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Decolonisation Therapy for Tears beyond the Icy Mountain in Northern Myanmar Seng Bu, Myanmar
Decolonisation Therapy for Tears beyond the Icy Mountain in Northern Myanmar
By Seng Bu, Myanmar
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“We don’t want the world heritage designation of Hkakabo Razi National Park!We don’t want WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society). We demand the law that recognises community-managed areas in our native land! This is the people’s demand!” (Saray, 2020)
Introduction
These radical claims echoing against the crystal white surface of the 19,320-foot tall, monumental Mount Hkakabo-Razi (Line, 1999) are the grievances, tears and anguished cries of the indigenous people living in the range of icy mountains area, Puta-o, at the Northernmost part in the tropical country, Myanmar. Puta-o is one of the districts in Kachin State, Myanmar and composed of five towns: Putao, Machanbaw, Naung Mon, Kong Lang Pu and Sumbrabum, where various ethnic tribes such as Rawang, Lisu, Khanti Shan, Jinghpaw, and a few others are residing (Aung Tun, 1998). Shifting cultivation and farming, hunting, finding herbal plants and medicines are how indigenous and local people survive in the 11,280km2 forested area of Puta-O (Fishbein, 2020). Poor transportation and infrastructure have historically hampered socio-economic and health access (Saray, 2020). In order to write about a community proposing cultural and ecological transitions, I searched exhaustively for various examples of alternative ecological conservation happening in Kachin State, Myanmar, which is close to my heart. Unsurprisingly, it was challenging to find published academic papers in English and Burmese that discuss the ecological transitions in Myanmar, particularly within the Kachin State. This illustrates the inequality in knowledge generation, production, distribution, and consumption which ends up as knowledge erasure (Icaza, 2021). This is a “coloniality” (Quijano, 2000) that is so systematically institutionalised that I needed to review various projects and transformation examples that are happening at the grass-roots level in Myanmar through local civil society organisations' websites, rather than through the university’s library. I have engaged with critical theories and concepts that have urged me to unlearn what I have learned so far through social constructions and normative, stereotypical understandings and to relearn the other side of mainstream development narratives, through contemplating the testimonies of local Myanmar people in the documentary, Tears Beyond the Icy Mountain, and drawing from Rabinowitz’s paper The Price of Salt (Rabinowitz, 2000; Saray, 2020). It is heart-wrenching to witness indigenous peoples standing firmly to protect their lands and habitats at the cost of their lives. A series of demonstrations at Puta-O in 2018 was led by Rawang indigenous people together with other local communities and thousands of protestors, following the potential UNESCO World Heritage Nomination to the Hkakabo-Razi and Hponkan-Razi protected areas, which would extend 4,778km2 to the southern part, where estimated 4000 people are living (Fishbein, 2020). Despite evidence that we are in imminent danger of mass extinction and apocalyptic environmental distress, which characterises life in the Anthropocene era (Sterner et. al., 2019), these groups are against this conservation project. Why are these indigenous people resisting the conservation plans proposed by the powerful state institutions, the Myanmar government, giant non-governmental organisations Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and a United Nations agency, UNESCO? Why do they fearlessly propose alternative community-managed conservation plans against such orthodox ones? In order to begin answering these questions, I will structure this paper in four themes, namely the import
of hegemonic conservation in Northern Myanmar, debunking the “Do-No-Harm” principle, the evolutionary process of development discourse, and linkages to degrowth.
Since the early to late 1990s, the modern Indiana Jones, Dr Alan Rabinowitz, then WCS’s Director of Science for Asia (Line, 1999), did exploration trips with Myanmar's Department of Forestry with the purpose of conducting biological surveys and recommending specific areas for protection in the hidden mountains and forests in the northernmost tip of Myanmar, also known as “the most forbidding terrain on Earth” (Frank Kingdon-Ward, quoted in Rabinowitz, 2000). It was little known that the very first Western, scientist-led team exploration to the region were mainly composed of the questions to the locals' daily expenses without clear explanations on the questionnaires and the ethical, informed consents, yet with bundles of verbal incentives given to the locals which turned out to be broken promises.
“They said they would build a large warehouse to store farmed items so that basic staples like rice, salt and oil would be available cheaply……. But they never took a yes or no survey, didn't ask if we liked it or not. That's how they created this national park.” Mvyit Dee,
Bangnamdim town (Saray, 2020).
