He was an accidental soldier. He had attended the prestigious St. Paul’s School in Rangoon, and took the exams for the Defense Services Academy on a whim. He thought he would serve just the minimum four years. But within eleven months he received an award for bravery after his encounter in the jungle with the Communists, and was recruited to hunt down Communist leaders. A few years later, he joined the intelligence service, first serving in Mandalay, where he had to deal with dissidents, black marketeers, narcotics traffickers, and “underground” leftists. He drew the line at imprisoning a suspected dissident’s wife who had just given birth—but not for sentimental reasons. “If you imprison her, this baby will be your enemy for life,” he said. All his colleagues thought that was the end of Aung Min’s career. Instead, he was promoted.
In Rangoon, he was part of the powerful Section 6 of the intelligence services: the administration department. This was the section that looked after the top brass and their families. The children of the generals often got into trouble, and any scandal had to be handled sensitively. There were also more mundane tasks. One day, Aung Min and his immediate superior were told to bring dinner for the then dictator Ne Win, who wanted Chinese takeout. They went to Chinatown, then to Ne Win’s residence on Ady Road, where they presented him with what the other officer said was Mandalay kung pao chicken. Ne Win seemed annoyed and brusquely asked, “Why do you have to say Mandalay kung pao chicken, why not just kung pao chicken?” The dictator’s anger froze the other officer. Aung Min stepped forward and said, “Mandalay kung pao chicken is the preferred type of kung pao chicken, eaten by rich Chinese. Rangoon kung pao chicken is an inferior dish, with mainly gristle.”2 From then on, Aung Min was in charge of all catering.
There were more promotions to come. In the late 1990s, he left intelligence and received a series of increasingly senior appointments in the army, including as a regional commander. In 2003, he became minister of railways. He bought new trains from Japan, China, and India, but didn’t have the budget to do much more. In 2008, he met Nay Win Maung, whose parents had been his lecturers at the academy. Nay Win Maung and the rest of the team at Egress began to change his thinking. He met Debbie Aung Din (who had met George Bush after Nargis). He felt he had power but didn’t know what to do with it, like “a monkey with a coconut.”3 He wanted Burma to have a better future, and that, he was increasingly certain, meant marrying knowledge with power. It also meant being fearless. “If I’m given responsibility, I won’t look back.”
On August 18, 2011, a little more than four months after taking office, President Thein Sein formally invited the leaders of the insurgent groups to new peace talks. He didn’t have a clear strategy, but he knew that his core agenda of economic development would be constrained unless he could also find an end to Burma’s seven decades of armed conflict. He appointed Aung Min negotiator—at first, one of several. His orders were clear: do not agree to anything that might lead to the breakup of the country or damage Burma’s sovereignty. Otherwise, anything is acceptable.
Within weeks, Thein Sein received a positive response from the country’s oldest insurgent group, the Karen National Union. The Karen lived across the south of Burma. They included both Buddhist and Christians, but in the eastern hills most villages, as well as the leadership of the KNU itself, were primarily Baptist. Colonial-era maps showed the Karen Hills as only “loosely” administered. In 1947, the KNU demanded independence. Their aim now was for autonomy within a federal union.
The KNU controlled a sliver of territory along the Thai border and had over 5,000 well-trained men (and some women) under arms. Over 400,000 Karen villagers had been driven from their homes over recent decades. Nearly 100,000 fled to Thailand as refugees, and some were resettled in America. Thein Sein sent Aung Min to the Thai town of Mae Sot, on the border, where the KNU leadership was based.
From the start, Aung Min acted completely differently than any past Burmese general or envoy. He eschewed the existing bureaucracy, preferring to depend on the Egress team to arrange the visit. He arrived in Bangkok with no fanfare and drove in a private car to Mae Sot. The journey took place during the epic floods of 2011, so what should have been a six-hour drive took fifteen hours. At first, the meetings were businesslike, even tense. The KNU were unsure what to make of the spectacle: a former general, with an NGO entourage, coming to their town without any security, inviting them to his hotel suite, and asking them to trust him. Aung Min brought with him an invitation from Thein Sein to come to Naypyitaw. Before leaving, Aung Min asked KNU deputy leader Zipporah Sein whether he could report back that there was at least a 50 percent chance they would accept. Zipporah Sein whispered, “You can make it 75 percent.”
