By Eric Vandenbroeck
Following one night in Yangon,
I boarded a train to Hpa-An, the capital of Karen
(Kayin) State.
If the Kachin have suffered the most at the
hands of the Burmans in recent years, it is the Karen who have fought them for
the longest.
To be fair, Myanmar features many of the problems that face
multicultural States and raises a basic question: how might societies with many
disparate ethnic and linguistic groups achieve national integration without
destroying local cultures – creating nations and not just states. Should there
be a uniform state school curriculum in the national language, or can other
local languages be taught (see Switzerland for example), and if so at what
levels?
In today’s Myanmar, political change has been lagging badly behind the
modest economic progress in the new Burma. There might have been some increase
in democracy at the center, with what might come out of the November elections
for instance, but the political and administrative architecture of central
Burman control over the whole of this extremely diverse country has scarcely
been touched.
Myanmar’s leading parties, however, don’t need to venture very far to
find the answer to the country’s chronic poverty and creaking economy – they
just have to look out the window onto the streets of downtown Yangon. Here is
where today’s Myanmar could learn to pick up the threads of the country’s past.
This is where globalization is visible, and despite successive attempts to
smash those silken webs that bind these traders to the world, still enough
survives. If they were all equal citizens in a new Myanmar, alike, that could
be an extraordinarily rich and potent mix. Just as the plural society, with all
its flaws, was born in these streets in its own time, so it is easy to imagine
another society emerging from the detritus of the old, better, stronger and
wealthier than before. But that would require enormous political courage from
all of Burma’s rulers, to surmount the country’s history in the name of forging
an entirely new nation.
One of the questions thus will be if the next government will be willing
to have a dialogue about implementing autonomy for the states and the
establishment of Myanmar as a federal union.
We should question how international and indigenous political legitimacy
symbols and attitudes may differ and may be perceived, and what effect these
views have on hot' internal and external state actors. What does it take in
Myanmar for a government to be considered legitimate by its various peoples and
the international community?
We need to know what kinds of foreign policies toward Myanmar have
proven to be effective or ineffective" International organizations can
learn valuable human rights lessons from the Burmese situation that will help
the international community-individual states, international institutions such
as the United Nations or ASEAN, and international nongovernmental organizations-improve
conditions there. The Myanmar case may help us understand whether the
international community can effectively promote democracy, pluralism, and
better governance elsewhere, and if so, over what period and to what extent.
After several hours, the train nears the town of Bago, a bustling city
of 200,000. It is not a top attraction for tourists (who mostly head for the
golden rock), but it does bring in some day trippers from Yangon. As the track
curves into Bago, a large golden pagoda is visible. I know from my reading that
this is the Shwemawdaw Paya,
which is the tallest one in Burma. At 375 feet, it is 53 feet taller than the Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon. Bago, formerly known as Pegu, was once an ancient capital of southern Burma when
much of the country was ruled by the Mon-speaking people. Just about the same
time as the fighting between the French and the English in the Hundred Years'
War was winding down in Europe, Burma was engaged in the Forty Years' War – a
similarly protracted conflict between two groups of people, the Burmans, and
the Mon.
Today the 4.0% or so Mon-speaking people living in Myanmar constitute an
ethnic minority, however, this has not always been the case. From early in the
first millennium, for a period of more than a thousand years, Mon and Khmer
kings ruled over much of mainland Southeast Asia. After the Mon moved westward
into the Irrawaddy River delta of southern Myanmar, they acquired Theravāda Buddhism, their state religion, from Ceylon and
South India, and they adopted the Indian Pāli script.
By 825 they had firmly established themselves in southern and southeastern
Myanmar and founded the cities of Pegu and Thaton.
About the same period, southward-migrating Burmans took over lands in
central Myanmar and established the kingdom of Pagan.
