Community land for most Indigenous Karen people in Myanmar is not subject to ownership — it is rather a source of their faith, a divine creator of which the Karen are solely the custodians. Despite this belief, Karen communities living in the southern Kayin state (or Kawthoolei, as Karen nationalists call it) have taken part in a land registration effort for more than a decade now. Karen leaders and activists map out ancestral lands in seven districts of the state, register them in a database and provide locals with their own land title certificates — all without asking the central government. It was the aftermath of frequent violent attacks that killed and displaced many people from their lands that led to the creation of this registration policy, says P’doh Saw Lay Say, the Karen head of the Kawthoolei Agriculture Department (KAD), a unit under the main political group of the Karen people, the Karen National Union (KNU). It emerged as a desire to strengthen what outsiders recognize as their lands and protect the ecosystems in this Indo-Burma Biodiversity Hotspot that they have stewarded for generations. To worry about the land and stress over their legal relationship with it is the condition of the Karen people today. Demarcation of customary land. The Karen Environmental and Social Action Network (KESAN), an environmental organization, initiated a land policy in 2012 and collaborated with the KNU to demarcate agricultural plots and community forests. Image courtesy of KESAN. Amid the decades-long armed conflict between the…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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