We Hope the Last Kachin Alive Continues to be Kachin

အဓိပါယ္ရွိတဲ့ အင္းတာဗ်ဴး အေမးအေျဖေလးတစ္ခုပါ။

"ကခ်င္ ျပည္နယ္ျမိဳ ့ေတာ္ ျမစ္ႀကီးနားျမိဳ ့ ျဖတ္သန္းစီးဆင္းေနတဲ့ ဧရာ၀တီျမစ္ကုိ နင္းေဂါကရိွဳင္၀ါး လုိ ့ကခ်င္ဘာသာလုိ ေခၚတာ ႀကာခဲ့လွျပီေပါ့။ တာေပမယ့္ ဗမာအစုိးရက တံတားထုိးျပီးလုိက္တဲ့အခ်ိန္မွာ ဗလမင္းထင္ တံတားဆုိျပီး ဗမာသူရဲေကာင္းတစ္ဦး၏ အမည္နာမျဖစ္ တံတားနာမည္ကုိ ေပးတာ က်ေနာ္တုိ ့ကခ်င္လူမ်ိဴးေတြအတြက္ ဘာမွ အဓိပါယ္မရွိဘူးဗ်"

The Rev. Pungga Ja Li is a local Kachin historian and the author of several books on Kachin customs and culture. He is now living in Laiza, a town in Kachin State near the Chinese border that is under the control of the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), which is currently engaged in renewed fighting with Burmese government troops in the north of Burma. In this interview, conducted by The Irrawaddy reporter Ba Kaung in Laiza in early July, Pungga Ja Li reflects on the Kachin leaders’ decision to join with the Burmese majority a year before Burma gained its independence from British rule in 1948, and shares his views on the current armed clashes and the future of the Kachin people.


Kachin historian Pungga Ja Li (The Irrawaddy)

Question: How do you view the renewed conflict in Kachin State?

Answer: Apparently, this is a cloudy period for all of us. But this is good in a sense that many Kachins now remember God. Many, including the KIO leaders, are now saying prayers, and we are becoming more united within us. We are now praying for God's support, but he sometimes can be cruel for the sake of our maturity.

Q: Here in Laiza, there is talk that the Kachin made a mistake in joining with the Burmese majority when their leaders signed the Panglong Agreement. What is your opinion on this?

A: Many Kachin leaders in those days disagreed with Panglong, except Sama Duwa Sinwa Nawng and Zauring. The Kachin leaders wanted to stay under British rule for five more years and only afterward wanted to establish the Kachin State as an independent state. But since his own grandfather was killed by the British soldiers, Sama Duwa did not want to deal with the British any longer—he even slapped the ground and said that if he made a mistake, he would get struck by lightning from the heavens. That's how he won the trust of fellow Kachin leaders and signed the Panglong Agreement. Otherwise, we would have been on our own all along and would never have had anything to do with the Burmese. We have lived under our rule—the rule of Duwas. But even if we made a mistake, the Panglong Agreement itself is a good treaty, I think, with all the guarantees for us though they never materialized into realities.

Q: Do Kachins feel betrayed by Aung San, who organized the Panglong Conference? What is your personal view of his daughter, Aung San Suu Kyi?

A: I don't know what Aung San would have treated us to if he had lived. But he came to us for Burma's independence and years ago his daughter came to us again for Burma's democracy. I think Suu Kyi is a good leader, but when it comes to our affairs, she would only walk away with another Noble Prize but would never be able to come to our help.

Q: Do you regret the KIA's ceasefire with the government in 1994, given that it has not produced any political results for the Kachin.

A: In 1994, we hoped to hold discussions with the government officials for a political solution. But as you know, those discussions were more about chatting over drinks and meals—those discussions were never meaningful enough. On the other hand, the Kachins forgot to prepare the military side. Many forgot gun-shooting lessons. Only now, they are all alert again. They did not really know their enemy well.


Q: Do you think the KIA should sign another ceasefire agreement with the government at this point? What about calls for independence?

Meaningful discussions must come with the ceasefire, which will result in self-autonomy which has long been our demand. There are some talks about this call for independence within the leadership of the KIO. We have long wanted to walk towards that direction. Even if all of us are killed by the government army in consequence of that, we'd hope that the last Kachin who remains alive continues to be a Kachin, not a Burmese. But one thing that restrains us from moving in this direction is that our elders decided to stay with the Burmese—this agreement we should not break, I think.
Q: How strong is anti-Burmese sentiment among the Kachin people?

A: When we refer to the Burmese, by that we mean a group of leaders, not the Burmese population. But in terms of culture, we have been slowly engulfed by the Burmese ways. Culturally, we have been forced to become bankrupt under the Burmese rule. We are now left with the Burmese culture only. Our culture has been lost over time.

When you become bankrupt, you start borrowing the culture of others, which is Burmese in this case. Burmese culture is good for the Burmese of course. If I were Burmese, I might like such an idea that the minority groups in Burma are forced to assimilate with the Burmese majority and get rid of their identities. But the problem is we are not Burmese, and the majority don't seem to understand that our culture has its own values. For example, the crossing over the Irrawaddy River in Kachin State's capital of Myitkyina has long been called as Ninggawn Hkrai Wa among us, but when a bridge was built by the Burmese government, it was named Bala Min Htin, the name of a Burmese hero, which does not make sense to our Kachins.

Q: Didn't you face the same sort of cultural imposition under the British rule?


A: Of course, we have become Christians when coming into contact with Western missionary groups. But our previous faith in animism has many things in common with Christianity. Only after we have lived under the Burmese rule, our own style of ruling with Duwas has disappeared and then we lost our state.

But the disappearance of Duwas must also be blamed on our own Kachin leaders as well. Those leaders, as you see, also run away at the sound of gunfire. There were many Duwas up until 1961, when the KIA is founded. It was wrong that those Duwas did not become part of the KIA leadership. We are now left with culture only, which means everything to us. Culture represents our identity as a people and it is our religion too. We are trying to promote our own culture.

Q: What is the future of the Kachin people as a whole?

A: Before we can successfully resist the rule of the government, we have to fight with layers of its proxies. For example, some proxies will be Rawang, Lashi, etc., which are the smaller ethnics in our Kachin State too. Whether we like it or not, we will be forced to fight with those proxies. Until we have fought them off, we will not be able to hit the target. But one sure thing is we should no longer take the injustices lying down and we should stand up for our rights.


Q: There is talk that the KIA will be able fight a successful guerrilla war with the government troops should any political talks fail to take place. How do you think this would play out?

A: Yes, it is true. When the Burmese government troops came in, they needed trucks and porters who would carry the weapons in the jungle. But for us, we don't need them. We only need to provide a packet meal and a lighter to our soldiers, who would then be ready to fight with the government soldiers. In terms of weaponry, we are quite inferior. But we only regret that we have not taken good strongholds like those of the UWSA (United Wa State Army, the largest ethnic armed group in the east of Burma). There are very good places to build such strongholds in our Kachin State, which we have not prepared for war due to our ignorance.
http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=21742&page=2