BURMA –
Twin Crusade
17’15’’
February 2000
Reporter: Evan Williams
SISTER ROBERTS: The circumstances of their birth were rather strange. That when they were born the sound of crowds around the house was heard and afterwards when people in the house went out to look there were no footsteps, or anything. Nothing to show there had been a crowd of people there.
DAVID FEINGOLD: These boys, Luther and Johnny, talked about getting seven weapons and seven fighters and seven uniforms. This is a very common standard kind of mythic structure and what they did is they went out and the defended their communities.
WILLIAMS: Baby faced and battle hardened -- guerrilla twins Luther and Johnny Htoo. The 12 year old leaders of a rag-tag army of boys and men fighting for their patch of jungle in one of the most dangerous and intractable of disputes, a war four times their age, between ethnic Karen and Burma’s hard-line military
They’re the youngest military leaders in the world, fighting to the death and divinely inspired.
THAI PRIEST: You ask me -- do I believe? Yes I do.., I’ve known them, seen them and heard them
and personally I see something special in them, They never exploit their power but just try to unite their people who are in difficulty.
WILLIAMS: For their dedicated followers there’s nothing to fear. After all, the twins take guidance directly from God and they’re blessed with miraculous powers to defeat the Burmese -- with God’s Army.DAVID FEINGOLD: I think the average low level Burmese soldier
is probably mildly terrified because there’s always the chance that in fact this might be true.
Music FX: Gunfire
WILLIAMS: This is a measure of just how desperate Burma’s jungle warriors have become well and truly outside their own turf, watched by a terrified Thai community and the world.
A Thai hospital under siege in Ratchaburi as Karen gunmen, including members of God’s Army, attempt to wrest medical assistance for their pathetically under-resourced comrades in the jungle.It was - plain and simple - a terrorist act, and despite widespread Thai sympathy for the plight of the Karen this was utterly intolerable. Authorities acted decisively and fatally.
When the smoke cleared ten lay dead some were just boys. Clearly in Burma’s jungle the Karen had been driven to drastic action.
NER DAH: They cannot kill our people the way they want
to kill our people because we still have some arms and we still have some resistance forces to protect the villages, so many people are still alive. At the same time if we don’t have many arms in our hands our people are going to be finished.
WILLIAMS: Out at the main Karen base young guerrillas muster a brave face and defiant mood for the biggest day of their year.
It’s Karen National Day - an anniversary of the day, fifty-one years ago, when - in a newly independent nation - his people rose up against Burma’s betrayal of what they clearly saw as their ethnic rights.
NER DAH: We tell them to stop killing our people before we have any kind of peace talks, but if they continue to killing our people and at the same time they ask us to
renounce our armed struggle to surrender and lay down arms, I don’t they are going to be serious about peace talks.
WILLIAMS: Ner Dah knows the Karen struggle intimately. He’s the son of the man who’s been leading the resistance.
At 73 General Bo Mya has just ended 20 years as leader of the Karen National Union.
While some leaders are old and retiring, others are too sick to show up for the celebrations.But for the bravado of a few youthful rookies, the Karen movement is splintering as some seek a more effective and aggressive alternative.
WILLIAMS: He’s an enthusiastic and accurate shot. Luther Htoo is also an unpredictable, at times violent, boy who doesn’t often seek the company of others.
His twin brother Johnny is more outgoing and personable. His angelic looks meant very early on he was mistaken for a girl.
SISTER ROBERTS: I understood there was a little girl, so she came close, I put my arm around her and took a picture and things like that.
But I thought I’d met the daughter of one of headmen in the village, and then later I saw her smoking a cigarette with father, but I didn’t say anything, but my thought that’s awfully professional like, the way she’s holding that cigarette.
WILLIAMS: Ursuline nun Sister Mary Roberts and Thai Priest Father Augustine Prasit know the Htoo boys better than anyone. They’ve watched and counselled Johnny and Luther for three years. Both have been touched by what they call the boys’ unearthly nature.
SISTER ROBERTS: These young boys, when they were smaller, they knew that they had a strength in them that was different from ordinary people, but they didn’t exalt themselves or show it. But they knew definitely that they were the reincarnation of two men who had died about the age of seventy -- between 70 and 80 -- and that those two men were very much respected in their village.
