I'm on a journey around beautiful and troubled Burma -
one of the largest countries in South East Asia.
On the first leg of my travels here,
I witnessed how Burma's all-powerful military
has turned on the Rohingya people.
This time, I discover more of a country
that was cut off for decades.
I haven't seen a sight like this anywhere in the world.
I visit the glorious highlands of Shan State.
More? More?
It's just completely, totally fantastic.
In the heart of the infamous Golden Triangle,
I travelled secretly into a conflict zone...
There's another checkpoint ahead,
and we're not sure we can get through it in the car,
and so we're going to have to try sneaking around it on foot.
..to discover the rebel force waging a hidden war.
Going off on patrol.
It's supposed to be one nation - a fledgling democracy.
But Burma's still racked by ethnic conflict.
I'm next to the Irrawaddy River,
and I'm just beginning the second leg of my journey across Myanmar -
better known as Burma.
No bouncing.
Are we on the right boat?
Towards Mandalay?
This one.
The name of the country's important.
It was called Burma for decades, of course,
and then the former military dictatorship
decided to rename it Myanmar.
In English, Burma is still often used as the country's name.
Many people here still use both.
I was heading out on a local ferry boat along the Irrawaddy River,
towards the city of Mandalay.
The Irrawaddy flows more than 1,000 miles from north to south.
I like this gentleman's technique.
So the foot means more power.
What does the river mean to you personally?
It's now just a few years since the country
began the process of transitioning from, er,
to become a democracy.
I'm just wondering - you do a very special route
through the country.
Have you seen anything starting to change
for people living along the river bank?
It will take time, hey?
We're coming to some sort of mooring point.
The community here is very disconnected from the outside world.
The river is their lifeline.
There's a track to this community but no real road.
Remember, independence from the British,
this was one of the wealthiest countries in Asia.
In the decades that followed,
it became a military dictatorship,
and it became one of the poorest countries in the world.
The military dictatorship lasted for nearly 50 years.
Then in 2011, the military said
they'd step aside to let civilians rule.
Life has improved for some people since then, but here
it looked like they were still living in a previous century.
Most people in Myanmar, in Burma, are farmers.
They work the land.
And they do it with ancient equipment and kit.
A wooden cart, for goodness' sake, in the 21st-century.
Best to take the hint.
Under democracy, the leader of the country is now supposed to be
the former human rights icon, Aung San Suu Kyi.
She promised reform and change.
There are incredible natural resources here,
incredible natural wealth.
But the ownership of them, the control of them,
is in the hands of an elite few,
many of them generals or former generals.
Not a lot of it trickles down to communities like this.
The military said they'd relinquish control but, in fact,
much of the money and the power here is still in their hands.
I'd arrived into Mandalay, the second-largest city in the country.
Famous for its magnificent palace, it was once the royal capital.
Fortunes have long been made here,
trading Burma's spectacular natural resources
and today it's an economic hub,
thanks in part to strong links with China,
which is just a couple of hundred miles to the east.
I'm off to a market now where they sell the so-called stone of heaven.
Prized for jewellery and ornaments, the stone is jade.
Most of the rarest and most valuable jade in the world comes from Burma.
Wow! Look at that!
Every day, hundreds of sellers make the trek
from secretive jade mines in the north of Myanmar,
to this market, laden with rough green slabs.
Right, he's in the middle of a sale.
It's enormous!
How much are you hoping to get for this stone today?
That's a huge sum of money, isn't it?
Is that going to go to you?
Will you get that?
What will you do with the money?
So you keep trading up?
OK.
Jade's been highly prized in China for millennia
by emperors and merchants,
and now by the new Chinese middle-class.
Buyers come here from across China.
When you are deciding, what are you looking for?
How do you look at it? How do you assess it?
So you want it to be as transparent as possible?
Are you going to make an offer for this?
Are you going to buy it?
Sorry.
Oh, this is beautiful.
Will you pay 400 for this?
So, there's a crack there.
This is very clearly a buyer's market.
One of the many things that's really incredible about this place is just
how dependent it is on China.
We're just a few hundred miles from the Chinese border here
and so many of the buyers, most of the buyers here, are Chinese.
China has long had power and influence in Burma.
From trading with the country, of course,
but also helping to prop up the military dictatorship.
This is what the jade becomes.
Oh, yeah, there's a price. Let's have a look. So that one is...
4,000 dollars.
So about £3,000.
She's holding on to it.
I'm teasing it away from her fingers.
So that's about £3,000.
