14 - State Terrorism and International Compliance: The Kachin Armed Struggle for Political Self-Determination

Summary

In March 2011 ex-General and former State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) Prime Minister Thein Sein became President of Myanmar, under the banner of reform and transition to democracy. The international community hailed this news as fundamentally positive after decades of military rule. However, the response of the people inside Myanmar was more sceptical, as was the response of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD), who initially advocated a response of “cautious optimism”. On 9 June 2011, three months into the presidency of Thein Sein's quasi-civilian government, what has been described as the largest military offensive in modern-day Myanmar (KWAT 2013, pp. 11–12) was launched against the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), breaking a seventeen-year ceasefire. Within the first year of Thein Sein's presidency the country saw the forced displacement of over 200,000 civilians in Kachin and Shan States in the north and Rakhine State in the west.

This chapter explores the on-going use of violence and terror as a means to force the objectives of the Myanmar government and its army on the Kachin people. It highlights the continuing historical patterns of the Myanmar government and military or both acting simultaneously, and their attempt to exert centralized power and control over ethnic areas through the use of violence and terror. In the case of the Kachin there are two processes at work: the first is the Myanmar state's systematic use of terror against its citizens, based on enduring ethnocentric ideologies; and second, the Kachin struggle for political self-determination and equality. In tracking the future trajectories of Myanmar's stated reform, it is essential to address the Myanmar government's systematic and institutionalized culture, mentality, and tactics of state terrorism.

THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF STATE TERRORISM

Every legal order or every order of explicit normativeness has to rely on a complex network of informal rules which tells us how we are to relate to explicit norms: how we are to apply them; to what extent we are to take them literally; and how and when we are allowed, even solicited, to disregard them….One of the strategies of totalitarian regimes is to have legal regulations (criminal laws) so severe that, if taken literally, everyone is guilty of something(…)