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KYAING TONG - At night, the gilded Buddha standing imperiously on a hill overlooking Kyaing Tong is one of the few spots of light in the inky blackness of eastern Myanmar's Shan hills.
But to the Shan, the former Burma's largest ethnic minority, the floodlit statue is no symbol of religious devotion.
It is a monument to their subjugation by the Burmese, leaders of the junta that has controlled Myanmar and its complex patchwork of 100 or more different ethnic groups for the past 45 years.
The Shan, many of whom are Christian, believe that when the Burmese military put up the statue in 2000, they stuffed it with bad-luck charms to cast the evil eye on the town, a seat of distinct Shan culture in the heart of the Golden Triangle.
"They say it's women's underwear, but I don't know for sure," one man said after a glance over his shoulder for military intelligence spies, the feared network that helped crush last week's protests in Yangon, 1000km to the southwest.
Elsewhere across the sleepy town of 30,000, soldiers - some with Nazi-style swastikas on their helmets - are the most obvious sign of the military occupation of the forested plateau that is Shan State.
Although 70 per cent of the people are Shan, all government officials and police are from the Burmese majority or other ethnic groups - part of a deliberate strategy of "divide and rule".
Ironically, the Shan, who have closer ethnic and linguistic links to Thailand than the rest of Myanmar, call themselves Tai, meaning free.
"Everybody in Myanmar is under arrest, although some are under more arrest than others," said one resident of Kyaing Tong, known as Keng Tung during the British colonial days that ended with Burma's independence in 1948. The junta that seized power in 1962 changed the country's name to Myanmar in 1989.
Since the Army tore down Kyaing Tong's teak-and-stucco Shan palace two years later to make way for a gloomy government hotel, stories have taken root about a golden age under the Shan chieftains, or Saophas, whose descendants now all live in exile.
"My grandfather and father were always talking about the old days, when you could leave your door open at night and nobody came in to steal," one man said, pulling a grainy black-and-white photograph of the destroyed palace from his wallet.
As the sun sets and darkness descends on a town that rarely has electricity, people huddle around ancient radio sets to tune in to Burmese-language broadcasts on the BBC or the United States-funded Radio Free Asia.
The junta-controlled state media are ignored. "Myanmar radio is just pop singers and lies," one man said.
Years of living under an Orwellian dictatorship that shows no signs of growing old have cowed the country's 53 million people into a perpetual state of fear, particularly in the mountainous and rebellion-racked ethnic border regions.
"People here are like the crow - always looking over their shoulders for signs of trouble," the man added.
Freedom of movement is non-existent under loathed internal security laws that force people to register with "immigration" officials whenever they travel from one town to another.
The 150km journey from Kyaing Tong to the Thai border, through jungle-clad hills still hiding various rebel militias and opium fields, has 10 checkpoints.
In the rare instances of the Government spending money on its people - the health budget amounts to just a few dollars a year for each person - it fails to get the credit because distrust of its motives is so ingrained. One Shan development agency that receives US$10,000 ($14,500) of junta cash a year to bring fresh water to remote hill-tribe villages has to disguise the source of the aid for it to be accepted.
"Every time the Government does something, people always think it is to oppress them," said one Kyaing Tong resident who visits hill communities regularly.
Millions from both the ethnic minorities and Burmese are voting with their feet and leaving a country regarded in the 1950s as one of the brightest prospects in Asia, but now one of its most desperate basket cases.
Besides long-term refugee camps in Thailand and Bangladesh for 150,000 people displaced by decades-long civil wars with ethnic rebels, including the Shan, millions more are working as migrants in Thailand or more affluent parts of Southeast Asia.
Those who remain behind cling to faint hopes that a new constitution expected next month as part of the junta's "roadmap to democracy" might bring minorities some minimal say in how they are governed.
The signs are not good. In Kyaing Tong, the offices of the Shan Nationalities League for Democracy have been deserted since 2005 when party leader Hkun Htun Oo was given a 100-year jail sentence for sedition.
The Shan, Chin and Kachin also recall the last deal they struck with the Burmese - the 1947 Panglong Agreement that was meant to guarantee minorities some form of representation.
"It only lasted for 10 years before the Burmese broke the promise," one man said. "We all know the Panlong Agreement, but only in our hearts. It's too dangerous to do more than that."
Subjugation of the Shan
* The Shan, the second-largest ethnic group in Myanmar, make up about 10 per cent of the 53 million population. Burmese make up 65 per cent.
* The Shan people are ethnically closer to Thais than the other three major groups in Myanmar, loosely categorised as Tibeto-Burman, Mon-Khmer, Karennic.
* Linguistically, the word Shan comes from the same root as Siam, the ancient word for Thailand.
* The Shan also identify themselves as Tai, meaning free.
* Native speakers of Shan and Thai can understand one another.
* Having dominated what is now Myanmar, and parts of northern Thailand, from the 13th to 16th centuries, Shan authority retreated under the growing might of the Burmese and Thai monarchies.
* The Shan hereditary chiefs, or Saophas, were formally subject to Britain under the colonial administration established in the late 19th century.
* After independence in 1948, the southern and eastern reaches of Shan State - along the borders with Thailand, Laos and China - became home to many ethnic militias funded by Chinese communists and the flourishing opium and heroin trade.
* The presence of so many narco-armies, including the fearsome headhunters of the Wa, gave rise to the region's infamy as the Golden Triangle.
* Most Shan are Theravada Buddhists, although many yielded to the persuasions of Christian missionaries.
- Reuters
