(Charmaine Benson Craig’s post from the DISSENT MAGAZINE in Fall 2014.)
Burma’s Fault Lines: Ethnic
Federalism and the Road to Peace. As gross human rights violations against the
country’s ethnic groups continue, can peace and democracy really take hold?
After more than half a century of
war and broken ceasefire agreements, Burma is currently in the midst of
landmark peace talks between its government and a coalition of ethnic
resistance groups.
In July, the Nationwide Ceasefire
Coordination Team (NCCT)—representing sixteen ethnic nationalities including
the Karen, the Kachin, the Mon, the Arakanese, and the Shan—met in Kachin-held
Laiza to discuss the terms of a proposed national ceasefire, under negotiation
with the government since last November.
The ethnic nationalities, of which all but the Kachin and the Ta’ang have already struck bilateral ceasefire agreements with the government, are calling for greater administrative autonomy within a new federal Union of Burma, control over natural resources in their territories, and a guarantee that political dialogue with the government will take place within months of a national ceasefire accord.
The Burmans—historically the
country’s most powerful ethnic group—control the central government, which has
so far avoided addressing the constitutional impediments to federalizing itself
and the military. Instead, the government has pushed to finalize a national
ceasefire agreement in advance of Burma’s elections in 2015, maintaining that
an agreement must be reached before real political dialogue can begin.
But even as the peace talks are
underway, the Burma Army, which looms under the shadow of the government, has
been using the opportunity of ceasefire to reinforce and expand its outposts in
ethnic territories. In Karen-administered areas, the army has put in new roads
for deeper access, built up its stores of weapons, and seized land for
large-scale development and commercial projects, displacing tens of thousands
of villagers.
Although the Burma Army’s major
offensive against the Kachin Independence Army—which began in 2011 and has
displaced more than 100,000 people in Kachin and neighboring Shan
states—officially simmered down with a preliminary ceasefire agreement in May
2013, clashes in these states have been on the rise.
In April alone, 4,000 villagers
were displaced due to attacks by the Burma Army on the China-Burma border, in
areas strategically important to China-backed dam projects. Like the military
incursions and land-grabs in Karen State, such attacks have led to forced
labor, forced recruitment, torture, killings, and rape of women by members of
the Burma Army.
These gross human rights and
ceasefire violations against the country’s ethnic nationalities leave one to
wonder how the current nationwide peace process can legitimately proceed. Just
as disheartening is the Burma Army’s key role in this process. One of the
weightiest subjects NCCT representatives must reckon with is the Burma Army’s
demand that it accept the government’s current constitution, drafted primarily
by the military in 2008.
This constitution calls for an
essentially unitary (rather than federal) state, places all armed forces under
the Burma Army’s central command, designates the head of the army (not the
president) as the country’s commander-in-chief during states of emergency,
guarantees the army’s control over its own budget and grants officers immunity
from civilian prosecution.
It also puts members of the army in
one-quarter of parliament seats while requiring that constitutional change be
passed by a three-quarter parliamentary majority. Understandably, the ethnic
nationalities have been left to wonder whether the Burma Army will ever
relinquish its absolute authority, and what the government intends to offer—if
anything—in the way of political change.
If Burma’s history is in the
making, it is a history that—to some extent—has already been made. And it is a
history that is personal to me: my maternal grandfather, Saw Benson, was a
political prisoner in Burma for fifteen years; my mother, Louisa Benson Craig,
led an “insurgent” brigade following her first husband’s assassination during
peace talks, and went on to lead her own inter-ethnic negotiations, both in
Burma and from the United States.
Burma’s history is not an easy one.
Western scholarly treatments tend toward inaccessibility (and frequent
inaccuracy) in part because the multiplicity of peoples in the country adds a
certain complication, and in part because the record of those peoples has
largely been effaced.
The Karen, among the region’s first
settlers some 3,000 years ago, tell of having their hands cut off by Burman
leaders if writing implements or books were found on their person—an
explanation for the loss of their alphabet, literacy, and written history. Yet
their story is representative of that of other “minority” ethnic nationalities.
