Taking flight in condemned grounds: Forcibly displaced karens and the thai-burmese in-between spaces

Alternatives

Volumn 31, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 405-429

  Tangseefa, Decha ^a  

^a THAMMASAT UNIVERSITY   (Thailand)

Author keywords

Borders; Displacement; Intelligibility; Sovereign power; State terror

Indexed keywords

EID: 33846266629     PISSN: 03043754     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030437540603100403     Document Type: Article

References (102)

1. In this article, I refer to Burma throughout except when intending to convey the present official recognition of the country as Myanmar. The change from Burma to Myanmar is not accepted by the opposition, and use of the latter term is politically charged. For discussion, see, for example, Robert H. Taylor, "Stagnation and Stalemate," introduction to Robert H. Taylor, ed., Burma: Political Economy Under Military Rule (New York: Palgrave, 2001), p. 1 n. 1;
2. David I. Steinberg, "The Burmese Conundrum: Approaching Reformation of the Political Economy," ibid., p. 41 n. 1;
3. Stefan Collignon, "Human Rights and the Economy in Burma," ibid., p. 70 n. 1;
4. and Josef Silverstein, "Burma and the World: A Decade of Foreign Policy Under the State Law and Order Restoration Council," ibid., p. 119, n. 1.Regarding the term Burma: Three related terms need clarification. First, Burma is a noun, referring to the country's name. Burman, an adjective, denotes an ethnic nationality living among varieties of other ethnic nationalities. Burmese, another adjective, signifies the discourse of statehood of Burma; hence, Burmese peoples, for instance - peoples living within the territory of Burma.
5. See, e.g., U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI), "Internally Displaced Persons (as of December 31, 2004)," World Refugee Survey 2005. (Washington, D.C.: Immigration and Refugee Services of America, 2005) : www.refugees.org/uploadedFiles/Investigate/ Publications_&_Archives/WRS_Archives/2005/internally_displaces_persons, accessed May 2006.
6. It must be noted that within the Burmese nation-state, the term indigenous peoples has to be separately deployed and cannot be used interchangeably with ethnic nationalities because not only just some indigenous peoples in this land have subjectified themselves as a nation but also it is the latter term, not the former, that has normally been used by the governing bodies of ethnic nationalities to refer to themselves, As Martin Smith states in a paper written between 1989 and1990, "the literature produced by the Karens, the Karennis, the Kachins, for the past forty years consistently confirm that they have always seen themselves as much more than minorities. The term they prefer is nationalities";
7. see Smith, "A State of Strife: The Indigenous Peoples of Burma," in R. H. Barnes, Andrew Gray, and Benedict Kingsbury, eds., Indigenous Peoples of Asia (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Association for Asian Studies, Monograph and Occasional Paper Series no. 48, 1995), p. 237. In an official booklet, for example, the government of Kawthoolei alleges that "throughout history the Burmese {sic] have been practicing annihilation, absorption, and assimilation . . . to the Karens. . . . The Karens are much more than a national minority. We are a nation": The Karens and Their Struggle for Independence (N.p.: KNU Publishing, 1984), pp. 2-3,
8. quoted in Martin Smith, Burma: Insurgency and the Politics of Ethnicity, 2d ed. (London: Zed Books, 1999), p. 36;
9. cf. Karen National Union (KNU). The Karens and Their Struggle for Freedom (KNU Publishing, 2000), pp. 4-5.
10. The phrase is from from Koetsawang, In Search of Sunlight: Burmese Migrant Workers in Thailand (Bangkok: Orchid Press, 2001).
11. For a critical narrative of the forcibly displaced lives in a "temporary shelter area," see, e.g., Decha Tangseefa, "'Temporary Shelter Areas' and Paradox of Perceptibility: Imperceptible Naked-Karens in the Thai-Burmese Border Zones," in Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr, eds., Borderscapes: Rethinking the Politics of Borders, Belonging, and Migration (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming).
12. Because the Karens in the Thai nation-state have not been brutally treated and forcibly displaced as their kin in the Burmese nation-state, a distinction must be made between the Karens from Burma and those from Thailand. The latter are not the focus of this article.
13. I am grateful to Nevzat Soguk for the expression "geography of the sacred." As for homo sacer, in a nutshell it is a kind of life that has been caught in the relation of exception, where the juridical orders refer to life and included it in themselves by suspending it. In such relation, humans encounter their nakedness and extreme vulnerability: see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998);
14. see also Decha Tangseefa, "Imperceptible Naked-lives and Atrocities: Forcibly Displaced Peoples and the Thai-Burmese In-between Spaces," Ph.D. diss. (University of Hawaii at Manoa. 2003), pp. 23-34.
