Land of Jade
Page 50
In early 1990 a KIA camp in the 2nd Brigade area was overrun by government troops and among the material they managed to capture there was our letter—which was subsequently, and prominently, displayed in the March 17, 1990 issue of the government’s news-sheet, Working People’s Daily, as proof of my supposedly devious character. “The letter will convince the [readers] what type of person Bertil Lintner is.”
For almost two years, we had not known whether Zau Shan actually had received our packet. When we read this, however, we were delighted to discover that our modest gifts had indeed reached him and his friends. We were also moved by the fact that Zau Shan had kept my short letter for almost three years, probably as a personal memento of our time together in northern Burma. But sadly, we also learnt that he had been killed in action during a subsequent battle in the 2nd Brigade area.
In the CPB’s territory, nothing remarkable happened for more than two years after the loss of Panghsai in January 1987. Kyaw Gyi, however, escaped from Panghsang in early 1988 and made it back to Rangoon where he presumably took part in the “people power” uprising later that year. But after Gen. Saw Maung’s military takeover on September 18, fierce fighting broke out between government troops and the CPB’s 768 Brigade. Sai Noom Pan and Michael Davies managed to capture Mong Yang and hold it for a few days.
In March 1989, however, the ethnic tension within the CPB, and the contradiction between the old leadership’s anachronistic views and the reality in the field—which we had observed at close hand two years before—finally developed into an all-out mutiny. On the 12th, the Chinese in Kokang took the first step and openly challenged the CPB’s Burman-dominated, central leadership. Two days later, the Kokang units took over Mong Ko, broke officially with the CPB and discarded Marxism-Leninism.
The mutiny spread rapidly and in April, Wa troops from Mong Mau arrested their political commissar, Mya Thaung, and marched south, towards Panghsang. In the early hours of April 17, they stormed the CPB’s general headquarters, smashed portraits of the communist icons Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao Zedong, and destroyed party literature.
All the old leaders and communist cadres—including Thakin Ba Thein Tin, Khin Maung Gyi, San Thu, Kyaw Zaw and Aung Htet—were driven into exile in China. Mya Thaung was detained by the mutineers and put in chains, before the Chinese persuaded the Was to allow him to retire across the border along with the rest of the former CPB leadership. Today, of the old top leaders, only Kyaw Zaw is alive, while Aung Htet and a few others are trying to keep the revolutionary flame alive from their retirement homes in Tengchong, Yunnan. But apart from the occasional bulletins they issue and send out over the internet, nothing remains of the once mighty CPB.
Those who had to flee from Mong Ko took refuge in Man Hai just across the border stream in the valley; among them were Ohn Kyi, Zaw Win, Kyaw Sein and Kyaw Nyunt. Altogether 200-300 CPB cadres gracelessly ended their political careers in the custody of the power that once had helped build up their organisation. But Kyi Myint (Zhang Zhiming), somewhat surprisingly, joined the mutiny. Kyaw Nyunt later returned to Mong Ko to become a petty trader in opium and other goods.
The CPB collapsed as a communist insurgency after forty-one years of armed struggle, but the remaining rank-and-file (no one surrendered to the government’s side) formed their own rebel armies, based along ethnic lines, as we had predicted two years before. The 101 War Zone in Kachin State became the New Democratic Army; the Mong Ko-Kokang group was renamed the Myanmar [Burma] National Democratic Alliance Army; the Was formed their United Wa State Army; and the 815 War Zone (led by Lin Mingxian who had helped us escape to Jinghong) together with Sai Noom Pan’s old 768 Brigade became the National Democratic Alliance Army, Eastern Shan State.
But it was the Burmese government, not the other ethnic armies in the National Democratic Front, or the NDF, that managed to exploit the CPB mutiny. The Kokang group and the Was struck deals with Rangoon according to which they were allowed to trade in any commodities—including opium and heroin—as long as they did not fight the Burmese Army.
Confusion reigned among the ethnic rank-and-file of the former CPB and much to our dismay, Michael Davies was shot and killed during faction infighting in May 1989. Unable to accept the accommodation with the military in Rangoon, my dear old friend Sai Noom Pan committed suicide in March 1990.
A peace of sorts was established in northeastern Burma for the first time in decades. But the consequences for the rest of the world were disastrous: the Kokang group and Lin Mingxian’s new army in the former 815 War Zone soon built up a heroin empire whose tentacles have spread as far as northern Thailand, Yunnan, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. Burma’s opium production sky-rocketed from less than 1,000 tons in 1987 to 2,800 tons during the 1994-95 harvesting season.
Within a year of the mutiny, more than 20 heroin laboratories had been established in the former CPB area along the Yunnan frontier: south of Mong Ko, in Kokang, at Mong Mai in the Wa Hills, near Panghsang and around Mong La and Man Hpai in the hills north of Kengtung—places which we had trekked through in 1986 and 1987. Today, Burma’s opium production is back to what it was in the mid-1980s—around 600 tons annually. But now a flood of synthetic drugs, mainly methamphetamines, is also pouring across the country’s borders in all directions. Nearly all the laboratories where those drugs are produced are located inside areas controlled by the United Wa State Army.
