The Death of Old Burma or Myanmar as a Burmese Nation-State and the Birth of ASEAN’s Syria

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 21 Oct 2024

Maung Zarni | FORSEA – TRANSCEND Media Service

The anti-nationalist Burmese author (with yellow towel, in the middle) with his Karen brethren of eastern Myanmar including Padoh Saw Khwe Htoo (in blue jacket), now the President of the Karen National Union, framed by the Burma mountain range, Thai-Burmese borders. (Photo: Zarni, April 2003)

19 Oct 2024 – Myanmar’s post-independence history since 1948 is a history of conflicts among different ethnic and ideological groupings, and their failures to resolve the differences of interests and visions peacefully. Successive generations of ethnic majority Bama or Burmese political elite, civilian and military, with their typical colonial mindset towards the other groups bear the greatest share of responsibility.

These days the two issues that have kept me awake are Israel’s ongoing genocide in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the future of my birthplace, which I continue to call Burma (throughout the essay I use Myanmar and Burma interchangeably).

Calling Myanmar Burma is easy, an activist’s choice as an act of defiance against the established order whose sell-by date has long gone past. The previous lot of military leaders changed the country’s anglicised name as part of their ostensible anti-colonialist stance, a year after their bloody slaughter of the anti-dictatorship protesters, unarmed and peaceful, in 1988.

Over the last 36 years since my mid-20s, I have consistently come to oppose all forms and entities of neo-totalitarianism that have thrived on the Burmese soil. There have existed two principal dictatorships.

One is the Tatmadaw or national armed forces, the organization which I aspired to join as a young boy with a growing nationalist consciousness, and the other is the Tatmadaw’s greatest adversary, the National League for Democracy (NLD) under Aung San Suu Kyi, which I supported as a foot soldier for the first fifteen years since its founding in 1989.

Alas, what a painful irony that the country’s central military and the NLD with their respective noble missions – one national liberator, at least for the dominant Bama or Myanmar people, and the other the flagship opposition against the repressive military – have both morphed into neo-totalitarian institutions. To belabor the obvious, both national institutions were instrumentalized by their absolutist leaders, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing and Myanmar State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, in pursuit of what turned out to be their own self-destructive ends.

For a brief period, the two adversarial national institutions collaborated, out of their own respective strategic rationales perhaps, but certainly out of their shared ethno-colonialist ideology towards the non-Bama peoples. At first, they joined together to suppress the federalist aspirations of the non-dominant ethnic nationalities such as Kachin, Rakhine, Karen and so on and, second, they committed genocide of the Rohingya, a predominantly Muslim population of Western Burma.

Then came the head-on collision between the two leaders with mercurial personalities and the self-destructive traits characteristic of totalitarians, including putting their personal political ambitions above the nation’s interests and the public welfare.

The three questions

Against the backdrop of worsening conditions where the country is engulfed in violence and armed conflicts in twelve out of the fourteen states and divisions (or regions), the three pressing Burma questions on my mind are: first, will the Myanmar military collapse in the foreseeable future; second, what would a future Myanmar look like without a national bureaucracy, which has over the last six decades refashioned Myanmar’s political state to suit its narrow objective of seizing and keeping state power in the name of the Nation of the dominant Bama Buddhist majority; and last, but not least, will the National Unity Government (NUG) replace the coup junta as the new national institution, in the event of the latter’s collapse.

To answer these nagging questions for my own understanding, I return to the drawing board of Burma’s internal politics, ethnically defined geography, the political economy of the civil war, and the predictable geopolitics. For the fundamentals shed greater light on the turn of events than the headlines of the international non-governmental organization (INGO) reports and news articles, and the (ever-shifting) popular opinions in the Burmese language social and conventional media.

The shifting narratives

Since the universally unpopular coup of February 2021, the narrative about Myanmar’s violent conflicts between the coup-regime of Min Aung Hlaing based in the fortified capital of Naypyidaw and the anti-junta forces of resistance is notably shifting.

At the time of this writing (December 2023) the BBC, Asia Nikkei, the Washington Post, and the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, as well as the National Unity Government of Myanmar (NUG) are among the growing number of institutions that have begun to say out loud what was until recently the un-thinkable: Myanmar’s military may be unravelling, and the coup regime’s collapse may be on the horizon.

A BBC November 9, 2023 news headline reads “A turning point in Myanmar as army suffers big losses,” while the Washington Post was more forceful with its November 28, editorial “Myanmar’s junta is losing. The US should prepare for its collapse.”