WILLIAMS: Their also believe the twins are supported by a legendary horde of invisible Karen warriors who join the boys in battle.THAI PRIEST: One fighter told me he and the kid were surrounded by the Burmese…
then he heard many people walking in the jungle around them and believed it was the invisible troops come to help them. The Burmese panicked and started shooting each other. It’s this kind of experience that makes the villagers believe in them.
WILLIAMS: So what turns jungle boys in to jungle warriors? It was this -- a massive Burmese infrastructure project punched through the Karen homeland.
Three years ago Burmese troops mounted a massive offensive to clear the troublesome Karen and make way for this gas pipeline to Thailand. Village after village was destroyed -- with the Karen guerrillas in disarray, their people were dying.That’s when Johnny and Luther made their mystical call to arms. They asked a Karen commander for seven weapons and seven men to attack a Burmese position, and their legend was born.
FEINGOLD: The mythology around these particular kids came around because they led a successful attack against the Burmese -- I’m sure the Burmese were completely astonished and terrified, you know, of little kids running at them with AK 47s or with M16s, and shooting at them.
And as a result these were the only protection that local villagers had. Also you have other kids joined them. Why -- because these kids had seen their parents killed, they’d seen their villages burned.
WILLIAMS: As word of their bravery spread they became an inspiration for an otherwise hopeless bunch of orphans, child fighters and disillusioned Karen guerrillas.
SISTER ROBERTS: It was then that the twins began to show themselves. They were telling the people, their own people, that there was no way that they were going to win with the ordinary process that had been used up to then by their own army. And that they were going to
now form their own group and they had their own rules. They said anybody that has faith, real faith in Jesus, come and follow them. But you’ve got to have faith and if you don’t have faith, don’t come with us.
DAVID FEINGOLD: With these boys you have an example of where you have local leadership that emerges, and that is endowed with magical religious significance. This is very common among upland groups in south east Asia. A lot of scholars feel that you develop these kinds of religious movements among people who essentially have been beaten up over a long period of time. They’re looking for something that is going to set them free.
WILLIAMS: For the twins the Bible is both a spiritual guide and a tactical rule book. Instead of specific commands they often recite one of twelve Biblical passages that they’ve chosen as a sort of ideological platform. One of their favourites is Matthew Chapter Five.
SISTER ROBERTS: Happy those who mourn. They shall be comforted.
Happy those who hunger and thirst for what is right. They shall be satisfied. Happy the merciful. They shall have mercy shown them. Happy the pure in heart. They shall see God.
WILLIAMS: God’s Army is as much a fighting machine as it is a moral fraternity -- based on a code that not everyone can measure up to.
Three years ago veteran Karen guerrilla Tennyson visited the twins to lend them a hand. He found a pair of normal kids who change dramatically in the face of danger.
TENNYSON: And then we go to the fighting… maybe his eyes become red… and then he talks – not like a child – but like an adult who gives the orders and then with many Burmese landmines he doesn’t worry… sometimes he’ll go there and no landmines will explode.
WILLIAMS: Signs in their camp spell out the four God’s Army rules drawn from their interpretation of Baptist abstinence: no eggs, no pork, no alcohol and no foul language -- even in battle with the enemy.
TENNYSON: We go together only for the borderline. He will fight and I don’t go… he tells me I am not pure. He says “When you are sober we can go together.” I think I am not sober. I stop.
WILLIAMS: But he went? And they won? They beat the Burmese.
WILLIAMS: An experienced fighter, Tennyson’s taste for the odd drink barred him from the group, but he came away convinced they the twins do have supernatural powers.
FEINGOLD: In almost all of these movements you want to have rituals of personal transformation. Sometimes it can be something as simple as giving up alcohol or giving up meat, but it is an idea that you do something that transforms you from your previous ordinary life
WILLIAMS: Anthropologist David Feingold has been studying ethnic minorities around Thailand for thirty years. God’s Army, he says, comes from a long line of messianic cults here that often spring from desperation.
FEINGOLD: These particular boys probably have many of the same feelings that 12 year old boys have and its fun to play with guns, but I think they probably do believe they’re divinely inspired.
