William Slim, in his memoirs, Defeat into Victory.

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PhoToGraPhS by LuKe DuggLeBy

referring to one of the turning points of the war in Burma – the race to the vital railhead and airfield in Taungoo – Slim noted: ‘I still had a shot in my locker. I gave the word: “up the Karen,” and they fell on the Japanese “like wolves”, winning the race.’

The veterans look back on those dramatic days with a zest mingled with sadness. ‘as I bent down to pull him away, the bullet hit me here,’ recounts another veteran at Mae La, Sein aye, who needs a cane now to get around but can still stand at attention and render a flawless British army salute. he points to a reddish scar at the back of his neck. The Japanese had ambushed his unit, and the teenage soldier recruited from a farming village struggled to save a dying British officer by dragging him to safety under fire.

Saw Chrit lost two close comrades in combat and many were wounded. a slight man who can still feel the weight of his Bren gun, he graphically describes how he gunned down seven Japanese soldiers from a hilltop when they came into a village to loot. Simeon u – 91 years old, twice wounded, four times decorated – recalls killing at least five Japanese ‘with my own hands’.

ne w uprisingBut the war’s end proved merely the beginning of yet another cycle of suffering and violence for the Karen and the veterans. The country’s ethnic minorities, long subjected to persecu-tion by the majority Burmese, had welcomed Britain’s colonisation of Burma, cemented in 1886. Finding a willing ally, the British favoured the Karen with better education and job opportunities, while missionaries converted many to Christianity. That served to intensify mutual suspicions and anger. Massacres of ‘Britain’s lackeys’ were perpetrated during and after the war.

‘The British occupation came as a liberation for the Karen people. The Burmese didn’t like it. They came to see the Karen as stooges of the British. They came to hate us,’ says David Tharckabaw, vice president of the Karen national union, which spearheads the ongoing Karen insurgency.

after the war, the Karen tabled various demands for their own state, reminding the British of promises made by some senior officers that they would champion their quest after the fighting stopped. But the government of Clement attlee, eager to shed its colonial burdens, granted Burma independence in 1948 without addressing the aspirations of its minorities.

‘It is a bit of an exaggeration to say the British betrayed us, although some Karen feel this way, as do British service-men who fought with us,’ says Tharckabaw. ‘They feel that the British should not have just said “you people work it out among yourselves”.’

Independence hero General aung San, father of today’s democracy icon aung San Suu Kyi, did hold out hope that the Karen and other minorities would enjoy autonomy under a federal system. But that brief, shining moment was shat-tered when the young post-war leader was assassinated by political rivals. The Karen rose up on 31 January 1949, ignit-ing the world’s longest-running insurgency, and most of the veterans, having barely laid down their arms, joined its ranks.

‘If, after 60 years, you stacked up the bones of those who have died, it would be as high as a hill. If you took all of their blood, it would form a river,’ says Dwe Maung, ex-Force 136

guerrilla, insurgent fighter and father of an officer in the Knu, where there’s no retirement age, pensions or regular pay.

he doesn’t exaggerate. Some half a million people have been driven from their homes in eastern Myanmar as the country’s military rulers, in power since 1962, pursue a cam-paign to stamp out the insurgents by denying them vital sup-port from the civilian population. Far from the international spotlight, stories filter out almost daily of what aid workers call ‘the hidden Darfur’ – of killings, rape, torture, forced labour, the burning of villages and even crucifixions by the troops of the military-controlled regime.

‘We had nothing to eat. The Burmese soldiers came and stole our rice. We left with nothing,’ says Sein aye of his deci-sion to flee and join some 160,000 other refugees at the Thai border. Today, he lives in a cramped shack in Mae La, surviv-ing on the rice, beans, fish paste and chillies handed out by aid groups. he lists his worldly possessions as two sarongs, three shirts and a broken watch. his Second World War comrades have suffered family members killed or maimed by landmines, and their houses torched, together with their medals and memorabilia.