Undoubtedly, the trigger behind this turn of Myanmar policy narrative is the stunning defeat of the military officially referred to as “the Tatmadaw” (or the national armed forces) by the combined hands of the Three Brotherhood Alliance in Northern Shan State along the Sino-Burmese borders.

From the perspective of Myanmar’s anti-junta resistance movements, there also are very inspiring military victories. The Chin resistance at large has gone from weakness to strength on Myanmar’s western frontier adjacent to India’s northeast region where the Chin-land National Army (Chin National Front and the Chin Defence Forces) has captured new strategic border towns and has rightly claimed control of eighty to ninety percent of the ethnic Chin Hills.

On the east across from northern Thailand’s Mae Hongsan province, representing the smallest but politically and historically significant state in the country, the Karenni resistance under the leadership of the Karenni National Progressive Party and the Karenni Defense Forces have established what they expect will serve as the autonomous government of the Karenni state, namely the Interim Executive Council.

In Myanmar’s coastal region of Rakhine (or ancient Arakan) where the coup regime’s military perpetrated the crime of genocide against the Rohingya in 2016 and 2017, several anti-junta armed organizations including the Rohingya Solidarity Organization and the (overwhelmingly) Rakhine Buddhists Arakan army, operate. After the Japanese-facilitated “humanitarian truce” established a year ago collapsed, the Arakan army is now engaged in fierce military clashes with the troops of the coup regime. The Tatmadaw has mobilized all three branches of its military, namely the air force, the navy, and the infantry. In Rakhine State, the Arakan army enjoys widespread support from the intensely ethno-nationalistic Rakhine, who are predominantly Buddhists and outnumber the Rakhine state’s Muslims by 12:1.¹

A cursory look at the December 1, 2023, map of Myanmar’s conflicts put out by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is indicative of how widely spread the anti-junta fighting has become. Twelve out of the total of fourteen states and divisions are now sites of military clashes. The expanding military conflicts have rendered half-a-million (500,000) Myanmar people “war refugees” (or the Internally Displaced Persons) in one month since Operation 1027 started in Myanmar’s northern Shan State, thereby bringing the total of IDPs in dire need of emergency and humanitarian aid to more than two million. Despite the human toll, both domestic public opinion and international perspectives are, perhaps understandably, upbeat about the prospect of regime collapse and the prospect for a democracy in a post-military Myanmar. That the nightmare of a military-controlled Myanmar must end one way or the other seems to be the popular opinion among Myanmar people.

The significance of Shan State and the Victors of Operation 1027

Of all the ethnic regions, Shan State is the largest in the country’s physical geography, bordering on both China and Thailand, which form informal trade corridors. The state’s rich ethnic tapestry of Shan, Kachin, Wa, Pao, Ta’ ang (or Palaung), Intha, is also a source of inter-group conflicts and historical grievances. The territorial aspirations, and (elite) commercial interests in the state are thoroughly embedded in the web of interlocking resource-based and cross-border informal economies.

A high sixty-four percent of the state’s population is in the age group (15-64), labelled “economically productive” in the 2014 Myanmar Census. In other words, Shan State has a high proportion of “fighting age” people, both men and women. The Shan of Myanmar were co-founders of the post-colonial Union of Burma alongside the Bama majoritarian leadership of the martyred Aung San. Because they were granted the constitutional right of secession in 1947, Myanmar’s ruling elite, both the political and military leaderships of the late Prime Minister U Nu and General Ne Win, built military bases in this vast mountainous state as early as 1953.

To date, Shan State houses more than 200 battalions, the largest number established in an ethnically defined state in the country, according to a Shan researcher colleague of mine. The reported low morale and the understaffing of these units are related and significant matters.

That is why the news of the stunning military victories by the Three Brotherhood Alliance’s Operation 1027 (October 27, 2023) in Shan State precipitated a media and policy buzz around the junta’s (potential) collapse and the need to prepare the National Unity Government as the future government of Myanmar.

The Three Brotherhood Alliance

A word about the background of these groups is in order.

The Three Brotherhood Alliance is made up of the three ethnic armed organizations.

The Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (or MNDAA) leadership and rank and file are drawn from Han Chinese minority known as “Kokang”). The Myanmar military had, in the 1960s and 1970s, used the earlier incarnation of the Kokang armed group as a counterforce or local militia against the armed resistance movements by the pro-independence Shan nationalists in exchange for lucrative commercial opportunities for the typically illicit trades (including narcotics). Along with half-dozen other ethnic territories, Kokang region has been stablished as a “Self-Administered Zone” by the reformist quasi-democratic government of President Thein Sein.