For centuries, the Karen were
enslaved and persecuted by Burman rulers—a situation that, from the perspective
of Karens, was resolved with the British conquest of the territories that
formed modern Burma in the 1800s. Viewing the British as liberators, the Karen
fought actively to help them gain and keep control of the region.
The British embraced their loyalty
and staffed two of the four battalions of the regional regiment of the British
army exclusively with Karens. Understandably, this only redoubled Burman
antagonism toward the Karen, despite British favoritism toward the Burmans when
it came to staffing the local administration.
Perhaps as a consequence, the
rising Burman call for independence was race-based, the predominant rallying
cry being “Burma for the Burmans!” By 1920 the British were loosening their
stronghold on the country, which was soon no longer a province of India but a
“ministerial” government under Westminster’s ultimate authority, with a Burman
prime minister, a Burman cabinet, and a legislature dominated by Burman
nationalist parties.
Then came the Second World War and
the emergence of a Burman leader who would turn the pressure of the wars at
large into his people’s domestic opportunity. Father of Nobel laureate,
democracy advocate, and presidential hopeful Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, General Aung
San, originally a law student at Rangoon University, underwent military
training in Japan along with a group of young Burmans who called themselves
“lords” and were collectively known as the “Thirty Comrades.”
He formed the notorious Burma
Independence Army, which fought alongside the Japanese in Burma and often
employed genocidal tactics, targeting Karen civilians and brutally massacring
the inhabitants of hundreds of Karen villages, though not under Aung San’s
purview.
Meanwhile, the Karen fought on
behalf of the British, staging what some have called the Second World War’s
most successful guerilla operation against the Japanese forces. When it became
clear that the Allies were winning the war, Aung San switched his army’s
loyalties. And then, to the shock of most Karens, the British pinned their
hopes on him.
Subsequent negotiations between the
British and Aung San ended with the balance of power in the armed forces
tipping from the Karen to the Burmans. The savvy Burman leader insisted that
his restructured army be undiluted by minority troops; he surely understood
that with his own solidly Burman battalions in the gross majority in the army,
the military and political sway of ethnic groups like the Karens would be
weakened.
Against a backdrop of mass protests
and strikes, Aung San rose as a figurehead for “unity” and democracy.
Meanwhile, Karen leaders reached out to London. They wrote a letter to the
British secretary of state to remind him of how the Burmans had made them
slaves in the past, and of the huge role the Karen had played in the British
army and police forces all along.
They worried that Aung San’s
democracy would be one in which a majority race would be sanctioned to
discriminate against “minorities.” Their perspective was that they weren’t
“minorities”—they were a national group on a given territory that had been their
homeland for millennia (long before it became home to the Burmans).
They worried about the racially
segregated army, many of whose Burman troops had targeted Karen civilians
during the war. And they worried that Aung San’s desire for unity trumped his
respect for diversity and federalism.
In 1946, my grandfather funded a
Karen “goodwill mission” to London to plead the Karen case. Saw Benson wasn’t
Karen by birth, but Sephardic; born in Rangoon, he had taken on a Karen
identity after my grandmother’s people rescued him from capture by the Japanese
during the war. He had every hope that the ministers in Clement Attlee’s Labour
Party—which had won a landslide victory over Winston Churchill’s Conservatives
in 1945—would respond favorably to a reminder of the Karens’ long loyalty and
demand for statehood within the protectorship of the British Commonwealth.
And he was devastated when the
goodwill delegates were rebuffed with the injunction that the Karens should
“throw in [their] lot with the Burmans.” The sting of betrayal only
increased—for him and other ethnic leaders—when only Aung San was invited to meet
with Attlee in London in January of 1947, prompting Churchill to comment: “I
certainly did not expect to see U Aung San, whose hands were dyed with British
blood and loyal Burmese blood”—in particular, Karen, Kachin and Chin
blood—“marching up the steps of Buckingham Palace as the plenipotentiary of the
Burmese Government.”
