On the full moon day of Thadingyut, October 9, People’s Defence Force fighters gathered for a traditional ceremony at a village near Moebye, a town in southern Shan State’s Pekon Township close to the border with Kayah State.
Seven elders from seven nearby villages intoned prayers and tied pieces of cotton thread to the men’s wrists, in a ritual that the Karenni believe will provide protection from harm.
In the past, these ceremonies were held to secure better crop yields or prevent drought or epidemics. However, since the coup they’ve been performed to “protect and strengthen the morale of the defence forces fighting in the revolution,” said a resident of Moebye, whose population of almost 30,000 people is, like neighbouring Kayah, majority Karenni.
The prayers are usually offered in churches belonging to the largely Christian Karenni community, but due to continuous heavy fighting in and around Moebye, the ceremonies have been relocated to PDF bases and internally displaced people’s camps.
Since the February 2021 military coup, resistance groups have regularly fought with the Tatmadaw for control of Moebye. The town is strategically located on a major supply route to the Kayah capital Loikaw, 25 kilometres to the southeast, and occupies a mountainous area crucial to the defence of Nay Pyi Taw, 200km to the west. However, up until last month, most clashes were short-lived and sometimes lasted for little more than an hour.
That changed on September 8, when PDF sources say about 400 Tatmadaw soldiers advanced on Moebye from the south under the cover of artillery fire, in an apparent effort to flush out resistance fighters in the town. This lightning advance sparked several weeks of almost continuous fighting, in which a coalition of resistance groups denied the Tatmadaw full control of the town and prompted it to partially evacuate its troops.
Moebye PDF fighter Ko Saw claimed the Tatmadaw’s initial assault was a failure. Although its heavy weapons fire destroyed a church and several houses in the town, “residents quickly fled from harm and PDFs were well prepared to defend [Moebye]”, he said, referring to the combined forces of the Moebye PDF, Karenni Army, Karenni Nationalities Defence Force, Karenni Revolution Union and United Resistance Force.
“Some of our comrades were injured but there were no fatalities,” Ko Saw said of the eight-hour battle. He credited the lack of civilian deaths to “local people’s experience of war”, meaning they had learnt how to evade danger. Frontier phoned the junta’s Ministry of Information, where an official referred questions about the Moebye conflict to the deputy minister, Major-General Zaw Min Tun, who didn’t respond. Further attempts to get comment from the ministry were unsuccessful.