H4FA, a charity for ethnic Burmese veterans, is trying to reach surviving soldiers who fought for Britain in a legendary World War Two campaign only to abandoned for decades by their old allies.
In a region that had so long been wracked by conflict, that first British visitor was Peter Mitchell, the son of a British officer who served in Burma and a trustee of Help 4 Forgotten Allies (H4FA), a small charity that pays the tribal veterans and their widows small but desperately-needed annual stipends of £120.
Thar Htoo emerged from the wooden hut where he lives with several generations of his family, pulled his ageing body ramrod straight and saluted with a flourish. It was 70 years since he delivered the same gesture to his departing British commanding officer the end of the Second World War after three years fighting the Japanese in the tribal highlands of eastern Burma.
The 89-year-old did not see another British visitor for the next seven decades as post-independence Burma plunged into a series of ethnic insurgencies and the military junta cut the country off from the world.
He is among a remarkable but dwindling band of about 455 surviving ethnic Burmese veterans who played a key role in the most legendary British guerrilla campaign of World War II. The Burma campaign, waged in remote Asian jungles by what have been called "forgotten armies," was one of the most brutal of the war for both sides. And Britain’s ethnic allies were largely “forgotten” again after Burmese independence as one of the world’s longest-running conflictsbroke out along the country’s borders.
The tribal groups, including the Karen, Karenni, Kachin and Shan, who practised the Christianity brought by missionaries in the late 19th century mixed with traditional animist beliefs, believed that the British would grant them autonomy when they left. Instead, with independence they were incorporated in a country dominated from Rangoon by a predominantly Buddhist majority, many of whom had sided with the Japanese during the war.
There is still disappointment, but remarkably no bitterness, that such fiercely loyal wartime allies were so cursorily abandoned as the post-war British government ended the era of Empire. “My officers told me at the end of the war ‘don’t worry, we won’t forget you’,” recalled Thar Htoo. “They said they would come back. But nobody came back until this year.”
The memories are fading, but Thar Htoo recalls the guerrilla campaigns conducted under the command of a small group of British officers who operated from hide-outs in the mountain caves of the Karenni Hills.
It is an area of stunning natural beauty where rocky forested outcrops jut dramatically out of the paddy fields and maize crops, but also home to some of the poorest villages in Burma, with no running water and only the occasional solar panel for power.
“After the Japanese invaded Burma, our chief told us to fight with the British to defend our lands,” said Thar Htoo, who signed up for the irregular forces at 16 in 1942. “These men supported us so loyally when we were in the gravest peril, at great and continuing cost to themselves,” said Mr Mitchell after his visit to Kayah state. “At this stage of their lives, now is their time of greatest need and we must support them.”
The establishment of H4FA began with a chance meeting when Sally McLean, a British aid volunteer working with refugees on the Thai-Burma border, met an elderly Karen veteran in a hospital near the site of the infamous Death Railway. She learned that despite loyalty, sacrifice and contribution to the defeat of the Japanese in Burma, the veterans had not received a penny of official British government funds since the end of World War II. For decades in post-independence Burma, they were viewed as enemies of their state, living in war zones or refugee camps.
As Burma’s semi-military government has eased travel restrictions and signed a peace accord with some ethnic factions, her charity is trying to reach as many old soldiers as possible.
* For more information on H4FA, please visit http://www.h4fa.org.uk/veterans