🇲🇲 Three years on in Myanmar and no resolution in sight

Hello friends!

Thursday marked three years since the military ousted the democratically elected government in Myanmar. A few updates on sanctions and some brilliant reporting on the resistance movement so let’s crack straight in.

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Erin Cook

No way out but victory for activists

Streets across Myanmar went silent again in protest against the military. “Myanmar people don’t accept the military’s participation in politics, or their human rights violations. That’s why there is no way other than the complete surrender of the military. We will accelerate our movement more,” democracy activist Nann Linn told the Guardian. 

Planning the long game

How’s the military feeling three years in? “The writing on the wall is just getting larger for the regime, Moe Thuzar at ISEAS told the Associated Press. “The military has not managed to completely quell armed (or other) resistance against it in many parts of the country. The harsh measures it takes to assert its messages of control, whether towards the communities that the regime views as supporting the resistance movement or to its own members (officers and rank-and-file on the ground), have not done it any favours,” she added. 

Keeping it together and playing the long game is the rule for the resistance. Myanmar’s fractured ethnic armed organisations have, historically, been fairly disparate but this has changed somewhat. ‘Now as military leaders mark their third year since seizing power in Myanmar, an uprising that melds the decades-old ethnic struggles for self-determination with the more recent armed fight to restore democracy has enveloped much of the nation,’ Al Jazeera reports in this interesting feature about how rebels bridge these huge, traditional gaps between each other. 

In another piece, Al Jazeera spoke with four members of resistance groups on why they joined up and how they were feeling. Especially interesting to hear from Ma Wai, a 32-year-old woman fighting for the Bamar People’s Liberation Army. Women’s stories are consistently missing from Myanmar coverage for a whole bunch of reasons, so this insight is a real treat. “Sometimes … they looked at me as if I didn’t know anything, but that was in the early days. When we worked together, they came to understand me more and appreciate my talent,” she said of the initial days of the conflict. 

US, Australia mark anniversary with sanctions

Happy three-year anniversary, Tatmadaw! Please, enjoy these new sanctions. ‘The US Treasury Department announced sanctions against the Shwe Byain Phyu Group of Companies, its owner Thein Win Zaw, and his wife and two adult children. Sanctions were also announced against Myanma Five Star Line, a shipping company,’ Voice of America reported. The companies are alleged to be linked to Myanma, a group previously sanctioned and linked to the military. 

“Today, we have ramped up our economic and political pressure on the military regime, including by restricting U.S. dollar transactions with state-owned enterprises that provide revenue enabling the military to do harm and kill its own civilians. We're going to continue to support efforts by the opposition to the regime and to seek a resolution of the conflict that provides for genuine and inclusive multiparty democracy,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said at a press conference on Wednesday, as per VOA. 

Australia also announced new sanctions last week, targeting the Myanmar Foreign Trade Bank and the Myanmar Investment and Commercial Bank — both of which support the country’s state-owned enterprises. Three companies — Asia Sun Group, Asia Sun Trading and Cargo Link Petroleum — reportedly involved in supplying jet fuel to the military have also been hit. “These sanctions are a response to the regime's ongoing repression of the people of Myanmar, escalating violence, and the continuing deterioration of the political, humanitarian and security situation,” Australia’s foreign minister, Penny Wong, told ABC.

Australia is still lagging behind our Western world pals in sanction-slapping and doing more has only become more urgent since the release of a report from Justice for Myanmar. The organisation has found that loads of Australian mining companies have continued operating and collaborating in Myanmar, despite years of campaigns. ‘This report exposes Australia’s outsized footprint in Myanmar’s mining sector, which has endured through three years of the military’s attempted coup and amid Australian government inaction,’ the group said in its report. The full thing can be read here. 

Good, but not a silver bullet for getting democracy back, write Charmaine Willis and Keith A. Preble for the Conversation. The update on the US policy is long overdue, the pair note and sanctions can be hurtful but ‘there are reasons to believe that they won’t be able to bring the government to its knees. It is likely that the uneven termination of the United States’ earlier sanctions provided insufficient time for American firms to fully engage and invest in Myanmar’s market, limiting the potential for future leverage now.’ 

Tatmadaw in tatters? Not quite, but defections up

Military defectors have been one of the most fascinating and underexplored elements for the last three years. I’m always hungry to know more so was thrilled to see this one from Rebecca Ratcliffe and Aung Naing Soe at the Guardian pop up. 

“I believed I would die if I did not defect,” Wunna Kyaw, a former soldier who defected last August alongside some colleagues in Kayin State, told the outlet. “I feel sorry for the people – people the age of my parents are being killed, and their houses destroyed for no reason. I saw it, I witnessed that.” 

The last few months have seen a sharp increase in defections and surrenders, Dr Sasa of the National Unity Government said. He said more than 4,000 had left the military since the launch of Operation 1027. Around 14,000 personnel had defected between the coup and the Operation, he added, mostly through programs ‘set up by activists to persuade soldiers to join the resistance.’ 

The Guardian notes it’s really difficult to verify these sorts of numbers, but Ye Myo Hein, an analyst at the Wilson Center, a Washington-based thinktank, estimates at least 10,000 have defected, including police. “Additionally, there has been a higher rate of deserters, historically a prevalent issue in the Myanmar military,” he told the Guardian.