There were other early moves. Thein Sein wanted peace as well with the Shan State Army North, another major ethnic-based insurgency. At Aung Min’s request, the president released their general, Hso Ten, who was serving a 106-year prison sentence. The very day of the release, Aung Min invited the rebel officer to his house for dinner, making sure it was an early dinner as he knew that in prison Hso Ten would have eaten his last meal each day at 4 p.m. Over the coming weeks, he would meet with the leaders of another prominent rebel group, the Restoration Council of Shan State, as well as with the KNU and several other armed organizations. He worked incessantly. After one meeting, he told me, “I may not know much, but I know how to deal with a man who has a gun in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other.”
Over the coming year, Aung Min negotiated no fewer than a dozen ceasefires. He kept the president regularly updated but acted decisively on his own, going back to his boss after the fact and saying, “You can fire or jail me if you want, but this is what I’ve done.” The momentum seemed incredible and, in 2012, it added to the overall feeling that Burma was finally breaking free of its past and heading in a peaceful and democratic direction. Until then, the very word “federalism” had been taboo in official circles. But Aung Min knew that the idea of a federal system of government was important to ethnic minority leaders, and saw no danger in accepting this in principle. He convinced a reluctant Thein Sein.
He told me that around this time he also “started giving the president a lot of strange ideas,” things that went well beyond the repertoire of past army regimes.4 One strange idea was the Myanmar Peace Center. By early 2012, it was clear that Aung Min couldn’t just rely on the ad hoc support of Egress and various hangers-on. There needed to be a new institution to support continuing peace talks. After Nay Win Maung’s death, two men—Tin Maung Thann (the fish expert) and Hla Maung Shwe (the shrimp exporter)—had taken over as the heads of Egress. They were now Aung Min’s key lieutenants in the peace process.
Over several weeks, we discussed options. The president decided on a three-part structure: a Myanmar Peace Center as a quasi-government institution, a Myanmar Peace Fund to mobilize and direct international financing for development in places where the fighting had stopped, and a Peace Donor Support Group. This last was meant to be a bridge between Aung Min and the growing number of governments and organizations (like the World Bank) keen to be involved in what looked an imminent success.
I was made one of four special advisors, and would attend most of the formal negotiations in the years to come. My particular focus was anything to do with foreign governments and international organizations. I often sat in on Aung Min’s meetings with visiting foreigners, interpreting for him as needed. Sometimes Aung Min gave very detailed and candid explanations of the dynamics at work. Other times, he would say a few words and then say to me in Burmese, “Just add whatever you think the foreigners want to hear.” If I added anything, it was to underscore both the urgency as well as the complexity of the situation, the big hills left to climb. Aung Min’s instincts were to show that he was different from past generals and to open the door as wide as possible to outside help. My instincts were to be very careful in not allowing the global peace-building industry to gain too big a foothold. I had seen from my perch at the UN in New Y
ork too many well-meaning efforts based on far too little local knowledge.
Over that year, the Myanmar Peace Center, or MPC, grew to over a hundred staff, mainly young Burmese, many from Egress, some newly returned from overseas. They worked around the clock from a compound of colonial-era houses in the middle of Rangoon. The MPC acted as well as an unofficial secretariat for the president’s office, assisting in everything from the president’s weekly radio addresses to the deluge of foreign visitors. Neither government body nor NGO, it was a many-tentacled organization tailored specifically for the political environment of 2012–13. Tony Blair dropped by one day. Bill Clinton came to give a speech. Western governments, the European Union, and Japan queued up to provide funding, eager to be part of one of the most successful peace processes in recent times.