One of the relatively new armed organizations, the Arakan Army is led by Buddhist Rakhine political elite with their unconcealed aspirations for the reclamation of their ancient kingdom’s sovereignty lost to the rival Burmese based in the upcountry plains around Mandalay, several years after the French Revolution of 1789. Out of geopolitical pragmatism, the AA leaders have indicated that they would be content with “internal sovereignty”. That is, Rakhine will remain a part of a post-military Myanmar which the AA leaders envisage as a loose confederation of politically autonomous regions.

Rakhine nationalists were the very first in Myanmar who revolted, without success, against the central government in Rangoon even before the actual ceremony for the transfer of sovereignty from Britain to the first independence government of Burma on 4 January 1948. Subsequently, Rakhine leaders led by the likes of Indian Civil Service (ICS) member and MP U Kyaw Min waged their liberation struggle in the emerging parliamentary space, openly pushing for “internal sovereignty” in the 1950’s. The central Bama-controlled government resorted to divide and rule, exploiting the emerging ethnic and religious divisions between predominantly Muslim Rohingyas and Buddhist Rakhine, alternating favours between the two rival claimants to indigeneity of the coastal state with a short 270-mile borders with Muslim Bangladesh.

The Ta’ang National Liberation Army (or TNLA, ethnic Palaung or Ta’ ang people) has evolved over the last 30 years since its inception as an armed organization fighting for the self-determination of the Ta’ ang people. The reformist-military government in 2010 created the Palaung Self-Administered Zone with its own territorial capital in Northern Shan State. It is one of Myanmar’s least developed sub-regions.

The conventional wisdom – evidenced by foreign experts, for instance the International Crisis Group – is that these three groups have stayed “aloof” in the broader armed resistance made up of hundreds of pro-democracy People’s Defence Forces. These forces are generally pro-democracy and supported Ms. Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party government. But this “expert” opinion is based evidently on shoddy research.

As early as March this year, the Irrawaddy was reporting on the Kokang group’s training and providing arms to the anti-junta resistance groups.

Every local knows that the country’s most important ethnic resistance organizations such as the Kachin Independence Organization in the north, the Karenni National Progressive Party in the east, the Karen National Union in the southeast and south, and the Chin National Front in the west provided new generation armed resisters from all walks of life from across Myanmar, most significantly from the Burmese majority heartlands, with sanctuary and military training.

But what is less known is the China-linked Alliance also has made its share of contributions to the growth of anti-junta armed resistance organizations in terms of arms, training, and even funding. Even the United Wa State Army (UWSA), which is wholly dependent on China and hence seen as Beijing’s proxy, is known as a source of arms and munition to all anti-junta forces throughout the country, despite the organization’s official “adherence” to the ceasefire with the junta in Naypyidaw, in the country’s expanding armed conflicts. The Rakhine’s Arakan Army is known to be the main trainer of the anti-coup Bama People’s Liberation Army (BPLA) while the Karen National Union has offered the latter sanctuary. BPLA – 1,000-strong) has been an integral resistance force that has joined the Three Brotherhood Alliance in its historic Operation 1027 in Northern Shan state.

According to Asian diplomats who participated in the so-called 1.5 Track meeting on the post-coup Myanmar held in New Delhi in April 2023, Dr. Yin Yin Nwe, a key Shan-Myanmar adviser to Myanmar’s coup regime and ex-daughter-in-law of the late dictator Ne Win, accused Thailand, without offering any evidence, of allowing Myanmar exiles to smuggle arms and munition via Thailand to Myanmar’s growing armed resistance. (The meeting attendees included representatives of India, China, Thailand, Laos, Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Indonesia, as well as state-linked think tanks from these Myanmar’s neighbors).

The fact of the matter is that various armed organizations from the United Wa State Army to the Kachin Independence Organization to the Three Brotherhood Alliance have played vital roles as “enablers” of Myanmar’s nationwide armed resistance along the fifteen hundred-mile long Sino-Burmese border.

To be sure, the respective ultimate aims of the various armed organizations are not necessarily identical: some are for “internal sovereignty,” some for the administrative control of expanded territories and populations, some for majoritarian democracy, and still others for an ethnically defined federalist state. But what is clear is that these disparate organizations, all armed and gaining significant battlefield experience, share the common rejection of the coup regime, and the Tatmadaw or the national forces in general.

Most importantly, all these groups envisage a future Myanmar without this repressive national institution. In their vision, the Myanmar military as the most repressive and murderous organization has no political role in a future Myanmar. Certainly, not without significant and fundamental institutional reforms. To put it bluntly, the coup regime and its military are no longer seen as “a stakeholder” in any dialogue about the political future of Myanmar as a multi-ethnic political state, a fundamental departure from the ASEAN’s failed policy discourse of “All-Inclusive Dialogue.”