Rohingya struggle for a fair go

Devastating story from Malaysia where a Myanmar migrant died in a traffic accident after fleeing immigration detention. The as-yet unidentified person was one of 131 migrants, mostly of the Rohingya minority but a few other ethnicities too, who escaped the Bidor centre in Perak state, Immigration Department director-general Ruslin Jusoh, as reported by Reuters.

This interesting piece from the AFP looks at how misinformation online has helped fuel attacks on the Rohingya community seeking shelter in Indonesia’s Aceh province. Indonesia is not a signatory to the refugee convention, but Rohingya have been previously welcomed, or at least quietly tolerated, in the fiercely religious province. It appears there’s a coordinated campaign online to undermine institutions working to support the Rohingya as well as stoke divisions as the group occasionally is addressed in the presidential election. 

The China balance

A huge one in China’s crime crackdown in collaboration with forces of all stripes in Myanmar. Ten Chinese nationals were handed over to the Chinese Ministry of Public Security after being rounded up in Kokang last week, including the infamous warlord Bai Suocheng who heads up one of the crime families so fascinatingly covered last year in the BBC. All the suspects are alleged to be involved in the nasty cyber crime compound business. Call it a “landmark success in the cooperation of China-Myanmar law enforcement in international police affairs,” the Chinese embassy in Myanmar said last week, as reported by the Guardian.

Beijing is hedging its bets in Myanmar, writes Enze Han for the East Asia Forum. What does that mean in practice? ‘Though few have applied this logic to relations between foreign governments and domestic actors, the hedging logic is applicable in the Myanmar context, where there are competing regimes and a plethora of armed resistance groups with their own agency and special interests. In this uncertain environment, Beijing, which has a huge economic and strategic stake in Myanmar, will naturally want to engage with as many actors as possible.’ 

The National Unity Government supports the One China policy in its recent platform, which should show the government-in-exile is getting it together to secure Beijing’s support. ‘Beijing is an all-around hedger amid Myanmar’s domestic political chaos. If the NUG or other stakeholders can demonstrate their utility to Beijing, it will probably be interested in working with them for a mutually beneficial solution,’ he notes.

The India balance

Last month, India’s federal minister Amit Shah announced the construction of a fence along the border with Myanmar. The fence would be a staggering 1,643km long, though that’s less than half the length of a similar boundary reinforced between India and Bangladesh, Soutik Biswas writes for the BBC. Expect to see the ditching of a long-running program that allows visa-free movement for Myanmar nationals up to 16 km into the country. 

In this analysis piece, Soutik Biswas notes that the construction of such a fence would be a total nightmare given the kind of rocky and mountainous terrain at which the two countries meet. Still, the timing of the suggestion is very telling. Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party is gunning for reelection this year on a platform that includes some very heavy-handed anti-immigration rhetoric at the exact same time as fighting between the military and armed groups has sent civilians fleeing across Myanmar’s borders into the states of Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur and Mizoram. 

It’s Manipur that’s the biggest question. I’m certainly not an India nerd, so shan’t get too deep into it but, as Michael Kugelman of the Wilson Center told the BBC, unrest in the state has the BJP on tenterhooks: “It wants to limit the spill-over effects of a deepening conflict in Myanmar, and to reduce the risk of refugees entering an increasingly volatile Manipur from Myanmar,” Kugelman told Soutik Biswas. 

Reporting while under attack

Voice of America took the occasion to assess independent media in Myanmar and while it’s largely not great news, there are some shoots for optimism. Democratic Voice of Burma’s executive director Aye Chan Naing told VOA that the outlet had reestablished its reporter network across the country: “We continue to take the risk for the last three years and will continue to do so.”

With a battered industry full of extraordinarily brave and talented journalists, the largest problem now is funding their work. “It is difficult — or even impossible — for many of them to make commercial revenue in this environment. This underlines the vulnerability of these media organizations whose operations are dependent on the whims of donors in faraway countries,” Frontier Myanmar’s editor-in-chief Ben Dunant told VOA. Get subscribing! 

What’s next?

The junta officially extended the state of emergency a further six months at the end of January, which comes as no surprise. Junta boss Min Aung Hlaing just had to do it “to bring the nation to a normal state of stability and peace” the military-run outlet Myawaddy said in a statement posted to Telegram and reported on here by Reuters.

Elections are still being floated, though no one cares at all. After announcing the extension, the junta said Thein Soe had resigned from the election chief position citing health issues. He’ll be replaced by Ko Ko, the Irrawaddy reports. The change in leadership follows amendments to last year’s garbage election laws including halving the amount of members required for a party to nominate and how many townships in which they’re active, the Irrawaddy reported last week. 

Given that no one trusts these elections at all — opposition parties have boycotted and foreign watchers are explicitly saying results will not be recognised internationally — it does have a bit of a deckchair on the Titanic air to it all. With the state of emergency extension, nothing should be expected in the first half of this year at least.  

I’m very reticent to write anything that could be construed as ‘military collapse is imminent’ but I found this from Richard Horsey very instructive. The Crisis Group’s Myanmar advisor is hardly one for hysteria! “The military's hold on power is more uncertain than at any time in the last 60 years. But it seems determined to fight on, and retains an enormous capacity for violence, attacking civilian populations and infrastructure in areas it has lost, using air power and long range artillery,” Horsey said, as reported by Reuters.