Abstract
The postwar period saw the proliferation of nationalist insurgencies throughout
Western Southeast Asia. This is often conceived of as an ethnic conflict. The
historical record tells a different story. These conflicts were in fact first motivated
by the economic and ideological factors. Their duration since the period between
the end of British Colonialism and the beginning of the Cold War prompts an
investigation of this important moment. Many current theories of both the nation
and peasantry obscure these factors and cannot be applied to Western
Southeast Asia without overlooking crucial factors. Culture in itself is not enough
to explain the conflict. Neither is the will of meddling "elites". The phenomenon
of protracted conflict requires a perspective grounded in Asian economic reality.
European models or frameworks will fall short as they reify a status quo instead
of observing a changing reality. Studying the pivotal period surrounding
independence reveals many inchoate forces behind the conflict. Understanding
these can serve to understand the longevity of violence, as well as their capacity
to shape the national movements there.
Introduction
Though Nationalist insurgency conflicts in India and Myanmar are nearly as old, or older
even, than those respective states, rather than starting at the beginning, which is lost in the
mists of time, in a past long obscured by colonialism, it is more useful to trace the history
backwards from its current state. It is also necessary to make some generalizations in the
process, as a cursory portrait of an issue of such complexity, especially one for and by
outsiders, must be somewhat impressionistic. The primary questions ought to be now only
why but how (these two are inseparable) did the Nationalist insurgencies in Northern
Southeast Asia develop? Moreover, what can explain the difference in outcomes for the
Nationalist insurgencies in Myanmar and India? Only 12 years after the partition of Burma as
a province within the British empire, there would suddenly be 3 noncontiguous nations divided
roughly on religious lines. The presence of a sizeable Christian population in Western
Southeast Asia could, at first glance, easily serve as a simplistic and primordialist explanation
for the proliferation of nationalist insurgencies there, however, what troubles such easy
conjectures of cultural ‘fault lines’ are the economic and ideological factors. The conflict
cannot be properly studied irrespective of the internal economic life of the nation and the
corresponding external ideological influences.
The secondary question is, in light of that, how should we regard the near unanimous
consensus regarding the importance of the territorial integrity of India and Myanmar? Why are
Assamese, Nagas, Was, Chins, Karens, Karbi, Kukis and Manipuris the ‘bad guys’? They call
them “terrorist”, “extremist”, “authoritarian”, ‘drug dealers”,”ethno-nationalists”? As hard as it
can be, in political science we must have no sacred cows. If questioning the assumptions of
the political status quo, which only serve the interest of obscurantism, upset the balance, it is
something which must be done. If in doing so, err is made on the side of the insurgents, so
be it. These are stories too often untold., which given the uncertainty, may be the story of tomorrow’s nationalism. We must not see things in terms of black and white, nor in shades of gray, but in colour. It is true that the Karen insurgents are supported by MPs for the Australian Liberal Party, likewise it is so that
the economic advisor to the president of the Burmese regime is another Australian of a similar
shade. Is supporting the “hill tribes” therefore a manifestation of British “divide-and-rule”
strategy? Now in truth, these nationalist insurgents are not a uniform faction in and of
themselves, as there are myriad conflicts within them in addition to the ones with the Burmese
state. But the point is that, one should not take it for granted that the Burmese nor Indian
states have any right to exist as they do, any more than the British empire did, except on the
grounds of force of arms, a concept which the nationalist insurgencies themselves have
grasped, though outside observers have not yet caught on. Currently we can see parallel
governments operating throughout Myanmar, with active insurgencies ranging from what
would be indistinguishable from petty crime to near full civil war. Control is contested not only
in military terms but in the daily administration of these areas1.
Within the Nationalist movements there are splits on the question of peace talks with
the Indian government. The Indian government has convinced some armed groups to
decommission and join what is called the “mainstream”. Though they are known as
“terrorists”(This, however, may well be besides the point, as the Indian state itself, and every other state, are often seen as ‘terrorists’ by many inhabitants of the area) , in almost every way the insurgent nationalists of India’s “Seven Sister states” and
Myanmar’s hills resemble conventional actors in a civil war, albeit on a reduced scale, and
notably with the areas under their control lacking a stable agricultural base, necessitating a
counter-economy existing in legal limbo2.
Sadly, almost all available literature related to the topic of Insurgent Nationalist movements in
Southeast Asia is marred by moderate to severe (neo-)colonial prejudice. Western
scholarship in particular is a hardly above the level of footnoted propaganda against the
nationalist movements themselves. While there is certainly no shortage of literature relating to
the ethnic conflicts in Myanmar or in India in their individuality, either pertaining to overviews
of the conflicts within a particular neocolonialist state or to the particular nationalist insurgency
itself, they are very rarely considered in their entirety across the colonial boundary. This is of
course, understandable as there are even more distinct and recognizable parties involved in the conflict
than the Balkans, Caucausus, Lebanon or the Democratic Republic of Congo. Therefore it is necessary to rely on
some primary source documents for the sake of comparison of the nationalist movements.
Eastern scholarship around the region might still be biased, either in favour of or against the
government, but at very least it is useful. Without as much money to throw at tawdry
propaganda, more of the truth can come out. For the Westerners, however the very
existence of these groups is a problem which needs to be solved by the government with
some subtle tweaking of the political system handed down from the colonialists. They don’t
give any reason for this, it is a reasonable assumption that they are willing to excuse the
atrocities carried out by these government for the sake of some formal or nominal
commitment to Western style bourgeois democracy and property is a constant problem. In
fact it is a fundamental problem which is itself the basis for the insurgency. The weapon of
criticism, however, scarcely replace criticism by weapons, which is what the national liberation
fighters have endeavoured to do. On the other hand in the rare cases where there is a serious
and sincere attempts to escape biases such as these, the authors display incoherence,
inconsistency, and political illiteracy by responding tu quoque to the Nationalist’s struggle
against the Burmese state. As we see in one particularly egregious passage from Callahan’s
Making Enemies: War and State Building in Burma.
