Two talk-shops in Bangkok last week were remarkable in a couple of ways. One: That they happened at all. And two: As proof, yet again, as to just how precarious things are in Myanmar, and just how explosive the goings on in that fractured country can prove for eastern South Asia.
The first was a confab on December 19, attended by the foreign ministers of host Thailand, Lao, the vice-foreign minister of China, Bangladesh’s advisor for foreign affairs, and the foreign secretary of India. All these countries share borders with Myanmar, whose junta-appointed foreign minister -- former prime minister Than Shwe -- also attended. The second meeting, also hosted by Thailand, followed a day later. It had Myanmar as its focus but comprised foreign ministers of several “interested members” of Asean, or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Myanmar is a member of Asean.
Although billed as “informal,” the intention of the first meeting was hardnosed realpolitik, and the intended outcomes, which we shall discuss shortly, are driven by hardnosed realpolitik. The intention and outcome of the second meeting, with vague chatter about elections in Myanmar and the moral rehabilitation of Myanmar in the grouping, remains murky. The undiscussed murky matter in the second, somewhat nonsensical meeting -- at least from a South Asian perspective: Asean’s position on the greatest of Myanmar’s several ongoing tragedies, the demonstrated genocidal practice towards the Rohingya. Unsurprising, because Asean does not even recognize the Rohingya as an entity, let alone treat South Asia’s Palestinians, as it were, as worthy of humanitarian gesture; or hold generations of Myanmar’s rulers to account for crimes against humanity.
As sordid as the protection rackets of geo-politics and its brutalist sibling, geo-economics, can be, let us address the rationale of the first meeting. It was held not out of a special love for Myanmar, a country whose leaders have for decades shown a marked lack of empathy for their own people, but out of the necessity of the national interest of Myanmar’s neighbours to protect their own borders, their own investments, and their own sense of security.
China is plugged into every facet of Myanmar’s wherewithal and future track. It has a border of more than 2,100km that travels roughly southeast from a trijunction with Myanmar to a trijunction with Laos. This borders mineral- and timber-rich -- and narcotics- and weapons-rich -- regions in Myanmar, which are either run autonomously or in outright rebellion to Myanmar’s rulers by the Kachin, Shan, and Wa peoples, among others. These regions have for long had a symbiotic relationship with China even as China has balanced its relations with whatever has passed for Myanmar’s governments, mostly run by juntas.
China operates two near-800km energy pipelines that carry oil and gas from Myanmar’s coastal Rakhine state, by the Bay of Bengal, right across central Myanmar to the southwestern tip of China, in the process travelling though several rebel areas. Along with China’s border engagements, these pipelines ensure that China also had to continue this rebel-and-junta balancing act for the crucial upkeep of the energy security for southwestern China. The head of the pipeline lies in Rakhine State, now largely under the control of the rampaging Arakan Army, the likely next-gen autonomous rulers of the this most strategic real estate. Moreover, as with the warlords and ethnic armies elsewhere in Myanmar, any peace in Rakhine that dilutes the power and purpose of the Arakan Army will bring no peace at all.
India’s gaze is relatively less overarching but no less intense. It shares a little over 1,600km of borders with Myanmar. India’s engagement with Myanmar’s rulers over the past decade-and-a-half has largely been to negate the influence of anti-India rebels of the Naga, Meitei, Assamese, Bodo, and Kamtapuri ethnicities who found sanctuary in that country; some are known to even have provided perimeter security to the Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s army, in northwestern Myanmar, and even participated in operations against several ethnic groups in Myanmar, all as a quid pro quo for residency. As anti-junta forces take over Myanmar’s northwestern Sagaing Division and adjacent Chin State, the presence of anti-India rebels in Myanmar is under huge pressure; many have headed home to fish in newly troubled waters.
Indeed, there is the added stress on account of India’s more recent self-inflicted domestic disasters in the state of Manipur. This has unleashed massive ethnic violence between the Meitei and Kuki-Chin-Zo peoples -- the latter now look to protect their brethren across the border in Manipur. The mostly porous border is so uneasy that India is attempting to fast-track the fencing of its entire border with Myanmar.
The other great Indian interest is to protect the Kaladan Multi-modal Transit Transport Project. A sea-river-road initiative, it is designed to link, via Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine State, eastern Indian ports -- primarily Kolkata -- to the far-eastern Indian state of Mizoram. As with the trade-and-transit arrangement with Bangladesh, it is intended to socio-economically bolster India’s far-eastern aspect and, as part of a broader scope, offer robust 360-degree defence in a game of Chinese checkers, if you will.
It so happens that Sittwe, precariously held by junta forces, is now isolated by the Arakan Army. For the past several months this reality has compelled India to jettison its typically blinkered approach of dealing primarily with precariously placed dictators, to also reach out to Arakan Amry and other rebel and anti-junta political elements. An outreach brought representatives of these groups to New Delhi this past November. (An Indian outreach has also begun with the post-Hasina Interim Government of Bangladesh to shore up Indian interests made vulnerable by India’s obtuseness and obduracy, but that is quite another track.)
Lao, with its sub-250km border with Myanmar, was present at the meeting in Bangkok more out of the politeness befitting a conduit nation, to put it mildly. Thailand, which at 2,400km has the longest border of any nation with Myanmar, was there to protect its vast trading and business interests in central, eastern and southeastern Myanmar, and to stanch a greater flow of war-displaced migrants from Myanmar; its role as a G7 proxy in the region has always remained a quieter parallel enterprise.
Bangladesh’s concern with its engagement with Myanmar remains unifocal: The status and fate of the million-plus Rohingya in Bangladesh, and their addition by births-in-exile of several tens of thousands each year. And there’s their continuing influx through 2024 as the situation in Rakhine turned steadily more toxic, not just on account of the conflict of junta forces and their implacable and well-funded and armed rebel foes, but also, belying every assurance given to the world at large by both the junta and Arakan Army, against the Rohingya. The slim 271km border between Bangladesh and Myanmar, and the slimmer border crossing in Bangladesh’s southernmost Teknaf area that was the channel for massive Rohingya influx, has proved to be the most negatively transformative in all eastern South Asia.
In the mind-numbing, shape-shifting equation that is today’s Myanmar, Bangladesh is left holding the emptiest hand. Its only trump card is to scare the hell out of Myanmar’s other neighbours of the explosive potential of a Rohingya breakout from Bangladesh’s teeming, lawless refugee camps that barely tick over, funded by global tokenism. The irony is of course that Bangladesh’s neighbours are, at present, keener to contain or exploit Bangladesh’s own tinderbox demographics and political economy; the Rohingya are the lowest even in that food chain.
But, yes, meetings that foreshadow futures are better than no meetings at all. Call it the golden mean of diplomacy.
Sudeep Chakravarti works in the policy-and-practice space in Eastern South Asia, greater South Asia, and the Indian Ocean Region.