Myanmar - Free Burma Rangers

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Flwg from BBC: Nurses on the Front Line:

Nurses On The Front Line follows a group of nurses into hostile territory – and lifts the lid on one of the world’s least reported conflicts


The Karen people of Eastern Burma have endured a 60 year old conflict with the country’s military government. The European Parliament has condemned the Burmese government’s activities as ‘ethnic cleansing’. But the conflict in the mountains of Eastern Burma the size of Switzerland between the army and the Karen Resistance has gone largely unreported by the world’s media. Under cover of dense jungle and airtight press restrictions, the military government has driven an estimated 150,000 thousand of Karen and their ethnic cousins the Karenni into neighbouring Thailand. Those unwilling or unable to leave are ‘internally displaced’ – scattered through the forest, tormented by landmines and malaria.

But the Karen have not been wholly abandoned. A band of medics and aid workers– the Free Burma Rangers – deliver basic health care to Karen and Karenni civilians. Many of the Rangers are Karen themselves, trained by outfits such as Medcins sans Frontieres and American medical experts. All are volunteers, seeking a way to help their embattled people. Some have been inspirted to lend their support by bitter personal experience. An example is 34-year-old Paw Htoo – one of the nurses featured in the first programme. Thai-trained Htoo told us she joined the Rangers when government soldiers murdered her husband. But the FBR – funded by churches and private individuals – also includes foreign volunteers from the US and elsewhere.

Over four years our ….On the Front Line filmmakers went on four mercy missions with the Free Burma Rangers. In the two films we see the nurses delivering medical aid in the heart of the war zone. Theirs is not a military operation. Their purpose is simply to deliver medical care and humanitarian aid to beleaguered Karen communities. But with the forest riddled with mines and Burmese soldiers, they are every bit as dangerous as any armed incursion and secrecy on locations and even of the precise composition of the FBR missions was a condition of the filming. Such is the concern, even our crew cannot be identified in the programmes or the credits.

In the first film, going back to the very first filming mission, the Rangers establish a makeshift treatment centre deep in hostile territory. They do not lack for patients – typhoid, diarrhoea, dengue fever and malaria are rife in the region. Then they get an emergency call – a young man has stepped on a mine. The Rangers amputate, but are unable to prevent infection from setting in. The victim is distraught, knowing that for the rest of his life he’ll be a burden instead of a help to his family. “When it happened I asked the others to shoot me,” he said. “Now no one can do anything for me. From now on I won’t be able to do anything”.

The second programme follows Maw Naw, a recent recruit to the Free Burma Rangers. He finds more evidence of the army’s campaign to demoralise the Karen and depopulate their mountain homelands: a burned-out village. The Rangers can’t be everywhere at once. In their absence the villagers must be their own doctors. Maw Naw meets a man who claims to performed amputations on seven land mine victims – without anaesthetic and using a small pocket-knife. Incredibly, he says all his patients survived.

In another part of the forest, Maw Naw and the filmmakers witness the evacuation of a village. A Burmese Army patrol is spotted and the villagers flee their huts for the forest. The exodus is eerily calm – this is nothing new for the Karen. Indeed they say this is the third time in a year that they have had to leave their homes. Other refugees tell harrowing tales of forced labour, nocturnal attacks and rape.

The film ends with Mwa Naw and the crew witnessing a brief gunfight between Burma Army and Karen guerrillas. This time, all of the Karen fighters return. But their numbers are rapidly dwindling – as is Karen resistance as a whole. The Free Burma Rangers are doing their best – they estimate they have treated some 300,000 people and delivered humanitarian aid to twice that number. But many believe that without further outside assistance the Karen will follow several of Burma’s other minority groups into oblivion.


More info: BBC World