DAVID SCOTT MATHIESON
Myanmar all but fell from the international conscience in 2023, with the world subsumed by the Ukraine war, conflict in the Middle East and the dumpster fire of domestic American politics Myanmar, which competed with Sudan for most neglected conflict, was further marginalized by misconceptions that its post-coup civil war had settled into a grinding post-coup stalemate.
That dramatically changed with Operation 1027 in late October, when ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) overran multiple military outposts in the country’s north, seizing big depots of weapons and sending State Administration Council (SAC) military troops into retreat. The lighting attacks renewed global media interest in the conflict while shaking diplomats from their natural state of torpor.
The year ended with overly optimistic predictions of an imminent resistance victory by the Three Brotherhood Alliance (3BA) as fighting spread further in Arakan, Karenni, Sagaing and Chin states and regions. 1027 clearly demonstrated that Myanmar’s struggle against a new era of military rule is not a stalemate and is gaining not losing momentum in various areas of the country.
In contrast to the battlefield, international action was consistently ineffectual. There was hope in 2021 that the world would help: it didn’t. 2022 was a period of anger against the United Nations (UN) and feeble efforts of international engagement.
But 2023 was a year of gritty self-reliance, determination and confidence, liberated from any expectation the world was coming to help the revolution. Many younger revolutionaries welcome Western humanitarian assistance and sanctions but realize that is all that will be offered. Revolutionary Myanmar needs to do it alone.
A member of the Karenni People Defense Force (KPDF) holds up their weapon as they take part in military training at a camp near Demoso in Kayah state.
2023 started with optimism that Indonesia, as chair of the Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), could recharge regional efforts at engaging the SAC, in line with the bloc’s April 2021 Five Point Consensus (5PC).
Yet it was a pedestrian performance by Indonesia and its Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi. This was despite multiple secretive conclaves in Jakarta and Singapore of foreign peace entrepreneurs, the exiled National Unity Government (NUG) and the key Karen, Karenni, Kachin and Chin EAOs, collectively known as the K3C.
The key Arakanese, Ta’ang and Kokang EAOs behind 1027 were notably absent, being more closely enveloped in China’s orbit, but also indifferent to hapless international diplomatic efforts. The ham-fisted approach of using the ASEAN AHA Center to expand humanitarian aid in Myanmar achieved next to nothing.
In the end, Indonesia had little to show for its year of quiet diplomacy as it handed ASEAN’s char to little Laos. In December, Rohingya boat people were attacked by local students after landing in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, an onslaught orchestrated by Jakarta political elites that marked a depressing conclusion to Indonesia’s chairmanship.
China was clearly the international actor with the most discernable influence on Myanmar. For three years, the cry resonated that the resistance needs weapons from the outside to fight the SAC. Misguided hope that the Americans would supply those weapons “like Ukraine” via Thailand obscured the reality that one Myanmar neighbor was quietly supplying the resistance: China.
Operation 1027 couldn’t have happened without tacit Chinese support for the 3BA. Beijing certainly didn’t “outmaneuver” the West or ASEAN; it simply just paid more attention and invested more diplomatic effort. Beijing’s brokering of the Haigeng Agreement ceasefire in Kunming on January 12 certainly won’t end the conflict or save the SAC, but it does illustrate that China has influence, even if evinces no love or trust from anyone in Myanmar.
Thailand in part pursued a manipulative role toward Myanmar in the past year, frustrating Indonesia’s efforts with a series of unilateral visits by senior Thai officials to SAC leaders in Naypyidaw. There was much hope that the Move Forward Party led by Pita Limjaroenrat would adopt a more pro-resistance friendly foreign policy, and dejection that they were not allowed to form a government after winning the Thai election.
Yet there was also frustration in Bangkok that the NUG was doing little to effectively engage Thailand on multiple humanitarian and political fronts, unlike EAOs who pursue discreet and generally effective interactions. Thai academic Surachanee Sriyai wrote in The Irrawaddy that “(a)part from its oft-cited legitimacy from the 2020 election, the NUG has been described as ‘unconvincing’ by many sources as the potential leader of the future Myanmar.”