SISTER ROBERTS: I believe that there was a strength there that was not – it was more than just human. That their faith -- after all in the Bible it says if you have faith you can move a mountain.
WILLIAMS: Inspired by faith or driven by frustration – anti-Rangoon militants last year launched one of the boldest guerrilla acts yet seen in Thailand. They stormed Burma’s embassy in Bangkok.
Holding it for 24 hours they again put Burma’s democracy struggle on the world’s front pages.Calling them freedom fighters, the Thais negotiated a bloodless end and even provided helicopters for their escape back to the Gods Army enclave in the jungles just inside Burma.
The raid was led by this man – Kyaw Nee – or Johnny – leader of a radical Burmese student group which received sanctuary with the God’s Army.
KYAW NEE: The military junta still rules our country and there’s no democracy. The people voted for it but they didn’t give up power.
WILLIAMS: But it was the raid’s brilliant success that sparked a tragic chain of events – not only for the students, but also Gods Army.
Just a few weeks ago an infuriated Burmese government sent a thousand men to crush the radical students and their Gods Army protectors.At the same time, the only escape – into Thailand – was inexplicably being shelled by an element of the Thai Armed Forces.
FEINGOLD: Many of the Thais were very upset, particularly people within some part of the army, were quite upset about the takeover of the embassy, and the fact that the students escaped to this area and that the God’s Army people refused to hand over – or this vigorous student movement as they called themselves – over to the Thai authorities.
WILLIAMS: Desperate for medical help and a safe escape route for their civilians, a band of student fighters and it seems a few God’s Army guerrillas hijacked a bus and took 800 hostages in the Ratchaburi hospital.
While it seems a few God’s Army guerrillas were involved, those who know say it was organised by the radical Burmese students, inspired by the success of their embassy raid.
No, I don’t think they’re capable of that. These are not very sophisticated peiople. God’s Army people are dealing eith local situations.Williams: In the bush?In the bush.
WILLIAMS: Back in the jungle Burma is continuing its offensive against these children.There are reports the Burmese overran the God’s Army headquarters of Kamaplaw.
The fate of the twins is unknown, but whatever happens the impact of their simple defiance will be felt along this troubled border for a long time to come.
Twin Crusade
17’15’’
February 2000
Reporter: Evan Williams
SISTER ROBERTS: The circumstances of their birth were rather strange. That when they were born the sound of crowds around the house was heard and afterwards when people in the house went out to look there were no footsteps, or anything. Nothing to show there had been a crowd of people there.
DAVID FEINGOLD: These boys, Luther and Johnny, talked about getting seven weapons and seven fighters and seven uniforms. This is a very common standard kind of mythic structure and what they did is they went out and the defended their communities.
WILLIAMS: Baby faced and battle hardened -- guerrilla twins Luther and Johnny Htoo. The 12 year old leaders of a rag-tag army of boys and men fighting for their patch of jungle in one of the most dangerous and intractable of disputes, a war four times their age, between ethnic Karen and Burma’s hard-line military
They’re the youngest military leaders in the world, fighting to the death and divinely inspired.
THAI PRIEST: You ask me -- do I believe? Yes I do.., I’ve known them, seen them and heard them
and personally I see something special in them, They never exploit their power but just try to unite their people who are in difficulty.
WILLIAMS: For their dedicated followers there’s nothing to fear. After all, the twins take guidance directly from God and they’re blessed with miraculous powers to defeat the Burmese -- with God’s Army.DAVID FEINGOLD: I think the average low level Burmese soldier
is probably mildly terrified because there’s always the chance that in fact this might be true.
Music FX: Gunfire
WILLIAMS: This is a measure of just how desperate Burma’s jungle warriors have become well and truly outside their own turf, watched by a terrified Thai community and the world.
A Thai hospital under siege in Ratchaburi as Karen gunmen, including members of God’s Army, attempt to wrest medical assistance for their pathetically under-resourced comrades in the jungle.It was - plain and simple - a terrorist act, and despite widespread Thai sympathy for the plight of the Karen this was utterly intolerable. Authorities acted decisively and fatally.
When the smoke cleared ten lay dead some were just boys. Clearly in Burma’s jungle the Karen had been driven to drastic action.
