LAIZA, Myanmar — Water-buffalo dung dots the fairways, girl caddies in flip-flops lug the golf bags and firefights with the Burmese Army have broken out a half-hour’s drive away.
There is also a camp of 5,000 displaced people around a bend in the road.
A war is under way in Kachin State, but the Laiza Golf Club is unfazed, a reflection, perhaps, of the clientele.
Senior officers of the Kachin Independence Army, the guerrilla force trying to defend its mountainous territory in northern Myanmar against government troops, show up here wearing polo shirts and carrying Chinese-made golf clubs. The dirt parking lot is crowded on weekends with sport utility vehicles driven by generals.
“Golf clears the mind for officers to make decisions,” said Col. Maran Zaw Tawng, 45, secretary of the club, after teeing off at the fourth hole, a 392-yard par 4.
The six-hole golf course may be among the world’s unlikeliest, but it is open to the public, even in wartime. Anyone can play a round for a dollar, though most golfers here are military men or civilian officials in the government, like the two who were playing with the colonel and a major on a recent morning.
Playing golf in war zones is not unique to the Kachin. During the Iraq war, American soldiers stationed at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad whacked golf balls off the roof. But the Laiza course sits in a particularly perilous spot, on the Myanmar-China border, in a town coveted by the Burmese Army. To say the war has not affected the game would be a lie. Some of the Kachin officers play only once a week, compared with three times a week or even daily before. And the Kachin generals can no longer play with their Burmese counterparts, as they did when the Burmese officers traveled to Laiza for talks during peacetime.
“We would beat them, of course,” said Brig. Gen. Sumlut Gun Maw, 49, deputy chief of staff of the Kachin army and founder of the golf club.
A 17-year cease-fire with Myanmar ended in June, and the military is now pushing the Kachin deeper into the hills. About 70,000 villagers have fled. The Kachin army still holds Laiza, the capital of the Kachin autonomous region, where the generals have established a command center on a hotel’s fourth floor. So despite mortar shelling elsewhere, golf goes on.
General Gun Maw got the idea for building a golf course here, on the banks of a river that forms the border, after he traveled to Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, for a national conference in 2004 to discuss reconciliation with the Myanmar government. A handful golfed for the first time at the invitation of Burmese officials.
“Instead of getting real political results, we learned to play golf,” said a Kachin spokesman, Kumhtat La Nan, 46, who also attended the conference.
Golf has a history in Myanmar, formerly Burma. In cities and large towns, it is common to find courses where the elite play. Yangon has a 36-hole course, and in the Burmese-controlled half of Kachin State there are courses in the town of Bhamo and the state capital, Myitkyina.
The course at Laiza was designed by Nay Min, a prominent Indian Burmese golfer living in Myitkyina. A village once stood on the site, erased in 1991 by floods and landslides. A white concrete memorial to the victims stands at the fifth hole.
Construction of the course began in 2006 and took a year. The longest hole is a 645-yard par 5. There are 15 sand traps, and a bad slice could easily send a drive irretrievably into a banana plantation.
The club is financed and run by the Kachin Independence Organization, the political wing of the army. It employs six greenskeepers, a security guard and a man who maintains the machinery. At the clubhouse, a wooden roof covers a dirt patch with a wooden picnic table and benches where players sip cans of beer.
The Kachin generally hold four tournaments a year here, usually during holidays. Col. Maran Zaw Tawng, the club secretary, pointed to a white board with names and numbers beneath the clubhouse roof with statistics from the last tournament, on Jan. 1: longest drive, 310 yards; most birdies, two; most holes at or under par, 11.
