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Most likely to secede?
a book review by Eric Jackson

War in Karen Country:
Armed Struggle for a Free and Independent Karen State in Southeast Asia
by Thomas James Bleming
iUniverse, Inc., Lincoln NE (2007)
191 pp, $16.95 in paperback
ISBN 978-0-595-45261-3

Tom Bleming is a warrior who served with the US Army in Vietnam and has fought on several continents off and on ever since, including a short stint with an ill-fated guerrilla movement in Panama that resulted in some pretty horrendous prison experiences here.

The Karen are an ancient people, some 7.4 million strong, who live mainly in Burma (or Myanmar, as the military dictatorship calls it). How ancient? Well, we know that their language is of the Sino-Tebetan family, but lacking in Chinese influences, which along with other evidence suggests that the Karen and Tibetans went their separate ways even before the ancestors of the latter had made their way from the desert plains of Mongolia to the plateau of Tibet.

By the time that the Americans and the Karen crossed paths more than 200 years ago, the Karen were considered an aboriginal people living in the hills of eastern Burma, with a few nearby in remote Siam (Thailand). American Baptist missionaries established the relationship way back then, and today about 40 percent of the Karen are Christian, the remainder being mainly Buddhists or Animists.

When the Japanese invaded in World War II many in Burma collaborated with them, buying the promise of a "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere." Burma's major cities were overrrun, and the Empire of Japan advanced across the frontier into eastern India, where its forces were smashed in the Battle of Imphal. One of the reasons for that Japanese catastrophe, and the successes of Merrill's Marauders behind Japanese lines, and the ultimate opening of the Burma Road to supply the Chinese front against Japan, was that the Karen supported the Allied cause.

But even though the Karen Rifles stuck by the British and the Americans when they were driven into the trackless wilderness by the Japanese onslaught, when the UK was calling it quits in that part of its Asian empire just after the war, the Karen were excluded from independence talks and their demands for autonomy ignored. The shaky peace that came with independence broke down in 1949 when a fanatical nationalist military-dominated government went on the offensive against ethnic minorities including the Karen. The latter declared the independent state of Kawthoolei and took up arms. They have been fighting ever since.

This book is not a dispassionate history. Bleming visited the Karen National Liberation Front and joined their independence struggle. It is in part a travel book and in part a war story. It's illustrated with rare photographs of a ragtag army that has fought off a far bigger force for decades, despite some severe geopolitical disadvantages. (China has this economic relationship with the pariah regime in Burma and moreover wouldn't want to be giving its own ethnic minorities any ideas about independence or even more than token autonomy, Thailand tends to bend its foreign policy to take the path of least resistance at any given moment, the United States may have its historic ties to the Christian Karen but is deeply in hock to China, and so on.) But despite all the isolation, the Republic of Kawthoolei soldiers on and Bleming tells a part of that story and makes a pitch for help.

So, what SHOULD be done about the rogue dictatorship in Burma? Actually, lending aid and comfort to those who are fighting against it --- not only the dissident politicians, intellectuals and Buddhist clergy in the cities but also the guerrilla forces of the Shan, Mon and Karen minorities of the north and east makes a certain amount of political sense. Supporting secessionists anywhere is still kind of disreputable, but the opprobrium attached to the Burmese military is so severe that one small Western power, Norway, has gone so far as to give diplomatic recognition to the Republic of Kawthoolei.

If this is the first time you have heard any of this and want to know more --- or if you know a lot about it and want to lend a hand --- Tom Bleming's well written book is a good place to start.