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In 1993, Rigoberta Menchu visited Karen refugees in a camp in Thailand, their uneasy haven from Burma's strife. Her attention had been drawn to Burma's ongoing human rights crisis by the plight of her fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, who has spent the past five years under house arrest. Ms. Suu Kyi was arrested for defying the SLORC (State Law and Order Restoration Council), the ruling junta that brutally suppressed a pro-democracy uprising in Burma, in 1988.
Before the 1988 uprising, Burma had been considered a "tranquil," peaceful country, a Buddhist backwater lost in time. Ruled by the xenophobic dictator General Ne Win since 1962, Burma has been isolated from events elsewhere in the region, although it is the southeast Asian mainland's largest country, has a population of around 43 million, and is bordered by Thailand, China, Laos, Tibet, India and Bangladesh. In reality, Burma has not been very peaceful for a very long time. Conflicts with several indigenous peoples have been unresolved since World War II and have resulted in warfare that has last for almost fifty years.
Following great river valleys, a variety of peoplesdescending mainly from Mon-Khmer, Tibeto-Burman, and Sino-Tai cultural lineagesemerged during the ancient past in the land now known as Burma. Civilizations founded by the Mons, the Shans, the Burmans, and the Rakhines, rose and fell in those valleys. They were all colonized by Great Britain in the late 19th century. Other indigenous peoples, including the Karens, Karennis, Chins, and Kachins, ruled the mountainous frontier areas and negotiated protectorate status with the British colonists.
When Japanese imperial forces invaded Burma in World War II, most of the country's most numerous nationthe Burmanssided with Japan, as a strategy to evict the British. The Burmans, who dominated the rice-growing central plains, resented British economic exploitation. However, the Karens and Kachins of the frontiers, enjoyed considerable autonomy and a more amicable relationship with the British, and they took the opposing side, providing valued guerrilla fighters for the Allies during the war. The war raged from village to village throughout Burma, devastating what had been Southeast Asia's richest country. At the war's end, Japanese, British and American forces left, and Burma was granted independence, but hostility from wartime conflict between the Burmans and other peoples remained unresolved.
In February 1947, General Aung San (Aung San Suu Kyi's father), a Burman who had led the anti-colonial movement, took steps to end the conflict that had by then become understood as "domestic" within a unified Burma. He met with representatives of the largest other nations, the Shans and the Karens, and together they produced the Panglong Agreement. The document established a loose federal structure for Burma, with a guaranteed right of secession within ten years, if the peoples of the "ethnic states" (the states of Shan, Chin, Kachin, etc.) were unhappy with the Union of Burma. Most indigenous leaders placed their trust in Aung San, but he was assassinated in a never fully-revealed political plot, later in 1947. His legacy today includes the sensitivity of his daughter, Aung San Suu Kyi, to the goals of the indigenous nations.
After Aung San's assassination, U Nu became Burma's prime minister. His government started out by promoting a high standard of civil rights, with some land reform. However, distrust of the predominantly Burman government and mistreatment by the military led Karen leaders to revolt early in 1949. They were soon followed by communist groups who felt that U Nu's post-colonial economic reforms were not going far enough. Meanwhile, other indigenous nations, including the Mons, took up arms against the government's army. The rebellion hit its high tide that year and closed in on Burma's capital, Rangoon. Government forces, led by Japanese-trained General Ne Win, then pushed the rebels back into the mountainous frontier areas. In 1962, when it seemed that U Nu was about to make major concessions of increased autonomy for the indigenous nations such as the Shans, Ne Win staged a coup d'etat, vowing to enforce total national unity.
Ne Win's ideology was "the Burmese Way to Socialism," the establishment of a planned economy under the direct control of the military, a design promoted in Buddhist-sounding terms as the path to a "morally better" nation. The state would control all aspects of life, but it would be for spiritual betterment, not just Marxist material ideals. A sweeping wave of nationalization of industry, small business and agriculture followed, along with the expulsion of foreigners and "alien" ethnic people, including tens of thousands of Indian descent.
The separate state administrations were abolished, and all areas, including the "ethnic states," were placed under military control. Even cultural autonomy became limited for the various indigenous nations; their literature was suppressed, and education in the frontier areas was neglected. Insurgency increased under these pressures; the Shans and Kachins raised rebel forces, which Ne Win's troops attacked ruthlessly. Government attacks on indigenous civilians sent more and more recruits to the various "ethnic" armies to fight for outright independence from central Burma.
The rebel forces included the Karen, Pa-O, Karenni, Kayan, Kachin, Mon, Shan, Rohingya, Rakhine, Chin, Lahu, Wa, and Palaung. The Communist Party of Burma (CPB) was based mainly in the northeast and had predominantly Burman and ethnic Chinese leadership and troops primarily of the Wa nation. The various rebel groups began to achieve some unity during the 1970s. Several non-communist forces formed the National Democratic Front (NDF) in 1975, and it conducted some coordinated operations. The communist rebels were powerful in the opium-growing region along the Chinese border, until their troops mutinied in 1989 and they were transformed into government militias. An ex-CPB cadre, Lin Mingxian, who is now the head of a government militia in the Wa region, is thought to be the predominant figure in Burma's opium/heroin trade.
Fourth World Bulletin • July 1994
Copyright © 1996 by the Fourth World Center
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