“They even took the statistics on how many uniforms, pencils, books a student would need.
How many cooking oil do we use yearly? They even had the girls calculate the money they'd need for cosmetics yearly…They even asked the amount we need to buy new underwear each year. They said it's a good organisation that can help us. So, we kept waiting patiently.”
Zame Khawdang, Longna area (ibid.). Moreover, it seems the perception of the locals' ways of living by Rabinowitz, a bioconservation pioneer, was severely limited. He condemned the locals as willingly trading the body of the animals for basic needs such as clothing, food, and salt (Rabinowitz, 2000). It was not clear why he did not mention the root causes of the country's political instability. Myanmar in the post-colonial period has pushed millions into an extreme poverty trap with a lack of access to health, education, and other fundamental needs (Nikoloski, McGuire and Mossialos, 2021). Locals have to travel on foot along slippery and dangerous terrains for a couple of weeks to get food staples such as rice and salt, and many of them injured themselves by doing so (Saray, 2020). Perhaps, to make sense of such different understandings, one must live like the locals and encompass the ontology and epistemology of why they do what they do for their own cosmological ways of living (Escobar, 2016). Reflections and discussions from a distance will give us the silhouette, not the reality. Mohanty argues that to reconstruct a society that is inclusive and does not leave anyone behind, we will have to approach social (in)justice issues through the lens of marginalised communities, because looking with privileged eyes will create a blind spot to those who have not (Mohanty, 2003).
Theme 2: Debunking the "Do-No-Harm" principle
The pure intentions for natural conservation with the romanticised and neo-liberal practices of Rabinowitz and WCS project have caused more harm to the locals than the expected and envisioned benefits. The Rawang people claim to have lived thousands of years in the region, even with the Tibetan people on the other side, where they lived as close-knitted groups and took care of animals and natural resources with ownership before the arrival of Rabinowitz and WCS (Saray, 2020). They assert that the mental trauma they have endured because of the consequences of hegemonic wildlife conservation will not be healed for generations (ibid.). 75
“We no longer dared to travel alone or in pair when we needed to go buy salt and tea. Even we bring nothing only just clothes that we are wearing. They would sometimes do body search. They even reached inside our clothes grope body parts. So, people are so scared." DSHN.Eliyah, Dazong area (Saray, 2020).
“In 2015, I dug up herbal roots and sold them because I needed money to send my kids to school. A forestry officer said the officials were searching the villagers at posts and he took my money. He never returned the money. My kids crossed the border to work since they could no longer go to school” ZBL.Deeram, Arumdam (Krong) area (ibid.).
This dehumanisation faced by locals has revealed that the one-size-fits-all approach to development is dangerous, particularly as we live in messy and complex power dynamics (Scoones et al., 2018). It would be wrong to single out the metastasis of racialised development in micro and meso levels alone, thus demarcating the boundaries of progressiveness and backwardness. At the macro level, the coupling of development and growth has been stated powerfully by United Nations in 1987 in"Our Common Future", also known as the Brundtland report (UN Secretary-General, 1987). Furthermore, the UN Sustainable Development Goal 15 (United Nations, 2016) regarding life on land was driven by mainstream conservation discourse, and gave almost no space for local communities to exercise their autonomy and participation in decision-making about the habitat of which they are the guardians (United Nations, 2016; Krauss, 2019). In such a scenario, I question whose conservation and development are we aspiring to? To address this, I recall the “white gaze”, which can be traced back to colonisation and slavery by racialising white/European societies as an upper-class human race and the rest as inferior ‘others’, creating us and them (Harcourt, 2021). In development discourse, this constructs harmful hierarchies as racialisation undermines the existing knowledge of the local community (ibid).
I posit that historicising is critical, not in order to blame and shame the people and institutions that have caused such mistakes, but in order to apprehend the generational sufferings of people, learn from past failures, and reshape society in harmony as we want to live. On closer inspection of the accumulative tragedies that locals have faced, one can undeniably highlight the Myanmar state’s intention to control the “areas of limited statehood” in Northern Myanmar, behind the agenda of eco-conservative development (Borzel and Risse, 2010).
“The central government rarely administered us. They govern only on paper.” Sanlu Eliyah,
Dazong area (Saray, 2020).
