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| Kachin Independence Army (KIA) troops |
By David Brenner
Many of Myanmar’s ethnic minorities are growing increasingly disillusioned with America and may turn to China instead.
“The water stays cool inside even if the bottle sits in the sun for the whole day.” Tu Ja proudly explains the virtue of storing water in his 1943 U.S. Army stainless steel flask, one of the few belongings he could save when fleeing his village from the advancing Myanmar army in 2011. The internally displaced person (IDP) holds the bottle against a sun beam entering the dim communal cooking space in one of the countless makeshift camps in Kachin State. The smoke from open fires in the cramped space makes it hard to breath. Yet, Tu Ja goes on telling the story of a water bottle which seems to be as displaced as himself in this remote corner of northern Myanmar. It was given to him by his grandfather who fought with the Kachin Rangers for Detachment 101 of the American Office of Strategic Services against the Japanese on one of the Second World War’s most vicious battlefields. The Kachin, an ethnic minority group, have earned a reputation for being skilled mountaineers without whose courageous and fierce fighting abilities the Allied forces could not have driven the Japanese out of Burma. U.S. soldiers have long left these rugged borderlands in between Myanmar and China. Sadly, war has stayed.
For many decades this area has witnessed various ethnic armed groups struggling for minority rights and political autonomy against central government control. After the breakdown of a 17-year long ceasefire in 2011, conflict escalated again between Naypyidaw and the Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO). Since then, large-scale army offensives against rebel-held positions have displaced more than 100,000 civilians. While this conflict is largely ignored by the international media, international affairs are closely followed in the tea houses of Laiza, a small town nestled on the border of China’s Yunnan province and headquarter of the KIO. “One of our long-term mistakes was to think that we can be allies of the U.S.,” an officer of the 10,000 man-strong Kachin Independence Army (KIA) – the armed wing of the KIO – explains over dinner. “You know, we helped the Americans in the past and we identify with them. After all they brought us Enlightenment: our script and the Bible,” he continues by referring to the Swedish-American missionary Ola Hanson, who spread the gospel in Myanmar’s borderlands and developed an orthography for the Kachin language in the late 19th century.
Read the full story at The Diplomat