Asia's Raging Fire: Will Myanmar's Civil War End Peacefully?
Omar Khan is a MSci Physics student at UCL with an interest in international relations.
6 November 2023. Kawlin, Sagaing Region. Airstrikes bombarded the township as resistance fighters battled their way to the administrative office held by the military junta. After four days of intense fighting under the humid heat in northwestern Myanmar, the anti-regime units seized the office as the soldiers on the ground either fled or surrendered. Dozens of civilians were killed and many more displaced. On 4 December, Kawlin became the first district-level town to come under civilian administration with the local People’s Defence Force (PDF) units providing security. Forming the backbone of the resistance, the PDF is a loose network of armed groups affiliated with the National Unity Government (NUG). The NUG is the shadow civilian government that was set up by lawmakers and activists in response to the military coup on 1 February 2021 which deposed famous civilian leader Aung Saan Suu Kyi. Since 2021, the NUG and PDF have fought a civil war against the junta, also known as the Tatmadaw – and it was in the autumn of this year that the course of the conflict changed dramatically.
PDF fighters training in Karenni State on 11 May 2023 [Sipa photo by Thu Myae via AP Images].
The capture of Kawlin was one of a myriad of resistance victories enabled by the massive attack launched by the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA), Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), and Arakan Army (AA) against the junta in eastern Shan State on 27 October 2023 – the attack was aptly named Operation 1027. These three groups, collectively known as the Three Brotherhood Alliance, are not PDF units, but rather ethnic armed organisations (EAOs).
Since independence from Britain in 1948, Myanmar (formerly Burma) has seen a number of armies from ethnic minority groups across the country wage insurgencies against the central government. Whether under brief civilian or decades-long military rule, the central government has always been dominated by Bamar people. Myanmar has well over one hundred ethnolinguistic groups; Bamars, roughly two thirds of the population, have typically enjoyed privileged positions in society while ethnic minorities like the Karen, Shan, Rakhine, Kayah, Rohingya, Chin, Mon, Kachin and more have faced systemic discrimination, limited government representation, and a lack of development opportunities in their regions (generally on the country’s periphery).
The intensity of the EAO insurgencies has oscillated over the decades but since the NUG’s formation, many ethnic armies have fought alongside the PDF units in their local areas – this reflects the results of an IGC survey that found that 69% of ethnic minority people trust the NUG to deliver on its promise of establishing a truly representative democracy. Civilian resistance units now consist of people from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds, notably including Bamars; the thousands of teachers, doctors, nurses, trade union workers and more who took to the streets in the wake of the 2021 coup, when met with regime violence, evolved into a series of guerrilla fighting forces (the PDF), armed with homemade weapons and whatever they get from captured military bases. On the political front, the NUG is fighting for recognition and support from the international community while trying to persuade the vast array of anti-regime movements to work together, primarily by convincing them of their vision for the country: a democratic federal government that respects the voices of all ethnic groups. Their vision is certainly ambitious: Myanmar has never had something like this before. Standing in the NUG’s way, however, is the ruthless military junta.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed over the two years since the NUG and PDF declared war against the military which is led by General Min Aung Hlaing. Accurate death toll estimates are very difficult to come by – in February, the BBC suggested over 25,000 people had lost their lives since the 2021 coup. From the start of the PDF’s campaign, the military’s air force has put it in a dominant position over the guerrillas. Aerial bombardments and gunship attacks gave the junta an insurmountable advantage. After 27 October, however, the tables have turned. As resistance forces gain momentum in their frontal attacks on the military, how will the conflict evolve in 2024? What role does China play? And could Myanmar’s civil war reach a peaceful resolution?
OPERATION 1027
By the time the Kachin Independent Organisation (KIO; a Kachin EAO) and local PDF units jointly captured Kawlin on 6 November, Operation 1027 was already in full swing 400 miles to the east. Military airstrikes displaced 60,000 people in Shan State in the days after the 27 October assault but did not stop the Three Brotherhood Alliance from capturing scores of military bases which the outnumbered ground forces had abandoned. The three EAOs (representing the Ta’ang (TNLA), Kokang (MNDAA) and Rakhine (AA) peoples) got their hands on tanks, multiple-launch rocket systems, light arms & ammunition, anti-aircraft heavy machine guns and a howitzer in the aftermath of their attacks.