“The transportation of British-Indian rule to nineteenth-century Burma
produced a matrix of state institutions that gave primacy to order,
coercion, and armed force. In sharp contrast to the earlier mercantilist
age of imperialism-during which India was brought into the British
Empire-the new imperialism of the nineteenth century produced colonial
states throughout Africa and Asia that were able to reorder society for
production and commerce at unprecedented speed. However, nowhere
was the pace as blinding as it was in the annexation to India of the
territory that came to be known as "Burma." The transportation of a
century-old colonial system of governance from India to Burma wreaked
havoc with traditional, nonstate forms of social control and created the
need for internal security forces that would come to control many aspects
of indigenous people's lives. The imposition of Indian administrators and
administration destroyed indigenous social mechanisms that could have
cushioned the impact of the rapid insertion into the world economy. The
resulting increase in landlessness, tenancy, and indebtedness was
responsible for the highest crime rates in the empire, and the government
of India's coercion intensive response to this rising lawlessness was in
part responsible for institutionalizing the primacy of armed coercion in
Burmese political affairs.” 3
Now here that Callahan is ready to accept that there’s a difference between Burma and India,
in the most absurd and nonsensical way. “Non-state forms of social control”. The state is the
monopoly on legitimate use of force in a given area. This form of special pleading with regard
to what the state really is, is dumbfounding. Suggesting the Princely states were not, in fact,
states. The reality of the situation is that, while the state may have different forms of property
(capitalist, feudal, chattel, etc) it remains a state, nonetheless. The question is not whether
states have navels, but what’s the missing ingredient that makes a state a state? Again, why
have Nationalist insurgents in India had such trouble while Nationalist insurgent in Myanmar
had such success? If Callahan were right, wouldn’t the state have quashed the rebellion
easily? Armed coercion is primary in all political affairs, as the state represents the use of
these and politics the contestation of this power with other means.
Conventional theories regarding the development of nations are of limited value in
regard to Southeast Asia, most often representing an elitist and eurocentric perspective. Their
hegemonic liberal ideology is also limiting to the study of nations and nationalism. None of
their rigid, mechanistic pseudoscientific “frameworks” or “lenses” apply. The campaigns
waged by the Chinese, Vietnamese, and others challenge the European notion of nationalism
as a product of "elites", particularly in regard to the state of the nation afterwards. The
development of the tats in Burma showed how a leader was nothing without their personal
army of supporters, whose allegiance and sympathies were bound to shift4. In Western terms,
this would be to say that Weber’s concept of the charismatic authority is not so compelling as
his concept of the state5. As for the East, Mao Tse-Tung would state that political power came
out of the barrel of a gun and not the individual genius of the warlords which dominated the
era when he coined the phrase. War is not fought by champion, but is rather the expression of
their policy, one which inevitably favours certain groups and classes.
There is a tendency of political theorists, mainly on the left, to treat Asian socialism as
"state capitalism". This sentiment, expressed by such big names as Emma Goldman and Richard Wolff, is also evident
sometimes on the right as a conclusion of the formulation "there is no alternative", with socialism being
capitalism, only poorly applied. Moreover, this leaves a vast lacuna in the period between the USSR's New
Economic Policy of 1921 and China's "opening up” following the ascendancy of Deng
Xiaoping. The critical factor, which is particularly evident in Burma, is the role of Asia’s
teeming peasantry and modest working class in troubling the foundations of postcolonial
nations. The political imagination leaves out most of the 20th century’s story of agrarian unrest,
along with the many conflicts it spawned which continue to this day. Within Europe, the lower
rungs of the peasantry had been cleared out to become the urban working class and create
larger, more profitable centralized plots6. Perhaps the most dramatic example might be Ireland in 1845-1850. British policy at the time is widely considered to be genocidal, but what is undeniable is the intent to liquidate the cottiers as a class with parliamentary records and journals showing this volition. In Asia, especially in China as patterned on the
USSR, there was a mobilization of the poorer peasants against landlords and wealthier
peasants, essentially flipping the script on the experience in Europe which had marked the
transition of Feudalism into Capitalism, along with the genesis of nations there, and stalling
the straightforward transition narrative we are accustomed to. Collectivization represented the
synthesis of the need for centralization (in tandem with mechanization) to increase production
and elimination of private plots. These were readily transferred to conventional factory farms
as market oriented reforms were introduced in the Khruschev (and Deng Xiaoping eras)7.
Such schemes could never be realized in Burma, as the CPB failed to take state power,
however, on account of its backing their struggle with arms, the lower echelons of the
peasantry were therefore insulated from either course of development. As they could not
migrate to the city and become workers, nor stay put as collective farmers, they would instead
sustain the roil of agrarian unrest that characterized feudal relations.
As the backing of a powerful political current, with much foreign support, posed a
serious challenge to typical capital accumulation in the pivotal agricultural sector, the
Nationalist insurgencies of Northern Southwest Asia can only be understood in light of the
geopolitics of the Cold War, on a macro scale, which could be likewise be understood as their
internal state of development writ large. The nature of these campaigns for national freedom
from a post- or neo-colonial state is one which precludes theories of elite manipulation and
forces analysts to give serious thought to the participation of the entire population in choosing
sides and the extent to which they sustain both insurgents and the the state. The Burmese
example most vividly shows a thoroughly militarized society. Though elite figures played some
role, overwhelmingly, economic and ideological factors were far more decisive towards the
question of the nation, and nowhere else is that more evidently the case than within India and
Myanmar.
According to Gellner, representing a modernist viewpoint in the tiresome debate
between “modernists” and “primordialists”, nations are a product of the modern era, (therefore
he represents a modernist view)8. Among humans, however tribes have almost always
existed and empires, likewise have existed for a long time as well. Realistically speaking, a
nation or “peoples” would fall somewhere between the two. Naturally, the modernist
perspective would lend itself to skepticism regarding the commonality of language, territory,
history, ethnicity, or psychological make-up on the basis of primacy of the individual.