Recently, there has been a public relations fiasco around the “dialogue” with the junta in Myanmar, resulting from a press statement issued by Indonesia as ASEAN Chair. Indonesia’s Special Envoy Office falsely portrayed various resistance organizations, including the NUG, as displaying willingness to dialogue with the junta. This outcome – having different stakeholders willing to dialogue – was clearly portrayed as Jakarta’s diplomatic achievement of sorts over 180 meetings in a single year during Indonesia’s one-year chairmanship.

In sharp contrast to external “state actors,” the overwhelming majority of the Bama public, inside the country and in diaspora, are in no mood for dialogue with the junta whose days they think are numbered. Whether regime collapse will ensue remains to be seen. But by all indications, the widely reviled junta is limping on its last legs. The multi-ethnic public now openly celebrate the repressive military’s serial defeats and territorial losses to the non-Bama ethnic resistance groups, whatever their names or backgrounds, or whichever external actors they are allied with.

This change in mood is unprecedented, ideologically, historically, and politically.

Among the gains of the resistance groups are the capture of roughly 200 military outposts, the control of the Sino-Burmese trade route in Northern Shan State, surrender of an entire battalion or two, the seizure of large caches of arms and munition (including anti-aircraft guns and a few tanks), the killing of a few Myanmar brigadier generals, and the siege of half a dozen towns including ones not too far from the second largest city of Mandalay.

The Shrills of “Balkanization” and State Collapse

Eleven days into the Operation 1027, the senior most leadership of the coup regime – coup leader Min Aung Hlaing and his senior and the military’s old hand ex-General Myint Swe, the former vice president in the NLD government of Aung San Suu Kyi who signed off on the coup, held an emergency National Defence and Security Council meeting in Naypyidaw on  November 9 and reportedly discussed the prospects for “national disintegration” (or “balkanization”).

The junta’s official mouthpiece Global New Ligh of Myanmar quoted my old “friend” Myint Swe as telling the meeting attendees including the coup leader Min Aung Hlaing, “if the government does not effectively manage the incidents happening in the border region, the country will be split into various parts.”

After the military junta’s unprecedented defeats in Northern Shan State, the Straits Times of Singapore ran an opinion editorial flagging this “balkanization” warning. More recently, the December 1 Japan Times Editorial was more shrill about what it projects as “chaos” and the process of Myanmar state failures, now that more than half the country have fallen into the hands of “ethnic insurgent” organizations, fighting for the rights of their own populations (as opposed to the entire Myanmar as a country). Japan’s primary concern is in the event of a state collapse, its Asian adversary, China, would openly intervene in a country which has been run – and ruined – by the World War II Japan-fathered national military.

Successive military regimes since the coup of 1962 had used the discourse of “national disintegration” as an ideological magic wand to rally the historically ethno-nationalist majoritarian Burmese public behind their acts of usurpation.

In his December 2 interview with the Irrawaddy media outlet, Kokangs’ Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army or MNDAA spokesperson Li Jar pointed out that the embattled coup leader Min Aung Hlaing reportedly used the word “foreign invasion” to describe the Three Brotherhood Alliance’s successful military operations against regime troops, with a clear intent to mobilize the country’s xenophobic Bama nationalist majority. Alas, this time neither the junta’s scaremongering propaganda mantra of “national disintegration” nor “foreign invasion” secured any buy-in from the country’s Bama public.

Debunking the view that non-Bama ethnic resistance movements have only narrowly defined self-interests, for instance, minority rights, the same MNDAA spokesperson stated that the Alliance’s politico-military objective is ultimately “to eradicate the military dictatorship.”

In January 2023, the leaders of another cluster of ethnic resistance organizations, including the Karen National Union, the Karenni National Progressive Party and the Chin National Front, who have territorial control over vast swathes of Myanmar, spelled out their Big Tent (inclusive) federalist vision with democratic and basic human rights for all groups and individuals.

In Japan’s Asia Nikkei, they wrote, “the military leadership knows that our ethnic resistance organizations are fighting for a federal system of power-sharing with the majority Burmans – not for secession or independence. It has deliberately mis-framed us as ethnonationalist secessionists bent on disintegrating the Union of Myanmar in an attempt to pit us against the Burman majority, but its misinformation campaign is no longer working.”

Emphatically, however, even in a few places where there exist ethno-nationalist contests within intra-minority populations, the contests are more about elite territorial ambitions and economic interests than the kind one observes in the Balkans where Serbian Orthodox Christians, Croatian Catholics, and Muslims of Bosnia have perpetrated atrocity crimes against one another over a long and sustained period. Precisely because of this crucial difference, I for one do not buy into the alarmist warnings of “Myanmar’s balkanization.”

