In a world with no shortage of mass atrocities, the civil war in Myanmar is perhaps the most inescapably dystopian. Ever since the February 2021 coup that deposed the popularly elected National League for Democracy (NLD), the military dictatorship has killed over 3000 civilians and set fire to more than 28,000 civilian homes in an attempt to crush the pro-democracy resistance movement. 17,752 arrests without trial had been made by February 2023, with four high profile political prisoners executed in July 2022 and most civilian political leaders in military custody or solitary confinement- even the still-talismanic Aung San Suu Kyi. On April 11, 2023, the junta carried out their 25th airstrike of the year in the village of Pazi Gyi in Sagaing region, killing up to 175 civilians. Schoolchildren’s corpses were carried away and confiscated from the families, and disposed of by regime authorities.
All of this forms part of what Myanmar’s military, also known as the Tatmadaw, officially calls its ‘Four Cuts Strategy’ against perceived enemies. It involves indiscriminate airstrikes and artillery shelling, razing villages to displace civilian populations, denial of humanitarian access, widespread sexual violence and forcible relocation of entire communities. In August 2017, this strategy was used to kill 24000 Rohingya Muslims in northern Rakhine state and to commit tens of thousands of acts of arson and targeted sexual violence in a matter of weeks. All in all, some 1.7 million citizens of Myanmar have been internally displaced alongside 630,000 stateless Rohingya, with many more leaving the country as refugees, mostly to neighbouring Bangladesh and Thailand.
Though the Union of Burma began as a parliamentary democracy in 1948, it did not last very long as such. In 1962, the general Ne Win led a coup and ruled the country with an iron fist for 26 years. Popular protests against the military regime in 1988, the so-called 8888 movement, were crushed with shocking cruelty: protesters were shot with live ammunition and the military even killed some of the doctors attempting to treat the wounded. Pro-democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi, who was later awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace, was put under house arrest for 15 of the 21 years between 1989 to 2010. At long last, the 2007 anti-government Saffron Revolution (led by saffron-robed Buddhist monks) led to an interim (military-dominated) quasi-democracy in 2011 and multi-party elections in 2015. Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD won thumping majorities every time there was a fair election. But this was often annulled, as in 1990 and most recently, in 2020.
In an inversion of much of the scholarship on Islamism since 9/11, in Myanmar it is relevant to look at Buddhist fascism, which often underlies murderous violence against ethnic and (mostly) religious minorities. This flies in the face of assertions by academics and commentators who have sought to make a distinction between violent ‘Abrahamic’ religions and tolerant ‘Indic/Dharmic’ ones. From the 1938 anti-Indian riots to the 1967 anti-Chinese riots, to Burmese founder Aung San’s own admiration for the fascist ideals of imperial Japan, a dangerous undercurrent of fascism has run through the country since Independence. The all-powerful military junta also exacerbates such divisions: although the 1947 constitution was upended in 1962, the State Religion Promotion Act remains in place and pro-military monks such as Sitagu Sayadaw and Ashin Wirathu receive state patronage. The journal New Mandala published a piece by the academic Paul Fuller reporting that on October 30, 2017, Sitagu Sayadaw gave a sermon suggesting that ‘‘the killing of those who are not Buddhist could be justified on the grounds that they were not complete humans, or indeed humans at all.’’
The worst victims of this by far have been the Rohingya people. Although massacres against the Rohingya have taken place since 1978 (Operation Dragon King), in many ways the August 2017 killings had echoes of the Holocaust owing to the sheer thoroughness of the brutality. The UNCHR described them as ‘a textbook case of ethnic cleansing.’ However, this was only the final outcome of a long-running attempt by the state of Myanmar to dehumanise the Rohingya and delegitimise them as an ethnolinguistic entity with roots in ancient Arakan (Rohang). The first Burmese military dictatorship in 1962 began with removing the Rohingya language from radio broadcasting in 1964 and eventually stripped the Rohingya of citizenship rights in 1982, declaring that the Rohingya were not one of the 135 recognised ethnic groups that formed the eight ‘national races.’ The Rohingya are not allowed to travel or have children without the state’s permission and are forbidden to marry Buddhists. They are even formally denied access to higher education. Rendered officially stateless, they are nonetheless forced to carry National Verification Cards that strip them of most rights emanating from citizenship, but allow access to some basic services for which they have to pay extortionate bribes.
