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A proliferation of Karen parties and candidates highlights the challenge of political unity.
In a hot and gloomy schoolroom 40 kilometres southeast of Hpa’an, the Karen State capital, a candidate for the Phlone-Sqaw Democratic Party (PSDP) stands beside a huge replica ballot paper printed on tarpaulin. Ten parties and their logos face an audience of 40 farmers.
The candidate identifies the three Karen parties and explains the differences in colour and shape. He then covers two leaving the horns and drum of the PSDP. The farmers clap and shout.
With the world’s attention focused on electoral conflict between Myanmar’s ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD), competition between the other 91 parties is easily overlooked.
Many of these are ethnic nationality parties which, in the final frantic days of campaigning, are locked in a bitter struggle to represent the interests and identity of their people.
For Karen communities this is just another chapter in a long struggle for political unity. With no less than six Karen parties and nearly three hundred Karen candidates contesting seats across the country, it would appear that Karen political differences have never been greater.
In an effort to take stock of the Karen political project on the eve of these elections I followed three of these parties as they campaigned in different parts of the country; what follows are snapshots from those encounters.
The Karen Peoples Party: for Karen and country
“For our Karens we need unity, that’s all – that’s the key issue.”
I am with Saw Say Wah, retired Police Colonel, Karen Affairs candidate for the Yangon Division Hluttaw and KPP General Secretary. We are driving out of Yangon to meet the Party faithful in Htantabin, a northern suburb.
“We have another strategy,” he explains. “We want to have a third power in our politics; there are only two in our country – the NLD and the USDP – we are trying to unite the ethnics and the other democratic forces.”
He describes how the KPP intends to use its membership of the Federal Democratic Alliance, a coalition of ethnic and Burmese political parties, to broker closer engagement with the Nationalities Brotherhood Federation, a large coalition of ethnic parties.
The KPP has been much maligned for its Executive’s background in government service and its non-Karen candidature, prompting other Karen parties to question its agenda and priorities.
A marriage of convenience: Karen parties in Karen State. Photo: Richard Dolan
At Htantabin a small group of Christian Sgaw Karen party members gather. Their Secretary now stands before them like a General in front of his troops, looking out of the window as he speaks.
A middle-aged man at the back consults the elections app mVoter on his smartphone, scrolling through the various candidates, hovering briefly over the Karen National Party (KNP) before flicking it away like some irritating fly.
Saw Say Wah’s lieutenant today is Saw Jacob Htoo, a 35-year-old lawyer and KPP candidate for the Amyotha Hluttaw in Yangon’s Hmawbi Township, and a great grandson of iconic Karen National Union President and Karen martyr Saw Ba U Gyi.
He is not the only KPP candidate from Karen aristocracy; others include granddaughters of Generals Smith Dun and Sanky.
The following day I join the KPP on the campaign trail in Ahlone where I meet Oo Tin Sein, the party’s Amyotha Hluttaw candidate for this Karen-dominated Yangon Township, and ethnic Barma. He tells me:
A lot of my friends are Karens, a lot of friends are Christian, a lot of my teachers are Christian, so that is why I am very close to them. It is thanks to those people who teach me so many things – that is why I want to help my people.
As we follow the campaign van in Saw Say Wah’s aging Nissan the KPP Secretary explains:
We Karens are not very tactful at all – we think the Burmans are our enemy – they are not our enemy, the political system is our enemy. We must avoid confrontation so we are trying to harmonise with every party, the government and all parts of society – this is our strategy to penetrate this government.
With the campaign song blasting overhead – ‘The KPP is coming with a United Force!’ – the Yangon traffic closes in around us like a vice.
The Karen National Party: a tale of two horses
In a clearing in Buffalo Swimming village on the Karen/Mon State border, Saw Aye Htoo, Chairman of the local Karen Literature and Culture Association (KLCA) and the KNP’s Karen Affairs candidate for the Mon State Hluttaw, holds aloft a copy of General Smith Dun’s autobiography, Memoirs of the Four-Foot Colonel.
The Buddhist Pwo Karen villagers sit in rows as in a schoolroom listening to him tell the story of how this diminutive Karen rose to become Commander-in-Chief of the Burmese Army. Afterwards he explains:
I try to educate them about our Karen because they don’t know that any Karen have achieved high office. I also tell them this so I can explain how they choose their leader for the next five years.
Women in traditional Karen dress from the nearby Agriculture and Farmer Federation of Myanmar are on hand to help the KNP candidate. As one of them hands me a campaign leaflet she whispers, “We are the real Karen – the pure Karen.”
It is a theme the candidate quickly picks up on:
A lot of Karen are hoping that the real Karen party will stand up so this is why we established our party. Our Karen people don’t like our Karen society to mix with some other Burmese, Chinese, Indians. The KPP are not bad, they are good but they are not real Karen because they are in bed with the government.
As we are preparing to leave U Shwe Myint of the National Development Party (NDP) arrives intent on speaking to the same village. He calls the locals to attention as if telling them that school is not yet over for the day. They reluctantly return to hear him speak. Saw Aye Htoo can’t resist schooling me:
In a horse race some horses will not win – they know that – but they have to make sure their horse will win so they try to disturb the other horses. The government has created a lot of sub-parties and then some of them will get the vote so NLD will not get it.
Back on the road he introduces me to a middle-aged woman who now sits exhausted beside me. “She is my campaign manager,” he explains, “but a USDP member – a strong USDP member!”
Everyone laughs.
“Don’t worry,” he says, “some of my party organisers are not KNP, some are USDP, a lot are NLD, but we are all Karen. In the village they concentrate on the Karen and forget about their party.”
