OLIVIER SARBIL PHOTOGRAPHY

The Karen: Sixty Years of War

For fifty years a war has raged in Southeast Asia. A brutal Davy and Goliath battle between the ethnic Karen Hill tribes and the powerful army of the Burmese Junta, have left the Karen scattered and badly battered. The Karen, through sheer determination have managed to hang on and though the Junta has systematically murdered, maimed, raped and burned their villages razed to the ground and are all but vanquished, they have still not quite given up.

The seven million Karen in Burma are descandents of the earliest settlers of the country, migrating from Mongolia nearly three thousand years ago, later pushed in the mountains as Burmese migrants moved in. during the British colonisation, the Karen sided with them against the Burmese and after the British departure after WWII, the new Burmese authorities went on the rampage against the ‘enemy’ Karen, who have since fought for not only for independence, but also for the right to exist.

In the past 20 years, with the complete military takeover of the Myanmar government, the Burmese junta has conducted campaigns to exterminate the Karen in a concentrated effort at ‘ethnic cleansing’. As one official put it during Armed Forces Day celebrations in 2006, “[We will] crush all enemies, on land, underground and at sea, all enemies, we will crush them totally, until they are uprooted, decimated.”

But the Karen have fought back against the junta’s massive armed forces, forming the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), the military wing of the Karen, employing about 10,000 disparate troops armed mainly with Vietnam-era weapons and little training against the Burmese forces of 400,000, and in spite of constant setbacks they continue to fight a guerilla war in the forests north of Rangoon and have even set up outposts in the dense jungles of Myanmar’s south.

Conditions are hard, rife with disease, the dangers of the jungle and little funding or international support, with small groups of Karen soldiers attempting to take care of their families feed and house themselves, while continuing to resist and harass the vicious onslaught of the Burmese junta.

The Karen’s ongoing struggle is of little concern to the outside world, and they continue to lose ground. It is an incredible feat that they have lasted as long as they have, and it may not be much longer before the Junta has burned down every Karen village and eradicated an entire race of people whose only desire has been to survive.