Across northern and central Thailand until six or seven hundred years
ago, and in central and lower Burma for another three hundred years, the bulk
of the population were ethnic Mons. The Mon kingdoms in chronological order are
the Thaton Kingdom (9th century–1057), the Hanthawaddy Kingdom (1287–1539), and the Restored Hanthawaddy Kingdom (1740–1757). The latter period of Mon
history came to an end when the Burman warrior-king Alaungphaya
defeated the Mon ruler of Pegu (currently Bago
Thousands of his followers were driven into exile in Ayuthaiya
(Thailand), where they settled in the border areas adjoining Burma.
Mon civilization was among the most influential in pre-colonial
Southeast Asia. Significant aspects of the language, art and architecture,
political and legal arrangements, and above all the religion of the Burman
civilization was derived from the earlier Mon society, which acted as a vector
in the transmission of Theravada Buddhism and Indianized political culture to
the region. This civilizing role helps to explain the enduring prestige
attached to the Mon heritage across mainland Southeast Asia. Mon nationalists
have looked back to the classical era as a golden age - a source of inspiration
and legitimacy. They have struggled to defend the historical Mon identity from
assimilation into that of the Burman majority.
Farther down the line, our train crosses the Sittang
River, which was the site of the first major battle of the Japanese invasion of
Burma in 1942, and by May 1942 they had driven the colonial administration out
of Burma. It has been argued that the Japanese invasion of Burma was the main
cause of the Bengal Famine of 1943 since it cut off all food supplies from the
region (although no doubt equally important was the epidemic of brown spot
disease that attacked the rice crop in Bengal in 1942).
With the help of a group of young nationalists led by Aung San (father
of Aung San Suu Kyi), the Japanese established a puppet Burmese government
under Dr. Ba Maw, as Naingngandaw Adipati
(or Head of State). It was overwhelmingly ethnic Burman in character, a factor
underlined by the harsh treatment it accorded some Karen communities.
In 1941 gangs on the fringes of Aung San's Burmese Independence Army had
massacred several hundred Karens in the delta.
Isolated Japanese and Burmese atrocities against them and other minorities
continued throughout the war.
On the borders of Chinese Yunnan Karen, Shan and Chin fought a long
guerrilla campaign against the Japanese invaders, not so much out of love for
the British but because the Japanese were invading their sacred territory
alongside ethnic Burmese to whom they were deeply antagonistic.
In an important sense, all Burma’s post-colonial governments, but
especially those since the instigation of the dictatorial military rule in
1962, have taken their cue from Ba Maw’s political program for the revitalisation of the Burmese people. There was no room, of
course, for the colonial plural society, but more importantly, for post-war
Burma this also excluded the possibility of allowing any authentic expression
of the culture and religion of the many other indigenous ethnic groups that
were supposed to share the territory of Burma with the majority Burmans in the
newly independent country. As one scholar had recently written, “Even before
they gained political power, Burman leaders declared their superiority over the
other ethnic groups and claimed that they were the rightful rulers of the
country.” (Matthew Walton, “The ‘wages of Burmanness’:
Ethnicity and Burman privilege in contemporary Myanmar”, Journal of
Contemporary Asia, 2012, p. 8.)
Thus, when Ba Maw proclaimed that “tribal
accounts are settled”, what he meant was that the nation should be united
under Burman hegemony. The Karen, Kachin, Chin, Mon, Shan and others of the
so-called “hill tribes” were accepted as were accepted as indigenous in the
state’s prescribed list of 135 ethnic groups, and so were supposed to have more
rights than the immigrants of the plural society, even full citizenship. But in
reality, from the 1960s onwards the military regime tried to construct a highly
centralized, culturally homogenous Burman state, thus pitting them for decades
against the Karen, Shan and more who saw themselves as having to refight older,
pre-colonial wars against aggressive Burman revanchism – wars that are,
essentially, still continuing. Kachin were fighting on the side of the British
and the Allies against the Burmans who, as we have seen, largely sided with the
Japanese. Thus, the war in Burma came to be fought partly along racial lines,
with the Japanese-trained BIA, composed mostly of Burmans, pitched against the
Karen, Kachin, and Chin, trained and supported by the British. This basic
racial division fundamentally shaped Ba Maw’s political convictions, as well as
those of his Burman successors such as Ne Win and Than
Shwe, most of whom had served with the BIA in the
war. The two sides, the Burmans, and the hill peoples, thus retain very
different narratives of the war and its place in the development of an
independent country.