Nevertheless, such things are not the result of individual genius, the discovery of which being
the emergence of mankind from some dark age. The transmission of national identity follows
a dialectic of contestation and struggle. Only in a short term view can the nation be thought of
as stable.
One of the topics encountered in the discussion of nationalism is “civic”
nationalism, this is considered the “good” nationalism in contrast. If Smith is to be taken
seriously and there is a difference between the nation and the state, there is therefore no one
to one relationship between “ethno-nationalism” and power 9. All this should go to show what
an absolute waste the abstract theoretical discussion of moralizing around the nation is. The
truth remains concrete. The creation of these entities is the result of conflict or political
negotiation. The nation-state represents the supremacy of force, as the case studies bear out.
Viewing nations as a process, we can see that the generative forces of these groups have
been with us long before “modernity”. In the same period, nations could be thought of as
geographical areas as well, and not a great deal would be lost owing to the subsistence
relationship between the land and the people.
Much of the theoretical literature is trapped in “modernity” between feudalism and
capitalism. It is all too easy to forget the transformation of the slave state into feudalism. Many
scholars of the nation state are vulgar Marxists. For those who have a clear memory of
precapitalist economic forms, we can see that the subjugation of peoples through war and
their economic positions are inextricably linked. Theories of the formation of nations which
neglect these facts fall short of explaining it. Gellner's sideways comparison of primordialism
to creationism, a religious mythology is a projection of liberal ideology into the past10.
Therefore in some respects, his account of the genesis of the nations could be considered the
opposite of how nations are formed. Rather, in India and Myanmar we can see the formation
of a national language from economic rather than artistic or cultural activity, particularly in the
Nagamese language, which emerged as a trade language which could unite the numerous
tribes of the area and was even transformed by the armed struggle there11. We can see that
many of the theories of the development of nations are false. The modernist and “ethno-symbolic” approach alike display an elitism neglects the economic, political, and legal factors
in the formation of nations, and disregards the daily lives of the inhabitants of the nation
through their economic activity. We should regard them as inadequate to addressing the
questions of nations on a concrete, material, and objective basis, they stand somewhere
between “great-man” theories of history and idealism. Rather, instead, within Southeast Asia,
the insurgencies which brought about many nations were sustained by the participation of the
population in both the political and military process. That the rebels are administering their
own justice and exerting a revolutionary tax, according to their detractors they are
assassinating and extorting people. Either are all essential processes for nation building and
state building. A rose by any other name.
Certain theorists, such as James C Scott have proposed that the geographical location
of West Southeast Asia itself have inhibited the creation of states12. This anarchist romanticism is typical of Rousseau liberalism. Scott’s “zomia” is not stateless so much as
stateful, with the contestation of political power being greater not lesser. Scott retroactively
imparts anarchistic motives to certain groups who went about forming their own states given
the first chance they got. Scott’s ennobled ‘resistance’ is Ashley South’s “forced migration”.
What they both share is a persistent blame upon “elites”, South goes so far as to place the
blame on them for “ethno-nationalism”., especially in the case of the Karen. For South, as for
Scott, the Karen are “poor rice farmers and day-to-day survival is their prime consideration”?
Scott makes an imaginary distinction between imagined and imaginary communities13.
South’s approach is patronizing and typical of a UN apparatchik. Nations are no more
imaginary than the family, an institutionalized collective holding the power of life and death.
They are not modern or ancient but the result of a process. They are neither natural or the
artificial creations of an elite but the products of the struggle for survival within a transforming
world economy.
Matthew J Walton’s account of what constitutes the nation in relation to Myanmar's “The
Myth of Panglong” likewise subscribes to several myths of his own, particularly myths of
authenticity in relation to manipulation, which occurs side by side with teleological
deterministic idealism14. Walton has a clear failure to engage critically with the relevant
literature, which is symptomatic of a wider solipsistic and postmodern reluctance to engage
with the realities of power and instead rely on subjective judgments. In a similar vein, Dr.
Nicholas Farrelly cautions us against” oversimplifying” the conflict lest it serve the interests of
political actors15. But by the same token, mystification in the case of Walton and obscurantism
in the case of Scott, also serve a political purpose, this most often being the status quo.
Farrelly merely nods along with Scott’s earlier eclectic Marxist, in the mistaken assumption it
addresses primordialism any further than in passing if that. Had Scott’s account of class
politics been written at another time, it would have been merely ignorant or absurd, but during
the Cultural Revolution as class politics came to the very forefront of Third World discourse, it
is an act of academic malpractice. It is because of class politics in the Third World that Scott,
or pretty much anyone else even knows the term “Third World”.
Likewise, Farrelly’s view of Burma relies on Alastair Lamb, a colonialist historian. The
view of colonial Britain towards its former colonies post independence as a peacekeeper or
guardian between various ethnic groups and their history after independence as one of
internecine tribal squabbles. It ignores the wider ideological and geopolitical currents of the
region which were far more important in shaping the politics of the region. The most important
concerns for the government of Myanmar following independence were not Nationalist
movements but rather the CPB and Kuomingtang insurgencies which were a much greater problem.
Both of these insurgencies provided the Nationalist movements in Burma with their guns,
without which they could not have waged armed struggle, brought the government to the
negotiating table, or driven it out when necessary.
It is nonetheless in keeping with Scott’s edenic, pastoral, ahistorical concept of the
peasant world in stasis. With his peasants being a perfect petty bourgeois homo economicus.
This arbitrary backwards projection onto the past is used by Scott to erase any material class
distinctions of the area. Assigning anarchist motives to hill tribes of Southeast, Scott’s
cheerful peasants possess the volition of a leisure class. In colonial India, perhaps the only
events more common than famines were peasant uprisings, there are no landlords. Scott is
able to overlook the seething class hatred in favour of a relationship formed out of “mutual
love” and “noblesse oblige”16. The sustained insurgency and upheaval across Southeast Asia
cannot be separated from class conflict among the different strata of the peasantry. In places
where the peasant was unable to kill their landlord, they have fled the misery and starvation of
rural life, tipping the balance of the world’s population from rural to urban.
