The Burmese Labyrinth. Carlos Sardiña Galache
for the 2,000 people evicted from their villages. When, in 2012, I visited one of the villages to which they have been relocated, people complained about the way they had been uprooted, unable to farm their original lands and sent to places without fertile soil, where they struggled to make ends meet. Many had left for other places in order to find jobs. It was virtually a ghost village, made up of wooden houses so badly built by the government that the cold wind entered through cracks in the walls during the winter.
For the Kachin people at large, it was a mixed victory. The protest was stirred up by Burman activists in Rangoon, not by them, and many of their underlying grievances remained unaddressed. As early as 2012, a Kachin activist in Rangoon complained to me that those activists and Aung San Suu Kyi had hijacked their protests. Moreover, the inter-ethnic solidarity with the Kachin was short-lived for many Burman activists and politicians, including Aung San Suu Kyi, soon to be replaced by an apparent indifference. Both Kachin and Burman activists had fought against the dam for nationalist reasons, but in the framework of two different nationalisms. In any case, the suspension was insufficient to stop the war that had begun three months before. In fact, nobody expected it to stop. The reasons for the war ran much deeper, and were as much economic as they were political.
The military junta that replaced the dictatorship of General Ne Win in 1988 ruled the country for a total of twenty-three years, but always portrayed itself as merely a ‘provisional government’ ruling in a permanent state of exception. Its purported raison d’être was to restore the order and stability necessary to establish a constitutional system – hence its original name, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC). In the meantime, it strengthened its position in restive border areas like Kachin State, both militarily and politically, and extended its control over state institutions including the bureaucracy and the judiciary.
After approving the Constitution by a referendum in 2008, the junta sent orders in April 2009 to the ethnic armed organizations to accept being placed under the command of the army as Border Guard Forces (BGF). This happened before the promised ‘legitimate’ government was in power, and without the offer of any political concessions in return. The KIA refused to obey.7 The KIO supported the formation of the Kachin State Progressive Party (KSPP), with some former high-ranking KIO leaders at its helm, but the government did not allow it to register, presumably as punishment for the KIO’s refusal of the order to transform itself into a BGF.8 In short, as the change of regime approached, the KIO could see how any avenue of political representation in the new post-military order was closed.
The Kachin are one of the ethnic groups in Burma that have only the most tenuous cultural, linguistic or religious linkages with the Burman majority. Many Kachin, like many members of other ethnic minorities, have little reason to feel any attachment to the Burmese nation-state, which has been dominated by the Burmans throughout the country’s recent history. In precolonial times, the writ of the Burmese kingdoms did not extend into the rugged mountains where the ancestors of the Kachin have lived for generations. More recently, like that of other ethnic minorities, the experience that many Kachin people have had of contact with the Burmese state – particularly those living in rural areas – is of soldiers and other security forces treating them as potential enemies, and often conscripting them to carry out gruesome forced labour, or even to use them as human landmine-sweepers.9 The government has always accepted the Kachin as one of Burma’s ‘national races’, formally enjoying equal rights; but they have often been treated as second-class citizens in the context of an implicit racial hierarchy in which the Burman majority, supposedly more civilized, sits at the apex, and ‘hill tribes’ like the Kachin, the Chin and the Karen occupy a lower place.
The Kachin nation comprises six or seven different ethno-linguistic groups, or ‘tribes’: Jinghpaw, Zaiwa, Lachid, Rawang, Lisu, Lawngwaw (or Maru) and Nung; but there is much controversy about the inclusion of some of these groups under the Kachin umbrella. This is particularly true of the Lisu and the Rawang, many of whom regard themselves as a distinct ethnic group. Kachin ethno-nationalism is a relatively new phenomenon, and is mostly dominated by the Jinghpaw.10 These groups speak their own languages, the most dominant being the Jinghpaw, and are predominantly Christian (the majority are Baptist, but there is a significant Catholic minority, as well as some Anglicans). Kachin State is also home to other ethnic groups: a sizeable Shanni population, a group related to the Shan, and many Burman and Rakhine workers. In fact, the Kachin are in a minority in the state, albeit the largest one.
The Kachin community is not free from internal fissures, and the allegiance to Kachin nationhood varies between the different ‘tribes’, the Lisu and the Rawang scarcely identifying themselves as Kachin. But over time the Kachin have developed tight and complex kinship networks that make them a remarkably cohesive community in times of crisis.11 The Kachin also have relatively strong social institutions independent of a government that provides little assistance to its citizens, and even less in the neglected areas of the periphery. In the territory controlled by the government, the Kachin Baptist Convention (KBC) is much more than a religious organization; it also plays a social role that includes education, development projects and rehabilitation centres for drug users, according to the church’s ethos of ‘holistic mission’.12
The struggle of the KIO/KIA also has some religious overtones, clearly expressed in its motto: ‘God is our victory.’ But it would be misleading to see the KIA as an army of crusaders. Religion is a rallying point that resonates powerfully in a deeply religious population, but the goals of the KIO are eminently political. Whether the final aim is full independence or autonomy within a federal Burma is more difficult to discern. Until the mid 1970s, the KIO officially demanded independence. It then switched to demanding autonomy, though some see it as a mere step towards independence. As I was told in 2012 by the late Reverend Maran Ja Gun, a Kachin historian, linguist and influential ideologue of the KIO, at his house in Laiza, ‘Our ultimate goal will probably be full independence.’
Kachin nationalists see Burman domination as the main obstacle to the progress of their nation. Their nationalism is predicated on respect for Kachin traditions, and a certain idealization of the period when the Kachin duwas (tribal chiefs) governed without Burman interference,13 but also on a project of modernization on Kachin terms that is currently hampered by the central government.14 In that sense, the Kachin nationalist project is arguably more forward-looking than others in the country. The Kachin never had a state as such, and that makes it difficult to rely on nostalgia for a golden age of power and wealth as the basis for a future Kachin nation. However, this does not necessarily mean that Kachin nationalists are politically progressive.
The KIO/KIA has built a mini-state in its territory with its own police force, hospitals, schools and TV station, Laiza TV. The KIO also provides bases in its territory for other armed groups, such as the All Burma Student’s Democratic Front (ABSDF – a mostly Burman guerrilla group born out of the protests against the military regime in 1988) and the Arakan Army (AA – a Rakhine ethno-nationalist armed group founded in 2009 that draws its recruits mainly from Rakhine workers in the jade mines of Hpakant). Politically, the KIO has become one of the most important armed groups in Burma – though the allied United Wa State Army (UWSA), whose force is estimated at between 20,000 and 30,000 soldiers, outnumbers the approximately 10,000 soldiers of the KIO.15 The KIO and the UWSA are the most influential armed groups that refused to sign the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) proposed by the government, after seven other armed groups, including the Karen National Army (KNU) and the Restoration Council of Shan State (RCSS), signed it in October 2015.
The position of the KIO remained the same at the time of writing: no ceasefire until there is a meaningful political dialogue. But there has been increasing pressure on the organization to sign, not less, from what Swedish journalist Bertil Lintner has described as the ‘peace-industrial complex’:16 dozens of foreign organizations and well-paid experts on ‘conflict resolution’, who have flocked to Burma since the transition started and who in many cases exert more pressure on the armed groups than on the government. But the KIO seems able to rely on the support of the Kachin people – though it is an open question how long such support will last if this inconclusive war of attrition continues indefinitely.
The military government used the ceasefire signed