NER DAH: They cannot kill our people the way they want
to kill our people because we still have some arms and we still have some resistance forces to protect the villages, so many people are still alive. At the same time if we don’t have many arms in our hands our people are going to be finished.
WILLIAMS: Out at the main Karen base young guerrillas muster a brave face and defiant mood for the biggest day of their year.
It’s Karen National Day - an anniversary of the day, fifty-one years ago, when - in a newly independent nation - his people rose up against Burma’s betrayal of what they clearly saw as their ethnic rights.
NER DAH: We tell them to stop killing our people before we have any kind of peace talks, but if they continue to killing our people and at the same time they ask us to
renounce our armed struggle to surrender and lay down arms, I don’t they are going to be serious about peace talks.
WILLIAMS: Ner Dah knows the Karen struggle intimately. He’s the son of the man who’s been leading the resistance.
At 73 General Bo Mya has just ended 20 years as leader of the Karen National Union.
While some leaders are old and retiring, others are too sick to show up for the celebrations.But for the bravado of a few youthful rookies, the Karen movement is splintering as some seek a more effective and aggressive alternative.
WILLIAMS: He’s an enthusiastic and accurate shot. Luther Htoo is also an unpredictable, at times violent, boy who doesn’t often seek the company of others.
His twin brother Johnny is more outgoing and personable. His angelic looks meant very early on he was mistaken for a girl.
SISTER ROBERTS: I understood there was a little girl, so she came close, I put my arm around her and took a picture and things like that.
But I thought I’d met the daughter of one of headmen in the village, and then later I saw her smoking a cigarette with father, but I didn’t say anything, but my thought that’s awfully professional like, the way she’s holding that cigarette.
WILLIAMS: Ursuline nun Sister Mary Roberts and Thai Priest Father Augustine Prasit know the Htoo boys better than anyone. They’ve watched and counselled Johnny and Luther for three years. Both have been touched by what they call the boys’ unearthly nature.
SISTER ROBERTS: These young boys, when they were smaller, they knew that they had a strength in them that was different from ordinary people, but they didn’t exalt themselves or show it. But they knew definitely that they were the reincarnation of two men who had died about the age of seventy -- between 70 and 80 -- and that those two men were very much respected in their village.
WILLIAMS: Their also believe the twins are supported by a legendary horde of invisible Karen warriors who join the boys in battle.THAI PRIEST: One fighter told me he and the kid were surrounded by the Burmese…
then he heard many people walking in the jungle around them and believed it was the invisible troops come to help them. The Burmese panicked and started shooting each other. It’s this kind of experience that makes the villagers believe in them.
WILLIAMS: So what turns jungle boys in to jungle warriors? It was this -- a massive Burmese infrastructure project punched through the Karen homeland.
Three years ago Burmese troops mounted a massive offensive to clear the troublesome Karen and make way for this gas pipeline to Thailand. Village after village was destroyed -- with the Karen guerrillas in disarray, their people were dying.That’s when Johnny and Luther made their mystical call to arms. They asked a Karen commander for seven weapons and seven men to attack a Burmese position, and their legend was born.
FEINGOLD: The mythology around these particular kids came around because they led a successful attack against the Burmese -- I’m sure the Burmese were completely astonished and terrified, you know, of little kids running at them with AK 47s or with M16s, and shooting at them.
And as a result these were the only protection that local villagers had. Also you have other kids joined them. Why -- because these kids had seen their parents killed, they’d seen their villages burned.
WILLIAMS: As word of their bravery spread they became an inspiration for an otherwise hopeless bunch of orphans, child fighters and disillusioned Karen guerrillas.
SISTER ROBERTS: It was then that the twins began to show themselves. They were telling the people, their own people, that there was no way that they were going to win with the ordinary process that had been used up to then by their own army. And that they were going to
now form their own group and they had their own rules. They said anybody that has faith, real faith in Jesus, come and follow them. But you’ve got to have faith and if you don’t have faith, don’t come with us.
DAVID FEINGOLD: With these boys you have an example of where you have local leadership that emerges, and that is endowed with magical religious significance. This is very common among upland groups in south east Asia. A lot of scholars feel that you develop these kinds of religious movements among people who essentially have been beaten up over a long period of time. They’re looking for something that is going to set them free.