When the British returned, the Karens received
them with enthusiasm, inviting British soldiers into their churches and homes.
For their part, the British applauded the formation of the Karen National
Organization in 1945 and put substantial amounts of money into the hill and
minority areas. The Seagrim Hospital was founded as a
memorial to the heroic special operations officer who had led them. At this
stage, only a few Karen, Kachin, Shan or Chin radicals were talking about
political separation from Burma, but with a partition in the air all around in
India, Palestine, Ireland and Poland - expectations had been raised to a
dangerously high level.
Their experience during the war is mentioned in all documents as decisive
for the relative unity in 1945-47. The Burma Independent Army (BIA) and the
Japanese Army attacked the Karen in and around Myaungmya,
in the Irrawaddy Delta and around Papun. Many Karen
had kept their weapons, and three British officers stayed in the eastern hills
after the British retreat. The tensions turned ugly when Christian Karen where
murdered in churches where they had sought sanctuary. An estimated 1,800 Karen
lost their lives. In Papun, ten elders were executed,
women were raped and Karen taken as hostages to capture Major Seagrim, who stayed behind the Japanese lines. The Karen
blamed the BIA and took the cruelty displayed as a clear sign that the two
groups could never exist peacefully together. Thus, xenophobia was produced and
later reproduced on both sides. The remedy was a separate state and the
criteria used in the mapping were geographical as well as mental/cultural and
published in so-called memorials from the KNA. The first publication - the
Humble Memorial of the Karens of Burma - was written
in September 1945 by Saw Tha Din. This memorial was
one of many papers circulated during the negotiations for independence and
before a Karen delegation arrived - like the first - in London 1946
Thus, in 1946, the expectations among the Karen had reached their
highest point. They were convinced that the British would reward their loyalty
and sufferings during the Second World War with an autonomous state. Although
they were utterly disappointed and perplexed when the state did not materialize,
their expectations and the British support seemed to converge into a common
conjuncture of expectations.
There was a British White Paper in May 1945
that formally articulated a “two Burma” solution, an idea that had long been
assumed administratively during the high colonial period. And Sir Reginald
Dorman-Smith, the incumbent Governor at the time of the Japanese invasion, in
his war memos from exile in Simla (India), envisioned
two postwar Burma – an Upper Burma made up of Karens,
Indians, and Anglo-Burmans; and a British Burma, with a capital in Rangoon, of
the peripheral peoples who would in due time declare their allegiance.
The British White Paper mentioned a Karen State - a reward for loyalty -
but the problem in the proposal was that representation of the Karen nation was
based on the assumption of a culturally homogeneous entity in contradiction to
the realities. During the negotiations, the imagination of a Karen nation had
become too blurred and the boundaries to fuzzy to all parties. However, this is
not to say that the Karen nation was and is an illusory construction but was an
entity with huge inner contradictions.
The confused military settlement between Aung San and the British had
made matters worse. At the negotiations at Kandy in September 1945 little
attempt had been made to merge the armed minorities with the armed Burmese.
Instead, there was to be a two-wing army, one wing consisting mainly of Kachins, Karens, and Chins
officered by British regulars, the other mainly of Burmese elements in the
British army and 6,too-odd Burmese Army men. The officer corps of this second
wing was to be “Burmanized”.
