Four score minus seven years ago, on Abraham Lincoln's birthday, the leaders of four of Myanmar's main ethnic groups -- the majority Burmans, plus Kachin, Chin and Shan -- committed to creating a country conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal. The year before independence from Britain in 1948, the legacy Panglong Agreement created conditions for a multicultural country including "a separate Kachin State within a Unified Burma … [I]t is agreed that such a State is desirable".
Despite the reforms of recent years, the people of Myanmar are still waiting for the unified society agreed to in Panglong by Myanmar's independence hero, Aung San.
Desire to see the promise of Panglong materialise remains strong among the country's minorities, as well their sympathisers worldwide. These include the Free Burma Rangers (FBR), who provide humanitarian support to Myanmar's minorities and advocate for "freedom, justice and peace" while shedding light on the abuses of the Myanmar army. My fateful mountaintop encounter three years ago with FBR founder David Eubank, on my first trip to Kachin while on a frontline tour with the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), provided the catalyst for my second trip last spring to this ruggedly beautiful land.
Instead of being invited to join a country in mutual respect and equality, Myanmar's ethnic minorities have for decades faced a relentless onslaught of abuse culminating in persecution of the Rohingya, described two years ago by the UN human rights chief as a "textbook example" of ethnic cleansing.
While the UN has advised penalising the country's military with "financial isolation", the international community has utterly failed to curb the generals' ferocious exploitation of the country's considerable natural resources. Instead, the biggest move by any nation has been China's investment for its Belt and Road Initiative, while simultaneously colluding with Myanmar's military to extract maximum gain from resources-rich Kachin state.
Like Lincoln, Gen Aung San was martyred while leading a country through reconciliation in the wake of a bitter history. "Now he belongs to the ages," wrote then-US Secretary of State William Seward after Lincoln's assassination, in an epitaph that also applies to Myanmar's founding father.
"Aung San was not the leader of the Burmese only; he was the leader of the Kachins also," surmised Sama Duwa Sinwa Nawng, a Kachin negotiator at Panglong.
"He was one of us. I used to tell him, 'Bogyoke [General], you must be a Kachin. You are truthful and given to plain, even blunt speaking, as we are. It was largely because the Kachins and the frontier peoples trusted Aung San that they joined the national movement for freedom. We peoples were near, yet circumstances had kept us apart in history. Bogyoke brought us together, made us a family again. He was humble and unassuming."
Largely converted to Christianity in the late 1800s, the Kachin, who make up about 1% of Myanmar's population of 53 million, were at the same time introduced to America's tradition of Thanksgiving. Armed with weapons forged within their remote fortress-capital of Laiza, on the border with China, the Kachin have fought a largely undocumented struggle for almost seven decades. In 2011, a 17-year ceasefire collapsed when Myanmar aggression reignited the world's longest ongoing civil war as government soldiers drove 100,000 Kachin residents from their homes.
President Lincoln's Thanksgiving Proclamation, delivered in November 1863 "[i]n the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity", sanctified the fourth Thursday of each November, in a nation in need of "the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and union".
The proclamation's spirit of freedom and atonement also flows through its sister declaration, the Gettysburg Address delivered by Lincoln a month later, the slavery-abolishing Emancipation Proclamation of the same year, as well as the Panglong Agreement this century.
As then Burma was on the verge of freeing itself from British and then Japanese colonial aggression at the end of World War II, Gen Aung San told his compatriots, "We are now fighting to win peace, not the kind of peace of a graveyard but a living peace with a future. It must be the kind of peace that fosters progress, prosperity, freedom and equity. Otherwise it will neither be just nor durable."
Among the main conclusions reached in the recent EU-supported report, The Hidden War, is that "The hidden war behind the formal visible armed conflict, is the intensive war that nowadays takes place against the IDPs [Internally Displaced Peoples] in Kachin and Northern Shan states. This is taking place by the impoverishment imposed on them through the reduced food supply and basic services, the violation and abuse of human rights, the cut in education opportunities, and ongoing exploitation of their natural resources... The majority of IDPs are not confident about recovering their rights or being able to express their ethnic identity, political thoughts and participate in social life." These sentiments echo loudly in dozens of conversations I have had with students, teachers, soldiers, civil society workers and other Kachin working to support the continued existence of their imperilled society.
While the Union's victory in the civil war secured a future of freedom in the United States, the fall of the strategic KIA outpost of Gidon to Mynamar troops in 2016 indicates a looming victory for government oppression that hides behind simplistic claims of eliminating separatists.
The Kachin and other ethnic groups of Myanmar are disillusioned by the neo-democratic Myanmar regime of today, in which peace efforts have stagnated along with hope of a government truly of the people, by the people, for the people.
In his greatest speech, America's greatest leader eternally reminds us to remain attentive to the "unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced", lauding the army destined to become destroyers of slavery, and invoking a moral authority that could just as easily been applied to Native Americans battling European invaders, or Kachin defying Myanmar aggression.
"It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and … shall not perish from the earth."
Carleton Cole is a Bangkok-based journalist who has focused on topics related to migration, culture and history for over 20 years.