MYITKYINA - Armed conflict is
not new to Myanmar. Images of internally displaced
persons (IDPs) flocking to makeshift shelters and
camps after the Myanmar Army has burned down their
homes and villages have long been familiar in the
traditionally military-run country.
However, President Thein Sein's
quasi-civilian government's recent use of fighter
planes and helicopter gunships, including
Russian-made Mi-35s, sometimes referred to as
"flying tanks", to fire on the positions of ethnic
political resistance forces is believed to be
unprecedented.
Thein Sein's drive to
achieve "peace and tranquillity" was also part of
the state's discourse under the previous ruling
military junta. However, his political reforms
have recently transformed Myanmar from pariah to
darling of the West, despite the ongoing and
intensifying conflict in
Kachin State. In the Myanmar military vernacular,
"peace" in Kachin State means that the Kachin must
surrender and subjugate their long-held demands
for political dialogue, autonomy and rights.
Months after the collapse of the
government's 17-year long ceasefire with the
Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), Thein Sein
said in a statement at an Association of Southeast
Asian Nations summit in Bali, Indonesia, that the
Myanmar Army could annihilate organizations like
the KIO and its armed wing, the Kachin
Independence Army (KIA), "within a day".
A
year later, that tough-talking prophecy has not
been realized. Many Kachins in the state capital
Myitkyina note with pride that the Myanmar Army
has failed to eradicate the KIA despite the recent
ramped up bombardments. Heavy casualties and an
apparent lack of motivation among Myanmar Army
soldiers confronting more driven Kachin guerrillas
could explain the government's recent move to use
fighter planes and helicopter gunships in its
pursuit of "peace and tranquillity".
Security and survival are key issues for
all stakeholders in the Kachin conflict. However,
there is a clash in perspectives on how these
should be achieved. On one side, the government
wants to secure and control its border areas as a
basic condition for state sovereignty. The
government may also view trade with neighboring
China, including the extraction and export of rich
natural resources such as jade, gold, timber and
hydropower, as vital for its economic and
political survival.
The KIO/KIA - founded
in 1961 with the objective of establishing
independence from the central government, a
political aspiration later downgraded to a demand
for autonomy in a federal setting - has a
competing vision. The KIO clearly articulated its
proposals concerning the distribution of
legislative power between the center and
peripheral regions and federal principles in 2004
and 2007 during the government-established
National Convention tasked with drafting the
country's present constitution.
The state
constitution drafting committee not only refused
to discuss the KIO's 2007 motion, known as the
"19-point Proposal", but threatened to break the
government's ceasefire agreement with the KIO/KIA,
declaring that the latter "can be pushed back to
the mountain", as the Commander of the Northern
Regional Command reportedly said at the time. As
part of the central government's own vision for
security and a political solution to the Kachin
conflict, the KIO (as with all other armed
ceasefire groups) were ordered to transform into
Border Guard Force (BGF) units under the command
of the Myanmar Armed Forces. This plan failed,
however, as many ceasefire groups with demands for
political autonomy, including the KIO, refused to
enter the program.
The government
responded with political retribution. During the
military-dominated general elections held in 2010,
the potentially popular Kachin State Progressive
Party, established by a former KIO vice chairman,
was not allowed to register due to its perceived
KIO connections. Voting was cancelled outright in
vast areas of Kachin State during the 2012
by-elections for what the government deemed
"security concerns".
Home-grown
security To the contrary, it has been the
security provided by the KIO/KIA in its controlled
territories that has promoted grassroots
development, including growing access to
international communications via Chinese mobile
phones and the Internet, the emergence of
non-governmental organizations active in education
and environmental issues and the empowerment of
local communities, and education in the Kachin
language.
The KIO-controlled town of Laiza
has flourished recently from the benefits of
border trade, seen in the development of modern
hotels, 24-hour electricity without blackouts, the
emergence of a local TV station, and other
benefits unthinkable in the rest of the
underdeveloped Kachin state.
At the same
time, many locals believed that the KIO lost much
of its past relevance and integrity during the
ceasefire period due to some of its leaders'
private business ventures, including rampant
resource extraction for trade with China. The KIO
has, nevertheless, worked hard to reconstruct
itself as a legitimate political entity
representing popular demands for an eventual
political dialogue with the Myanmar government.
For now, many Kachins are looking to the
KIO for basic protection from the government's
onslaught. "Ceasefire does not mean peace," says
Brang Seng, a pastor and schoolteacher who has
worked for years in KIO-controlled areas and who
now lives in Myitkyina. "The government does not
want peace, they want ceasefire."
Brang
Seng, one of the KIO's earlier critics due to his
concerns about a lack of transparency, continued
militarization, and leaders' private business
interests, now says he looks to the group to
safeguard Kachin rights and interests.
