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Naw Mu (Human rights)
In May 2020, two soldiers of the Burmese Army walked into Poe La Hta village and shot Naw Mu Naw, a Karen woman, three times in the face, killing her. Stationed at a local army post, the soldiers were alleged to have stolen her jewellery and promptly fled the scene. These army posts have long been a concern to Karen villagers for their close proximity to villages. The murder resulted in a large protest of over four thousand people, with the demonstrators demanding accountability for the killing of civilians with impunity. Since 2011, when a supposed civilian government was elected in Burma, there have been reports of a 272% increase in attacks that target civilians and a 180% increase in the military budget[i].
This is part of a larger story of persecution and displacement that goes back at least 60 years, where the Burmese Army has fought a sustained war against ethnic minority populations in Burma, the Karen being one of them. This unresolved conflict continues to impact everyday life, resulting in widespread fear, killings, rape, destruction of land and villages, and extortion. These events have led to displacement, forced relocation and refugee flows across Burma’s borders.
Resistance to these atrocities continues. In August 2020, nearly three thousand Karen people in Burma used World Indigenous Day to protest the Burmese military destruction of Karen people and lands. The list of demands included the withdrawal of Burmese army camps from Karen territory, the cessation of murder of civilians, and the preservation of Indigenous land and knowledge. The protests were shared extensively through social media networks in the borderlands and across the globe. [ii] Such visible protests are unusual in Burma and have traditionally led to brutal Burmese Army retaliation. Despite the actuality of state violence, it is important to see these protestors not as victims but as politically active citizens.
Activism and allies
In 2005, Mort, a community trainer for a local grassroots organisation, asked me to present at a community organising training he was running. The training took place in a house outside the border town of Mae Sot where I was conducting fieldwork. The house was cheap, big and safe. They moved there after the previous house had been raided by Thai police multiple times. This was a common occurrence in Mae Sot. Situated about half-way up the Thai-Burma border, Mae Sot has long been a hub for Burma’s political opposition movements and varied dissidents, meaning that a large contingency of Thai military and police personnel were a visible enforcement presence in the town. Mort would train them in community organising techniques, leadership and public speaking tools, and conceptual and practical understandings of peace, conflict and human rights. After the training, attendees would go back inside Burma to their communities and deliver the training more widely. These training sessions had long-term goals and represent a commitment to both relationship and resistance building.
While the training’s foundations were guided by a grassroots, localised, non-violent paradigm, a core component was to place the persecution and displacement of Karen people in the larger global context of human rights violations. In this view, human rights abuses were a structural manifestation of power inequities. While these trainings used scaffolding familiar in the global human rights frameworks, they were largely devised and delivered by locals with the aim of meeting the needs of local communities. In other words, they were performed through a loop of “design, implement, revise”, and were driven by community feedback.
Revolution
When we met during my subsequent fieldwork in 2008, Ehna told me that he had written something[iii]. The text was partly based on an old fable present in both Western and Burmese cultures; the story of the mule and the donkey. A man packs his donkey and mule for a trip. After they have been traveling for a while, the donkey becomes weak and the owner asks the mule to carry some of the donkey’s load. The mule refuses. Finally, the donkey dies from exhaustion and the mule now has to carry his own and the donkey’s packs. The mule realises that because he refused to help the donkey, he now faces a greater burden alone.
Ehna is a Karen journalist with a keen interest in Karen politics. He told me this story because he had plans for a new revolution. He thought things needed to change in the Karen political movement; he needed to persuade the mule (Karen leadership) to take some of the donkey’s (Karen people) load, to change course to alleviate the suffering. There was a list: building ‘a new generation of political leaders’; if ‘an organisation doesn’t change it becomes idle’; leaders need to ‘see unity in diverse viewpoints, which become a strength when working together’; it is important for organisations ‘to evaluate themselves and improve the way they work’. Responses to his writing were divided: one group was supportive while another held that this type of criticism only caused disunity in the political movement. But Ehna was determined. He believed in the organisation that he had dedicated his life too, and that in turn has dedicated itself to the freedom of the Karen people.