15. For Rancière, politics is viewed as contained in a specific mode of relation of "part-taking," and political struggle is about a special kind of "counting." For Rancière, there are two contrasting ways of counting. One he calls police, the other politics. The former counts only empirical parts, whereas the latter counts, "in addition," a part of the no-part: see Jacques Rancière, "Ten Theses on Politics," Theory and Events 5, no. 3 (2001): p. 19;
16. and Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999);
17. see also Decha Tangseefa, note 7, pp. 35-44.
18. See. e.g., Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Sarah Harasym, "Criticism, Feminism, and The Institution," in Sarah Harasym, ed., The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 11.
19. See, e.g., Rancière, "Ten Theses on Politics," note 8; Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, note 8.
20. She told me later that her father died when she was seven years old.
21. Aristotle, "Politics," trans. Benjamin Jowett, in Jonathan Barnes, ed., The Complete Works of Aristotle - The Revised Oxford Translation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), vol. 2, 1253a 9-17.
22. Aristotle, "De Interpretatione," trans. J. L. Ackrill, in Barnes, note 12, vol. 1, 16a 3-9.
23. Giorgio Agamben, preface to Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience, trans. Ritz Heron (New York: Verso, 1993), p. 8.
24. In this light, in every three-to-four-hour class, twice a week, I spent about half of the class time teaching "English" (i.e., my normative English with a certain level of proficiency), while simultaneously teaching "Introduction to Politics." This class was one of a very few opportunities for post-high school education in the temporary shelter areas. Most people there had no access to higher education.
25. Jacques Rancière, Solange Guenoun, and James H. Kavanagh, 'Jacques Rancière: Literature, Politics, Aesthetics: Approaches to Democratic Disagreement," Roxanne Lapidus, trans., Substance 29, no. 2 (2000): 11.
26. The notion of quotidian life employed here is inspired by David Campbell's treatment of "everyday life": David Campbell, "Political Prosaics, Transversal Politics, and the Anarchical World," in Michael J. Shapiro and Hayward R. Alker, eds., Challenging Boundaries: Global Flows, Territorial Identities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 7-23. Specifically, everyday life is a "transversal site of contestations" rather than "a fixed level of analysis": ibid., p. 23. Referring to Richard K. Ashley's development of Michel Foucault's notion of transversal struggles, Campbell adds that it is transversal because it cannot be "reconciled to a Cartesian interpretation of space, with its insistence on absolute boundaries between inside and outside . . . [and] because the conflicts manifested there not only transverse all boundaries; they are about those boundaries, their erasure or inscription, and the identity formations to which they give rise": ibid., p. 23.
27. See also Richard K. Ashley, "Living on Border Lines: Man, Poststructuralism, and War," in James Der Derian and Michael J. Shapiro, eds., International/Intertexual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1989), pp. 270, 296-297;
28. Michel Foucault, "Afterward: The Subject and Power," in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, eds., Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2d ed., 1983), pp. 211-212.
29. There have been many publications and some websites,; see, for example, Free Burma Range: www.freeburmarangers.org/, by a group of missionary and medic teams going into war zones "inside" Burma; also report of the special rapporteur on the situation in Myanmar to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights: www.unhchr.ch/html/menu4/chrrep/6497; Open Society Institute;
30. Karen Human Rights Group: www .khrg.org, In addition to annual reports by Amnesty International and the US State Department, see, for example, Thailand Burma Border Consortium (TBBC), Relief Programme: January to June 2005 (Bangkok: Thailand Burma Border Consortium, 2005);
31. Committee for Internally Displaced Karen People (CIDKP), Karen IDPs Report: The Plight of Internally Displaced Karen People in Mu Traw District of Burma (Chiangmai, Thailand: Nopburee Press, 2000);
32. annual publications of the Human Rights Documentation Unit of the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma (NCGUB), e.g., Human Rights Yearbook, 1999-2000 (Nonthaburi, Thailand: NCGUB, 2000);
33. Burma Ethnic Research Group (BERG), Forgotten Victims of A Hidden War: Internally Displaced Karen in Burma Chiangmai (Thailand: Nopruree Press, 1998);
34. Karen Human Rights Group (KHRG), Wholesale Destruction: The SLORC/SPDC Campaign to Obliterate All Hill Villages in Papun and Eastern Nyaunglebin Districts (Chiangmai, Thailand: Nopburee Press, 1998);
35. Images Asia and BurmaNet, Nowhere To Go: A Report on the 1997 SLORC Offensive Against Duplaya District (KNU Sixth Bridge) Karen State Burma (Chiangmai, Thailand: Images Asia, 1997);
36. Moe K. Tun, The 1997 Offensives: Suffering and Struggle for Identity and Justice of the Ethnic Karen in Burma (Bangkok: Burma Issues, 1997).
37. Hazel J. Lang, Fear and Sanctuary: Burmese Refugees in Thailand (Ithaca, N.Y.: Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2002). The reason for putting quotation marks around the word refugee will be obvious below.
38. Ashley South, Mon Nationalism and Civil War in Burma: The Golden Sheldrake (London: Routledge/Curzon, 2002).