In agreement with the retreating British authorities, the new Burmese
(Tatmadaw) army incorporated a flimsy alliance of historical antagonists. The
head of the new Army was a famous Karen fighter, General Smith Dun. Smith Dun,
however, was frustrated by the unwillingness of these force commanders to
recognize or carry out War Office orders.
Finally, in December 1948, the violence escalated to outright massacres.
On Christmas Eve 1948, Burmese irregulars threw hand grenades into a Karen
church where people were celebrating the festival. The fleeing congregation was
shot down or bayoneted. The insurgent Karen forces now went on the offensive,
digging in at Insein, close to the capital, even after they failed to take
Rangoon itself. Rangoon civilians took day trips out to
the front where the army allowed them to take pot shots at the Karen fighters
for one rupee a bullet.
Violence in the delta escalated and inevitably landed in the suburbs of
Rangoon, where Karens and Burmans lived in adjacent
quarters. Sitwundan units, reinforced by university
students and hooligans from Rangoon, moved into Insein and surrounded the Karen
quarters there. From time to time, the Sitwundan and
other irregulars fired shots toward Karen quarters in Insein, Ahlone, Kyimendine, and Sanchaung (the latter three located inside Rangoon city
limits). The Karen, in turn, rebelled against the new Burmese-dominated
government and three Burmese battalions deserted to join a powerful communist
insurgency.
The 1947 Constitution was received as the root cause of problems that
Myanmar encountered in the past fifty years and remains a major issue to be
solved. Referring to the defects in the constitution, the leaders of the hill
peoples said that the Union Constitution is not a genuine federal system. In
the set up of the Union, they said though the
minorities are constituted as constituent states, Myanmar proper was
incorporated within the central government and enjoyed the monopoly of Union
power whereas the status of the remaining states are lowered to that of
tributary states to Myanmar.
The imposition of military rule in 1962 next led to the heartbreaking
ruination of the country.And with the 1974
Constitution, the practice of absolute authority was written into law.
Simultaneously, the national map was redrawn to accommodate seven
divisions (inhabited by the majority of the population) and seven ethnic states
(in underpopulated border areas). Geographically, the principal ‘national
races’ were extended recognition, but in reality, the states’ role has been
merely to enforce policy radiating from the capital.
As racism drove out diversity and creativity, so commerce dried up and
Rangoon, in particular, began to fall into a state of miserable disrepair. With
no attempt to maintain the buildings, much of the city has fallen prey to the
invasive tropical climate. More recently there was a change of heart, when the
generals, recognizing the failure of their socialist policies, adopted a
version of crony capitalism instead, but by then most of the damage had been
done.
But the generals wanted to go much further. A new body called the
National Language Commission ordered that the English language is dropped
altogether from school curriculums as a language of instruction. It would only
be taught as a second language. Much more importantly, the generals ordered
that Burmese was to be the sole language used and taught throughout the entire
country's school system, effectively denying all the ethnic groups in the Union
of Burma the right to use, teach or learn their language. 8 This, more than
anything, made language the central battleground of Burmanisation,
the insistence that in this country of at least one hundred different
languages, including at least three distinct language families (Tibeto-Burman,
Mon-Khmer, and Tal), everyone had to use only Burmese. It was a tongue that
would have been as foreign to many of the Chin and Karen as Spanish or Russian.
Another, Adaptation of Expressions Law, ordered the change of the
English translation of Burmese place names, but only to reflect the translation
of these place names from the language of the majority Burman group - Burmese -
and not from the local language in which the places were geographically
situated. These new names were thus far less inclusive as toponyms to the
citizens of the whole of Burma than many of the spellings they replaced, as the
British colonialists had usually taken great care to record the local names as
they heard them, and then to render them as closely as possible in English.
