An escalating civil war threatens to divide a country of about 55 million people sandwiched between China and India. That has international consequences, but the conflict has not attracted much attention.
For the past six months, resistance fighters inside Myanmar have been defeating the ruling military junta in battle after battle, surprising analysts. That raises the possibility that the board risks collapsing.
War is already a catastrophe for human rights. Myanmar’s implosion since the 2021 military coup has ruined its economy and thrown millions of people into extreme poverty. Its reputation as a hub for drugs, hubs for online scams and money laundering is growing. And its destabilization has created strategic headaches for China, India, the United States and other countries.
Here’s an introduction.
A coup d’état paved the way for disaster.
Myanmar is not a democracy. The junta allowed elections more than a decade ago, allowing Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of a slain independence hero, to take a seat in Parliament. She later led a civil government. But the junta controlled key levers of power through a constitution drafted by the military.
In 2021, the generals arrested Ms Aung San Suu Kyi, who by then had lost her halo as a human rights icon, and staged a coup. That sparked demonstrations, a brutal crackdown on mostly peaceful protesters and waves of resistance from armed combatants.
Civil war is not new. Myanmar’s military has been on a warpath since the former British colony gained independence in 1948. The recent fighting is unusual because many civilians from the country’s Bamar ethnic majority have taken up arms alongside ethnic groups that have been fighting against the military for decades.
The fighting has killed thousands of civilians.
In the years before the coup, Myanmar was emerging from decades of isolation under oppressive military rule. Companies like Ford, Coca-Cola and Mastercard made large investments. In Yangon, the largest city, tourists wandered among golden pagodas and grand colonial-era buildings.
Now, bombings have put Yangon on edge, Western nations have imposed financial sanctions on members of the military regime, and thousands of middle-class people have fled to the jungles to fight alongside ethnic insurgencies.
Civilians are bearing the costs. The fighting has killed thousands of people and displaced nearly three million more. The country is now riddled with landmines and extreme inflation has contributed to a drastic shrinking of the middle class, according to the United Nations.
The health sector is in crisis, in part because the regime has attacked doctors. Among the many problems, childhood vaccination has virtually stopped and malaria has increased substantially. Experts fear the spread of HIV and tuberculosis.
The rebels gain territory.
Rebels have seized large swathes of territory since October, when an alliance of ethnic groups near the border with China in Shan state captured several towns. Some attacked the capital, Naypyidaw, with drones and made rapid advances in several border regions. In recent weeks, rebels from the Karen ethnic group captured a commercial town that lies east of Yangon along the border with Thailand, a once unthinkable objective. Neighboring Karenni state could be the first to completely free itself from junta control.
There has also been progress in northeastern Kachin state, where the military controls lucrative jade mines, and in the western border state of Rakhine, where Myanmar soldiers and their allied militias once massacred members of the Muslim minority. Rohingya, causing the death of hundreds of thousands of people. flee to neighboring Bangladesh.
Some analysts say the Arakan Army, a powerful ethnic militia in Rakhine, could soon take Sittwe, the heavily guarded state capital.
The conflict has international repercussions.
The war has regional and international consequences. Russia and other countries have sold at least $1 billion worth of weapons to Myanmar’s military since the 2021 coup, according to the United Nations. China sees threats to the infrastructure projects it has funded across the country. And India, which has long feared chaos in its border areas, is deporting refugees from Myanmar.
Thailand, Myanmar’s eastern neighbor, is equally concerned about the estimated 40,000 or more refugees the United Nations predicts will cross the border this year. Bangladesh sees obstacles to its efforts to repatriate the Rohingya. And the United States has begun providing non-lethal aid to armed resistance groups.
So why isn’t more attention paid to war? One reason could be that Aung San Suu Kyi has gone from being a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, kept under house arrest by the generals, to an apologist for their murderous campaign against the Rohingya.
Richard Horsey, a Myanmar expert and adviser to the International Crisis Group, said his fall from grace ended the “democracy versus generals narrative” that would have helped generate interest in the war.
“The fairy tale narrative is gone,” he said. “And you know, Sudan, right? Haiti? “They don’t get as much attention either.”
Sui-Lee Wee contributed with reports.