A Kachin Independence Army solider shows off a captured Burmese weapon from the front line fighting. Photograph by Ryan Libre
That would be a serious mistake. The election, involving a relative handful of seats in a powerless Parliament, was little more than a bone thrown by the Burmese government to the opposition and the international community. It was also a distraction, allowing the regime to continue business as usual across the country.
Future Kachin Independence Army officers run 5 miles everyday. KIA officer training is 2 years long. Photograph by Ryan Libre
Future Kachin Independence Army officers run 5 miles everyday. KIA officer training is 2 years long. Photograph by Ryan Libre
As an 83-page report issued by Human Rights Watch last month documented, the army has systematically killed and tortured civilians, raped women and burned houses to the ground. Physicians for Human Rights found that “between June and September 2011, the Burmese army looted food from civilians, fired indiscriminately into villages, threatened villages with attacks, and used civilians as porters and human minesweepers.” Some 75,000 people have been driven from their homes and are now living in refugee camps, primarily in KIO-controlled territory.
Burning Houses
I’ve spent the past three weeks inside Kachin State, and have heard similar reports first-hand. I’ve met middle-aged farmers who volunteered for the Kachin military forces after ethnic Burmese troops opened fire on their houses and their livestock, driving their families to the refugee camps. The fighting is intensifying. Each day was marked by the sounds of shelling, smoke from burning houses, wounded Kachin soldiers brought in for treatment and a steady flow of refugees into the camps.Yet in all the discussion of Myanmar’s supposed shift toward political freedom, which earned the regime a visit from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, there has been almost no attention paid to the violence in Kachin.
Part of the reason, I believe, is terminology. Most media sources follow the Burmese government’s lead in referring to the KIO as an “insurgency” or an “armed group.” An Op-Ed article last month in the New York Times by Louise Arbour, of the International Crisis Group, was typical. “The government has abandoned policies of confrontation with the country’s ethnic minorities for a new peace initiative that has seen 11 cease- fire agreements signed with armed groups, leaving out only the resistant Kachin,” Arbour wrote. She argued that: “Using sanctions to force a solution to the outstanding ethnic conflict involving the Kachin armed group is a clumsy tactic that puts pressure only on the government and encourages the other side to fight on for a better deal.”
First: The main thing the Kachin are resisting is the army’s attempt to seize their lands and kill their families. Who wouldn’t resist that? (And the “better deal” that the Kachin are fighting for is that the Burmese army withdraw to the line agreed on in a 1994 ceasefire agreement.)
Second: Arbour’s description of the KIO calls to mind images of masked bandits hiding in the jungle with submachine guns, making threats. Nothing could be further from the truth. For 50 years, the KIO has protected parts of Kachin State from the Burmese military, which seized power in a 1962 coup. The regime craves Kachin State’s wealth of minerals, hardwood forests and potential hydropower sites, as well as its access to China. Although the KIO began as an insurgency, years of stability, a flourishing border trade with China and some forward-thinking leaders have allowed the KIO-controlled areas to blossom into a full-fledged micro-state.
Hydropower and Radio
During my time among the Kachin “insurgents,” I watched their doctors remove the inflamed appendix from a young Kachin woman in the KIO hospital. I watched their engineers build a radio station, which will be the first to broadcast in the Kachin language. I saw KIO license plates and ID cards issued by the immigration department. I drank clean water from a KIO reverse-osmosis plant. I ran my laptop on clean electricity delivered by a KIO hydropower dam. I sat in cafes savoring traditional cuisine and listening to Li Li, the most famous Kachin singer, play his black guitar and sing about his people’s heritage and uncertain future.When a fire broke out on a hillside one day, I watched the KIO fire department put it out using their antique red fire truck. I attended Sunday mass -- 90 percent of the population is Christian -- where the women wore bright Kachin skirts and traditional face paint and plastic flip-flops. I watched the KIO schools hold classes in the Kachin language, which is forbidden by the Burmese regime. In short, I experienced a vibrant and unique culture with its own traditions, but one that is close to the breaking point.
I also stayed in the refugee camps, where I was staggered by the numbers and the horror stories. One woman told me how the Burmese army bound the women of her village in their church, using strings of electrical wires used to light their Virgin Mary, while they led the men of the village away. Many did not return. I listened to an elderly woman tell of hiding in the jungle for days after the army burned her village, and then clinging to the back of a motorcycle for eight hours to make the journey to a refugee camp. There are thousands of such stories in every camp. (To be fair, both sides have violated international human-rights standards with their use of land mines and child soldiers, though in my observations the Kachin used mines very sparingly as a last-ditch defense, and assigned soldiers under 18 to positions in their military headquarters and training camps, far from the front lines.)
Planning Ahead
The only reason the humanitarian crisis hasn’t been far worse is because the KIO had been anticipating this government offensive for years and had already chosen sites for camps and established an executive committee to organize them. This is taking a tremendous financial toll -- no doubt part of the government’s strategy -- and international relief agencies have mostly been barred by the Burmese government from aiding the camps. Soon the summer rainy season will arrive, with its many diseases.“How do people in America feel about our situation?” is the repeated question I get from refugees. All I could do was look them in the face and tell them that most people in America don’t know they exist.
That ignorance, I’m convinced, is the only thing that has allowed the regime to continue its brutality. The world needs to understand that the Kachin are not a group of rebel insurgents but a self-sufficient society that has governed itself for centuries.
Instead of linking Myanmar’s diplomatic and financial status to a minor election, the U.S. and its allies should insist that the Myanmar regime immediately withdraw its troops from Kachin territory and allow nongovernmental aid groups full access to the refugee camps. Insurgencies come and insurgencies go. But ethnic cleansing is forever.
(Rowan Jacobsen is a 2012 Alicia Patterson foundation fellow writing about conflict in the borderlands between India, Myanmar and China.)
Read more opinion online from Bloomberg View.
Today’s highlights: The View editors on the real Mitt Romney, austerity in Spain and the Muslim Brotherhood’s political rise; Ezra Klein on worrying about the deficit; Caroline Baum on scapegoating oil companies; Jonathan Weil on Groupon’s IPO; Susan Antilla on the JOBS act.
To contact the writer of this article: Rowan Jacobsen at rowan@rowanjacobsen.com
To contact the editor responsible for this article: Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net.
စစ္မွန္တဲ့ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးကိုလိုခ်င္ၾကတဲ့၊ ျမန္မာျပည္သူျပည္သားအားလံုးက၊ မွန္ကန္တဲ့ေစတနာနဲ ့က်ိဳးစာၾကမယ္ဆိုရင္
က်ေနာ္တို ့တိုင္းျပည္တကယ္ျငိမ္းခ်မ္း၊ သာယာ၊ ခ်မ္းသာၾကရမွာပါ။
We, all Burmese (including all ethnics) have to do our self to build the true peace and re-consolation of our country. This is our responsibility as a Burmese.
ေအာင္မိုး(ကေနဒါ)
No comments:
Post a Comment