Feared warriors who once fought for notorious drug warlord Khun Sa have reunited in a 15,000-strong guerilla army to confront the military regime in Rangoon.
The move is expected to lead to an upsurge in the bitter fighting that has already resulted in many scores of civilians being killed in retaliation by the junta.
The Rangoon regime has invited trouble over the past two months by stepping up its campaign of forcing whole villages to move into 'protected' areas at gunpoint in an attempt to clear contested areas of the so-called Golden Triangle of northeast Burma.
'The mood is very, very down and the people are very angry. The attitude is to try to bury the quarrels of the past and face the real problem - the Burmese Army,' said a Shan exile in Chiang Mai with close contacts to the resistance movement.
The new Shan States Army is the name that three fighting groups - mostly made up of Khun Sa's old fighters - have given themselves.
Two of the armies previously signed peace treaties with the junta, indicating that the Burmese Army's ferocious attempts to stamp out all resistance in the Shan state may have backfired.