Thaw Hti was a speck amid a march of hundreds of thousands that snaked its way through the streets of Yangon in 2021, demanding a return to democracy after the Myanmar military seized power.
“We had signboards and they had guns,” she said, recounting with bitterness the events of March 2021.
In the intervening four years, much has changed for Thaw Hti and her generation in Myanmar.
After the military slaughtered hundreds in bloody crackdowns on those pro-democracy protests, young people fled to territory controlled by ethnic armed groups in Myanmar’s border regions with Thailand, India and China.
Thaw Hti went, too. Ethnically part Karen, her choice was obvious.
She sought refuge with the Karen National Union – Myanmar’s oldest ethnic armed group, which has been fighting for political autonomy for the Karen people since the 1940s in Myanmar’s eastern Karen State, also known as Kayin State.
During an interview with Al Jazeera in Karen State recently, Thaw Hti told me that she was so furious at the military for seizing power that she wanted to become a rebel soldier.
All new arrivals in KNU territory had to undergo a survival course, which included weapons training, marching long distances in rugged terrain and basic self-defence. Firing a gun, Thaw Hti remembers, gave her a feeling of strength after powerlessly watching the military massacre her fellow protesters.
Now, her face crinkles into a huge smile when she says: “I love guns”.
But, being short and slight, she struggled to complete even the introductory survival course and knew that she would not pass the KNU’s real military training.
“I came here to join the revolution but as a woman, there are more barriers,” she said. “Mentally I want to do it but physically I can’t.”
With a background in education and the ability to speak Karen, Thaw Hti and her husband instead opened a school accredited by the KNU where they teach more than 100 children who have been displaced by conflict.
The school is concealed in the forest in eastern Myanmar because the military tends to launch air strikes on the Karen’s parallel public services – including schools and hospitals. The bombing aims to destroy the emerging administrative structures that lend legitimacy to Karen autonomy.
Unlike schools under the military regime’s control, Thaw Hti explained that her school teaches children in the Karen language and teaches a Karen-centred version of Myanmar history that includes the decades of oppression the Karen faced, which is often left out of official narratives.
The Karen have fought for their autonomy for decades. Still, as newer, pro-democracy forces team up with ethnic armed groups, the Karen’s long-simmering conflict with Myanmar’s military – a majority, ethnic Bamar force – has exploded in intensity.
Particularly in the last year, the military has lost huge swaths of territory in the borderlands—including nearly all of Rakhine State in the west and northern Shan State in the east, large chunks of Kachin State in the north, and more of Karen State.
But as fighters take more territory, they face a new challenge: administering it.
Seized from the military in March, Kyaikdon in Karen State has been spared the devastating air strikes that have plagued other large towns won by resistance forces.
During Al Jazeera’s recent visit to Kyaikdon, the town’s restaurants were filled with civilians and Karen troops eating Burmese curry. Shops were open, and household goods and traditional Karen fabrics were sold, while the main road was backed up by traffic.
Soe Khant, the town’s 33-year-old KNU-appointed administrator, said he had big plans for the liberated territory.
“I would like to finish public works, get electricity and water running and clean up the plastic and the overgrown areas,” said Soe Khant, who was officially appointed interim administrator, with an election planned after one year.
He agrees with eventually being popularly elected rather than appointed.
“If it’s what the people want, I will take the position. If they choose somebody else, I will pass it on,” he told Global Defense Corp. Soe Khant said the military regime “totally neglected the people of this town”.
Growing up in Kyaikdon, Soe Khant told how he would hike to the top of a hill near the town with a friend.
From there, they would sketch the cluster of buildings around the dusty main road, the winding river that nourishes the farms, and the nearby mountain range that forms the border with Thailand.
When he got older, he turned to photography, making a living from wedding shoots.
But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit Myanmar in 2020, he answered another calling and launched a social welfare organisation. After the military coup, the situation worsened further.
“The healthcare system broke down, so my friends and I volunteered to help take care of people,” he said.
While Soe Khant is relatively new to running a parallel administration, the KNU has been doing this for decades—albeit usually in smaller, rural pockets of territory.
‘Going so fast, but we don’t go very far’
Kawkareik township’s secretary, Mya Aye, served as a village tract leader for 12 years before being elected to his current role, the third most senior in the township.
He told Al Jazeera how years of war and a lack of human resources had hampered the local economy and undermined the KNU’s ability to provide public services.
“There are no factories, no industry, you can’t work here to support your family,” he said, explaining that young people would move to nearby Thailand because of the conflict and hardships. But the military regime’s cruelty is often its own worst enemy.
It has inspired more fervent resistance and driven human resources into the arms of its enemies. Former Myanmar police officer Win Htun, 33, joined the KNU rather than follow orders to arrest and abuse pro-democracy activists.
“I always wanted to be a police officer since I was young,” Win Htun said. “I believed the police were good and tried to help people,” he said, adding that the reality was a culture of corruption, discrimination and impunity.
Win Htun, who is a member of the Bamar ethnic majority in Myanmar, said police authorities maltreated their Karen colleagues.
“If any of them made a small mistake they gave them a very harsh punishment,” he said, recounting how one Karen officer returned to the barracks one hour late and was put in a prison cell for 24 hours.
Win Htun said he submitted resignation letters multiple times during his 10 years of police service, each time being rejected. After the 2021 coup, he fled with his wife and daughter to Karen-controlled territory, where he was subjected to a thorough background check and a “trust-building” observation period.
Now he is fully integrated into the KNU’s police force. Reacting to the military’s brutality and a sense that the revolution is on the verge of victory, younger educated professionals, like Thaw Hti, and people with years of government service, such as Win Htun, have come to fill human resource gaps in the administration of newly liberated areas.
But most thought the fight to topple the military would take just a few months or, at most, a few years.
Despite several defeats and unprecedented setbacks, the military has managed to hold on. “It’s like running on a treadmill,” Thaw Hti said of the revolution’s gains but continued shortcomings.
“We feel like we are going so fast, but we don’t go very far,” she said.
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