Burma was not, however, on the verge of peace. The ceasefires signed were significant, but they didn’t include any of the big rebel armies on the Chinese border. Many of the leaders of those armies—which had agreed to the earlier generation of ceasefires—had been doing business with the Burmese army since the 1980s. Aung Min was initially instructed only to focus on the Karen National Union and other rebel groups along the Thai border, and leave relations with Chinese border insurgencies to other ex-generals, the same men who had been in charge of them for years, and who were following old instincts and old motivations, trading in money and power. But the earlier ceasefires were unraveling. In 2008, the junta had attacked the Kokang militia. In 2011, tensions between the Burmese army and the Kachin Independence Organization boiled over into all-out war.
When the KIO refused to become a Border Guard Force, the army responded by blocking KIO trading routes. The KIO then shot and killed a Burmese battalion commander after he led troops into KIO territory without prior agreement. In June 2011, clashes broke out between the two sides at a Chinese-operated dam. Within days, the KIO placed all troops on a war footing and destroyed a number of bridges in the area to prevent government resupply of bases.5 The Burmese army then attacked KIO positions, first along the Taiping River and then all across the ceasefire line.
What followed was the bloodiest fighting in Burma in decades. By the end of the year, Burmese forces were inching over frost-covered hills toward the KIO headquarters at Laiza, a town of about 50,000 people on the Chinese border, deploying Russian-built helicopters to transport troops and supplies. Hundreds of troops on both sides were killed or wounded, and thousands of civilians displaced. Before Christmas, Thein Sein ordered the army not to take Laiza itself.
In the spring of 2012, with a string of successful negotiations behind him, Aung Min was asked by the president to try his hand at ending the Kachin fighting too. From the start, he wanted to try something different, and went to Maijayang, in KIO-held territory, to meet directly with Kachin leaders. Venturing into enemy territory during an active conflict was something no Burmese envoy had done in decades. Just getting to Maijayang was no easy feat, as it meant crossing several front lines. Aung Min and his team passed dozens of burnt-out villages. They could smell the stench of death. A Burmese battalion commander constantly hovered over him. “Are you afraid I will try to escape?” Aung Min asked. “No, I am responsible for your life, minister,” was the reply.
There were many more meetings. There were also quiet gestures. Aung Min sent a set of expensive golf clubs from the president to the Kachin commander, Sumlut Gun Maw. He assumed Gun Maw would want to keep the gift discreet. But a few weeks later, Aung Min received a photograph Gun Maw had taken of himself, with the clubs and in full golfing attire, at the Laiza Golf Club.
In October 2012, Chinese diplomats insisted on a role. Talks had been going reasonably well and the Chinese government convened a high-level negotiation at Ruili, across the border inside China. Ruili was a boomtown, with bustling shopping centers and high-rise hotels, which had become prosperous from Burmese jade and timber. Aung Min wanted to move discussions toward an actual deal to separate forces, to prevent future clashes, and worked frantically to secure senior Burmese army participation. But the KIO, in what was perceived on the Burmese side as a snub, didn’t send any of their top leaders to Ruili. It’s possible that the KIO were irked by continuing Burmese attacks, or that they had not yet reached an internal consensus on a new ceasefire. They were also unfamiliar with the new politics in Naypyitaw, and unaware of the political capital Aung Min had to expend to secure army participation. Regardless, the snub weakened Aung Min’s hand with the Burmese military.
Fighting raged again, including around the fabulously lucrative jade mines at Hpakant, leading to thousands more men, women, and children fleeing their homes. In a fresh offensive near the KIO headquarters of Laiza, government forces reportedly lost over a hundred troops with four hundred more wounded, as the Kachin put up spirited resistance. The Burmese army used Russian-made Mi-35 helicopter gunships for the first time, the kind that had been used during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, as well as Karakorum-8 jet fighters bought from China years before.6 This use of airpower marked a major escalation and worried the Chinese.