The Phlone-Sqaw Democratic Party: a moral mandate
The PSDP are riding high. In 2010 they captured at least 70 per cent of the vote in Karen State, winning more seats across State and Union assemblies than any other Karen party.
They are fielding 44 candidates in this election, more than double the number that stood in the last election, and are confident they are going to win big.
We sweep out of town in an air-conditioned motorcade behind tinted windows. I am travelling with Saw Aung Kyaw Naing, a former government employee in the Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation and PSDP incumbent candidate for the Amyotha Hluttaw in Karen State’s ‘Region 1’.
I ask him what distinguishes his party from the other Karen parties:
We are the real national party, we organise with the local people – the Karen people in Karen State, the national people – the real Karen people.
Photo: Richard Dolan
Despite its inclusive mantra, the PSDP is largely a Buddhist Pwo Karen party reflecting the identity and interests of the majority in Karen State. Only a minority of candidates are not Pwo-speaking Buddhists. Indeed, the party was largely founded by Ashin Pin Nya Tha Mi, Sayadaw of nearby Taungalae Monastery, who remains a significant power broker in party politics and the formation of policy.
As the candidate describes:
We don’t want conflict or illegality – we just want peace to organise our people, to manage our affairs self-sufficiently. We don’t want to favour certain groups and we don’t want to follow others.
When we turn our attention to the current state of Karen politics he holds little hope of coming to some sort of agreement with other Karen parties:
Some are organising with foreign people like the Burmese. Now that there are six Karen parties it is much more difficult to have discussions.
At the village of Wei Kayin I join some villagers crouching in the grass behind the schoolroom where the PSDP have set up. With the reverberation of the microphone echoing in the background they give me their views on Karen unity.
“We are Karen,” says one “we have two religions, Buddhism and Christianity, but we are the same Karen; we don’t need more parties.”
Later, one of the village elders takes me aside. “If our Karen people go down a road they go alone and never look back,” he says.
“But if we look back we will learn from the past and how we can move forward together in unity. We have six parties because we cannot look back, learn and then move forward together.”
He looks into the gathering gloom and spits into the dust.
Richard Dolan is a DPhil Candidate at the Department of International Development, Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford currently carrying out fieldwork in southeast Myanmar.
This article forms part of New Mandala’s ‘Myanmar and the vote‘ series.
As Johnny-Come-Latelys to ceasefire capitalism the Karen leaders sadly have shown they aren’t immune to this new improved attractive brand of divide and rule whereas the Kachin have gone through that phase and hopefully learned their lessons.
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Right you are; suppose it’s worth remembering that the Kachin, who are mostly Christian (about 90%), have not had politically inflected religious difference to contend with to the same extent as the Karen. Furthermore, considerable difference between Karen-populated areas has clearly fostered alternative political visions and notions of Union Karen over time and in response to changing and often contrasting realities. Viewed in this way, the Karen are therefore more likely to succumb to ‘divide-and-rule’, less likely to resist it and still less likely to learn anything from it. If things are being manipulated, as you say, we might fear the government as much as Karen leaders.
The political role of the KNU will be decisive in the future, especially now that it’s within the legal fold; it’s a fact all Karen parties acknowledge, all of which have been in discussion with the KNU over the future shape of the Karen political project. We can only hope that this has the potential for greater stability and cohesion; that is, if the KNU can get their own house in order.
I was at a meeting a few months ago in which a member of the KNU Central Committee was lecturing a large Karen audience, including representatives of at least four of the political parties, on the benefits and virtues of federalism. Afterwards, the guy next to me quipped, “A Federal Union of Karen!” He may well be right in which case the KNU would assume its old precarious role at the helm of a still more diverse and divided union within the country this time. Unlike the Kachin, the Karen could find themselves fighting with unfamiliar weapons on many fronts and in uncertain terrain.
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The DKBA is a relatively recent phenomenon arising from historical disenfranchisement of the Buddhist Karen in the struggle finally exploited to its tremendous military and political advantage by the military regime.
The current division I believe has been among the Christian leadership, achieved by dangling a big juicy carrot in front of them which some of them just found it too hard to resist and attractive enough to betray their own people.
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The Karen State Democracy and Development Party (KSDDP) is the political voice of the DKBA which came into existence at the time of its BGF incarnation. It is one of four Buddhist Pwo Karen parties in the southeast with different agendas. Another of these four parties, the newly formed Karen Democratic Party (KDP), emerged in a recent split with the PSDP, only for yet another new party, the appropriately named Karen Unity and Democracy Party (KUDP), to emerge at much the same time.
The differences and developments here speak of considerable political divisions amongst Buddhist Karen and their leaders. With four of the six Karen parties implicated in this, the Karen political project (certainly in the Karen heartland) is therefore predominantly in the hands of Buddhist Karen amongst whom the significant political fault lines appear.
The above makes divisions within Christian Karen party politics look like something of a dull sideshow, where the fledgling Karen National Party (KNP) has emerged as an alternative model to that of the Karen Peoples Party (KPP). The KNP is so small that it poses little threat to the KPP, still less after these elections. The aging KPP leadership are the best of friends over many years and are more likely to retire together than break up and form new political parties.
If you’re talking about the recent ‘NCA divisions’ in the leadership of the Christian Karen National Union then that of course is something else. I would say that if there has been any betrayal here it is the KNU’s betrayal of its NCCT brothers like the Kachin, whom you mentioned earlier, rather than their own people; but we all need to get a closer look at the specific shape, size and substance of that big juicy carrot you talk about before calling it.
With the KNU still deciding what to do with itself and the political parties left reeling in the wake of the NLD juggernaut the most pressing question now is ‘what leadership?’ because I don’t see much leadership, whether it be Buddhist Karen, Christian Karen or Benevolent Karen leadership, right now.
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