Curiously, it is nations which are the static entity here, and the national unity being the
purpose, whereas ethnicity is the fluid category that is more of a “performance”. How many
examples of “nation building” do we have against how many examples of ethnogenesis?
What is the ratio? Within liberal ideology, nothing is more unthinkable than the contestation of
political power. The upset of law and order, no matter how intolerable the status quo is to
those who must live within it, is unspeakable. It begs the question; what would happen if the
Karen were given their own state? The Panglong agreement is presented in a near vacuum,
and the Aung San-Atlee agreement from the same year is ignored, despite the fact that it
contained important provisions for the Karen, and other groups. The most vague platitudes
are substituted for a grounded historical context. The characterization of the conflict in
Myanmar as ethnic conflict rather than a Burmese civil war is a reminder that for political
scientists, history is a convenient act of forgetting as much as remembering. These dryasdust
ruminations are read in lamentable contrast to lively contemporary accounts from the Institute of Pacific Relations’s
Far East Survey, which present a dynamic view of the events surrounding the Panglong
agreement, in contrast to Walton’s dry and dogmatic reflections. Namely, it highlights the role
of the Communist Parties in Burma waging a campaign against the government which would
prefigure labour unrest, intrigues, insurgencies in Thailand and Malaysia, and notes the early
alleged cooperation of Communists with the most militant nationalists of Arakhan, and their
propaganda drive to paint the fledgling independence government of Burma with the colours
of the British empire through continued economic and military ties to the newly independent
state17. The IPR was an alleged hotbed of fellow travelers, therefore it may be somewhat
slanted towards the Reds. It does, also, almost read like a radio drama, But this was a time
when many western reporters were being charmed by Mao and his merry men. While Virginia
Thompson, the luckless IPR correspondent, never found such a handsome bandit in
Myanmar, we can find something in her report which casts aspersions upon the conventional
understanding of the Burmese Civil War as simply an ethnic conflict, inasmuch as it did not
start out so.
In contrast to Western academics, pro-government Indian writers give us greater
insight into the nuances of the conflict. It presents a Gandhian idyll of pre-colonial village life,
where war and trade are incidental. This is corroborated by the first wave of Naga leadership
before the initiation of armed hostilities. Nearly all blame for the ills is placed on the British,
the West, and Christianity. A massacre carried out by the Indian government are quite literally
a footnote, described simply as an “incident” with an unclear perpetrator. It is an example of
how neocolonialism subtly maintains it’s credentials from an earlier anti-colonial struggle. One
of the most useful characterizations of the nationalist movement is the division between the
“Underground and Overground” parts18. The way in which the Nationalist paramilitaries
operating in India establish a parallel society within their remote guerilla camps is something
which exists on a far larger scale in Myanmar, wherein entire regions fall within their control
with their provision of social services to the state, as has been commented on by CS
Kuppuswamy, who advocates for a similar reformist resolution of the conflict, carrot as well as
stick 19. The parallel society of the rebel held areas, with their own legal structure and land
reform, along with their reception among the various strata of the peasantry would become
the basis for economic relations throughout the countryside that could make or break an
insurgency. One of the strange ironies is how the relations, or ‘intersections’, of class, caste,
and ethnicity were addressed more clearly in literature from the 40s than today.
Finally, the closest thing we have in literature with regard to the scope of this study is
that of the work of TS Letkhosei Haokip, which offers us an oasis of insight in a desert of
stale, safe and vague platitudes, helping connect dots on the complex relationship between
Karen Nationalists, Burmese Communists, and the Chinese Kuomingtang, besides giving us
an overview of the interconnections between the constellations of Nationalist insurgents within
across the region20. Some data within the work might be questionable, particularly in relation
to the origins of different ethnic groups such as the Kuki being of Jewish origin, however,
errors of commission are more frequent than errors of omission, and a work which attempts to
be exhaustive will inevitably encounter them21. Haokip’s work, for it’s encyclopedic scope and
painstaking research alone is worth more than all the Western commentators put together.
Some spin is a small price to pay for insider knowledge and dedication.
The Origins of the Burmese Civil War
In 2020 there were 3 main coalitions of Nationalist militias operating in India and Myanmar: the United Nationalities Federal Council and Brotherhood Alliance in Myanmar and the United National Liberation Front of Western Southeast Asia in India. The UNFC has been on the decline since its formation in 2011. The armed wing, the Federal United Army(FUA)was formed in 2014 with fewer than half of its members remaining. The emphasis here should be on the UNFC as it represents the largest ceasefire groups and thereby its armed wing or army should be downplayed. One of the most notable desertions from this alliance was the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), KNU, and Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA), three of the oldest and most powerful militias in Myanmar. The TNLA later went on to join the "Northern Alliance - Brotherhood" that later became the Brotherhood Alliance, which has in recent years seen some of the fiercest fighting outside the KIO. This has proven to be the tipping point against the NCA and the Aung San Suu Kyi’s “21st-century Panglong” 22. While the NCA proved to be barely a speed bump for the fighting, they couldn’t have chosen a more accurate name. The 20th-century Panglong Conference in 1947, held by the father of the current leader, Aung San punctuated what could very well have been a manageable Communist guerrilla but became what will be an end to the political union of Myanmar. This is, of course, the worst nightmare of Western scholars as mainstream academic opinion on the subject is heavily pro-government, or "neutral".