Ehna tells me this story in a nondescript house 60 years after the Karen National Union (KNU) first took up resistance against the then newly-independent central Burmese government. In a conflict as long as the one the KNU has been fighting, some adaptation to the various phases of the revolution is to be expected. Ehna’s concern is that they have been stuck in singular approach for some time, and that radical change is now necessary.
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In retrospect, Ehna’s concerns back in 2008 were justified. The KNU have, through their military arm (the KNLA), long pursued a form of guerrilla warfare, but they have also negotiated ceasefires. Such events can be game changers, signalling a cessation of military operations, a reprieve for the civilian population most at risk, and an invitation to pursue diplomacy. The KNU has negotiated four of them over the years, beginning in 1997, but the Burmese government has almost always used them as temporary truces. It then resumes business as usual, meaning that a return to military operations and their accompanying human rights abuses against Karen civilians. The current, and supposedly active ceasefire which was negotiated in 2015 is breached regularly in horrifying ways, with Naw Mu Naw being one of many examples.
A well-funded global human rights apparatus has dominated how Karen persecution and displacement has been framed, articulated, and responded to, often in both liberating and oppressive ways that work to reinforce existing inequities (Brooten 2004). Too often, these discourses follow a path that is disempowering – the Karen are ‘victims’ of human rights abuses and are in need of assistance. Their political agency, and indeed their political struggle are rendered mute in such discourses, exposing fault lines in the human rights apparatus: in operationalising protection of the vulnerable, the apparatus entrenches them as apolitical victims.
Yet, in the Thai-Burma borderlands, social movements and armed resistance that have been evident over many decades and are often emboldened and guided by Western human rights frameworks. Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink (1998) foreground how global human rights norms and frameworks can be applied in both transnational and local settings. They show how these frameworks do not function in and of themselves, and how elements can be locally rooted. The mobilization of the global language of human rights, the community trainings and the protests are evidence of where the global and local can meet. They also indicate the deep local adaptations of these frameworks in border zones and the important work done by local activists.
For at the centre of human rights activism in the borderlands are Karen people who collect the data, tell their stories, take the risks and agitate for political change both in their community structures and in Burma’s echelons of political power. Karen activists to some degree use the mechanisms and resources of global human rights frameworks to mobilise, some of which have brought undeniable benefits, but equally important are other acts of resistance – localised, informal actions that highlight how a singular approach to human rights is a disservice to the local activism that often occurs. What Mort, Ehna, and many others in the borderlands do then is to function as key political agents to redress their own persecution, displacement and marginalisation from political power.
The case of Karen resistance is inherently political and not a ‘humanitarian case’ (Malkki 1996) to be resolved. Their work utilises the mobilities of the borderlands space through collaborations, exchanges and connections that are relational and co-existent (Massey 2005). It is important for scholars and activists to note this ‘local work’ of resistance, as too often they are missing from conventional human rights frameworks.
[i] ‘Burma/Myanmar: Armed attacks against civilians up by 272%’, Altsean Burma, 8 August 2020, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FfpI7xWyKS1yNtVLKm_K8-tYs-p4y78i/view
[ii] See, for example, the Facebook pages of the Salween Peace Park, Karen Rivers Watch, Karen Environmental and Social Action Network (KESAN).
[iii] The article was published in the Karen language newspaper, KweKaLu. Saw Ehna, ‘Will KNU change now, or wait for more problems’, KweKaLu, 6 November 2008.
References
Brooten, L. 2004. ‘Human rights discourse and the development of democracy in a multi-ethnic state’, Asian Journal of Communication, 14(2): 174-191.
Keck, M.E. & Sikkink, K. 1998. Activists Beyond Borders. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Malkki, L. 1996. ‘Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization’, Cultural Anthropology, 11(3): 377-404.
Massey, D. 2005. For Space. London: Sage.
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Mae La Refugee camp which houses predominantly Karen displaced from Burma, 2005. Photo by author.
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