The Htoo twins’ saga is at once tragic and scarcely plausible. Can these two waifs really command an adult guerrilla army? Old Burma hands insist it’s no hoax. Little is known about the boys’ family except the rudimentary fact that they are members of Burma’s fiercely independent Karen ethnic minority–a people with ancient traditions of heaven-sent mystical heroes. In this credulous climate, the brothers built and led their own fighting force by a combination of superstitious awe, old-style military discipline and pop-star flamboyance–teen-idol hair and all. Before their recent setbacks, the boys employed a dwarf as their gatekeeper. When unwanted visitors approached, the little man reportedly shouted a warning: “Don’t come any farther or you’ll die!” If they faced a battlefield emergency, Johnny claimed, he could summon 5,000 spirit warriors from their lookout on a holy mountain–and somehow he made it sound true. The group’s flesh-and-blood soldiers, most of them older than the twins, were convinced that the Htoo brothers could make themselves invisible, read minds and smell enemies from miles away.
God’s Army was born of the Karens’ desperation. Three years ago the once proud rebels of the Karen National Union were on the run, and Rangoon’s troops were ravaging their villages with impunity. Then Johnny, until that point an ordinary Karen child, began hearing voices. The message he received had first been brought to the region by American Baptist missionaries in the 19th century: “Repent!” The Karens were paying for their sins. Their only hope was to quit their lying, cursing, drinking, stealing and fornicating. Local elders, most of them born and raised in the Baptist faith, listened to the precocious boy’s sermon in amazement. At the edge of annihilation, many Karens were ready to try anything, even prayer. Within a few weeks Johnny delivered another message. He and Luther would lead five KNU volunteers in a raid on a Burmese Army base.
The attack became a legend among the Karen people. The two little boys and five guerrillas triumphantly brought home a splendid haul of captured weapons and ammunition. Even in the most heroic retellings, the target was only a small outpost. But the boys proved Karens could win. As word spread of the startling victory and the boys’ apparent magical powers, KNU soldiers began flocking to join the twins. Emboldened by faith that Johnny and Luther could protect their followers from bullets, God’s Army began scoring a succession of modest battlefield wins and building a larger-than-life reputation.
The success of the twins’ 200 or so fighters has helped keep Burma’s resistance alive. If God’s Army falls, Burma’s military rulers will be a step closer to unchallenged power over their destitute police state. Back when the Htoo boys were born, about 12 years ago, Rangoon was at war with nearly two dozen separatist ethnic groups. Now only one remains: the Karen National Union, with about 5,000 demoralized troops and some 100,000 civilians in dirt-poor refugee camps along the border. The KNU’s chief allies are two ragtag bands of exiled dissidents who scarcely count as soldiers at all, the Vigorous Burmese Student Warriors (VBSW) and the All Burma Student Democratic Front.
The boys preached a weird asceticism, part hard-shell Baptist and part something quite different. Karens generally agreed that the soldiers of God’s Army were the most disciplined and courageous fighters their people had ever produced. The recruits forsook not only sex and alcohol but eggs and pork. They knelt and prayed before every fight. The mere presence of women was forbidden before going into combat. They liked to sing hymns as they headed into battle. Religion has always been a powerful force among the Karen. Sunday church services can sometimes continue all day, even in the KNU’s guerrilla camps. Choruses of “Rock of Ages” resound through the surrounding forests.
The boys had a small army in practically no time. It was as if the Karen people had been waiting for someone like the Htoo brothers to come along. In fact, that’s not far from the truth. Long before the Western missionaries arrived, the Karens had their own traditions of saviors appearing during times of trouble. Their ancient legends actually may have helped prime them for wholesale conversion to Christianity. The minority Karens have always been at odds with their more numerous neighbors, the ethnic Burmese. Many social scientists theorize that embattled minorities like the Karen have a natural tendency to develop messianic ideals. And those visions tend to come true. According to a Western missionary who has spent years working among the Karen people on the Thai-Burmese border, their history is studded with messianic leaders who emerged in times of crisis.
Most Karens retain some of their ancient beliefs even after many generations of Christianity. “We Karen believe the twins are the reincarnations of former Karen military heroes,” says Saw Ka Nyaw, an exiled dissident living at Maneeloy, a U.N.-sponsored refugee camp for Burmese students. Some Karens are also giving obeisance to another child prophet named Thue Play, also known as The Black-Tongue King. Karens say a dark-colored tongue is a sign of special powers. The magically marked 13-year-old boy has gathered his own personal army, allied with the divinely bestowed powers of God’s Army. “Karens believe that the twins are God-sent and that they can protect themselves and others from harm,” says Porpimon Trichot, a Burma specialist at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. “Their soldiers always come back from battle.”
