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Shadip Jahpang
From: Put Ti <bungsh...@gmail.com>
Date: 2012/4/9
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Date: 2012/4/9
Subject: ကခ်င္ကိုုေထာင္းဖိုု႕ ကရင္ကိုုအခ်ဳိသပ္ေနျခင္း
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What Really Explains Thein Sein Regime’s Current Pursuit of ‘Ceasefire’ with the Karens while Killing the Kachins
by Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service
What is motivating Naypyidaw regime to establish ceasefire with the Karen National Union while waging wars against the Kachin Independence Organization – rather than a comprehensive national and ethnic reconciliation with – is the most crucial question that needs to be raised?
Here is a short list of factors that are at work, according to my friends and colleagues who are on the ground:
1). local commercial interests organically tied to or a part of the regime (cronies and generals’ and ex-generals’ families) want to secure lion’s share of the spoils during the initial phase of free-marketising the country when there is no effective international competition as yet – because big time Western investors are not yet putting the money on the table for fear of huge initial risks in Burma.
No one powerful enough from the powerful Ministry of Defense or the omnipotent National Defense and Security Council is involved in any of the ceasefire – only ministers from the line-ministries which are poised to gain commercial shares/interests (such as railway, electricity, energy, etc) if effective ceasefire holds. Here are some hidden facts: the Thai commercial interests, starting with Thaksin’s Foreign Minister Suriakat (spelling?) have been known to take a keen interest in building an Asia rail link (from Thailand to India through Burma’s Karen-controlled areas). The Tavoy or Dawei Special Economic Zone projects – considered one of the world’s largest construction projects – involving the Italian-Thai Company – is in part located in the Karen-controlled strip of Tenasserim coastal region.
No wonder then that the financial underwriters of all the ceasefire talks are Burmese businessmen. Of course, local Capital never acts alone.
Some German foundations which serve as the front groups for German business interests have been active behind the scenes.
Don’t forget West German companies have, both historically and contemporaneously, had no morals, qualms, or principles about supplying arms and dual-use technical hardware, setting up arms factories, mining, oil exploration, etc. during the half-century of Burma’s dictatorial regimes, starting with Ne Win’s Neanderthal regime in 1962 to Than Shwe’s monk-slaughtering SPDC. The Germans have a head start as they have identified, teamed up and supported Free Market-minded local commercial interests such as Myanmar Egress.
The German interests may behave rather crass and crude. Tory or Labor, the British, the largest “donor”, are not so far behind their EU rivals either; they have created a network of several dozen strategically placed local proxies using a 3-months program called “Chevening Fellowship” who will do Britain’s bidding in the former colony.
Former British Ambassador Vicky Bowman in Rangoon is now 2nd in command of External Affairs (international lobby and public relations) at Rio Tinto, the world’s 3rd largest and notorious mining company where the Brits are majority shareholders.
The Burmese have an expression for things similar to “development and other types of foreign aid from the West (or the East)”: you throw crumbs when chunks are to be gained by doing so (Htaung Myin Yar Swant). “Development” in Burma is in effect what Marx called “primitive accumulation” -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vTS9T81b0o
2). So, the regime offers ceasefire and talk of “codes of conduct” of its troops and the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) to be followed by “development”.
Note “development” is THE CODE word for the commercialization of expendable agricultural land (among other things) most of which, according to a recent survey by the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization, are located in non-Bama ethnic regions as the Delta and the Dry Zone, the historically profitable agri-land, have far less expendable commercially exploitable land;
3). the regime’s typical “divide and conquer” strategy which makes them pursue peace (e.g., KNU) with one group while attempting to decimate another (for instance, the KIA/KIO).
The regime is ‘managing’ ethnic conflicts, for strategic and tactical reasons. The resolution of Burma’s armed ethnic conflicts does in fact require a comprehensive nation-wide truth and reconciliation plan. At the moment, despite the right-sounding noises coming from Naypyidaw and its circle of advisers about a peace conference in Burma this is not the idea that will likely be turned into a reality by the ex-generals and generals. (Remember how the regime misled and manipulated the international media by claiming to have resolved the 6-decades of ethnic armed conflict with the world’s oldest revolutionary group, namely the Karen National Union, while it was only a tentative ceasefire? Even the New York Times felt compelled to later publish a separate article which refuted the regime’s claim of having ended this longest war in Burma).
4). ceasefire without a political settlement is profitable in the short and medium terms for those with huge commercial stakes in the region; but genuine peace and reconciliation require sharing power (and control of resources, revenues and labor/population) among parties in conflict.
Obviously, the Burmese generals and ex-generals have outsourced the business of “strategic peace” to its commercial elements – Burmese commercial interests.
Investors from Norway,
Germany, etc. are licking their lips while the locals do the foreplay
with the ethnic virgin lands (and untapped resources).