The Nagas battled on for their seemingly hopeless dream of an independent nation, encompassing territories of both India and Burma. The Burmese Army had withdrawn from Kesan Chanlam about four weeks after the attack on December 20, 1985, and the NSCN built a new headquarters near Donyu village. Muivah went to Pa Jau later in 1986 and hoped to continue to China, but he was turned back by the Chinese authorities at the Yunnan border. The NSCN was in a shambles and in late 1988 the inevitable happened: Khaplang’s eastern Nagas broke with their Indian cousins and chased Muivah out of the Eastern Hills. Angam (with whom we had spent Christmas in 1985) and many other Tangkhuls were killed during the infighting. Muivah himself, however, managed to escape to Somra opposite his native Ukhrul area in Manipur. Isak, who also survived the bloody infighting, retreated to Somra as well. There, Muivah built up a new army, consisting mainly of Tangkhuls from his native Ukhrul District—and went to Bangkok to purchase arms. A few shipments got through to the Naga Hills from Thailand via Bangladesh, and by 1993, Muivah’s NSCN was alive and kicking again, ambushing Indian army patrols, and fighting rival gangs along the Manipur-Burma border. In 1996, however, the Indian government began to express the need to seek a political negotiated solution to the conflict. Meetings between Indian officials and representatives of Isak’s and Muivah’s NSCN were held, resulting in August 1997 in a ceasefire agreement followed by a series of peace talks. The faction led by Khaplang entered into a ceasefire agreement with the Indian government in 2001 but formal peace talks are yet to take place.
The cessation of open hostilities in Nagaland has, for the first time in decades, made daily life in the state relatively peaceful. Although the draconian 1958 Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) remains in force, there are fewer army checkpoints on major roads, people can move around freely in the state, and a relaxed atmosphere prevails in the state capital, Kohima. State police and personnel from the paramilitary Indian Reserve Battalion patrol the streets of Kohima, the commercial centre of Dimapur and other towns, but the general situation is not nearly as tense as it was before the ceasefire. Neighbouring Manipur is an entirely different matter. The NSCN’s desire to create a “greater Nagaland”, called “Nagalim”, encompassing Nagaland as well as the Naga-inhabited areas of Manipur, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh and Burma, has created a severe rift between the Nagas of Manipur and the state’s majority Meitei population. In 2010, Nagas loyal to Muivah blockaded the main border crossing between Nagaland and Manipur for months, causing severe shortages of petrol, medicines and other daily necessities. The blockade has been lifted, but the conflict betw
een the Meities and Manipur’s Nagas remains unresolved.
But before all that happened, in August 1987, I had visited England and met the founder of the Naga movement, Angami Zapu Phizo, in his suburban terrace house in Bromley, Kent. At the age of 83, he was still adamantly advocating Naga independence. I could not help feeling sorry for him and the plight of his people, although I found their intransigence difficult to understand. After all, the Nagas in India have managed to get from the Indian government exactly what Rangoon denies its national minorities: a separate state with a high degree of self-government, aid from the centre and the right to preserve their own customs and culture.
Phizo died in 1990 and his body was flown back to India. A grand funeral was held in Kohima and tens of thousands of Nagas showed up for the emotional event. There were few dry eyes in Kohima that day as men, women and children, old Naga warriors, village headmen, local politicians, church leaders, and even officials from the state government showed up to bid the founder of the Naga movement their final farewell.
Along the Thai-Burmese border, frictions arose almost immediately between the leaders of the northern NDF and the KNU. An NDF congress was held at the KNU’s Manerplaw headquarters in June 1987 and the Karens persisted in their independent stand. The conflict almost paralysed the NDF for more than a year.
It was in the midst of this ethnic infighting that the people in central Burma launched their massive streets protests in August-September 1988. Hundreds of thousands of people in towns all over the country took to the streets to vent 26 years of pent-up frustrations with a xenophobic military regime which had turned what once was Southeast Asia’s richest country into an economic and political wreck.
To many people, whose only impression of Burma was a stereotype of a gentle land of golden pagodas and smiling people, the uprising came as a complete surprise. Both foreigners living in Rangoon and ordinary Burmese—who had been blissfully unaware of the brutal reality of the country’s frontier areas—were also taken aback by the savagery of the government troops. Thousands of unarmed demonstrators were gunned down in the capital and elsewhere. Even children, women, hospital workers and Red Cross personnel were slaughtered in an orgy of violence.
Suddenly, this almost forgotten country hit the front pages of newspapers all over the world. Diplomats, historians and journalists had to revise their old perceptions of Burma and Burmese society. The glossy guidebook image collapsed like the fragile house of cards it had been, especially since the military coup d’etat in 1962.
Even to those who had been following internal developments in Burma at close hand, the nation-wide uprising came sooner and with more ferocity than expected. But the process as such was, as a matter of fact, inevitable and, therefore, predictable. For the first time in 26 years, it seemed as if the military government was about to fall and that Burma was on the dawn of a new democratic era.
Initially, the NDF had failed to link up with the urban movement for democracy; the weaknesses of the jungle-based guerrillas were exposed and many analysts thought that the rebels were going to miss the opportunity and be left outside the political process once more.
