Overlooked, deadlocked conflict divides a nation
This week marked two years since Myanmar’s generals interrupted their nation’s fitful experiment in democracy.
On Wednesday, the day of the anniversary, people followed the instructions of the main opposition group and carried out a ‘‘silent strike’’ by staying at home and shuttering businesses. In Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, downtown streets usually teeming with activity were empty.
Far from the battlefields of Ukraine, which have captured much of the West’s attention, Myanmar remains one of the worst nations in the world when it comes to the severity of conflict and violence.
The ruling junta is locked in a stalemate with a variety of opposition groups, ranging from an urban non-violent protest movement to ethnic minority militias in the countryside and jungles.
In certain remote rural areas, there is a full-blown civil war. Struggling to control large swathes of the country, the junta has resorted to scorched-earth tactics, launching air strikes on civilian population areas, and razing villages.
According to humanitarian groups, close to 3000 civilians have been killed since the coup was launched on February 1, 2021. The junta justified it on the specious grounds that there were irregularities during a 2020 election where the army’s favoured candidates lost in a landslide. Rights advocates believe the toll may be much higher.
‘‘Myanmar’s military junta has spent the two years since the coup engaged in a worsening spiral of atrocities against the people of Myanmar that amount to crimes against humanity and war crimes,’’ said Elaine Pearson, Asia director at Human Rights Watch.
Amid sweeping post-coup crackdowns by the army, nearly 14,000 political prisoners languish behind bars, including Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s famed Nobel laureate and de facto elected leader.
An estimated 1.5 million people have been displaced by conflict, 40,000 homes have been destroyed, and 8 million children are no longer in school.
The United Nations estimates that some 17.6 million people, roughly a third of the country, will need humanitarian assistance this year. That’s a figure nearly identical to the population in Ukraine that is in need of similar aid.
But the UN-backed response plan for Ukraine is five times the size of what has been earmarked for Myanmar, and has received about 79% of requested funds from international donors – whereas the funding for Myanmar has reached only 35%.
‘‘The level of violence involving both armed combatants and civilians is alarming and unexpected,’’ said Min Zaw Oo, a political activist in exile who founded the Myanmar Institute for Peace and Security. ‘‘The scale of the killing and harm inflicted on civilians has been devastating, and unlike anything we have seen in the country in recent memory.’’
The opposition to the junta has received minimal international support. Myanmar’s neighbours have largely found accommodation with the military regime, and have curbed possible flows of weaponry across the nation’s
notoriously porous borders.
The United States and a number of other European countries have imposed rounds of sanctions on the junta, but enforcement is difficult, and the West retains minimal leverage over a clique of generals who are no strangers to geopolitical isolation. Russia and China are still propping up the junta with military support.
A ragtag rebellion endures away from the major cities, with irregular units known as the People’s Defence Forces waging a cat-and-mouse game of ambushes and surprise attacks against the regime’s troops. Some of the PDF factions have been supported by the country’s more veteran and better-equipped ethnic minority armies, which have themselves been locked in decades of conflict with the central state.
‘‘Myanmar is in a slow-motion process of state collapse,’’ wrote Ta Doh Moo and Salai Thla Hei, respectively key leaders of the Karen National Union and Chin National Front, two major ethnic factions, in an op-ed for Nikkei Asia in which they highlighted the new decentralised forms of administration popping up in areas outside the junta’s reach.
‘‘The military is losing territorial control to the armed resistance, which has now spread to the Burman Buddhist heartlands from which the military typically drew its recruits.’’
One estimate by three former UN experts last year suggested that the junta had ‘‘stable’’ control of only 17% of Myanmar’s territory.
And there’s little sign of change on the horizon.
On the second anniversary of his coup, junta chief Min Aung Hlaing announced a new extension of the state of emergency he had ordered, which will mean a likely deferral of elections scheduled for August – although the opposition had never taken the prospect of the junta-sponsored polls seriously, and had planned a boycott.
The foreign ministers of Asean are convening in Jakarta this weekend, and the chaos in Myanmar is likely high on the agenda. The junta has paid lip service to a five-point Asean plan to defuse the crisis, but has shown little willingness to follow through and engage with the opposition factions.