39. Smith, Burma, note 3. The other works are Jonathan Falla, True Love and Bartholomew: Rebels on the Burmese Border (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991);
40. and Bertil Lintner, Land of Jade: A Journey Through Insurgent Burma (Edinburgh: Kiscadale Publications, 1990). In the words of Martin Smith, written more than ten years ago, going into the "ethnicminority regions" - which by and large are equivalent to the later Thai-Burmese non-ceasefire war zones - is also critical because "any journey into the ethnic-minority regions of Burma would confirm that the last fifty years have wrought enormous changes on traditional societies in Burma. These, however, much to the ethnic-minority population's detriment, remain largely unrecorded." Smith, "State of Strife," note 3, p. 234.
41. For anthropology of borders, see, e.g., Hastings Donnan and Thomas M. Wilson, Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation, and State (Oxford, Eng.: Berg, 1999);
42. cf. Alexander Horstmann, "Incorporation and Resistance: Borderlands, Transnational Community and Social Change in Southeast Asia" (WPTC-02-04, 2002): www.transcomm.ox.ac.uk/working%20papers/WPTC-02-04%20Horstmann, accessed February 2002. For ethnographic research on displacement and refugees,
43. see Liisa H. Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Finally, for anthropology of state terror,
44. see Jeffrey A. Sluka, ed., Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000);
45. Carolyn Nordstrom and Antonius C. G. M. Robben, eds., Fieldwork Under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Survival (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995);
46. and Michael Taussig, "Culture of Terror - Space of Death: Roger Casement's Putumayo Report and the Explanation of Torture," in Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan, eds., Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 241-279.
47. Jennifer Hyndman, Managing Displacement: Refugees and the Politics of Humanitarianism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 27.
48. See Rajah Ananda, "Ethnicity, Nationalism, and the Nation-State: The Karen in Burma and Thailand," in Gehan Wijeyewardene, ed., Ethnic Groups Across National Boundaries in Mainland Southeast Asia (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1990), pp. 102-133;
49. Carole Nagengast, "Violence, Terror, and the Crisis of the State," Annual Review of Anthropology 23 (1994): 118.
50. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, rev. ed., 1991).
51. Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994).
52. Agamben, note 7, pp. 9, 27, passim; see also "The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter Benjamin," in Agamben, Potentialities; Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 161-162.
53. See Donnan and Wilson, note 22.
54. Homi. K. Bhabha, The Location of Cultures (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 38;
55. cf. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).
56. See Liisa H. Malkki, "Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization," in K. F. Olwig and K. Hastrup, eds., Sitting Culture: The Shifting Anthropological Object (London: Routledge 1997), p. 227;
57. cf. A. S. Preis, "Seeking Place: Capsized Identities and Contracted Belonging Among Sri Lankan Tamil Refugees," in Olwig and Hastrup, ibid.; and Malkki, note 22.
58. See T. Allen and D. Turton, "In Search of Cool Ground," introduction to T. Allen, ed., In Search of Cool Ground: War, Flight, and Homecoming in Northeast Africa (London: James Currey, 1996), p. 9;
59. Prem Kumar Rajaram, "Humanitarianism and Representations of the Refugee, "Journal of Refugee Studies 15, no. 3 (2002): 247-264.
60. See Decha Tangseefa, note 7, pp. 89-106.
61. See, e.g., Rancière, "Ten Theses on Politics," note 8; idem, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, note 8; Decha Tangseefa, note 7, pp. 35-44.
62. Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, note 8, pp. 32, 33.
63. The notion of "univocity of statist discourses" belongs to Ranajit Guha, "The Small Voice of History," Subaltern Studies 9 (1996): 1-12. I adapt it for my study of atrocities upon the forcibly displaced peoples. Although the target of his critique of univocity and mine is the state, the peoples for whom Guha intended to create a theoretical space were those who had been struggling within the boundary of the nation-state, whereas I am concerned with transversal subjectivities.
64. Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, note 8, p. 36,
65. Taussig, note 22, p. 242.
66. Ibid.; cf. Jeffrey A. Sluka, "Reflections on Managing Danger in Fieldwork: Dangerous Anthropology in Belfast," in Nordstrom and Robben, eds., note 22, pp. 276-294.
67. Compare E. Valentine Daniel, Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthrapography of Violence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), chap. 6, for the speechlessness of those who have survived traumatic experiences of violence.
68. No published study in either English or Thai combines these three anthropological approaches and focuses on atrocities committed against forcibly displaced peoples in the Thai-Burmese border zones. In Thai, there are only two books that study ethnic nationalities from Burma in these zones, and they employ different approaches: Pornpimon Trichot, Chonklumnoi kap ratthaban phama [The Burmese government and the ethnic minority groups] (Bangkok: Thailand Research Fund, 1999);
