The Burmese Labyrinth. Carlos Sardiña Galache
drug-trade; and members of other ethnicities use drugs in Kachin and elsewhere in the country.
The theory surely gives too much credit to the leaders of the Tatmadaw, whose control of the country, and particularly the border areas, is far from complete. But the conspiracy, whether real or imagined, has a strong explanatory power for many Kachin, as it is inscribed in a wider pattern of oppression by the military. It also serves to reinforce their sense of victimhood under Burman domination, and, crucially, their support for the KIO/KIA, which has managed to present itself not only as a bulwark against the Burmese army, but also against drugs. Thus, the particular war on drugs waged by the KIO and other Kachin organizations is also a nationalist war.
Gam Ba told me that his centre has treated 1,700 addicts since it opened in 2010. He believed that, in most cases, the treatment dispensed by the KIO was successful, and claimed that the majority of those treated had conquered their addiction for good. Only fifty people had been readmitted, he said. ‘But many people go to government-controlled areas after leaving here, and then we cannot keep track of them’, he acknowledged. The main weapon employed in combating addiction in the rehabilitation centres was religion. Drug users are encouraged to embrace the Christian faith in order to be saved from their addiction. They were directed to heal through sermons, Bible studies and songs. They were also put to work in the local town and taught how to farm. However, there were virtually no palliatives to alleviate withdrawal symptoms, and corporal punishments were often used to subdue rebellious addicts.
Some of the drug users in the KIO centres were volunteers, or were sent by their families, but most had been detained by the KIO and held there against their will. One of them was Ma Bung, a forty-eight-year-old woman who had been sent to a rehabilitation centre in Mai Ja Yang, the second-biggest town in KIO-controlled territory, after she was discovered buying drugs in a village known as an important hub of drug distribution in the area. The most surprising fact about Ma Bung was that she was not a Burmese citizen. She was an ethnic Kachin, but lived in China, where some 130,000 Kachin (classified there as Jingpo) live in Yunnan Province. She held Chinese citizenship, but the KIO did not seem to care, and kept her in the rehabilitation centre for six months. ‘She is poor, and the authorities in China would not care about her’, a worker at the centre told me. Official borders between nation-states are often meaningless in northern Burma, and are easily overridden by ethnic allegiances.
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The war in Kachin state soon reached an apparent stalemate, which bombings by the Burmese military, including that of Laiza over Christmas of 2012, did not break. The KIO’s territory shrank during the years of Thein Sein, but, as Colonel Maran Zaw Tawng told me in 2012, it was proved that an outright defeat was impossible. Meanwhile, the KIO managed to regain wide popular support from the Kachin population after the years of the ceasefire, during which many Kachin criticized KIO leaders as more interested in economic gain than defending the political rights of their people.20 With the war, and some changes in the KIO leadership, many Kachin again saw the organization as the defenders of their interests. As a consequence, Kachin nationalism has also been greatly reinforced by the war – a process to which the crimes of the Burmese military against civilians have undoubtedly contributed.
Meanwhile, Burman activists in Rangoon and elsewhere in central Burma have made some gestures of solidarity towards the Kachin. The ‘88 Generation’ students – the leaders of the popular uprising in 1988 – organized trips to Myitkyina and issued calls for peace.21 The Free Funeral Service, a civil society organization based in Rangoon, sent donations to the people displaced by the war.22 But there is little awareness among most of the Burman population in the heartlands about the conflicts in the periphery. These conflicts seem almost as distant as if they were happening in another country.23 The Burman majority enjoys a set of unofficial privileges that often go unrecognized even by the politically involved Burmans, making them more pervasive.24 It is no wonder that many Kachin feel they have little support from the Burman population at large. Both may have been victims of the military dictatorship, but they have not been victimized in the same ways or to the same degree.
Throughout the Thein Sein administration, Aung San Suu Kyi remained aloof regarding the conflict in Kachin. As part of her strategy of reconciliation with the generals, she refused to commit herself on the issue. ‘There are people who criticized me when I remained [silent] on this case. They can do so as they are not satisfied with me. But, for me, I do not want to add fire to any side of the conflict’, she said in 2012 in London.25 ‘It is up to the government. This case is being handled by the government at the moment’, she would say later – a strange comment from an opposition leader who seemed to wash her hands of a fundamental issue in the country she aspired to govern one day.26
The refusal of Suu Kyi to adopt any position on the issue elicited a variety of responses from the Kachin. When I asked a Catholic priest in Laiza in 2012 whether he trusted Suu Kyi, he replied that she was just another Burman, and as such could not be trusted. Soon, another conflict flared up on the other side of the country, further revealing the limits of her moral commitments and leadership.
By June 2012 the democratic transition seemed to be progressing smoothly, at least in central Burma. Aung San Suu Kyi had become a member of parliament in April; some political prisoners had been released earlier that year; and new laws liberalizing the media and trade unions were in the pipeline. Thein Sein was applauded internationally, and even Hillary Clinton had visited the country as US Secretary of State in late 2011 – a move by which the most powerful country on earth was giving its blessing to the new regime. The war in Kachin State seemed to be the only intractable problem in what might otherwise have looked like the beginning of a promising new era for the country. Then a new crisis suddenly erupted in Arakan State – a crisis that would only get worse in the coming years, and would have profound implications beyond the state.
In late May, a twenty-seven-year-old Buddhist Rakhine woman called Thida Htwe was brutally raped and killed on Ramree Island, in central Arakan. The alleged perpetrators, two Muslim men and an orphan Buddhist adopted by a Muslim family, were arrested the next day by the police, but villages and towns throughout the state were swept by media reports and pamphlets denouncing the crime, and emphasizing the religion of the perpetrators. Over the following weeks, this triggered a spiral of intercommunal violence that snowballed throughout the state and broke, perhaps irremediably, the fragile coexistence between the Muslim and Buddhist communities. A few days later, on 3 June, in Toungup, a town in the south of the state, a mob of several hundred Buddhists stopped a bus, dragged ten Muslim men from central Burma from it, and beat them to death.
Five days later, thousands of Muslim Rohingya in Maungdaw town, in the predominantly Rohingya north of the state, near to the border with Bangladesh, went on a rampage after Friday prayers, destroying a number of buildings and killing several Buddhists. The violence soon spread to the state’s capital, Sittwe, where it was mostly perpetrated by Buddhist Rakhine against Rohingya Muslims in retaliation for the rape and assassination of the Buddhist girl in Ramree and the attacks in Maungdaw. On 12 June, the army stepped in and restored order in the state. By then, hundreds of houses had been destroyed, over 100,000 people, most of them Rohingya, had been displaced to makeshift camps. The government claimed that seventy-eight people had been killed – a figure that was, in all probability, a gross underestimate.1
The government portrayed the violence as an eruption of spontaneous sectarian hostility between two communities incapable of living together – a convenient narrative that allowed the Tatmadaw to portray itself as the pacifier. The rape and killing of Thida Htwe had been widely publicized in the state, playing up stereotypes circulated widely among the Buddhist population that depicted Muslims as brutal sexual predators. An individual criminal case was blown out of proportion; collective blame was assigned to the Rohingya community as a whole for the alleged actions of just three men. Not all Rakhine participated in the violence, or even supported it; but the invocation of collective responsibility played into pre-existing intercommunal tensions.