The three-year anniversary of the 2021 coup d’etat obscured one of Myanmar’s most important timestamps: the Karen National Union (KNU) revolution turned 75 on Jan. 31—the world’s oldest insurgency organization. A mixture of sheer persistence, commitment, a determination to maintain identity, fostering legitimacy and a solidarity borne out of surviving year after year of Myanmar military aggression and state murder has marked those decades of struggle to establish a free Kawthoolei.
The KNU was formed in 1947, and its first armed wing, the Karen National Defense Organization (KNDO), formed soon afterwards, and went into open armed revolt in 1949. The main claimant to the longest running insurgency is the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), which was formed in May 1964, although it had antecedents in the peasant defense forces of the La Violencia period from 1948 to 1958. To many in academic and conflict studies, the FARC are the oldest, but it’s always been the KNU that has endured the longest.
Armed conflict in Myanmar has been largely ignored by the outside world for many years, especially during the “transition” decade between 2011 and 2021, when the KNU revolution was seen as incompatible to peace, and the contemporary raison d’etre of the organization was the protection of Karen communities from an unrelenting Myanmar army that persisted in pressuring them even as foreigners proclaimed the territory “post-conflict”.
The first president of the KNU, Saw Ba U Gyi, assassinated by the military on Aug. 12, 1950 (the date of the annual Karen Martyr’s Day), famously formulated the organization’s four main principles: “Surrender is out of the question; The recognition of the Karen country must be completed; We shall retain our arms; We shall decide our own political destiny.” After 75 years of near constant struggle, multiple setbacks, near defeat, deep divisions and major internal splits, the KNU might be closer to its dreams of deciding its own political destiny than at any times since the 1950s.
It’s worth reading over political manifestos at that time during this current revolutionary period, to gauge consistency of messages, even if the articulation doesn’t necessarily date well (the early years of the KNU were infused with a great deal of anti-American imperialism rhetoric). In his strongly worded political tract from Aug. 16, 1951, Mahn Ba Zahn, President of the KNU (Irrawaddy) Delta Command, reflected on the three stages of the two-and-a-half years of revolt: “(1) the period when we occupied and controlled territories; (2) the period when our enemies reoccupied territories held by us; (3) the period when our war efforts were at a standstill.” The KNU’s revolution emerged soon after independence from the British “in order to set up a sovereign Karen state and a new democratic world for the Karens within which the Karens will be able to direct their own destinies.”
Mahn Ba Zan was particularly critical of Prime Minister U Nu. “Mg (Maung) Nu’s Government is a fascist Government…fascism as a heritage from the Japanese…(t)he army officers such as Ne Win, Kyaw Zaw were members of the Thirty Comrade who had their military training in Japan and it was they who during the Second World War instigated and brought about a racial war between the Karens and the Burmese.” The KNU slowly developed into a parallel government with an armed wing, the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), Department of Education and Culture, Transportation, Foreign Affairs, Forestry, and Agriculture amongst many others. The KNU even at one point had its own mail stamps, marriage ceremonies (adultery was for a time punishable by death) and still has effective police forces and judiciary. The KNU is under-studied in the field of Western conflict studies and rebel governance, with the exception of the seminal work of scholar David Brenner.
A seminal book on the history of the KNU is Fifty Years in the Karen Revolution in Burma: The Soldier and the Teacher by Saw Ralph and Naw Sheera. Saw Ralph was a senior KNLA commander who joined the KNU the year the revolution started and his wife Naw Sheera was a leading figure in the Karen Woman’s Organization (KWO). This is a rare insight into prolonged insurrection and the relationships maintained in such adversity, including their marriage and eventual “long leave” from the KNU and KWO and eventual exile to Perth in Australia. The undulating military and social fortunes of the KNU and the broader community are an important reminder of multi-generational suffering and sacrifice.
Another instructive strength of the memoirs is how much patterns of conflict in the 1950s bare some similarity with post-coup conflict. The military then used a more combined arms approach to combatting insurgency, with ground troops, naval craft and air strikes, not the scattered jungle warfare which was the norm after 1995. This is outlined in the fascinating description of the battle for Hlaingbwe in 1953, which involves the epically named KNU officer, “Brigadier Elmo Peel”.
