Edited by Stephanie Olinga-Shannon, with an Introduction by Martin Smith. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2019. xvi, 172 pp. (Maps, B&W photos.) US$23.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-5017-4694-9.
Although Burma’s civil wars rank among the world’s longest—they began in 1948 and continue to the present—there are few memoirs about life during the war by people directly affected by the conflict. Fifty Years in the Karen Revolution in Burma helps fill in this gap by offering two people’s firsthand accounts of the long-running armed conflict between the ethnic Karen resistance movement and the Burmese military.
The personal narratives are from a married couple, the titular soldier and teacher. Naw Sheera, a Karen woman born in 1932 in a small village in southern Burma, became a schoolteacher and later served as a woman’s advocacy organization leader. Born in 1930, the soldier, Saw Ralph Hodgson, is an Anglo-Karen man. At the age of 18, he joined the nascent Karen resistance movement during the Battle of Insein. Ralph rose through the ranks to become a Brigadier General in the Karen National Liberation Army, the military branch of the Karen National Union (KNU).
Through chapters on their childhoods, family, careers, and postwar settlement in Australia, the book explores the impact of the civil war on their lives. They married in 1961, after a three-year courtship that began in a village where they both worked. Their first child died of malaria in infancy; another four survived childhood. The couple endured long periods of separation because of their commitment to the Karen resistance movement. Their sense of obligation and sacrifice is clear. When asked by Sheera why he had to return to duty after another too-brief home leave, Ralph replied: “If the teacher is not there, what will happen to the students? If I’m not there, what will happen to the soldiers?” (130). The couple’s commitments came at a cost. Sheera notes: “When my husband came home, sometimes my children thought he was a visitor because they did not recognize him” (138).
Their lives play out against a background of potentially deadly violence. Sheera fled unexpected attacks by the Japanese, the Burmese military, and the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA)—forced to give birth in a remote jungle hut. After her wedding, she moved to a secure village out of concern that her new status as an officer’s wife put her at risk. When she returned to the village, the Burmese military detained her along with her infant. She feared mistreatment but was eventually released unharmed. Even refugee camps in Thailand failed to afford sanctuary. After DKBA soldiers kidnapped one KNU official and shot another, Ralph and Sheera often slept at a friend’s house to avoid a similar fate. Concerns about government retribution against family members also took their toll. Relatives in government-controlled areas cut ties, leaving the couple isolated from family.
For readers interested in Burma’s civil war, the book offers unique perspectives not found in other studies. For instance, Ralph describes the Karen revolution’s outbreak from a foot soldier’s viewpoint. Memoirs by soldiers on both sides of the conflict avoid criticizing their comrades but not their enemies. In this book, one finds the complex realities of war, where rebels sometimes behave badly, and enemy soldiers can act humanely. Ralph also points to the forced recruitment practices of two KNU officers in helping foment a breakaway by a Buddhist-led faction that formed the DKBA in 1994. His account differs from conventional explanations for the recurring splits within Burma’s armed resistance groups. Rather than attribute this splintering solely to the Burmese military’s “divide and rule” strategy, Ralph’s explanation also looks at the inner workings of resistance organizations and the challenges of policing their members.
Sheera and Ralph’s story also points to shortcomings in classifying Burma’s civil wars—which rarely register in the scholarship on civil war—as a “low intensity conflict.” What are the merits of classifying a conflict that has raged for over 60 years as low intensity? Is the intensity of violence its constitutive element? Looking at the impacts of the ongoing conflict through the couple’s eyes—such as losing contact with family members—shows that this approach is incomplete. Ralph recalls, “The whole time I was in the revolution, my family lived with the worry that I would be killed and never knew if I was dead or alive” (105). The account also offers new ways to think about Burma’s civil wars. Currently, conflict metrics that count clashes between armed groups form the bedrock for analyzing Burma’s civil war. Assessments based on changes in the number of clashes over time offer a narrow understanding of the conflict. This narrative helps fill in the gaps by looking at how militarized conflict affects people’s lives in the periods between the clashes.
For over 70 years, fighting and government restrictions have impeded access to Burma’s conflict zones, limiting scholars, journalists, and others from studying the impact of civil war on society. Memoirs by people with experience in war-torn areas, such as the classic by rebel cum scholar Chao Tzang Yawnghwe, provide valuable insights on the civil war (Chao Tzang Yawnghwe, The Shan of Burma: Memoirs of a Shan Exile, Singapore: ISEAS, 2010). Ralph and Sheera’s story adds to our understanding of the war by providing personal accounts of daily life in Karen areas.
Why aren’t there more firsthand narratives of Burma’s war? Part of this story is that Ralph and Sheera—like Yawnghwe—survived the war and moved to a place where they had the time, resources, and encouragement to write about it. The editor’s note suggests another possible explanation: during the book’s early stages, “[i]t became clear that this would be a difficult emotional journey for them both” (x). By reading Sheera and Ralph’s stories about the loss of lives and the disruption to family life, it is not hard to understand why so few people want to relive the trauma in writing their memoirs.
John Buchanan
Tallinn University, Tallinn