23 - Putin-like Compatriots Elsewhere, I: Myanmar

            President Biden, referring to Putin last week, said: “People like this shouldn’t be ruling countries, but they do.” Moreover, he continued, “it doesn’t mean I can’t express my outrage,” presumably on behalf of the American people and the civilized world more generally.  Unfortunately, as venal is Putin’s pursuit of power and wealth, others across the globe are equally evil.  We will discuss a few such miscreants this week.

            A clear candidate for opprobrium is Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the head of state and armed forces leader of Myanmar (Burma). Fifteen months ago, Hlaing led a coup that ousted Aung San Suu Kyi from governing Myanmar after she had led her National League for Democracy (NLD) to its second stunning electoral triumph. In late 2020, as in

2015, Suu Kyi and her party won 83 percent of all contested parliamentary seats.

            But Hlaing and his generals feared that Suu Kyi would start to deprive the Tatmadaw, as Myanmar’s army is known, of its many lucrative militarily-controlled state owned enterprises, its stake in gold and jade mining, its cut of opium trade profits, and a vast array of other economic hustles that have long enriched high-ranking officers and submerged the Southeast Asian country of 54 million people in corruption.  Lately, those hustles have included protecting new Chinese-owned casinos along Myanmar’s borders and sharing the profits of (largely) mainland-originated Chinese gambling.

            Since the coup, Hlaing’s junta has resumed oppressing Myanmar’s civilians. After arresting Daw Suu Kyi and her close associates on spurious charges (she faces seventy-three years in jail), the Tatmadaw have imprisoned 13,000 Burmese anti-coup presumed protestors, killed 1,700 alleged dissidents, and declared outright war on its own people.  Like the Russians in Ukraine, Myanmar’s 400,000 person army uses its weapons of war indiscriminately, trying to keep control. Its airstrikes have burned innumerable villages and spread terror across the now divided country.

At first, as Buddhists, some Bamar thought that passive resistance, strikes of physicians and other essential workers, and boycotts of businesses controlled by the military, would bring Hlaing and his fellow despots to their senses. Millions took to urban streets nonviolently. But that strategy accomplished very little. The Tatmadaw instead used lethal ammunition to kill noncombatants and perpetrate unspeakable atrocities.  The United Nations has accused Myanmar’s government of war crimes against its own people.

            Tens of thousands have since taken up arms against the ruling regime, establishing resistance militias across the Texas-sized land. Some are army deserters. Many have grouped themselves clandestinely in jungle warrens where they train and from where they emerge to attack the national army. The Washington Post rightly calls the junta’s opponents a “ragtag amateur force of [outgunned] doctors, dentists, tattoo artists, poets, and farmers.” So far they have battled the much better equipped army to a stalemate.

            Loosely organized as the People’s Defense Forces (an arm of the new opposition National Unity Government), this nation-wide guerilla struggle has been augmented for the first time by an alliance between majority Bamar amateurs and more experienced soldiers from the twelve minority ethnic groups that have (mostly) been estranged from Myanmar for decades.  Thus Bamar now fight for freedom and regime change alongside the long-established Christian Karen and Karenni ethnic armies, the militias of the Shan, Chin, Kayah, Mon, and Wa states, the Kachin (along Myanmar’s northern border with China), and others.  In the western state of Rakhine an Arakan autonomy movement has gained strength.

 The rights and privileges of most of the separate ethnic groups (collectively about 40 percent of the nation’s population) have been systematically neglected by the military rulers in Myanmar over many decades. About half of the ethnic states, each of which has its own local government, have long contended with the army for control of valuable crops such as opium and, especially, over the profitable mining of gold and jade and the smuggling of those goods into China. Now the casinos are another source of loot, and of rivalry.

            Myanmar has long been a criminalized state, with Aung San Suu Kyi’s period of ruling the country alongside a still controlling military having been unable to bring integrity to its governance between 2015 and 2020. She even cooperated with the Tatmadaw when its soldiers in 2017 slaughtered approximately 10,000 Muslim Rohingya in western Rakhine State and drove 700,000 Rohingya into pitiful exile in Bangladesh. Washington recently denounced the extermination and exiling of Rohingya as genocide in violation of the 1948 UN Convention Against Genocide. The International Criminal Court has started a war crimes investigation of Myanmar’s genocidal acts.

            Since 1962, the Burmese people have enjoyed limited freedom and individual security only from 2015 to 2020.  In 1962, soldiers under Marshal Ne Win shut down its incipient democracy.  Independence from Britain had been won in 1948 by Gen. Aung San, Suu Kyi’s father, after India won its freedom and the rise of a similar consciousness in Burma (as Myanmar then was).  Ne Win isolated Burma economically and politically from the world, destroyed its vaunted existence as the rice bowl of Asia, and tightly repressed anything that looked like dissent. He also ended its intellectual preeminence in the region.

            Burma emerged briefly from the cold when students successfully protested against military rulers in 1988; an election in 1990 was won handily by Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD, but the Tatmawdaw quickly expunged the results and jailed Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize awardee in 1991, until 2010.  Five years later, gingerly cooperating with Hlaing, his representatives in parliament and the other generals, parliamentary elections were permitted and she and the NLD proved victorious.  She was able, subsequently, to carve out a zone of free expression and political progress for herself and her party, while still acknowledging the army’s supremacy in Myanmar.

            Today Myanmar is fully at war, with PDF fighters performing better than expected against the massive Tatmadaw.  But they neither have the equipment, the funds, nor the external support that the Ukrainian army is now using to hold its own against the Russians.  Myanmar’s junta also has Chinese backing, making the struggle difficult for opponents. Nevertheless, those in Myanmar who are bravely battling a much larger and much better resourced oppressing force doubtless take heart from the qualified success to date of the Ukrainian resistance. 

This post was delayed by Substack and many subscribers may not have received it. So it is being resent now.