Looming: Civil war in Myanmar?

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Looming: Civil war in Myanmar?

Saturday, 02 July 2022 | Hiranmay Karlekar

Looming: Civil war in Myanmar?

The junta’s reign of terror in Myanmar is facing growing resistance from several insurgent ethnic organisatons and civilian population

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has pushed the developments in Myanmar away from the centre stage of global discourse. Hence, the ruling junta’s increasingly savage war on its own people demanding a return to democracy and the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and other detained Myanmar leaders no longer receives the attention it earlier did. The junta has killed over 2,000 civilians and detained more than 11,200 political prisoners, according to Myanmar’s Assistance Association for Political Prisoners recently.

Daw Aung San Suu-Kyi’s persecution continues. The icon of Myanmar’s democracy has been convicted in half a dozen cases, and sentenced to a total of 11 years in prison, following sham trials by kangaroo courts closed to the public. Her lawyers have been barred from addressing the media. She has recently been moved from house arrest to solitary confinement in prison. As in the cases of fabricated verdicts against her, the move has been widely condemned, with Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for the United Nations Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, criticising it sharply.

All this, of course, has had no effect on the junta chief, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, who presides over the reign of terror unleashed by the Tatmadaw, as Myanmar’s army is officially known. Things will change only after the junta is defenestrated. How long will that take? Opposition to the junta is growing. The National Unity Government (NUG), formed on April 16, 2021, by some leaders of the National League for Democracy — the party led by Daw Suu Kyi — activists and representatives of several insurgent ethnic organisatons and minor parties, announced, in May, 2021, the formation of its armed wing, the People’s Defence Force (PDF). According to a report by Richard C Paddock (The New York Times, June 6, 2022), it claims to have a strength of 60,000. Also, the NUG, according to Paddock, claims that at least 14,890 of Tatmadaw’s soldiers died fighting while its forces lost only 1,000 fighters. The Tatmadaw does not give casualty figures but that it is having a hard time is clear from its burning of villages, use of indiscriminate artillery fire and air attacks against civilian targets.

The Tatmadaw’s strength is generally estimated to be between 300,000 and 350,000 troops. In an article in Asia Times (February 24, 2022), however, Bertil Lintner has quoted the Australian Myanmar-watcher and military matters expert, Andrew Selth, as saying that the key element was “not the number of men and women in uniform, but the number of combat soldiers the junta” could field. “Most estimates,” he added, “cite 100,000-120,000.” Even after counting another 80,000 personnel of the national police, the figure is hardly enough to cope with a hostile population spread out over the entire country and increasingly taking to arms.

As for arms, Lintner states, “Beginning in 1989, the then ruling junta, known as the State Law and Order Restoration Council, or SLORC, spent more than a billion dollars procuring new, more sophisticated military hardware. But most of it would be of little use in counterinsurgency operations in remote mountainous ethnic areas.” Helicopters and aircraft have helped the Tatmadaw but, as seen in Vietnam and, more recently, in Afghanistan, they are not enough to avert defeat.

As for combat capability, Lintner states that Myanmar had battle-hardened troops that had fought guerrillas of the Communist Party of Burma (CPB), the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and the Karen National Army (KNA). A generation of Myanmar’s soldiers, however, has had no combat experience following peace deals the Tatmadaw had signed with over 20 armed ethnic insurgent groups in the 1990s. They are, he cites a source as saying, better at parades and showing off their new uniforms and guns than in combat! He further states that lacking in training and experience, they were mowed down by KIA guerrillas in the major battles that had followed a breakdown of the ceasefire in June 2011. The Tatmadaw had to withdraw its infantry and depend on heavy artillery and attacks by helicopter gunships and aircraft.

The Tatmadaw suffers from low morale and desertions. The opposition, however, is unlikely to be able to oust it from power in the foreseeable future. They lack numerical strength besides heavy artillery, tanks and aircraft, which is almost impossible for them to procure now. Without these, they will not be able to win large battles in the plains.  On its part, the Tatmadaw is losing control over increasingly large areas. Its inability to prevent the assassination — at the rate of more than one a day — of village ward administrators appointed by it, clearly indicates this. We thus have a scenario in which the junta and opposition forces are increasingly unable to defeat each other and the entire country is a contested area where economic activity is disrupted and civil war conditions prevail with guerrilla and terrorist action countering State repression. There will be more desertions and discontent within the Tatmadaw as its war against its own people continues. The odds are against it in the long run.

(The author is Consulting Editor, The Pioneer. The views expressed are personal.)

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