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New Mandala readers who have been following my recent series of posts on Manau festivals in northern Burma and northeastern India will be keen to see these pictures from Kachin State Special Region – 2, taken in February 2008. These shots are from the Manau festival held to mark the 47th anniversary of the Kachin rebellion against Burmese rule. The town where the festival is held is called Laiza. It is wedged right against the Sino-Burmese frontier and is managed by the Kachin Independence Army/Kachin Independence Organisation under their 1994 ceasefire agreement with the Burmese military.
Does anyone know if those concrete “tusks”, if that is what they are, are symbolic of the elephant tusks of the Ginsi Duwa?
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That was interesting. You can read about the celebrations in Kachin (which dialect?) and Burmese but not English. Windows wouldn’t recognise the Burmese font though. I think you need an Adobe font engine? Got about a dozen incompatible Burmese fonts all with different character encodings installed. Kind of like the political situation in Burma.
The ceasefire has been going since 1994? That’s a long time. Sounds successful in some sense. Probably discussed in Win Min’s new book, which you’ve motivated me to read:
Assessing Burma’s Ceasefire Accords,by Zaw Oo and Win Min, East-West Center Washington; Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) (September 24, 2007)
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Hi Aiontay and Jon,
Just quickly –
Aiontay: I’m not sure of the original symbolism behind the tusks. This is not, however, the only Manau ground with a similiar configuration. Anyway, this is a good question – I hope one of our readers can answer it.
Jon: The Kachin that is generally used in Laiza (and as a lingua franca by the KIO/KIA) is the “Jinghpaw” that was standardised (for want of a better word) in the early efforts to convert the Kachin to Christianity. Of course, there are still a number of variations and the spelling of Jinghpaw words is not always entirely consistent.
As for the font engine for the Burmese – I’m not sure. I can’t get it to open on my machine either.
And, on the ceasefire front, the KIA/KIO agreement with the Burmese authorities is actually one of the more recent. Many of the agreements in the Shan state (and also the other major agreement in the Kachin state) were made in the late ’80s and early in the ’90s.
A useful chronology of ceasefires is available here. Note that it only lists the major groups. For whatever reason it has excluded the DKBA, and smaller factions like the Kachin state’s “Lasang Awng Wa Group“.
Best wishes to all,
Nich
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[…] few days ago, regular New Mandala contributor Aiontay asked about the tusks at the Manau ground at Laiza, the Kachin Independence Army/Kachin Independence […]
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