“Independence is not the kind of thing you can get by begging for it from other people. You should proclaim it yourselves. The Japanese refuse to give it? Very well then, tell them that you will cross over to someplace like Twante and proclaim it and set up your government. What’s the difficulty about that? If they start shooting, you shoot back.” – Colonel Suzuki to the future 1st prime minister of Burma Thakin Nu, 1942 

If you follow world news at all, you’ll have been shocked by the mounting death toll in the Country formerly known as Burma in Southeast Asia, where hundreds of peaceful protesters have been gunned down in city streets by the army after a coup replaced the government a month earlier. What you might not know is that there have been thousands of ARMED protesters fighting the government of Burma (or as the military dictatorship insists on calling it, Myanmar) for over 70 years, wishing to split not once, not twice, but as far as I can tell at LEAST 9 ways.
This is Charlie Lee with Springtime of Nations, and we’re going to be taking a look at the biggest players in the Burmese Civil War, which is waged by armed national minorities against the Burmese state, which is dominated by the Bamar ethnic group who make up the majority of the country and reside in the populous south. In the mountains and jungles of Burma however, the paramilitaries of the Karen, the Shan, the Arakans and many others are able to hold off territory from the Myanmar armies. With murderous chaos reigning in Burma’s central cities, some of these ethnic conflicts which were under perilous ceasefires have resumed. Let’s dive into why these disparate groups have allied (and sometimes infought) against the Burmese state long before the scenes of horror in 2021.
In the late 19th century the British Empire defeated and annexed the Burmese Empire, which was run by a centralized Buddhist monarchy. For a long time the region was restive, and the British relied upon ethnic groups like the Karen and Chin who had converted to Christianity earlier in the century as allies, who became overrepresented in government and enjoyed favorable administration in contrast to the Bamar majority, who developed a nascent independence movement. During World War II, Japan occupied Burma and set up a puppet regime with a collaborationist army, the BIA. This formation was almost wholly made up of Bamar, and they engaged in ethnic cleansing against the minorities in the north, who stayed loyal to the British and fought the Japanese and their Burmese allies. The British made vague promises of Karen independence especially, but as the tide of the war turned in 1944 the BIA (Now the Burmese NATIONAL army) switched sides and managed to present itself as the biggest player in negotiating for Burmese independence with the British under the leadership of Aung San. To allay the fears of the minorities post independence, in 1947 Aung San sat down with the Kachin, Chin and Shan at the Panglong Conference to work to create a federalist Burma with broad ethnic autonomy and the promise of the ability to secede after 10 years of independence (the Arakans and Mons and Karens were invited to a 1948 follow up conference).
Any good will among the Karens created with the Panglong Conference was destroyed in 1949 when the central government attempted to “de-karenize” the government and military, replacing high level officials such as the Army Chief of Staff with Bamar nationalists. The outraged Karen National Defense Organization attacked the capital of Rangoon until a preliminary ceasefire agreement was reached (though the reforms agreed to were never implemented). The Kachin also revolted that year in response to Prime Minister Thakin Nu (our man from the opening quote) establishing Buddhism as the state religion of Burma. These conflicts harried the young nation which had only gained independence in 1948, and its lack of stability led to the 1962 military coup in Burma which established a socialist totalitarian State, scrapping the provisions of the 1947 Constitution and any promise of autonomy, much less independence for the national minorities.
The seizure of power by the military intensified the resistance to the central government, not only by the Karens and Kachins, but the Karenni nationalist movement, the Mon, the Arakans and the Shan all vying for their own land to be theirs alone. They were joined by other less sectarian groups like pro-Chinese communist groups in the bloody fighting that lasted through to the collapse of the Junta in 1988 in the aftermath of the “8888” uprising in Burma’s cities. The Socialist government was replaced by a less doctrinaire military Junta, which was also more effective at suppressing the minority forces, with a terrible price inflicted on the civilians in their areas, displacing hundreds of thousands by burning down whole villages, indiscriminately planting landmines in civilian areas, and engaging in ethnic cleansing operations to weaken groups like the Karenni and Arakan Armies. This strategy led many of the separatist groups to reach ceasefire agreements in the early 2000s, and in return the government created the 2008 Constitution which nominally granted more regional autonomy. In 2011 the Burmese (or Myanmar) military Junta officially returned rule to civilians, although they gave themselves a significant amount of institutional power in the new constitution that year, and by 2021 they took power back from Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of the founding father Aung San which set off this recent round of protests in the cities, although even during “democratic” rule the national minority armies have rejected their ceasefire agreements for various reasons mostly between 2014 and 2016, with four different ethnic armies forming the Northern Alliance in 2016 against the central government (the Arakans, Kachins, Kokangs and Palaungs).
The separatists AND the central government have been suspected of using child soldiers against eachother, but only the central government has been credibly accused of weaponizing rape against minority women, and the well known genocide of the Rohingya Muslims which took place in 2016-2017 and killed at least 24,000 Muslims and gang raped at least 18,000 Rohingya women, involving both the military and (with the government’s blessing), the Buddhist majority population in that region. The Rohingya are ethnically Arakan but are seen as foreigners as non-Buddhists like most of the other minority groups in Burma. The prime minister Aung San Suu Kyi has received large amounts of international criticism for her presiding over the Rohingya genocide and rightly so, although too much of this belies the amount of control the civil government really had on the military even before this latest coup.
The case of the Burmese wars of secession, and in particular the creation of the Northern Alliance, is instructive for libertarians when it comes to a popular front strategy. Coalitions with non-libertarians should not be undertaken lightly, lest we fall into what Lenin called Opportunism (ignoring the longer term goals of the revolution). However, the Northern Alliance is working together on the basis of setting themselves free from EACHOTHER. If any libertarian organization that wants secession from their government finds a group that is less libertarian than them but is a reliable fighter for greater autonomy and ultimately secession, whether they be conservative, left-liberal, or communist, we can find common cause with them. As we have said in our video on the Tigray nationalists in Ethiopia, give us a communist who truly wants to break away from the American Empire over a milquetoast “libertarian” who does not. The Bamar have their nation state, so let the Karen, Karenni, Shan, Kachins, Kokangs, Palaungs, Mon and Arakans have theirs as well! May 1000 flowers bloom!
Dixie or Bougainville will be our next nation.