If the implosion of a country can ever be equated with the slimmest possibility of a renaissance of democracy, dignity, and aspiration, then Myanmar is a living, breathing -- if somewhat choking -- example.
The future of that country’s 54 million people is tied to the outcome of the pitched battles between the Tatmadaw -- or army -- controlled government, and a loose coalition of the opposition NUG or National Unity Government, 550-plus increasingly better equipped and fiercely determined units of so-called PDFs or public defence forces which count aggrieved citizens as members, and several dozen ethnic armed groups.
Things have come to such a pass that several dozen soldiers of the Myanmar army, including some officers and accompanying families, crossed over to India’s Mizoram state last week to escape the onslaught by the rebel Chin National Army and its affiliates.
The short-to-medium-term outcome -- chaotic democracy or increasingly chaotic dictatorship -- is also of great interest to several countries with extensive geo-economic and geopolitical interests in Myanmar.
Among such vested interests the principal country is China, which shares a 2,000km border with Myanmar. India, which shares a 1,600km-plus border with Myanmar, comes next.
And there is, of course, Bangladesh, which -- besides a relatively short 270km border -- carries the enormous burden of housing a million Rohingya refugees. South Asia’s Palestinians, as it were, have surged across from Myanmar’s Rakhine State to Bangladesh’s hinterland of Cox’s Bazar for a decade to escape a genocidal campaign sowed with hate speech and propaganda engineered by ultra-conservative Buddhist clergy and the military and then reaped with outright military action. Call it GM Hate: The seed of structured animosity against Muslim and the “Bengali” -- as the Rohingya continue to be dismissively referred to in Myanmar.
What happens in Myanmar will decide the future of China and India’s economic and political interests and Bangladesh’s desperate -- and, as yet, deaf -- pleas to China, India, and much of the world for their help to repatriate the Rohingya.
Escalation
Matters have escalated since October 27, when a coalition of three ethnic armed groups calling themselves the Three Brotherhood Alliance launched attacks on junta bases and strategically important towns in the Shan areas, linking a strategically important swathe from the country’s northeast in Shan State along the border with China to the west-central region along the border of Rakhine and Chin States with Bangladesh and India.
The attacks by “3BHA”, the concert of the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, the Ta’ang National Liberation Army, and the Arakan Army -- which operates in Rakhine -- have led to their controlling or influencing key towns, roads, and trading hubs.
Among China’s numerous geo-economic interests in Myanmar -- from extractives to transhipping and a huge range of exports -- are two near-800km hydrocarbon pipelines of great strategic importance that cuts across Myanmar, from Rakhine by the Bay of Bengal and then through Shan State, to southwestern China. At stake in Rakhine, large parts of which is the domain of the Arakan Army, is also a vast proposed Chinese SEZ.
India has a major energy and transhipment node in Rakhine, to link the Indian mainland to its northern arc, just north of China’s hub. It also has a major stake in keeping in quid pro quo delight the junta or whatever expedient power-source is available, to ensure that anti-India rebels who have freely used Myanmar’s border areas as safe haven, headquarters, and for weapons sourcing and training, are denied that space.
In the past week there have been at least two instances of Myanmar army soldiers escaping to the state of Mizoram to India’s far-east. Mizoram shares a 510km border with Myanmar’s western Chin state. Between November 12-17, police in Mizoram confirmed that 74 Myanmar army soldiers, including a major and a captain, crossed over to Mizoram’s Champhai district to escape the onslaught of local forces in Chin state directly across that section of the border.
This is a key difference. Civilians have crossed over in a steady flow since the renewed outbreak of hostilities after the Myanmar military coup of February 2021. They have been welcomed as kin by the local people and the local government -- and also acknowledged by India’s foreign ministry. An estimated 32,000 Chin displaced from Myanmar on account of the ongoing conflict now live in Mizoram.
The Mizo belong to the Kuki-Chin-Zo grouping and share ethnic and cultural roots and linguistic affinity with the Chin. The border has largely remained a line on a map and a figure of speech for decades with border trade supplementing the flow of people; and a more recent uptick in smuggling of everything from narcotics to weapons and accessories -- telescopic sights, et al -- and red sandalwood to pangolin scales.
Myanmar army personnel, on the other hand, sought safety in practicality. They surrendered to Mizoram police, who promptly handed them over to Assam Rifles -- a hybrid entity that is an operational adjunct of the Indian Army but administered by the interior ministry, and which monitors a vast section of the India-Myanmar border. Assam Rifles reportedly flew the Myanmar army personnel by military helicopters from Mizoram to the border town of Moreh further north, in India’s Manipur state, before handing them over to the Tatmadaw.
If this is a curious development, it’s also an understandable one. Like China, India has a lot to balance, a lot to play for.
What about Bangladesh?
As for Bangladesh, the Rohingya repatriation will come a cropper if the Tatmadaw and the State Administration Council, or SAC, that it populates, doesn’t soften its years-long Rohingya hate-mongering and some recent, facile attempts at repatriation -- engineered by China and designed as a face-saver for Bangladesh. Equally, it will come a cropper if ascendant ethnic entities like Arakan Army do not provide the physical and psychological space for the Rohingya to return to their former homeland -- to the villages and towns they called home.
The boast of a Chinese envoy about imminent repatriation of the Rohingya with China’s blessing, needs to be seen through this lens. Indeed, there might not be anything imminent in, or with, Myanmar except the certainty of uncertainty.
Just three months earlier in end-August, this column flagged increasing chaos and a likely endgame. This column stressed that whatever the collective delusion in Nay Pyi Taw, the capital of Myanmar, and the pivot for the stranglehold of the Tatmadaw particularly since the military coup in February 2021, the junta’s hold over the country remains ragged at best.
In that column I quoted a top Myanmar analyst with his premonitory heads-up.
“Here is a message to India, China, and Asean,” the analyst had said, referring to the three entities, besides Japan, that have ramped up their commercial and strategic interests in post-coup Myanmar. “The military is not the only partner for your interest. You have to diversify. Or you will see a huge influx of people, or refugees, in your countries.”
To repeat, he broadened the scope of mitigation from a Rohingya matter to a matter of Myanmar’s disorder scattering refugees of several ethnicities across all points of the compass, in numbers exceeding the two million-plus currently estimated as being internally displaced in Myanmar after the coup.
He described an “existential moment” for the Tatmadaw, which continues to be being challenged for its “legitimacy” and “centrality;” and an existential moment for Myanmar as a whole, where there can be no return-to-normal because the decades-old parameters of normality no longer exist.
This argument extended not just for the people of Myanmar, but also with regard to protecting the geo-economic and geopolitical interests of these countries and regions.
As it happens, China and India are engaged in this multifaceted outreach-and-protection program in Myanmar with all its bewilderingly varied entities.
So is the Tatmadaw, by all accounts. Even as the US imposed fresh sanctions on members of the junta and businesses associated with it in end-October, the Institute for Strategy and Policy-Myanmar, a major Thailand-based think-tank, reported the visit of three Russian Navy destroyers for a first-ever maritime exercise with Myanmar, over 7-9 November.
Watch this space.
Sudeep Chakravarti is Director, Center for South Asian Studies at University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh. He has authored several books on history, ethnography, conflict resolution, and Eastern South Asia. His most recent book is ‘The Eastern Gate: War and Peace in Nagaland, Manipur and India’s Far East’ (Simon and Schuster).
