London: Almost four years after anti-coup protests engulfed my birthplace, Myanmar under Min Aung Hlaing’s junta looks more and more like Bashar al-Assad’s Syria in the wake of America’s failed ‘colour revolution.’ The ongoing and escalating conflict in the largest mainland country in Southeast Asia, has morphed into a brutal civil war.
Over the past year, the anti-junta ethic armies of The Three Brotherhood Alliance (the Arakan Army, Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, and the Ta’ang National Liberation Army), as well as other very well-established groups such as the Karen National Union, the Kachin Independence Organisation, the Chin National Front, Kareni National Progressive Party, have made significant military gains against the Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s Chinese- and Russian-backed military junta that seized power from Aung San Suu Kyi in 2021.
Multi-front fighting involving multiple armed parties, including several hundred ‘People’s Defence Forces’ (or pro-democracy militias) has caused massive civilian sufferings among already poverty-stricken communities.
In October, Nicholas Koumjian, head of the UN’s ‘Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM),’ wrote in the IIMM’s latest news update that war crimes and crimes against humanity are “being committed with impunity across the country.” A month earlier, Koumjian reported to the Human Rights Council that “aerial attacks on civilian targets, unlawful imprisonment, torture in detention centres, violent sexual and gender-based crimes, the burning of villages, beheadings and the public display of sexually mutilated bodies.” Most of these crimes are committed to punish and induce terror in the civilian population, the “collateral damage” in this conflict, to use that American euphemism.
Myanmar’s armed conflicts are no longer a simple, binary morality tale of good versus evil. Yes, the Tatmadaw remains the country’s largest armed organisation and regularly commits atrocities, their anti-junta adversaries fighting “the common enemy” also perpetrate their fair share of atrocities against localised “enemy” ethnic populations.
Today, the violence in Myanmar is both vertical – the central state versus the rest in society – and horizontal – internecine communal conflicts – and different parties in these conflicts spout political bromides like ‘political autonomy,’ ‘democracy,’ ‘revolution,’ and ‘peaceful solution’ to justify their violent actions.
Most of the ‘war crimes’ evidence that the UN investigators in Geneva have collected concerns atrocities committed by Myanmar’s security forces. However, there is a growing body of credible evidence that the armed ethnic groups are also carrying out atrocities. The UN recently opened new investigations in Rakhine State where fighting between the ethno-supremacist Arakan Army and the military junta continues unabated and reports of rape, torture, and executions of suspected informers are widespread.
Civilians from all ethnicities in Rakhine have suffered, but especially vulnerable are the now stateless Rohingya population who have been directly targeted for genocidal expulsion for over four decades. In 2017, Myanmar’s military conducted a “security clearance operation” against them that led to the exodus of 740,000 Rohingya into neighbouring Bangladesh. Thousands were slaughtered by both the government’s military forces and local Rakhine Buddhist vigilante groups while hundreds of Rohingya women and girls were gang-raped by the government troops.
Also read: ‘Angry, Hopeless, Depressed’: Rohingya Voices From Cox’s Bazar
At present, the Rakhine Buddhist forces like the Arkan Army (AA) are the spearhead of a new wave of the genocidal violence. Against the Arakan Army whose rank-and-file members are local Rakhine supremacists, Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims are currently fighting alongside their former perpetrators, namely the despised official armed forces. It is noteworthy that in Burmese and Rakhine language social media platforms, these supporters of AA publicly cheer on Israel’s ongoing genocide of “Muslim terrorists” in Palestine. Some of them express their admiration for Israel as their model for Rakhine Buddhist nation-building.
Rohingya who survived Myanmar’s state-organised genocide in 2017 have long been caught in what I call “the genocide triangle” in the shifting alliance between Myanmar military and Islamophobic Rakhine nationalists.
“Once again, the Rohingya people are being driven from their homes and dying in scenes tragically reminiscent of the 2017 exodus,” said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General. “But this time, they are facing persecution on two fronts, from the rebel Arakan Army and the Myanmar military, which is forcibly conscripting Rohingya men.”
Besides the documentation of the UN and human rights organisations, my daily monitoring of Myanmar news and contacts on the ground have made me painfully aware of the ongoing sufferings of my fellow country peoples. In August of this year, the UN offered this staggering statistic – since the coup of 2021, approximately three million people have been internally displaced in Myanmar. According to the World Food Programme, 13.3 million, one in four, are “food insecure” and 18.6 million are “in need of humanitarian assistance”.
The junta’s active campaign of mass conscription has resulted in the panic exodus of thousands of young men and women who would otherwise be engaged in agriculture, transport and other productive careers.
To make matters worse, these multi-front, multi-actor armed conflicts along Myanmar’s international borders – China, India, Bangladesh and Thailand – have crippled the nation’s economy. According to the Radio Free Asia, China, in close collaboration with Myanmar junta, has closed key border crossings effectively shutting down overland trade. China is attempting to pressure the anti-junta ethnic armed organisations to fall in line with Beijing’s goal of ending the armed conflict and re-establishing stability in Myanmar.
