Under a plastic tarp in a classroom at a school in a camp for internally displaced people (IDP) in Shan State,Burma (Myanmar), students and teachers told how they were displaced by the Burma army,lost family members, and had their lives turned upside down. Their ambitions and hopes have been frozen, and many have been displaced multiple times. A common thread among a significant percentage of the camp’s hundreds of residents is that their previous IDP camp was bombed repeatedly, including the destruction of their church.
IDP camps are not protected by the UN. Most exist inside resistance-controlled areas. Across the country, more than 4 million people are internally displaced. They receive almost no international aid. Most face food and water shortages, with residents living under plastic tarps that were meant to be temporary housing but have now been used for as long as five years since the military coup thatsparked the revolution.
Families in the camps are often incomplete, with some members killed, young men in the resistance, and others separated by war. IDP life is a life of suffering, and to make matters worse, their own government continues to bomb them.
A teacher named Saw Ayar Soe Htoo recounted how, when the Burma army attacked his village, his family escaped to an IDP camp. Sadly, just a few months later, the camp was hit by an airstrike, and his wife and son were killed.
“I couldn’t teach for two months because when I saw the students, I missed my son so much,” he said, the emotion visible on his face.
After that, he and many of the residents took refuge in this camp, hidden in a valley with thick jungle overhead, making it difficult to spot from the air. He explained that the students struggled to learn because of the trauma of displacement and the deaths they had witnessed, as well as the constant fear and privation under which they lived.
Most of Burma’s population is Buddhist, but people of the Karenni ethnicity, the majority in this region, are Christian. When asked what he prays for, Saw Ayar Soe Htoo said, “I pray that I will see my daughter again.”
His nine-year-old daughter had been studying at a boarding school in Shan State. When the attack came, he had to prioritize helping his wife and son escape and could not reach the school to collect his daughter. He is now living in a resistance-controlled area, while his daughter, now twelve years old, remains in school in a government-controlled area.
If he returns to bring her back, he risks arrest. She is too young to travel alone across a war zone to join him. As a result, father and daughter remain separated, possibly until the war ends. It has now been five years since the coup that sparked the civil war, and there is no sign of it ending soon.
The next interviewee was fifteen-year-old Angela. She explained that when the SAC military arrived at her village, she and her family ran to the mountains.
Source: The Gateway Pundit
