Ongoing Conflict in the Kachin State

Background to the Conflict

Even casual observers of the Myanmar political scene will be aware that one of the most difficult and enduring problems that continues to challenge the country’s political transition is the need to find a resolution to the manifold conflicts that have taken place in the so-called “ethnic” states.¹ One of the longest of these conflicts has been in the Kachin State, in the north of the country. The Kachin Independence Army was founded in 1961 and entered into armed conflict with the central military regime following General Ne Win’s takeover of power in 1962. Although there were some attempts to broker ceasefires during the following decades, the fighting continued more or less without cessation until 1994, when an agreement to retain arms but refrain from violence was eventually signed. In June 2011, this ceasefire in turn collapsed after being in place for seventeen years and the conflict has since then remained stubbornly impervious to resolution. It is proving as difficult as ever it was in the past to find a way forward through negotiation, and the national peace process, centred upon the conclusion of a nationwide ceasefire with all principal ethnic armed groups as promoted by the national government, is floundering once more.²

It is a convention in almost any policy document or analysis of the Kachin conflict to begin with a longer history of the Kachin region, often invoking, too, a pseudo-anthropological interpretation of kinship and lineage as perennial markers of “Kachin” identity and a means of explaining the nature of this enduring resistance. Typically, too, such analysis will describe the Kachin experience under colonial rule as a decisive factor in explaining the continuation of problems down to the present. This includes the political separation of the Frontier Areas from the rest, the military privileging of ethnic recruits into the colonial army and then the failure and ongoing symbolism of the Panglong Agreement of 1947.³ The agreement was signed by General Aung San and a number of elite representatives of “ethnic minority” communities with the intention of facilitating the speedy withdrawal of British imperial power on the basis of a future commitment by the Burmese nationalist government to introducing a federal system.⁴ This over-arching historical narrative, which is used to explain the emergence and rationale of the Kachin conflict down to the present, is so well-rehearsed that it has become almost impossible to resist.

Yet there is a case for saying that the continued repetition of the same historical narrative to explain the Kachin conflict, and others, has served mainly to naturalize, even to normalize the prevalence of conflict in this region. As a result, more penetrating analysis of the present re-emergence of conflict in the Kachin region is often lacking because the causes are already felt to be known and understood. One outcome of this tendency to normalize conflict rather than subject its longevity and resilience to a careful critical questioning is that there is a tendency also to believe that it will only be fully resolved when there is capitulation of the weaker to the stronger political impetus, of the “traditional” to the “modern” — in this case, the innate drive of the unitary state must inevitably win out over that of the federal with its implicit attachments to perennial loyalties.⁵ The sense of frustration with “the Kachin” is palpable among those Myanmar and foreign policymakers and observers who seem mainly to wish that they would stop fighting a battle that they are bound to lose, and which they consider currently as producing a great impediment to political progress nationally.

From the perspective of central government concerns, this seems to be a not unreasonable line of analysis. However, if we are to understand why in 2014 we are in many respects as far from an agreement to end the conflict than we were in 2013, closer attention needs to be paid to understanding a more contemporary history rather than relying on convention within a narrative about a more distant past. While this longer history is threaded through the present situation...