made during the colonial period, more than seven decades before. Given this harsh reality, and the fact that Suu Kyi seemed to have sided with the companies and the military, all the farmers expressed deep disappointment with her. They felt they had been betrayed and were now alone in their struggle. The only person I talked to at the time who said he was not disappointed with Suu Kyi was Thein Aung, a fifty-three-year-old farmer who told me that he ‘had never believed in her to feel any disappointment now’. These sentiments were far from universal among the Burman majority, but a crack had now been opened in Suu Kyi’s hitherto untarnished image.
* * *
The transition was supposed to be a pact of three elites: the military, the pro-democracy opposition led by Suu Kyi, and the leaders of the ethnic minorities.20 The pact between the first two would be surprisingly successful – but not so much the pact with the third. In any case, the terms of such a transition were dictated exclusively by the military, which had designed a bullet-proof constitution and still wielded great power. The reaction of Suu Kyi to such imbalance of power was to try her best to reassure the generals that she and her party posed no threat to them. Since her release from house arrest, Suu Kyi had mostly engaged in playing politics in the opaque corridors of power in Naypyidaw, making tours abroad that mostly served to legitimize the transition in the eyes of the Western powers, rather than listening to the grievances of the Burmese population, whose support she probably took for granted. Even the outspoken Win Tin criticized this aloofness from the public, and it became increasingly easier to find Burmese saying that she was not close enough to the people.21 She went as far as to assure the ‘cronies’ (a handful of extremely rich businessmen who had amassed huge fortunes during the junta period through their contacts with the generals) that she would not threaten their position, merely asking them to ‘act fairly’ and ‘work for others’.22
In the name of ‘national reconciliation’, Suu Kyi renounced two important weapons she had at her disposal to extract concessions from the generals – her popular support at home, and the influence she wielded on foreign powers like the United States, at a moment when the government was keen to develop closer relations with the West. Such a strategy reveals Suu Kyi’s deep distrust of participatory politics. Recalling her attitude to the protests against the copper mine in Letpadaung, she reacted with indifference, and even veiled hostility, to the wishes of the people.
The only issue on which she campaigned strongly was the clause in the Constitution that prevented her from becoming president. Shortly after her release, she called for a multi-ethnic conference;23 but the issue was mostly swept aside by the NLD during the Thein Sein years, leaving the initiative to the government. Moreover, the NLD was scarcely active for most of the period. Suu Kyi’s strategy of winning the trust of the generals rendered the party politically impotent, reducing it to merely reacting to developments shaped by others. Moreover, as the transition proceeded, an ugly truth, previously obscured, became increasingly clear: on the most crucial issues afflicting the country, the NLD’s vision for Burma was not so different from that of the military. Regarding the questions of citizenship, who belonged to the Burmese nation and who did not, and the political rights of the ethnic minorities resentful of Burman domination, the NLD failed to offer any alternative to the military. These were precisely the issues that would prove crucial during the transition.
On the night of 9 June 2011, three months after Thein Sein assumed the presidency of Burma, a series of explosions woke up Labang Hkawn Tawng, a stout, widowed farmer in her sixties, and her grandson while they were sleeping in their house in Sang Gang, a tiny, remote village in the hills of Kachin State, the northernmost state in Burma. Still halfasleep, at first she did not know what was going on, but soon she realized: the Tatmadaw and the KIA were fighting around the village. Frightened and with no time to collect their belongings, she and her grandson fled to the forest with the rest of the villagers, all of them ethnic Kachin. After hiding for several days, they were found by a group of KIA soldiers who directed them to Nhkawng Pa, a camp for internally displaced people located in the very small territory that the KIO controls along the border with China, where I interviewed her one year later.
The war between the Tatmadaw and the KIA resumed that night around Sang Gang, after a ceasefire that had lasted for seventeen years. The resumption of hostilities disrupted the lives of hundreds of thousands of Kachin people, like Laban Hkawn Tawng. In the subsequent months and years, more than 100,000 Kachin people were displaced from their villages, many seeking refuge in KIO-controlled areas. An unknown number of soldiers on both sides, as well as civilians, perished in the beautiful but unforgivingly harsh mountainous rainforest in Kachin State, which the British and American soldiers who had fought against the Japanese in World War II called the ‘Green Hell’. In the meantime, the government of Thein Sein launched a series of peace talks with the KIA and other armed groups, and even publicly ordered the army in mid 2012 ‘not to launch any offensive actions’.1 The army did not respect the order, and even escalated its operations throughout the year, culminating in the bombing with jet fighters of Laiza, the town on the border with China where the headquarters of the KIO/KIA are located, over Christmas that year.2
The main stumbling block in the negotiations – as the chief of the KIO’s negotiating team, Sumlut Gam, told me in his office in Laiza in 2012 – was that the Burmese government wanted to sign a ceasefire before engaging in any political dialogue about the status of Kachin State, while the KIO wanted the opposite: not to lay down its weapons until reaching a political agreement. The reluctance of the KIO to sign a new ceasefire was related to frustrations with the long ceasefire that had been ended one year before. Sumlut Gam believed that the government had cheated them in 1994, when they had accepted the ceasefire in the hope that it would lead to a political dialogue that never took place. ‘At that time, they told us that the army did not have legitimacy to maintain that kind of dialogue’, he said.
In this context, the war was inextricably linked with the negotiation process. Colonel Maran Zaw Tawng, one of the main military strategists of the KIA, believed that neither side could win an outright military victory. The Burmese army might be better equipped and superior in terms of manpower, but the Kachin soldiers of the KIA were better prepared to survive the extreme environment, having good knowledge of the difficult terrain. The Kachin fighters were also adept in the guerrilla tactics that had made them famous in World War II, when they fought against the Japanese alongside the British army. Given this military stalemate, Colonel Zaw Tawng told me, the objective of the KIA was to maintain an upper hand in the battlefield so as to improve their position at the negotiating table.
The immediate cause of the war was the decision of the Tatmadaw to send reinforcements to the site where the construction of a dam was planned in the Ta Ping River, near Sang Gang village. According to the KIO, the location was in their territory, and the reinforcement violated the ceasefire signed in 1994. But that was just the spark; tensions between the Tatmadaw and the KIA/KIO had been steadily mounting over the years ahead of the transfer of power.
An important contributing factor was the plan for another, much larger dam to be built about forty kilometres in the north of Myitkyina, the capital of Kachin State, at the confluence of the Mali and N’mai rivers, which forms the Irrawaddy River. In 2005, a bilateral agreement was signed between the Chinese state-owned China Power Investment Corporation, the Burmese Ministry of Electric Power and the huge Burmese conglomerate Asia World. This company had been founded by a man who had made his fortune as a drug lord in northern Shan State, and was currently chaired by his son, Steven Law. The Myitsone dam would be the biggest dam built by a Chinese company outside its borders, and would produce 6,000 MW; 90 per cent of the electricity it generated would be destined for the power grid of the Chinese province of Yunnan, and such energy would not be directed to Burma until fifty years after its completion. No Kachin organization