_______________________
Dr. Maung Zarni is member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment, founder and director of the Free Burma Coalition (1995-2004), and a visiting fellow (2011-13) at the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit, Department of International Development, London School of Economics. His forthcoming book on Burma will be published by Yale University Press.
In Northern Myanmar, Kachin Refugees Are Victims of the New Asia
APF Fellow
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- Updated on Fri, 2012-04-06 12:32
LAIZA, Myanmar—Jangma Pri Seng was in the paddy fields, harvesting rice far from her house, when she heard the artillery shells exploding in the distance. Though her stomach always sunk at the sound of explosions, at first she didn’t panic. It was November 2011, five months since the Burmese army had broken a 17-year-old ceasefire agreement with the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) and invaded Kachin State, the jagged northern tip of Myanmar that is home to ethnic Kachin like Jangma. For five months, the residents of Nangkyu, Jangma’s village, had been listening to explosions in the hills as the KIO fought desperately to keep the army out of its territory. Several times they had fled into the jungle as the fighting neared, but always Nangkyu had been left alone. Still, as the only Kachin village in an area dominated by ethnic Shan villages, they knew they were a target. The Burmese authorities, convinced the village was harboring KIO soldiers, had ordered them not to leave the village without permission, and had made a list of all members of the village. No outsiders were allowed to enter. One man caught on the road between villages was arrested and beaten. It was a grim way to live, but as long as they obeyed, they survived.
Yet that November evening, when Jangma and her fellow villagers returned exhausted from the fields, they walked into a nightmare. More than twenty artillery shells had struck Nangkyu. Many houses were burning or obliterated. The oldest and youngest citizens of Nangkyu were hiding terrified in the remaining houses. Jangma found her four young children, who were unharmed. Miraculously, no one in the village had been killed, but the animals had not been so lucky. A pigsty had been ripped apart by a direct hit, scattering pig remains across the smoking ground. And the army was very near.
Jangma and the rest of the villagers immediately grabbed whatever things they could carry and ran into the jungle. They had heard what had happened to other villages that didn’t. “If we had stayed any longer, we’d be dead now,” she says. They hid in the jungle for the next three days, trying to figure out what to do. “It was terrifying. Most people hadn’t brought anything but the clothes they were wearing. We didn’t have enough food. And we could hear troops everywhere. We couldn’t make a sound. We couldn’t even let the kids cry.” Eventually, they made some calls on cell phones to relatives and some friendly Shan neighbors, and a motor-scooter convoy came to the rescue, slipping around the army positions. They loaded three to four people on each scooter. Jangma helped her 108-year-old grandmother onto a scooter with another villager behind her, holding her tight. In that position, they made the tortuous eight-hour journey over rutted dirt roads to Laiza, capital of the KIO, where they finally collapsed in one of the bursting refugee camps filling the Laiza countryside.
A UNIQUE CULTURE CAUGHT BETWEEN MYANMAR AND CHINA
Walk through any of the refugee camps in KIO territory, and you will find endless stories like Jangma’s. For nearly a year now, Myanmar’s notorious military, which has kept a stranglehold on its citizens since it seized power in a 1962 coup, has been trying to squeeze the life out of the KIO, which has controlled much of Kachin State during those same 50 years.
Though unrecognized by any nation, the KIO has functioned as an independent micro-state. It collects taxes and generates additional income through government-owned mining and logging businesses. It operates immigration departments, police departments, fire departments, drug treatment centers, hydropower plants, bottled-water plants, free schools, free hospitals, Kachin cultural programs, and, of course, the Kachin Independence Army (KIA).
It has been a lifeline for the Kachin people, who originated in the mountains of Tibet, before migrating centuries ago across the border to Northeast India and eventually occupying the rugged borderlands between India, Myanmar, and China. Despite the lines on the map, the two million Kachin of the region are united by their unique language, religion, and culture. That culture was allowed to flourish in Kachin State, the northernmost region of Myanmar, where the terrain was so rugged and difficult to cultivate that it held no interest for the Burmese, who live in the fertile tropical river plains of southern Myanmar.
Yet now, even as Myanmar opens up to the world and tries to parlay its democratization into an easing of international sanctions and an increase in financial support, it has decided to exterminate the KIO and take brutal control over Kachin State. The timing seems strange, until one understands that Kachin State has transformed from worthless backwater to one of the key geopolitical spots on the planet. The Burmese regime plans to fuel its metamorphosis into a Southeast Asian powerhouse with a series of highways, oil and gas pipelines, and some of the largest hydroelectric dams the world has ever seen, all built in Kachin State. When completed, they will link landlocked sections of India and China with Myanmar’s ports on the Bay of Bengal, and create a new energy-rich nexus for the New Asia, centered right in northern Myanmar. The only thing standing in the way is the Kachin people.