That reputation would be their undoing. Last October five VBSW members painfully embarrassed Thailand’s generals. The students, who had been living on Thai soil, seized the Burmese Embassy in Bangkok, taking about 90 people hostage. Caught hopelessly flatfooted, the Thai security forces had no choice but to cut a deal giving the students safe passage in exchange for the hostages’ lives. The students fled across the Burmese border, taking refuge among God’s Army at Kamaplaw. Furious, the Thai military sealed the border and began shelling the rebel base, determined to drive the fugitives out. Meanwhile Burmese artillery and ground forces attacked the camp from the other side. Dead and wounded guerrillas piled up while medicine and surgical dressings ran out–along with the rebels’ confidence in their own invincibility.
At dawn on Monday, 10 panicky rebels made a break for it. Masked and carrying M-16 and AK-47 assault rifles, they hijacked a crowded Thai commuter bus near the border at dawn. They squabbled among themselves about where the driver should take them. Finally they made up their minds. At 7:30 a.m. they rolled into the 2.4-acre hospital complex at Ratchaburi, firing their weapons in the air. The gunmen demanded that the Thais open the border so Karen civilians could escape the fighting. They demanded immediate medical assistance for their wounded comrades at Kamaplaw. And they demanded safe passage back to the base for themselves.
Thailand’s hostage negotiators had no intention of letting the hostage-takers walk away free. While they haggled over details, a team of commandos infiltrated the hospital complex, disguised as patients and medical personnel. The troops unobtrusively took up positions near the gunmen. At 5:30 the next morning, the hostage-takers were startled by several loud explosions in front of the hospital. That was the signal for some 200 black-clad police commandos and special Army troops to storm the complex, some on foot and others in pickup trucks. For the next half hour a fusillade of automatic weapons fire filled the air, finally tapering off to sporadic shooting. Then a series of single shots. Finally silence.
The siege was over. Within minutes the hostages began to walk out of the building, some with tears in their eyes. The only casualties among them during the entire episode had been four patients who died in the absence of proper care. A 10-year-old boy was undergoing brain surgery when the guerrillas attacked. He came through in fine shape. His doctors calmly locked the operating-room doors and kept on with the operation. “They were polite,” one operating-room assistant said of the gunmen. “I was not afraid.” Soon after the hostages had all emerged from the hospital, the rescuers began parading out. Hundreds of bystanders cheered them wildly.
Ugly questions soon arose. Several hostages told Thai journalists that some of the guerrillas, having surrendered with their hands up, were then disarmed, stripped to their underwear and killed with a bullet through the head. A Thai paper ran a photo showing one dead gunman dressed only in shorts, electrical wire binding his wrists. The hospital’s second floor, where eight of the guerrillas were reportedly found dead, hardly seemed like the scene of a pitched battle–just a few bullet holes in the plywood walls and some broken windows. The Thai press even quoted one Special Forces officer as admitting that some of the guerrillas were shot in the head after they put their hands up. “If we didn’t shoot,” he was quoted as saying, “they would have shot us.”
Thai government officials and military officers angrily denied that any of the gunmen had been summarily executed. The prime minister, Chuan Leekpai, emphatically defended his men. “It was either them or us,” he said. Most Thais didn’t seem too worried about the gunmen’s rights. They had been outraged by TV images of masked guerrillas holding frightened patients at gunpoint. They agreed with the words of Chuan’s top security adviser, Prasong Soonsiri: “Nobody takes hospitals hostage.” A local truck driver added: “They deserved to die.”
The hostage-taking stirred up the Thais’ widespread resentment against the Karen refugees encamped on their soil. Many people, in and out of government, began calling for a re-evaluation of their policy granting temporary asylum to Burmese fleeing war or political oppression. Government hard-liners have long urged the closing of the camps and the repatriation of the refugees who live there. More than one senior general spoke of shutting down such dissident camps as Maneeloy. “Look at what we’ve got in return for our hospitality,” grumbles General Mngkol Amporpisit, commander of Thailand’s armed forces. In fact, the dead gunmen included two of the rebels who had taken the embassy in October. KNU and student-exile leaders denounced what they themselves described as “the terrorist act of seizing a hospital.”
Luther and Johnny did not participate in the Ratchaburi raid. By the weekend, the twins were nowhere to be found. Their mother is said to be in a Karen refugee camp in Thailand. No one says a word about their father’s whereabouts. If the boys are alive, one thing is certain: they are praying as hard as they can.