69. Somchoke Sawasdiruk, Khwamsamphan rawang thai-phama-kariang [Thai-Burmese-Karen Relations] (Bangkok: Thailand Research Fund, 1997).
70. Smith, Burma, note 3, p. 259.
71. Amnesty International, "Myanmar Ethnic Minorities: Targets of Repression" (Amnesty International - Report ASA 16/014/2001, June). www.amnestyusa.org/annualreport/, accessed November 2002, p. 13.
72. Known in Burmese as the Pya Ley Pya, the Four Cuts strategy was a so-called counterinsurgency program. It was designed by the Tatmadaw in the mid-1960s to cut the four main links - food, funds, intelligence, and recruits - between ethnic nationalities' soldiers and their families and local villagers. For more details see Decha, note 7, pp. 142-147;
73. BERG, note 18, pp. 23ff.;
74. Smith, Burma, note 3, pp. 263-267.
75. Smith, Burma, note 3, p. 259; BERG, note 18, p. 23. For more details of the procedure of these military strategies, see Smith, ibid., pp. 258-262, passim.
76. See, e.g., Committee for Internally Displaced Karen People (CIDKP), "No Mercy, No Peace: Burma's Internally Displaced," Internally Displaced People News 1, no. 5 (2000): 2; BERG, note 18, p. 98 fig. 12.
77. See CIDKP information sheet, Internally Displaced People News 1, no. 2 (999): 3;
78. BERG, note 18, p. 23;
79. Smith, Burma, note 3, pp. 258-267. According to David Eubank of Christians Concerned For Burma, an organization that has long been active in helping forcibly displaced peoples from Burma, 2002 saw the severest onslaught against ethnic nationalities because attacks continued throughout the wet season: Benedict Rogers, "Visit to the Thai-Burmese Border, 30th June-8th July 2002," a report by Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) (2002), p. 12. This electronic document can be solicited from Benedict Rogers through brogers50@hotmail.com; or visit www.csw .org.hk or www.csw.org.uk, accessed September 2002.
80. Because my study focuses more on Karens in general than on the leaders, the issue of the politics of disintegration within KNU is beyond the scope of this article.
81. Paul Tabori, The Anatomy of Exile: A Semantic and Historical Study (London: Harrap, 1972), p. 37.
82. This was also confirmed by a conversation with a KNU leader in December 2001. The word Animist is capitalized in order to problematize the very notion that Animism is not a religion in the conventional sense.
83. See, for example, an editorial of Internally Displaced Peoples News, a newsletter produced by a group of Karens on the Thai side: CIDKP, note 45. p. 3.
84. This story is from an interview conducted in January 2001.
85. For many displaced in the war zones, being away from relatives could mean being separated forever.
86. In The Rice Fairy: Karen Stories from Southeast Asia (Simplicity Press, 1987), a compilation of Karen folktales by the Rev. Edward N. Harris. The main characters of most of the tales are orphans.
87. A district KNU leader told me of this exact date. As well as working as a district head of KNU's Department of Information and Organization, he has kept records and written historical accounts about the Karens, in Karen language, for years.
88. The conversation took place in January 2001.
89. Since 2003 and completing my doctoral degree, I have renewed my fieldwork along the Thai-Burmese in-between spaces.
90. Arjun Appadurai, "Place and Voice in Anthropological Theory," Cultural Anthropology 3, no. (1988):16-20.
91. Quoted in Agamben, "The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter Benjamin," note 24, p. 160.
92. See also Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Benjamin, Illuminations, ed., Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), p. 259.
93. The notion of being victimized here is different from that in the earlier section, where I problematize the general conception held by many international relief agencies about forcibly displaced peoples, that they are victims without agency. Among other things, even with agency, the forcibly displaced are not in a position to deal with the transnational public sphere because they have inadequate juridical protection. That public sphere is a stage of engagement predominantly for citizenry.
94. See Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996);
95. Appadurai, "Sovereignty Without Territory: Notes for a Postnational Geography," in Patricia Yaeger, ed., The Geography of Identity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 40-58.
96. See, for example, Agamben, note 8; and Decha Tangseefa, note 7, pp. 23-34.
97. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, note 60; and "Sovereignty Without Territory," note 60.
98. See, for example, Decha Tangseefa, note 7, pp. 208-248. For discussions in the same light, see Victor Roudometof, "Transnationalism, Cosmopolitanism and Glocalization," Current Sociology 53, no. 1 (2005): 113-135;
99. Yan Haiping, "Other Transnationals: An Introductory Essay," Modern Drama 48, no. 2 (2005): 225-248.
100. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, note 60, p. 21.
101. KNU, "Karens and Their Struggle for Freedom," note 3, p. 5.
102. Yan, note 63, p. 226.