Across Kachin State, villages like Nangkyu are being emptied as the KIA is driven back to its core territory, a 100-mile strip of land along the border with China. As the NGO Human Rights Watch documented in a March 20 report, the army has murdered civilians, tortured men suspected of being KIA members, and raped women. It has ransacked churches, burned entire villages to the ground, killed livestock, and pillaged food supplies. With resupply routes along Myanmar’s crumbling roads difficult at best, the 146 Burmese battalions in the region must feed themselves. It’s no coincidence that the wave of attacks intensified right around harvest time in November. And then there is the most insidious part of the army’s plan: What better way to paralyze your enemy than by sending wave after wave of its own people, hungry and penniless, onto its doorstep?
Of the 75,000 refugees, mostly Kachin, who have fled the Burmese army since its June invasion, about 40,000 are sheltering in KIO-operated camps. Another 20,000 are living in camps run by the government. The other 15,000 are off the map, likely hiding somewhere in China. Other than two minor exceptions, the government has prevented United Nations relief convoys from reaching the refugees in KIO territory. Some speculate that this is because the government fears the KIO being seen as a caretaker of the refugees, rather than the “insurgents” it labels them. Others believe that the goal is to stress the KIO’s limited resources to the breaking point.
CAMP LIFE
For all the trauma suffered by its residents, Je Yang Camp, the largest of the refugee camps, is a surprisingly pleasant place. 5,764 people, about half under the age of sixteen, live along the banks of the Je Yang River in peace and security, if not exactly comfort. This is a testament to the KIO, which has been anticipating a Burmese offensive for years. A refugee committee was already in place, emergency supplies stockpiled, and land for the main camp had already been chosen, so when the refugees began pouring out of the jungle into Laiza last summer, they were ready.
The KIO had previously donated a large tract of land along the Je Yang River to the Roman Catholic Church to be a wildlife sanctuary—badly needed in this state, whose fabulous hardwood forests are being cut and shipped to supply China’s building boom. Now the church turned around and donated the land back to the KIO, which went to work building bamboo huts, outhouses, and wells. When the first refugees arrived on June 27, two weeks after the fighting had started, they were assigned huts and broken up into village blocks, delineated by a grid of dirt footpaths. Block leaders were chosen. People volunteered for administrative, health, and religious committees. The new people began building huts for the next arrivals.
Today, Je Yang Camp is a case study in how order can arise from chaos, a living embodiment of the Gilligan’s Island fantasy that an entire society can be built if you have enough bamboo. There are bamboo houses, restaurants, marketplaces, clinics, schools, administrative centers, and weaving centers. There is bamboo furniture and bamboo pigsties. The bamboo Baptist church holds 600 people. Now there is also a concrete stage, a concrete well, and a concrete micro-hydro installation in the river that generates enough power to light the Christmas lights in the church and to power a handful of computers. Acres of gardens line a terraced hillside. Gaggles of boys splash in the river all day.
Jangma Pri Seng spends her days cooking food, cleaning their shack, which, like most shakcs in the camp, houses three families, each squeezed into a ten-foot square room, and caring for her four children and her grandmother, Lazing Lu, who is an unexpected source of comic relief. “DID YOU LIKE RIDING ON THE SCOOTER?” Jangma shouts in the deaf woman’s ear.
“I don’t remember,” she responds. “Was that the thing with all the shaking?”
“DO YOU WANT TO GO BACK TO OUR VILLAGE?”
“No! I can’t walk that far.”
“DO YOU LIKE IT HERE IN THE CAMP?”
“I have nothing to do,” the old woman responds, pausing with perfect timing before breaking into a toothless grin. “It’s so relaxing!”
Part of the reason the camp is so peaceful, says camp director Hting Nam Ja, is because drugs and alcohol are banned. The main evening entertainment is at the churches, which hold a service every night. And every night, people pack into them, sing a few hymns in the Kachin language, and then 5,764 people settle down for an amazingly early and quiet night.
Yet the pleasantness is misleading, says Hting. Just around the corner are the monsoons, the endless rains and winds that last all summer. “What we have won’t survive the rainy season,” he says. The blue tarps tacked to roofs with bamboo strips will be shredded by the winds. “We need corrugated tin. But most of all, we need food and medicine. We have plenty of rice that people have donated, but we have almost no protein. Soon, there will be malnutrition. And when the rains come, so do the waterborne infectious diseases.” The charming, dusty footpaths will become mudpits. The firewood will smolder. And, over everything, looms the constant threat of the Burmese. “Yes, I worry that the army will come,” says Hting. “But there’s nothing I can do about it.”