While it tends to be true that “areas of limited statehood” have granted selfdetermination and autonomy, I question the possibility of healing the environmental damages in isolation (Borzel and Risse, 2010, p.119). Additionally, when it comes to human-caused environmental catastrophes and their consequences on people's health, such spatial splits and physical territorialisation do not seem to be effective. Because it would be impossible to command the polluted air in China not to cross the boundaries into Myanmar or vis-à-vis. On the one hand, critics should not fail to recognise the continuity of changes in science and so too in development discourse. On the other hand, one may question the dialectics of sustainability and growth. Jackson has argued that it might be one of the most challenging conundrums for experts to discern eventually the compatibility of sustainability and growth, specifically in envisioning effective climate strategies (Gerber, 2020). The next question
would be to determine the pragmatic steps for transforming towards sustainable ecologies and cultures that dignify all human and non-human actors and an economy that decouples from the fairy tales of growth (Khanna et. al., 2020).
Theme 4: linkages with degrowth
When I first learnt about "growth", I recalled a scene within the novel, “The Little Prince” about baobab trees that infested soils, occupied the whole planet, and would never be able to be uprooted if intervention came too late (Saint-Exupéry, 2011, p.28). The instrumentalisation of growth has been geo-political, from West to East and North to South, in order to provide the myopic, quick-fix solutions for socio-economic needs without transparency of its pitfalls (Gerber and Raina, 2018; Gerber, 2020). However, the bright side is that there is a second chance if we act with urgency on the ecological destructions. To take action, we must go “beyond growth, post-growth” by embracing the plurality with the substantivists, and not holding the universality with the formalists (Gerber and Raina, 2018, p.353). While researchers and scientists have contested four significant waves of post-growth, degrowth, agrowth, steady-state economics and post-development, I will expand the concept of "degrowth" in relation to the Rawang indigenous community from Myanmar (ibid., p.353). Gerber has introduced "degrowth" by explaining its genealogy, demystifying the term, and linking it to agrarian studies (Gerber, 2020). Gerber elaborates that degrowth should not be understood as a way of going back in time, yet it brings us back to what it means to be human, to reconnect ourselves, to uncover our ego-centred, blinded eyes to see the beauty in small things, to share, to care, to heal and to live in simplicity and communality (Gerber, 2020). However, I depart from Gerber's argument that “degrowth is still largely today a white middleclass movement of the global North” (Gerber, 2020, p.238), as the progressive green values and voluntary frugality has been the blueprint for indigenous communities like those in Northern Myanmar (Saray, 2020). Some of them may not comprehend what degrowth means academically, but he practices of it are ingrained in their daily lives (ibid).
Conclusion
I problematise that an ecological transition and transformation without a shift in ontological and epistemological conceptualisations will not bridge us to where we want to be. Decolonisation is a point of departure to shift development discourse from rehabilitation to structural change in pursuing sustainability. Besides, to understand the development process as it is highly skewed by political economy, the decolonial perspective is the only possible way to evaluate modernity as a totalising project (Icaza, 2021). Therefore, taking a step back and thinking collectively it is probably wise not to be entrapped in a system constantly pushing us towards growth. Although the Rawang community is demanding for “organisations-freezone”, they also envisage technological support through institutions (ibid.), thus amplifying Jonathan Rigg's “big D and little D” assertion on the developmental process of Southeast Asia (Lewis, 2019; Fishbein, 2020). On top of that, the locals' dream of self-sustaining and nonprofiteering eco-tourism (Saray, 2020) offers a potential project similar to the example of community-based tourism in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, in which the indigenous community adapts their culture of solidarity to support living and protecting them from migration and economic refugee (Pineda, n.d.). With the combination of these factors, one may argue that the balance of “big D and little D” is needed more than ever to achieve these alternative conservation solutions for a conflict-ridden country like Myanmar (Lewis, 2019). In this regard of transformation, one should be mindful of the nonlinear process of finding all possible solutions and discarding the status quo of foreign aid dependency in conservation
efforts which appear to reinvent colonialism. I propose amalgamation is a key, and we must treat divisions as a contagious disease and take actions on the intranational, transnational and international collaborative strategies to rejuvenate human lives alongside the forests, rivers, and oceans.
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