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above: a Karen National Liberation army (KNLa) soldier sits at a camp inside

Myanmar. The KNLa is the armed wing of the Karen National union (KNu)

and has been fighting for more than 60 years for the right to greater autonomy

and democracy; right: these Karen soldiers were injured in clashes with the

Myanmar army and now live in the Mae La refugee camp

below: during the Revolutionary Resistance Day service at Mae La, teenage

refugees carry the Karen flag and placards calling for peace; bottom: the vast

refugee camp of Mae La on the Myanmar–Thailand border provides housing for

more than 50,000 Karen people who have fled the fighting in their homeland

charit y c ampaignThe bloodshed shows no signs of abating. ‘We cannot give up our weapons. If we surrender, we would become third-class citizens,’ says Tharckabaw, who joined the insurgency as a 14-year-old in 1949. ‘all of our traditions, our culture would be suppressed, and the Karen would be eliminated as a people.’

he was speaking on the eve of the annual Karen revolutionary resistance Day, which marks the start of the uprising. on the day itself, young women and men in tradi-tional dress make their way down a hillside at Mae La, a vast cluster of bamboo and thatch huts that clambers up steep limestone cliffs. From below rises a full-throated Lead On, O King Eternal by henry Thomas Smart, a 19th-century Lancashire composer of hymns. Widows, mothers and chil-dren of the insurgency’s dead pray from crowded pews of a simple, sturdy church, along with some of the old warriors, helped along by younger kin.

The plight of the veterans was almost unknown until 1998, when Sally Steen, a British humanitarian agency worker whose grandfather served as a headmaster in colonial Burma, visited the border and met an 87-year-old man who had fought with the Burma rifles. he was caring for a mentally impaired daughter, suffering from severe asthma and totally destitute.

‘When I asked him what I could do to help, he said: “I would like you to inform my officers,”’ Steen recounts. ‘In other words, his officers still had a responsibility.’

unlike nepal’s Gurkha soldiers, who recently won substan-tial pensions and rights to settle in the uK after a spirited, high-profile campaign, support for the Karen hasn’t been forthcoming from the British government. So Steen formed her own group, help 4 Forgotten allies.

Pension provisions that might have applied didn’t exist prior to 1975. ‘That is a dead duck. They will not give pen-sions. You can knock on the door but they are adamant,’ says Steen. regardless, officials have said that the Karen would be ineligible for benefits because they fought alongside the British rather than in British units. They even suggested that the vet-erans – who have been singled out by Burmese soldiers for execution – seek pensions from the rangoon government, which would amount to an act of suicide.

Some monetary help has come to Steen from the royal Commonwealth ex-Services League, the Special Forces Benevolent Fund, churches and individuals. and she enjoyed a big boost when Dame Vera Lynn, Britain’s much-loved wartime singer, now 94, became a patron of the small private charity last year.

‘They fought on our side and they should certainly be enti-tled to pensions. Many lost their lives,’ the ‘Forces’ Sweetheart’ said in a telephone interview, remembering her 1944 tour of Burma to entertain the troops. ‘They are poor people. They should be supported as they supported us.’

change not compensation This January, Steen again toured the border camps, distribut-ing £60 and some small gifts, including second-hand eye-glasses, to each of the known 140 Karen and Karenni veterans and their widows. With these annual donations, the veterans bought sugar, fish, medicines and other necessities.

‘I don’t want to say that the British government should give us regular compensation,’ says Dwe Maung not long

after Steen’s latest visit. ‘The British should help us bring democracy to Burma, because we helped them.’

Some veterans will tell you that if the likes of Seagrim were still alive, they would go to her Majesty the Queen to take up their cause. ‘he was a great chap. We trusted him. he inspired the Karen people in their effort,’ says Simeon u, a Burma rifles sergeant who fought with Seagrim, as he squats on the floor of his hut at Mae rama Luang, a camp embedded in a remote, malaria-ridden valley that houses 20,000 fellow refugees.

after his surrender, Seagrim was taken to rangoon. Seven of his Karen companions who had been captured were all tried before a Japanese military court. Pleading for their lives until the execution squad arrived, all seven said they pre-ferred to die with him. Today, ‘Grandfather Longlegs’ still lives as a legend in the hills.

n To learn more about Help 4 Forgotten Allies and to offer support, visit http://handsoffriendship.eu/h4fa G

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