Inside the Karen Insurgency: Explaining Conflict and Conciliation in Myanmar’s Changing Borderlands

What is it about?

As Myanmar’s government prepares for a long-delayed second round of its Union Peace Conference, also known as the ‘21st Century Panglong’, it remains unclear which of the many conflict parties will actually attend. Some ethnic armed groups that did not sign the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) indeed remain locked in combat and are likely to abstain. To government officials and international donors, it thus seems all the more important that the country’s oldest ethnic insurgency, the Karen National Union (KNU), supports the government-led peace process. A closer look, however, casts doubt on the degree of this support and points to wider, significant shortcomings within Myanmar’s national peace process. At first glance, the KNU indeed seems like an important champion of Myanmar’s official peace process. This is even more so after its conciliatory Chairman Gen Mutu Say Poe cemented his position by winning the internal leadership elections on the 16th KNU congress in April 2017 against a less-compromising internal opposition, led by Naw Zipporah Sein. That said, the KNU’s rapprochement with Naypyidaw is anything other than self-evident. In fact, the KNU has long been regarded as Myanmar’s least compromising rebellion. It has, for instance, continued its armed struggle at a time when most other ethnic insurgencies in Myanmar entered bilateral ceasefire agreements during the 1990s and 2000s. Only after Myanmar’s military leaders initiated wide-ranging political reforms in 2011, the movement agreed to a historic ceasefire on 12 January 2012. Against the background of Myanmar’s transition, the movement’s changing outlook has often been regarded as the direct outcome of wider political change. While this seems intuitive, political transition cannot account for the simultaneous escalation of conflict with rebel groups whose own long-standing ceasefires collapse, most importantly with the Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO). It is also ill-suited to explain the mounting tensions that have emerged within the KNU between a pro-ceasefire leadership and an internal opposition that criticises the movement’s rapid rapprochement with the government. In an article recently published in Asian Security, I argue that these divisions are central for understanding the movement’s past, current and future trajectory. Instead of being the result of wider political transition, the rapprochement between the KNU and Naypyidaw has foremost been driven by the power struggle between two rival factions within the movement. In order to understand how internal contestation impacts the external strategy of the KNU, it is important to trace the origins of these internal fissures and explain how they translated into the divergent outlooks that exist within the group and the competition for leadership. While the KNU has always been a heterogeneous movement, the two different factions that we observe today emerged after power relations inside the movement had shifted considerably due to military challenges and geopolitical transformations at the Thai-Myanmar border. Militarily, the KNU lost ground to counterinsurgency offensives since the early 1990s, not least after rival non-state armed groups emerged from increased fragmentation of the main movement—most importantly the split of the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA) in 1994, which was caused by the mutiny of Buddhist soldiers dissatisfied with discrimination within a Christian-dominated movement. Geopolitically, the changing bilateral relations between Thailand and Myanmar brought powerful, outside economic interests from Thailand and Myanmar to the former periphery. While liberalising trade policies undercut the movement’s revenues from illicit border trade, infrastructure construction allowed the state to territorialise formerly off-limit territories, cutting deep inside the KNU’s ‘liberated areas’, locally known as Kawthoolei. These had divergent impacts on the movement, weakening some of its regional brigades more than others, not least by dis-embedding the insurgency from local communities in some areas in particular. Southern and central brigades of the KNU’s armed wing, the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), have traditionally controlled most smuggle routes, which turned them into the movement’s powerhouses. Yet, they have been severely challenged by incoming military and geopolitical pressures. Brigades 4, 6 and 7 in particular lost large swathes of territory, military strength, and were dis-embedded from local communities. This has severely challenged the authority of their leaders among local communities and their own rank-and-file. In contrast, the northern units of the KNU, including Brigade 5 and 2, remain relatively isolated and emerged as the last stronghold of the Karen insurgency. In contrast to their central and southern comrades, northern KNU units have maintained comparatively strong control of territory, over which they continue to rule as a quasi-government, delivering social services and security in return for taxes and recruits, and in effect maintaining reciprocal relations to local communities. External pressures have thus effectively shifted the KNU’s internal power balance from its traditional backbone in central Karen State to the north. This has, in turn, given rise to two competing factions in the KNU leadership and their diverging strategies towards the state, the movement’s ceasefire and the current peace process. The rapprochement with the government was led by central brigade leaders who sought to compensate for their declining power and authority. Indeed, Gen Mutu Say Poe was previously the leader of Brigade 6, his Chief of Staff and trustee Saw Johnny formerly commanded Brigade 7 and former General Secretary and now Vice-Chairman Saw Kwe Htoo Win was KNU District Chairman in the area of Brigade 4 at a time when its units had to give way to a large-scale Tatmadaw offensive along the corridor of the Yadana pipeline. On the other hand, the internal opposition surrounding former vice-chairperson Naw Zipporah Sein is supported by the movement’s northern brigade, most importantly the strong units of Brigade 5. Indeed, one of her closest trustees KNLA’s Vice-Chief of Staff Gen Baw Kyah Heh was previously the long-term leader of Brigade 5.

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