But then, when Gen. Saw Maung took over on September 18, 1988 to set up a new junta, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), countless people were arrested or summarily executed. Nearly 10,000 students and other urban dissidents fled to the areas bordering Thailand, China and India to get arms and military training from the armed ethnic groups. At last, there were signs that the rebels in the frontier areas and some of the dissidents from the towns were beginning to co-operate. This new front was called the Democratic Alliance of Burma (DAB), uniting the NDF and Burman dissidents.
That co-operation was strengthened after a general election was held in May 1990. Burma’s main opposition party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), secured 392 out of 485 contested seats. The NLD had been formed during the 1988 upheaval by Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of Burma’s independence hero, Aung San. The party won despite the fact that the military had placed her under house arrest in Rangoon in July 1989.
But instead of releasing her and handing over power to the elected assembly, the military launched a massive crack-down on the election victors: more than 60 MPs elect were arrested and scores of others were forced to resign. About a dozen fled to the Thai border, where they in December 1990 formed the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma (NCGUB).
Then came another typically Burmese twist of events. The SLORC extended its cease-fire offer—which the former CPB forces had benefited from—to all other ethnic armies as well. Weary of decades of war, and eager to get the same business opportunities which the ex-CPB troops had secured, they gave in one by one. The SSA had made peace with Rangoon in late 1989, and they were now followed by the Pa-Os, the Palaungs and the KIA’s 4th Brigade in northeastern Shan State. In October 1993, the main KIA also struck a deal with Rangoon. A formal cease-fire agreement was signed on February 24, 1994.
However, Brang Seng was unable to oversee the final negotiations with Burma’s ruling junta: he suffered a massive stroke in September 1993 and was hospitalised in Kunming. After nearly a year of illness, he died in China on August 8, 1994. Another of the architects of the grand alliances of 1986, U Soe Aung, who had led the NDF delegation to Pa Jau and Panghsang, died from cancer at Manerplaw in April 1993. Following the cease-fire between the government and the SSA, Sai Lek tried to keep what remained of the Shan resistance alive for a couple of years until he in late 1994 teamed up with the Mong Tai Army of Golden Triangle warlord Khun Sa. Not much came of that alliance either: Sai Lek died from illness and fever in January 1995 at Khun Sa’s headquarters at Homong near the Thai border.
All the structures which had been built up so painstakingly during the 1980s and early 1990s—the new NDF, the DAB, and the NCGUB—collapsed almost overnight. Inside the country, what remained of the leaderless and rudderless NLD was cowed into submission. The military appeared more firmly entrenched in power in Rangoon than at any time since it first seized power in 1962. The final blow to the Thai-border based resistance came when in early 1995 the Burmese Army launched a surprise attack on Manerplaw and managed to capture it. But the peace agreements, which are still in place, should be viewed as extremely fragile. Although a peace under duress has been established in Burma’s traditionally volatile frontier areas, the ethnic groups have not been offered any political concessions: the issues which prompted them to take up arms in the first place have not been addressed. They have also been allowed to retain their arms and control over their respective areas; the ethnic problem has been frozen rather than solved. Unless there is a radical change in the Rangoon government’s approach to Burma’s ethnic conflicts, it is likely the struggle will continue by violent means or by more peaceful agitation.
In November 2010, Aung San Suu Kyi was finally released from her house arrest. But even so, the ruling military junta, which was renamed the State Peace and Development Council, SPDC, in 1997, has shown only scant interest in entering into a dialogue with her to solve the country’s problems. A general election, held a week before Aung San Suu Kyi’s release, has changed nothing. It was blatantly rigged to ensure that the military’s own party would be able to form the next government. In all aspects of political life in Burma, the military remains firmly entrenched in power. Where this strife-torn country is headed is no clearer in March 2011 than it was twenty-six years before, when we went to India to begin our long journey over the hills and through the jungles of northern Burma.
INDEX
2, 4-D, American sponsored, 1
101 War Zone, 1, 2
768 Brigade, 1, 2, 3, 4
815 Military Region [War Zone], 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
A
A Burmese Arkady, 1
aircraft, American supplied, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Akha, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Alawbum Fort, 1, 2
Amguri, 1, 2, 3
Angam, 1, 2, 3, 4
Angami Zapu Phiso, 1, 2, 3
animism, Akha, 1
Kachin, 1, 2
Naga, 1
Wa, 1, 2
Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League, 1
Ao, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Arakan; Arakanese, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Atzi, 1
Aung Gyi, 1
Aung Htet, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Aung San, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Aung San Suu Kyi, 1, 2
Aung Sein, 1, 2
Aye Tan, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
B
bagpipes, 1
bamboo, flowering of, 1
Bangkok, founding of BIA in, 1
narcotics agency in, 1
narcotics syndicates in, 1
wire services, 1
Bangladesh, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
bank robbery, Naga, 1, 2, 3
Bawk Di, 1, 2, 3, 4
BBC, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
birth of Lintners’ daughter, 1
Bo Zeya, 1, 2
Brahmin duck – see hinthe