This had meant that the original English names were broadly reflective of the
local ethnic ones, but these were now unceremoniously abandoned without any
consultation with the local people who used them the most. Thus, the Burman
ethnic group was renamed Bamar, and eight of the
fourteen administrative state and division name spellings were altered as well,
sowing confusion always. Thus, Arakan became Rakhine;
Karen was changed to Kayin; Magwe to Magway; Pego to Bago; Rangoon to Yangon, and so on. lt was a huge politicization of place names and a Burmese
linguistic land-grab in somebody else's language. In general, linguistics as a
subject was gradually dropped from Burma's universities. Even if a Burman had
wanted to learn anyone of the many minority ethnic languages that were used in
his country (rather than a Karen, say, having to learn Burman), it was now
almost impossible to do so as there were so few competent teachers left.
It was also in this context that the change in the country's official
name, from Burma to Myanmar took place. Myanmar. Moreover, so the argument
went, as the name Burma reflected the existence only of the majority Burman
ethnic group, so Myanmar better represented all the peoples of the country. In
fact, as many have pointed out since, Myanmar and Burma were used pretty much
interchangeably before the British arrived. The name change thus further
disenfranchised the non-Burman ethnic groups who had become used to forms of
"Burma" to describe the whole country.
Just as language became an instrument of Burmanisation,
so did education. What happened in the classroom increasingly became more about
the maintenance of military control than equipping children with knowledge and
skills. The result has been a disastrous decline in the country's educational
standards over the past fifty years.
The United Nations Development Program estimated that public spending on
education in Burma constituted less than 2 per cent of the country's GDP in
2009, a tiny amount by international standards. (Harvard University Kennedy
School, Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, David Dapice, Anthony Saich and Thomas
Vallely, Appraising the Post-Sanctions Prospects for Myanmar's Economy:
Choosing the Right Path, January 2012, p. 20.)
Spending on health was also minuscule, only about 0.5 per cent of GDP.
In 2000, the World Health Report said that Burma had the world's worst health
system bar only the desperately poor and war-ravaged West African state of
Sierra Leone. (Ian Holliday, Burma Redux: Global Justice and the Quest for
Political Reform in Myanmar, Columbia University Press, 2011, p.77.)
By way of contrast, spending on the military amounted to about 40 per
cent of the national budget.
Despite its dominance of Burma's national affairs for decades, the
Burmese armed forces, the Tatmadaw, remain in many respects a
closed book.
It is clear, however, that since 2011 Commander-in
Chief Min Aung Hlaing has implemented wide-ranging plans to improve its order
of battle.
The latter includes an ambitious arms acquisition program that some have
compared with the dramatic expansion and modernisation
of Burma's armed forces during the 1990s. As seen at recent Armed
Forces Day parades, it has new
surface-to-air missile systems such as the Chinese HQ-12/KS-1A and the
Russian Pechora-2M. It has also shown an interest in obtaining more heavy
artillery and unmanned ground vehicles.
In 2014 an unspecified number of CAC/PAC JF-17 Thunder multi-role combat
aircraft was
ordered. It has also received new
transport aircraft and air-to-air missiles. several of these acquisition
and construction programs were initiated before the handover of power to a
hybrid civilian-military government in 2011.
This suggests the then ruling military council wanted to ensure that the
Tatmadaw had the revenue and hardware necessary to handle any challenges that
arose after that time.
The Burmese generals also knows that, regardless of who is in power,
Myanmar's internal stability, and sovereignty will remain important factors in
any consideration of the country's military capabilities, and its annual
defense expenditure.
Whereby the main task of the huge army so far has not been to defend the
country from foreign invasion but to fight the government's internal enemies.
The Burmese armed forces, so far, it appaers focused
almost entirely on counter-insurgency, and the various ethnic rebel groups.
Pondering this through part of this 5-hour train segment, we arrived at Kyaikto near the Kyaiktiyo Pagoda
over the Golden Rock.
