KNU Denies Shelling Border Town

By SAW YAN NAING

The Karen National Union (KNU) has rejected claims by Burma’s state-run media that it shelled a number of sites near a town on the country’s border with Thailand, suggesting the attacks were staged by the Burmese army to portray its enemies as terrorists.

According to The New Light of Myanmar, a Burmese junta mouthpiece, the incident took place early Saturday morning near Myawaddy, a town in Karen State located opposite Thailand’s Tak Province.

The newspaper reported that two shells landed about 10 km southwest of the town, one near a lodging house and another in the compound of a Buddhist monastery. No casualties were reported.

The attacks occurred on the same day that the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in Burma, Tomas Ojea Quintana, arrived in the country for a six-day visit, and a day before he was scheduled to traveled to Pa-an, the capital of Karen State.

The KNU, Burma’s oldest ethnic insurgent group, immediately denied any involvement in the incident, and suggested that it was carried out by the Burmese military to coincide with the UN envoy’s visit.

“They want to accuse the KNU of being a terrorist group while Quintana is visiting Burma,” said David Takapaw, vice chairman of the KNU, speaking to The Irrawaddy on Monday.

Indeed, The New Light of Myanmar report seemed to suggest that the purpose of the attacks was to terrorize the local population. It said that the KNU was guilty of “firing from the distance into the towns and villages in a cowardly way with heavy weapons.”

However, Takapaw denied the charges, saying that since the KNU doesn’t possess the kind of heavy artillery allegedly used in the attacks, they could only have been carried out by the better-armed Burmese military.

The Burmese newspaper also accused the KNU of “bullying the innocent people with the use of arms, murdering, planting mines, looting, robbing people of their possessions, demanding extortion money [and] burning down the houses of people.”

Similar charges have been leveled against the Burmese army by human rights groups, which have extensively documented the targeting of civilians by government forces during the regime’s decades-old war with ethnic insurgents.