A little bit small for my wrist.
Still...
I can't fit...
Ah, magic.
You see. She knows what she's doing.
I bet...
Oh, like this. OK.
It's not going to come off, I tell you.
There we go.
Do men normally wear this?
For anything. For anyone.
I think I know what's happened here.
Now I'm not going to be able to get off, am I?
So I'm going to have to buy.
A discount. Discount for you.
I don't think I'm paid enough, but it is very beautiful.
The jade industry in Myanmar is enormous,
believed to be worth more than £20 billion a year.
But much is sold via the black market.
This is about as close as I can get to the source of jade.
Almost all of it comes from the far north of Myanmar,
an area that's completely closed to us.
Conditions in the jade mines are often horrendous.
Many are run by people connected to the Burmese military.
As with so much else here, army generals,
or former army generals, pull the strings,
and they don't want outsiders knowing what's going on.
The international campaigning group Global Witness
has suggested jade mining in Burma
might be the biggest natural resources heist in modern history.
It isn't just money from jade that's not benefiting the people here.
I left Mandalay and headed into
one of Burma's main oil-producing regions.
But first we needed to get permission.
We're now heading to an immigration office where local officials
apparently are going to decide
whether or not we can stay in the area.
That does fill me with a bit of dread.
Here's my passport. I should stay here?
We should keep the windows...
OK.
All right.
It became clear a surveillance unit from the Burmese secret police
had been keeping a close eye on our travels and filming.
We didn't know whether we'd be allowed to stay in the area.
But we had all our paperwork,
and were supposed to be allowed to travel and film freely here.
Good news. Excellent.
All done.
As Burma now opens to the world,
foreign oil companies are investing in the country,
carving up drilling areas.
But many ordinary folk are also keen to get the riches underground.
Bloody hell.
Right. Let's go.
This is one of the largest unofficial oil-drilling areas on the planet.
I haven't seen a site like this anywhere in the world.
This looks as though this is a real,
almost little family patches, it's bizarre.
Thousands of people have come here from across Burma,
to dig and drill for the black gold,
using the most basic equipment.
What are you doing?
So you use the pipe as a bucket?
The winch is really going down.
How far down do you put the pipe?
What an astonishing system this is!
Here comes the pipe.
He's unplugging it, letting out water from the deep
by the look of it.
Then, when it starts to turn dark yellow, that goes into the bucket.
I've never really seen anything like this.
It's thought there could be more than 50,000 primitive oil wells
throughout this region.
Is this your well?
Do you own the well that you're drilling now?
What was life like for you before you started working here.
What were you doing?
You were a farmer!
It's a bit of a shift, isn't it, from working with the soil
to working with oil?
Which job do you prefer?
Why don't you go back to farming?
My God! So, this is the best alternative.
It's dirty and dangerous work -
completely unregulated.
Fires and explosions are a constant hazard.
And, of course, the oil is toxic.
But poverty drives desperation.
The vast majority of the millions
living below the poverty line in Burma are in rural areas.
23-year-old Yemen Byne took me back to meet his family.
So your husband is saying that...
He quite misses being a farmer,
but he needs to be here to earn good money.
Are you happy for you as a family to be here?
Poverty has actually been declining in Myanmar, but the country lags
behind neighbours like Thailand and Vietnam,
which have seen huge increases in living standards.
But even here people are starting to feel
more connected to the outside world - albeit virtually.
This is the first time seeing a foreigner.
Have you never seen a white person before?
Have you heard anything about our small country?
What about Manchester United?
The Queen of England?
David Beckham?
Isn't it an amazing thing?
You can access the world through your smartphone.
Most of the people I'd met on the central plains of Myanmar were
from the majority Bamar ethnic group,
who comprise almost 70% of the population.
Now I headed east into the country's vast forested highlands -
home to some of the dozens of other ethnic minorities
who make up this huge country.
I was entering Shan State, the biggest in Burma.
It makes up a quarter of the entire country.
Nearly 3,000 feet up in the Shan Hills
is one of the wonders of Burma.
HE SPEAKS LOCAL LANGUAGE
Hello.
I'd arranged to meet local guide Jau So.
Here we are. We've just gone through the entrance, if you like,
and we're now on the magnificent, extraordinary Inle Lake.
This mountain lake is around 45 square miles in size.
This huge lake is absolutely stunning.
It's been described as being like the Galapagos of Asia,
because life here has been cut off from the outside world
for an absolute age, and it's evolved in
special and spectacular ways.
Among the numerous endemic species found
in the lake is the unique Inle carp.
