Burma

Shan State, Burma - Confronting the military

Friends inside Burma related the following story to me. This story happened 5 years ago in the Shan State. The Burmese military always uses porters to carry their weapons and supplies. Every village house must provide porters for the military, or if they can not provide a porter, the SPDC (Burmese military) will demand money as a substitute. Also, when the soldiers march in a column to front line areas, the SPDC always requests rice and curry for the soldiers as well as porters from the villagers.

The villagers have land enough to grow rice and vegetables for themselves to eat. But the soldiers take that from them, so they people do not have sufficient to eat. One day the leader of a village called a meeting. He discussed with the villagers how to solve this problem and how to protect themselves from having this problem in the future. After much discussion, they decided that when they cook rice, they would cook only broken rice which is usually only used for animal feed. The curry would be cooked the same as before.

Later, when the villagers had to give rice to the SPDC, the soldiers did not want to eat it because it was very bad rice usually used only for the pigs and chickens. They stopped requesting rice and curry from this village. The above story happened in the Karen State too.