the mid 1970s, the KIO officially demanded independence. It then switched to demanding autonomy, though some see it as a mere step towards independence. As I was told in 2012 by the late Reverend Maran Ja Gun, a Kachin historian, linguist and influential ideologue of the KIO, at his house in Laiza, ‘Our ultimate goal will probably be full independence.’
Kachin nationalists see Burman domination as the main obstacle to the progress of their nation. Their nationalism is predicated on respect for Kachin traditions, and a certain idealization of the period when the Kachin duwas (tribal chiefs) governed without Burman interference,13 but also on a project of modernization on Kachin terms that is currently hampered by the central government.14 In that sense, the Kachin nationalist project is arguably more forward-looking than others in the country. The Kachin never had a state as such, and that makes it difficult to rely on nostalgia for a golden age of power and wealth as the basis for a future Kachin nation. However, this does not necessarily mean that Kachin nationalists are politically progressive.
The KIO/KIA has built a mini-state in its territory with its own police force, hospitals, schools and TV station, Laiza TV. The KIO also provides bases in its territory for other armed groups, such as the All Burma Student’s Democratic Front (ABSDF – a mostly Burman guerrilla group born out of the protests against the military regime in 1988) and the Arakan Army (AA – a Rakhine ethno-nationalist armed group founded in 2009 that draws its recruits mainly from Rakhine workers in the jade mines of Hpakant). Politically, the KIO has become one of the most important armed groups in Burma – though the allied United Wa State Army (UWSA), whose force is estimated at between 20,000 and 30,000 soldiers, outnumbers the approximately 10,000 soldiers of the KIO.15 The KIO and the UWSA are the most influential armed groups that refused to sign the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) proposed by the government, after seven other armed groups, including the Karen National Army (KNU) and the Restoration Council of Shan State (RCSS), signed it in October 2015.
The position of the KIO remained the same at the time of writing: no ceasefire until there is a meaningful political dialogue. But there has been increasing pressure on the organization to sign, not less, from what Swedish journalist Bertil Lintner has described as the ‘peace-industrial complex’:16 dozens of foreign organizations and well-paid experts on ‘conflict resolution’, who have flocked to Burma since the transition started and who in many cases exert more pressure on the armed groups than on the government. But the KIO seems able to rely on the support of the Kachin people – though it is an open question how long such support will last if this inconclusive war of attrition continues indefinitely.
The military government used the ceasefire signed in 1994 to strengthen the army and increase not only its military presence in Kachin State but, more crucially, its economic stakes in that land rich in natural resources, most importantly timber and jade. The jewel in its crown is its vast complex of jadeite mines at Hpakant, in the west of the state, most of which were gradually snatched from the KIO by the government after the ceasefire. This reduced one of the Kachin guerrillas’ main sources of revenue. The jade business was greatly expanded during the ceasefire years, and it is now in the hands of military-owned conglomerates; a few generals, including the family of the former junta supremo, senior General Than Shwe; a few cronies; and an assortment of drug lords associated with the latter.
The financial rewards of the jade business in Hpakant are astonishingly high. According to a report published in 2015 by Global Witness, the value of jade production may have amounted in 2014 to as much as US$31 billion, of which the Burmese state received only US$374 million in official revenues – less than 2 per cent of the total. To put things in perspective, the jade business amounted to 48 per cent of the country’s official GDP and forty-six times the government’s expenditure on healthcare.17 It goes without saying that the wider Kachin population does not receive any benefit from this massive economic plunder, which is also resulting in enormous environmental devastation in Kachin State. The jade mines have also attracted many workers from all over the country, lured by the prospect of making a fortune – albeit unlikely. The big money is made by others. Instead, the workers are often given heroin or methamphetamine, at first to endure the harsh working conditions. Eventually, when they have become addicted, many of them are paid only with drugs.
It is the Kachin population that has suffered most acutely from the conflict. Since the war was reignited in 2011, the Burmese government has for most of the time blocked any access to humanitarian agencies to the tens of thousands of displaced people sheltered in KIO-controlled areas. The conditions in the camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in those areas are far from perfect, but the KIO and several Kachin civil society groups have been able to organize them with remarkable efficiency, all the more impressive given the harsh circumstances.
Knowing well that its survival depends on popular support, the KIO has made an effort to protect the IDPs in its territory, whereas those in government-controlled areas live in fear of the Burmese authorities. Since the resumption of the war, dozens of people have been accused of being members of the KIO or having links with the organization. Most have been charged with violating Article 17.1 of the Unlawful Association Act, which makes punishable any link with a clandestine organization. A prominent case has been that of Lahtaw Brang Shawng, a young farmer and father of two who was arrested in June 2012 by Military Affairs Security (MAS) agents and accused of being part of a KIO bomb plot. Brang Shawng and his family had escaped from the fighting around their village a few months before, and were IDPs living in a camp in Myitkyina.
A few weeks after Brang Shawng’s arrest, I interviewed his wife, Ze Nyoi, and his lawyer, Mar Khar. Ze Nyoi, a soft-spoken woman whose sad expression bore the emotional scars of her ordeal, had led protests against the detention of her husband, of whose innocence she was convinced. ‘They claim he holds a university degree, but that’s not true. He’s a very simple man who speaks very little Burmese and had to provide for all his family. He couldn’t go anywhere and join the KIA, as they claim’, she told me, pointing to the fact that many Kachin in rural areas do not speak the language of the majority. She had visited her husband three or four times when he was under detention – short visits of no more than five minutes, always in the presence of the police. ‘He couldn’t talk much, but I could see clearly he was injured, and they didn’t provide any medical treatment for him, they only gave him paracetamol’, she said. The authorities wanted to make an example for other IDPs, so one week after his detention they paraded a dishevelled Brang Shawng in the IDP camp, ostensibly to re-enact the crime, but most likely to intimidate the other displaced people in the camp.
It was so evident that Brang Shawng had been tortured to extract a confession that the first judge who heard his case asked him to remove his shirt, his lawyer told me. What he discovered, apart from bruises all over his torso, was an audio recorder taped to his chest by the police, to make sure he repeated the confession they had dictated to him. In a rare example of judicial independence, the judge refused to accept his confession; but he was quickly replaced by a more compliant judge. ‘They didn’t have any evidence against him, only his confession, extracted after weeks of torture’, Mar Khar told me. Eventually, on July 2013, Brang Shawng was sentenced to three years in jail – but President Thein Sein pardoned him one week later with another dozen Kachin serving time for similar offences.
In 2014, I met Brang Shawng in the camp. He was a man broken by the torture he had suffered for months on end. Covered with scars, he was unable to move properly and work for his family, and he suffered constant headaches and memory loss as a consequence of the many blows he had received to his head.
In the Kachin war, as in many others, allegiances are complex affairs, and opportunities for profit often trump military or ideological considerations. The story of a man I met in Myitkyina on December 2017 is instructive about these grey zones and the economy of the war. Let us call him Hkun Lah; a Kachin man in his fifties, he was the son of a distinguished soldier who had fought in World War II with the US army, and then had joined the Burmese army after independence. When I met him, he was working in one of the camps for IDPs in the state’s capital. He had joined the
