Читать книгу The Burmese Labyrinth - Carlos Sardiña Galache - Страница 11

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The War in the ‘Green Hell’

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 was ever consulted on the project.

In 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 within a federal Burma is more difficult to discern. Until 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 Burmese army in the mid 1980s, ‘as it gave me 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.