A Big Story in a Small Distant Land

“I want to eliminate the military and its rule… I’m not scared to fight. I’m prepared to die.”

“I want to eliminate the military and its rule… I’m not scared to fight. I’m prepared to die.”

A 26-year-old Myanmar educated woman embarking to join rebels hell-bent on overthrowing the military junta.

Myanmar (formerly Burma) is relatively small Asian nation, 54 million people of which 88% are Buddhist, and over two thirds of whom are ethnic Bamars. This ethnic group lives mainly in the large urban areas of the Irrawaddy River valley. They have dominated military and political life in Myanmar since national independence in 1948. Tensions from much smaller ethnic groups challenging Bamar supremacy, have simmered for decades, occasionally erupting into regional insurrection. 

On February 1st, the nation experienced a military coup, toppling a fragile civilian elected government effectively led under the aegis of Nobel Peace Prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi. Myanmar is a dark hole of poverty, a backward cloistered country that spent most of recent history under repressive and brutal military rule. Myanmar’s quivering evolution toward democracy is recent, beginning really in 2010, yet still under a malevolent and constant watchful eye of its powerful military. A little summary of the nascent events leading up to that coup, plus a few of the first days of that takeover, is in order (from Wikipedia):

“Since the 2010 election, the government has embarked on a series of reforms to direct the country towards liberal democracy, a mixed economy, and reconciliation, although doubts persist about the motives that underpin such reforms. The series of reforms includes the release of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest, the establishment of the National Human Rights Commission, the granting of general amnesties for more than 200 political prisoners, new labour laws that permit labour unions and strikes, a relaxation of press censorship, and the regulation of currency practices. 

“The impact of the post-election reforms has been observed in numerous areas, including ASEAN's approval of Myanmar's bid for the position of ASEAN chair in 2014; the visit by United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in December 2011 for the encouragement of further progress, which was the first visit by a secretary of state in more than fifty years, during which President Bill Clinton met with the Burmese president and former military commander Thein Sein, as well as opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi; and the participation of Aung San Suu Kyi's NLD party in the 2012 by-elections, facilitated by the government's abolition of the laws that previously barred the NLD. In the April 2012 by-elections, the NLD won 43 of the 45 available seats; previously an illegal organisation, the NLD had not won a single seat under the new constitution. The 2012 by-elections were also the first time that international representatives were allowed to monitor the voting process in Myanmar. 

“In the early morning of 1 February 2021, the day parliament was set to convene, the Tatmadaw, Myanmar's military, detained State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi and other members of the ruling party. The military handed power to military chief Min Aung Hlaing and declared a state of emergency for one year and began closing the borders, restricting travel and electronic communications nationwide… The military announced it would replace the current election commission with a new one, and a military media outlet indicated new elections would be held in about one year – though the military avoided making an official commitment to that. 

“State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint were placed under house arrest, and the military began filing various charges against them. The military expelled NLD party Members of Parliament from the capital city, Naypyitaw.  By March 15, 2021 the military leadership continued to extend martial law into more parts of Yangon, while security forces killed 38 people in a single day of violence. 

“By the second day of the coup, thousands of protesters were marching in the streets of the nation's largest city, and commercial capital, Yangon, and other protests erupted nationwide, largely halting commerce and transportation. Despite the military's arrests and killings of protesters, the first weeks of the coup found growing public participation, including groups of civil servants, teachers, students, workers, monks and religious leaders – even normally disaffected ethnic minorities. 

“The coup was immediately condemned by the United Nations Secretary General, and leaders of democratic nations – including the United States President Joe Biden, western European political leaders, Southeast Asian democracies, and others around the world, who demanded or urged release of the captive leaders, and an immediate return to democratic rule in Myanmar. The U.S. threatened sanctions on the military and its leaders, including a ‘freeze’ of US$1 billion of their assets in the U.S.” Protests mounted. Streets were filled with angry civilians. The Tatmadaw responded with violence. A few dozen were killed. Then a few hundred. The violence escalated well beyond protests. More died. Many were calling the civilian protests the beginnings of a civil war of an “unprecedented scale.” An ultra-violent “bloodbath” looms.

Much of the rest of the world was and is aghast at the violence. The United States pressed economic sanctions against Myanmar exports, mostly precious gemstones. International demands for a return to democracy, for the military to stand down, were ignored. A ceasefire stalled and clearly ended. Writing for the April 11th Los Angeles Times, David Pierson and Kyaw Hsan Hlaing tell us: “The international community fears the conflict could escalate into a volatile diplomatic standoff in a part of the world contested by major powers such as China, India, Russia and the U.S. The legitimacy of the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations, a union of regional states that includes Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and Myanmar, may rest on its efforts to persuade the junta to back down…

“Myanmar’s military, the Tatmadaw, has given no indication it will refrain from brute force in a crisis that could leave it ruling over a wasteland of devastated cities and ruined villages… Security forces’ victims include dozens of children, and the forces have terrorized swaths of the population in nighttime raids. They’ve burned protesters alive, beaten others to death and tortured prisoners by scorching off tattoos of popular civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi, now jailed…

“Tension abounds over how the Bamar share power and national identity with the remaining major ethnic groups such as the Shan, Karen, Rakhine, Kachin and Chin. Other groups such as the Muslim Rohingya have been rejected — made stateless and driven out by the hundreds of thousands to refugee camps in Bangladesh in ‘clearance operations’ led by the Tatmadaw.

“One of the signature efforts of Myanmar’s decade of democratic reforms prior to the coup was the civilian government-led peace process aimed at ending years of civil war in the borderlands… While the initiative led to a national cease-fire agreement with some groups, the process eventually stalled. Ethnic communities continued to view Suu Kyi and her ruling National League for Democracy party as a defender of Bamar interests, highlighted by their indifference to the Tatmadaw’s treatment of the Rohingya.

“The coup has changed that calculus. The Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, a group of deposed NLD lawmakers claiming to be the legitimate government of Myanmar, has declared the country’s military-backed constitution void and drawn up an interim charter in its place… The group’s constitution aims to draw support from the ethnic regions by recognizing calls for greater autonomy and the formation of a federal army under the control of civilian leaders.”

Unlike our perception of a strongman-led military, disciplined professional soldiers imposing a social order, the Tatmadaw operates somewhere between the bounds organized crime and a being a traditional autocratic power elite. Most soldiers struggle within minimal provisions, but the “Generals” are effectively the criminal shot-callers, hording wealth and power to the exclusion of everyone else: “David Eubanks, a Christian missionary embedded with the rebels, said the outgunned insurgents do have advantages in their knowledge of the jungle and their zeal to fight, compared with the typical Tatmadaw foot soldier, who is often underfed and poorly treated by his superiors.

“‘The Burmese military lacks an ideology,’ Eubanks said. ‘They’re not like ... the Nazis or the Japanese Imperial Army. They’re a big mafia. That makes it very hard for units to sustain [combat] action. No one is going to willingly die for a lie.’” LA Times. It’s hard to expect sanctions to work in a nation that has lived on fumes for all of recent memory, but the mounting inhumanity just might compel the world to enter the fray and depose this cruelest leadership. Will the international community engage to protect civilians in a country that produces little in the way of strategic resources? A small dot of inconsequence on the Indian Ocean? Are we too distracted with the pandemic, the nascent economic recovery and our battles with rising right-wing militancy to care? Or does human life still matter to us?

I’m Peter Dekom, and a crowded, climate impaired planet creates massive distractions from man’s inhumanity to man, but our claim to being a moral force is being challenged once again.