Myanmar looks more like ASEAN’s Syria than a democracy in waiting

An edited version of this article was printed in The Jakarta Post on 5 Nov., 2024.

Almost four years after anti-coup protests engulfed my birthplace, Myanmar under Min Aung Hlaing’s junta looks more and more like Assad’s Syria in the wake of America’s failed “Color Revolution.” The escalating conflict in the ASEAN country has morphed into a brutal civil war.

Over the past year, the anti-Junta ethnic armies 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.

Myanmar’s armed conflicts are, tragically, no longer a simple, binary morality tale of Good vs. 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 entire country of 55 million.

In October, Nicholas Koumjian, head of the UN’s “Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM),” wrote that war crimes and crimes against humanity are “being committed with impunity across the country.”

Today, the violence in Myanmar is both vertical – the central state v. the rest in society –and horizontal – internecine ethno-communal conflicts – with different parties, spouting political bromides like “democracy” “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 population who have been directly targeted for a slow genocide for over four decades. In 2017, Myanmar’s military conducted a “security clearance operation” against them that led to the exodus of 740,000 Rohingyas into neighbouring Bangladesh.

Rohingya 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 Myanmar military and Islamophobic Rakhine Buddhist nationalists since the country’s independence in 1948.

According to the war-fleeing Rohingyas, the anti-junta Rakhine group like the Arkan Army (AA) has become the spearhead of a new wave of the 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, 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.”

Alarmingly, in Burmese and Rakhine language social media, these supporters of AA publicly cheer on Israel ongoing genocide of “Muslim terrorists” in Palestine. Some of them express their admiration for the Jewish Supremacist state as their Rakhine nation-building model.

Amidst the escalating civil war, Myanmar’s economy is in dire state. This August, the UN offered this staggering statistic – since the coup of 2021, approximately 3 million people have been internally displaced in Myanmar. That number is growing. According to the World Food Program, 13.3 million, one in four, are “food insecure” (13.3 million) and 18.6 million are “in need of humanitarian assistance”.

The junta’s active campaign of mass conscription has also resulted in the panic exodus of thousands of working-age young men and women.

In collaboration with Myanmar junta, China has shut down Sino-Myanmar overland trade. The PRC is pressuring the border-based anti-junta ethnic groups to fall in line with Beijing’s goal of ending the armed conflicts and re-establishing stability in Myanmar.

Consequently, the prices for 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 to the rebel-controlled border regions.

Are the junta’s battlefield and territorial losses then a win for multi-ethnic 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 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 inter-ethnic peace plan both inside these regions, and for the nation at large. The junta’s retaliatory aerial bombings have also hampered any efforts to rebuild any local institutions or start new community structures.

Worse still, the Big Picture of the 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 Asian region, as a de facto state. In October, the junta’s Myanmar hosted the well-attended and important ASEANPOL conference while no UN member appears ready to recognize the anti-junta National Unity Government – whose leadership calibre is also a suspect – as the country’s legitimate government.

Even under Indonesia’s chair, ASEAN’s big actor, the bloc has proven incapable of moving beyond its Five-Point Consensus on Myanmar. ASEAN’s policy failure is due to the 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 United States 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 which it planned to dictate, and, presently, US unconditional support for Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing in Palestine has, once and for all, shattered the US image as the white knight of human rights.

Today Washington’s nominal backing of Myanmar resistance has become both a moral and strategic liability. Understandably, China wants no group which it sees as lackeys of US to be in power next door.

Recently activists and artists from the predominantly Buddhist nation of Cambodia and Vietnam organized a solidarity event for the people of Gaza. Their conspicuous silence about the ongoing civil war in another predominantly Buddhist ASEAN 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 the Rohingya genocide victims.

Four years into the anti-coup movement, I have had the time and privilege to reflect on my early post-coup post-NLD optimism. On 26 March 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, 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, UN Special Envoy to Myanmar Julia Bishop pointedly told the UN 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 who care about the country’s future must swallow the bitter pill of reconciling with those whom they view as “enemies”. Otherwise, our strife-torn country will become permanently fractured, like Assad’s Syria.

Maung Zarni

Banner: Mon State Kyomaro Township, According to local residents, many houses have been set on fire due to the SAC’s air attack on Dhammatha village as well as heavy weaponry. Photo: Wikipedia

An edited version of this article was printed in The Jakarta Post on 5 Nov., 2024.