The Myaungmya Incident and Karens under the Japanese Occupation in Burma

The Karen's Experience through Shwe Tun Kya

Abstract

The Myaungmya Incident was the first large-scale ethnic collision between Karens and Burmans in the history of Burma, and it was triggered by the entry of the Japanese Army and the BIA (Burma Independence Army) into Burma in early 1942. This paper examines the significance of the incident for the Karens, who were in fact a scattered people comprising several distinct groups or communities before it occurred. Among them, it was Baptist Sgaw Karen who, in collaboration with Baptist missionaries, British colonialists, and Burman intellectuals, had propagated Karen-ness in the colonial society and cultivated the idea that there is an entity or people called the Karen. However, Buddhist Pwo Karen, for example, who constituted about two-thirds of the whole Karen population in the Irrawaddy Delta region, had hardly shared a sense of being Karen as defined by the Baptist Sgaw.
It has been said that clashes between the Karens and Burmans took place because the BIA were in need of weapons, and they believed these could be found in the hands of Karens without regard to their internal differences. However, the BIA and Thakins or Burman nationalists, applied a label of Karen versus Burman to this complicated conflict. As a result of the incident, about 5, 000 were killed and 15-30% of the 2, 000 villages in the northern Myaungmya District suffered partial or total losses of their houses. In the course of the clashes, the Buddhist Pwo suffered most and accepted the label applied by the BIA and Thakins. During this process, the Buddhist Pwo gradually realized that they were a part of the Karen and began to foster Karen nationalism. This development can be best observed through the existence and image of Shwe Tun Kya, who was an ordinary Buddhist Pwo and even a Thakin before the conflict and who subsequently took on an active role as a Karen nationalist.
For the Karens, the Myaungmya Incident incited various grass-roots movements, and limited though these movements were, the participants actually perceived, experienced, and shared a collectivity of Karen-ness, which had mostly existed on the level of discourse until then. This Karen-ness was perceived first by the Karens who suffered in the Myaungmya Incident and second by the Karens who heard of the event afterwards and received it as part of their own experience. Furthermore, without the events of the Myaungmya Incident, the Buddhist sector would have participated less in the Baptist-led armed struggles of the Karen against the Burman central government in independent Burma, which started in 1949 and is still continuing to this day. Only after the Myaungmya Incident were the Karens able to form an ethnic political movement, which could mobilize the wider part of the Karen population.