EAOs that have allied (officially or tacitly) with the NUG have long histories with the military and their support for local PDF units has been vital to the series of victories won. Equally essential to the NUG is the trust of ethnic minorities. Since EAOs tend to govern the territory they control, the IGC survey found that those in areas where the local EAO provided reliable social services like education and healthcare were less trusting of the NUG than people who faced high taxes or were otherwise unhappy with their local EAO’s leadership. Fortified by the World Bank’s report that the Myanmar economy is 10% smaller than it was in 2019 and will grow by only 1% by March 2024, the IGC results demonstrate how important it is that the NUG shows it can guarantee security and provide essential services.
Haemorrhaging manpower is a major concern for the junta. As of May 2023, the military has around 150,000 men of which only 70,000 are frontline soldiers. Most units are undermanned. Often described as a “state within a state”, the military maintains a vast economic empire drawing (both legal and illegal) income from: trading natural resources like jade, oil and gas; getting involved in drug production and trafficking; and, managing enormous conglomerates with stakes in banking, beer, tourism and more. Testimonies from ex-personnel reveal that the wealth is hoarded by the top brass but that because the military has been at war (internally) non-stop for over 70 years, soldiers are shielded within a propaganda bubble. Several of those who have left have since joined civilian resistance movements. In addition to the twenty-odd EAOs (who have roughly 80,000 fighters in total), other armed groups in Myanmar include the hundreds of military-aligned militias which vary in size and ethnic makeup (some homogenous, others mixed) that don’t tend to have explicit political aims and typically fund themselves through the illicit economy. More formally are the two dozen Border Guard Forces made up of ex-militiamen and ex-insurgents which are nominally under military command but operate with autonomy and also tend to be involved in the illicit economy.
As the Three Brotherhood Alliance makes headway in Shan State, resistance forces across the nation have gone on the attack. Karenni EAOs launched Operation 1111 in southern Kayah State with a break for the state capital Loikaw. On 13 November, Chin forces captured an Indian border town. On the same day, the AA ended a year-long ceasefire with an array of attacks on the military in western Rakhine State. A key question would be how the situation has turned around so suddenly and one underlying reason has been, like many things, made in China.
China and Russia have proved absolutely essential to the military junta’s survival. In addition to protecting Naypyidaw at the UN Security Council, Beijing and Moscow have also bolstered the Myanmar Air Force. For example, Russia supplied the Mi-35 gunships that the junta used to attack a school housed within a monastery in Let Yet Kone, Sagaing Region in April this year. Meanwhile, China has nearly $22 billion worth of investment projects in Myanmar and has supplied the regime with FTC-2000 jets which can carry up to three tonnes of missiles, rockets, or bombs. Furthermore, China is an important trading partner for the junta. However, observers assert that Beijing has recently grown impatient with Naypyidaw over its failure to crack down on scam compounds. Human trafficking victims being lured to centres across southeast Asia run by organised crime gangs where they are forced to conduct online scams (e.g. romance, cryptocurrency etc.) has become a regional plague. Beijing has demanded that Myanmar’s government do more to stop these operations particularly as many Chinese people have been trafficked to compounds in the country or indeed have been victims of the scams themselves. Some analysts believe that the Myanmar junta’s failure to handle these scam centres has led China to scale back its support and that the Three Brotherhood Alliance and other resistance movements took advantage of this rift when launching Operation 1027. At the time of writing, the junta are on the back foot. The people are behind the resistance. Judging how the war will evolve from here requires looking at contextual factors, some of which predate Myanmar’s independence.
HISTORY HAS GONE WRONG
The Students’ Union building at Rangoon University was blown up on 8 July 1962, the day after the military gunned down scores of students who were protesting against General Ne Win’s coup d’état four months prior. Roughly 25 years earlier, British colonial forces arrived at the university and attacked students and workers who had organised nationwide strikes as part of the Burmese independence struggle. Rangoon University was at the heart of the movement and was where leaders like Aung San and U Nu formed the Thakhins and spearheaded the push for self-governance and eventually, following Japanese occupation during the Second World War, independence from the British Empire.
