Episode #157: Simplicity And Solidarity
Eh Nay Thaw only spent the first two years of his life in his native land of Karen (Knyaw) State. In 1995, the Burmese military captured Manerplaw, the longtime headquarters of the Karen resistance. Following this event, known as the “Fall of Manerplaw,” nearby villages went under a near constant assault by the Burmese military, and many Karen fled to Thailand to escape the violence, including Eh Nay Thaw’s family. He spent the next ten years in a refugee camp here before being resettled in the United States.
“I don't remember much, because if I did, it’d be a lot of pain and suffering,” he says, referring to his early years when his family had to escape the state-sponsored violence. Although Eh Nay Thaw knows that the retelling of past trauma can reopen psychological wounds, he nonetheless sees great value in intentionally revisiting painful experiences. “Thankfully, through this journey that I have experienced, I am comfortable retelling stories of suffering,” he says. “Part of my goal is advocating for the Karen people and other ethnic groups that are persecuted by the Burmese military regime. Through that journey of advocacy, of storytelling the past of persecutions and oppressions, I found that while it's difficult to return to the story, I find also space for reflection and healing. It is through healing that I'm able to retell stories of friends and families being killed on sight, or others being cut off or mutilated of certain body parts.”
Sadly, like many ethnic minorities in Myanmar, the current oppression that now even the majority Bamar group are facing at the hands of the Tatmadaw is nothing new for Eh Nay Thaw. While he doesn’t remember much of his early years in his native village outside of Manerplaw, he has vivid memories of growing up in the squalid refugee camps in Thailand where access to basic resources were always a challenge, including even adequate supplies of drinking water. This was compounded by the ever-present threats that Thai authority figures posed, as they could act towards the Karen with impunity. Because the Thai government never felt an obligation to care for the camps, refugees always had to pack light and be ready to move on a moment’s notice, either to another camp or even to be forced back into Myanmar. Moreover, the Thai officials and security personnel were capricious and brutal, and everyone was afraid because they acted with impunity. So whenever vehicles approached the camp, refugee children fled into hiding, not waiting around to see what might happen. “Because of that experience, I became mature quickly. At the age of 12, I looked after my younger brothers and sisters, and had to pretty much parent them and take care of them,” he recalls. “You become sort of the adult in the family, and so I normalized having to be the adult… and it was common that when it comes to food, there's never ever going to be enough! That's what my childhood was.”
Eh Nay Thaw became aware of his limited options as a refugee at a young age. He recalls scoffing at a teacher’s question as to what he wanted to be when he grew up, as there were so few opportunities that a refugee child could aspire to. At that time, the only thing that came to mind was to be a soldier and fight the oppressor that had taken so much from him and his people. But as Myanmar went through the transition period of the 2010s, he began to wonder if his people’s freedom might not be better achieved through words rather than guns, and so he dedicated himself to study. He applied himself in the refugee camps, and once he arrived in the United States, he pursued an academic path with vigor.
Yet even as his career path became set, there was a lot of emotional trauma that needed healing. Eh Nay Thaw was well aware of the history of persecution of the Karen people, stretching back historically to their difficulty surviving between the much larger Bamar and Siam kingdoms, and certainly continuing into the present. Growing up, his hatred of the Tatmadaw extended to a mistrust of the entire Bamar ethnicity, as for many years he didn’t meet a single Bamar person who was not a soldier engaged in actively perpetuating the oppression of his people. His body would recoil with the mere mention of a Bamar person, and he cringed when Karen children were taught the Burmese language in the camps. It was only after arriving in America and attending a series of conflict resolution programs, combined with religious sermons from the church on the power of forgiveness and letting go, that he was able to move on from his deep-rooted hatred. He also studied past examples of reconciliation, such as from case studies in South Africa and Vietnam. “It took a long time, I would say, to convince myself that Burmese people are not to be blamed, but instead the military junta, those in power, and it wasn't easy,” he acknowledges. “It was a long, long, long journey to be able to say that, to be able to be where I'm at now.”
Several years ago, he visited Yangon, where he taught English to a diverse class of students. “I found that experience to be meaningful and transformative,” he recalls. “I didn't see a Burmese or a Chin or a Kachin or a Karenni. What I saw was people, just like you and I, who wanted to live in harmony, wanted to live in peace and security, who wanted to have a bright future for themselves… And by having that experience, I did not see a race or ethnicity anymore!”
Aside from engaging in studies and holding dialogs, however, Eh Nay Thaw also realized he had his own inner work to do. “If somebody still hates others based on their race or ethnicity, it tells me that that person hasn’t healed him or herself yet, that person still holds grudges, because that person has not healed his past trauma and experience. What it tells me is that that person still has space for to forgive him or herself! I learned to let go of my past, because I learned to forgive myself, and I learned to forgive my former perpetrators.”
