River of Tears: Snapshots from the Edge of a War
Here’s a link to Michael Yon’s latest photo essay is which he remarks on the similarities between AfPak and Burma/Thailand.
Those similarities are among those you see in almost every long lasting low burn conflict; but the one factor that works in all of them are refugee camps that have become institutions and cities in their own rights. They are the same the world over — whether you call them Gaza and the West Bank, or whether they lie on the border of Bhutan once you make a refugee camp into a city you are pretty much guaranteed never ending conflict.
For more than sixty years, the Burmese government has tried to crush the Karen and other ethnic minorities. In a vague sense, Thailand is to Burma as Pakistan is to Afghanistan; many Karen people live on the Thai side or use it as sanctuary, and fight against the government on the Burma side. But the war is far more complicated than just Karen vs. Burma government; a cursory examination reveals a situation probably more complex than what we see in Afghanistan.
Attempting an ultimate makeover, in 1989, the murderous Burmese government changed the country’s name to the Union of Myanmar. Some months ago, in October 2010, they did it again, changing the flag and forging a new birth certificate with the latest name: “Republic of the Union of Myanmar,” but they might as well have renamed it “The Country Formerly Known as Prince.”
After more than sixty years of war, the Burmese fighting has matured to a point that three generations know only conflict, and instead of Muslim extremists helping Taliban in Pakistan, some Westerners have made a cottage industry of helping Karen and other minorities resist the junta. In total, that cottage industry does good and important work, but it is neither pure nor simple.