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2 Karen between a rock and
a hard place By Clifford McCoy
contacts have recently occurred,
including invitations to each other's Karen New
Year celebrations.
In part, the struggle
between the KNU and the DKBA is about popular
appeal. To many villagers in central Karen state,
KNU soldiers last visited their areas years ago
and no longer have a direct impact on their daily
lives. Instead, DKBA and Myanmar
army
forces control the area, which has made it almost
impossible for the KNU to extend its influence any
further than its small and narrowing enclaves
along the Thai border.
Conversations and
interviews with villagers from the area make it
clear that while many may prefer the KNU as the
Karen's original representative, they now have
little choice but to support the DKBA.
Church-based and other Karen civil-society
organizations have filled some important social
gaps. While such organizations do not offer much
of a political voice for the people, they do
provide a nationalist one where Karen can still
find ethnic pride.
Any potential
post-conflict political strategy by the KNU will
have to take the DKBA into account. The struggle
for local resonance extends beyond Karen state and
bleeds into the Karen communities in the old
capital Yangon and the Irrawaddy Delta, where the
majority of Myanmar's estimated 6 million to 7
million Karen live. The KNU's fading political
relevance is especially acute among the younger
generation, who view as more important the need to
help their families financially in Myanmar's
failing economy than joining a political or
military organization fighting for a separate
homeland.
Officers of the Karen National
Liberation Army (KNLA), the armed wing of the KNU,
have openly complained of the difficulty finding
new recruits because members of the younger
generation would rather find work in Thailand and
send money home to their families than join the
resistance - where there is no pay and a grave
risk of being injured or killed in combat. It is
estimated that there are more than 600,000 Myanmar
nationals, including many ethnic-minority people,
including Karen, working in Thailand as manual
laborers, farm hands, shop clerks, and domestic
help and in the sex trade.
The new
generation's reluctance to take on the hard life
of a soldier or political activist, as many of its
forebears did, is even more apparent in the
refugee camps along the Thailand-Myanmar border.
In the past few years Western governments,
especially the United States, have increased their
resettlement quotas for Karen refugees, relaxing
the previous rigorous acceptance processes they
used to implement.
After years in
rough-and-tumble refugee camps, fleeing the
Myanmar army in remote jungle areas, or living the
hard and dangerous life of a soldier or political
cadre, many Karen are now seizing the chance to
apply for resettlement in third countries. Relief
workers active along the border, leaders of
community-based organizations, and KNU officials
have all said that most of those who apply and are
accepted for resettlement are those with the most
education and management skills.
Pressure to quit All of these
factors are conspiring to pressure the KNU to
arrive at a ceasefire agreement with the SPDC.
This pressure is mounting from within both the KNU
and the Karen community as well as from external
players, especially the Thai business community
currently active in border areas. The Karen are
understandably wary of the SPDC's motives,
particularly after talks in 1997 and 2004-05 both
broke down amid new Myanmar army offensives.
A January 2004 ceasefire agreement split
the KNU into two camps, and the offensive the
Myanmar army launched in 2006 vindicated the
group's hardliners who still oppose any sort of
negotiations with the SPDC. Yet the army's
sustained offensive and intensifying attacks on
civilians did not deter some senior KNU members,
including Brigadier-General Htain Maung, Colonel
Ner Dah and Pastor Timothy, from pursuing
negotiations for personal economic concessions.
During talks with the SPDC in the new
capital Naypyidaw in late January this year, the
breakaway group managed to arrange a separate
peace for areas around Karen state's Taw Kaw Ko
village and Htain Maung's former headquarters on
the border with Thailand north of the Myanmar town
of Myawaddy.
The group was granted
permission to farm the land around Taw Kaw Ko
village, but it is not yet clear what other
economic concessions they may have been granted
for agreeing to a deal. It has become a common, if
not controversial, practice for insurgent groups
to be granted autonomous business concessions by
the SPDC in exchange for entering into ceasefire
agreements.
Those deals, however, don't
always have the desired effect. On February 11, a
ceremony was held in Taw Kaw Ko to formalize the
small group's defection. In the following weeks,
many of the 450 or so soldiers from Htain Maung's
7th Brigade who defected returned to KNU lines.
That leaves Htain Maung with only a few soldiers
at Taw Kaw Ko village and his former headquarters
on the Thailand-Myanmar border.
The split
- one of six inside the KNU since 1994 - does not
represent a clear and present danger to the
insurgent group's continuity. However, it does
highlight serious cracks in the KNU's policy and
indicates rising internal dissent. In many ways,
the death of Saw Bo Mya marked an important
turning point.
While he was alive,
decisions within the KNU were often divided along
factional lines between supporters of one clique
that had grown up around him and another of
younger, more progressive officers. There was hope
among some KNU and KNLA officers that Saw Bo Mya's
death would clear the way for a more streamlined
decision-making process inside the organization.
During visits to the various offices of
the KNU, whether military, political or in
civil-society-related fields such as education,
many of these young people are just as dedicated
to the struggle for a Karen homeland as their
forebears.
But more progressive leadership
and efficient administration supported by able
community organizations will likely not be enough
to turn back a surging SPDC. And as the territory
the KNU controls shrinks, so too does its
negotiating power to broker an equitable peace
deal for its long-beleaguered people.
Clifford McCoy is a Chiang
Mai-based journalist.
(Copyright 2007
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