Hard to see in this silty water but it's long played an important
role in the life of the 100,000 Intha people,
who live around and on the lake.
The depth of the lake is just a couple of metres so...
whopping big poles into the ground.
And then they put up the structures,
to include a whopping pagoda.
In 2015,
the United Nations added the lake to
the world network of biosphere reserves -
the first in Myanmar.
This is incredible. This is like Burma's version of Venice.
It's an upcoming tourist destination,
but also a precious ecosystem for the Intha people,
who traditionally make a living from fishing and farming.
Looks as though we're heading for a bang.
HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE
Jau So took me to some rather clogged side channels
to see just how to feed a family
and make a living when you live on a lake.
Look what's ahead!
Tomatoes!
It floats.
And does it work well?
The area covered by floating farms
increased by up to 500% in recent decades.
They produce hundreds of tonnes of tomatoes a day.
Because farmers are using quantities of fertilisers and pesticides,
the delicate ecosystem is threatened,
changing life here for the locals and the fish.
So they fish in a quite extraordinary way.
There's a gentleman here doing a most incredible pose.
This is one of the signature images of Myanmar.
It's a very popular, famous image of the country.
He does seem to have caught a fish in the side of that net.
It looks very dead.
I wonder if it might be a bit of a prop.
To make a living from fishing.
Can I just ask, do you make more money doing this than fishing?
Fishing is dying out.
The lake is being poisoned,
and another threat comes from the surrounding hills.
Look at this!
So is this dredging?
Why is it dredging here?
Up in the hills, Burma's farmers chop down trees to clear land for
cultivation, but tree roots hold the soil together.
Without them, silt floods down
rivers during rains, clogging the lake.
Experts fear beautiful Lake Inle could one day disappear.
Forest cover in Myanmar has fallen dramatically in just a generation.
What's left contains astonishing biodiversity,
including some of the most magnificent trees on the planet.
So we are just stopped by the side of the road,
because we saw this incredible teak tree!
This is a wonder tree.
It grows most exceptionally here in Burma, in Myanmar.
Fortunes have been made from this tree.
Teak was one of the world's most important natural resources.
It was what first attracted the British to Burma.
They felled countless great trees for the Royal Navy.
Even after Burma secured its independence from Britain,
they kept chopping the trees down.
It was a massive source of revenue for the military dictatorship.
Burmese teak is renowned as the best in the world.
Part of what makes it so strong,
valuable and special is how long it takes to grow.
An inch in diameter in 20 years by one reckoning.
There was often only one way of extracting the valuable timber.
Oh, wow!
This is quite the scene.
You know what, Myanmar is a country...
Since the arrival of democracy,
the Government here has tried to reduce logging
to preserve the forests.
But that's left 40% of working elephants in Burma out of a job.
To support ellies,
lucky travellers can visit and get up close
at the Greenhill Elephant Sanctuary,
set up by Tin Win Maw and her husband.
What's her name? She's called Hug Mo Yin.
We need to introduce who you are,
so we will make you friendship with our elephants and you.
Elephants are big eater.
They can eat all day long.
So as long as you don't get tired of feeding,
they never get tired of eating.
And later they will recognise you as their new good friend.
I would like that very much.
Oh, you want more. Your teeth are actually quite big, aren't they?
More? More?
You want a full mouthful?
OK. How about that?
More? Goodness me.
OK. This is the most extraordinary sight.
They say Asian elephants, I know,
are smaller than African elephants but, still,
when you are this close to an Asian elly, it looks like a truck.
OK, OK. I'll get more.
I'll get more.
I'm glad she's a herbivore.
They eat so much, don't they?
Unbelievable. It is true.
Elephants are eating like elephants.
They need to eat over hundreds and hundreds of kilograms per day.
Do you not want this? There we go.
The forest is shrinking here,
and there's been a ban placed on the export
of some timber from Myanmar.
So there's nothing really left.
There's not enough work left for them to do,
which means there's not enough money to be earned
for their owners and carers to feed them.
Which means a lot of elephants are not getting work,
and they are going hungry.
That's it. No, that's it.
No more.
You're enormous...
And snotty.
Each elephant here has its own mahout, dedicated to its care.
It was time for an essential part of the day - bath time.
She likes everywhere you washed her.
But be careful where you wash, you know, near the ears area,
she gets a little bit itchy sometimes.
So this is some sort of natural skin care product for elephants -
a bit of an acacia tree.
Deforestation is also a huge threat to these ellies' wild cousins.
