Very occasionally there is good news shining through the gloom of war. Myanmar (Burma) has been in conflict for much of its last sixty-one years, especially since Senior General Min Aung Hlaing and his junta thrashed democracy in early 2021 and arrested Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Laureate who had emerged from long years in detention to bring the Burmese people out of their decades of authoritarian-ruled darkness.
In recent weeks, in a series of startling battlefield developments, Myanmar’s democratic resistance movement has claimed a series of localized but important victories over the powerful army that Min Aung Hlaing commands. In northern Shan State, the rebels took control away from the army. Calling themselves the Brotherhood Alliance, three ethnic armies allied to a shadow civilian protest movement called the National Unity Government captured ten towns in Shan State, athwart the border with China.
Within and beyond the large Shan State, the anti-military alliance also controls large swaths of countryside. In the Upper Sagaing Region in the northwest, it took Kawlin town. Elsewhere the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, part of the Brotherhood Alliance, says that it has captured 150 army outposts. In Kayah State, next to Thailand, the Karenni Nationalities Defense Force seized a number of “positions” from the army, and three towns.
In total, possibly as much as 8,000 square kilometers of Myanmar is now in rebel hands. That is the approximate size of Delaware. Equally important, the Brotherhood Alliance holds critical border crossings where trade with China, India, and Thailand is taxed.
All of these Tatmadaw defeats – acknowledged by Min Aung Hlaing and a military spokesperson -- are blows to the ruling junta, and represent a major turn in the long, hitherto forlorn, struggle to give Bamar and ethnic Burmese people a voice in their own country. But as important and portentous as the resistance advances against the Tatmadaw (300 soldiers of whom have surrendered to the rebels) the return of Myanmar to civilian and democratic rule is not a given. The junta has controlled Myanmar for decades. Its leaders have grown wealthy off the proceeds of oil, natural gas, opium, jade, clothing exports, casino profits, and illicit trade with China. These victories of the democratic alliance and the ethnic armies may be a harbinger of regime change. Or they may simply be a marker of an interminable struggle. The generals who run the junta will not give up their profitable hold on Myanmar without a titanic struggle.
Min Aung Hlaing commands the Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s 356,000 strong army. He and his oppressive strong-man predecessors have kept Myanmar’s 54 million people in thrall, and under tight control, since 1962. They have repressed student-led uprisings in 1988 and 1989 and overturned the election that Suu Kyi and the students\won decisively in 1990. But after relaxing their impress a little in 2010, releasing Suu Kyi and allowing a little popular discussion, Myanmar’s Tatmadaw command seemed tentatively to be democratizing – until Suu Kyi led her National League for Democracy to a striking electoral victory and was poised in early 2021 to govern Myanmar on behalf of its people.
Min Aung Hlaing and the Tatmadaw struck, closed down the elected government, and resumed total military rule. In prior decades that clamp down, with the imprisonment of thousands of protesters (Suu Kyi was sentenced to 33 years on trumped up charges), would have plunged Myanmar and Burmese back into a dark dungeon of despair. But this time, the protesters continued battling the national security forces. Massing both in cities and in rural areas, students and professionals created a resistance movement that, since 2021, has harassed military forces and prevented Min Aung Hlaing’s junta from gaining the upper hand.
Because the Tatmadaw is so large and has decades of experience as a repressive force, the effectiveness of the resistance is new to Myanmar. But what gives it unusual vigor is an unexpected anti-military partnership between white collar protesters (now armed and determined) and the dozen or so ethnic armies that have been fighting official Myanmar since before 1962.
Myanmar has long been divided; roughly 68 percent of inhabitants are Bamar or Burman, and largely Buddhist. Another 32 percent are mostly Shan, Karen, Karenni, Mon, Wa, Chin, Kachin, Kayah, and Rakhine – many professing Christian and traditional religious affinities, and all having been discriminated against by the rulers of Myanmar since the end of British colonial rule in 1948.
The largest of the ethnic states have their own armies and have been fighting Myanmar’s central government since the British withdrew. Several are wealthy because of opium growing and jade mining, and thanks to profitable trade (some of it illicit) with neighboring China. Now the mobilization of ethnic and Bamar democratic antagonism against the junta has combined for the first time to pose an actual threat to the continued repression of democracy in Myanmar.
How successful the rebels will be, and how soon if ever the combined ethnic and professional forces will overcome oppression by the junta is obviously unknown. But their breakthroughs this month and last will at least give hope to embattled Burmese and embolden at least this one struggle for freedom.
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Professor Rotberg has again called our attention to a potential landmark in the quest for democracy in yet another of he world's most deeply-embedded autocracies. The military regime in Myanmar is one of the longest-tenured and most brutal dictatorships...that there is a homegrown resistance movement able to reclaim even a corner of this rich and stunningly beautiful nation for its people is a moment to be celebrated. Thank you, Professor!