Justice has finally caught up with one of Myanmar’s notorious Karen strongmen, Saw Chit Thu, head of the Karen National Army (KNA) and widely seen as the mastermind behind the country’s proliferating scam center scourge.

On May 5, the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) finally placed Chit Thu and his two sons, Htoo Eh Moo and Chit Chit, and the KNA on a sanctions list on accusations of running a transnational criminal organization through the scam centers of Shwe Kokko, situated north of the border town of Myawaddy.

The US Treasury announcement said that:

(t)he KNA profits from cyber scam schemes on an industrial scale by leasing land it controls to other organized crime groups, and providing support for human trafficking, smuggling, and the sale of utilities used to provide energy to scam operations… Chit Thu has emerged as one of the central figures in Burma’s scam economy, facilitating transnational crimes in a KNA-controlled zone along the border with Thailand.

What the OFAC designation only mentions in passing is that Chit Thu, up until March 2024, was the commander of the Karen State Border Guard Force (BGF) since 2009, a colonel in the Myanmar army and a long-time “proxy” of the Myanmar military.

In December 2023, Chit Thu, one of his BGF colleagues and a Chinese criminal were sanctioned by the United Kingdom under the Global Human Rights (Sanctions) Regulations 2020, on claims they were:

responsible for, provided support for or obtained benefit from activity that violates the right not to be subjected to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment and the right to be free from slavery, not to be held in servitude or required to perform forced or compulsory labour [connected to Shwe Kokko scam centers.]

In October 2024, the European Union (EU) sanctioned Chit Thu, two of his subordinates and the Chit Linn Myaing Group for alleged:

transnational crime, including online fraud, drug and human trafficking, and is experiencing massive human rights violations, including forced labour and torture (and for being) closely associated with the Tatmadaw (Myanmar Armed Forces), with whom it collaborates, for example by informing the Tatmadaw about opponents of the government and by forcefully recruiting soldiers.

For anyone closely watching the scam center saga over the past several years, Chit Thu’s prominent involvement wasn’t a surprise. The question was why it took these sanctioning entities so long, with all the publicly available evidence of his complicity.

A May 2024 report by Justice for Myanmar (J4M) laid out in exhaustive detail the expansive business empire of Chit Thu and the KNA, with involvement in online scam centers and other enterprises going back to at least 2016 when Chit Thu signed a deal with Chinese criminal She Zhijiang to develop the Yatai New City project in the BGF’s long-time base area of Shwe Kokko.

All of these developments have been extensively documented by Myanmar’s independent media and rights groups over the past decade.

Chit Thu first rose in Myanmar’s eastern borderlands in 1994, when he was ejected from the rebel Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) and joined the Myanmar military-aligned Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA), leading its notorious 999 Special Battalion.

Chit Thu and his troops were engaged in multiple cross-border atrocities, entering Thailand to kill civilians and burn down refugee camps. These crimes were assiduously documented by multiple groups, including the Karen Human Rights Group (KHRG).

Chit Thu’s business empire later reportedly expanded to ya-ba (“crazy medicine”, or methamphetamine), logging, smuggling, including trafficking human beings, especially Myanmar migrant workers, real estate and construction. He also built a massive theme park and resort outside of the Karen state capital Hpa-an, eponymously known as Chit Thu Myaing.

For over two decades, Chit Thu has been a case study in prolonged impunity in an environment where insecurity merges seamlessly with illicit enterprise, collective elite rent-seeking and the “gray area” of multiple antagonists with shifting loyalties in a long-running civil war.

This extended to the “democracy period” of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) from 2016 to 2021, when one of Chit Thu’s companies, Chit Linn Myaing Toyota, became a subcontractor for the China Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC) to assist in building an extension of the Asia Highway through an Asia Development Bank (ADB) loan.

However, Chit Thu’s fortunes became increasingly tenuous following the 2021 coup and the rise of multiple armed groups fighting the State Administration Council (SAC) junta regime. As conflict spreads, his combined military strength and economic riches have been gradually challenged.

He quit the BGF and the Myanmar army, establishing the KNA after vexed negotiations with the military, who wanted Chit Thu to use his forces more aggressively against the KNLA and their multiple anti-military People’s Defense Force (PDF) allies.

However, he was dragged back into negotiations in April 2024 when the KNLA was projected to seize the strategic border town of Myawaddy.

Chit Thu’s involvement in brokering the arrangement that averted the KNLA’s full capture of the town illustrates the crucial, if conflicted, role he has played for many years, negotiating with multiple Karen armed factions, Myanmar military officials and multiple cross-border commercial and security concerns.

But his deep involvement in scam centers was the main cause of the three sanctions listings, as a combination of widespread media scrutiny and intensive Chinese pressure to force some version of a “crackdown” spurred multiple efforts to curtail the fraud operations and “rescue” various nationalities working in Shwe Kokko and elsewhere.

The SAC has claimed to have processed over 10,000 people caught up in the scam trade. In February, the Thai Department of Special Investigation (DSI) requested a court to issue an arrest warrant for Chit Thu, but it is not clear if this has been granted or what effect the OFAC designation could have.

So is this the end of the line for Chit Thu? The lessons of Chit Thu are not just the rise of one corpulent gangster, but the multiple types of border strongmen, entrepreneurs of violence and illicit enterprise with ambiguous political roles that have long thrived in Myanmar.

These actors continued to thrive unimpeded by “reform” and the peace process of 2011-2021, making a mockery of the rule of law.

The Kachin warlord and BGF commander Zhakung Ting Ying saw his fortunes reversed in 2024 when most of his territory along the China border, including lucrative rare earth mines, was seized by the Kachin Independence Army (KIA).

Yord Serk, chairman of the Restoration Council of Shan State (RCSS), is another example of a border strongman, albeit one diminished by his vacillation since the 2021 coup, trying to sit out the civil war and find a way to benefit from the carnage.

As his legitimacy withers amongst many Shan inside Myanmar, and the hundreds of thousands living in Thailand, Yord Serk has to find an accommodation with the SAC and border authorities to find a way to exist.

One suggestion floated amongst observers is for the RCSS to become one variety of BGF or militia, continuing a general tradition of balancing multiple relationships similar to Chit Thu.

The spread of the United Wa State Army (UWSA) over three decades along the Myanmar-Thailand border has been another example of “parallel state” actors gaining power.

From sparking the modern methamphetamine trade in the late 1990s and flooding Thailand with ya-ba, the Wa now have a monopoly of control, either directly or through proxies, of the joint border and extensive interests in casinos, narcotics, smuggling and a range of mining interests.

Gold mining activities along the border have over several months polluted rivers running into Thailand with arsenic, with minimal pushback against the Wa, according to a recent article by Paskorn Jumlongrach in Transborder News.

As welcome as the US sanctions on Chit Thu may be, it is still too early to predict his demise. A survivor with multiple fingers in multiple dirty pies, he could reach eclectic accommodations and deals with multiple actors to ensure his exposure over scams centers is a temporary setback, a kind of gangland market correction.

The pity is that Chit Thu will likely never face full justice for his three-decade crime spree in Karen state, replete with forced labor, land grabbing, narcotics peddling and modern-day slavery in the scam centers.

A greater pity is that he is not the only one in the Myanmar conflict multiverse, and likely not the last to rise from the chaos of war.

David Scott Mathieson is an independent analyst working on conflict, humanitarianism, and human rights in Myanmar