In January 2013, the Burmese army, now within a mile of Laiza, fired artillery directly into the town, killing civilians. Shells also landed on the Chinese side of the border. This was a wake-up call to senior echelons in Beijing. The vice foreign minister Fu Ying and deputy army chief Qi Jianguo both arrived in Naypyitaw to discuss “border stability.” The Chinese then called both sides to a new round of talks in Ruili, and assertively attempted to direct them. Their negotiator suggested a very formal process, in which the Chinese would meet with each side first in different rooms before everyone met together in one room. Both the Burmese government and the Kachins piped up, “But we know each other already!” The Chinese pushed. Aung Min at one point told them, “This has nothing to do with you!” and shut the door. In a way, Chinese heavy-handedness helped to bring the two sides together.
At last, in May 2013, a final round of negotiations were held, not in China but in the Kachin state capital, Myitkyina. By then, thousands were dead and up to 100,000 civilians had been displaced by the fighting. A Chinese envoy, Wang Yifan, was there, as well as a senior UN diplomat, Vijay Nambiar. It was the first time the KIO had set foot in government-controlled territory since fighting had broken out nearly two years before.
Heading their delegation was their charismatic army vice chief, General Sumlut Gun Maw. A few years before, many Kachins had felt that the KIO’s top leaders were too eagerly stuffing their own pockets, along with their Burmese counterparts. Gun Maw was of a younger generation. The recent conflict had aroused deep nationalist feelings among the Kachin. They knew the KIO had put up a tough fight against overwhelming odds.
When a seven-point agreement was signed, hundreds of Burmese reporters were there to cover the event. Gun Maw received a hero’s welcome along the streets of Myitkyina. It was impossible not to feel the raw emotion of thousands of ordinary Kachin people as they cheered Gun Maw’s convoy. The Burmese in Myitkyina seemed like an occupying power. I could only hope that a just and lasting peace would be possible before too long, so that another generation, Burmese and Kachin, wouldn’t have to fight this senseless war. But any rational analysis suggested we were still far off. One of the senior Chinese diplomats said to me, “If we were serious, we would be looking at revenue substitution.” He meant weaning the men with guns away from illicit money. No one had even begun to talk about the economy.
With the Kachin agreement, the peace process reached its high-water mark. The image of a Burma heading toward inevitable peace and democracy was stronger than ever. Foreign governments jostled for pole position. Many provided financing for ethnic armed group negotiators. They funded visiting experts and teams of consultants. Hardly a day went by without a Western nongovernmental organization proffering help and looking for a role.
The idea of a “Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement” was now introduced. The proposal was first made by several ethnic minority leaders, who wanted to avoid
a situation in which the government could divide and rule. By the summer of 2013, Aung Min came to see this as a useful aim as well: it could lock all sides, including his side, into a political process, especially if there was maximum fanfare and international acclaim. The nationwide agreement was originally meant to be a simple document which would repeat key elements from the ceasefires already agreed, such as a commitment to end fighting, set up liaison offices, and seek a negotiated peace.
Many of the ethnic minority leaders began to sense that what the government wanted was not just a step toward peace but a political victory as well. Elections were two years away. A nationwide ceasefire agreement would provide a very attractive feather for Thein Sein’s cap. So some began pushing for a new, more political agreement that would go well beyond the terms of the existing ceasefires. Time would not be on their side.
In November 2013, top representatives of seventeen “Ethnic Armed Organizations” (their preferred moniker) met in an unprecedented summit at Laiza, the Kachin headquarters. There they attempted to hash out how best to negotiate the proposed nationwide accord. There was much heated debate. Some saw the need to move quickly. They had waited their entire lives for this moment, and wanted to use the positive momentum. Others distrusted the government’s sincerity. And there was inertia: after seventy years of fighting, some were settled into a way of life. Peace, after all, meant change.
A set of eleven principles was nevertheless agreed upon, which included the aims of a “federal union” and a “federal army.” They also included the demand that “the fundamental rights of the taing-yintha (indigenous) people” be defended. The drafting of the points was done overnight by a Baptist theologian named Lian Hmung Sakhong. “People ask me how I drafted these eleven points overnight,” he told me. “The answer is simple: these have been my feelings for my whole life.”7
The Hidden History of Burma Page 18