The question is whether or not the country's "Ethnic Armed Organizations" have a right to operate. Like the British once viewed the Burmese nationalist militias, with their shifting allegiances, as a nuisance. Let us put aside the groans of cartographers and deal not only with the question of peace in West Southeast Asia but with a just and lasting peace. The latest alliances have proven hopeful. Perhaps, with the formation of a military pact, the Burmese military may be held in check. But realistically peace among rebels with their own overlapping land claims is likewise elusive. Likewise, the latest Panglong agreement seems to have only renewed the conflict in Burma for another generation. Or so it seems. The vulgar explanation for the years of ethnic conflict which has plagued Myanmar is that Aung San was killed. Typical great man history. You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain, so the adage goes. Perhaps if he had lived, things would have been different, at least. But conflict, of both the ethnic and economic kind, had begun long before Aung San’s was shot down. To be sure the armed conflict was ethnic in nature, and ethnic hostilities existed well prior, but the initiation of armed struggle would predate the Karen taking up arms. It would even predate the better-known CPB insurgency. April 2nd was quite off the mark as a starting point for the conflict. Scarcely a dozen years before, peasants rebelled with only medieval weaponry, During this time Burmese Nationalists had begun to train for armed struggle as open paramilitary organizations known as tats, which were acceptable to the British as they carried no guns, their only function being security detail and parades, they were essentially a marching band without instruments. now the country was full of guns and people who knew how to use them. The dubious distinction of kicking off the world’s longest ongoing civil war goes to an obscure faction of the Communist Party of Burma known as the "Red Flags"(or "CP(RF)"). a fact which is obscured by the post-independence insurgencies of the main Communist Party of Burma or the Karen National Union23.
The conflicts in these countries are not simply turf wars between various tribes, rather they are struggles between ideologies, between capitalism and socialism, which continue today in spite of the “End of History” triumphalism. Moreover, there were people who would not want to admit it, but between the end of the Second World War and independence, around 1 in every 20 inhabitants of Burma belonged to a peasant union controlled by the CPB, and the party controlled almost all trade unions24. These figures may be embellished, however, as they are coming from the Party itself, nonetheless, they were a force to be reckoned with, acutely sensitive to the developments in Asia though increasingly bold after the menace of Japan was lifted and things were as they should be, the enemy being, as it had been for as long as they could remember, Britain. The Communists, were also untainted by collaboration with the Japanese or the British, unlike many major players in colonial Burmese politics.
Unlike his Indian counterpart Bose, Aung San had been able to maneuver a spectacular and impeccably timed double cross against the Japanese which delivered Burma back into British hands with the expectation of sovereignty. Neither the British nor his allies would be able to fully trust him afterward. His Japanese backed Burmese Independence Army carried out extensive atrocities against the Karen, the most Christianized and Pro-Western of the minorities which would foster loathing against the “independent” Burma. To come. As Aung San was making peace with the British, so too were the Communists. Dizzy with success, and with the Axis defeat in sight, happy-go-lucky American Party Boss Earl Browder became the whipping boy for the entire Communist movement for suggesting “peaceful coexistence” between communists and everything communists would conceivably oppose. Communist Parties around the world to this day invoke the name of Browder against their rivals25. In Burma, Thakin Soe made it his rhetorical weapon of choice. According to the CIA, Thakin Soe would later criticize Khrushchev and Mao in the same vein as Albanian Partisan leader Enver Hoxha. Thakin Soe and the CP(RF) are therefore a candidate for creating the very first anti-revisionist split in the world, precipitating the Sino-Soviet split and its effects throughout the world26.
Thakin Soe, however, is more than just an irrelevant doctrinaire as most of his colleagues were. Though his party and its parent party fizzled out, the Burmese Civil War likely began with him. Was he just a gore-obsessed warmonger, or did he only want to fight the conflict out to its bitter end and be done with it? His motives notwithstanding, politically, he had his finger on the pulse of the goings on of the day and his version of events clearly matched the goings on around him, to the point where those who had shunned him were forced to accept his version of events as they found themselves in his very position. If Aung San had died, there may well have been another to take his place as a consummate opportunist, while deft, he was pliable to the needs and wants of Empire. Thakin Soe was the opposite, a man of ironclad principle, no matter what the cost. Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.
The Japanese had not yet disembarked from the USS Missouri when Lord Mountbatten summoned Aung San to Ceylon. In exchange for a murmured promise of independence, the BPF would become the Burmese Army and a fraction of itself. The 1945 Kandy Agreement between Aung San and the Earl of Burma asked that the BPF be disbanded and drastically reduced. Tantalized by the prospect of independence, the BPF was disbanded, Aung San, however, tried to pull a fast one on them by organizing the demobilized members into the "People’s Volunteer Organization" or PVO. But by then the damage was already done. Aung San’s rival, the ex-prime minister and lawyer U Saw had managed to secure a private military of his own: the Garuda Militia, named after his first and most famous client, Saya San. San had led a famed peasant uprising against the British during the depression, a period of major growth for the Burmese middle class27. Were this not enough, before the war was over in Asia, the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League (AFPFL) had begun disarming itself, hence denying the possibility of an independence war against the British and rankling some members of the CPB. Not long after the Kandy agreement, Thakin Soe would be in Calcutta, where the debate surrounding “Browderism” and “peaceful” coexistence was taking place. Judging from the outcome, it was clear that Browder, or his phantom, had lost. Indian communists made clear their dedication to the path of armed struggle, to the extent that a popular common misconception blamed the subsequent congress of the Communist Party of India in 1948 for almost every insurgency across Asia28. The later Aung San-Atlee agreements would confirm suspicions left and right. Aung San was accused of being a British puppet and Burma’s “independence” no different than that which was granted to it by the Japanese29. Thakin Soe was among the first to condemn him, in the latest Marxist-Leninist language of the day.