As fascinating as Ralph and Sheera’s book is, and a rare addition to our understanding of conflict in Myanmar, and justly balanced between the perspective of a soldier and a women’s leader, it has an air of melancholy over the sacrifices of prolonged resistance, what Ralph calls first a “father to son war” that has become a “father to grandson war.” In another section he remembers speaking to a sentry looking into the darkness who laments: “It’s just fighting, fighting, fighting…(w)ill it end with fighting, or will there ever be a chance for my children to call me Daddy?”
Equally fascinating is the long-term KNU leader Saw Bo Mya’s book from 2000, with another epic title: Memoirs on my true past experiences that I wish to disclose. Perhaps not as polished as Ralph and Sheera’s, but for an insight into the cunning anti-communist leadership it is important reading (The Irrawaddy founding editor Aung Zaw reviewed it 22 years ago). It also reminds us that one dimension of the Karen revolution was the almost yearly “dry season offensives” against bases and tax gates along the Thai-Myanmar border for almost 20 years. The full death toll will never be known, but it must be staggering: dead and forever mutilated soldiers on both sides, so many civilians and possibly thousands of convict porters. Meeting some Sit-Tat (Myanmar military) officers in Mae Sot in 1996, Bo Mya claims one of them confided that in just one offensive in 1992, “if they lay down the dead bodies of their soldiers killed in battle, the corpses laid astride would fill the distance between Manerplaw [KNU headquarters on the Myanmar-Thai border] to Moulmein.”
Read one of the “KNU Bulletins” from the 1980s to determine how sophisticated the KNU machinery was back then, while continuing to resonate today. Bulletin No. 6 from September 1986 has articles on (then) Burma army war crimes, Bo Mya’s appeal to Western leaders, a profile of resistance in Arakan (Rakhine), and a letter from one H.A. Stoner on who really killed Aung San. The “Summary of KNLA Activities for June/July 1986” follow the same methodology as today: enemy killed in action 164, wounded 244, “leg severed (landmines) 15”, and only one soldier captured. This was a brutal war, with so many years looking like this.
The KNU endured numerous setbacks and defeats. Multiple waves of refugees fleeing into Thailand from repeated offensives in the mid-1980s grew eventually into nine camps (including Karenni camps further north) that still exist with over 80,000 people still residing. The attempt to reopen a front in the Irrawaddy Delta in the 1990s was brutally defeated, and the Sit-Tat crushed the attempt during “Operation Storm” through heavy firepower and collective punishment across the Delta: the death toll and numbers of detainees may never be known. The most crushing blow was the fall of the main bases at Manerplaw and Kawmura in early 1995, following the treachery of a faction of Karen soldiers that had formed the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA) with a great deal of Myanmar military intelligence manipulation.
The armed conflict between the KNU and DKBA and then Border Guard Forces (BGF) from 2009 has lasted 30 years. The surrender of the Brigade 7 commander Htein Maung in late 2006 (ironically just days following the funeral of Bo Mya) and the formation of the KNU/KNLA Peace Council (which is still SAC-positive even after the coup) was another low-point for Karen unity. (The SAC, or State Administration Council, is the current junta’s governing body.) The Northern Karen State military offensive from 2006 to 2008 fueled widespread misery again. By 2009, some of the foreign whack jobs who flitted around the border were predicting a “Sri Lanka style endgame for the KNU, and that Mae Sam Laep would become the ‘Dunkirk of the Karen.’” The KNU finally took the long standing Myanmar army base across from Mae Sam Laep on April 27, 2021. More than two years later the Sit Tat have been pushed back steadily west and hundreds of Myanmar army bases have fallen.
It’s also an indubitable fact that the KNU wouldn’t have had such long survivability and legitimacy without the Karen Women’s Organization (KWO). As old as the KNU, the first period of the organization was directly under the political wing, as all the other departments of justice and health would be. But the KWO was reorganized in 1985 and slowly became more independent, both from KNU control but also from entrenched patriarchal distain from older dinosaur leaders to the idea of women’s participation. Following the setbacks of the mid-1990s, the KWO was crucially important not just in aid and administration on the ground in Karen State, but in human rights advocacy and research internationally, keeping the plight of civilians in war zones as high on international attention spans and in the media as possible. But possibly even more than the KNU, the KWO was vilified by foreign peace entrepreneurs in the early days of the peace process as “spoilers”.
