LAIZA - Helicopter gunships
hover in the sky above a battlefield. The constant
sound of explosions and gunfire pierce the night
for an estimated 100,000 refugees and internally
displaced people. Military hospitals are full of
wounded government soldiers, while bridges,
communication lines and other crucial
infrastructure lie in war-torn ruins.
The
images and sounds on the ground in Myanmar's
northern Kachin State shatter the impression of
peace, reconciliation and a steady march towards
democracy that President Thein Sein's government
has bid to convey to the outside world. In
reality, the situation in this remote corner of
one of Asia's historically most troubled nations
is depressingly normal.
Along the dirt
road that snakes through the forests and over the
mountains to Laiza, the
headquarters of the rebel Kachin Independence Army
(KIA), civilians who have fled the fighting eke
out a living by growing whatever they can and from
the meager provisions provided by the rebels. They
have been largely ignored by the international aid
community, including United Nations agencies that
to date have made only symbolic gestures towards
the unfolding humanitarian crisis.
The KIA
are clearly outnumbered and out-gunned by the
government's forces, but they are operating in an
environment where the mountainous terrain and
sympathetic local population work to their
advantage. Casualties on the government's side,
meanwhile, are believed to have been extremely
heavy since hostilities broke out in June last
year. In September this year, a KIA officer,
quoted by a local Kachin news group, urged the
government to come clean about government losses
in Kachin State war zones. The truth about the
loss of life, he argued, would shock the general
public.
In the conflict's initial
phases, the Myanmar army deployed
heavily armed but poorly trained infantry forces against
the KIA, resulting in a virtual slaughter
on the battlefield. Some of the young government foot
soldiers, many of whom have since deserted and
are now in Laiza, were street children who had
been rounded up in the old capital of Yangon, given
some basic training and dispatched to Kachin State
to fight, according to human rights workers who
have interviewed deserters from the government's
army.
The Myanmar army was once a poorly
equipped but battle-hardened light infantry force
that was constantly on the move in operations
against ethnic as well as communist insurgents.
Since the Communist Party of Burma (CPB) - then
the country's largest and most powerful rebel army
- collapsed and splintered into four different
ethnic forces that entered into ceasefire
agreements with the government in 1989, there has
been little action in most of Myanmar's frontier
areas.
With the collapse of the CPB, many
other rebel armies that depended on the communists
for the supply of arms and ammunition also made
peace with the government. They included the KIA,
which signed a ceasefire agreement with the
government on February 24, 1994. All of the dozen
or so other agreements made between the government
and rebel groups were made verbally rather than in
writing.
The Kachins insisted on having
their ceasefire in writing in hope that it would
be more legally binding. However, the then ruling
military junta said at the time that their
government was only temporary and that the KIA
would have to wait for an elected government to
assume power before any talks about political
issues, including their demand for local autonomy,
could be held.
The Kachins waited for 17
years, but after an election was held in November
2010 no such talks on political issues were
forthcoming. Instead, on June 9, 2011, government
forces broke the ceasefire and attacked KIA
positions along the Taping river east of Bhamo.
"Several of out liaison officers, whose
duty had been to oversee the ceasefire and
maintain contacts with the government, were also
arrested. The one in Mohnyin town was badly
tortured and died in hospital shortly afterwards,"
said Lazing Ji No, a senior officer in the KIA's
political wing, the Kachin Independence
Organization (KIO).
Several rounds of
peace talks between the Myanmar government and the
KIO have been held since, but with no resolution
in sight. "They just want to get us under their
control. Our aim, and the aim of all the
nationalities in the country, is to negotiate to
get our rights," said KIO chairman Zawng Hra in an
interview with Asia Times Online at his Laiza
headquarters.
Clearly, peace means
different things to the government and the ethnic
rebels. The former want the latter to accept the
2008 non-federal constitution and convert their
armed forces into so-called "Border Guard Forces"
under the command of the Myanmar Army. Peace for
the Kachins, on the other hand, means a new, or at
least fundamentally amended, constitution that
gives ethnic states a large degree of autonomy.
These two seemingly
incompatible interpretations of peace are
the reason why foreign interlocutors attempting to
help broker a peace settlement have so
far been unsuccessful. By avoiding discussions of political
issues and only emphasizing ceasefires, disarmament and
economic development, those interlocutors -
including a "Peace Support Initiative" sponsored
by the Norwegian government and in
a separate initiative the Switzerland-based
Center for Humanitarian Dialog - are essentially
promoting the government's view, according to
several people Asia Times Online spoke with in
Laiza and elsewhere.
