A journey into Chin State, bordering India in Myanmar’s mountainous northwest, reveals a struggle where former migrant workers and local chess champions are giving everything to oust a ruthless regime.
By IVAN OGILVIE | FRONTIER
Zike was among the hundreds of thousands of people across Myanmar who quit their government jobs and joined the Civil Disobedience Movement, a mass strike in opposition to the 2021 coup.
A public school teacher in Chin State’s Tedim Township, Zike’s name soon appeared on the military junta’s wanted list. He was warned with enough time to flee his home before soldiers came to arrest him, spending the next two years in various refugee camps across the border in India’s Mizoram state. Having broken his leg during a fall while fleeing across the hills, he was also in and out of hospital.
Dozens of resistance groups were formed in response to the coup and the brutal crackdown on peaceful protesters, including the Zomi Federal Union on March 30, 2021. The group is drawn from the Zomi people, who consider themselves distinct from other Chin ethnic subgroups. Its armed wing – the People’s Defence Force-Zoland – is fighting to oust the junta from its homeland, which it calls Zoland, spanning Chin’s northernmost townships of Tedim and Tonzang.
With a movement established, Zike decided to return to Tedim and join his fellow Zomi fighters. For the past year, he has lived and undergone training at a mountainside People’s Police Force camp overseen by the PDF-Zoland.
Zike is a charming, thoughtful 37-year-old who seems ill suited to conflict. He is a former chess champion in Tedim and is all too aware of his own capabilities.
“I am more suited to the classroom, but I will fight. This is our only chance at freedom,” he told Frontier during a visit to ZFU-controlled territory from February to March this year. “Once our PDF became stronger, I came back to do whatever I can for the revolution. I want to help my people.”
He said the beauty of the mountains around the camp makes him miss his home in Tedim town, which has turned into an active conflict zone. “It’s been three years since I’ve been home. It’s only 16 miles from here,” he said, adding that he has hope for the revolutionary struggle.
“I’ll be in my home soon, I think,” he said. “It’s cold where I live, high on the mountain, but it’s beautiful. In December we have cherry blossoms. I look forward to seeing my family again.”
Zike has some reason for optimism. Large swathes of Chin, including the official border crossing with India at Rikhawdar town, are now in the hands of resistance groups. Many villages and several towns have been seized from junta forces, and organisations representing different Chin subgroups, including the Zomi, are establishing local administrations across these newly liberated areas.
Brothers against brothers
However, the fighting is far from over. The junta has responded to its losses with airstrikes targeting resistance bases across Chin. At the same time, grievances between various Chin anti-junta forces have led to political fissures and even armed conflict between them.
Among these groups is the Chin National Front. While most of the Chin armies were established after the coup, the CNF was born in 1988, amid a pro-democracy uprising that was eventually crushed. In December last year, the CNF and allied groups promulgated the Chinland Constitution, which created a ruling Chinland Council that in February appointed a cabinet to ostensibly administer all Chin areas.
The ZFU, however, is a member of the Interim Chin National Consultative Council. The council was formed earlier, in April 2021, by elected Chin MPs, the CNF, striking civil servants and Chin political parties and civil society groups. Deadlock over the ICNCC’s efforts to write a Chin constitution led the CNF to quit the group in April last year and draft its own charter.
The ZFU and its allies who remain in the ICNCC strongly oppose this constitution and boycotted the process. They say the CNF unfairly dominated proceedings, to the exclusion of other important groups, and allotted itself huge privileges. These include a provision enshrining the group’s armed wing, the Chin National Army, as the sole Chin armed force, and placing all local Chin defence forces under the supervision of the defence ministry, headed by a CNF member. The constitution also designates the CNF’s own hornbill flag as the Chinland flag, and automatically gives the group 27 out of the 140 seats on the Chinland Council – an arrangement reminiscent of the Myanmar military’s 25 percent quota of unelected MPs stipulated in the 2008 Constitution.
So, in December, the ZFU and allied groups formed the Chin Brotherhood as an apparent counterweight to the Chinland Council. They have received support from the Arakan Army, a powerful ethnic armed group that mostly operates in neighbouring Rakhine State and has long had poor relations with the CNF.
