Karen at the present
Karen at the present finds the Karen people suffered the brunt of the atrocious civil war waged on them by the successive Burmese government since 1948 and there is still no easy way to end it. The toll was very heavy for the Karen people. The KNLA lost most of their strongholds and the Karen people in the revolutionary area lost their footholds. There is no detailed record of the Karen casualties during these long years of engagement with the Burmese troops. But no one can deny that more than 100,000 lives of the Karen people had been sacrificed in the struggle to establish the autonomous Karen state.
Besides, more
than 3000
Karen villages were destroyed and more than 500,000 Karens became
displaced in
their own country. Over 100,000 Karens fled the country to become
refugees in
Thailand and for more than two decades. The current Burmese military
regime
naively cherished the destruction they imposed on the Karen people as
victory
and shamelessly claimed themselves liberator and defender of the
country. The
world must know that the problem of Burma is ethnic problems. Whoever
comes to
the Government seat of Burma must give priority to solve ethnic
problems by all
political means. There are more than a hundred ethnic groups who
settled in
this land at the same time with Burmese and some like Karen settled
here far
earlier and they even named the land “Kaw Lah”. They all will fight to
the end
for their rights, dignity and integrity.
What
did the Karen really want? The Karen have fought for their survival
over half a
century, sacrificing everything they possessed, even their lives. There
is one
common and sacred cause behind this long-year of struggle and effort.
The following
article is taken from “Burma and the Karens” by Dr. San C. Po and it
well
explained the root cause of the present unending conflict in Burma:
A French writer once wrote: “From the past don’t receive ashes but fire”...
This is our land... "The long years effort of the Karen people to create their own national state is a decent and deserving struggle. We bear malice towards none. It is the mark of a common aspiration for a civilized race to attain and by which is conceived and cherishable to all."