There is a particular form of state-sponsored Islamophobia resulting from Buddho-fascist narratives depicting the Rohingya either as outsiders to Myanmar or as rapists who ‘pollute’ Bamar or Arakan Buddhist bloodlines. Such narratives among Bamar Buddhists bear echoes of Hindutwa conspiracies about ‘love jihad’ and pronouncements by Sri Lanka’s fascist Bodu Bala Sena, which inspired the Organisation for the Protection of Race and Religion (Ma Ba Tha) and the notorious 969 movement. Tufts University’s journal PRAXIS published a report stating that after the 2012 rape and murder of the 26-year-old Rakhine Buddhist Ma Thida Da Htwe, ‘‘gendered narratives spread on social media popularised the notion that the Rohingya were the primary threat to Buddhism, accusing Rohingya women of strategically spreading Islam through high birth rates and men of sexually assaulting and corrupting ‘vulnerable’ Buddhist women.’’ It led to an immediate ‘reprisal’ massacre killing at least 80 Rohingya.
Even elected civilian leaders in Myanmar like Thein Sein have openly wished for the Rohingya to be ‘resettled’ abroad, while Aung San Suu Kyi went so far as to defend the Tatmadaw against charges of genocide against the Rohingya at the International Criminal Court. Even the anti-junta Buddhist Arakan Army is accused of killing and torturing Rohingya men or forcing them to work for free. Therefore, one of the thorniest problems for supporters of the democratic movement in Myanmar will be to ensure that democratic Myanmar will be responsive to the suffering of the Rohingya, to commit to recognising their full and equal rights to citizenship, and to ensure safe repatriation.
However, with stakes in everything from banking and mining to tobacco and tourism, the military remains omnipotent. As flawed as Burmese society may be, the corruption and savagery of the junta is the single largest impediment to peace. It also explains the extraordinary humanitarian crisis in Myanmar and near each of its borders. The roots of violence may often run deeper, but since Independence up to the present day, it is the military alone that is responsible for most of the bloodshed, sexual violence, arson, and forced labour, as well as for the country’s endemic poverty.
The resistance to the military’s complete control over Myanmar has traditionally been led by ethnic resistance organisations (EROs) belonging to the various ethnic minorities persecuted by the Burmese state. These include fighters from Chin, Kachin, Karenni, Karen, Rakhine (Arakanese), Mon, Shan, Pa-O, Ta’ang, and other ethnic groups. Since the coup in 2021, pro-democracy politicians (largely from the NLD) have formed a National Unity Government (NUG) and perhaps for the first time, have apologised to non-Bamar ethnic groups (although there is no firm commitment yet on the Rohingya). The democracy movement calls itself the Spring Revolution and has organised People’s Defence Forces (PDFs) that fight alongside and are often trained by several EROs. This augurs well for the emergence of a genuinely federalist, multiethnic national self-conception for the first time since the long-defunct Panglong Agreement gave certain ethnicities a right to autonomy, even to secede.
But who gains from regime survival in an increasingly blood-soaked Myanmar? The junta’s granting of access to Kyaukphyu deep sea port in Rakhine State would appear to give the People’s Republic of China a long-desired toehold in the Indian Ocean and strategic proximity to the Strait of Malacca, one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. Chinese state media even refers to the 2021 coup in Orwellian terms as a ‘cabinet reshuffle,’ and the UN in May 2023 detailed transfer of arms and other goods from China to the junta, including raw materials for Myanmar’s domestic arms production, worth $267 million. An even greater contributor is Russia, whose contribution amounts to $406 billion. Russia’s contribution includes the Sukhoi Su-30s used to bomb civilians and the Mi-35s used as helicopter gunships in the Tula Toli massacre of the Rohingya and since the coup, used against Bamars and other ethnicities as well.