According to legend, the Golden Rock itself is precariously perched on a
strand of the Buddha's hair. Thus the hair relics of the Buddha believed to be
inside the granite boulder are the objects of devotion, but the rock’s sanctity
owes as much to its rich legacy. How this granite boulder balancing on a cliff
side in a remote mountain range came to achieve national veneration is
testimony to not only the tenacious continuity of old legends but also their
remarkable elasticity. A believe in the Buddha giving a strand of his hair to Taik Tha, a hermit who gave it to
the King (other legends talk about six strands to six hermits) probably arose
in Burma during the fifteenth century. The theme survived in Lower Burma and
gave rise to numerous separate traditions following the Mon defeat in the
sixteenth century.
One has to be careful navigating the area due to the similarity of the
place names: Kyaikto (the town) versus Kyaiktiyo (the name of the mountain and the pagoda on top,
also sometimes spelled as Kyaik-htiyo).
It is accepted that the foundation of the current ceasefire between the
KNU and the Burmese government was grounded
more on economic and business interests than on any grand strategy to find a
solution to political problems. True, since the end of 2013 there is some
economic development here. And like most of the hotels on my trip this year,
the new United Hpa An Hotel features free WiFi throughout the property.
But if the Karen civil war fatally wounded the early post-independence
Burmese state, it eventually did far more damage to the Karen themselves. Kayin
State was turned into a war zone, with the seven-brigade-strong KNLA, the armed
wing of the KNU, at times exerting military control over much of the south of
the state, especially in the most remote hills pressed up against the Thai
border. From bases in Thailand, principally around Three Pagodas Pass, they
received supplies and support from their fellow Karen and were joined by
well-wishers and soldiers of fortune, motivated by religion, anti-communism or
just a simple love of adventure. The war ravaged the once-thriving Karen hill
economy, as the Burmese army clearly intended. There was massive depopulation
as hundreds of thousands fled the fighting, many of them braving the arduous
journey through the jungle to scores of refugee camps around Mae Sot in Thailand.
These camps contained about 145,000
people by 2010. And it is estimated that a total of around one million five
hundred Karen’s, live outside Myanmar.
Many who fled were the young and better educated, as there were no more
jobs available in Kayin State. Much of the land became off limits due to
landmines, laid by both sides, rendering it impossible to cultivate. As normal
administration broke down completely in the state, so over the decades it
became one of the poorest in Burma, itself the second-poorest country in Asia.
Increasing malnutrition, disease, displacement and the stress of war
contributed to a steady and marked decline in the Karen peoples’ health, so
much so that they now have some of the worst such statistics in the world.
By 2010, they and other such groups had found that 41.2 per cent of
children under five were acutely malnourished in the hills of eastern Burma and
that 60 per cent of deaths in children under five were from preventable and
treatable diseases. Child mortality rates were nearly twice as high as in the
rest of Burma, and the maternal mortality figure three times the national
average. (For
details see and
also see.)
The terrible consequences of all these decades of conflict, military,
political and cultural, are all much in evidence in the city of Hpa-An. Road access to it is rigorously controlled by
Burmese army checkpoints. And like in Myitkyina, the central Burman authorities
are confined to a small enclave, where they occupy the choicest buildings
leading down to a lake that gives on to some memorable views of the local
limestone outcrops. It is the only part of town that could vaguely be described
as picturesque. For the rest, Hpa-An is mainly a
depressing collection of shabby concrete and corrugated iron houses, sagging
electricity wires and crumbling masonry.
Most new investments in Kayin state today have been negotiated by
Burmans over the heads of the Karen. It seems that, for all its ceasefires,
Myanmar’s government has yet to learn anything very new politically.
The Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement signed on 15 Oct was the government’s
chance to add some much-needed credence to the elections in November.
Unfortunately not everyone is convinced it will bring stability to the country.
On the eve of the ceasefire signing, the Karen National Liberation Army issued
a statement making their position clear: They would never give up their
cause. The Karen’s are also weary the government might
be using the situation to renew hostilities.
The nature outside of Hpa-An does not
disappoint however, following a beautifully located monastery outside Hpa-An:
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