Page 2 of
2 Myanmar's endless ethnic
quagmire By Bertil
Lintner
None of the ceasefire agreements
which the government has concluded with more than
20 big and small rebel groups since 1989 includes
any political concessions by the central
government. Rebels have in some instances been
granted unofficial permission to retain control
over their respective areas - and been encouraged
to engage in any kind of business to sustain
themselves. The government's strategy seems to
have hoped rebel groups would be more interested
in making money than pressing demands for
constitutional reform and political autonomy. That
strategy is obviously not working, as the flare-up
of hostilities in the northern Kachin State shows.
On the other hand efforts by the various
ethnic resistance forces to form a united front -
or even to devise a common political platform -
have also failed miserably. Most neutral observers
familiar with Myanmar's ethnic issues would argue
that the
conflict is not only
between the Bama and other nationalities but also
between different minority ethnic groups.
For instance, tensions have existed for
centuries between the Kachin and the Shan, between
the Shan and the Karen. A smaller group, the Pa-O,
even took up arms in the early 1950s to fight
against local Shan princes. In later years, Shan
and Kachin rebels fought turf wars for control of
areas in the country's northeast which have
sizable Kachin populations but belong to Shan
State. Even more recently, the Shan and Wa armies
have fought bloody battles for control of areas
adjacent to Thailand's border.
Ethnic
divisions It is also clear that the
different backgrounds of Myanmar's multitude of
ethnic groups, many with armed insurgent wings,
will make it difficult to achieve a lasting
solution to the problem. The insurgency among the
Karen, who number at least 3.5 million and live in
the Irrawaddy delta southwest of the old capital
Yangon and in hills near the Thai border, is one
of the longest lasting in the world. Many of them
are Christian, mainly Baptist, and they have
dominated most Karen rebel movements for more then
six decades. The majority of the Karen, however,
are actually Buddhist and fierce battles have been
fought between the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army
and the forces of the Christian-led Karen National
Union.
The Shan are Buddhist and related
to the Thais and the Laos, and traditionally have
been ruled by feudal princes called saohpa, or
"Lords of the Sky." They took up arms when the
Panglong Agreement's 10-year-trial period was up
in 1958 and it was clear that they would not be
allowed to exercise their then constitutional
right to secede from the union. The Kachin in the
far north are almost entirely Christian, also
mainly Baptist. Their rebellion broke out in 1961
when the then U Nu government tried to make
Buddhism the state religion and at the same time
had negotiated a border agreement with China which
many Kachins disapproved. Shortly after the war
broke out, Kachins, whose guerrilla warfare skills
were recognized and utilized by Britain and the
United States during the Japanese occupation in
the 1940s, quickly seized control of most of their
rugged hill country between China and India. The
government has consistently failed to dislodge the
Kachin from the geographical strongholds they
established in the 1960s.
The strongest
and most powerful of Myanmar's ethnic armies, the
drug-trafficking United Wa State Army (UWSA), has
recently received scant attention. Its more than
30,000 men and women in arms are equipped with
sophisticated weaponry obtained mainly in China,
including modern automatic rifles, heavy
machine-guns, 120mm mortars, and even
man-portable, surface-to-air anti-aircraft
missiles. The UWSA was born out of a mutiny among
the Wa hilltribe rank-and-file of the CPB in 1989
where they drove the old, orthodox communist and
mainly Bama leaders into exile in China. The
CPB subsequently crumbled and was later divided
into four regional ethnic armies of which the UWSA
was the strongest. Currently the UWSA controls a
huge area adjacent to the Chinese border, enclaves
along the Thai border in the south, and most of
the lucrative production areas of narcotics,
opium, heroin and methamphetamines in the Myanmar
sector of the so-called Golden Triangle. The Wa
have never been controlled by any central
government in Myanmar. They were headhunters well
into modern times and few outsiders entered the
area before it was taken over by the insurgent CPB
in the early 1970s. Since the 1989 mutiny, the
UWSA has independently administered the areas it
controls.
The pre-2010 elected government
requested that all of those ethnic armies convert
themselves into "Border Guard Forces" under
command of the Myanmar Army. That proposal,
however, had few takers; only some of the smallest
former rebel groups agreed. For now, the plan
seems to have been put on ice but it is unclear
how the government aims to tackle the issue over
the medium term. At the same time, there has been
no deviation from the previous ceasefire strategy:
stop fighting, engage in business, and forget any
visions of a federal Myanmar. According to sources
familiar with recent government-ethnic group
negotiations, ethnic leaders have been told that
"a discussion about federalism is not even on the
table."
On the other hand, there are few
countries in the world that have a federal system
based on ethnicity or along linguistic lines.
India, the former Soviet Union and the former
Yugoslavia are a few examples and show the perils
ahead for such a potential model in Myanmar. India
has survived and despite all the problems that
country faces is perhaps the best model for
Myanmar to adopt. The United States has
geographical entities as member states of a union,
Germany is based on ancient kingdoms and
principalities, and even multinational Malaysia
has a federal system based not on ethnicity -
there are no Malay, Chinese and Indian states
there - but on the old Malay sultanates.
Whichever model Myanmar aims to follow, it
cannot be done unless significant clauses in the
present constitution are amended. Most of these,
including those concerning state structure and
ultimate military control over the decision-making
process, cannot be considered without the approval
of at least 75% of all parliamentarians in both
the Upper and Lower Houses and would need to be
enshrined through a national referendum. In
practice, this makes any fundamental
constitutional reform impossible.
Scrapping the 2008 constitution and
drafting a new one based on some kind of federal
concept is likely the only viable way ahead to
resolving Myanmar's unresolved ethnic issue.
Judging from the government's response to ethnic
demands, that isn't likely to happen any time
soon. Whatever the outcome of the present mass
movement and the likelihood of some token NLD
representation in parliament after the April 1
by-elections, Myanmar's ethnic quagmire will
endure and the government's half-hearted calls for
national reconciliation will remain unfulfilled.
Bertil Lintner is a former
correspondent with the Far Eastern Economic Review
and author of several books on Burma/Myanmar,
including Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma's Struggle
for Democracy (Published in 2011). He is currently
a writer with Asia-Pacific Media Services.
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