Myanmar’s junta is losing control

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This article was published 03/06/2024 (669 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Of all the world’s conflicts, the civil war in Myanmar is among the most overlooked. The country has been ruled by military dictatorships for nearly all its post-colonial existence — armed rebellion is nothing new. Except now, pro-democracy forces appear to be winning.

For the past three years, an opposition movement and ethnic militias in the southeast Asian country have banded together to wage a grinding insurgency against the incumbent military regime. And their efforts have started paying off. Since late last year, the coalition has wrested a majority of territory from the junta’s grip.

Military elites led by General Min Aung Hlaing staged a coup in February 2021 against the then-newly-elected civilian government of Aung San Suu Kyi. The daughter of one of Myanmar’s independence heroes, Suu Kyi was lauded for decades as a global icon of democracy. Her steadfast dissent against military rule included winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 and enduring 15 years of on-and-off house arrest between 1989 and 2010.

But after being appointed in March 2016 to be Myanmar’s equivalent to prime minister, the ensuing years would see Suu Kyi fall from grace. Discriminatory policies against the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority continued under her watch. Suu Kyi’s government also proved unable — or unwilling — to halt a brutal military crackdown against Rohingya populations in Rakhine state in 2017 that triggered charges of genocide.

In December 2019, Suu Kyi defended Myanmar’s military, known as the Tatmadaw, against the allegations at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. She dismissed reports of heinous atrocities and the burning of whole Rohingya communities to the ground by state security forces as simply part of an “internal armed conflict.”

Yet Suu Kyi’s re-election in 2020 nevertheless gave hope to a younger, digitally connected generation demanding a say in who their leaders were. Following the subsequent military coup, she was jailed by the junta in late 2021 on numerous fabricated charges. Writing in The Atlantic, a journalist formerly with the Myanmar Times offered a prescient warning: “Ham-fistedly banishing Suu Kyi from politics may provide the generals with a satisfying moment of vengeance, but it will not halt the anti-junta resistance.”

Indeed, the military’s actions sparked mass street protests for months that were met with lethal repression. Pro-democracy groups and middle-class citizens from urban centres then began escaping into rural hinterlands bordering China and Thailand. There, they linked up with armed ethnic militias that have been fighting the Tatmadaw for self-determination for decades. Members of Suu Kyi’s deposed administration meanwhile formed a shadow government in exile.

Inspired by Ukraine’s asymmetric war effort, rebel groups have since learned how to combine consumer tech components with improvised explosives and Starlink internet services to create a homegrown drone-manufacturing industry. Custom drones built deep in Myanmar’s dense jungles are used to gather intelligence, remotely attack military bases and even strike government buildings in the capital city, Naypyidaw.

Drone footage has also provided content used to fundraise via social media. Some youthful fighters are already being trained in rebel camps as future civil servants as well, should the junta collapse.

But the conflict is far from over. Despite rebels’ deft use of drones, the Tatmadaw retains air superiority. Military warplanes continue to scatter landmines and relentlessly bomb insurgents’ positions and civilian infrastructure. The junta regime gets weapons from Russia and a degree of economic and political support from China. UN investigators say that transnational criminal organizations are also exploiting Myanmar’s lawlessness to expand regional production and trafficking of heroin and methamphetamine.

In January, Western governments released a joint statement marking three years since the military coup, condemning how “under the military regime, violence against civilians has escalated, with thousands jailed, tortured and killed.” But aside from issuing sanctions and offering rhetorical support and some nonlethal aid, they have remained bystanders.

The statement also reiterated support for a peace plan created in 2021 by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), an economic bloc. The plan calls for an immediate end to hostilities, dialogue among all parties, the appointment of a special envoy as mediator and increased humanitarian assistance.

But with Myanmar’s war being drowned out on the global stage by other competing crises, efforts to achieve peace have stalled. The junta — which briefly endorsed ASEAN’s plan, before walking back its commitment — has said it will only consider the recommendations “when the situation returns to stability.”

Given their rapid territorial gains, Myanmar’s rebels clearly don’t intend on laying down their weapons any time soon either.

Kyle Hiebert is a Winnipeg-based researcher and political risk analyst, and former deputy editor of the Africa Conflict Monitor.