Karen at the present finds the Karen people suffered the brunt of the atrocious civil war waged on them by the successive Burmese government since 1948 and there is still no easy way to end it. The toll was very heavy for the Karen people. The KNLA lost most of their strongholds and the Karen people in the revolutionary area lost their footholds. There is no detailed record of the Karen casualties during these long years of engagement with the Burmese troops. But no one can deny that more than 100,000 lives of the Karen people had been sacrificed in the struggle to establish the autonomous Karen state.
Besides, more than 3000 Karen villages were destroyed and more than 500,000 Karens became displaced in their own country. Over 100,000 Karens fled the country to become refugees in Thailand and for more than two decades. The current Burmese military regime naively cherished the destruction they imposed on the Karen people as victory and shamelessly claimed themselves liberator and defender of the country. The world must know that the problem of Burma is ethnic problems. Whoever comes to the Government seat of Burma must give priority to solve ethnic problems by all political means. There are more than a hundred ethnic groups who settled in this land at the same time with Burmese and some like Karen settled here far earlier and they even named the land “Kaw Lah”. They all will fight to the end for their rights, dignity and integrity.
What did the Karen really want? The Karen have fought for their survival over half a century, sacrificing everything they possessed, even their lives. There is one common and sacred cause behind this long-year of struggle and effort. The following article is taken from “Burma and the Karens” by Dr. San C. Po and it well explained the root cause of the present unending conflict in Burma: A Nation’s Desire
Looking back a couple of century was not a total past for a nation with nearly 5000 years of history. The present finds the Karen people straddling between few paces of recent past and new steps into the future.
A French writer once wrote: “From the past don’t receive ashes but fire”... Fire among Ashes
This is our land... "The long years effort of the Karen people to create their own national state is a decent and deserving struggle. We bear malice towards none. It is the mark of a common aspiration for a civilized race to attain and by which is conceived and cherishable to all."