“Everyone feels unsafe”: Indian military forces kill Myanmar’s rebels, border panic | Political News

The fly floats above the blackened boy’s body, lying on the tarpaulin in bloody combat fatigue, in preparation for a rushing cremation in the Term district of Myanmar’s Saga region, which borders India.

The wooden logs quickly placed form the base of a large amount of pia, with some worn rubber tires burning to maintain the fire.

Of the 10 members of Pa Ka Pha (PKP), part of the large-scale people’s defense forces (PDF) killed by Indian Army on May 14th, three were teenagers.

The PKP is under the direction of the National Unified Government (NUG), Myanmar’s government in exile, including lawmakers who were excluded from the 2021 coup.

It mainly supports PDF, a network of civilian militia groups against military governments. This effectively serves as Nag’s army.

Indian forces said on May 14 that a battalion of the country’s Assam Rifle (AR) paramilitary forces patrol border postings in Manipur, northeastern India, had killed 10 men armed with “war-like shops” “a suspected of being involved in cross-border rebellion activities.” The Indian Army said the battalion “acts on a particular intelligence.”

Indian soldiers were stationed at the border of Chandel, a district adjacent to Tam on the Myanmar side of the frontier. Manipur has been torn apart by civil wars between ethnic groups over the past two years, and Indian authorities have often accused Myanmar of robbing those tensions.

However, in disputing the Indian version of the May 14 event, Nugu, who was exiled, said the executive was “not killed in an armed encounter within Indian territory.” Instead, in a statement they said they were “captured, tortured and executed immediately.”

For almost five years since the coup, political analysts and conflict observers say that along the 1,600km (994 miles) long border with India, resistance groups operating in Myanmar share their understanding with the Indian military, under which both sides are effectively caring about their business.

It has now been transformed by Tam’s murder, sending shockwaves through exile Nugu, dozens of rebel armed groups and thousands of refugees fleeing in Myanmar to find shelter in northeastern India. They are now afraid of ripples along the wider frontier.

“The fighters are panicking, but the refugees are more concerned. They feel everything is unsafe now,” he said, working with Tamu Pa ah Pha or the People’s Management Team to organize a rebel funeral on May 16th.

Meanwhile, New Delhi has traveled for the past year to fence the international border with Myanmar, splitting transnational communities for generations before India and Myanmar gained freedom from British rule in the late 1940s.

“We felt safe [with India in our neighbourhood]Tida said. “However, after this incident, we were very concerned that similar things might follow up from the Indian Army.”

“This didn’t happen in four years [since the armed uprising against the coup]But now it happened,” she told Al Jazeera. That’s my biggest concern. ”

“An aggressive manipulation or retaliation?”

On May 12, 10 PKP officials arrived at the newly established camp in Tam after their previous positions were exposed to the Myanmar army. The Tam-based elderly and two locals have independently told Al Jazeera that they had warned the Indian troops in advance of their presence.

“AR staff visited the new campsite [on May 12]”They were informed of every step we had.” ”

What continued over the next four days had contradictory versions emerged from Indian officials and Nugu, and could not be independently verified. There are also contradictions in the stories given by Indian officials.

On May 14, the Eastern Commander of the Indian Army claimed that the army had acted on the Intelligence News, but was “dismissed for suspected executives,” killing 10 executives in a shootout in the new Samtal area of ​​Chandelle district.

Two days later, on May 16, a spokesman for the Indian Ministry of Defense said that the “Assam Rifle Patrol” had been fired. In retaliation, they killed “10 individuals wearing camouflage fatigue” and retrieved seven AK-47 rifles and a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

Five days later, on May 21, the Ministry of Defense identified the man who was killed as a PKP official. A spokesman for the ministry added: “They are patroling to disinfect areas where fence construction is underway. [border]“It is intended to cause serious harm to construction workers or the army of Assam rifles to block fencing operations.