Perhaps to satisfy the British,
Aung San made significant gestures toward federalism at a conference soon held
at Panglong, in Shan State. But in July he was murdered—coldly gunned down,
with a Burman rival taking the fall. His replacement was another “lord”—U
Nu—who became Burma’s first Prime Minister when the country gained independence
in 1948, and who went on to advance a program of discriminatory policies.
“Burmanization” refers to a
centuries-old, ongoing effort by majority rulers to create a “unified”—or
homogeneous—Burma through policies that reward assimilation and punish the
expression of cultural, linguistic, and religious difference.
(The government’s renaming of the
country in 1989 to Myanmar can be seen as an aggressive act of Burmanization,
as “Myanma[r]” has historically been the Burmans’ elevated, formal word for
their own ethnic group and domain, whereas the Anglicized “Burmese” is an
ethnically inclusive term, referring to all nationals.)
Under U Nu’s helm, the nearly
exclusively Burman ministries proselytized Buddhism in the countryside,
promoted the teaching of history from a perspective of Burman nationalism,
passed acts stripping “foreigners” of entitlements to their property, and mandated
that only Burmese (the Burman language) be used in governmental affairs and
taught in schools from the fourth standard onward. Yet even U Nu professed
concern when a group of Burman veterans descended on Rangoon soon after his
inauguration, chanting, “We want to eat Karen flesh.”
In February 1948 the Karens staged
a peaceful nationwide demonstration of over 400,000 people, expressing their
desire to avoid civil war and calling for an end to violence, equity among all
ethnic groups, and the immediate creation of a Karen state.
Within weeks, a communist party in
the country launched a rebellion, aiming to overthrow the government. Around
the same time, the government called for the disarmament of minority
irregulars, and even allegedly issued a decree, “Operation Aung San,” calling
for “the elimination of the Karens first and then other hill people.”
Acting in solidarity with the
ethnic Mon, Karen leadership approached U Nu, demanding a separate Karen-Mon
state. The government responded by supplying Burman irregulars with weapons
(some 480,000 rounds of ammunition in just a month). Those irregulars proceeded
to fire on Karen neighborhoods unprovoked.
Then, on Christmas Eve in 1948,
while the congregated inhabitants of two Karen villages were singing carols at
midnight, the Burman policemen who had disarmed them launched hand grenades
into their church, fired on the survivors, and torched every last structure.
Hundreds more Karens were murdered
during the first weeks of 1949. Had the time come for armed revolt? Karen
leaders requested a peacemaking meeting with Prime Minister Nu, and a date was
set for January 31, 1949. But on January 30, U Nu named Burma’s future military
dictator Ne Win “Supreme Commander of All Defense Forces and Police Forces.”
That same night shots were fired across my family’s property, where by this
point Karens were stockpiling arms.
With those shots in 1949, the Karen
Revolution—the longest running civil war in recorded history—began. Soon Burma
was in the grips of multiple ongoing revolutions. In May, my grandfather was
thrown into a rat-infested cell, while U Nu met with Karen elders in Thaton and
allegedly told them that he would “personally see that all the Karens in Burma
[were] killed.” Some ten years would pass before U Nu—again serving as prime
minister, and seemingly worn down by the state of affairs—came close to
capitulating to the ethnic demands for federalism.
The irony is that this call for
federalism represented—and continues to represent—a concession for many of the
ethnic nationalities. Though none of the major ethnic groups are actively
pursuing independence today and most support a policy of ethnic federalism—politically
autonomous ethnic states within the Union of Burma—many would prefer to secede
if given a choice. But the government and its army have long viewed even
federalism as undesirable, equating it with the “disintegration” of the
resource-rich nation.
Blaming the deteriorating state of
the country, Commander of the Burma Army General Ne Win overthrew U Nu’s
government in May 1962 in what is often described as a swift and bloodless coup
d’état. Under military rule, Burma was now a one-party state, a ship steered by
Ne Win’s Burma Socialist Program Party, wherein even dissent by Burmans had no
place.
