BANGKOK – Government troops in Myanmar have attacked one of the country’s powerful northern militias with artillery in a bid to force rebel fighters from a strategic region where China is constructing major hydropower plants.
The fighting, which began Thursday, has killed at least four people and forced 2,000 more to flee, according to the U.S. Campaign for Burma.
The rebels belong to the Kachin, one of Myanmar’s sizable ethnic minorities. Those groups have struggled for decades to win more autonomy, but their efforts have routinely been met by military suppression.
Kachin military commander Gwan Maw told U.S.-funded Radio Free Asia on Monday that the fighting in northern Myanmar’s Momauk region, near the Chinese border, could spread and possibly escalate into civil war if the government refused to negotiate an end to it with the Kachin Independence Organization.
The 8,000-strong Kachin militia reached a peace deal with the country’s former ruling junta in 1994, but the truce broke down last year after the militia rejected a call by the government to become border guards under army leadership. The junta made the appeal ahead of last November’s elections, Myanmar’s first in 20 years, which paved the way for a new a civilian government to take
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