BURMA: Karens Isolated but Fight for Autonomy Stays

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Feb 2 2006 (IPS) - An anniversary marked along the remote Thai-Burmese border should offer little comfort to rebel groups who settle for the long haul to achieve their political ends. They are ignored by the international community and only appear as a blip on the world media’s radar.

But one of Burma’s oldest ethnic rebel groups, the Karen National Union (KNU), does not expect the kind of attention Indonesia’s rebels GAM (Free Aceh Movement) has enjoyed in recent months or, for that matter, Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tiger militants.

KNU leaders revealed during the ceremonies, Tuesday, that they are determined to stay the course mainly because Rangoon’s military regime has offered little alternative. ”Surrender is out of the question for us,” Mahn Sha Lah Phan, general secretary of the KNU, told IPS after the insurgents marked 57 years since they began waging a battle with the Burmese government to gain political freedom for the country’s Karen ethnic community.

Yet, the KNU has not ruled out a political dialogue with the Burmese junta, known formally as the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC). ”We are ready for a meaningful political dialogue with the SPDC but they are not interested now,” says Mahn Sha Lah Phan.

What the KNU seeks for the Karens, who number an estimated seven million in a country that has a 50.5 million-strong population, is political autonomy in the region they call home, along Burma’s eastern border. ”We want national equality for the Karens and the right to self-determination,” he adds. ”That can happen within a federation of states in Burma. We are not for separation or trying to divide the country.”

The KNU’s position stands in stark contrast to that of 17 other ethnic rebel groups that signed ceasefire agreements with Rangoon since the mid-1990s. Rebel groups from Burma’s Shan and Karenni communiies are among other groups still holding out.

This week’s decision by the Burmese government to adjourn a round of talks to shape the country’s new national constitution could not have been better timed, proving that the KNU and other two rebel groups may have been right all along to avoid kowtowing to Burma’s generals.

”Ceasefire agreements have not led to peace agreements, fundamental reform of the political structure or economic development in the areas the 17 ethnic ceasefire groups come from,” Debbie Stothard, of the regional rights lobby Alternative ASEAN Network on Burma (ALTSEAN), said in an interview. ”The SPDC has gained more control at the expense of the rebel groups.”

The National Convention to draft the new constitution was supposed to take up this case, but this political process billed by the junta as a ”roadmap to democracy”, is showing little willingness to listen to the political demands of the ceasefire groups..

”The convening committee of the convention appointed by the SPDC has already rejected the proposals made last year by the ethnic groups,” says Stothard. ”What is worse is that human rights violations by the (Burmese) army have not stopped in the ceasefire areas.”

Among the seven demands made by the ethnic groups during the February-March 2005 session of the National Convention was for Burma to have a federal and state-level political structure, with separate constitutions, legislative bodies and separate referenda to gain the people’s approval.

The battle Burma’s ethnic communities are waging with the country’s junta has often been overshadowed by the other political tussle that has grabbed international attention – Rangoon’s suppression of the country’s pro-democracy party, the National League for Democracy, led by Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.

Yet, when it comes to human rights violations, the military generals do not discriminate, treating with equal vengeance political activists of the majority Burmese community who form the NLD as they do with activists from the ethnic communities.

But in other forms of abuse, the ethnic communities have been singled out, according to a slew of reports from human rights monitors. They have included rapes, forced labour, forced relocation and indiscriminate attacks on villages.

The junta, however, has denied such charges. It has also gone on record to assert that the military’s rule since a 1962 coup has held this South-east Asian country together.

Burma has over 130 ethnic communities, with the largest among them being the Chin, Kachin, Karen, Karenni, Mon, Rakhine and Shan who populate regions mostly along the country’s borders.

On the eve of Burma gaining independence from the British in 1948, an agreement ensuring equality among all ethnic groups and the Burman majority was reached. But the promises of that document, the Panglong Accord, were never implemented.