Other ethnic groups
and prominent political players share the KIO's
view. In an interview in Yangon in September, Hkun
Htun Oo, chairperson of the Shan Nationalities
League for Democracy, a legal political party,
said that, "We totally reject the 2008
constitution." Pro-democracy icon and opposition
parliamentarian Aung San Suu Kyi told Asia Times
Online in a recent interview in the new capital
Naypyidaw that "democracy cannot be substituted by
economic development".
Intensified
conflict With such divergent, locked-in
positions, it is hardly surprising that the war in
Kachin State is intensifying. According to several
diplomatic sources, the government is set to
launch a major offensive to try to capture Laiza
and other KIO/KIA strongholds.
Perhaps
fearing more heavy casualties in face-to-face
combat, government forces have recently resorted
to the extensive use of artillery, including 105mm
howitzers, 120mm mortars and Russian-made Mi-35
helicopters, the export version of the Mi-24 Hind
helicopter gunship that was used extensively in
the Afghan war in the 1980s. Such helicopter
gunships have also been used to attack KIA forces
in the area west of Laiza and near the Pangva area
northeast of the state capital, Myitkyina.
In the Hpakan area in western Kachin
State, the government has used 84mm Carl Gustaf
rocket launchers manufactured in Sweden to attack
rebel positions. The revelation, first reported by
this correspondent earlier this month, has
prompted a Swedish government investigation into
how the weapons ended up in Myanmar despite a
European Union embargo on arms sales to the
country.
According to a statement made by
trade minister Ewa Bjorling in the Swedish
parliament on December 13, the weapons in question
were supplied to the Myanmar army by India despite
an agreement between Stockholm and New Delhi that
the guns could not be transferred to a third
country. The Myanmar government has tried to dodge
the issue by claiming in a report published in the
Myanmar-language weekly The Voice on December 17
that the guns were imported to Myanmar from Sweden
"before the EU arms embargo came into force".
While Myanmar did buy a quantity of Carl
Gustaf rocket launchers from Sweden in 1982, they
were a much older model. The one that was captured
by the KIA in October this year was the most
recent model of the gun, and according to the
serial number was part of a larger shipment of
arms sold to the Indian government in 2003,
according to a spokeswoman for Sweden's Agency for
Non-Proliferation and Export Controls (ISP).
According to informed local sources in
Myanmar, the Swedish weapons were given to the
Myanmar army to be used against insurgents from
the northeastern Indian states of Assam and
Manipur who maintain bases across the border in
northwestern Myanmar. But instead of attacking
those rebel camps used to launch cross-border
raids into India against Indian government
positions, the Myanmar army deployed the weapons
against the KIA.
The controversy has
internationalized the Kachin war in an
unprecedented way and comes significantly at a
time when many Western countries have largely
turned a blind eye to the conflict in pursuit of
engagement policies and commercial opportunities
with Thein Sein's quasi-civilian government.
According to knowledgeable sources, the arms
embargo issue will soon be raised in the European
Parliament, a move that could lead to a more
critical diplomatic approach to recent
developments in Myanmar.
Even so, it is
doubtful that the Myanmar government will halt its
offensive against the KIA or engage any time soon
in meaningful peace talks. One major problem is
that the government's chief negotiator, minister
in the prime minister's office Aung Min - the
darling of the Norwegian government and other
foreign interlocutors - has no mandate to
negotiate political issues with the KIO.
"Aung Min has no political mandate," said
KIO chairman Zawng Hra. "So far, he has always
avoided talking about political issues. His duty
is only to present and follow his government's
policies."
Moreover, it is not clear that
even Thein Sein has the power to negotiate with
the Kachin. His calls upon the army to stop
fighting have fallen on deaf ears on at least two
occasions since hostilities broke out last year.
That has raised questions about whether Thein Sein
has control of the military, which appear to
answer only to Commander-in-Chief Gen Min Aung
Hlaing. The ongoing war in Kachin State is thus a
grim reminder that when it comes to crucial issues
of national security, Myanmar remains firmly under
military rule.
Bertil Lintner is
a former correspondent with the Far Eastern
Economic Review and author of several books on
Burma/Myanmar, including Burma in Revolt:
Opium and Insurgency Since 1948 (published in
1994, 1999 and 2003), Land of Jade: A Journey
from India through Northern Burma to China,
and The Kachin: Lords of Burma's Northern
Frontier. He is currently a writer with Asia
Pacific Media Services.
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