Besides, “balkanization” involved the birth or rebirth of new states out of a federated political system such as Marshal Tito’s Yugoslavia, with mass atrocities as by-products. There were external actors such as NATO and post-USSR Russia whose meddlesome geopolitics in the Balkans made worse the already poisoned regional politics of race and faith.

Sandwiched among stable and populous neighbors including such global powers as China and India, redrawing Myanmar’s external boundaries is simply inconceivable. None of the immediate neighbors would stomach the idea, let alone the potentially violent realities of spill-over cross-border impact, of the disintegration of Myanmar as a political state. With the exception of the ethnic Bama-controlled National Unity Government, run by the Burmese exiles in Washington and other Western capitals, who have been egged on by Western actors as “future leaders,” none of Myanmar’s ethnic resistance organizations on the ground will undertake any act, military or political, that will breach the security concerns of Bangladesh or Thailand, not to mention China and India.

However, what is unprecedented, ideologically and historically, is the generally anti-Chinese, and to a lesser extent, anti-Rakhine, majoritarian Burmese public are now rooting for the Three Brotherhood Alliance – and any other non-Bama ethnic resistance organizations as they attempt to “eradicate the military dictatorship.”

The (exiled) National Unity Government as the replacement for the Junta?

Given the chorus of celebrations of a recent series of military victories over the much-reviled coup junta in Naypyidaw, are we to assume that the National Unity Government (NUG) is going to step up to the plate and offer the much-needed leadership as the central actor in place of the six-decades old military?

The short answer is, “No.”

The NUG supporters and the old NLD loyalists may disagree, however.

After all, this is the political grouping with the greatest media recognition, if not diplomatic recognition as a new state actor, among both the Burmese public at home and in the media circles. Its make-up includes Aung San Suu Kyi loyalists, both elected parliamentary members and NLD party activists, as well as ethnic Chin, Kachin, Karen and Rohingya representatives. Though in captivity, the ousted NLD leader Suu Kyi is named the NUG’s State Counsellor.

The inconvenient truth lurks beneath the discursive construction of the NUG as the new central authorities ready to fill the power vacuum once the anticipated junta collapse.

Despite the typical portrayal of the NUG as an ethnically unifying body of politicians, revolutionaries and activists, the NUG’s legitimacy, capabilities, and political integrity are suspect among the two crucial constituencies of Myanmar.

First, none of the ethnic resistance organizations (or EROs) considers the NUG to be the umbrella organization under whose central leadership the former will operate in a future post-junta Myanmar. Quite the contrary, my own conversations, sustained over the years, with a number of key resistance leaders have produced a deeply troubling fact: there exists an acute unease in these non-Bama ethnic resistance quarters about the all-too-apparent posturing of the NUG’s key players as if they were the government in the making while displaying the same old ethnic Bama chauvinism vis-à-vis non-Bama ethnic political classes.

Myanmar’s post-independence history is, fundamentally, a history of failures in inter-ethnic relations in a richly diverse multi-ethnic country. These failures can be explained by the typical colonial attitude and deeds on the part of the Bama political elite.

From U Nu to Aung San Suu Kyi, the Bama elite have squandered many an opportunity to build a truly federalist state. In my possession is a verified copy of a typewritten letter signed by independent Burma’s first Prime Minister U Nu, addressed to his fellow exile revolutionaries in the early 1970s, where he openly rejected non-Bama ethnic nationalities’ right to self-determination. In her capacity as the unrivalled Bama political leader, Aung San Suu Kyi is notorious for treating the leaders of ethnic nationalities as if they were second class citizens.

As such, the dominant Bama Buddhist leadership, both civilian and military, communists and liberals, bear the lion’s share of responsibility in this crucial aspect of post-colonial state building.

Myanmar as a nation-state where Bama Buddhists are more equal than the rest of the society (made up of thirty to forty percent of non-Bama nationalities) is simply un-workable. The unitary state model in Burma has not worked since the country’s birth in 1948. And it will not work in the future either.

Almost ten years ago, I singled out this internal colonial attitude as a major obstacle to national unity. Though a member of the Bama, Buddhist majority with deep ties to the country’s central military through my extended family, I spoke out for ethnic group equality. In my New York Times op-ed (25 September 2015, I then wrote, “(i)f the government is as serious as it claims about wanting peace, it must let go of its oppressively majoritarian mind-set and recognize ethnic minorities’ legitimate aspirations for more autonomy.”