Elephants are endangered across Asia.
Here it's possible there's just over 1,000 left in the wild.
So the sanctuary's embarked on an ambitious project.
So this way... To rebuild some of the elephants' habitat.
OK. I met Tin Win's husband, Tun Tun Win.
Oh, goodness. So this is your nursery.
Nursery.
Every visitor to Greenhill Valley is invited
to plant their very own teak tree.
So far an incredible 45,000 saplings
have been put into the ground.
Excellent work, Tin Tin.
All right. Is that too deep?
No. Is that acceptable?
Yes. Why don't we name one after your son,
and one after my son?
Your son's ten.
Can. My son is six.
Jake. So this is Can.
And your will be?
My one's going to be called Jake.
Because, frankly,
this is about the next generation
and how soon there's a risk there won't be
any elephants in the wild for them,
which is a horrific thought.
Tiny deed done, I continued my journey further into Shan State.
It's home of the largest of Burma's ethnic minorities -
the Shan people, who make up around one in ten
of the population of Burma.
Ever since independence
they've complained of discrimination and persecution
at the hands of the military.
Before democracy came their language was even banned in schools.
But they fiercely protected their culture.
And I've come to a Balloon Festival.
Traditionally it marks the end of the rainy season,
and it's also just a chance to have a good time.
Each year, people from all over Shan State come here,
to their capital, Taunggyi, to celebrate.
For a whole week, teams compete to release the most spectacular and
enormous balloons.
Now that is a balloon!
Entire communities get behind their team.
There are huge amounts at stake... ENERGETIC MUSIC PLAYS
..£4,000 for the winners.
I'd arranged to meet the leader of
one of Shan State's top balloon teams.
We are just very pleased, we're very pleased to be here.
So you are the best balloon team in all of Myanmar.
What's going to happen tonight?
Did you just say, "fireball?"
LAUGHTER
CHANTING
The team has spent two months preparing their balloon and a hefty
payload of fireworks.
How many fireworks do you have?
70 kilos of home-made fireworks?!
They're readying.
HE SPEAKS IN OWN LANGUAGE
They want everybody back.
A string is going up to hold people back.
Excellent.
WHISTLES BLOW
It's just completely and totally fantastic.
There's a tension and a stress amongst the team because, of course,
this is when it can go horribly wrong,
because the balloon is made of paper.
Paper!
The burner goes in. So that's the key, crucial burner,
so the explosives are now being brought in.
Bloody hell!
Look at that!
CHEERING
Yes! Come on!
Stage one complete.
The balloon's taken off without exploding.
How far into the heavens will it rise?
40 minutes?! Yeah. Wow, that's quite a challenge! OK.
Not every launch went completely to plan.
CHEERING
Bloody hell!
Wow! Shit!
I took a minor hit.
I was just whacked by a firework.
It hit me like the proverbial rocket.
Our BBC team - professional to the end - had produced a fire blanket,
which we can all shelter behind.
We'll protect the camera and the footage, and, of course, Jonathan.
THEY CHANT IN OWN LANGUAGE
As I learned, even on the first leg of my travels here,
Burma is a very troubled country.
I headed deeper into Shan State, where there are conflict zones that
are sealed off by the Burmese army, to prevent outsiders -
especially TV crews - from entering.
The area I'm heading into now is in a state of long-term crisis.
There has been conflict here over decades,
and right now, it's starting to get worse.
The world's now aware of the Burmese military's long-term human rights
abuses against Rohingya Muslims -
recently attacked and driven out of Myanmar,
in a campaign the UN has called ethnic cleansing.
The Rohingya are not alone.
Across Burma, there are numerous conflict areas,
where ethnic minority groups have been fighting the Burmese state.
There's been war in the Shan area -
near and along Burma's eastern border, and my best chance to get
into the conflict zone there was to head to neighbouring Thailand.
From Thailand I planned to double back across the border into Burma.
But the Thai authorities aren't always keen on outsiders crossing
into restricted areas of Burma, so I needed to keep a low profile.
We're in a sort of rural part.
Now I'm going to stick out like a sore thumb,
so we need to keep the windows up.
And I think this is where we're going to do the transfer from one...
from our car to the others.
OK. There are Thai army checkpoints all along the road towards Burma.
If they knew where we were going,
we'd be stopped and quite possibly arrested.
It was time to change vehicles.
It's quite nerve-racking, actually,
because people are taking risks to get us into the Shan area.
They're risks that they're saying they're willing to take, they want
to take, not for us but to show you what's going on there.