Aung San, a Bamar from central Myanmar who is considered to be the “Father of the Nation”, was heralded for reaching the Panglong Agreement in 1947 with Shan, Kachin and Chin representatives which respected their push for autonomy. He was assassinated by political rivals (allegedly with British support) before Burma became independent and U Nu formed the first government. Insurgencies broke out shortly after independence notably those of the Karen National Union (KNU) and the Communist Party. Aung San had previously initiated the evolution of the anti-colonial Burmese Independence Army (BIA) into the Tatmadaw but it was the post-1948 security crisis that emboldened the military and led to the 1962 coup. Ne Win’s “Burmese Way to Socialism” ideology manifested as geopolitical isolation, an increasing dependence on China, and a flourishing black market. Students in Yangon (formerly Rangoon) were joined by thousands of anti-regime demonstrators during the 8888 uprising in 1988. One of the most prominent leaders of the uprising was Aung San’s daughter, Aung San Suu Kyi, who was later placed under house arrest and became a global icon. Though the 8888 uprising compelled Ne Win to step back, the Tatmadaw did not loosen its grip on power. After two further decades of military rule under the SLORC (later SPDC), Buddhist monks (wearing saffron-coloured robes) played a leading role in anti-government protests in 2007 forcing the regime to commit to gradual liberalisation in what was dubbed the Saffron Revolution. Over the next few years, the military made gradual reforms (e.g. amnesty for political prisoners, relaxing media censorship) to allow for partial civilian rule while making sure to secure their own position. Some also believed that they wanted to reduce their reliance on China and open up the economy to global investment; part of the sales pitch was that democracy was, slowly, returning to Myanmar.
In 2015, Aung San Suu Kyi (having been released in 2010) led the National League for Democracy (NLD) party to success at the general election but, as the new civilian leader, was forced to share power with the military generals (who acted in parliament via their proxy party, the USDP). Aung San Suu Kyi’s international image was scarred when she defended the military’s restrictions on press freedom and genocidal abuses against the Rohingya in an attempt to appease the generals. The NLD won a landslide victory at the November 2020 general election, humiliating the USDP. Min Aung Hlaing and the generals disputed the results; three months later, he overthrew the government and restored military rule.
Naing Myanmar, a famous musician, wrote the song “The World Will Not End” which became the anthem of the 8888 uprising. The song is about the people committing to fight for democracy until the end times. One moving line is addressed to Kodaw Hmaing, a Burmese nationalist icon, and Aung San: “Kodaw Hmaing, history has gone wrong, Grandfather! Thakhin Aung San, the country has shed its blood, Father!”
Colonial administrators who trekked through the forests of British Burma a century ago made critical errors when trying to ethnically classify the diverse populace. Randomly conflating language and race, and arbitrarily distinguishing languages from dialects, the administrators came up with an infamous list of 135 distinct ethnic groups. Ethnicity became ingrained in politics as determining who belonged and who didn’t was a central issue during independence. Two decades after his coup, Ne Win passed the 1982 Citizenship Law which only considers ethnic groups who were present before 1823 (prior to the First Anglo-Burmese War) citizens. Later the regime published a new list of 135, supposedly drawn from colonial censuses but with an odd mix of village names, clans, languages and amateurish errors; notable exclusions from the list are the Rohingya and Panthay peoples. The list has since been used to deny basic rights to certain communities and stir up inter-ethnic tensions. Zero-sum competition between ethnic groups leads to people forming armed groups and starting conflict; delinking ethnicity from politics should therefore be an absolute priority for the NUG. Another powerful line from “The World Will Not End” says: “We will keep fighting until the end of the world, For the sake of the history and revolution written in our blood.”
BLOOD METH
Opium has such power in Myanmar that it once killed a god. As one of the vertices of the infamous Golden Triangle, Myanmar is a notable hub for the illegal drug trade. Heroin, and more recently methamphetamine, production are important assets; control over these trades is a cause of violence, particularly in Shan and Kachin States. Myanmar’s civil war has fostered greater production and trafficking, and coincided with a significant uptick in poppy farming. Before Afghanistan, Myanmar was the opium hotspot. Indeed, according to myth, in the 16th century, a nat (deity or spirit) belonging to a pre-Buddhist religion actually died of an opium overdose.
Opium consumption was limited before the 1800s; poppy farming expanded in Shan State in the late 19th century. The Kuomintang, who would eventually lose the Chinese civil war against Mao’s communists, used the drug trade to fund their campaign. As mentioned, Ne Win’s regime saw the black market flourish: at one point, 80% of consumer goods were smuggled into Myanmar. Consequently, heroin (derived from opium) became a powerful medium of exchange. By the 1980s, Myanmar was the world’s opium capital. The slow decline in opium cultivation from the mid-1990s onwards facilitated the rapid development of methamphetamine production, many of the labs hidden in Shan State’s mountainous hinterland. Today, Myanmar is at the heart of the region’s synthetic drug trade.