As the Burmese were impatient for independence and British prevarication on the subject proved to be frustrating, The CPB had gone about organized rent and tax strikes among the peasantry. They supported the peasants' theft of the rice (which they had grown) and their reprisals against the landlords in the form of robbery. The chettiar landlords of Burma were so hated by the peasantry that even today’s bourgeois economists like Aung San Suu Kyi’s very own darling advisor Sean Turnell praised their managerial skills in keeping the Burmese peasantry starving and productive, through “microcredit” 30. The proliferation of microcredit, essentially glorified loan sharking, though lauded by the academy in the west, has left in its wake a horrifying wake of suicides, the urban counterpart of India’s crisis of farmer suicides. Indeed, the constant famines which Burma suffered set the ‘demand’ high enough it forced the Burmese to sell their children in exchange for a small pot of rice. Famine and disease followed hot on the heels of the British Army’s ravages across the country. The devout blamed this on non-Buddhists in power31. The Communist Party had taken the molten hot rage in the hearts of Burma’s famished cultivators and forged it into a coordinated strike. Peasant uprisings had been a persistent feature of life in Myanmar, prior to independence they were wedded to a superstitious traditionalist Buddhist monarchism, not altogether unlike the Boxer movement in China. Likewise, in regard to labour, the class conflict was interpellated by Burma's place in the British Empire and its incorporation within India. Burmese peasants had fought asymmetrically on clear-cut lines against the Chettiars, but there had been lateral violence between Burmese and Indians within urban working classes of Rangoon and other cities throughout the 30s. A strike by Indian dockworkers led to hundreds of killings when the Burmese strikebreakers were told to return home. A sacrilegious text appeared in 1938, leading to a similar scenario, and foreshadowing and underscoring the seriousness of the later Pe Myint scandal32. Remarkably, the CPB managed to overcome this antagonism. They extolled internationalist sentiment in the cities while encouraging the peasants to fight against their foreign landlords in the countryside.
A few spontaneous robberies took place, which was, of course, cheekily condoned by the Communists33. Seeing as the chettiar landlord were primarily of Indian extraction, and had come over during the colonial period, attacks on them meant little to the xenophobic right-wing of the AFPFL. The fragile alliance held. Only after the appearance in the press of a Rabelaisian novel about the Buddhist clergy penned by leading leftist Thein Pe Myint with a foreword by U Nu that cracks began to show. Ba Pe, a Devout Buddhist and veteran statesman within the AFPFL fired back at the Communists with a polemic against the Soviet Union. Upon hearing this, Thakin Soe charged Ba Pe with being an imperialist agent. The mere accusation of treachery threatened to upset the AFPFL and it prompted an immediate interrogation of Soe by the central committee concerning his claims. The truth of his allegations is debatable, especially in light of the events which would follow. Over the course of the investigation, Soe’s key accusers were removed from their position, only to be reinstated shortly after to eject Soe himself from the Central Commitee34. Soe then formed the CP(RF), which was immediately outlawed by the government to the protestations of his former comrades. With no one to restrain him, Thakin Soe embarked on his armed campaign against both the British and the Burmese capitalists, while his comrades would devote themselves to the conquest of power by more conventional means. Ironically, Soe’s inventive rationale for splitting the Communist Party came from none other than Puran Chand Joshi, General Secretary of the CPI and key “Browderist”, who reasoned that Burma was then a province of India and therefore the CPB was illegitimate35. With this distinction in mind, Soe’s alliance with the Arakan nationalists becomes more clear, as they too, were then part of India.
By August a massive general strike organized by the communists had reached Rangoon itself, with all branches of the civil service including the police joining in. Students vandalized a temple. Soe’s initiation of war may not have not been much more than a ripple but the strike conditions had a devastating effect on the economy. Perhaps in an attempt to bring the Communists back into the fold, Aung San dared to support the strike36. This was much to the dismay of the British, whose profits took a serious hit. They are often implicated by conspiracy theories surrounding his assassination. Any overture to labour was short-lived, however, as in October the AFPFL had had enough and the CPB was kicked out of the group37.
The following year saw the Aung San-Atlee Agreement, which maintained the British Military Mission in Burma, At this affront, U Saw, former prime minister, refused to sign. As the agreement was being used for all it was worth as political ammunition. Aung San commenced the Panglong Agreement, in which autonomy was promised to some of Burma’s minorities, which many exceptions38. By then, the CB(RF) had become entrenched in Arakan and formed an alliance with U Seinda to denounce Aung San and initiate their own armed struggle for Arakanese independence. During the War, much like Aung San, Seinda had sided with the Japanese for the promise of an ‘independent’ Arakan led by the ANC (which, obviously, never materialized). The CB(RF) was instrumental in convincing the ANC, already acting as the government in some areas, to begin the armed struggle39. This faction, composed of Burmese, Arakans, and some Karens, began carrying out ambushes against police and other paramilitary groups in the Irrawaddy delta40. To those on the receiving end, it may have been indistinguishable from dacoity, but to Thakin Soe and his Red Flag communists, it was a distinct political tactic and in time it would engulf the entire region.
In April, elections were held. Up until then, elections, which the mainstream anti-colonial General Council of Burmese Associations(GCBA) boycotted, were now being boycotted by many different parties, including the CP(RF), U Saw’s Patriot party, and the KNU. In spite of PVO shepherding voters to the polls, turnout was well below half41. All sides view Aung San as a traitor. Two months later he was assassinated. U Saw was hung for it, but there was considerable doubt as to who it could have been.
By independence, the war was already in full swing. By the end of the summer, hundreds had defected to join the Communists. The following war saw Burmese Communists form alliances with tribal leaders throughout the country, with the notable exception of some Kachins, who had been organized into the Kachin Independence Army in 196142. In spite of this, for the first 20 years of its war against the Burmese state, the CPB had very limited success, its major breakthrough in 1968 would form the future areas claimed by the Nationalist rebels which would split from the party in 1989. The creation of this guerrilla base area which ousted the Burmese army would not have been possible without an immense contribution from China as well as the Chinese ethnic groups within Myanmar, chiefly Kokang, and the Wa State. The Red Flag faction with had initiated the collapse of the AFPFL found support within Arakan in the east, which by some accounts maintained a presence there even after the collapse of their CPB.
