‘When You Talk About Peace, You Have to Talk to Your Enemies, You Have to Talk with Them Even More Than Your Friends’: Khun Oo, General Secretary of the PYO — PART 1

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This interview is the second one in Burma Link’s “Youth Voices” series that we will be publishing until further notice. The series is meant to give more in depth understanding into the situation, concerns, and feelings of Burma’s ethnic youth and the work that ethnic youth organisations are conducting.

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Pa-O Youth Organization (PYO): “Our goal is to create justice, equality and peace through building new society in Burma by the power of the youth.”

My name is Khun Oo and I am currently working in Pa-O Youth Organization (PYO) as General Secretary. I joined PYO in September 2008. After that, I was selected to take interview for the General Secretary

[position] when we had the 2015 Pa-O Youth Organization Conference to make an election for selecting committee members. We can select [the committee members] and I was elected as General Secretary.

PYO started in 1998, it has been already 20 years until now. Our goal is to create justice, equality and peace through building new society in Burma by the power of the youth. Currently, we have four main projects and each of our projects is based on our objectives. We have four main objectives [justice, equality, peace and youth], so these objectives are our projects. The first project focuses on youth leadership and critical thinking. The next one is called “youth, federalism and politics” and we organize workshops, forums, and conferences, [with] discussion based on these themes. Currently, we relate youth participation to politics and peace projects.

Another [project] is based on the issues of natural resources and environment which we need to protect. That’s why we also do research, documentation and report writing about the issues of natural resources and environment. Regarding the natural resources issue, what we do includes investment monitoring like coal-power plant and steel investment, and land issues. Other than that, we have [one project] about gender equality, human rights and other gender-based issue. Besides [that], now we have already started a project based on the drug issue and it has been in progress for about half a year. In the past, we did the drug issues [project] in 2012-2014, then we postponed [the project] for a while and this year we restarted the project. These are what PYO have been doing.

For the achievements of PYO in 2017, we established networks in the local areas, knowing who can do community-monitoring jobs and research jobs. We have created networks, so we could cultivate leaders among the young generation at the community-level. Another [achievement of PYO] is related with land issue: some lands have been given back to the community. The lands that were taken by the military [Burma Army] have been returned [to the locals].

For some projects, we managed to inform [facts and findings] to the public, so many people came to know about the issue. Then, the stakeholders and the government started to realize that “there is something [the issue] we need to be careful about,” they [residents] started knowing something [the issue] because they [PYO] are doing something [to raise public awareness]. The government has started taking action to deal with the issues as the public has started having awareness. Some companies have started talking to the people. They never did something like that before the PYO raised public awareness. They [the companies] did whatever they thought was good [for them], but later they started talking to the people. These are some of the impacts we have created last year.

Challenges the PYO Faces: “The current situation is all about checking, checking, checking and taking all records [of what the civil societies organizations are doing].”

In our organizations, we have a way of thinking: if you receive the challenges, they become challenges for you and there will be challenges for you. But if you don’t receive them, then the challenges will be reduced into half of them. If you think there is a challenge – you should not feel like that, you should think like there’s no challenge. As long as you don’t receive the challenges in your heart and in your mind, the challenges could not hinder you in achieving your goal. Then another way is that you can think about the challenges but don’t receive them in your heart. This is because you will start to feel the pressure when you receive them in your heart. You can think about the challenges clearly but do not turn them as pressure. So, this how we try to minimize the challenges we face.

The challenges we face are when we execute activities, the special police [military intelligence of Burma] – they always come. Then, they start to take notes of what we are doing and ask some questions before they leave. Another [challenge] is that they [military intelligence] talk with some of our leaders secretly when we have a publication launch and press conference. Then the next week, some of the special police come to our leaders, asking: “Hey, what have you done?”. So these kinds of things are happening currently. The current situation is all about [the military intelligence] checking, checking, checking and taking all records [of what the civil societies organizations are doing]. The checking is more frequent than in the past. In the past, they didn’t know what we were doing but now they have started to know what we are doing [to raise public awareness]. That’s why they are interested and then they try to [control us]. They want to know more about what we are doing. This is one of the main challenges.