Divisions have only hardened in recent months, and lately spilled into violence. Brotherhood spokesperson Salai Yaw Marn said that in June, the CNF and allied groups from the Chinland Council attacked Brotherhood forces in southern Chin’s Matupi Township, leading to several days of fighting. The Chinland Council told local media that its forces were responding to the Brotherhood’s detention of one of its members who was helping displaced people, adding that the AA was fighting alongside the council’s rivals. The Brotherhood said in a July 9 news report that at least 10 of its fighters had been killed in CNF-led attacks in Matupi since June 18.
The ZFU says it is open to dialogue with its Chin rivals to peacefully resolve their differences, but it insists on its right to self-defence.
“They are our brothers,” said ZFU President Sia Langh. “We don’t want to fight with them, but if they don’t want to join our revolution and they continue their aggression, we will defend ourselves and our allies.”
Gideon, commander-in-chief of the PDF-Zoland, said that even with dialogue, his group had certain red lines. “If CNF’s stance is based on equality of rights, we can accept their ideas. However, if they are unwilling to modify their position, we see no reason to join, as we do not see any benefits for Zoland in their plans,” he said.
Gideon grew up in Tedim in a family facing severe financial hardship. At 15, he left home by himself and travelled overland to Malaysia, where he worked in kitchens, learned Malay, Mandarin and Cantonese, and brought in enough money to send some home to his family. He returned to his homeland in 2019 and ran multiple businesses selling car parts, rice and other goods that are often scarce in Chin, considered Myanmar’s poorest state or region.
Gideon, who is now 26, founded the PDF-Zoland in rural Tedim as a modest local militia with a handful of friends following the coup. They started with single-barrel rifles left over from the Second World War.
It took two years before the PDF-Zoland was able to establish its own base. High on a cold, windy mountain, Gideon and five of his friends made a clearing in the forest and built the camp, while sleeping in a small wooden hut for two months.
That camp is now the group’s Battalion 1 headquarters. During Frontier’s visit, roughly 100 new recruits were going through gruelling training programmes. PDF-Zoland has expanded into five battalions with about 400 troops in total, all commanded by Gideon. They receive large shipments of guns and ammunition from allies, including the AA in recent months.
However, Gideon said initial support came from the Kachin Independence Army. The latter mainly operates in Kachin State, in Myanmar’s far north, but since the coup has trained, armed and fought alongside new resistance groups in Sagaing Region – including in areas bordering Chin.
Gideon’s prowess on the battlefield led to an internal committee appointing him commander-in-chief of the new PDF group. “I participated in frontline operations with other members and received training from different ethnic armed organisations like the KIA,” he said, without specifying any other group. “I was promoted to my current position as the commander of PDF-Zoland.”
Gideon said his group was fighting “to achieve federal democracy and prevent military dictatorship”. “We established PDF-Zoland in response to the increasing violence against unarmed civilians and peaceful protesters throughout Myanmar,” he said, referring to the junta’s brutal crushing of anti-coup demonstrations. In place of the regime, he hopes for a system that enables “good governance” with free education and healthcare, and which “does not create a massive division between the rich and the poor”.
But the group’s aims are also more local. “We formed this movement specifically for the Zomi people of Zoland in northern Chin State. We are protecting our land and people from oppressive forces and advocating for our right to self-determination, equality, autonomy and other fundamental human rights,” said Gideon.
Mountains to climb
The mountainside People’s Police Force camp where Zike lives includes housing for trainees and officers, alongside a kitchen with a long mess table. One small room has a wall hung with old hunting rifles, used early on in the uprising.
The camp also houses a small jail divided into two cells, with a tarpaulin door, reinforced sandbag foundations and a simple corrugated iron roof. During Frontier’s visit, one of the cells held five local men who had been arrested for petty crimes, while the other was crammed with 12 junta prisoners of war. One of the POWs had lost the use of both his legs. Another was being treated for an infected bullet wound that had eaten away half of one leg.
