In his Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Karl Marx wrote: 'The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.' Such an assessment is only half-right when it comes to Burma's internal conflicts, of which ethnicity is of equal importance to class. Whether ethnicity is largely a matter of 'political choice', as many academics suggest today, has little relevance in the lives of these ethnic peoples. The Karen, Kachin, Mon, Shan, Karenni and others have chosen to hold on to their AK-47s or M16s in order to fight on. The unappealing alternative is surrender and subjugation at the feet of their uncompromising enemy in Rangoon and, since 2005, Naypyidaw.
With varying degrees of ferocity, intermittent waves of ethnically mobilised wars have flared up since independence in 1948. Most of these were triggered by the non-Bamar communities' perception and experience of being denied a fair share of state power and control over resources by the Bamardominated governments, both civilian and military. Like the colonial Burma, the military-ruled Myanmar is in effect a garrison state; unlike British Burma, the generals' Myanmar remains so after a half-century of their monopoly rule. Under the Raj, Burma was the lucrative 'rice bowl of the world', exporting nearly half of the total global output; the Burmese generals, on the other hand, have succeeded in turning Burma into the region's 'basket case', worse off than post-genocide Cambodia.
Whether under General Ne Win or Senior General Than Shwe, the military leadership has never been keen on just and lasting peace with ethnic resistance movements, always attempting to dictate the terms of the 'peace'. In 1963, a year after the military coup that laid the foundation for military rule, Ne Win launched a series of highly publicised but half-hearted 'peace talks' with non-Bamar resistance groups, as well as the armed Bamar communist movement. When little came of these, Rangoon adopted a zero-sum policy of 'annihilation' towards any dissent. Just a year ago, Gen Than Shwe reiterated the military's institutional mission – not of peace and reconciliation, but rather of the reconsolidation of the central government's power vis-à-vis the non- Bamar ethnic communities, the power that was presumably fractured by the century-plus interval of British rule. 'I would like to urge you to build on the national reconsolidation that has been achieved,' he told the graduating class of a military medical academy, 'and avoid all thoughts and notions that might lead to the disintegration of the union.'
Consequently, some 60-plus years after independence, the armed conflicts still smoulder on. The anti-Naypyidaw armed resistance organisations – 21 as of January 2011 – vary significantly in both size (from 500 to 30,000 troops) and degree of political significance. The expansive conflict landscape encompasses Burma's Kachin highlands below Tibet, the 200-mile stretch of landlocked Pegu Yoma; from the Chin Hills due east from Mizoram and the Arakan Yoma that divides the Rakhine coastal region from the rest of Burma; the Wa Hills near the Sino-Shan frontier and the Naga Hills across from Assam, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland to the northwest. Furthermore, the ethnic armed groups – including the Shan State Army, the Karenni National Progressive Party, the New Mon State Party, and the Karen National Union – continue to dot the nearly 1500-mile-long Thai- Burmese border, from the Shan plateau in the east and the tiny Karenni state bordering northern Thailand, down to the Karen trans-Salween River region adjacent to the Thai provinces of Tak and Kanchanburi and the 500-mile Tenasserim coastline.