No end in sight for Myanmar's protracted war
Three years after the Tatmadaw took over, the civil conflict is reaching unprecedented levels of destruction — and hopelessness.
Arrested development
It was less than 4 years ago when Myanmar held its latest general election. A sense of hope and excitement swept the country on November 8, 2020, when millions of Burmese came out to cast their ballots in the country’s second openly contested GE since the 1990 election, which was annulled by the Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s military, following a landslide victory from the National League for Democracy (NLD).
State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi was running for a second term after attaining office in the 2015 election, and despite an express constitutional amendment put forward by the Tatmadaw to prevent her from becoming president. The successful completion of her first term was hailed by many local and foreign observers as an important milestone on Myanmar’s road to democracy, after decades of military rule since gaining independence from the United Kingdom in 1948.
Still, despite hopes that democracy might consolidate in the country, saying that Myanmar was leaving its darkest days behind would be euphemistic at best, and revisionist at worst.
Aung San Suu Kyi’s first term remains marred in controversy, peaking in December 2019 when the State Counsellor was summoned at the International Court of Justice in The Hague to defend Myanmar in the case brought by The Gambia against the Tatmadaw, accusing them of genocide against the Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic minority primarily residing in the southwestern Rakhine state.
Despite widespread documentation on the persecution and ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya in Myanmar, including several United Nations reports, Suu Kyi denied that a genocide is unfolding in Rakhine state, instead arguing for an “internal armed conflict” between the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army and the government of Myanmar. Aside from that one instance, she infamously didn’t use the word ‘Rohingya’ while arguing her case.
Suu Kyi’s supporters nonetheless point out that the political structure of Myanmar makes it nearly impossible for the Nobel Peace Prize recipient to completely break away from the Tatmadaw. In Myanmar’s parliamentary system, 25% of seats are reserved for the military, and any constitutional amendment seeking to change the status quo requires 75% of the votes in the Assembly — which becomes de facto impossible given the presence of several Tatmadaw-backed political parties, namely the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP).
Advances…
So, when the tanks rolled down the quiet streets of the capital of Naypyidaw on February 1, 2021, most notably captured in the background of a local woman filming her aerobics workout, many said they were only half surprised. In the midst of a nationwide communications and Internet outage, people took to the streets to protest the coup, which marked the official return of the Tatmadaw to power in Myanmar.
When protesting became too dangerous, citizens took to banging pots and clanging cymbals from their windows at night, and social media campaigns as well as awareness campaigns flourished, despite near-daily Internet blackouts and power outages.
After a few months, fighting died out across Myanmar’s big cities — largely Yangon, Mandalay, and Naypyidaw — and the mundanity of life under the junta took over, meanwhile guerrilla warfare was raging in the country’s peripheral regions where ethnic militias only coexisted in an uneasy truce during Suu Kyi’s term.
At a time when I was investigating the rise of Yangon’s rave culture as a space of community & resistance against the Tatmadaw, a young Burmese man, who asked that he remains anonymous, told me “[the Tatmadaw] messed with the wrong generation, […] we grew up with Aung San Suu Kyi [as State Counsellor], and we’ve had a taste of what democracy is like. We won’t settle for anything less.”
Clearly, it felt like things were different this time.
Later in 2021, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) excluded Senior General Min Aung Hlaing from its annual summit, widely regarded as a bold move considering ASEAN’s position of neutrality and non-intervention in the domestic affairs of its member-states. The only other time ASEAN had openly rejected a member-state’s course of action was in the aftermath of the Vietnamese invasion and occupation of Cambodia in 1978.
A year later, U.S. President Joe Biden signed the BURMA Act 2021 as part of the NDAA 2023, a bill actively promoted by Burmese interest groups in the U.S., which hosts one of the largest diasporas from Myanmar along the UK, Thailand, and Australia. The act imposes property- and visa-blocking sanctions on individuals and entities “responsible for or complicit in undermining [Myanmar]'s democratic processes”, as well as senior leaders in Myanmar's military and government.
Domestically, it seemed as though the dynamics at play in the decade-old civil conflict were changing too. After decades of intra- and inter-fighting between ethnic-based factions, a military coalition of three ethnic armed groups gathered forces to form the Three Brotherhood Alliance, which went on to launch the ongoing Operation 1027, a coordinated military offensive against the junta.
Since October, the offensive has helped reclaim over 200 towns in the northern Shan State in what has been labelled as “the most difficult moment” for the junta since taking over in 2021, and has received support from the National Unity Government (NUG), Myanmar’s exiled civilian government.
This military prowess has been costly for both the Tatmadaw, which is believed to lose nearly US$423,000 per day in tax revenue, as well as local populations, with over 335,000 people displaced since the operation started, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA).
…and setbacks
Considering the widespread effect of Operation 1027, it was only a matter of time before the Tatmadaw would retaliate. In February, the military revived the Military Service Law, which requires men aged 18 to 35 and women aged 18 to 27 to serve a minimum of two years in the military.
Within a day, fearing forced conscription at a time when insurgency forces are becoming stronger, thousands of Burmese lined up at foreign embassies and passport offices in the former capital of Yangon for education and work visas. Many others spoke of dodging the draft, defecting to a resistance armed group, or even self-harming to protest conscription.
While extreme in description, these acts are merely symptoms of Myanmar’s increasingly fatigued and discouraged youth willing to do whatever it takes to sabotage the junta regime and disrupt the brutality of life under the Tatmadaw. If the self-immolation of U.S. soldier Aaron Bushnell in protest of his country’s involvement in the assault on Gaza taught us anything, it’s that extreme violence will only fuel more extreme means of resistance.
A concrete course of action that moves beyond the purposely vague Five-Point Consensus is hard to envision when many ASEAN states still hold stakes in the Tatmadaw. A 2022 report published by advocacy group Justice For Myanmar showed that of the 78 Myanmar-based companies currently supplying the military, 38 are subsidiary of or associated companies based in Singapore.
It’s hard to feel discouraged when the neighbouring community seems unwilling to move. Despite ASEAN’s initial decision to sideline Min Aung Hlaing and the military leadership, there has been no further steps to take meaningful action in favour of Myanmar’s Civil Disobedience Movement, or engage with the NUG.
Former Prime Minister Hun Sen even took Cambodia’s chairmanship of ASEAN in 2022 as an opportunity to normalize relations with the junta. Despite initial concerns from fellow ASEAN heads of state at the time, thee was no concrete pushback, even as Indonesia assumed chairmanship the following year, and while many feared the Laos chairmanship this year would serve Chinese interests by favouring rapprochement with the junta, it appears that the status quo will remain.
With many missed windows of opportunity to step up in changing the course of action on the protracted conflict, the local population is left to grapple with the consequences, at huge costs for both the physical & mental healths of everyday Burmese people.