Name: Myanmar: How armies of young insurgents are changing the course of a forgotten war | BBC News
Uploaded: 2024-05-27T05:26:39.000Z
Duration: 8 min 17 s
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Now the second of our special reports from Myanmar. The country is in a grip of a widespread insurgency as resistance groups attempt to overthrow the military which seized power there three years ago. As much as two-thirds of Myanmar may now be under the control of the resistance. Some people have taken up arms against the military but others including doctors and teachers are supporting the insurgency with skills of their own. Access to the country is difficult but our correspondent Quentin Somerville has managed to get inside and spent a month with the young revolutionaries at their jungle hideouts and on the frontlines. Like a beacon in the night a jungle base has become a sanctuary. The final stop on a journey to freedom for young Burmese who refused to serve in the army. They were spirited here from cities by an underground railroad of agents and safe houses to escape a new conscription law that would see them fight against the insurgency. Instead they've joined its ranks. Why don't you want to fight for the military government? The military is terrorizing people. They bomb using planes and they burn villages. I will never fight for their side. I will help and fight alongside the revolutionary forces. And they aren't the only ones fleeing. Across Kareni state hundreds of camps for the displaced have sprung up. Young and old they live in fear. It's a hard scrabble existence. Heartbreak is a way of life here. Some two and a half million people have been forced to say goodbye to their homes since the military coup. They've left their farms and rice paddies to avoid the hundreds of army airstrikes that target opposition held territory. A relentless air campaign has civilians running for their lives. Tens of thousands have been killed since the coup, many of them children. The bombs fall daily. The state capital Woiko is now a ruin. We follow Cobra and his best buddy Sam on patrol. They were national karate champs who've taken up arms. Peaceful protests failed so they've been in a stand-off with the army since November. This is the heart of Woiko. Look at the state of it though. There's destruction everywhere. If we just look over here, look at the destruction in the buildings. This is, incendiary drones were dropped here, artillery, airstrikes. We know this was the military junta because the rebels don't have that kind of weaponry. It's something else. Silence because there are no civilians here. They fled because the junta doesn't distinguish between rebel fighters, between resistance fighters and civilians. It's labelled them all as terrorists. In fact, about eight kilometres from here, just yesterday, a military airstrike killed a family of six, including two children. So wherever they attack, they turn these places into ghost towns.

Cobra and Sam will defend these front lines whatever the cost.

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This is a struggle of the young against the old. A new generation battling a military elite and it's Myanmar's youth that's sacrificing most. Ong Nye is just 23. He took shrapnel to his femoral artery in an attack on a military base. His comrades comfort him as much as they can.

Not all revolutionaries carry a gun. Dr Uri was in his last year of medical school and abandoned his studies to help in this secret hospital treating fighters and civilians alike.

I just don't want you guys to give away our location for security measures. So this is our operation theatre room. It's underground. They take every precaution here. The reason the operation theatre is underground is because if we are over the ground, they can see us and if they see us, they will bomb us. So we have to go underground. In the light blue is his fiancée, Dr Tracy. She too didn't graduate. Now she's performing surgery. We've met some of the wounded here today. Yeah.

They're young men. Yeah, very young. Very young. With their whole lives ahead of them. Yeah. And they have horrible injuries. How do you both cope with that mentally? We can cry the whole day. It's okay. Let it cry. Let it cry. Everything is okay. But we have to stand up again. Because if we are not here, who will treat those patients? Children too have been forced to seek shelter from the military's warplanes under the jungle canopy. Despite the war, songs are still heard and ballads still played by these students at the Golden Flower Music School. Maupremier's violin drowns out the din of war. Some of her students are as young as 14. This is their refuge for now. We've met a lot of young people here today. Some of them very young, but soon they'll have to go and fight. How does that make you feel? They have to sacrifice their bodies, their limbs, their lives.

And they have to leave their girlfriends and boyfriends behind to go to the front line. That shows their dedicated heart and how strong their beliefs are. I will always respect and honour the comrades. And some might never come back. And this is the toll that Myanmar's fight for freedom takes on Maupremier and the young.

For Cobra and Sam, it's a price they have to pay now. They're fighting the same battles their parents fought against military rule. And Tracey and Yori hope it's for the last time, that their revolution means future generations, their children, might live together in a free

 Myanmar. Quentin Somerville, BBC News, Kareni State, Myanmar.