We've just gone through a checkpoint
and, um, it was OK.
They seemed to know our guy.
We were pretty much waved through.
HE SPEAKS IN OWN LANGUAGE
If the best thing to do is to walk around, then we should walk.
There's another checkpoint ahead and we're not sure we can get through it
in the car, so we're going to have to try sneaking around it on foot.
We were just a stone's throw from the border with Burma.
So from here we've got to walk.
I really don't like this. We've had to abandon most of our kit in the
vehicle that's gone ahead, and
apparently they're going to be able to get that past the checkpoint as
long as we're not in the cars,
but we've been left with basically nothing.
We just had to bail out in a rush.
But we've got to be pretty quiet,
because the army base is just over there.
We can't use any lights, because apparently they have cameras
watching for movement, and...
they find us, they'll catch us, basically.
There's a vehicle coming. Get down, get down, get down!
They're saying, "Get down."
OK.
So just here, we're crossing from Thailand into Burma, into Myanmar,
and into Shan State.
There's somebody here.
There's somebody walking towards us.
OK. So it's a friendly face who's come to meet us.
After a short trek through the forest, we finally joined up with
our vehicles on the Burmese side of the border.
So we've made it across into Shan State...
..and I think...
Oh, God, I think we've actually arrived.
We've just come out of the darkness into what looks like a military camp.
I'd arrived at a place called Loi Taleng.
Waiting for me was Charm Tong...
Hello, hello!
..a teacher and Shan human rights activist.
We are now in Shan State. Yes, you are.
Phew!
She was there to welcome me to the headquarters of a rebel army.
When Burma won independence from Britain in 1948,
some ethnic minorities had been promised a degree of independence,
but the promises weren't kept.
Ethnic groups took up arms.
Then, in 1962, the Burmese military seized power in a coup.
They occupied or invaded many ethnic areas, to keep tight control over the country.
And the world's longest-running civil war really began.
There's at least six different ethnic armed organisations fighting
with the Burmese military in Shan State.
We are with the Shan State Army South.
Oh, bloody hell.
This is a guerrilla group
that operates in the mountains and jungles of eastern Burma.
It's a guerrilla group, but it's an army.
Lieutenant General Yawd Serk commands roughly 8,000 troops.
These guys are completely hard-core.
They've been fighting now for decades.
COMMANDS GIVEN IN OWN LANGUAGE
MILITARY CADENCE
Running an army costs a fortune.
The Shan area is rich in timber, gold, and gemstones - like rubies.
But this is also the infamous Golden Triangle,
where a quarter of the world's opium is grown.
MILITARY CADENCE
Both the Burmese army and resistance movements have been accused of
involvement in drug trafficking -
a charge the Shan State Army South denies.
That's how you do it. HE LAUGHS
WHISTLE BLOWS
What are they doing now?
HE BLOWS WHISTLE
More than 12 million people in Burma live in areas affected by conflict
or tensions between the government and ethnic armed groups.
Because of fierce fighting, there are nearly 500,000 displaced
people along the Chinese and Thai borders.
Here, the Shan State Army South protects thousands of Shan civilians
who fled, seeking safety.
My guide, Charm Tong, took me to the local school,
which is educating around 700 children in their own Shan language.
THEY GREET EACH OTHER IN SHAN
Many children here have had to leave their families to escape fighting.
Some are orphans. When Charm Tong was just six,
her parents sent her out of the war zone.
She grew up in an orphanage, in shelters like this.
How do you come to be here?
How many times have you heard stories like this?
Every time. Still like this. SHE SOBS
It's just gone on too long, hasn't it?
The depth of the suffering here
and how endless it's been.
Do you feel like quite a traumatised people?
Yeah, I think it's just impunity that the...
..you know, there's all kinds of atrocities that's been committed.
It's too long. Mm-hmm.
And there's been no justice. Yeah.
Is that what...? And that's why we want to change the situation.
We have to work harder, so that we can change this kind of situation.
For decades international human rights organisations have documented
horrific abuses against Burma's
ethnic minorities, including the Shan.
Forced relocation, forced labour, mass rape, torture, looting,
and arbitrary killings.
With the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people,
the world is now waking up to the crimes of Burma's military leaders.
But shockingly, since the transition to democracy
and arrival of Aung San Suu Kyi as the national leader,
the military has actually ramped up attacks on ethnic areas.
Burma is opening up to the international community for
investment, and the local peoples don't have any right to own any
ownership of the land and rivers and natural resources,
and the Burma military just put more control, you know, make the
shelling, attacks, offensive, so that they can have more control.
