‘They Are Fighting Us Like a Foreign Invasion'

In the past 17 years of experience, in that period, we just got the ceasefire, and on the government’s explanation, the ceasefire meant peace for them—the solution for them. That’s why we are asking them, we said, the conflict in Burma is the problem of the political approach. That’s why to solve the problem, we need to discuss politics. So far now, even though we are fighting each other, we always try to communicate with them. By means of correspondence, by means of telephone, and a couple of days ago, we sent some of our delegates to meet with Gen. Aung Min [The Burmese railways minister, an ex-general] in Thailand. We are just trying to let them know that we are struggling for, we are demanding, for ethnic equal rights and democracy and real federalism. We are not trying to be separated from this union.

Q: The KIO lost forests during the ceasefire, and minerals. Are you trying to protect resources for the future?

A: We have been trying to protect all these resources for a long time but since we are the revolutionary group we cannot work on it very effectively, successfully. We lost a lot of our natural resources, like the wood, forests and jade mines, they are almost gone now. When we speak about the Myitsone Dam, we objected to this project because we need to preserve, protect the environment, the land. But on the other hand, the government says we are disturbing the national interest. That’s why we lost a lot of nonrenewable resources from our land. That will never come back again.