Published by Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) on November 10, 2024
Almost four years after anti-coup protests engulfed my birthplace, Myanmar under Min Aung Hlaing’s military junta looks more and more like Assad’s Syria in the wake of the United States’ failed color revolution. The escalating conflict in the ASEAN country has morphed into a brutal civil war.
Over the past year, anti-junta ethic armies have made significant military gains against the Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s China- and Russia-backed military junta that seized power from Aung San Suu Kyi in 2021.
Myanmar’s armed conflicts are, tragically, no longer a simple, binary morality tale of good versus evil. Yes, the Tatmadaw remains the country’s largest armed organization and regularly commits atrocities. On their part, the anti-junta adversaries fighting “the common enemy” also perpetrate their fair share of atrocities against localized “enemy” ethnic populations.
Not all of these groups share an inclusive, democratic vision for the country of 55 million.
In October, Nicholas Koumjian, head of the United Nations Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM), wrote that war crimes and crimes against humanity were “being committed with impunity across the country.”
Today, the violence in Myanmar is both vertical (the central state versus the rest of society) and horizontal (internecine ethno-communal conflicts), with different parties spouting political bromides like “democracy” and “revolution” to justify their violent actions.
Take Rakhine State. Civilians from all ethnicities in Rakhine have suffered, but especially vulnerable are the now stateless Rohingya people, who have been directly targeted in a slow genocide for over four decades.
Rohingyas who survived Myanmar’s state-organized genocide in 2017 have long been caught in what I call the “genocide triangle” in the shifting alliance between the Myanmar military and Islamophobic Rakhine Buddhist nationalists since the country’s independence in 1948.
According to the war-fleeing Rohingyas, anti-junta Rakhine groups like the Arkan Army (AA) have become the spearhead of a new wave of genocidal violence while talking up human rights.
“Once again, the Rohingya people are being driven from their homes and dying in scenes tragically reminiscent of the 2017 exodus,” said Agnès Callamard, secretary-general of Amnesty International.
“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.”
Alarmingly, on Burmese- and Rakhine-language social media accounts, supporters of AA publicly cheer on Israel’s ongoing genocide of “Muslim terrorists” in Palestine. Some of them express their admiration for the Jewish state as their Rakhine nation-building model.
The junta’s active campaign of mass conscription has also resulted in the panicked exodus of thousands of working age young men and women.
In collaboration with the Myanmar junta, Beijing has shut down China-Myanmar overland trade. Beijing is pressuring the anti-junta ethnic groups based in border areas to fall in line with its goal of ending the armed conflicts and reestablishing stability in Myanmar.
Consequently, the prices of essential commodities like rice, medicine, food and machine oil have surged. Chinese authorities have added to the misery by cutting off water, electricity and the internet in rebel-controlled border regions.
Are the junta’s battlefield and territorial losses, then, a win for multiethnic peoples? Yes and no.
Yes, because these regions are ancestrally non-Myanmar ethnic regions where the junta’s imposition of brutal military control for decades has generated so much local resentment.
No, because these armed groups have so far been unable to translate their military victories into policy victories that will bring communal stability (law and order), economic betterment, social and health services and education, and ultimately, an interethnic peace plan both within these regions and for the nation at large.
The junta’s retaliatory aerial bombings have also hampered any efforts to rebuild local institutions or start new community structures.
Worse still, 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 unpopular generals could not have come at a better time for the junta. Beijing has enabled the junta to operate, at least within Southeast Asia, as a de facto state.
In October, the junta hosted the well-attended and important ASEANAPOL conference, while no U.N. member appears ready to recognize the anti-junta National Unity Government (NUG) as the country’s legitimate government.
Even under the chairmanship of Indonesia, ASEAN’s big actor, the regional bloc has proven incapable of moving beyond its Five-Point Consensus on Myanmar. ASEAN’s policy failure is due to its members’ conflicting interests and divisions over how best to help end Myanmar’s all-out civil war.
At the end of the Cold War, the U.S. was seen, rightly or wrongly, by many pro-democracy activists as a force for good.
Washington’s vicious global war on terror post-9/11, its failed attempt to build the unipolar world it planned to dictate and, presently, its unconditional support for Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing in Palestine has shattered the U.S.’ image as the white knight of human rights.
Today, Washington’s nominal backing of the Myanmar resistance has become both a moral and strategic liability. Understandably, China wants no group it sees as U.S. lackeys to be in power next door.
Recently, activists and artists from the predominantly Buddhist nations of Cambodia and Vietnam organized a solidarity event for the people of Gaza. Their conspicuous silence about the ongoing civil war in Myanmar, another predominantly Buddhist nation, speaks volumes about just how morally 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 Rohingya genocide victims.
Four years into the anti-coup movement, I have had the time and privilege to reflect on my early post-coup 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 a post-Aung San Suu Kyi Myanmar was going to be morally different.
I believed that the Nway Oo Revolution, or Myanmar Spring, and its multiethnic armed resistance, which I supported financially and otherwise, would usher in an era of progressive change and transform my homeland into an inclusive society.
Alas, my optimism has been proven rather premature. Last week, U.N. Special Envoy for Myanmar Julie Bishop pointedly told a U.N. General Assembly committee: “Myanmar actors must move beyond the current zero-sum mentality. There can be little progress on addressing the needs of the people while armed conflict continues across the country.”
Myanmar people who care about the country’s future must swallow the bitter pill of reconciling with those they view as “enemies”. Otherwise, our strife-torn country will become permanently fractured, like Assad’s Syria.
Maung Zarni is the co-author of Essays on Myanmar’s Genocide of Rohingyas (2012-18). He is a UK-based Burmese exile with over 30-years of first-hand involvement and scholarship in Burma affairs.