U Nu and his cabinet members were
arrested. Then, over a hundred peacefully protesting students were gunned down
at Rangoon University before others were killed with the dynamiting of the
Student Union Building. Subsequently, opposition politicians were arrested en
masse. Yet, for mysterious reasons, Ne Win’s government soon invited leaders of
various armed resistance groups to engage in peace talks.
My late mother met her first
husband, a Karen brigadier general named Lin Htin, when he was pursuing peace
negotiations with Ne Win’s government in 1963. Talks had already failed for
other groups, and with disastrous results. Ne Win had made a preposterous
condition that the “insurgents” surrender unconditionally, then reneged on the
terms of the agreed-upon ceasefire, according to which the resistance parties
were to be allowed three days to retreat after the failure of the talks before
fighting resumed.
In 1965 Lin Htin was assassinated during his own struggling talks with Ne Win’s people, prompting my mother to reinvent herself as a soldier. She assumed leadership of Lin Htin’s brigade-5 and spent the rest of her days in Burma both liaising with leaders of other ethnic nationalities and convincing Karen leadership to look for support from the West.
The problem was that the
West—namely the United States and Britain—was covertly supportive of Ne Win’s
military counterinsurgency program. According to recently declassified CIA
documents, members of the U.S. State Department were reassured by Ne Win’s coup.
They had feared that U Nu was “losing his grip on the affairs of the nation.”
The United States reasoned (as it likely does now) that a Burma divided by ethnic interests would be more apt to fall under China’s influence. If Burma were to be pulled into the “communist orbit” all of Southeast Asia could do the same, followed by the Middle East, if not Japan and Europe. What was preferable was a country held tightly together in the dictatorial fist of a man who declared himself to be nonaligned in the Cold War.
(One declassified report mentions
Lin Htin and “attempts to get armed insurgents to join in promoting the Burmese
Way to Socialism,” leaving me to wonder whether the United States wasn’t
behind—if not the coup—Ne Win’s early negotiations that left Lin Htin dead.)
For some of these State Department
dignitaries, the peace talks under Ne Win—and their swift failure—clearly
legitimized the dictator’s bloody military measures. Those strong military
measures were eventually formalized in a policy called “Cut Four Cuts,” which
aimed to eliminate the ethnic opposition by cutting off their access to food,
funds, manpower, and information.
In real terms, Cut Four Cuts meant
that ethnic villages were constantly assaulted, ethnic people repeatedly
displaced, ethnic women raped by Burma soldiers, and ethnic children forced to
serve as human porters. Cut Four Cuts—which arguably continues today even in
areas under ceasefire—is synonymous with torture, interrogation, extortion,
forced military recruitment, murder, and other human rights violations.
Yet American support of Ne Win’s
military program persisted until the widely covered 1988 military crackdown, in
which some 10,000 of Burma’s demonstrating civilians were murdered. It was at
this moment that Aung San’s daughter, then living in England and visiting her
ailing mother in Rangoon, began vocally and boldly calling for democracy.
For the next two decades, while the
military regime’s Four Cuts policy destroyed the lives of millions of villagers
across the country, Aung San Suu Kyi lived primarily under house arrest. She
also remained mostly silent about the crucial issue of ethnic subjugation,
disenfranchisement, and discontent.
Her relative silence in this regard
has been at once worrisome and understandable: worrisome because it implicitly
endorses the same “Burma for the Burmans!” orientation that defined her
father’s claim to political authority, and denies the existence and plight of
the “minority” ethnic nationalities; understandable because it panders to the
racism of Burmans, whose political support she needs.
But some argue that Burma’s
“minorities” constitute nearly 50 percent of the country’s population. (The
still undisclosed results of a controversial census taken last spring have many
in the country worried that final tallies will be grossly skewed.) Aung San Suu
Kyi’s reluctance to engage with the ethnic question also suggests an
unwillingness to recognize a common interest with the ethnic nationalities:
their claim to a place in the political landscape relies on an inclusive,
democratic vision of Burma’s future, one in which everyone can enjoy equal
rights.