What the Kachin witnessed during the
1994-2011 ceasefire period in the government
controlled areas in Kachin State has also
contributed to this shift in sentiment. Myanmar
army-led natural resource extraction and land
appropriation for various military and private
agribusiness ventures resulted in a doubling of
Myanmar Army battalions in the area to protect and
enforce their investments.
Environmental
destruction from mining and logging is now beyond
repair in many areas and is still ongoing. The
state's cultural, language and religious policies,
all of which promote the majority Burmans'
Buddhist way of life, are widely perceived to
discriminate against the Kachins. The government's
highly touted reforms, including a loosening of
press censorship and move towards parliamentary
democracy, have had little relevance in Kachin
State.
"There is no change between now
when there is the [civilian] State Assembly and
before when Kachin state was under the [military]
Northern Command," says a retired former Kachin
government worker who requested anonymity due to
fears of reprisal.
Fierce fighting,
meanwhile, has caused a rise in the number of
internal refugees, with some estimates now as high
as 100,000. Physicians for Human Rights, an
international NGO, has recently called the
situation a humanitarian crisis. Photos and videos
of shot or wounded civilians, including pregnant
women, schoolteachers, church leaders, and
uprooted children in makeshift IDP camps under the
KIO/KIA's protection, have spread over the
Internet and social media like Facebook, YouTube
and independent blogs and are believed to have
played a role in mobilizing the Kachin.
"It's not a conflict between the KIO and
the Myanmar Army but a war against the Kachin,"
said a young Kachin man studying for a degree at a
Bangkok-based university. He says he is torn on
whether to join the KIA to fight or continue his
studies so that he may contribute to Kachin
State's development after graduation.
Raising money to support IDPs has united
Kachin all over the world. Fund-raisers range from
young Kachin artists selling postcards and
T-shirts in Myanmar's former capital, Yangon, to a
Kachin martial arts star based in the United
States, Aung La Nsang, who has donated some of his
prize money to the cause. However, KIO relief
agencies in charge of the refugee camps say that
the funds raised so far are not enough to handle
the scale and scope of the crisis.
Shifting priorities Nonetheless,
the government's claim of pursuing "peace" through
war has resonated with various Western interest
groups eager to see Myanmar open for business and
turn away from China. The international community
has issued public statements condemning the
violence but have also called on the Kachin to
enter a political process that is rigged against
them.
Calls for an end to fighting and for
a start of a political dialogue in Kachin State
made by United Nations secretary general Ban
Ki-moon and US President Barack Obama have thus
missed the mark. Their perspective disregards the
KIO's sovereignty and legitimacy, and reduces its
actions to being disruptive, if not illegal. This
internationally endorsed view allows government
officials to reject unfavorable information or
news coming from the frontlines, casting off
reports of soldier abuses and civilian casualties
as unreliable and falsified by the KIO/KIA or
other "biased" pro-Kachin sources.
By
seeming to side with the government's position on
the conflict, the international community's view
is increasingly colored by geopolitics rather than
morality. The prevailing view is to show patience
with Thein Sein's government out of concern his
incipient reforms could be derailed without
continued international support for the process.
Powerful international agencies like the UN,
particularly its refugee agencies, continue to
work with the Myanmar government even as it denies
them access to refugees in KIO-held territories.
Opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize
winner Aung San Suu Kyi, from whom the
international community has long taken its policy
cues, recently emphasized the broad need for
security of individuals and communities in the
country's political transition. At a recent speech
at the US's Virginia Tech University, Suu Kyi
said, "Democracy means for me, and I think for
those who are in the same movement as I am, a fine
balance between liberty and security. We want to
be free but at the same time we want to be secure.
And we think that so far democracy is the best
system that we know that can achieve both liberty
and security for us." On the Kachin conflict,
however, many Kachins feel that Suu Kyi has
remained deafeningly silent.
A high-level
government order was given to pursue airstrikes
against the Kachin resistance forces, leading to
an escalation of a conflict that has already
imperiled tens of thousands of Kachin civilians.
The same Myanmar armed forces that are bombarding
civilian populations in Kachin State have a
pending invitation to observe for the first time
the annual US-led Cobra Gold joint military
exercises in neighboring Thailand.
Many
have interpreted the invitation as a US reward for
Thein Sein's reforms and engagement initiatives
with the West. But as the war in Kachin State
intensifies, his quasi-civilian government
increasingly looks and acts like the previous
military regime the West sanctioned and isolated
rather than embraced.
Karin
Dean, a political geographer, has conducted
research on Kachin communities for the past
decade. She is at present based at Tallinn
University in Estonia.
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