The Politics of Aid to Burma by Anne Decobert

Author:Anne Decobert [Decobert, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, General, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781317517030
Google: OI74CgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-11-19T03:20:13+00:00

It’s easy. We can speak. We make friends with those who have different languages. Here we have the same target and work for only one goal, then it’s easier. Shan, we are the same, same life, you see. Karen, same. It’s easier to make friends…. We eat rice together, talk, it just takes a moment. It’s very easy.

(28-year-old male medic, Shan State)

While living and working as part of the wider Back Pack community, the medics continued to express their ethnic, cultural, religious, linguistic and other differences. So although Burmese was the common language for trainings and meetings, outside of the meeting hall the medics would typically speak their own minority languages. They also celebrated their own cultural or religious events. This expression of diversity was encouraged by the leaders, who explained that the Six-Month Meetings were also an opportunity for the medics to share their cultures and traditions. To coincide with the Leading Group elections – held every three years during the Six-Month Meetings – the leaders would also organise what they called cultural events: medics from different areas were asked to perform a traditional dance or song in order to showcase their diverse cultures.

This emphasis on diversity was particularly significant, given the life experiences of the Back Pack members. Whether they had grown up in conflict or ceasefire areas, the medics’ life stories described discrimination, injustice or abuse as a result of belonging to an ethnic minority group. Medics who lived in areas under the control of government forces or armed ceasefire groups often described not being allowed to attend school taught in their minority languages. Many medics also spoke of armed resistance groups as fighting for the preservation of their languages, cultures and traditions. By encouraging diversity, Back Pack was therefore promoting precisely what its members saw as being repressed or destroyed by the state.

The embodiment of a shared history of state-driven violence also reinforced the sense of community between diverse groups. As illustrated through the stories above, a cross-cutting theme was that of having suffered or witnessed the suffering of loved ones as a result of violence and injustices by agents of the state. Even medics who lived in ceasefire areas and/or had not directly experienced conflict or abuses saw the state as driving the suffering of generation after generation of ethnic minority communities. Through their interactions, medics from different areas then often came to identify explicitly with a wider community defined as “ethnic” and oppressed, in opposition to a state defined as unjust in its treatment of ethnic minorities. So it was that, when I asked him what he meant by his “community”, a 22-year-old Kayan man who was working as a Back Pack medic in a ceasefire area of Karenni State told me:

My community means who? The place where we stay, it includes Karen, Karenni, Shan…. The communities who stay there, all are my community. Not only Karen, not only my Kayan. Karen, Shan, Karenni – communities who are in this area are our community. All communities who are oppressed are our community.

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