The POWS were captured during the seizure of Kennedy Peak in Tedim Township towards the end of last year. At 2,703 metres (8,868 feet), the peak is the second-highest mountain in Chin State, after Mount Victoria in the south, and is a strategic position overlooking the surrounding hills. The road that passes below the peak is a major trade route between India and Sagaing Region’s Kalay town, and from there to the rest of Myanmar.
After scaling the steep, rugged mountainside to arrive at the military base, the Zomi groups asked the junta soldiers to surrender, only for them to refuse. Twelve junta soldiers fled the ensuing battle and were later captured in the surrounding hills. These were the men now languishing in the camp jail.
The ZFU then occupied large parts of Tedim town, with the junta garrisoned in the Light Infantry Battalion 269 base on the outskirts and only able to receive supplies via air. Gideon said his group was focused on seizing this base, as well as a police station in Khaikam, a small town at the foot of the Chin hills, right on the border between Tedim and Kalay townships.
But the ZFU’s ambitions don’t stop there.
Besides Zomi members, who like other Chin groups are devout Christians, the ZFU says it accepts volunteers of any other ethnicity or religion, although Frontier did not encounter any. Gideon said this policy reflects their broader aim of helping to free Myanmar from military rule in cooperation with other resistance groups. “We are not fighting based on religion, ethnicity, region or political party. Our fight is against a system that is not serving the needs of the over 50 million people of Myanmar. We are striving for the freedom and rights of everyone,” he said.
Gideon said his group “can also dispatch reinforcements to other towns, states and regions upon request”, and has already done so by sending troops to Sagaing.
“Our commitment to service is not limited to our immediate vicinity.”
It is also keen to deepen its ties with other ethnic forces, particularly the AA, which has joined the Chin Brotherhood’s offensive in Matupi to the south. ZFU President Sia Langh visited Rakhine in January, when he met with the AA to highlight the progress of the fight in northern Chin.
One armed group Gideon would like to bring back into the revolutionary fold is the Zomi Revolutionary Army, founded in 1997. Drawn from the same ethnic community, the ZRA provided three months of training to the PDF-Zoland shortly after the coup but later pivoted to supporting the military regime.
“We are not currently engaged in direct conflict with the Zomi Revolutionary Army but have differing political ideologies and interests. Their primary objective is to become a participant in the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement with the State Administration Council,” Gideon said, using the junta’s official name, and referring to a ceasefire pact signed by multiple groups in 2015 that the regime has sought to extend.
“They aspire to have their own self-governing region like the Nagas, Wa State or the Border Guard Force of Karen State,” he explained. “They also appear to be interested in the type of businesses that operate along the borders of eastern and southern Myanmar.”
Groups like the United Wa State Army and the military-aligned Kayin State BGF have signed ceasefires or made other accommodations with the military, and in return, been granted lucrative business opportunities. Both groups have been implicated in the massive cyber scam industry that’s taken root in Myanmar’s borderlands, and often relies on forced labour.
“We are extending an invitation to the ZRA and their supporters to join our revolution. However, there is a condition: they must be willing to fight against the SAC,” Gideon said.
While the ZFU strives to broaden its coalition, it is also raising money through various means, including lotteries. One recent lottery draw raised US$1.5 million, primarily from the large Zomi diaspora in the United States, Europe and elsewhere who bought tickets online, but also through sales at local shops, according to Gideon.
He said he planned to use some of the money to travel into India to buy weapons. “Surface-to-air missiles,” he said. “We need to be able to shoot down the planes. This will change everything.” However, Frontier has not confirmed whether the group has been able to purchase such munitions, which could nullify the military’s control of the skies.
Since Frontier’s trip, fighting has intensified. In late May, the ZFU, its Chin Brotherhood allies and the AA launched a full-scale offensive to liberate Tedim town. In retaliation, junta planes conducted airstrikes while soldiers torched houses in a campaign of collective punishment that has displaced most of the town’s residents. The offensive appears to have resulted in a stalemate, with the regime winning back ground but unable to oust the resistance forces.
Zike sent Frontier a photo of his family home, which had been burned to the ground amid the fray. If the revolutionary struggle prevails, he and his comrades will have to build their homeland anew.
