At a checkpoint outside Panghsang, in the mountains of eastern Myanmar, a teenage girl in an olive-green uniform decorated with distinctive United Wa State Army (UWSA) patches is checking ID cards and passports. No older than 14 and sporting an eye-catching furry hair grip, she looks like she belongs in school rather than in the army. But the AK47 dangling from a nearby hook makes it clear that she has long since left the classroom.
Welcome to Wa State, an unofficial country within a country where children are entrusted with automatic weapons and stand guard over government buildings, as well as man checkpoints and direct traffic. Many are recruited when they are as young as six years old.
In Wa State, which is defended from the rest of Myanmar by the UWSA, few think it strange that child soldiers should play their part. In fact, little about the state, which lies along Myanmar's border with China, can be considered what we might call normal.
Home to 600,000-odd people, it is a lawless region. Part of the notorious Golden Triangle, the source of most of Southeast Asia's illegal narcotics, it is a place of refuge for drug traffickers, people smugglers, gamblers, opportunistic Chinese traders and companies, and anyone who wants to hide from the generals who still run Myanmar.
To the junta, the state is known as 'Special Region 2' (Special Region 1 is Kokang, in northern Shan State), an ethnic enclave it is increasingly determined to bring under its control. But for the Wa people, one of Myanmar's 135 ethnic groups, it is the nation they have been fighting for ever since Burma, as Myanmar was then called, gained its independence from Britain, in 1948. For the past 22 years, an uneasy ceasefire has existed between the 20,000-strong UWSA and the Myanmese army. That has allowed the Wa to establish a de facto country, complete with its own government, flag, banks, tax system and car licence plates.
Wa State's capital, Panghsang, has emerged as Asia's most unlikely boomtown. The gaudy homes of the newly rich sit behind high walls topped with coils of barbed wire, the city's casino is packed 24 hours a day and top-of-the-range pick-up trucks and SUVs imported from Japan via Thailand roar up and down the dusty streets.
'There are more cars than people in Panghsang now,' says one local man who, like most people we speak to here, does not want to reveal his name.
