The Burmese military claims it has only engaged in defensive combat
with the KIA, accusing the Kachin of attacking Burmese supply convoys.
But how is it that after a week of supposed cease-fire and defensive
movements, the Burmese army has edged ever closer to Laiza? Human-rights
groups have spent the past few months documenting violence, like
indiscriminate shelling, committed by the Burmese military against
Kachin civilians. The Burmese government has refused to give
international human-rights groups access to internally-displaced-person
(IDP) camps. President Thein Sein has publicly vowed that the Burmese
army will not overrun the KIA headquarters, which lies just across the
border with China’s Yunnan province. But few Kachin believe the Burmese
President’s assurances about sparing Laiza. The border town, surrounded
by overflowing IDP settlements, is preparing for a final showdown.
Over the past year, democratic reforms have energized Burma, which
languished for nearly half a century under repressive military rule. But
ethnic conflict has always threatened the country’s foundations — and
it continues to do so today, despite the liberalizations introduced by a
new quasi-civilian government headed by retired general Thein Sein. At
least one-third of Burma’s roughly 60 million people hail from a mosaic
of ethnic-minority groups that have chafed against the majority Bamar
(or Burman) population. The army regime that ruled
Myanmar,
as Burma is now officially known, was dominated by Bamar officers,
whose campaigns of forced labor, rape and child slavery were most
cruelly targeted at ethnic peoples. Desperate for autonomy or even
independence, dozens of ethnic militias declared war on the Burmese
government, fueling some of the world’s longest-running insurgencies,
particularly in Karen, Shan and Kachin states. Hundreds of thousands of
ethnic villagers are internally displaced in Burma today because of
fighting between the national army and various ethnic militias.
Since coming to power in 2010, Thein Sein, a former junta member, has
signed long-term cease-fires with 10 ethnic armies, including the
Karen, the Mon and the Shan. But peace has eluded Kachin areas of
northern Burma, which are spread over Kachin state and parts of Shan
state. For a year and a half, the Burmese army and the KIA, which is the
military wing of the Kachin Independence Organization, have clashed in a
low-grade but deadly combat. This was a war of land mines and
unreliable mortar fire.
(
MORE: The Regime’s Inner Reformist: Can Thein Sein Change Burma?)
A ragtag militia outfitted with rifles sometimes held together by
duct tape, the KIA makes up what it lacks in technological
sophistication with grit born of a long martial tradition. During World
War II, Kachin rangers fought with legendary bravery for the Allied
side, even as other parts of present-day Burma fell under Japanese
occupation. Christians who were converted by British and American
missionaries, the Kachin face persistent discrimination because of their
faith in a Buddhist-majority land.
Around the new year, the Burmese military escalated hostilities by
launching air strikes against the KIA — a tactic the Burmese government
at first denied employing. As government forces began closing in on
Laiza, the government cease-fire was announced on Jan. 19. It wasn’t the
first time that Thein Sein, who took office in March 2011 as part of
the new semicivilian government, ordered a break in fighting. In late
2011, he called a cease-fire that never stuck. Are his orders not being
followed by a military frustrated that the new administration is curbing
the armed forces’ power? Is there a grain of truth in the government’s
complaints that the Kachin are sniping at Burmese forces — and that the
KIA’s leaders somehow desire to profit from a war footing? Or could the
latest cease-fire talk be an attempt to divert attention as the Burmese
army prepares for a major offensive on Laiza? “I would imagine that
there are people in the Burmese military who anticipate sitting down
eventually with the Kachin,” says human-rights researcher Smith. “So the
more ground they can take over before that point, the better their
negotiating position will be.”
In 2009, the Burmese military, which then still ruled the country,
overwhelmed the northern rebel stronghold of the ethnic Kokang people,
in a fierce blitz that sent tens of thousands of Kokang scurrying across
the nearby border to China. Some Kachin fear a similar strike is in the
plans for their rebel base in Laiza. (Most of Kachin state has long
been in government hands, with the KIA only controlling a few pockets of
territory, even if sympathy for their cause remains high in Kachin
areas.)
(
MORE: Will Ethnic Violence Kill Burma’s Fragile Reforms?)
The KIA, though, is far better prepared and much bigger than the
Kokang militia ever was. In the decades before their 1994 cease-fire
with the Burmese army, the Kachin excelled in the kind of morale-sapping
insurgency that can stymie a larger national army. The Tatmadaw, as the
Burmese armed forces is known, may be one of the world’s largest
militaries per capita, but its ranks are filled with ill-prepared,
underpaid recruits. Hundreds of Burmese soldiers have died on the Kachin
front since the June 2011 cease-fire broke. On Jan. 24, the
International Labor Organization said that it had helped negotiate the
release of eight underage Burmese soldiers that the KIA had captured.
