23 minutes agoShareSaveAdd as preferred on GoogleJonathan Head,South East Asia correspondentandLulu Luo,South East Asia producer , Mae Sot, Thailand
BBC/ Lulu Luo“One day we will get our freedom back.”
The 22-year-old has spent much of his adult life fighting for it. But now, after five years of civil war in Myanmar, he has had enough of war and political struggle.
“I want to help our people as much as I can. But I choose another way. A non-violent way.”
The young man is part of a huge exodus of people from Myanmar seeking sanctuary in the Thai border town of Mae Sot.
He spoke to the BBC from a small, dark room tucked away down a back street – one of a network of safe houses set up by charities to help new arrivals.
Most have very little. They are exhausted, traumatised by their experiences in Myanmar, and very vulnerable. With no legal status in Thailand, the safe houses are their only refuge.
He was 17 when he joined the nationwide protests against the military coup in Myanmar in 2021.
When these were crushed by the army, like many young protesters he travelled to an area controlled by ethnic insurgents to get military training.
He returned to Yangon as part of an urban guerrilla squad, planting bombs outside targets like police stations. “I thought then that non-violent protests were not the right way to get back our freedom.”
But he was soon caught and sentenced to seven years in Insein prison, notorious for its brutal treatment of inmates.
He was released last year, and fled to Mae Sot because of the intense police surveillance of his family at their home in Yangon. It is for their sake that he does not want to use his name.
For the millions of Burmese who have risked their lives and left their homes to oppose military rule, these are disheartening times.
They have been dreaming of a revolution which will remake Myanmar as a more democratic and inclusive country, and purge the armed forces from politics.
Instead, they are watching the man they hold responsible for igniting the civil war strengthen his hold on power.
BBC/ Lulu LuoLast month Myanmar’s military ruler General Min Aung Hlaing was given a red-carpet welcome by China’s Xi Jinping, capping a joint effort by both countries to transform his image from blood-stained dictator to civilian president, increasingly accepted, if not respected, by neighbouring countries.
Chinese diplomatic and military support has been critical in helping the man who deposed the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in 2021 to recover from the catastrophic consequences of his coup.
Over the past year the military junta recaptured much of the territory it had lost to the hundreds of insurgent groups which formed to resist the coup.
A stage-managed election earlier this year, from which the main opposition groups were excluded, has now allowed Min Aung Hlaing to present himself as a legitimate, elected leader.
So where does that leave those who had hoped for a very different future? Many are effectively trapped in Mae Sot.
The town is the main gateway for trade between Myanmar and Thailand, and has always had a large, though fluctuating Burmese population. This has been swollen by refugees since the coup. But you rarely see them outside.
Most are undocumented. They got here unofficially, by crossing the narrow Moei river which marks the border, and live in constant fear of arrest and deportation by the Thai police.
They also fear reprisals against family members back in Myanmar. One former army officer, who defected to the opposition three years ago, told the BBC she only dares leave the room she rents in Mae Sot twice a month.
For those who have just arrived, the safe houses offer them short-term shelter, usually for a maximum of six months. These are warrens of small rooms with basic communal facilities, hidden down the city’s smaller side-streets.
Behind every door is a harrowing personal story.
BBC/ Lulu LuoThe young urban guerilla who was imprisoned in Insein jail described routine torture and sexual assault by the guards. He also says prison was where he had a change of heart about the struggle.
“I had hoped the revolution would be better. But they did not unite at all [the insurgent groups], they fought each other and I did not like that situation. I saw many casualties from the war, and I could not bear to see things like that.”
As the eldest child, he also felt he couldn’t risk his life and abandon his family. “So I gave up the armed struggle – not only the armed struggle but other kinds of struggle too, like in politics. I want to help our people in another way.”
He has dedicated himself to teaching children in the safe house, and to supporting as best he can friends who are still in prison.
“I try to give them hope that the revolution is not finished yet, and that we still have a chance to win.”
Our presence in the safe house drew a crowd of other residents, all with different stories to tell.
There were former members of the people’s defence forces which have been fighting against the junta. There was an official from Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, and several young men avoiding forced conscription into the army.
A common refrain among them was that, while they all still believed in the revolution, after five years they were exhausted and needed to earn money for their families. Mae Sot was their only option.
BBC/ Lulu LuoAlso here was Yin Yin Aung, a 20-year-old woman with her husband and young son.
They had made an epic, 1,000-mile journey to reach Mae Sot from Sagaing, a region which has put up some of the strongest resistance to the military coup, and suffered terrible reprisals, including relentless air strikes.
Her village, Htomar, was sandwiched between a military base and an insurgent-controlled area. She described the day more than two years ago when soldiers occupied the village, firing their weapons and driving the population ahead of them.