War and revolution are social undertakings as much as political projects, and the more successful inclusion of community often signals success, especially as armed groups become less authoritarian and more responsive to representative arrangements as the KNU has done over the past 20 years. Organizations such as the Karen Environmental and Social Action Network (KESAN), Karen Human Rights Group (KHRG, formed in 1992 as one of Myanmar’s first human rights organizations), Back Pack Health Worker Team (BPHWT), and Karen Office of Relief and Development (KORD) amongst many others have been important contributors and allies to the Karen revolution.
Leadership matters, and the KNU have had a highly uneven and at times fractious command structure. There is no doubt Saw Ba U Gyi and Mahn Ba Zahn were effective and visionary commanders. In hindsight, Bo Mya’s tenure from the 1980s to 2000 was a period of brutal hubris, marked by one of the organization’s biggest setbacks, the fall of the border bases of Manerplaw and Kawmura in 1995 and the increase in internal Karen religious divisions. One strong period was the tenure of Padoh Mahn Sha, a well-respected and principled intellectual who took a strong stand against peace talks with the Myanmar military. His assassination in February 2008 was a major blow to the organization.
His successor David Thakerbaw was also well respected. The KNU elected Naw Zipporah Sein in 2012 as Vice Chair until 2017, where she led many of the initial talks with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and then the National League for Democracy (NLD) administration. Zipporah should be remembered as a principled voice during a period of international over-optimism: she had the measure of the Myanmar military just as Mahn Sha did and had to withstand strong Western pressure to engage with the Myanmar military. Kwe Htoo Win, the current president, will always have the “Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) Mark of Cain” on his legacy (and his strongly suspected role in the KK Park casino complex) but he did serve to oust the conservative and confused 91-year-old General Mutu Say Poe, who traveled to Naypyitaw to hug dictator Min Aung Hlaing just months after the April 2023 KNU Congress. It was fortuitous that the post-coup phase of the revolution had Thadao Moo as General Secretary: just the confident, safe pair of hands needed in a crisis.
The deputy commander of the KNLA, General Baw Kyaw Heh, is a very popular leader, one of the leaders of the “anti-NCA” faction, and even before the coup was pursuing strategic partnerships with rising insurgents such as the Arakan Army (AA) and since the coup as benefactor to Maung Saungkha’s Bama People’s Liberation Army (BPLA). In contrast, the scion of the Bo Mya family, Ner Dah Mya, had a decidedly checkered role in various leadership positions, and is now terminally disgraced after his role in murdering unarmed prisoners of war in 2021, and the formation of the Kawthoolei Army, which is garnering an increasingly notorious reputation for criminal conduct in Brigade 4. His eventual expulsion from the KNDO and KNU in 2022 included an accounting of multiple misdeeds, with an official KNU statement asserting: “Kindly be informed that his actions are no longer relevant to us.”
By 2018 it was obvious that the NCA process wasn’t working: not from any outside analysis, but when the KNU suspended their involvement because of blatant Myanmar military obstructions. By 2020, the KNU, in large part due to its sophisticated civilian aid apparatus, was being promoted as a credible operator of COVID-19 programs. Some over-optimistic commentators predicted the pandemic could be a catalyst for peace, much like the 2004 tsunami was for the conflict in Aceh: a ludicrously fatuous notion. In any event, the Sit-Tat began destroying KNU formed health checkpoints, using the lockdown as an excuse to keep pressuring the Karen, but also destroying EAO (ethnic armed organization) COVID-19 checkpoints across EAO territory throughout Myanmar.
The murder of a Karen woman, Naw Mu Naw, by two soldiers in July 2020 sparked rare civilian protests against Myanmar military bases in Hpapun calling for the army to withdraw. The army claimed it was a case of “unintentional weapons discharge”, but everyone understood it was the result of long term militarization and a culture of impunity: protests were even larger in late December when 10,000 civilians demonstrated.
And yet the World Bank was preparing to throw US$200 million to the Southeast under a project called “Peaceful and Prosperous Communities”, which according to the planning document was designed “to improve access to basic infrastructure, services, and economic opportunities for vulnerable communities in selected conflict affected areas of Myanmar in a conflict-sensitive manner.” Notice the term conflict is not framed as “post-conflict”, which is how Karen State was viewed in the early days of the democratic transition, and which drove a disastrously inept Asia Development Bank (ADB) road building project which involved Saw Chit Thu and the Karen State Border Guard Force (BGF): the DKBA turncoats.