The scholarship on the subject of peace and stability in states with a high percentage of “minority” populations has found that a unitary state in poly-ethnic societies establishes neither peace nor stability. Whether through a civilian democratic party run by a populist leader (such as Suu Kyi), or a neo-totalitarian military, the dominant ethnic group that seeks to turn the political state into an expression and instrument of its religious, ethnic, cultural, and political supremacy at the expense of the non-dominant ethnic populations, with their own respective historical memories, cultural, and language traditions and political aspirations will fail.

There are two Buddhist examples of such cases in the South and Southeast Asian regions: one is Burma and the other is Sri Lanka.

Second, the new generation Burmese activists and social revolutionaries have bitterly rejected Aung San Suu Kyi’s racist and socially conservative leadership and neo-liberal economic policies – specifically regarding the Rohingya genocide, her condemnable collaboration with the military in the latter’s repression of non-Bama ethnic populations, her siding with the commercial interests over workers and farmers and her dismissal of ecological concerns.

By extension, the NUG’s leadership which continues to draw on Aung San Suu Kyi’s popularity at home and her party’s re-election results while hoisting her name as NUG’s patron-saint, is a deeply morally compromised entity. It is backseat-driven by the infamous Rohingya genocide-denialists. Among them are the Permanent Representative of Myanmar at the UN in New York Kyaw Moe Tun; the iconic student leader of 1988 generation Min Ko Naing; Dr. Win Myat Aye who, in his capacity as the Union Minister of Social Welfare in the NLD government, was Aung San Suu Kyi’s point man on the crisis in Rakhine; and Khin Ma Ma Myo, who framed Rohingya as “insects” and “rats” that needed to be gotten rid of. These individuals occupy influential positions in the NUG and its policy circles. They have not come clean. Instead, they have put it all on the military’s genocidal disinformation campaign, in the age of the Internet where fact-checking is and can be done on one’s fingertips.

Moreover, intellectually, the NUG – and its supporters – are rightly viewed as self-contradictory in their self-perception as the group with the national mandate to rule, above all other anti-junta forces.

On one hand, the NUG holds up the 2020 re-election landslide as their sole source of mandate. And on the other hand, it points out that it joined the public in overwhelmingly rejecting the military’s 2008 Constitution. The NUG is correct to reject the Constitution, which enshrined the military’s role, in effect, as the eternal and unconditional holder of State Power, and which placed the military above the law and the society. But it is wrong to establish its claim of political mandate based on election results that were rooted in the very constitution which it and the public resoundingly rejected.

“The NUG cannot have it both ways” is a typical view among the federalists who see the NUG as the old NLD reincarnate with its lip service to ethnic group equality and a federalist power-sharing arrangement.

From the perspective of ethnic resistance movements, the NUG’s attempts to eat the political cake and have it too, is typical of the familiar age-old phenomenon among the Bama political actors. It is rooted in the lack of political – and even personal – integrity in the way the dominant Bama political elite has treated non-Bama ethnic political actors and respective populations.

These communities of ethnic resistance see the NUG’s talks of ethnic group equality, a tokenistic inclusion of pliant non-Bama representatives from other indigenous groups, its nominal parliamentary wing (Committee Representing People’s Parliament – or in Burmese, CRPH) are old wine in a new bottle.

However, this time around ethnic resistance organizations are no longer waiting for the Bama political opposition elite to show enlightened magnanimity toward the former’s quest for political autonomy and recognition. The ethnic resistance movements now control more than sixty percent of the country’s ethnically defined regions.

Admittedly, there are inter-minority tensions in various regions, particularly in Rakhine, Shan, and Kachin areas. Defining territories along the dominant mono-ethnic lines is a potentially dangerous political act, which can ultimately result in “ethnic cleansing.” But, thankfully, so far such dark signs are not on the horizon. Political elites of the country’s overall resistance know only too well the violent, racist abyss into which the country had plunged with the military-sponsored genocide of Rohingya in western Myanmar only six years ago.

Myanmar’s Ethnic Resistance Organizations (EROs) now command well-established and seasoned defense forces. Their rank and file are professionally trained. Economically, making the most out of their strategic locations in the country’s border regions that saddle the world’s largest and/or sizeable economies such as India, China, Bangladesh, and Thailand country’s vast informal economies, the EROs have built their economic foundations and revenue bases, some illicit and some transparent. In the absence of the World Bank financing, the resistance movements generate income to feed, arm, and finance their troops.

Politically, in the foreseeable future, there will come a time when these politically, economically, and territorially autonomous organizations of resistance, and their respective ethnic populations, will openly reject the NUG as the country’s “unifier,” “the new central organization” with power to shape the contours of Burma’s future.