Yet the much-vaunted ‘global South’ and its desire for a ‘multipolar world’ continues to expose itself through its deafening silence for what it is in reality- an inverted form of racism that winks at and excuses every mass atrocity committed by an anti-Western, overtly anti-democratic coalition. In this category of pseudo-revolutionary discourse, Myanmar’s civilians, the Rohingya, Tigrayans (10% of whose entire population was wiped out between 2021-22 by the Russian-and-Chinese-backed Ethiopian and Eritrean armies), Uyghurs, Syria’s Sunni population, Kurds, Yemenis, Yazidis, and of course, Ukrainians, must bear the cross of Western colonialism, the Iraq war, apartheid, the imperfections of liberal democracy, and all of NATO’s real and imagined crimes during the Cold War by surrendering to their oppressors, laying down arms, and accepting genocide and/or permanent refugee status as a fact of life. Even the use of food blockades as a weapon of war is to be accepted as par for course, or else one is a Western imperialist or Uncle Tom as per this rather jaundiced view of the world.
Equally disturbing has been India’s approach, a result of callous and muddled thinking. As with most issues of global importance, New Delhi is engaged in a precious ‘balancing act’ between the junta and the NUG. This, despite the Myanmar crisis having spilled over into its borders through intense ethnic conflict in the state of Manipur. Moreover, since the coup, some 50,000 civilians from Myanmar have fled to the country’s northeast, largely to the state of Mizoram. Despite all of that, however, one would still be hard-pressed to find a single major headline about Myanmar in an Indian newspaper: about a catastrophe of this magnitude in its immediate neighbourhood!
The Modi government’s latent and often not-so-latent Islamophobia has resulted in devious anti-Rohingya discourse in the immediate aftermath of the 2017 exodus, the adoption of the racist and unconstitutional Citizenship Amendment Act for refugees entering India, and attempts to forcibly repatriate some of the 40,000 Rohingya refugees resident in the country. India continues to support the junta under the excuse that it helps control insurgencies in India and furthers national security imperatives- despite the junta-enabled November 2021 ambush on an Assam rifles convoy and despite the junta granting China control of Great Coco Island- a mere 55 km from India’s naval and air force bases in the Andamans. New Delhi’s continued attempts to dilute Quad and UN resolutions on Myanmar constitute but yet another sad chapter of its democratic decline since May 2014. It also betrays India’s own legacy of humanitarian action- including the acceptance of Tibetans (the Dalai Lama among them) fleeing persecution under Mao, All India Radio’s vocal denunciation of Myanmar’s military violence during the 8888 uprisings, and its diplomatic, military, and humanitarian response to the 1971 genocide of Bengalis in East Pakistan.
ASEAN, for its own part, has tried and failed to enforce a Five Point Consensus formally reached in Jakarta in April 2021 to end the crisis. Coup leader Min Aung Hlaing signed on to the terms, later dishonouring every single one of them. The Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen personally intervened to request a stay on the summary executions of captured dissident leaders in Myanmar. Yet the regime has turned a deaf ear to all such requests.
The last resort, as always, though a poor one, is pressure through sanctions. Putting Myanmar on the black list of the FATF and a regime of sanctions under the BURMA Act signed into law by US President Biden on December 23, 2022, could degrade some of the Tatmadaw’s capacity to wage war against its own people. This could be coupled with sanctions on aviation fuel to put an immediate stop to aerial bombing of civilians and media exposés of the regime’s restrictions on humanitarian access to enable delivery of much-needed aid to vulnerable populations. Intergovernmental bodies such as the UNHCR and WFP must be helped in their efforts to ensure refugees from Myanmar have their basic needs met and human rights guaranteed.
Yet recent experience shows that dictators can circumvent sanctions through ‘multipolar’ geopolitics and weather the storm. Russia, China, Thailand, Singapore, and India are actively helping the regime bypass sanctions and global scrutiny: can one or more of them be made to stop?
The only way out of the hellish conditions in which Myanmar’s civilians and displaced populations find themselves is to end the world’s collective silence and apathy. Until that time, so it goes…
