"COLONEL Saw Min Min Oo is the managing director of Chit Linn Myaing Co Ltd, a company owned by the Kayin Border Guard Force that oversees a growing stable of lucrative businesses. The ethnic Karen armed group’s readiness to partner with shadowy Chinese investors, and to undertake projects with seemingly little regard for Myanmar law, is deeply controversial. Its most audacious venture so far is the vast “new city” project next to the Kayin BGF’s headquarters of Shwe Kokko Myaing in Kayin State’s Myawaddy Township, popularly dubbed as a “Chinatown” because of the largely Chinese financing and workforce. However, Min Min Oo insisted that the profits from these ventures don’t only accrue to the armed group, which is aligned to the Tatmadaw, but are shared with “the residents of our Karen land”. Min Min Oo was a 55-year-old battalion commander in the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army nine years ago when it became a Border Guard Force under Tatmadaw command and he was appointed to run Chit Linn Myaing. The company’s board of directors is made up of officers from the BGF, he said. When Frontier met Min Min Oo briefly in Yangon in October, he was dressed casually in a Karen blue-and-red longyi. He spoke limited Burmese, and a later phone interview with him was done mostly in the S’gaw Karen language. The Kayin BGF, whose supreme commander is Colonel Saw Chit Thu, has about 6,000 troops and was formed in August 2010 with 12 battalions from the DKBA and one battalion from the Haungtharaw-based Karen Peace Front. It is one of several BGFs in borderland areas of Myanmar, which were formed at that time out of ethnic armed factions that had come to ally themselves with the Tatmadaw..."