Another challenge is the propaganda [of the Burma Government and the Burma Army]. This is linked to politics. When we talk about peace and ceasefires, the other side which is the military [Burma Army] side says “they [ethnic armed organizations (EAOs)] don’t [sign] a ceasefire, that’s why we fight”. Also, we [PYO] always think that we have to be careful about what we do. Let’s say [for example] the Tigyit coal-fired power plant, we have been opposing it and urging to stop the project as the project is not good for the community and the environment, or beneficial to the country. That’s why we said the project should be stopped. But on the other side, this project is controlled and decided by the central [Burma] government. The local administrative leaders fear the government. So, if we say something [to oppose the project], they will say “don’t go against the central government.” So, these kinds of situations also happen.

Attitude in Coping with Challenges: “When you talk about peace, you have to talk to your enemies, you have to talk with them even more than your friends.”

[We] don’t give up. [We] keep going, we have to keep informing the people, informing the public [about the human rights issues happening on the ground]. We have to publish reports and talk to the media about the issues. We have face to people who hold different ideas and different views. How do you face them? We make friends with the public and we get support from the public. So, we don’t feel fear.

We also make friends with our enemy. Enemy refers to the military [Burma Army] and also some of the militia groups’ leaders. We face our enemy directly in a nice way. We talk to them openly. When you talk about peace, you have to talk to your enemies, you have to talk with them even more than your friends. Some people only want to talk to friends when talking about peace. But, no, you have to talk to your enemies; the people whom you don’t like and the people who don’t like you. Maybe we don’t like that group but we go and talk to them openly. Then they also talk to us openly because we communicate with them openly in the first place. We talk openly with them, saying, “We do these things [report publications and advocacy] because we want to change the public policy, we don’t target you, that’s why we talk openly with you.” Even though we do something that is not good for them or the military, the way our organization works is to go and talk to them directly.

We don’t avoid them because if we avoid them, the problem will be bigger and bigger, and the misunderstanding gap is getting bigger. So we don’t want to do like that. What we do is really based on the facts and evidence we collected on the ground, and then we talk to them with the findings. We also invite them to come to the meetings, show them [the evidence] and say “this issue is happening, that issue is happening, you can’t do what you are doing now because this is the problem.” We just had an open discussion like that recently. We said, “Oh! This issue is happening, what do you want to do? You have the rule and responsibility to do this thing and that thing.” Then they [Burma Army or militia groups’ leaders] talk to each other. After we talked to them, some progress started happening.

Currently we don’t know yet [if there will be any outcome], but we are trying to tackle the issues through communicating openly and directly with them. If there is any problem, we will face the problem and we talk openly to each other by showing the facts and evidence on the ground. So this is how PYO copes with the challenges.

Youth Participation in Peace Process: “Youth can not really sit around the table to talk or debate with the Burma Army Senior General Min Aung Hlaing about the NCA directly yet. What they can do and [what] their role is, is to support from behind as their voice depends on collecting facts and evidence.”

There are two main meaningful ways for the students and the youth participate in the peace process. The first one is through advocacy; another thing is through policy. Advocacy means that youth are the one who have the energy to travel, speak and act. So, they can organize the public, advocate for rights and raise public awareness of the people. Policy means that youth can [observe, investigate and document] what is happening on the ground. They can do documentation, researching and fact-finding. After that, they can use the evidence to do advocacy with different stakeholders, the government and armed groups, showing them what is happening on the ground. That’s when you can talk about the issues and policy by presenting your advice [with the evidence]. If you [youth] can play these two main roles to involve with advocacy and policy, I think that would be meaningful in contributing to the peace process. This is because when the leaders [of the Burma Government, Burma Army and EAOs] are talking, sometimes they just talk from their heart, but [it is] not based on facts. So, we have to provide the facts and evidence which are very important. Youth can also do all this by giving facts and evidence to the leaders. They can help with monitoring if they [Burma Government, Burma Army and EOAs] speak correctly or they speak incorrectly.

Sometimes, it’s hard to find representatives to express our concerns, that’s why we [Pa-O people] have to find another way [advocacy and policy] to speak out about our issues. We need to collect facts and evidence showing what’s happening on the ground for the representative groups to speak out about our concerns. As what we are saying is based on the facts that youth are collecting for us, the government and the armed groups should allow our role to represent our own interests and concerns. Youth can’t really sit around the table to talk or debate with the Burma Army Senior General Min Aung Hlaing about the NCA directly yet. So, what they can do and [what] their role is, is to support from behind, as their voice is dependent on collecting facts and evidence. Then they present their voice and speak about the issues with the government and the EAOs. So they will speak out about our [Pa-O people’s] issues and concerns. That will be good.