WILLIAMS: For the twins the Bible is both a spiritual guide and a tactical rule book. Instead of specific commands they often recite one of twelve Biblical passages that they’ve chosen as a sort of ideological platform. One of their favourites is Matthew Chapter Five.
SISTER ROBERTS: Happy those who mourn. They shall be comforted.
Happy those who hunger and thirst for what is right. They shall be satisfied. Happy the merciful. They shall have mercy shown them. Happy the pure in heart. They shall see God.
WILLIAMS: God’s Army is as much a fighting machine as it is a moral fraternity -- based on a code that not everyone can measure up to.
Three years ago veteran Karen guerrilla Tennyson visited the twins to lend them a hand. He found a pair of normal kids who change dramatically in the face of danger.
TENNYSON: And then we go to the fighting… maybe his eyes become red… and then he talks – not like a child – but like an adult who gives the orders and then with many Burmese landmines he doesn’t worry… sometimes he’ll go there and no landmines will explode.
WILLIAMS: Signs in their camp spell out the four God’s Army rules drawn from their interpretation of Baptist abstinence: no eggs, no pork, no alcohol and no foul language -- even in battle with the enemy.
TENNYSON: We go together only for the borderline. He will fight and I don’t go… he tells me I am not pure. He says “When you are sober we can go together.” I think I am not sober. I stop.
WILLIAMS: But he went? And they won? They beat the Burmese.
WILLIAMS: An experienced fighter, Tennyson’s taste for the odd drink barred him from the group, but he came away convinced they the twins do have supernatural powers.
FEINGOLD: In almost all of these movements you want to have rituals of personal transformation. Sometimes it can be something as simple as giving up alcohol or giving up meat, but it is an idea that you do something that transforms you from your previous ordinary life
WILLIAMS: Anthropologist David Feingold has been studying ethnic minorities around Thailand for thirty years. God’s Army, he says, comes from a long line of messianic cults here that often spring from desperation.
FEINGOLD: These particular boys probably have many of the same feelings that 12 year old boys have and its fun to play with guns, but I think they probably do believe they’re divinely inspired.
SISTER ROBERTS: I believe that there was a strength there that was not – it was more than just human. That their faith -- after all in the Bible it says if you have faith you can move a mountain.
WILLIAMS: Inspired by faith or driven by frustration – anti-Rangoon militants last year launched one of the boldest guerrilla acts yet seen in Thailand. They stormed Burma’s embassy in Bangkok.
Holding it for 24 hours they again put Burma’s democracy struggle on the world’s front pages.Calling them freedom fighters, the Thais negotiated a bloodless end and even provided helicopters for their escape back to the Gods Army enclave in the jungles just inside Burma.
The raid was led by this man – Kyaw Nee – or Johnny – leader of a radical Burmese student group which received sanctuary with the God’s Army.
KYAW NEE: The military junta still rules our country and there’s no democracy. The people voted for it but they didn’t give up power.
WILLIAMS: But it was the raid’s brilliant success that sparked a tragic chain of events – not only for the students, but also Gods Army.
Just a few weeks ago an infuriated Burmese government sent a thousand men to crush the radical students and their Gods Army protectors.At the same time, the only escape – into Thailand – was inexplicably being shelled by an element of the Thai Armed Forces.
FEINGOLD: Many of the Thais were very upset, particularly people within some part of the army, were quite upset about the takeover of the embassy, and the fact that the students escaped to this area and that the God’s Army people refused to hand over – or this vigorous student movement as they called themselves – over to the Thai authorities.
WILLIAMS: Desperate for medical help and a safe escape route for their civilians, a band of student fighters and it seems a few God’s Army guerrillas hijacked a bus and took 800 hostages in the Ratchaburi hospital.
While it seems a few God’s Army guerrillas were involved, those who know say it was organised by the radical Burmese students, inspired by the success of their embassy raid.
No, I don’t think they’re capable of that. These are not very sophisticated peiople. God’s Army people are dealing eith local situations.Williams: In the bush?In the bush.
WILLIAMS: Back in the jungle Burma is continuing its offensive against these children.There are reports the Burmese overran the God’s Army headquarters of Kamaplaw.
The fate of the twins is unknown, but whatever happens the impact of their simple defiance will be felt along this troubled border for a long time to come.