My mother emigrated to the United
States in the 1960s, and as an expatriate began pushing for inter-ethnic
dialogue in Burma as early as 1988. She organized an ethnic unity seminar in
1997 on the Thailand-Burma border, where the historic inter-ethnic Mae Tha Raw
Hta Agreement was signed by leaders of fifteen armed and unarmed ethnic groups.
With the agreement, the
representatives pledged to strive mutually to “dismantle the military
dictatorship and establish peace in the country,” “practice the democratic
political system,” “achieve the rights of equality and self-determination for
each and every nationality,” and “establish a federal union.”
Yet the repeated efforts of ethnic
groups individually and collectively between 1995 and 2005 to negotiate
ceasefires were met with the government’s refusal to negotiate with more than
one nationality at a time (because, the state argued, each nationality wanted
“different” things). In later talks with the Karen, the government explicitly
stipulated that a condition of peace was the refutation of the inter-ethnic Mae
Tha Raw Hta Agreement. Unsurprisingly, these talks went nowhere.
These divisive policies toward the
ethnic nationalities persisted even after Thein Sein’s assumption of Burma’s
presidency in 2011. Thein Sein, a former Burma Army commander, is responsible
for the release of hundreds of political prisoners and the institution of
reforms such as the loosening of media censorship.
But dozens of political prisoners
are reportedly still being detained, with more than a hundred on or awaiting
trial for their political activities. In July the head of a local newspaper and
four Burmese journalists were sentenced to ten years in prison with hard labor
for alleging that a government factory is producing chemical weapons. Only
recently, after negotiating bilateral ceasefire agreements with most major
ethnic nationalities, has the “post-junta” government been willing to work with
the inter-ethnic ceasefire consortium.
All of these reforms have been met
with praise by the international media and rewarded by the Obama
administration, which has lifted sanctions, renewed diplomatic engagement with
the government, and reportedly recommenced a defense outreach program (the British
Ministry of Defense is already training members of the Burma Army).
The hitch, of course, is that the
bilateral ceasefire agreements in place are bogus. As part of its preliminary
ceasefire agreement with the Karen in 2012, for example, the government’s Peace
Negotiation Team signed a five-point document agreeing to cease carrying arms
except in designated territories, and an eleven-point document agreeing to
address at the union level, among other things: the cessation of forced labor
and military operations in ethnic areas, the full participation and support of
local villagers in development projects, and peaceful solutions to land rights
issues.
But instead of withdrawing, the
Burma Army continues to rotate and resupply its troops, refortify military
outposts, and even increase its now estimated 300 outposts in
Karen-administered areas. In May the organization Karen Human Rights Group
reported that since the 2012 ceasefire agreement, abuse of villagers by members
of the Burma Army has continued.
In some Karen areas, there have
been killings and gang rapes, and forced labor, arbitrary taxation, internal
displacement and confiscation of land for government and commercial projects
are common. Clashes in June between Karen soldiers and invasive Burma Army
troops have only intensified villagers’ distrust of the peace process.
Very recently, Thai and Burma Army
officials agreed to orchestrate the repatriation of around 130,000 largely
Karen refugees who have been living in camps along the Thai-Burma border for
over twenty years.
Whether these refugees will be
safely returned to their villages, and whether they will have adequate access
to food, healthcare, education or economic sustenance remains an open question.
Human Rights Watch has reported that residual landmines also threaten the
safety of repatriated refugees. “We feel the noose closing around our necks,”
one Karen leader recently told me.
It is difficult not to see a
correlation between this lack of media attention and the U.S. government’s
efforts to regain its foothold in the region politically and
economically—vital, according to some experts, to maintaining a balance of
power with China.
Yet there has been precious little
in the American media about either the ceasefire violations or the continued
abuses of the Burma Army. It is difficult not to see a correlation between this
lack of media attention and the U.S. government’s efforts to regain its
foothold in the region politically and economically—vital, according to some
experts, to maintaining a balance of power with China.
