To appease Burma’s generals – who would probably swap their star-spangled epaulettes for a rebel-free Shan state – the Thai government recently ordered its army to expel the SSA from its Loi Tai Laeng HQ. That hasn’t happened and, despite public pronouncements to the contrary, probably won’t. Operating deep inside Burma, the SSA shares vital intelligence with the Thais on the movements of Burmese troops and Thailand’s true foes, drug-smugglers, alike.With another anti-government rebel group, the Karen National Union, currently in historic ceasefire talks with the Burmese regime, pressure on the SSA to sit round the negotiating table with their sworn Burmese enemies is increasing. But the rebels, who are staunch supporters of Burma’s pro-democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, have so far shown little interest in a ceasefire. Until it does, the SSA will lurk in the mist, a ghostly army for a haunted people.Andrew Marshall is the author of a book about football in Burma called ‘The Trouser People’, published by Penguin, priced £12. Two of the world’s great nuclear-armed rivals met in open conflict yesterday and hurled everything they had at each other.

Happily, the projectiles were no more harmful than cricket balls, and the opening game of the first full Test tour for 14 years between nations that have faced each other on genuine battlefields three times was a joyous, trouble-free occasion. A home defeat meant huge disappointment for the local crowds, but not, happily, a soured atmosphere.Thus has begun the first full-scale series between the countries since 1989, when the Soviet Union still existed and Benazir Bhutto was Prime Minister in Islamabad. In the intervening years, querulous disputes have marked their relationship, and so the morning began with security arrangements unprecedented at a sporting occasion. More than 6,500 policemen and paramilitary commandos cordoned the team hotel and the stadium, and the six-mile route on which the teams travelled to the ground were lined with armed officers as police helicopters buzzed overhead. Once inside the stadium, the Indian team were escorted to the pavilion by an armoured vehicle. The first pitch inspection was carried out not by the umpires, but by sniffer dogs and their handlers.But once the match had begun – to a great roar from the crowd – it was the sport, and the desire of ordinary Indians and Pakistanis to share something other than military tension, that took over. The Shan rebels have been fighting a losing battle against the Burmese junta ever since.

When not launching guerrilla attacks behind enemy lines, the SSA sticks close to the relative security of the border with Thailand. The Thais are ethnic cousins of the Shan – the word itself is a corruption of “Siam”, the old name for Thailand – but the two have an uneasy relationship.Unlike other ethnic groups fleeing persecution in Burma, the Shan who cross the border are not granted refugee status, and easily fall prey to disease and human traffickers. But if the British Empire could be compared to a rambling old house, as one colonial judge once wrote, then these Shan principalities were, “the imperial attic… The Burmese military launched a coup 14 years later, and Burma – then a fledgling democracy tipped to become one of Asia’s richest nations – began its descent into poverty and fear. Not one Englishman in 10,000 has ever heard of them.” The same could be said today.Burma won its independence in 1948. The wealthier ones took many wives, sent their children to English schools, and ruled with an opulence which recalled the maharajas of India. For years this uncharted territory was administered by a diminutive Scotsman called Sir George Scott, who spoke Shan and many other languages, and had the distinction of first introducing football to what is today a soccer-mad nation.

After 1886, when all Burma came under British control, the chieftains – known as saopha, or “lords of the skies” – were granted semi-autonomy. The upshot of all this is that many young Shan do not understand their mother tongue.And yet the Shan have always been a proud and independent-minded people, their rugged homeland run for centuries by dozens of feuding chieftains. Meanwhile, there has been a similarly ferocious assault on Shan culture. The Burmese government has razed historic Shan buildings, destroyed signs bearing village names in Shan, and outlawed books and school lessons in the Shan language. This is like evacuating a city the size of Belfast, or depopulating an area almost as large as Wales.