This Month in History - July - The Second National Congress
The KNU’s second congress was held between 26th June and 11thJuly 1956 at Maw Koo camp in the Papun hills. Over 70 delegates and over 80 observers, including Pa-oh, Karenni and Mon, were present and it was here that the Second Phase Programme was ratified and officially unveiled. Under the slogan of ‘Peace within our Country’, and overtly mixing socialism and communism. The KNU was divided into the Kawthoolei People’s Council, Kawthoolei People’s Military Council, Kawthoolei People’s Justice Court, and the main administrative body - the Kawthoolei Revolutionary Council(KRC). The armed forces were divided into the Kawthoolei People’s Liberation Army (KPLA), the Kawthoolei People’s Guerrilla Force (KPGF), and the Karen National Defence Organisation (KNDO) following Maoist ideology a political commissar was appointed to each unit. The new direction of the KNU identified the following
Main enemy: Imperialism
Immediate target: the AFPFL which represents those interests
Strength: the leadership of the working class, but the main strength will be the peasants, the backbone of the revolution, under the worker's leadership
Alliances: intellectuals, government employees, businessmen
Temporary Alliances: national bourgeois
Strategy: armed struggle
Military Strategy: protracted warfare
Agrarian Strategy: abolition of landlordism
Foreign policy: peaceful coexistence
Sadly, these socialist and Maoist influences that shaped the revolution in the mid-50s and early sixties have, for the most part, been largely erased from KNU records with minutes from the ‘54 and ‘56 congresses lost to history. Even though a number of leaders including current President Ba Thin Sein and KNLA Commander Tamla Baw were both ex-KNUP members - for the most part the KNU’s flirtations with socialism are largely played down amid what in the seventies and eighties, under the leadership of Gen. Bo Mya, would become a rabid anti-communist, pro-capitalist movement.
Image: KNDO Personnel in 1952. In 1956 the armed forces were completely re-organised with the main military wing becoming the Kawthoolei People's Liberation Army (the fore-runner of the KNLA).
