ethnic
Kayin State’s Fragile Peace Myanmar’s recent reforms have many Kayin people trying to navigate their way through rumors and a range of isues, from leadership divisions to citizenship and land rights By PHIL THORNTON
P
’da Myah raises a sun-bronzed arm and points across a never-ending blanket of green rice fields that disappear into the distant horizon and Myanmar beyond. The faint smudge that makes up the Dawna Range mountains stands flat against a sky sliding into night. P’da Myah is at times excited, nervous and sad as he speaks about being resettled to Australia from the Thailand-Myanmar border. “I’ve spent seven years in displaced hiding sites and then 10 years at Mae La Refugee Camp with my family,” he said. “My mum died in the camp—in 2007 she passed away. Mum never knew peace in her lifetime—17 years without a real home for us is enough. I will leave for Melbourne in four days.” P’da Myah has mixed feelings about resettling in a third country. The 30-year-old is caught between wanting to stay and help build peace in his beloved Kayin homeland and leaving to build a stable and secure future for his young family. “I’ve always wanted to live in peace in my country—that’s always been my dream—but I have never known freedom. I don’t want to lose any more time; I want to learn, get new skills and hopefully come back here one day.” P’da Myah can be forgiven for losing patience. The Karen National Union (KNU), one of Myanmar’s biggest ethnic armed groups, has been fighting the central government for greater autonomy in Kayin State for 63 years. The group first signed a peace
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TheIrrawaddy
agreement with President Thein Sein’s reformist administration on January 12, although the ceasefire remains precarious and the consequences of more than half-a-century of bloody insurgency plain to see. The Thai Burma Border Consortium (TBBC), a humanitarian group which works with both internally displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees, estimates that militarization in southeast Myanmar has displaced as many as 450,000 local villagers, with around 145,000 people living in nine refugee camps just over the border in Thailand. The TBBC and partner agencies have “documented the destruction, forced relocation or abandonment of more than 3,700 civilian settlements in Southeast Myanmar since 1996, including 105 villages and hiding sites between August 2010 and July 2011,” according to a statement on the group’s website. Like P’da Myah, Kayin journalist Saw Wei Thoo fled his home in the late 1990s after attacks on his village by government troops and has spent more than 10 of his 27 years in Umpiem Mai Refugee Camp located 95 miles (152 km) south of Mae La. “I have never known peace, and my father has never known peace,” he said. “My country has never had the benefits of the stability that peace brings. My village of 5,000 people has no electricity—that means we have no refrigeration for medicine or food. The roads in and out of my village are unusable in the wet season.” The KNU was Burma’s first ethnic
December 2012