The Burmese army is routinely criticized for forcibly recruiting child
soldiers, and a January report by the NGO Child Soldiers International
detailed the way in which Burmese children are still involved in armed
conflict, acting as porters, scouts and even land-mine exploders. (The
KIA has also been accused of sending underage soldiers into battle.)
The prospect of more strife right on its border surely displeases the
Chinese, who have much riding on peace in the region. Decades ago,
Beijing funded communist-linked ethnic rebels in northern Burma who
battled the national army. Although the Chinese government later became
one of the Burmese junta’s few international patrons, it still maintains
informal relations with various ethnic armies. Several rounds of peace
talks between the KIA and Burmese government have taken place in China’s
neighboring Yunnan province — although to no avail so far.
Beijing has a right to be concerned. Earlier this month, Burmese
shells strayed onto Chinese soil, prompting a complaint from the Chinese
Foreign Ministry. Tens of thousands of Kachin refugees have flooded
into Yunnan, a repeat of the Kokang influx of 2009.
There are economic interests for China too.
Oil
and gas pipelines — which originate in Burma’s western Arakan (or
Rakhine) state, another ethnically combustive region, and snake through
Kachin areas — are likely to begin flowing in June, channeling badly
needed energy resources to interior China. Any instability in these
ethnic regions could compromise Beijing’s attempts to secure natural
resources for its economic engine. Already, unrest in Kachin, as well as
a Burmese civil-society groundswell, led to Thein Sein ordering a
suspension of construction of the Myitsone Dam, a massive project in
Kachin that would send nearly all its electricity to China. When a top
Chinese delegation visited Burma earlier this month, the sanctity of
Chinese-backed projects, ranging from Myitsone Dam to a copper mine, was
a key topic of discussion.
(
PHOTOS: Sectarian Unrest in Burma Sees Dozens Dead, Thousands Fleeing)
It’s telling that Thein Sein’s administration isn’t the only one
equivocating on the Kachin. As her homeland’s most famous citizen, Nobel
Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi has tremendous moral sway
domestically and internationally. But the leader of the opposition
National League for Democracy has shied away from a harsh condemnation
of the Burmese army’s actions in Kachin, preferring to note that abuses
have occurred on both sides. Over the weekend, while on a trip to
Hawaii, Suu Kyi expressed affection for the Burmese army, which her
father, independence hero Aung San, founded. Coming at a time when
Burmese soldiers were bearing down on Laiza, the comment hasn’t pleased
exiled Kachin, who took to social media to criticize her. (Another
target of their ire was a politician from the military-linked Burmese
ruling party who said late last week in parliament that the only way to
achieve peace in Kachin was to essentially wipe out the KIA.)
Suu Kyi’s father, Aung San, was one of the few Bamar to earn the
trust of ethnic groups. He spearheaded the 1947 Panglong Conference, in
which five ethnic groups, including the Kachin, agreed to join the Union
of Burma in exchange for a certain amount of autonomy in a federalized
system. Aung San, however, was assassinated soon after the Panglong
agreement was signed, and civil war quickly descended over a nation that
had only recently wrested itself from the British Empire. His famous
daughter has disappointed some of Burma’s ethnic groups, including the
Rohingya, a stateless Muslim people who now crowd refugee camps in
far-western Arakan state, along the border with Bangladesh. The Kachin
too have long been wary that Suu Kyi’s democratic principles might not
extend to their home in the Himalayan foothills. “She is a Nobel Peace
Prize winner and she should stand up for victims of human-rights abuses
in Kachin,” says Naw La, a Kachin activist and environmental campaigner
who lives in Thailand. “If she doesn’t speak out for oppressed people,
then who else will? I’m surprised and disappointed.”
Meanwhile, Burmese troop reinforcements are reportedly flooding the
hills of Kachin, where the national army over the weekend captured a
strategic pass just outside of Laiza. Town residents are stockpiling
food supplies in case of a final offensive and building makeshift bomb
shelters. Hospitals and Christian pastors are overwhelmed with
casualties and IDPs. In phone calls to Laiza, the boom of mortar fire
echoes on the line. If this is a cease-fire, what might war sound like?
PHOTOS: Burma Unbound: Photos from a Waking Nation by Adam Ferguson
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