Military pressure is building around key highways in northern Myanmar's Shan State as government troops engage the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) amid bids by Chinese officials to broaden a strategically important highway in the region, sources told RFA on Friday.
Officials from the Dehong Dai and Jingpo Autonomous Prefecture in the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan had recently approached KIA forces with a request for access to the area to carry out preliminary work on the road-building plan, they said.
"The Chinese government and the Myanmar government are in cahoots," an anonymous source in the region told RFA. "Only the local leadership in the Dehong autonomous prefecture knows about this."
Repeated calls to the Dehong autonomous prefecture government offices rang unanswered during office hours on Friday.
"It looks as if there will be major fighting in the next few days," the source added. "The Myanmar army has already sent 30,000 troops to the area, and the the Kokang rebel forces are preparing to engage them."
"The KIA has refused permission to work on the highway."
According to the source, the Myanmar army is trying to cut Kokang rebels off from their resources, including mines and timber operations that fund their campaign.
Plan confirmed
Meanwhile, a former Kachin government official now serving with the KIA surnamed Pai confirmed the Chinese-led plan to widen the highway.
The plan would apparently broaden an existing highway leading to the Chinese border town of Laying, where it would join up with the S320 highway in China's southwestern province of Yunnan, according to information garnered from the region.
Pai said the Kokang alliance is currently engaging with Myanmar government troops along the Lashio to Muse highway, to the south of the proposed highway project.
"There is a capitalist from China who, along with the Myanmar government, wants to build a highway to open up trade routes with China," Pai said.
"They wanted our troops to move back from four or five command posts we have built along that highway," he said. "We didn't agree to this."
He confirmed reports from other sources that a request by Chinese officials and investors to visit the area to prospect the plan had also been turned down.
"Our highest-ranking commanders said not for the time being," he said.
China distances itself
Beijing has been at pains to distance itself from involvement in the Kokang conflict following tensions with Myanmar's ruling military junta over the role played by its citizens in supporting the ethnically Chinese Kokang side.
Chinese authorities had previously offered reliable humanitarian aid to some 100,000 Kokang refugees who fled to Yunnan, but have begun forcing thousands back across the border into Myanmar in recent days, refugees and aid workers said.
As a result, some 4,000 civilians are now encamped at the Border Marker No. 125 camp on the Myanmar side, aid workers said on Friday.
"Conditions here are OK," a volunteer surnamed Zhang said. "We have around 3,000 to 4,000 people here, while some have returned to their homes, and others have managed to go back to Nansan [in China]."
He said Chinese authorities were allowing people who could afford to stay in guesthouses to cross the border into Yunnan.
Further south in the Shan town of Lashio, refugees from the fighting told RFA how they had left their homes and jobs in the regional capital Laukkai when fighting broke out.
"I was at work in a casino at the time the fighting started, and everybody immediately dropped what they were doing, collected their salary, and left," a 16-year-old youth surnamed Yang told RFA.
"I was very frightened at the time," Yang said. "I had never been involved in a war before."
"It may be a while before we are able to go back to Laukkai," Yang added.
Harm to both sides
A man in his seventies surnamed Li said the conflict has had a devastating effect on the civilian population.
"It has been a huge impact," Li said. "As soon as the fighting starts, people get killed, and the armies want to conscript labor."
"There is no benefit to either side."
Li said the region's sugar cane industry has been decimated by the fighting, to the extent that sugar factories across the border in China have been forced to halt production.
"Both sides are trying to conscript labor and requisition supplies and money," Li said. "Peace is the only good option."
Fighting began on Feb. 9 in Laukkai, capital of the special region of Kokang near Myanmar's border with China, between army troops and Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) rebel forces.
The MNDAA under ethnic Chinese commander Peng Jiasheng are trying to retake the Kokang self-administered zone, which it had controlled until 2009, forcing a wave of refugees away from the conflict zone and across the border into China.
The MNDAA is allied with three other ethnic minority armies: the Ta'ang National Liberation Army (TNLA), the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), and part of the Shan State Army (SSA), although the KIA has remained in the region it controls, rather than fighting alongside MNDAA troops.
Reported by Qiao Long and Lee Tung for RFA's Mandarin Service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.