For this, the Bama political elite have only themselves to blame.

The ethnic nationalities – as the non-Bama prefer to be called – have seven decades of bitter experience working with or against the ethnically Bama-controlled central or national organizations. In the last thirty-odd years, their experiences with both Ms. Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party, first as the flagship opposition and later as the government, and the central military or the Tatmadaw, have been unfruitful and un-rewarding.

This will seriously erode the NUG’s claim to the representative power to speak for the entire country. It is not the alternative to the country’s military and the regime that commands it.

The geopolitics and the prospects for Burma’s federal democratic transition (or lack thereof)

To this entirely domestic problem lurking beneath the media framings of NUG as the “future government,” transitional or otherwise, add the crucial geopolitical factors that have direct bearing on developments in Burma.

For instance, it is highly unlikely that Beijing will ever accept any political grouping which it perceives, rightly or wrongly, as a US proxy coming to power next door.² The NUG coming to power as the government of Myanmar is as likely as the United States keeping quiet if China or the Russian Federation installed a Beijing or Moscow-allied government in Mexico City or Havana.

For more than half-a-century, the country’s military had universally been seen in international policy circles as the strong hand that had kept the ethnically diverse country together. Conversely, the country’s non-Bama nationalities with their aspirations for political autonomy and self-determination were labelled as “insurgents” bent on destabilizing and dismembering the post-colonial nation-state of diverse ethnic communities.

Notable amongst Myanmar’s emerging realities since Min Aung Hlaing’s military coup of 2021, are the successful bottom-up efforts at building genuinely autonomous ethnic regions with the EROs maintaining law and order and a community-based judiciaries. They are financed through the interlocking informal war economies, that principally rest on highly lucrative resource-extraction and overland cross-border trade with China, India and Thailand. The establishment of inter-ethnic group relations is more or less based on equal respect, appreciation, and strategic collaboration. This is not to paper over inter-ethnic group tensions which do exist in several regions such as the ones that between Ta’aung (or Palaung people) and the Shan, the Kachin and Shan-ni (or “red Shan”), Mons and Karens, and Rohingya and Rakhine. However, with sensible resistance leadership cooler heads can prevail in order to stop the decades-long trend of ethnicity-driven politics.

The current media and policy narratives are extremely counterproductive in that they are promoting one chosen political grouping, that is, the Bama-elite controlled-NUG, amongst many existing ones. Those external actors, primarily of the West, are seeking to help establish one Central Entity with its ethnic tokenism in place of the two crumbling central and neo-totalitarian organizations, namely the military and its nemesis the NLD of Aung San Suu Kyi.

It is imperative that the external actors attempt to understand and appreciate the pervasive anti-central state, and pro-autonomy ideological climate, and the fast-emerging regional/local administrative and political structures.

The re-making of Burma beyond the mould of a (colonial) nation-state

The era of the Union of Burma as a nation-state during which the elite Bama imposed, with ruinous consequences for the society at large, their mono-ethnic Buddhist nationalist imagination has irreversibly passed.

Not only have the non-Bama resistance communities resisted, since independence from Britain, the various versions of a totalitarian vision served up by successive generations of the Bama political class, including the military leaderships, but some of the ethnic resistance leaders have even raised the need to re-imagine the country’s name, that is not rooted in a mono-ethnicity.

Not long ago, one of the senior leaders of the Kachin Independence Organization, General Gum Maw shared with me a rather poignant anecdotal story of him informing both Myanmar State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi and her ex-partner in power Senior General Min Aung Hlaing of the need to find a commonly acceptable new name for the country – other than Burma or Myanmar.

The post-colonial nation-state of Myanmar, or Burma, is for all intents and purposes dead. A nation is not simply a product of like-minded people imagining a national community, based on a common language, culture and a set of shared historical memories. Even the late Benedict Anderson of “Imagined Communities” fame, with his psychological and culturalist view of the nation and nationalism would readily admit the crucial material basis of nation-building, namely the land.

A nation is, necessarily, territorially defined with external (international) demarcation of boundaries. In Burma’s case, the ethnic resistance organizations are redrawing the boundaries of internal territories at home, as autonomous ethnic nations, while leaving the country’s national boundaries along powerful neighbors intact. Amidst violent armed conflicts, they are building structures to keep these ethnic regions autonomous and stable within their internal demographic make-ups.

It is extraordinary that the people of the country are searching for home-grown solutions and thinking anew their own localized futures. Note the plural.

The last thing the international community should do is to repeat the past mistakes of applying the old formula of replacing one bad Bama-led central organization with another one.