In addition to overcoming enmity towards Bamar people, Eh Nay Thaw also worked to cultivate pride in his own community. He explains that the native word used to describe his own ethnic group is not Karen, but Kynaw Poe. As Kynaw means “minimalistic” and Poe means son or daughter, he likes to translate the full term as “children of simplicity.” This linguistic definition takes on great meaning to him. “To me, that's the identity that I hold true to myself,” he notes. “And so the term Karen is quite misleading, in my opinion, because it loses that meaning of Knyaw Poe.”
For Eh Nay Thaw, this is not just a linguistic point, but one deeply relevant to the Karen communities today. Given their history of survival amid larger empires, Karen have long had to make a home in jungles and hilly regions that many others had found inhospitable. Yet for the past several generations, successive Tatmadaw attacks have driven many out of their homeland. “Believe it or not, if you ask a lot of Karen people who live in the United States, especially the elders, they dream of returning back to live that simple life! They want to live as a hunter-gatherers, as villagers, as rice farmers, because that's the way of Karen people. And to me, I value that identity of Karen people, of Knyaw Poe, because it really emphasizes simplicity and minimalism.”
At the same time, Eh Nay Thaw expresses concern with how splintered the Karen community has become, a result of their tumultuous history of colonialization and military invasion. This has created a number of factors—linguistic, religious, geographic, etc.—that has made the establishment of a “pan-Karen identity” and solidarity more challenging. Rather than finding commonalities in an effort to come together, he sees Karen leaders emphasizing differences. “The leaders of the Karen National Union have largely remained older men who grew up and lived mostly in the resistance territory,” he notes sadly. And historically, ethnic leaders in Myanmar have viewed politics and the establishment of security and prosperity as a zero-sum game, emphasizing one’s own group over others. Of course, further impacting “Karen identity” is that so many are now growing up in the diaspora, without a firm connection to their ancestral homeland.
One new development that makes him more hopeful is the role that Karen youth in the diaspora have begun to play. They have taken on much of the burden of fundraising, while also seeking to chart out a more unified future that doesn’t navigate the social and political landscape like Karen elders traditionally have done. Eh Nay Thaw describes an extremely complex scenario in which Karen fighting forces in Myanmar are beginning to splinter and pursue different goals, while Karen leaders in Thailand are trying to bring order and organization, and Karen diaspora groups are continuing to send funds while pushing for objectives that promote unity.
Eh Nay Thaw points out the somewhat contradictory nature of these new developments. “Especially a time where we should be more unified, when the larger movement is to resist and take down the military regime, we also see once again, breakaway factions! This is not unique in the Karen history,” he notes. “However, I'm seeing a lot of unity amongst the democratic activists and other groups that are fighting the military. I'm seeing a lot of unity with the Karen and the Burmese and the larger ethnic groups that are unifying into a common goal to resist the military regime… And the movement to build and establish a federal democratic state is becoming widely accepted among the democratic activist organizations and society here.”
Another factor that Eh Nay Thaw sees as challenging a pan-Karen identity is in the growing generation gap. Generation Z activists that make up the diaspora have different dreams and hopes for the future of their country than their elders. “The younger generations have lived in society where there's rule of law,” he notes, “and this allows you to interact with people of different colors and different languages and races, and it is nice to live in relatively peaceful society.” In contrast, the elder generation still has memories of a war-torn society in which only “the strongest and most fierce” hold power. This history of mistrust contrasts with the more optimistic dreams and ambitions of the younger generation in the diaspora. But Karen leaders still speak of the tentative alliances with student activists after 1988 that ultimately led to spies infiltrating their organization, resulting in the aforementioned Fall of Manerplaw. “They believe it's going to repeat itself again when the resistance movement gets tired,” he explains. “And when they run dry, they predict that it's going to be the same thing, where [Bamar] students are going to lay down their arms and return back to the city life and live their life as they once did.”
Because of this fear, “the older generation tends to be more skeptical of this idea of a federal system where we share equal power and decentralized power, which the younger generations hope for, a Federal Union where we can all coexist and live in harmony.”
Like many ethnic minorities in Myanmar, the unhinged brutality of the military, now on full display throughout the country, is nothing new. “It was not a shock that the military coup occurred, it was almost like déjà vu!” he exclaims. “If we don't have this mentality that we are all in this together, standing against a brutal, misogynist, and patriarchal military regime, we won't see much change in the country as a whole.”
Eh Nay Thaw has organized several marches in American cities protesting the coup. In the early days following the coup he noticed a division between ethnic-led protests and those organized by the Bamar, which emphasized a Bamar-centric perspective, with their posters in support of the NLD and Aung San Suu Kyi. But in later gatherings, such as during one large protest he organized in Washington, DC, he saw something quite different: diverse groups marching arm-in-arm and expressing a similar wish for the future. This fills him with a tentative hope.
“What we're seeing now is that, yes, there is this common ground that this military regime, they have to go, and there's no question in that they have to go!” he notes. “Because of this common mentality, common desire, we're able to come together. But this is not a recipe for the future of Burma. This is just the first approach to combat the military regime as such, and there is still a long way to go… So while I'm optimistic, I'm cautiously optimistic about the future of Burma.”