The refugees also have little choice. They know that, if the army comes, there will be nowhere to run this time. Even if there is a ceasefire, they couldn’t easily return to their villages; having missed the harvest and lost their livestock, they would have no food. Many of them from outlying villages, having been harassed by Burmese soldiers for years, have begun to savor the safety and freedom of living in KIO territory. A few have begun murmuring that—if the KIO survives—it would be nice to see Je Yang take that final step and transform into a permanent town.
Jangma, too, has no illusions about returning to her village anytime soon. “I have no idea how long we’ll stay,” she says, fighting back tears. “I miss my home, I miss being self-sufficient, and I really miss my animals. It’s not perfect here. But we’re out of the rain, we’re not starving, and we’re safe. That’s such a relief. For so long, I had to worry all the time.” When asked if she’d like to send a message to the outside world, she pauses, trying to think of something good, then finally gives up with a shake of her head. “Just have pity on us,” she says.
Lifting sanctions on Burma’s regime would be a mistake
By Tom Andrews,
The writer, a former U.S. representative from Maine, is president of United to End Genocide.
Last Sunday international election monitors and media outlets reported a remarkable event in Burma. Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi — who spent years under house arrest, and sometimes in prison, fighting for democracy and justice — was elected to parliament. All week, calls have grown for all economic sanctions and international pressure on the Burmese regime to be lifted.
Heeding these calls would be a serious mistake.
I and a colleague spent election day in Kachin state, in the northernmost part of Burma, also known as Myanmar. Bullets, not ballots, are the currency there. International observers and reporters are not welcome. After crossing the border from China under the cloak of darkness, and making our way over bone-crushing roads, we saw why.
Tens of thousands of Kachins, a long-repressed ethnic minority, have been forced from their homes into crowded makeshift camps as more and more Burmese troops march into an area rich in natural resources. Despite President Thein Sein’s promise to pull back the military in December, the opposite is happening in Kachin, where the escalation of troops, weapons and brutality continues unabated.
I met several dozen Kachin who had just escaped from their village, leaving behind their homes, crops and livestock. Some had walked for four days with only enough food for their children, carrying all that remained of their belongings on their backs.
They fled to makeshift camps that lack adequate food, sanitation and health care. We saw children with obvious respiratory illness and skin disease. The government’s unwillingness to allow food or humanitarian aid into these areas recently gave way to international pressure. We saw five United Nations trucks delivering food. Still, relief workers told us it was only a small fraction of what was needed. A child coming down with what would otherwise be a highly treatable illness can die under these conditions. We attended the funeral of one such child — an 11-month-old who died after contracting diarrhea. The family asked that we stay as honored guests so that we, and the outside world, would know.
A farmer described being apprehended when he, his wife and father-in-law were harvesting corn. They were forced to carry the corn to a military encampment but attempted to escape. His wife was caught and he has not seen her since. A Baptist minister, father of seven, was apprehended after he tried to sneak back to his village. His wife, speaking with a toddler afoot and an infant on her back, sobbed as she said she had no idea what had become of him.
We made our way to an outpost of Kachin Independence Army soldiers, just beyond the range of the Burmese military’s mortars. If we went further, we were told, our car would almost certainly become a target. As we spoke a pickup truck appeared carrying two elderly women. They had abandoned their homes and village that morning. Their crops had been destroyed, they told us, and their cattle killed. They escaped carrying what they could on their backs.
Without question, Aung San Suu Kyi’s election to the Burmese parliament is a remarkable achievement. But what I have seen this week reminds me that it is only part of the story. The other part, hidden in the mountains and valleys of Kachin state and in villages of other ethnic minorities, is vastly different. It is one that Burma’s military-dominated government does not want you to see.
It is reasonable for the United States and the international community to recognize what progress has been made in Burma with measured, prudent (and reversible) rewards. But relaxing all sanctions and international pressure on this regime would be a serious mistake.
Progress did not occur in Burma because military leaders suddenly realized that they had erred. It came about precisely because of international pressure. To remove this pressure at a time when the Burmese government escalates its brutality against a long-suffering people would be unconscionable and should be unacceptable to the United States.
The Obama administration and
Congress should recognize the progress in Burma. But they should not do
so by condemning tens of thousands of innocent people to the mercy of a
military government entirely freed from the pressure of sanctions.
Laja Yang myen hpyen ni hprawng mat
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- Published on Saturday, 07 April 2012 16:34
Wunpawng Mungdan Shanglawt Hpyen Dap KIA ni Zin lum lam, Manmaw lam ni hta shara la nga ai re majaw Laja Yang Myen hpyen dap de malu masha ni n lu htaw sa mat ai grai na sai re majaw 2012.4.6 ya shana hta Laja Yang Myen hpyen dap ni malu masha hkyet mat nna hprawng mat sai lam chye lu ai.
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F-R-I-E-N-D,
F- Few,
R- Relations,
I - In,
E - Earth,
N - Never,
D- Die,
''''God Is Love'''''