Shan State is incredibly rich in natural resources.
With Burma now free to trade with the outside world,
there's even more incentive to take control of the Shan people's land,
and there are regular clashes
between the rebels and the Burmese military.
OK. Flipping heck.
Going off on patrol.
Soldiers are waiting. A unit of 60 Shan soldiers were setting out,
led by Colonel Jai Hong Can.
When your soldiers go on patrol,
presumably they always have to be aware there's a risk of...
Of course. ..of conflict with the Burmese military.
Sure. Sometimes, we admit, the fighting can take place.
So we have to be very careful all the time.
So there's always a risk?
Always.
When you're holding the guns,
you have be sure that you have the enemy in front of you.
What inspired you or prompted you to join the fight, initially?
Human rights abuses.
You cannot just stand back and watch what is going on.
You, as a, as a man...
you have to find a kind of dignity of your...
of your...how do you say, of your people.
So that is why. We are fighting for our dignity,
we are fighting for our cultures.
If you don't fight, you are a dog.
A dog? We are human!
They are bullying us, they abusing us.
As a human being, what will you do?
Fight back, man. But still you have to be careful.
We do not know when the enemy will be coming to attack us.
The soldiers marched on, combat-ready, hour after hour.
This is quite a good position, isn't it?
You have an incredible view all around.
OK. We're making camp here tonight.
The toilet is there. You look at the sign there.
And it goes down a little bit and you see the toilet.
It's an open toilet, sorry. THEY LAUGH
We understand, don't worry.
It's in the jungle. We're in the jungle.
There are hundreds of local militias
and around 20 ethnic armed groups in Burma.
The largest has perhaps 30,000 troops.
Oh, man!
Some are not just fighting the Burmese army, but each other.
It's made the conflict even more deadly.
So noodles and bean paste? Yeah. This is the leaves from the trees.
Just eat them with the food? Yeah, we eat them with the bean paste.
These fighters told me about a clash with a rival rebel army.
Despite infighting between the rebel groups,
the Burmese army remains the common enemy.
We try our best, we are trying to stay as a Shan, as a human.
We are not here to be a slave. Hmm.
As long as there is no political...
Settlement between the Burmese and the Shan,
as long as they still oppress us, bully us,
the fight will continue.
Maybe I will die in the future, on the battle. I don't know.
My children will come up again.
This is how we are going to fight.
It's an idea worth dying for? Mm-hmm.
Certainly worth fighting for. Yes.
I think most people could understand that. Yeah.
I think so. Yeah. HE CHUCKLES
This is pretty extraordinary, actually.
We are inside the infamous Golden Triangle,
we've been out on patrol and are now staying overnight with a guerrilla army in Shan State.
It's been a long day.
I'm looking forward to a comfortable night's sleep in the hammock.
It's a slight contradiction in terms, but I think it'll be all right.
The Burmese leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, has said ending the country's
civil conflicts is her top priority.
The rebel armies are no angels,
but this one and others have signed a ceasefire agreement.
The Burmese military, however, have continued their attacks.
Aung San Suu Kyi can't or won't stop the military
who still control parts of the government.
I was coming to the end of my journey.
I went to meet the rebel leader on the edge of his territory.
So we are now heading up to the front line.
Oh, my God! Look. This is a trench!
Flipping heck.
So there are dozens, then, of Burmese army bases deeper inside
Shan State, out there, across the hills.
Does it feel like they're an enemy occupying your land?
And what happens if the peace negotiations fail?
Looking at the number of guards and soldiers that have to be here when
you're here, because there is presumably, there is always the risk of an attack.
Talking to the Shan people,
it was clear the tactics used to drive out hundreds of thousands of
Rohingya have also been used against other ethnic groups.
As a result this country has been more deeply affected by civil war
than any other in Southeast Asia.
The outlook for Burma is worrying.
Aung San Suu Kyi has failed to speak out against, let alone tackle
the root cause of so many of the problems facing this beautiful land.
The country may have had democratic elections, but clearly there is
still conflict here. Peace has not come to Myanmar yet.
I think what I've learned here has come as a real shock to me,
actually. Is really obvious to me that the biggest problem facing this
country, I think, is the Burmese military.
They are the biggest issue here, but they're also a huge problem for
people in the rest of the country as well,
who have to deal with their power, their corruption, their abuse.
Until the Burmese military are reformed and transformed,
I don't think Burma can ever really truly change.