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At 6 years old, Shawnai Ku fled one of the world’s longest-running civil wars.

She and her father, a Karen soldier in Myanmar, escaped on foot across the country’s border with Thailand. She still remembers crossing a river in a small boat, fearing for her life, knowing that both sides of the conflict would want to kill them — one side for her father’s desertion and the other for their ethnicity.

“I remember being so scared as a little girl because my dad was a soldier, and if anyone would have found out, god forbid, they would all have killed us,” said Ku, a senior at Corcoran High School in Syracuse. “And the Burmese would have killed us, too.”

Ku later joined thousands of Karen, an ethnic minority in Myanmar, in resettling in Syracuse. Over a decade after she arrived, she’s organizing with other youth in her community to raise awareness about the Karen people and a genocide the world has largely forgotten.

Those efforts brought Ku and the other organizers of her movement, Syracuse Youth March for Justice, to the steps of City Hall on Saturday, where she and other Karen refugees shared their experiences fleeing violence in Myanmar.

“As I got closer to the Karen community, I saw that a lot of people were afraid to speak out,” Ku said. “It’s an experience people are so scared to unravel because of the horrors that they go through.”

The Karen community

The Karen are a minority ethnic group in Myanmar, also known as Burma, that have been fighting for independence for the last 72 years. They face ongoing human rights violations from the Burmese military, and approximately 100,000 people have been displaced since 2002, both in Myanmar and as international refugees.

Displaced Karen people have resettled in countries including the U.S., Canada and the United Kingdom, while vast numbers remain in refugee camps in Thailand. Since the early 2000s, Syracuse has welcomed several thousand refugees of Karen descent.

Emmy Naw recalled arriving in Syracuse at the age of 2 as one of the first Karen refugees to resettle in the area.

“Growing up, I remember helping people settle in,” said Naw, who is now a sophomore in Syracuse University’s Martin J. Whitman School of Management. “My father knew English better than other people, so he helped them.”

Shawnai Ku, a senior at Corcoran High School in Syracuse, speaks in front of City Hall. Emily Steinberger | Photo Editor

Most of the coordinators of Syracuse Youth March for Justice grew up in the community that early immigrants, such as Naw’s family, helped build — a community spread throughout the city but bonded by shared heritage and experiences.

Children of refugees went to the same churches or Buddhist temples. They could walk to one another’s houses. They attended the same Karen New Year events and played in the same soccer tournaments.

It was through those connections that Ku organized the march, hoping to unify Karen refugees in a city where they haven’t always been acknowledged or accepted.

“All our Karen people are in a diaspora,” said Shally Da, one of the march’s coordinators and a sophomore at SU. Another early refugee in Syracuse, she remembers many Karen arriving in the city without “a single penny,” though they would be able to afford cars and nice homes years later.

“The most important thing to getting back our country is just reconnecting, little by little,” she said.

Marching for justice

Saturday morning, over 100 Karen demonstrators and other community members gathered in Clinton Square for the march.

Karen flags — red, white and blue tricolors with red and blue sunbursts in the corner — snapped in the wind while sticker versions clung to jackets and children’s foreheads. Attendees wore traditional, handwoven Karen attire and spoke to one another in their native language between chants of “Justice for Karen!” and “Human rights!”

As the march started toward City Hall, almost all of the attendees carried signs, banners or phones to livestream the event. Many, like Pladoh Moo, also carried memories of the violence and refugee camps they fled to come to Syracuse.

Da, who translated for Moo, said Moo was born in an impoverished village in the jungle where his family had fled to escape ethnic violence.

“When he was younger, his mom would tell him stories of how they ran away from the Burmese people,” Da said as Moo nodded along behind her. “Even in their houses, they weren’t feeling safe, so they had to go out into the jungle.”

Ehkiu Taw, Moo’s friend, recalled living in a cramped bamboo house that was part of a massive refugee camp.

“I had no shoes,” he said. “I was playing soccer in no shoes.”

At City Hall, organizers led the crowd in singing the U.S. and Karen national anthems. They played recorded interviews with elders in their community who told stories about the violence they faced when the war broke out. One recalled hearing a gunshot as his family tried to run from Burmese soldiers, only to find the bullet had struck his 2-year-old sister.

As the march started toward City Hall, almost all of the attendees carried signs, banners or phones to livestream the event.  Emily Steinberger | Photo Editor

One speaker, Shelly Moo, brushed tears from her eyes as she recalled the Burmese military burning her village. She only escaped by crossing a fast-moving river on a makeshift raft, though she didn’t know how to swim.

“I’ve been running from the Burmese for as long as I can remember,” Naw translated. “They denied everything about the genocide, but we are living proof that (it) happened.”

“How can (the Karen) suffer through all that and have the world not recognize them?” she said.

Preserving a culture

That’s a question many of the organizers have asked not only about the international community but also about their neighborhoods and their schools, where they feel pressured to hide their culture.

“I felt like I had to hide myself sometimes because I wanted to be American,” Naw said. “I wanted to fit in with these people.”

While Da and Naw said they attended schools with diverse populations including several Karen students, Ku and Newstar Bell, another organizer, both went to majority white schools. Few people there knew who the Karen people were, and both said they were scared to express their culture around classmates at times.

Ku recalled feeling that classmates would judge her for the way she looked, the clothes she wore, the language she spoke and the food she ate. On one occasion, she was told she shouldn’t represent the Karen at a school multicultural festival because her classmates and teachers might not understand who they were.

Bell, a student at Bishop Grimes High School in East Syracuse, once saw a teacher throw away a Karen classmate’s traditional food because they didn’t recognize it — an event that stuck with her for a long time.

“I’d always been ashamed to say where I’m really from, what my ethnicity is,” Bell said. “Looking back, I don’t know why I was ashamed, because when I look at my culture and what we stand for, I think it’s something I shouldn’t be ashamed for. It’s something I should be proud of.”

Saturday’s march, the organizers said, was their way of reclaiming a culture they’ve grown to love and are no longer afraid to share.

Several speakers at the march, including a representative from the Karen Organization of America, echoed the importance of preserving Karen customs. They urged the young Karen people in Syracuse to learn their history, their traditions and their language, and to keep their culture alive.

Organizers also encouraged the crowd to keep fighting for justice and to remind their peers, U.S. leaders and the world to hold the Burmese military accountable for its crimes.

“Today, we will no longer be silent,” Ku said, her voice carrying over the loudspeaker, punctuated by the flapping of Karen and American flags. “Threats can no longer scare us. We will use our unity, our words, unravel our untold history.”

Published on March 14, 2021 at 11:39 pm

Contact Chris: cjhippen@syr.edu