One of the metrics for the success of the Nationalist movements depended on to China, also evident in the case of Nagaland. The Communist Party of China has provided rebel groups with training, arms, and funding. Ironically, however, it was a withdrawal of Chinese funding that lead to the creation of the most powerful and autonomous secessionist movement in the region. In 1989, As Communism was being overthrown in Eastern Europe, a strikingly similar process took place in Eastern Myanmar, whereby the CPB leadership was ousted in its base at Panghsang43. The collapse of Communism in Asia is a neglected subject, being undoubtedly less dramatic than its parallel in Europe but around the exact same time, the People's Republic of Kampuchea, Communist Party of Burma, Communist Party of Malaya, and Communist Party of Thailand collapsed. While the People's Republic of China, Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and Lao People’s Republic were not affected this brought an end to a decades-long Communist insurgency that had cast a long shadow over politics on the continent. The main instigators of the rebellion against the CPB were the newly formed United Wa State Party and its armed wing the United Wa State Army. In Myanmar, the most palpable effect of the end of the insurgency was the transformation of the Communist guerrilla army and its base area into the Wa State, which became an ally of the government in exchange for a significant regional autonomy. In effect, the CPB went from being Chinese-funded to being what some more vulgar commentators might consider a Chinese knockoff of China. In many ways, Communism was synonymous with the Chinese in Southeast Asia as it was with Russia in the West, and the Chinese played a crucial role in the insurgencies in Thailand and Malaya.
The cultural similarities between the Was and Chinese are not lost amid the confusion. If we consider the developments around Panghsangh as an extension of China’s foreign policy since the death of Mao it makes a lot more sense. Since then, China has favoured a rapprochement between itself and the embrace of the previously anathema idea of peaceful coexistence. As continuing the fight for an armed takeover of Myanmar could lead to the loss of all the gains made by the insurgency, the ethnic Burmese revolutionaries were ousted and the Was began negotiations with the Burmese government for the territory. The war-weary government granted this. Like the Red Guards movement in Panghsang smashed Buddhist idols like their Chinese cousins in decades before, the rebellious cadres of the CPB tore down the pictures of communist leaders from the wall. Today, in the Wa capital of Panghkham, pictures of Buddha, and Mao, along with Jesus and Aung San share a place in the market stalls. The yellow press is eager to paint it with the lurid colours of the drug trade, but in a war-torn land such as Myanmar, it is a rare example of stability and economic development. It is respected by neighbours and former foe the KIA, who have invited it, along with China, to observe their negotiations with the government.
The Karen Revolution
The story of Karen nationalist insurgency, perhaps Myanmar’s most well-known nationalist movement, is one which likewise weaves through the CPC’s victory, but more importantly the consequent KMT insurgency in Myanmar. In many ways, the Chinese Civil War was being fought in Myanmar long after 1949. First by the KMT directly in the form of troops moving through the Northern Border, followed by the CPC escalating support for the CPB during the Cultural Revolution, to the point where much of the Burmese communist guerrilla army was replaced by ethnic Chinese reinforcements along the border during the ‘70s44. This would set the stage for the creation of the Wa state.
Following the death of Mao, the CPC maintained a more indirect presence in Myanmar, characteristic of a lightness of touch in foreign policy, and part of the compromises which it had to make in exchange for trust and recognition from the international Community. Its rival the KMT, who was for this time considered the legitimate representative of the Chinese nation to the world, had a direct presence even before the CPC. After being routed in 1949, the KMT, backed by the West, used the fledgling state of Burma as its secondary base to retake the Chinese mainland.
Like its neighbour, India, Burma maintained a policy of neutrality. The Communist insurgency had grown rapidly, with defectors from the PVO and army joining them, realizing their chance, more ethnic groups had risen in revolt. In many cases, the KMT could effectively take control of certain regions, necessitating the government to respond in order to assert sovereignty and address concerns that it was supporting the KMT rebels. The heavy-handed presence of the Burmese Army in areas that had supposedly been granted a degree of regional autonomy following Panglong was similar to the way in which the presence of the Indian Army in Northeast India had garnered resentment by demonstrating to the inhabitants that they continued British colonialism under a different flag. Ethnic groups which were included in the Panglong agreement would later revolt against the government like the ones which weren’t and already had.
The areas most affected by the KMT presence were those inhabited by the Karens and Shans, which would be flashpoints of armed conflict for decades to come. The KNU, together with its first armed organization the KNDO at first glance favoured a pro-Western orientation from the Burmese government and formed an alliance with the KMT, with them together controlling roughly about ⅕ of the country in 1953 and together being over well half of the insurgents operating the country. The KMT, it seemed had not learnt anything from their defeat in China and through the KNDO many of the arms which were coming to them from the US eventually found their way into the hands of the CPB. The geopolitical orientation of the Karen guerrillas was more ambiguous than it seemed 45.
Though the Communist insurgency was the first in a newly independent Myanmar, the rebellion of the Karen is sometimes considered the beginning of the Civil War, especially in the conventional “ethnic” characterization of the conflict. It is clear that it has been a mistake to consider them separately from one another given the role which the Communists played in challenging the new government, particularly in relation to the successive developments of the Kandy Agreement, the Panglong Agreement, the Aung San-Atlee Agreement and the implications for the Karen which both had, being the most represented group in the colonial era armed forces of Burma.
In a strikingly similar fashion to what the Nagas had done in India, the Karen had unsuccessfully demanded an independent administrative region from the British prior to independence and afterward made an increased demand of the Burmese for complete independence, backed by a boycott of government gatherings. The key difference between the Karen of Burma and the Nagas of India is that the Karen had initiated armed struggle against the Burmese state, prior to the country’s independence. India was capable of luring the Nagas into a sense of security. Where it looked as if they were prepared to grant them autonomy for long enough that they could put in place a plan to carry out an invasion that would settle the country. The legitimacy of the agreement notwithstanding, possession is 9/10ths of the law.
After British leadership had rebuffed the Karen and they realized it would not be possible to obtain their state through negotiation, they set about their plan to take it themselves. Martyred founder of the Karen nation, Saw Ba U Gyi, laid out this 4 point policy which recognized the primacy of armed struggle after his unsuccessful plan to negotiate a transfer of power to the Karen from the British in spite of pleas from Sir Winston Churchill to the Attlee government. Ba U Gyi’s transformation from clean-shaven student to bearded guerrilla marks the turn of the Nationalist movement across West Southeast Asia towards military pragmatism46.
Part of this remarkable pragmatism on the part of KNU involved the reorganization of the armed forces and the creation of a united front in an imitation of the CPC which was followed by severing all ties they had with the CPB and other Communists in order to attract funding from the US and the Kuomingtang47.