Support from the International Community: “If the government doesn’t allow them [international community] to support the local organizations inside Burma, they also can’t do anything.”

There is some support from the international community, for example, some Canadian and international organizations support us [PYO]. They support us but their [support] is only a little bit. We have not received enough of support yet to achieve our goals. We will [receive enough of support] soon, hopefully. The procedure [of getting funding] is usually very complex. It is not direct and we have to go through many mechanisms and many procedures to get funding. Even though we have to work a lot on the ground, at the same time we also have to go through a lot of procedures that they [international donors] are putting in place.

I think, sometimes we should negotiate well when it comes to the agreements that involve both sides [local organizations and international donors]. Donors and the international community, most of the time they just come with their own agreement. They just show their agreement and ask, “do you agree with it?”, then we can only agree with their agreement to get the money. If we don’t agree with their contract, they would deny supporting us. I think next time they should also say like “okay, this is our paper, what is your paper?” We [local organizations and international organizations] should involve each other when negotiating on agreements, instead of just one side [making decisions]. I would like to improve and promote [the relations between local organizations and international donors]. I would like to contribute some ideas into the relations, helping to promote a two-sided agreement, so that the local organizations could focus better on the issues that are really happening on the ground.

Anyway, they [international community] also have to care about and observe the Burma Government. If the government doesn’t allow them to support the local organizations inside Burma, they also can’t do anything. So I am thinking to find if there is any alternative way to get understanding and support from the government directly to effectively help with local issues. If the procedures [of getting funding] are complex while the international community is also controlled by the government and other factors, the support to the local organizations would be delayed and we can not really work effectively. Time is also very important, sometimes the money is important but time is also important. If it is delayed, you could not achieve [your goals and the outcome of the projects].

Youth Development: “We have to invest a lot in youth through enhancing youth employment and youth capacity building. We have to trust in youth, build up their capacity, and work with them.”

[What] I would like to talk about currently is related to Burma and related to the youth. We have to invest a lot in youth through enhancing youth employment and youth capacity building. We have to trust in youth, build up their capacity, and work with them. We want to restart the country with a new system, but we can’t change everyone’s minds in Burma. To restart Burma by killing all men with old mind-sets is not working. However, when we think about the other side, it also works. I don’t mean like killing them [those with old mind-set], I mean that investing to the young people [to rebuild Burma with a new federal democratic system]. If you would like to invest in Burma, I think it’s a right decision to invest in youth and work with the young people closely. They are like kind of white paper, which you can paint color on, so I think that it is better to invest in young people. It’s the right decision for the government, the global [community] and the international governments [to invest in the youth].

Dream and Vision: “We help each other and we love each other not because we are from the same ethnic nationalities but because we are all human beings.”

My dream for Burma is [reached] when people don’t get angry or fight with each other, they help each other, and they respect each other. If you don’t have food, I share with you something to eat. If you are suffering, I give you some counseling. So that’s the kind of situation I would like to see in Burma. They are helping each other and loving each other. We help each other and we love each other not because we are from the same ethnic nationalities, but because we all are human beings. That’s what I would like to see. A vision for Burma with equality and justice.

Another thing is that currently we have to increase a lot of dialogue among the youth and older people and among leaders. I think that we have to talk to each other to reach that vision and goal. We cannot let people fight and fight again and again. So, we will go [forward] achieving that dream by sharing opinions, talking, discussing, and debating in a good way. That vision will come [true] one day, step by step. To complete one step, there are many strategies and many steps that we have to take. Although it could take long time, the main thing is that I want to see that kind of society. That is the vision for the whole of Burma, for everyone, whether you are black or white or Shan or Pa-O or whatever ethnic group. So, we have to reach that goal by talking to each other, not by killing each other. We have to believe that this day will come true. So I hope that you will keep your hope and keep strengthening your hope.

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END NOTE: The interview was conducted with Khun Oo on October 18, 2018, marking the World Youth Day for Democracy. The interview was conducted in English and has subsequently been edited for clarity and flow whilst retaining the original language as much as possible.