While the plight of the Rohingya (a
stateless and persecuted Muslim ethnic nationality of Burma whose citizenship
the government denies) has been covered widely, American media outlets have
failed to make the meaningful link between the discrimination suffered by the
Rohingya and the discrimination against the ethnic nationalities upon which the
political and military structures in Burma are based.
Currently, 125,000 Rohingya have
been internally displaced. What is happening to them (and has been happening
over decades) unquestionably deserves to be covered with care—but not to the
exclusion of reports about the millions of other disenfranchised people across
the country (as of 2012, there were an estimated 650,000 internally displaced
people across Burma).
The focus on this ethnic group by
the American media suggests an unawareness of the depth, reach, and history of
the problem of racism in Burma, and of the shared suffering of Burma’s ethnic
nationalities and their inclusive efforts toward peace.
If anything, American coverage of
news in Burma has sometimes inadvertently sabotaged the efforts of the ethnic
nationalities to defend themselves against the government and the encroachment
of the Burma Army.
A 2012 New York Times article by
Thomas Fuller, for example, called the Karen’s attitude following the
preliminary ceasefire agreement with Thein Sein’s government “defiant,” the
Karen government “a cash-strapped organization with a ragtag army,” and their
position following the reported ceasefire “backpedaling.”
Primitivizing rhetoric aside,
Fuller’s argument misunderstood what was actually happening on the ground for
the Karen, whose leaders had at that point signed an agreement merely to
discuss a ceasefire (not an actual ceasefire agreement, as Thein Sein’s
government reported) and were already facing a violation of those terms.
The charges of backpedaling, along
with the West’s praise of Thein Sein and glee over Burma’s “opening up” to
foreign investment and democracy, has all but kept groups like the Karen from
standing up to the Army’s bullying. It has certainly left them feeling
disenchanted with the West’s commitment to upholding democratic values.
There is a widespread sense that
the Burmese government’s recent willingness to work with an inter-ethnic body
may merely be a tactic intended to legitimize the regime and encourage foreign
commercial investment. Many fear that the West, wittingly or not, is being
blinded by the “good news” of the national peace talks that so far promise
nothing for the ethnic nationalities and nothing for federalism.
It could easily be argued that this
process—which has delayed real political dialogue and is being funded by
seemingly well-meaning international parties—is a hindrance to political
solutions in Burma that would deprive the military of its 25 percent of parliamentary
seats and make other sweeping constitutional changes a reality.
At the very moment the West is
hailing the opening up of Burma, tourism is blooming in Rangoon, Aung San Suu
Kyi’s National League for Democracy is poised to sweep the 2015 parliamentary
elections, and landmark peace negotiations are taking place, those who have
been fighting for Burma’s ethnic peoples are more despondent than ever.
“There will be a time when we can
no longer ignore the atrocities, when our suffering is so great, we must break
the terms of our ceasefires, too—when we must resume fighting, much as the
military is now everywhere in our territory,” I was told by one young woman,
whose family was on the run and in hiding in the jungle for decades.
The involvement of Western powers
and their narrative about Burma are as dangerous to the people of the country
as dictatorship has been, because both can serve as a cover for the continued
persecution of ethnic groups by the Burma Army.
The West needs to exert diplomatic
pressure on the Burmese government and insist that violence against ethnic
groups is immediately addressed, that constitutional reforms allowing
federalism are implemented, and that political dialogue with the various armed
and unarmed ethnic groups be a precondition of nationwide ceasefire and broader
diplomatic and economic engagement.
The West also needs to understand
that ceasefire agreements in Burma have yet to produce peace. Not even a
visionary president working with an inter-ethnic body can make peace if she
doesn’t have authority over the Burma Army. Peace can only emerge from a
willingness to share power, revenue, and resources, and out of respect for
Burma’s rich and diverse cultural heritage—by all of Burma’s peoples, and by
the rest of the world.
(Charmaine Craig is a novelist who studied literature at Harvard and received her MFA from the University of California, Irvine. She is on the faculty in the Department of Creative Writing at UC Riverside, and is finishing her second novel, which is inspired by the life of her mother, once Miss Burma and leader of a Karen army brigade.)
