This is the question I can no longer escape, having spent twenty years with the people who live and shape this history.
It burst out during a conversation with David Eubank, founder of the Free Burma Rangers, a veteran humanitarian leader known for documenting war and rescuing civilians across Myanmar's frontlines.
A committed Christian and pastor himself, Eubank has witnessed some of the country's darkest moments firsthand.
He is a man of God. So I asked him my honest question.
"Does God really exist? If he does, how can he allow these things to happen to Myanmar and its people?"
For a moment, Eubank struggled to answer. Tears filled his eyes.
Such a question sounds unfair to him. Eubank and his family have spent more than thirty years crossing Myanmar’s conflict zones, often on foot and horseback, to reach people in need. Who am I to trouble him with such a question? A question I wasn't even sure I had ever wanted the answer to.
Following a 2021 coup d'état, which has since provoked widespread resistance, at least 100,000 people have died in battle up to July 2026. Displacement has reached 5.2 million people, and one-third of the population is experiencing extreme food insecurity.
But make no mistake: the violence in Myanmar did not begin with the coup. It has lasted—well, on and off—for more than seven decades since independence. The human losses and destruction are too vast to document fully.
Year after year. I am privileged to be among the few Thai journalists who have reached Myanmar's frontline—the frontline of armed battle and the frontline of humanity, crushed under forms of oppression most of us can barely imagine.
I have met men who carried firearms for much of their lives. But some of the conversations I recall most vividly weren't about wars, territory, or military strategy. They were what these men might have been if there had been no war.
Brigadier Maran Zau Tawng, the second-in-command of the Kachin Independence Army, told me he wanted to be a teacher. “I believe in the strength of education." He was studying physics at university when the conflict pulled him from class.
And all those years on the battlefield, something of the man who aspired to be a teacher remained. He is calm, unassuming, and soft-spoken. Without that camouflage suit, he could be any teacher you meet at a parent-teacher meeting.
I remember a conversation with Lieutenant Colonel Naing Maung Zaw, spokesperson for the Karen National Army (KNA), a controversial armed force that has worked closely with the Myanmar military.
Although he commands Karen fighters. Naing Maung Zaw is Mon.
As a young man, he left Mon state to join the Karen National Union (KNU), the largest non-state armed organization in the country at that time. He chose not to join any forces in his own state but instead joined the one he believed was strong enough to make a change.
A young Mon leaves home thinking armed resistance can alter the country; decades and factional ruptures later, he’s a member of an armed organization with more questions about scam compounds, illicit businesses and human trafficking than about freeing the people.
Then my conversation with Saw Nimrod, a KNU key member who remains unwaveringly insistent on building peace in a country where war has lasted for generations and millions have fled, many having given up hope that peace will ever come.
Nimrod has left behind the stable life and his children in Canada to return and work on peacebuilding for the KNU.
Working as a peacebuilder within an armed organization? I asked.
“I believe this is the best option. This organization has been fighting for us for over 70 years. I believe and trust that they will lead us to peace. " Nimrod held firmly to his belief that he would see his country at peace within his lifetime. He is in his mid-forties. There is time for him.
On the other side of the Karen political divide, Gen. Nerdah Mya, a leader of KTLA, another Karen armed group at odds with the KNU, made headlines early this year declaring independence. His force has been a KNU splinter since 2022, following his dismissal from a leadership position.
I visited his camp and found that many of his soldiers were young, easily distracted by their phones, but clearly respectful of their general. The youth's sense of humor led them to nickname the administration building under construction the “White House.”
Nerdah insisted that within two years, I could see a functioning administration under his new government.
One believes the old movement can eventually deliver peace.
The other believes the old political project has failed and promises a new state.
Both still believe.
The memory of sitting face-to-face and listening to their stories is vivid. But it is the faces of ordinary people—bearing the war's heaviest burden—that linger longest.
I think of Paw Powa. Her father named her after the white blossom of Kawthoolei. The promised land that so many Karens dream of. He hoped his little girl would one day return to the land where the white flower would bloom.
At 81, Paw Powa passed away quietly in Thailand. Never set foot on the land her father dreamed of for her.
He, too, never returned.
I also remember a baby girl I recently carried in Northern Karen State, who was born in a cave. Her parents had fled Phaphun, their ancestral home, and have lived in the cave for three years. Airstrikes made even makeshift jungle shelter unsafe.
She was born in the dark cave, and they named her "the golden light of dawn."
That took me back to a five-year-old boy who was born in the internally displaced persons (IDP) camp in Kachin State.
He quickly became my friend when he saw the photos I had just taken of him appear on my phone screen. He was so amazed that he followed me everywhere. I then asked him to draw his "home" for me on a piece of paper. He shyly handed me a drawing of a triangular tent.
For him, life had always meant plastic tents. He didn’t know what a “door” or a “window” looked like; he had never seen anything resembling what we call a “house” or “home.”
In several reports that follow, I called children like him the “tent generation."
Now there is the cave generation. Imagine the kind of house she might draw one day.
Each memory carries a different story of survival. Some chose revolution or resistance, believing they were fighting for protection, peace, or political survival. Others had no such choice. They were trying in every way, just to survive.
A man can sincerely believe his weapons protect civilians while other people believe those same weapons endanger them.
After twenty years, Myanmar has shown me people capable of holding apparently irreconcilable things inside themselves—violence and tenderness, conviction and doubt, weapons and dreams of peace.
As a journalist, I feel responsible for exploring the human and moral sides of Myanmar's crisis through the eyes of those who have lived it and for keeping asking a question shared by many Myanmar people today: after everything that has happened, how do people continue believing—in God, in humanity, or in a better future?
What makes Eubank continue to believe when Myanmar has given him so little reason to?
I witnessed him kneel on the dusty ground and pray before leading ten medics into the darkness toward a battle zone with only two bulletproof vests among them.
I think I know.
