184 - The Wars of the World: Avarice, Ambition, and Massive Collateral Suffering, II
Myanmar, the Congo, African Leaders Intervene in Ukraine
Senseless and ego-driven assaults on humanity like those perpetrated by Putin in Ukraine (this newsletter last Monday) and by two rapacious warlords in Sudan (last Thursday) are hardly exceptions in this troubled and dangerously polarized world. Similar ambitions and greed are driving a host of other wars, mostly intrastate, across the globe. Notable are the tragic killing fields in Myanmar and the Democratic Republic of Congo, plus the collection of Islamist-inspired onslaughts south of the Sahara and in Somalia and Nigeria. Plunder, not ideology, is the driving force, with hapless civilians caught between governmental defenders and relentless marauders.
The African leadership delegation to Kyiv and St. Petersburg might have conveyed that message to Putin this weekend, but whatever they tried to say fell on deaf ears.
Myanmar
Late last week the Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s giant standing army of about 400,000 soldiers, killed a further set of civilians, this time in Shan State, east of Naypyitaw, the country’s inland capital. This was just the most recent skirmish in a devastating civil war that has engulfed what once was Burma in a seemingly endless and existential conflict between a military government that ousted an elected, democratic, regime (led by Daw Aung Sung Suu Kyi) in early 2021 and has since ruled brutally. Opposed to Senior General and dictator Min Aung Hlaing is a ragtag collection of former students and professionals linked to the ethnic-based militias that have battled official soldiers since the 1960s.
Myanmar consists of a Bamar (Burmans or Burmese) core of about 60 percent of the national population of 54 million and a dozen or more non-Bamar ethnic peoples like the Shan, Mon, Chin, Karen, Karenni, Kachin, Wa, Rakhine, Rohingya, and others that have always resisted Burmese dominance. The Bamar are Buddhists, and many of the ethnic groups Christian, although the Rohingya (nearly a 1 million of whom have been forced to flee into Bangladesh) are Muslim.
Now, in an innovative manner that is novel for Myanmar, the ethnic armies are joined for the first time to a mobilized Bamar civil society that, since the 2021 coup, has become the People’s Defense Force (PDF) and the Government of National Unity. This collective entity has proven a much more formidable opposition to Hlaing’s established fighters than anyone expected. Indeed, although as many as 4,000 anti-government protesters have been killed since 2021, the PDF has effectively harassed and inflicted local defeats on the Tatmadaw. The steady civil war has caused a serious humanitarian crisis, worsening food shortages, frequent losses of life (including some coming from bombings), and the collapse of Myanmar’s economy. The formerly clubby Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has condemned Myanmar’s ruling generals.
Hlaing and his junta rule Myanmar militarily and ruthlessly, largely with Chinese backing. Their opponents may have gathered clandestine support from the West, but much of the resistance is home grown – a true maquis. With even modest external assistance, especially modern weapons, the army’s opponents could make serious gains. The majority of all ethnic groups, as well as middle-class Burmans, are fully supportive of the resistance.
As in the Sudan, where the two military contenders seek sole control of gold mines and the myriad business entities that the army runs, so in Myanmar, the Tatmadaw and its supreme leader profit from opium and jade exports, and a host of other corporate pursuits. The 2021 coup occurred because Suu Kyi, after a massive electoral victory, hinted that she would curtail military profiteering and curb its corporate pretensions.
The Myanmar military is finding it unexpectedly difficult to suppress the PDF. Victory for the opposition is equally unlikely unless ASEAN intervenes or the West channels arms and funds to the rebels. Brokering a peace is unlikely. That means that the dire educational, medical, and humanitarian crisis in Myanmar will continue to roil a country that deserves far better.
The Congo
Greed and personal ambition are likewise at the center of much of the unrest in the vast Democratic Republic of Congo. The northeastern reaches of a nation that occupies an eastern America-sized entity in the very heart of a continent contains gold, diamonds, wolfram, tourmaline, and coltan (columbite and tantalite), the last when refined as tantalum being immensely valuable in the manufacture of electronic equipment and jet nose cones.
