Myanmar’s ethnic minorities pin hopes on ‘final showdown’
During nearly seven decades the villages of the Karen have been torched, their men summarily executed and their women raped as the ethnic minority battled Myanmar’s military regime in the world’s longest-running insurgency. Their homeland has been called the “hidden Darfur,” where some 350,000 people have been driven from their homes into the jungles or refugee camps in neighbouring Thailand.
Now, many of the survivors are pinning their hopes on a historic election Nov. 8 pitting the militarybacked ruling party against one helmed by pro-democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi and numerous ethnic parties. They fear victory by the military’s United Solidarity and Development Party would plunge Karen state and its 1.5 million people back into a hellhole.
“If the USDP comes into power, we will walk the same path. We will remain beggars. If they lose, the country will change. This is the final showdown,” says Hkun Kyi Myint, an elder of several villages around Hpa-An, the state capital.
Ethnic minorities including the Karen make up about 40 per cent of Myanmar’s 52 million people. For them, the election is more than a step in Myanmar’s uneven path toward democracy. It opens up the possible fulfilment of a longcherished dream.
Shortly after the country, then known as Burma, gained independence from Britain in 1948, the Karen rose against the central government, which then and since has been dominated by the Burman ethnic majority. The country’s first constitution and the 1947 Panglong Agreement, endowed with an almost mythic aura among ethnic people, promised a large measure of self-determination for minorities — even the possibility of secession.
All promises were broken following a 1962 military coup, after which a welter of insurgent groups from the Kachin, Shan, Karen and other minorities rose up in revolt. Myanmar historian and government adviser Thant Myint-U has called this endless, bloody struggle the country’s “original sin.”
“Myanmar will not be able to fulfil its potential, or provide the kind of future its people expect and deserve, without finding a lasting resolution to the ethnic conflicts it faces,” says Tim Johnston, Asia director for the think-tank International Crisis Group.
On Oct. 15, a National Ceasefire Agreement was signed after two years of talks and more than 200 meetings. President Thein Sein, who chairs the USDP, described it as “a historic gift from us to the generations of the future.”
But only eight of the more than 20 armed groups signed it, including the Karen National Union (KNU), the minority’s main insurgency group. Other ceasefires were negotiated in the 1980s and 1990s, only to be violated.
“I hope for the best, but I have only about 10 per cent faith in the ceasefire,” says Mahn Khin Tun, a farmer and community leader near Hpa-An who has fought with the KNU.
Suspicions about the regime’s sincerity were redoubled as its troops battled several insurgent groups while peace talks proceeded.