Consequently, the consumer prices for essential items for commodities like rice, medicine, food, consumer goods and machine oil have surged. Chinese authorities have added to the misery by cutting off water, electricity and the internet to the areas under the control of the anti-junta ethnic groups.
In the eastern and northern Shan and Kachin states, the non-Myanmar ethnic armies have won important military victories. Not only have they captured lucrative mineral mines, but the anti-Junta armed groups also control important trade routes with China. Despite their significant battlefield losses including a regional command and several major towns in N. Shan State, Rakhine and Chin states, the junta in the capital Naypyidaw has dugged in. Emboldened by China’s decision to recognize and support Senior General Min Aung Hlaing’s junta as the de facto state actor of Myanmar, its generals are now intent on frustrating the victorious ethnic militia groups’ attempts to establish viable alternative local governments. The junta’s reprisals for these regional defeats now include indiscriminate airstrikes of several important towns they have lost in the different regions.
While the ethnic communities have cheered the news of the ethnic army’s capture of large swarths of territories which belong to them, is the junta loss a win for the people?
Yes and no.
Yes, because these regions are ancestrally non-Myanmar ethnic regions where the junta’s imposition of brutal military control for decades generated so much resentment and hatred from the locals.
No, because these armed groups have been unable to translate their military victories into policy victories that will bring communal stability (law and order), social welfare, education, and health services, and ultimately, an inter-ethnic peace plan both inside these regions, and for the nation at large. Sadly, these local and regional military victories offer no real hope for peace or a better future for the country’s 55 million multi-ethnic peoples.
Worse, the big picture of international power politics provides little hope for an end to this civil war.
China’s significant policy shift to back the embattled and unpopular central military could not have come at a better time for the junta. Beijing has enabled the junta to operate, at least within Southeast Asian region, as a de facto state. In October, the Myanmar Police Force hosted Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam at the important ASEANPOL conference that gathered this year with the goal of “strengthening regional and global partnership to combat transnational crimes.”
On Myanmar’s Western border, India has been playing catch-up with its Asian geopolitical rival. However, the recent thaw between New Delhi and Beijing at the recent BRICS Summit closed the window for the insurgent movements to gain the support of the regional giants’ contest over Myanmar. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has also been unable to move beyond its Five-Point Consensus on Myanmar due to the members’ conflicting interests, and their internal divisions over how best to help resolve Myanmar’s all-out civil war.
Also read: How ASEAN’s Failed ‘Five-Point Consensus’ Has Let Down the People of Myanmar
At the end of the Cold War, the United States was seen, rightly or wrongly, by many pro-democracy activists as a force for good. Many thought America would genuinely support grassroots resistance movements that opposed authoritarian regimes. The leaders of the vainglorious ‘indispensable nation,’ spoke loudly about civil society, democracy, human rights, and international law.
Then came 9/11, the Global War on Terror, and America’s wholly unsuccessful attempt to build the unipolar world which it planned to dictate. More recently, the Biden administration’s unconditional support for Israel genocidal war has shattered the image of the United States as the white knight of international politics once and for all.
Today, America’s nominal backing of the opposition National Unity Government of Myanmar, as a democratic alternative to the junta, is viewed with suspicion by activists of the Global South. To Washington, Myanmar simply does not matter because it will not further America’s militarist and imperialist objectives in Asia. It is not Taiwan, Japan or South Korea.
As someone who studied, worked and lived in the US for 17 years, I know that there is no movement or grassroots support for Myanmar in the US, or anywhere else in the world. There is no end in sight for this increasingly bloody civil war.
Recently activists in the predominantly Buddhist nation of Cambodia organised a solidarity event for the people of Gaza. Their conspicuous silence about the ongoing civil war in a neighbouring, predominantly Buddhist ASEAN nation, speaks volumes about just how uninspiring Myanmar’s anti-junta resistance is. No moral citizen of the world wants to support a resistance movement that demands human rights, freedom and democracy only for their own ethnic groups, but refuses to extend the same rights to the Rohingya genocide victims.
Four years into the anti-coup movement, I had had the distance, time and privilege to reflect on my early post-coup post-NLD optimism. On March 26, 2021, I wrote an optimistic op-ed in the Washington Post, shared my hope for a better future in Myanmar with the BBC World Service, and argued confidently that the post-Aung San Suu Kyi Myanmar was going to be morally different. I believed that the Nway Oo Revolution (or Myanmar Spring) and their multi-ethnic armed resistance, would usher in an era of progressive change and transform my homeland.
Alas, my optimism has been proven rather premature.
Instead, my strife-torn country looks more and more like Assad’s Syria. Now I must face the sad fact that the world is well-aware of the bloody and ongoing tribal war in Myanmar. but does not care.
Maung Zarni is a Burmese genocide scholar and human rights activist with 36 years of involvement in international affairs and activism. He is co-founder of the Forces of Renewal for Southeast Asia and the Free Rohingya Coalition.
