![]() The Myanmar government does not recognize the park. This approach rejects strict preservation as a Western model that has not only failed to halt deforestation in most of the tropics, but that has been used by governments to dispossess Indigenous groups, not least in Myanmar, through “green land grabs.” Indeed, KESAN, which helped conceive the park, is keenly aware of many examples from Latin America - in places like Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru - where local communities have taken control of their forests and are achieving better outcomes than preserves that are off-limits to communities.Ī rapidly changing political environment in Myanmar has opened the door to land grabbing.īut it remains far from clear that the Salween Peace Park will become another such example. It is a vision that is in line with international trends towards increased recognition of Indigenous peoples’ rights to conserve forests, safeguard biodiversity, fight climate change, and enable locally driven development. To that end, the park - which Karen have proclaimed as a self-governed, independently administered territory within Myanmar - puts development into Karen hands while conserving the forest that generations have called home. Rather than focusing strictly on nature preservation, the reserve’s backers promote Indigenous land management systems like traditional swidden agriculture and forest management. Photo courtesy of KESAN.Īlthough it is called a park, it is not your typical protected area. The Salween Peace Park covers more than 550,000 hectares in Myanmar’s Kayin State, an internationally important region for biodiversity conservation. Covering more than 550,000 hectares - nearly twice the size of Yosemite National Park in California - the park is located in a remote corner of Myanmar’s Kayin State, which is internationally important for biodiversity conservation. The Salween Peace Park is central to this agenda. As a result, many Karen have accepted that autonomy will never be realized.īut others continue the struggle, some utilizing new, non-violent strategies of resistance. Meanwhile, the area under Karen control has dwindled to a small fraction of what it was when the revolution began in 1949. Multiple efforts to negotiate peace have failed. Thousands of Karen communities have been displaced, and more than 200,000 Karen have fled the country. Over the intervening decades, far from granting the Karen meaningful rights, the Myanmar military has waged a grinding war of attrition against them. “We are in Kawthoolei.” He is using the Karen name for their ancestral land, which once covered a large swathe of southeast Myanmar and western Thailand, running down the Salween River basin south to the Andaman Sea.įor more than 70 years, since shortly after the country formerly known as Burma gained independence, a low-boil insurgency has fought for Karen self-determination, promised first by the British and then the Burmese. “We are not in Thailand, but we are not in Myanmar,” he notes. “Welcome to pure Indigenous Karen territory,” says Saw Mabu Htoo, 40, a Karen who works with an environmental rights group here called KESAN. ![]() We are cleared and enter the area that local communities have declared as the Salween Peace Park, a refuge for the last holdouts of the Karen revolution, the longest-running ethnic insurgency on earth. ![]() It is manned not by Myanmar government border patrol, but rather by soldiers of the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA). ![]() After plying rough currents upriver for hours - threading powerful eddies that threaten to throw us off course - we reach a different type of checkpoint. It is the end of the dry season, and most of the trees in the forest around us are leafless, allowing us to catch glimpses of the giant river below, a rushing torrent even now at its lowest ebb.Īs the sun rises, we scramble down a steep embankment and board a longboat piloted by a teenager in army fatigues. As we wind north through a sparse woodland up an unpaved track, the first signs of daylight begin to appear. IT IS BEFORE DAWN WHEN WE PASS the last checkpoint perched above the Salween River, along the border between Thailand and Myanmar.
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