After seventy-years of civil, political, and military strife, the peoples of Burma deserve better than an old sour wine of one big central state in the new fancy bottle labelled “democratic federalism.”

One month after the military coup of February 2021, I wrote these words on the opinion editorial pages of the Washington Post: “(i)t is now clear that Myanmar society is burying for good the decades-old myth of the armed forces as the selfless defenders of national unity.”

The popular desire for getting to the bottom of their/our national nightmare is apparently far more radical than I had thought. The post-independence nation-state that was really the legacy of the British colonial state, with one ethnic group controlling it from the center is now being dismantled. Whether a new entity being built from the bottom-up will be more successful and conducive to interethnic harmony remains to be seen.

Postscript

Reading Chinese FM Wang Yi’s Meetings with Myanmar Military Leaders – TMS

I penned this above analysis almost a year ago as a draft of a book chapter in the edited volume on Southeast Asian politics. Upon re-reading I realize that the fundamentals of my argument still hold, despite many specific developments within the country’s full-blown civil war since the essay’s completion last December.

Among the developments three are noteworthy: the Arakan Army’s genocidal approach towards Rohingya Muslims, Myanmar military junta’s activation of the country’s mass conscription law (and its potentially devastating impact on the economy, society and education), China’s decisive end in its largely wait-and-see approach towards its deeply unstable southern neighbour of Myanmar. India on its part is playing catch-up with its arch-Asian rival while the Association of Southeast Asian Nations remains perennially impotent to help bring Myanmar’s civil war to a close. Washington has its own strategic plan to maintain its imperialist supremacy in Asia, and Myanmar is evidently of no real concern to the Americans.

Importantly, I reflected on my early post-coup post-NLD optimism that the Nway Oo Revolution (or Myanmar Spring) with a full-blown multi-ethnic armed resistance, made up of Generation Z was ushering in a fundamental transformation of our collective ethos and cultural values, from the ethnicity- and personality-based exclusionary opposition to our common oppression under the boot to inclusionary, progressive liberation.

Alas, my optimism has proven rather premature.

The strife-torn country is now moving in the direction of Assad’s Syria where the internal fragmentation has taken place, with no real winner in its bloody internecine conflicts, in its 8th decade and counting.

NOTES:

1. Before the 2016 and 2017 waves of genocidal destruction the ratio was about 3 Rakhine :1 Rohingya, and the estimated Rohingya population was 2 million in total. Today only roughly 500,000 out of that 2 million remain in the state.
2. My numerous personal communications with members of the Kachin and other resistance organizations that operate along Sino-Burmese borders establish very firmly how sensitive China is to anything, act or presence of entities perceived as US-influenced including the visit of an American Baptist missionary group or a US diplomat to these Sino-Burmese border regions.

___________________________________________

Further Readings:

* Reading Chinese FM Wang Yi’s Meetings with Myanmar Military Leaders – FORSEA
* China’s foreign minister meets with Myanmar’s military boss as civil war strains their relations | AP News
* Why does China continue to support Myanmar’s junta despite its losses to resistance forces? | The Straits Times
* How the world—including the West—helps to sustain the Myanmar military’s violence (myanmar-now.org)
* The New Humanitarian | What’s Unsaid | Who can the Rohingya rely on?

A Buddhist humanist from Burma (Myanmar), Maung Zarni, nominated for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, former Visiting Lecturer with Harvard Medical School, specializing in racism and violence in Burma and Sri Lanka, and Non-resident Scholar in Genocide Studies with Documentation Center – Cambodia. Zarni is the co-founder of FORSEA, a grass-roots organization of Southeast Asian human rights defenders, coordinator for Strategic Affairs for Free Rohingya Coalition, and an adviser to the European Centre for the Study of Extremism, Cambridge. Zarni holds a PhD (U Wisconsin at Madison) and a MA (U California), and has held various teaching, research and visiting fellowships at the universities in Asia, Europe and USA including Oxford, LSE, UCL Institute of Education, National-Louis, Malaya, and Brunei. He is the recipient of the “Cultivation of Harmony” award from the Parliament of the World’s Religions (2015). His analyses have appeared in leading newspapers including the New York Times, The Guardian and the Times. Among his academic publications on Rohingya genocide are The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingyas (Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal), An Evolution of Rohingya Persecution in Myanmar: From Strategic Embrace to Genocide, (Middle East Institute, American University), and Myanmar’s State-directed Persecution of Rohingyas and Other Muslims (Brown World Affairs Journal). He co-authored, with Natalie Brinham, Essays on Myanmar Genocide.

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