The Militarization of Naga Nationalism
One of the most recent major events in the history of Northeast India’s nationalist movement was the passing of Shangwang Shangyung Khaplang. This occasion was honoured by a 21-gun salute from members of every faction comprising the ULFWA, including Khaplang’s eponymous National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Khaplang faction) or NSCN-K. Roughly speaking, the NSCN-K represent a “hardline” faction of the Naga nationalist movement in terms of being committed to armed struggle. They nonetheless maintained a ceasefire with the Indian government between 2001 and 2015, and further splintered factions of the NSCN-K have re-entered ceasefire again48. The NSCN-K has demonstrated a similar relationship to ceasefires in Myanmar, where the group also operates.
The life of Khaplang saw India’s largest ever bandh (also the largest strike in human history), the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (and the corresponding fall of the Congress) alongside India’s rise as economic and nuclear power, the Communist revolution in Nepal, the collapse of the CPB (and the overthrow of Communism more broadly), the founding of Bangladesh, the creation of the Indian state of Nagaland, the independence of Nagaland, India, and then Burma from the British Empire, and finally the Battle of Kohima, which marked a dramatic reversal of fortune for the Japanese in the Second World War. Khaplang was by no means an elite figure. The youngest son of a large family born in a remote village on the border of India and Burma, his alma mater was a bible school in British Burma, which he dropped out from during the war. Khaplang joined the Naga National Congress (NNC) of Angami Zapu Phizo, a traveling insurance salesman, who some regard as the founding father of Nagaland. Phizo used his vocation to travel throughout Northeast India fomenting nationalist sentiments among the other tribal peoples, as well. The presence of a figure straight out of ‘50s America, the traveling salesman, in such a region, may be comical, but when one recalls Turnell’s favourable characterization of chettiars as microcredit institutions similar to banks, it becomes a little clearer. After a traumatic military occupation of Nagaland by the Indian army, the NNC would begin to militarize49. It was the end of this militarization and the signing of the 1975 Shillong Agreement which precipitated the creation of the militant NSCN, which was dedicated to armed struggle.
Khaplang's faction coalesced after the organization was rocked by internal intrigues50. Khaplang’s training took place in China during the Cultural Revolution, the high water mark of Maoist internationalism. In 1967 the central organ of the CPC called the Naxalbari movement in India “Spring Thunder over India” to which the Communist Party of India - Marxist-Leninist responded with the assertion that ‘China’s Chairman was their Chairman’. While the CPI-ML existed for barely three years, it generated a pattern followed by insurgent groups throughout the world, including the fissiparity and physical force, particularly evident in the NSCN. The principles that one divides into two and that political power comes out of the barrel of a gun. The experience of the Chinese revolution showed that while temporary cease-fires are possible as was the case between the CPC and the KMT, the laying down or decommissioning of arms is not acceptable. Geopolitically, the CPC supported insurgency in India, which was then an ally of the USSR. Likewise, Indian intelligence (who, along with that of the United States had earlier supported an insurgency in Tibet in 1962). This political education was inseparable from military training and armament. This echoed the experiences of the insurgencies in Burma, with the split in CPB and the 4 principles of Saw Ba U Gyi, which regarded disarming as tantamount to surrender.
Conclusion
Nationalism is both a distinction and a negation. What is important in its development are the events that establish the neocolonial state as a continuity of the first colonial state. in Northeast India, it was not only the Assam Maintenance of Public Order (Autonomous Districts) Act 1953, Assam Disturbed Area Act, 1955, and the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958, but the subsequent attacks upon the population which galvanized nationalist sentiment. In Myanmar, it was the Aung-San-Atlee Pact, which cemented the independence leader as a pawn of British Imperialism in the eyes of many. This act, like that which delivered Nagaland into the control of India as the successor state of the empire, relied on prior legislation and cooperation with the British, on unsatisfying compromises and ‘loose ends’. The idea of achieving a martial victory against the oppressing power also played the role of a “cleansing force” in the anti-colonial movement, a ‘clean break’ where the subjects could enact their vision of a postcolonial society which was simultaneously new and rooted in the precolonial past51. Suspended between a colonial past and a neocolonial future,nNowhere else is the legal ambiguity of the continuity between Britain and India felt more acutely than in Manipur. A former Princely state (much like Hyderabad, and Jammu and Kashmir), it was admitted to the union in 1947 under the instruments of ascension and only later was it merged wholesale after 1949. The key difference between a negotiated independence and independence won by force of arms is the continuity established with the colonizer in the form of the legal system, the essential framework of the state, not to mention the economic context.
The literature on the topic, however, places undue blame on Britain, and the British legal reliance on suzerainty instead of Burma and India, who in turn relied on the British, and took over their colonial role for the peoples of West Southeast Asia The result of much politics resulting from a series of elites blaming elites. The armed struggle in Myanmar predates even Myanmar or Burma for that matter. While India is another matter, The armed struggle. proved there is no such thing as neutrality in politics, and anarchy, but rather that prevails at an international level. No sooner had the Japanese been driven out when the West began their own invasion of Asia. There are Was in China, as there are Jingpo, likewise, there are over 1 million Karen in Thailand. So why aren’t they claiming part of them? India and China are neutral countries. Now, what is a neutral country? It is, after all: “if you’re not for us, you’re against us”, not “if you’re not against us you’re for us” for that matter. People reason in a risk-averse way, after all. If you invade a neutral country, who is going to come to their aid? No one! Both the Reds and the West could throw tons of guns and money into these places. The concrete economic benefits meant far more than empty promises and the armed struggle in Asia had proven that they did not need to rely on the goodwill of any colonizer, who could be driven out with force of arms.
The nation is something like a family, it is neither molded by organic nor modern factors, but a unit of economic production, which has been transformed and reconfigured in response to objective factors necessitating the inclusion and exclusion of those within and without alike. As is shown in Myanmar and India, the disruption of economic relations shows how nations within a neocolonial context can and must be generated and reconfigured in response to external circumstances.
Notes
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