“When the phone signal was cut, we knew something was going to happen. I heard three gunshots, and saw people running between the houses shouting that an army column was coming. We could not carry much. My father took a bag of rice so we would have something to eat, and we ran until we reached a place deep in the forest and hills.”
There was nothing there, she adds, so they had to drink the river water, which they also used for bathing, and as a toilet. They fell sick and some of them died. But they stayed in the forest for six months.
The soldiers left the village after one month, but Yin Yin says it had been thoroughly looted, with landmines laid around the houses.
No-one dared move back.
During this time she gave birth to her son, but he has an abdominal hernia which needs surgery.
Over several weeks the family made their way south and east, arriving six months ago in Mae Sot. This is the second safe house they have lived in; they had reached the maximum stay allowed in the first.
They are trying to avoid having to rent a room commercially so she can save up for her son’s operation.
BBC/ Lulu LuoNot everyone is disheartened by the military’s successes.
In another safe house we met a former Yangon bartender-turned-rebel, with his wife and two month-old-baby.
They had left war-torn Karen State, where he is a member of the Cobra Column, one of the more effective fighting units in the opposition, and come to Mae Sot to have their baby.
But he seemed eager to get back to the war.
“I believe that the revolution we are fighting right now will succeed one day. Because they [the military] are fighting a war against the entire country. They are fighting a war against the very citizens they are supposed to protect and safeguard. There is no way they can win.”
BBC/ Jonathan HeadThe Cobra Column fights alongside the Karen National Union, which is relatively well-armed and has been fighting the central government for nearly 80 years. Morale is still high there.
But other people’s defence forces are struggling this year, after Chinese pressure cut their supplies of weapons and technology. Meanwhile the Myanmar military has benefitted from training and new equipment from Russia and China.
Louis – not his real name – is an entrepreneur from Yangon, who left to join the insurgents in Karen State after the coup.
“I thought it was my duty as a citizen, even though I was already 40-something years old. I thought if I don’t join now, I will regret it for the rest of my life.”
He too was captured and imprisoned by the military junta, but was able to persuade them he was an ethnic Karen combatant, not a member of the civil disobedience movement that emerged in response to the coup.
That at least meant he got treated less harshly. But when he was released last year, he decided his family’s need was greater than that of the revolution.
“For the first two or three years, we had high morale and were very motivated. But, since the war is dragging on for so long, a lot of people have other responsibilities that do not stop. Like me, my kids are growing up, they need a good education, a better life. A lot of people feel like this. We have changed under that pressure.”
Many of those recruited to fight in Myanmar’s civil war are children as young as 13. One activist has dedicated herself to extracting them from insurgent groups, and bringing them to a refuge she has made in an old house in Mae Sot, where she tries to get them work experience.
The adjustment is hard. The youngest boys have become conditioned to military life, and still have family members fighting on the other side of the border. They feel it is their duty to be with them.
“Sometimes I get depressed about the revolution,” she says. “Before the coup there were villages which were friends, and now they become enemies because one supports the military and another supports the resistance.”
She believes it’s time for them to change their strategy. “We have to prepare for a long fight for this revolution, not only with weapons, but also thinking about education and healthcare. There are many displaced people now in refugee camps. What are we going to do for them?”
Yin Yin Aung has been told by a private hospital in Mae Sot she must raise a deposit of 38,000 baht (about $1,140; £845) for her son’s operation, a near impossible sum for her and her husband.
Without any official status they have no access to Thailand’s state-run health system. Ideally, she would like to go back to her village, but says that so long as Min Aung Hlaing is in charge, she must stay in Thailand.
“He is the very one who caused all of this to happen. So, if you ask whether we could live there with him still in power, we cannot. Because given the choice, I would prefer to bring my parents here.”
BBC/ Lulu LuoDespite shedding his uniform Min Aung Hlaing is not letting up on his war against the opposition.
Last month the UN Human Rights Commissioner reported that a minimum of 702 civilian deaths had occurred in the period between the election announcement last August and its conclusion at the end of January, most of them women and children, most killed by air strikes.
Fragmented among hundreds of armed groups and starved of arms, the resistance has lost ground in recent months, but still controls large parts of the country. And yet diplomatic engagement by Myanmar’s neighbours has so far produced no meaningful concessions from the regime.
All of this leaves hundreds of thousands of Myanmar’s war refugees, including those in Mae Sot, in devastating limbo.
Yin Yin Aung’s home is now a small, dimly lit room with a very basic bathroom at the back. It isn’t much for a family of three.
Those in the other 19 rooms are living in the same conditions, all carrying the weight of their own terrible memories of the war.
With no end to her exile in Mae Sot in sight, in six months Yin Yin Aung will probably have to move again.
About The Author
