56 minutes agoShareSaveYogita LimayeSouth Asia and Afghanistan correspondent in MyanmarShareSaveBBCLate one night last month Iang Za Kim heard explosions in a neighbouring village, then fighter jets flying overhead. She ran out of her home to see smoke rising from a distance.”We were terrified. We thought the junta’s planes would bomb us too. So we grabbed what we could – some food and clothes and ran into the jungles surrounding our village.”Iang’s face quivers as she recounts the story of what happened on 26 November in K-Haimual, her village in Myanmar’s western Chin State, and then she breaks down.She’s among thousands of civilians who’ve fled their homes in recent weeks after the Burmese military launched a fierce campaign of air strikes, and a ground offensive in rebel-held areas across the country, to recapture territory ahead of elections starting on 28 December.Four other women sitting around her on straw mats also start crying. The trauma of what they’ve gone through to make it to safety is clearly visible.While the air strikes were the immediate cause for Iang to flee, she also doesn’t want to be forced to participate in the election.”If we are caught and refuse to vote, they will put us in jail and torture us. We’ve run away so that we don’t have to vote,” she says.Some from Chin state have described the junta’s latest offensive as the fiercest it has launched in more than three years.Many of the displaced have sought refuge in other parts of the state. Iang is among a group that crossed the border into India’s Mizoram state. Currently sheltered in a rundown badminton court in Vaphai village, the group’s few belongings they were able to carry are packed in plastic sacks.Indian villagers have given them food and basic supplies.Ral Uk Thang has had to flee his home at the age of 80, living in makeshift shelters in jungles for days, before finally making it to safety.”We’re afraid of our own government. They are extremely cruel. Their military has come into our and other villages in the past, they’ve arrested people, tortured them, and burned down homes,” he says.It isn’t easy to speak to Burmese civilians freely. Myanmar’s military government does not allow free access in the country for foreign journalists. It took over the country in a coup in February 2021, shortly after the last election, and has since been widely condemned for running a repressive regime that has indiscriminately targeted civilians as it looks to crush the armed uprising against it across Myanmar.During its latest offensive, the junta last week targeted a hospital in Rakhine State, just south of Chin State. Rebel groups in Rakhine say at least 30 people were killed and more than 70 injured.The Chin Human Rights Organisation says that since mid-September at least three schools and six churches in Chin State have been targeted by junta airstrikes, killing 12 people including six children.The BBC has independently verified the bombing of a school in Vanha village on 13 October. Two students –Johan Phun Lian Cung, who was seven, and Zing Cer Mawi, 12 – were killed as they were attending lessons. The bombs ripped through their classrooms injuring more than a dozen other students.Myanmar’s military government did not respond to the BBC’s questions about the allegations.This is the second time Bawi Nei Lian and his young family – a wife and two young children – have been displaced. Back in 2021, soon after the coup, their home in Falam town was burnt down in an air strike. They rebuilt their lives in K-Haimual village. Now they’re homeless again.”I can’t find the words to explain how painful and hard it is and what a difficult decision it was to make to leave. But we had to do it to stay alive,” he says.”I want the world to know that what the military is claiming – that this election is free and fair – this is absolutely false. When the main political party is not being allowed to contest the election, how can there be genuine democracy?”The National League for Democracy party, led by Aung San Suu Kyi, which won landslides in the two …
