Page 384 - The Rough Guide to Myanmar (Burma)

382 CONTEXTS MyanMar’s ethnic groups
Though the Shan are the most populous group in the east, you may not actually see
many of them – the main Shan heartlands lie east of Taunggyi, an area off limits to
foreign travellers due to the civil conflict that has been rumbling on for decades between
the national government and various militias. Hopes that peace would finally return to
Shan State were raised following the signing of a peace deal between the government
and the large Shan State Army in 2011, although fighting broke out again in early 2016
between government forces and local militias including the Ta’ang National Liberation
Army (TNLA) and Kokang’s Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA)
– calls by many Shan for the creation of an independent Shan nation persist.
There are myriad other different hill tribes in eastern Myanmar, nominally classified
as subgroups of the Shan and including the Intha (see below), the Palaung, Pa-O, Eng,
Danu, Akha, Lahu and Loi. Many of these tribes have villages in both Myanmar and
Thailand, and some of them, such as the Akha and Lahu, are more easily visited on
hill-tribe treks on the Thai side of the border.

Intha
One of the country’s more visible minorities, the Intha (“sons of the lake”; see box,
p.259) number approximately 70,000 people and live mainly around Inle Lake where
they eke out a living cultivating small plots and floating gardens on and around the
water. They are believed to have originally come from Dawei in southern Myanmar
and still speak their own distinctive Burmese dialect. They’re best known for their
unusual style of leg-rowing, as featured in innumerable tourist literature.

Kayin (Karen)
The Kayin – aka Karen – are Myanmar’s third-biggest ethnic group, with around 3.5
million people, who live mainly in Kayin State in the south of the country (seven
percent of the national population), while many more have fled to Thailand. The Kayin
are the most heterogeneous of Myanmar’s ethnic groups, comprising a disparate
collection of hill tribes speaking various languages, most of them mutually
unintelligible. They were first grouped together under the umbrella term “Kayin” in
the 1800s by Baptist missionaries who had considerable success converting the region’s
Buddhist natives. Today, a quarter of all Kayin in Myanmar are Christian, with the rest
professing Buddhism, sometimes with strong animist elements.
Strongly favoured under British rule thanks to their Christian leanings, the Kayin have
suffered even more than most other Burmese ethnic minorities in the decades since
independence. The separatist Karen National Union (KNU) was founded in 1947 to push
the case for their own independence, although peaceable efforts to create a Kayin sovereign
nation (provisionally named Kawthoolei) collapsed just two years later when government
troops slaughtered eighty Kayin villagers in Palaw, Tanintharyi. The resultant conflict,
fought between the KNU’s military arm, the Karen National Liberation Army, and
government troops, was the longest running of Myanmar’s many ethnic insurgencies,
displacing as many as 200,000 people before a formal ceasefire was signed in 2012. Save
for the occasional KNU truck rumbling down the streets of Hpa-An, visitors to the Karen
heartlands of Myanmar will see little sign of the conflict’s impact, although an estimated
140,000 Kayin people still live in refugee camps along the Thai–Myanmar border.

Rakhine
Living mainly in Rakhine State, in the west of the country, and in neighbouring
Bangladesh, the Rakhine (also spelt “Rakhaing”, and previously known as the
Arakanese) share much in common with the Bamar but have also been significantly
influenced by their proximity to the Indian subcontinent, claiming to have been

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