preparation for the dam’s construction, five villages were emptied, and around 2,000 people uprooted from their ancestral lands and relocated in new villages. Local activists had protested against the dam since 2009, seeing it as further proof of the Burman state encroachment onto their lands, and as part of a wider conspiracy to Burmanize their land.3 Some Kachin I spoke with in 2012 feared that the dam could break at some point and flood Myitkyina, drowning its 300,000 inhabitants. The protests grew more vocal over the years, even when the government started to arrest some of the activists. Then, in March 2011, three months before the resumption of the war, the KIO chairman, Lanyaw Zawng Hra, sent a letter to the Chinese government warning that the project might spark a civil war in Kachin State4 – a warning that went unheeded. But with the democratic opening and the change of regime, a new movement sprang up against the dam, this time led by Burman activists in Rangoon. To some extent, this was a movement of inter-ethnic solidarity; but it also represented Burmese nationalism, reflecting increasing anti-Chinese sentiment.
The ‘Save the Irrawaddy’ campaign rallied the support of prodemocracy forces in Rangoon, including Aung San Suu Kyi herself. The popular appeal of the movement was due in no small measure to the symbolic power that the Irrawaddy has in the Burmese national imagination as the ‘bloodline’ of the country. On 30 September 2011, President Thein Sein made the astonishing announcement that his government would suspend the construction of the Myitsone dam, ‘to respect the people’s will’.5 It was the first time in decades that the Burmese government had yielded to a popular demand, and it was a stroke of political genius by which Thein Sein was able to kill two birds with one stone: on the one hand, he appeared to be responsive to popular demands, thus boosting his democratic and reformist credentials; on the other, his snub to China signalled his intentions to initiate his rapprochement with the Western powers that had isolated the Burmese regime diplomatically for more than two decades.
In fact, Thein Sein only suspended the Myitsone project for the duration of his mandate. The issue is still pending, with the Chinese demanding some sort of compensation. It is doubtful that the Chinese are ever going to build the dam as originally envisaged, as the political cost for any Burmese government would be far too high, and in recent years Yunnan has attained a surplus of electricity,6 so the need for the electricity is not as pressing as it originally would have been. But the Burmese government will at some point have to offer some alternative project by which China can recoup its losses. In any case, the suspension was a victory, as the dam has never been built. But a victory for whom? Not for the 2,000 people evicted from their villages. When, in 2012, I visited one of the villages to which they have been relocated, people complained about the way they had been uprooted, unable to farm their original lands and sent to places without fertile soil, where they struggled to make ends meet. Many had left for other places in order to find jobs. It was virtually a ghost village, made up of wooden houses so badly built by the government that the cold wind entered through cracks in the walls during the winter.
For the Kachin people at large, it was a mixed victory. The protest was stirred up by Burman activists in Rangoon, not by them, and many of their underlying grievances remained unaddressed. As early as 2012, a Kachin activist in Rangoon complained to me that those activists and Aung San Suu Kyi had hijacked their protests. Moreover, the inter-ethnic solidarity with the Kachin was short-lived for many Burman activists and politicians, including Aung San Suu Kyi, soon to be replaced by an apparent indifference. Both Kachin and Burman activists had fought against the dam for nationalist reasons, but in the framework of two different nationalisms. In any case, the suspension was insufficient to stop the war that had begun three months before. In fact, nobody expected it to stop. The reasons for the war ran much deeper, and were as much economic as they were political.
The military junta that replaced the dictatorship of General Ne Win in 1988 ruled the country for a total of twenty-three years, but always portrayed itself as merely a ‘provisional government’ ruling in a permanent state of exception. Its purported raison d’être was to restore the order and stability necessary to establish a constitutional system – hence its original name, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC). In the meantime, it strengthened its position in restive border areas like Kachin State, both militarily and politically, and extended its control over state institutions including the bureaucracy and the judiciary.
After approving the Constitution by a referendum in 2008, the junta sent orders in April 2009 to the ethnic armed organizations to accept being placed under the command of the army as Border Guard Forces (BGF). This happened before the promised ‘legitimate’ government was in power, and without the offer of any political concessions in return. The KIA refused to obey.7 The KIO supported the formation of the Kachin State Progressive Party (KSPP), with some former high-ranking KIO leaders at its helm, but the government did not allow it to register, presumably as punishment for the KIO’s refusal of the order to transform itself into a BGF.8 In short, as the change of regime approached, the KIO could see how any avenue of political representation in the new post-military order was closed.
The Kachin are one of the ethnic groups in Burma that have only the most tenuous cultural, linguistic or religious linkages with the Burman majority. Many Kachin, like many members of other ethnic minorities, have little reason to feel any attachment to the Burmese nation-state, which has been dominated by the Burmans throughout the country’s recent history. In precolonial times, the writ of the Burmese kingdoms did not extend into the rugged mountains where the ancestors of the Kachin have lived for generations. More recently, like that of other ethnic minorities, the experience that many Kachin people have had of contact with the Burmese state – particularly those living in rural areas – is of soldiers and other security forces treating them as potential enemies, and often conscripting them to carry out gruesome forced labour, or even to use them as human landmine-sweepers.9 The government has always accepted the Kachin as one of Burma’s ‘national races’, formally enjoying equal rights; but they have often been treated as second-class citizens in the context of an implicit racial hierarchy in which the Burman majority, supposedly more civilized, sits at the apex, and ‘hill tribes’ like the Kachin, the Chin and the Karen occupy a lower place.
The Kachin nation comprises six or seven different ethno-linguistic groups, or ‘tribes’: Jinghpaw, Zaiwa, Lachid, Rawang, Lisu, Lawngwaw (or Maru) and Nung; but there is much controversy about the inclusion of some of these groups under the Kachin umbrella. This is particularly true of the Lisu and the Rawang, many of whom regard themselves as a distinct ethnic group. Kachin ethno-nationalism is a relatively new phenomenon, and is mostly dominated by the Jinghpaw.10 These groups speak their own languages, the most dominant being the Jinghpaw, and are predominantly Christian (the majority are Baptist, but there is a significant Catholic minority, as well as some Anglicans). Kachin State is also home to other ethnic groups: a sizeable Shanni population, a group related to the Shan, and many Burman and Rakhine workers. In fact, the Kachin are in a minority in the state, albeit the largest one.
The Kachin community is not free from internal fissures, and the allegiance to Kachin nationhood varies between the different ‘tribes’, the Lisu and the Rawang scarcely identifying themselves as Kachin. But over time the Kachin have developed tight and complex kinship networks that make them a remarkably cohesive community in times of crisis.11 The Kachin also have relatively strong social institutions independent of a government that provides little assistance to its citizens, and even less in the neglected areas of the periphery. In the territory controlled by the government, the Kachin Baptist Convention (KBC) is much more than a religious organization; it also plays a social role that includes education, development projects and rehabilitation centres for drug users, according to the church’s ethos of ‘holistic mission’.12
The struggle of the KIO/KIA also has some religious overtones, clearly expressed in its motto: ‘God is our victory.’ But it would be misleading to see the KIA as an army of crusaders. Religion is a rallying point that resonates powerfully in a deeply religious population, but the goals of the KIO are eminently political. Whether the final aim is full independence or autonomy