Just 10 days before the 2021 coup d’etat, 172 civil society groups wrote to President U Win Myint and State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi to request help on curtailing military expansion. “Upon observing the catalyst for such conflict and tensions between the NCA signatories…we have found that the Myanmar (Sit-Tat) broke the NCA as they have taken positions and expanded deployment, giving different excuses, including in the name of development projects. Therefore, we call on the government, elected by the people, to look towards national reconciliation and genuine sustainable peace.”
It was therefore with an infusion of irony that so many NLD grandees flocked to KNU territory to seek shelter in the days and months after the 2021 coup. They also fled to Karenni and Kachin States where the EAOs and communities there had been subject to similar shabby treatment by the NLD on everything from peace, development and IDP resettlement. Initially it had a surreal re-make of 1988 feel. The NUG leadership should be mindful that much of this resentment hasn’t completely gone away, nor will the scar tissue of decades of central state oppression and atrocity.
Over the past three years, the KNU has quietly achieved a series of strong battlefield gains, expelling SAC presence out of Hpapun, pushing into the plains of Bago, not quite seizing Kawkareik but putting pressure on Myawaddy and potentially surrounding the Karen State capitol of Hpa-an. It did this through the tutelage of numerous People’s Defense Forces (PDFs) such as Cobra Column and Venom, as well as National Unity Government-affiliated groups. The decentralized nature of brigade areas became an asset over the past three years, as most eventually joined the fight against the SAC (with the obvious exception of Brigade 7, which seems to have made a strategic decision to sit out the SAC era, so far). Tanintharyi, Brigade 4, has slowly joined the fight after initial reluctance, although the conflict landscape there is incredibly confusing.
But these unprecedented territorial and administrative gains have come at a high cost. A total of 717,626 civilians have been internally displaced in all the KNU districts. Increased humanitarian assistance is urgently needed. Airstrikes continue against both military and protected civilian places, an intensification in 2023 indicating the fighting won’t be over any time soon. Land mines and explosive remnants of war (ERW) remain a major problem: imagine seven decades of land mine contamination, plus the past and future human toll this takes.
Even Saw Chit Thu has made a dramatic realignment, recently ending his alliance with the military, and after first attempting to retire in Yangon and Mandalay, then declaring “autonomy” in a stunning turn after 30 years of being the Sit-Tat’s hired thug. Chit Thu claims the decision was prompted by “Karen not wanting to kill other Karen.” This may apply to some of the BGF personnel, but Chit Thu has been murdering other Karen since 1994, so to assume he had a recent change of heart is a contemptible canard. After three decades of the DKBA, then BGF, burning down refugee camps, drug dealing, land grabbing and conniving with Chinese gangsters to create the monstrosity of Shwe Ko Ko casino and the scam centers, Chit Thu should be in the top five defendants at any eventual Karen State War Crimes Trial.
The KNU has also had to contend with decades of very strange foreigners coming to help, although often getting in the way. Diplomats, donors, UN officials, aid workers and a never-ending slew of salivating “peace” INGOs have poked and prodded the KNU revolution and cast judgement, questioned legitimacy, predicted downfall and then when it suited them, exploited Karen people for their own gains. From mercenaries to journalists, war groupies who like to play dress-ups in KNLA uniforms or gawkers in war zones, deranged drifters in Mae Sot, often with patient Karen indulgence that doesn’t always reflect well on the revolution. The KNU’s forbearance is admirable, and the post-2021 influx of foreign war profiteers flocking to impose workshops and capacity support in Mae Sot is an invasion of extractive nonsense they have endured numerous times.
Notable exceptions to the gaggle of loons is without doubt The Border Consortium (TBC), which has coordinated assistance to refugees and IDPs since 1984, and the Free Burma Rangers (FBR) relief organization, working with communities and the KNU for over 25 years. But also the many hundreds of aid workers and teachers over the years who have assisted in refugee camps and worked for various aid organizations and schools have made important contributions to the KNU.
There are three major lessons the KNU provides for the study of conflict in Myanmar and for the current generation of insurgents. Commitment, tenacity and innovation on the battlefield are centrally important. The administration of services through a credible and professional administration, “seeing like a state”, is equally important. But so too is a solution oriented approach that doesn’t require seven decades of conflict to achieve. The KNU always knew the primary impediment to peace in Myanmar was the Sit-Tat and their entrenched treachery. The military leadership must realize the revolution is delivering the ultimate defeat against the Sit-Tat: the KNU will likely outlast them.
David Scott Mathieson is an independent analyst working on conflict, humanitarian and human rights issues on Myanmar
