Karen State, Myanmar – Thaw Hti was a tiny speck in the middle of a march of hundreds of thousands winding through the streets of Yangon in 2021, demanding the return of democracy after Myanmar’s the army took over.
“We had signs, and they had weapons,” she said bitterly recounting the events of March 2021.
In the past four years, a lot has changed for Thaw Hti and her generation in Myanmar.
After the army slaughtered hundreds in the bloody suppression of those pro-democracy protests, the young ran away to the territory under the control of ethnic armed groups in Myanmar’s border regions with Thailand, India and China.
Thaw Hti also left.
Ethnically part Karen, her choice was obvious.
She sought refuge with the Karen National Union – Myanmar’s oldest ethnic armed group, which has been fighting for the political autonomy of the Karen people in Myanmar’s eastern Karen State, also known as Kayin State, since the 1940s.
Speaking recently in an interview with Al Jazeera in Karen State, Thaw Hti said she was so angry at the military for taking over that she wanted to become rebel soldier.
All newcomers to KNU territory had to undergo a survival course, which included weapons training, long-distance marching over rough terrain, and basic self-defense.
The gunfire, Thaw Hti remembers, gave her a sense of strength after watching helplessly as the military massacred her fellow protesters.
Now her face breaks into a big smile when she says, “I love guns.”
But being short and thin, she struggled to complete even a basic survival course and knew she would not pass the KNU’s real military training.
“I came here to join the revolution, but as a woman, there are more obstacles,” she said.
“Mentally I want to do it, but physically I can’t.”
Lessons in oppression
With an education and the ability to speak Karen, Thaw Hti and her husband instead opened a KNU-accredited school teaching more than 100 children displaced by the conflict.
The school is hidden in the forest in eastern Myanmar because of the military’s tendency to launch airstrikes on parallel public services in Karen – including schools and hospitals. The bombing aims to destroy the newly created administrative structures that give legitimacy to Karen autonomy.
Unlike schools controlled by the military regime, Thaw Hti explained that her school teaches children in the Karen language and teaches a Karen-centric version of Myanmar history, which includes the decades of oppression the Karen have faced, which is often left out of official narratives.
The Karen have fought for their autonomy for decades, but as newer, pro-democracy forces have allied with ethnic armed groups, the Karen’s long-simmering conflict with the Myanmar military – a majority ethnic Bamar force – has exploded in intensity.
In the past year in particular, the military has lost huge swathes of territory in the border areas – including almost all of Rakhine State in the west and northern Shan State in the east – as well as large parts of Kachin State in the north and also more of Karen State.
But as the fighters take more and more territory, they face a new challenge: managing it.
Parallel administration
Seized from the military in March, Kyaikdon in Karen State has been spared the devastating airstrikes that have hit other major towns captured by resistance forces.
During Al Jazeera’s recent visit to Kyaikdon, the town’s restaurants were full of Karen civilians and soldiers eating Burmese curry. Shops were open selling household goods and traditional Karen fabrics, while the main road was jammed with traffic.
Soe Khant, the 33-year-old city administrator appointed by the KNU, said he had big plans for the liberated territory.
“I would like to finish the public works, start the electricity and water and clean up the plastic and overgrown areas,” said Soe Khant, who has been officially appointed as the interim administrator, with elections planned after a year.
He agrees that in the end he will be popularly elected and not appointed.
“If that’s what the people want, I’ll take the position. If they choose someone else, I will pass it on,” he told Al Jazeera.
Soe Khant said the military regime “completely neglected the people of this city”.
While growing up in Kyaikdon, Soe Khant recounted how he would hike with a friend to the top of a hill near the town.
From there, they would sketch a cluster of buildings around a dusty main road, a meandering river that feeds farms, and a nearby mountain range that forms the border with Thailand.
When he got older, he turned to photography, and he made a living by shooting weddings.
But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit Myanmar in 2020, he answered another call, starting a social welfare organization.
After the military coup, the situation further worsened.
“The health care system broke down, so my friends and I volunteered to help take care of people,” he said.
While Soe Khant is relatively new to the business of running a parallel administration, the KNU has been doing it for decades – albeit usually in smaller, rural parts of the territory.
‘We’re going so fast, but we’re not going far’
Kawkareik Municipality Secretary Mya Aye served as village leader for 12 years before being elected to his current role, the third highest ranking in the municipality.
He told Al Jazeera that years of war and a lack of human resources had hampered the local economy and undermined the KNU’s ability to provide public services.
“There are no factories, no industry, you can’t work here to support your family,” he said, explaining that because of the conflict and hardship, young people will move to live in nearby Thailand.
But the cruelty of the military regime is often its own worst enemy.
He encouraged fiercer resistance and encouraged of human resources into the arms of his enemies.
Former Myanmar policeman Win Htun (33) joined the KNU rather than follow orders to arrest and abuse pro-democracy activists.
“I always wanted to be a policeman since I was young,” Win Htun said.
“I believed that the police were good and were trying to help people,” he said, adding that the reality is a culture of corruption, discrimination and impunity.
Win Htun, who is a member of Myanmar’s Bamar ethnic majority, said police authorities treated their Karen counterparts very unfairly.
“If one of them made a small mistake, they punished him very severely,” he said, recounting how one Karen officer returned to the barracks an hour late and was put in a jail cell for 24 hours.
Win Htun said he resigned multiple times in his 10 years of police service. They were rejected every time.
After the 2021 coup, he fled with his wife and daughter to Karen-controlled territory, where he was subjected to a thorough background check and “trust-building” observation.
It is now fully integrated into the KNU police force.
Reacting to the brutality of the army and the feeling that the revolution was on the verge of victory, younger educated professionals such as Thaw Hti and men with years of government service such as Win Htun came to fill the gaps in human resources in the administration of the newly liberated areas.
But most thought that the struggle to overthrow the army would last only a few months or, at most, a few years.
Despite a series of defeats and other unprecedented setbacks, the army managed to hold its own.
“It’s like running on a treadmill,” Thaw Hti said of the revolution’s gains, but still its shortcomings.
“We feel like we’re going so fast, but we’re not going far,” she said.