The West, meanwhile, failed Myanmar in three crucial ways. First, it failed at an international system level, especially from the United Nations. The Under Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths move to throw the Secretary General’s Special Envoy Noeleen Heyzer under the bus in May pretty much put paid to the credibility of the UN’s mediation efforts: Heyzer hasn’t been replaced and it would make little difference if a successor was announced.
Griffiths paid a debasing visit to coupmaker Senior General Min Aung Hlaing soon after, managed to obtain some more visas for foreign UN staff and self-stamped the trip a success. It was anything but, though. The UN country team remained divisive and uncoordinated, managing to deliver aid only when and where it is safe to do so and generally became increasingly irrelevant inside the country.
Debasing visit: Myanmar’s Senior General Min Aung Hlaing and the UN’s Martin Griffiths embrace in Naypyidaw.
But the West also failed in its inability to generate new and better ideas that could work in real-world Myanmar. It did, however, produce several bad initiatives. Finland invited SAC officials to Helsinki for a secret meeting (which went nowhere). Switzerland convened a workshop with the SAC and leaders of insignificant, illegitimate and barely armed EAOs who signed the farcical 2015 Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA).
Both were castigated by Myanmar civil society organizations for groveling to the SAC. And both served to discredit the West at large while raising speculation about what other secretive initiatives may be festering. All in all, the attempts at quiet diplomacy showed the limitations of Western capacity to foster innovative thinking on supporting the real resistance forces: so many pointless strategy workshops in hotel conference rooms, so little time.
The international human rights system also let down Myanmar despite producing multiple reports on mass atrocities, many of them of high quality and some deplorably poor and opportunistic funding grabs. They were met largely by silence. Trust in international rights promotion, justice initiatives, laudable but likely ineffectual universal jurisdiction campaigns and strategic advocacy likewise waned, following a global pattern.
Second, many Western countries failed domestically to construct more effective unilateral approaches or make Myanmar a more prominent issue within their foreign policy outlook. The highly anticipated Burma Act in the United States has produced literally nothing, and whilst humanitarian assistance is important, diplomatic capital is tokenistic and governance support wasteful.
Canberra largely gave up on Myanmar by inexplicably imposing no further sanctions on the SAC and indefensibly accepting only a handful of asylum seekers. The EU, Britain, Canada and others were likewise transfixed by multiple global crises and demonstrated declining interest in “complicated” Myanmar.
Third, the West failed to support the NUG and the broader resistance complex to perform more effectively in international forums. One can make the argument that it is not the West’s role to strengthen the exiled government comprised mainly of members of the National League for Democracy-led government toppled in the February 2021 post-election military coup.
Yet if there is a clear desire to have the resistance succeed, then more effective support programming to do so could and should be devised. It is utterly absurd, to the point of cruelty, to have Western diplomats insist the NUG have a “plan” for a post-SAC collapse when it is clear the international community itself doesn’t have anything resembling such a plan.
Yet the NUG’s credibility as an international representative of the revolution failed to improve over the past year. Foreign Minister Zin Mar Aung has still not managed to generate a higher profile for Myanmar, amidst clearly fierce competition globally with the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.
But the NUG must also realize that it needs to control the narrative with more confidence. A November profile in the New York Times of the NUG’s “teeny office” in Washington DC was both embarrassing and counterproductive to the resistance. The question stands then: is it even worth making the NUG more effective internationally or is it better to concentrate on the most crucial domain inside Myanmar?
Where the international community could do real damage is if it tries to meddle with the now clearly gathering domestic momentum. In the wake of Operation 1027, there were two broad Western pathologies at play: over-optimism of imminent victory, understandable but unhelpfully premature, and countervailing destructive alarmism of a looming collapse into anarchy.
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