the chance to play football’, he explained half-jokingly. As a Kachin, he was always under suspicion in the military. He could join the army, but he had little chance of being promoted to a high-ranking position, and he was confined to administrative duties.
He had relatives in the KIO and secretly sympathized with them. For years, he passed secret documents and ammunition to the enemy, until he was caught in 2009. He was arrested and sentenced to seven years in jail, but he was released only two years later, in an amnesty ordered by the president. If the sentence was not very long, that was due to the fact that he was only charged with passing secret documents, not for giving ammunition to the KIA. He explained that the army simply did not want to dig into the issue too much, because investigating it would have led to uncovering the embarrassing fact that many in the Burmese military were involved in selling ammunition for a considerable profit to the KIA and other groups. ‘Many people were involved [in] that, including high-ranking officers who were Burmans; it was better not to stir that’, he explained.
The Tatmadaw is not the only enemy that the KIO and the Kachin are fighting. They are also waging a war against a faceless foe – drug addiction – that has been undermining communities throughout the state for years. Drugs are widely available in Burma, and the country is the second-largest producer of opium in the world after Afghanistan. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, in 2015 there were around 55,500 hectares of opium poppy plantations in the country. Most were in Shan State, the southern neighbour of Kachin State, but around 4,200 were in Kachin.18 Shan State is also the biggest source of methamphetamine in Southeast Asia. Many of these narcotics make their way into both government- and KIA-controlled areas.
To combat the use of drugs, the KIO established the Drug Eradication Committee in 2010. As well as dealing with drug users, the KIO is also waging a war on drug producers. When an opium poppy field is discovered in its territory, soldiers destroy the harvest and attempt to persuade the owners to plant different crops. If a farmer is discovered planting poppies again, he is sent to jail. In 2014, I interviewed the secretary of the Committee, Hpaudau Gam Ba, a burly man who had been a member of the KIO since 1988, and who also ran a rehabilitation centre in Laiza. Many Kachin believe that the drug scourge in his community is part of a well-planned conspiracy by the Tatmadaw to weaken the Kachin. This notion is so widely spread and accepted that it is virtually impossible to find any Kachin who does not subscribe to it.19 ‘Some people from the government even distribute the drugs themselves and then jail the Kachin addicts. This is part of their strategy to divide and rule’, Gam Ba told me.
Nobody has conclusively demonstrated that there is a master plan to flood Kachin with drugs, and other explanations are perfectly plausible: since Kachin neighbours areas with high production of narcotics, it is natural that so many of them find their way there; law enforcement is often arbitrary not only in Kachin, but throughout Burma, and corrupt policemen, generals and civil servants are known to be involved on the drug-trade; and members of other ethnicities use drugs in Kachin and elsewhere in the country.
The theory surely gives too much credit to the leaders of the Tatmadaw, whose control of the country, and particularly the border areas, is far from complete. But the conspiracy, whether real or imagined, has a strong explanatory power for many Kachin, as it is inscribed in a wider pattern of oppression by the military. It also serves to reinforce their sense of victimhood under Burman domination, and, crucially, their support for the KIO/KIA, which has managed to present itself not only as a bulwark against the Burmese army, but also against drugs. Thus, the particular war on drugs waged by the KIO and other Kachin organizations is also a nationalist war.
Gam Ba told me that his centre has treated 1,700 addicts since it opened in 2010. He believed that, in most cases, the treatment dispensed by the KIO was successful, and claimed that the majority of those treated had conquered their addiction for good. Only fifty people had been readmitted, he said. ‘But many people go to government-controlled areas after leaving here, and then we cannot keep track of them’, he acknowledged. The main weapon employed in combating addiction in the rehabilitation centres was religion. Drug users are encouraged to embrace the Christian faith in order to be saved from their addiction. They were directed to heal through sermons, Bible studies and songs. They were also put to work in the local town and taught how to farm. However, there were virtually no palliatives to alleviate withdrawal symptoms, and corporal punishments were often used to subdue rebellious addicts.
Some of the drug users in the KIO centres were volunteers, or were sent by their families, but most had been detained by the KIO and held there against their will. One of them was Ma Bung, a forty-eight-year-old woman who had been sent to a rehabilitation centre in Mai Ja Yang, the second-biggest town in KIO-controlled territory, after she was discovered buying drugs in a village known as an important hub of drug distribution in the area. The most surprising fact about Ma Bung was that she was not a Burmese citizen. She was an ethnic Kachin, but lived in China, where some 130,000 Kachin (classified there as Jingpo) live in Yunnan Province. She held Chinese citizenship, but the KIO did not seem to care, and kept her in the rehabilitation centre for six months. ‘She is poor, and the authorities in China would not care about her’, a worker at the centre told me. Official borders between nation-states are often meaningless in northern Burma, and are easily overridden by ethnic allegiances.
* * *
The war in Kachin state soon reached an apparent stalemate, which bombings by the Burmese military, including that of Laiza over Christmas of 2012, did not break. The KIO’s territory shrank during the years of Thein Sein, but, as Colonel Maran Zaw Tawng told me in 2012, it was proved that an outright defeat was impossible. Meanwhile, the KIO managed to regain wide popular support from the Kachin population after the years of the ceasefire, during which many Kachin criticized KIO leaders as more interested in economic gain than defending the political rights of their people.20 With the war, and some changes in the KIO leadership, many Kachin again saw the organization as the defenders of their interests. As a consequence, Kachin nationalism has also been greatly reinforced by the war – a process to which the crimes of the Burmese military against civilians have undoubtedly contributed.
Meanwhile, Burman activists in Rangoon and elsewhere in central Burma have made some gestures of solidarity towards the Kachin. The ‘88 Generation’ students – the leaders of the popular uprising in 1988 – organized trips to Myitkyina and issued calls for peace.21 The Free Funeral Service, a civil society organization based in Rangoon, sent donations to the people displaced by the war.22 But there is little awareness among most of the Burman population in the heartlands about the conflicts in the periphery. These conflicts seem almost as distant as if they were happening in another country.23 The Burman majority enjoys a set of unofficial privileges that often go unrecognized even by the politically involved Burmans, making them more pervasive.24 It is no wonder that many Kachin feel they have little support from the Burman population at large. Both may have been victims of the military dictatorship, but they have not been victimized in the same ways or to the same degree.
Throughout the Thein Sein administration, Aung San Suu Kyi remained aloof regarding the conflict in Kachin. As part of her strategy of reconciliation with the generals, she refused to commit herself on the issue. ‘There are people who criticized me when I remained [silent] on this case. They can do so as they are not satisfied with me. But, for me, I do not want to add fire to any side of the conflict’, she said in 2012 in London.25 ‘It is up to the government. This case is being handled by the government at the moment’, she would say later – a strange comment from an opposition leader who seemed to wash her hands of a fundamental issue in the country she aspired to govern one day.26
The refusal of Suu Kyi to adopt any position on the issue elicited a variety of responses from the Kachin. When I asked a Catholic priest in Laiza in 2012 whether he trusted Suu Kyi, he replied that she was just another Burman, and as such could not be trusted. Soon, another conflict flared up on the other side of the country, further revealing the limits of her moral commitments and leadership.