The security arm of the Congo hardly reaches into this remote part of the world. Kinshasa, the nation’s capital, is 1,600 miles away and culturally and ethnically very different. Even the largest global UN peacekeeping force, based on the edge of the contested North and South Kivu provinces, has been unable to contain the decades of death and destruction that have been wreaked on this region for twenty years, worsening by the day.
About 120 indigenous armed gangs vie for primacy in the Kivus. They joust for territory, of course, but their main goal is to control the artisans who mine the gold, diamonds, and coltan and control the export of these valuable minerals to Europe, Japan, and the United States via Rwanda and Dubai. Of the 120 fighting groups, the most dangerous are M23, a largely Tutsi set of operatives backed (despite denials) by neighboring Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame, and the Islamic State Muslim franchise called the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF).
The M23 at one recent point invaded Goma, a major city on Lake Kivu. Earlier, too, M23 tried to seize control of the Virunga National Park, where mountain gorillas roam. Together with the ADF, M23’s depredations in the Kivus have caused 50,00 civilians to flee into displaced persons camps. Both rebel groups typically leave swaths of devastation when they rampage through the Kivus, extorting “rents” from villagers and vendors.
Just before midnight Friday, ADF militants crossed from the Congo into southwestern Uganda, attacking a high school, burning a dormitory, and killing about forty pupils and adult villagers and kidnapping a number of pupils. The ADF may have been on a recruiting mission; it frequently creates mayhem to show that it still exists as a potent force. Ugandan soldiers pursued the marauders back into hideouts in Congo’s much ravaged Virunga National Park.
An East African military force led by Kenyan and Ugandan troops was supposed to have repulsed the several rebel forces by now. But the security situation in the Kivus is as bad as it has long been. Pressure by the African Union and his Western friends may persuade Kagame to cease employing M23 for his own devious geopolitical ends. And Kenyan and Ugandan troops just conceivably will be able to sunder the ADF links to the Islamic State. If not, beleaguered citizens in northeastern Congo will continue to be battered by outlaw gangs composed of their own kin.
Africans in St. Petersburg
At a moment when African presidents have been hoping to mediate between Ukraine and Russia, and bring about peace in eastern Europe, conflicts rage up and down their own continent that maim and kill with impunity. Fixing Africa’s innumerable security concerns could be a surer step forward to ensuring more global peace.
Nevertheless, South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa and his traveling cohort of other African leaders tried to persuade Putin to end an invasion that was causing African food insecurities and higher costs for their battered economies. They said nothing to Putin about Ukraine’s inherent sovereignty, Russia’s abuse of Ukrainian human rights, the persistent infliction of atrocities, or the importance of ending the war to preserve freedom in the world and in Africa. Anyway, Putin cut off the public feed of their discussions when the African delegation began pushing Putin more than he wished.
Ramaphosa and his fellow presidents were not heard telling Putin that he was an aggressor, and that the world and Africans had an inalienable duty to campaign everywhere, especially at home but also in Europe, against wanton aggression that prevents the pursuit of happiness and prosperity for all persons on the planet. That should be a leadership message conveyed sharply to Putin and to all of the troublemaking autocrats of Africa. Peace and economic growth in Africa is not possible without the complete withdrawal of Russians from Ukraine.
Dear Subscribers: I am deeply honored that so many of you “like” and “support” this newsletter. However, starting tomorrow there will be a pause in the transmission of my Substack columns into your various inboxes. I am traveling to Europe and Africa -- and leaving my computer behind. That will make writing columns difficult. But I will return with fresh insights about the war in Ukraine and European responses, and about how its civil conflicts and political battles are transforming much of Africa. Look for me again in your inboxes in late July or early August. Happy summer!