Secession: The Karen National Union

The Karen people have been fighting the Burmese government off and on for sixty years. Karen is one of the four main branches of the Sino-Tibetan language family. It has three subfamily languages which are not mutually intelligible.

The Karen are the largest of over 20 minority groups that have fought the government of Burma. They have been fighting since independence in 1948. Over the years their ultimate aim has vacillated between an independent Karen nation and a Karen autonomous province in Burma.

The borders of modern Burma were created by the military successes of the Burmese Konbaung Kings. This last, pre-colonial state of Burma was conquered by the British over fifty years. The last Burmese King left the country in 1885.

In the years before the collapse of the Burmese Monarchy, they ruled from a court called Ava, and apparently divided the world along linguistic lines...

To the early modern people of Ava, the world was divided into a number of different lu-myo . As mentioned already, myo means 'seed' and the word was used commonly to mean a descent group or kinship. The Myanma lu-myo was this an expanded descent group, an identity perhaps also tied to language, religion, political institutions and a common historical experience, but perceived to be tied by blood (or semen, in the local metaphor) as well. As early as the early seventeenth century, court records list the 'one hundred and one lu-myo of the world'. By the early nineteenth century, these were classified into five overarching categories: Myanma, Tayok, Shan, Mon and Kala. Language appears to have been one important component in the thinking behind these divisions. The Arakanese, for example, who spoke a near identical langauge but who were as similar or distinct from the people of the Irrawaddy valley in other ways as the Mon, were lumped together under the 'Myanma' heading. Similarly, all the various Tai-speaking peoples, from the people of the Hukawng valley in the Himalayan foothills to the people of Bangkok, were all seen as 'Shan'. The idea of language, orthography and translation were all subjects of considerable study at Ava, being related in different ways to Buddhism and the search for 'authentic' texts. Discovering which languages were related to which others was perhaps a topic of interest as well.1

The Shan, Mon and Karen tribes were often, but not always, subjects of the rulers of the Irrawaddy valley.2