The UNDP estimated that Myanmar’s civil war and subsequent economic downturn would push nearly half the population into poverty. There has also been a major increase in drug production though whether this is because of the conflict is undetermined; some analysts say that the post-coup instability has given drug cartels greater freedom and hindered law enforcement. Military junta connections (often through military-aligned militias like the Pyu Saw Htee) to the drug trade have been reported on extensively, though both the junta and EAOs have made some limited effort to seize and destroy illegal substances. Given the state of the economy though, according to a drug prevention worker in Magway Region, “drugs have become the best goods to trade.” The production spike has led to a limited price decrease: one yaba pill (mix of low-purity methamphetamine and caffeine) cost as low as 350 kyats (£0.13) at the end of June and a single gram of heroin cost as little as 5000 kyats (£1.87).
Going forward, now that, as of 12 December this year, Myanmar is the world’s largest opium producer, the poppy will probably only become more important as the war goes on. Opium production has not just increased but also seen the efficient use of fertilisers, irrigation systems and densely organised plots. Shan, Chin and Kachin states will no doubt continue to see opium cultivation expand going into 2024 especially as heroin exports from Myanmar over the past year were worth $2.2 billion and more people seek employment. The illicit drug trade encourages violence and conflict in all parts of the world; unless EAOs, local PDF units or the military itself make tackling drug trafficking more of a priority it looks likely to proliferate for as long as the conflict continues and indeed beyond its end.
RAGING FIRE OF BRUTALITY
War crimes and human rights abuses sadly abound in Myanmar. The military junta has attacked whole villages, schools, hospitals and camps for displaced people. Civilians in custody have been executed, sometimes in mass killings with their bodies disfigured so as to, in the UN special rapporteur on Myanmar’s view, “terrorize the civilian population”. Extrajudicial murder victims, including some children, show signs of being raped; the special rapporteur asserted that “[c]ruelty and dehumanization are defining features of sexual crimes perpetrated by the military, including gang rape.” Airstrikes have increased by 300% in some parts of the country in the last year alone and have killed countless civilians. In April, a thermobaric bomb dropped on a village in Sagaing Region killed 160 people. As recently as 15 November, the junta bombed a school in Chin State killing 11 people, including eight children. Three weeks prior, the UN said that a “raging fire of brutality” was engulfing Myanmar.
So how will this conflict unfold in 2024 and beyond? Before 27 October, analysts asserted that the military would rather use indiscriminate scorched-earth tactics to win a pyrrhic victory than negotiate with the NUG/PDF. But since the offensive, the two sides are now on level ground: it is estimated that the Three Brotherhood Alliance has 45-50,000 combatants, that the armed wings of the KNU and KIO have a combined 20,000 fighters, and that the Chin National Army (CNA) and Karenni Army (KA) have 1,500 and 1,000 men respectively. Put together, analysts say the number likely matches the military’s frontline troops. Additionally, there are an estimated 65,000 fighters in the PDF and a further 30,000 in local defence forces.
At the time of writing, the resistance’s momentum does not seem to be waning; the military’s hold on the country will continue to unravel and the conflict may well reach some of Myanmar’s major cities sometime next year. If this means an eventual military defeat, the NUG must prepare for the chaotic uncertainty that will no doubt follow as the colossal array of armed groups in the country compete to fill the power vacuum. Perhaps instead, the junta, if pushed to the brink, might change course and actually agree to negotiations – given the abysmal record of Min Aung Hlaing and his cronies, it is more likely that this change would be preceded by an internal coup. Talks, though, come with their own risk – if they don’t succeed, it will be near-impossible to build any trust between the parties and effectively negate the possibility of a peace settlement. What is clear is that predicting how a conflict as complex as this one will unfold in 2024 and beyond is extremely difficult.
In truth, the struggle to build a safe, multi-ethnic, and prosperous democracy in Myanmar will not end regardless of who wins the war. Therefore, for now, remembering the thousands of people who have endured unthinkable suffering, the only hope is that the conflict ends as soon as possible.
