Fleeing Battle, Myanmar Refugees Head to China

BANGKOK — After two decades of relative calm in northern Myanmar, fighting has broken out between the central government and upland ethnic groups, sending tens of thousands of refugees fleeing into China and threatening a fragile patchwork of cease-fire agreements that ended decades of civil war.

The fighting began between soldiers from the Kokang minority group and government troops, but it broadened to involve at least two more groups, the Wa and the Kachin. All three groups oppose the central government.

The official Chinese news agency Xinhua reported Thursday that refugees were fleeing into Yunnan Province, which borders Myanmar’s Shan State, where the fighting was. An estimate by the U.S. Campaign for Burma, a nongovernmental advocacy group that uses the old name for Myanmar, put the number of refugees at about 10,000. The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said it had received reports that 10,000 to 30,000 had fled into Yunnan Province since Aug. 8.

“We have been informed that local authorities in Yunnan Province have already provided emergency shelter, food and medical care to the refugees,” the United Nations agency said in a statement.

The crisis prompted China to make a rare comment about the internal affairs of one of its neighbors. Jiang Yu, a spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said that the government in Beijing “hopes that Myanmar can properly deal with its domestic issue to safeguard the regional stability of its bordering area,” Xinhua reported.

Civil war raged through much of the country after it gained its independence from Britain in 1948, and Myanmar still does not control all of its borders. Aside from the groups fighting now along the Chinese border, there are Karen militants who occupy some camps north of the border with Thailand.

The junta that has long ruled Myanmar has jailed its opponents, crushed pro-democracy uprisings and clung to power through force, justifying its actions, in part, as necessary to counter the destabilization threatened by rebel movements. Now, it is pressing more than a dozen armed ethnic groups to give up their weapons and become border guards, an effort that appears to have galvanized the groups’ opposition.

“In my 30 years’ experience on the border this is the first time I’ve seen such unity among the ethnic groups,” said Aung Kyaw Zaw, a former soldier in the defunct Burmese Communist Party who monitors the conflict from his home in Ruili, along the China-Myanmar border.

Fighting between government forces and Kokang fighters took place Thursday morning in the village of Yan Lon Kyaik, only a few hundred yards from the border with China, Mr. Aung Kyaw Zaw said. It resumed Thursday evening in the village of Chin Swe Haw, where three Kokang fighters and several dozen government troopers were killed, he added. On Friday, there were at least three clashes, according to the U.S. Campaign for Burma.

There was no way to independently confirm the accounts of the fighting, which occurred in a remote area along the border. The military moved troops into the area earlier this month, saying they would crack down on illegal drug business, the U.S. Campaign for Burma said.

If the military continues its advance, Mr. Aung Kyaw Zaw said, “there will be so much bloodshed.” The central government, he said, has sent reinforcements to the area.

Various ethnic groups control large pockets of territory in the northern borderland areas and risk losing their control over the lucrative trade in timber, jade, gemstones and, in some cases, heroin and methamphetamine.

The Kokang are allied with the most heavily armed group along the Chinese border, the United Wa State Army, which has about 20,000 soldiers and is known to have large-caliber weapons, including field artillery and antitank missiles.

Farther north, the Kachin Independence Army has about 4,000 men under arms.

“This Kokang fighting is not only a Kokang problem — it has become a wider issue,” said Brang Lai, a local official in Laiza, a town on the Chinese border controlled by the Kachin Independence Organization.

“The border guard issue is unacceptable for all the armed groups,” he said. “All the armed groups have a common agreement to help each other.”

The fighting comes as Myanmar’s military government prepares to adopt a new and disputed constitution next year.

“They want to show military victory before the elections next year,” said Win Min, a lecturer in contemporary Burmese politics at Payap University in Chiang Mai, Thailand. In early June, the government launched a successful offensive against ethnic Karen insurgents along the border with Thailand.

The elections and new constitution would nominally return Myanmar to civilian government after four and a half decades of military rule. The junta is proposing a unitary state, but the ethnic groups are loath to give up their hard-won autonomy, and they fear domination by the majority Burman ethnic group, most of whom are Buddhist and today hold power in Myanmar’s military junta.

“My sense is that the fighting will continue and could spread to other areas,” said Aung Din, the executive director of the U.S. Campaign for Burma.