Speaking to retired Indian government official Al Jazeera has been advising New Delhi on Myanmar’s policies for ten years, pointing out the dissonance of the Indian version. Have Indian soldiers responded actively to intelligence news alerts or have they responded to attacks from rebels from Myanmar?

“It’s hard to understand these killings. This happened against the execution of play,” said a retired official who asked for anonymity. The contradiction suggested that “a mistake occurred in the mist of war,” he said.

“It can’t be both aggressive operational and retaliation.”

Al Jazeera first requested comment from the Indian Army on May 26, and again on May 30, on May 30, but has not yet been responded.

Thura, an officer with PDFs from Sagan, the northwest region of Myanmar, where TAMU is located, stated, “The The The The [PKP cadres] They are not combat training or armed enough to imagine taking on a professional army. ”

“Use our war”

When they were notified of their death by the Indian troops on May 16th, local TAMU authorities rushed to the Indian side.

“The Assam Rifles already had a docket of documents,” said a Tam official, who has coordinated the handover of the body, and requested anonymity. “We were either forced to sign false documents or threatened to give them to the corpses of martyrs.”

Al Jazeera reviewed three documents from the docket. This means that they agreed to border fencing and emphasized that PDF executives were killed in a shootout on Indian territory.

Officials from Thida and Nug, who are from Tamu’s People’s Management Team, told Al Jazeera they repeatedly asked Indian officials to reconsider border fencing.

“Last month we have been asking the Indian military to speak to our ministry. [referring to the exiled NUG] There will be a meeting. Until then, we’ll stop the border fencing process,” she said.

Confusing by the killing, Tida said, “It’s easy to use while our country is in such a crisis. And, to be honest, we can’t do anything about it. We are our own rebels. How can we choose to fight a large Indian army?”

Among other things, Tida said she was heartbroken. “The corpse was horrifying. The insects were growing inside their bodies,” she recalls. “If that’s the case, the Indian military should respect our dead.”

Border fencing anxiety

Angshuman Choudhury, a researcher focused on Myanmar and northeastern India, said that conflict observers were “confusing at these killings at Tamu.”

“It was counterintuitive and should not have happened on any scale,” he said.

Choudhary notes that border fencing, the main point of the conflict, is a long-standing problem. “It has always caused friction along the border, and is very violent fiction in the sense of intense territorial misunderstanding from groups on both sides,” he said.

When New Delhi first moved to end the freedom movement regime last year, it allowed people to move across the border, leaving indigenous communities in Mizoram, Nagaland, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh in the northeastern states of India. Members of these communities live on both sides of the border with Myanmar and have lived for centuries.

Political analysts and scholars note that border communities on both sides have reconciled with ideas from India and Myanmar for freedom to travel. Building physical infrastructure creates a kind of anxiety in these transnational communities where mapped boundaries are not, Choudhary argued.

“Fencing creates an entirely new form of uncertainty that did not exist in the 1940s. It’s an immediate colonial period,” Chaudhary said. “It is going to create an absolutely unnecessary form of instability, ugability and widen existing fault lines.”

Last year, India’s Home Minister Amit Shah said border fencing is a move that is widely seen as a response to the conflict in Manipur, ensuring India’s “internal security” and “maintain demographic structure” in the region adjacent to Myanmar.

Since May 2023, continued ethnic violence between Meitei majority and the minority communities of Kuki and Naga have killed more than 250 people and displaced thousands. The national government is facing allegations that it exacerbates anxiety in order to strengthen support among the Meitei population, which the government has denied.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government and Manipur state government have denounced some undocumented migrants from Myanmar under the BJP, who have accused the crisis of Manipur of deepening ethnic tensions.

Now, with the killing in Tam, Chaudhary said that Indian security forces have a new frontier of dissatisfaction along the border where numerous armed groups are operating against Myanmar’s ruling forces.

Death could change the rules of involvement between the Indian military and those groups, he said. “Remember, other rebel groups. [in Myanmar] We’re also looking at this carefully,” he said.