On February 1, Myanmar completed four years of military rule. On this day in 2021 General Min Aung Hlaing ousted the National League for Democracy government, which had won the November 2020 election, on the charge the election was fraudulent.
The coup, however, failed to be a swift usurpation of power, as the Myanmar armed forces or Tatmadaw had expected. Instead, it has thrown the country into anarchy amid strong resistance from an overwhelmingly large section of the people.
Myanmar is not new to such crises, having faced them time and again ever since its independence from the British on January 4, 1948. At the time of independence, other than the Buddhist Bamar, who now constitute over 68 percent of the country’s 5.46 crore population, a few other ethnic communities began fighting for their own independence. Shelby Tucker’s Burma: The Curse of Independence profiles this chaos convincingly, as does Bertil Lintner’s Burma in Revolt: Poppy and Insurgency Since 1948.
The post-independence turmoil is best illustrated by the fact that two divisions of Kuomintang soldiers entered Myanmar’s Shan state and stationed themselves there without consent for a decade starting 1949, preparing for counter-offensives against Mao Zedong’s Communist regime assisted by the CIA.
Tucker says it was the Kuomintang soldiers who started systematic poppy cultivation to fund themselves after the US withdrew support in order to befriend China, taking advantage of a fissure that had appeared between China and the Soviet Union. When the Kuomintang soldiers finally left Myanmar for Formosa (now Taiwan), the drug infrastructure they built were inherited by local warlords such as Khun Sa. Thus was born the notorious Golden Triangle between northeastern Myanmar, northwestern Thailand and northern Laos.
The sense of humiliation was such that when General Ne Win staged a military coup in 1962 to oust Myanmar’s first Prime Minister U Nu’s elected government, the Myanmarese people heaved a sigh of relief. It was only when it became clear that the military was there to stay that public disillusionment grew. In a manner similar to what’s happening today, this anger boiled over to become a revolt that’s often called the ‘8888 Uprising’, because some key events occurred on August 8, 1988.
The division between the hill communities and the Bamar is also a fallout of British colonial administration. As in Northeast India, the British were only interested in revenue from the plains and left the hills unadministered, although claiming them as British territories, thus encouraging two distinct outlooks to nationhood.
The hills communities became nurseries for colonial army recruits who were sometimes used to put down Bamar resistance. This division showed up during the Second World War, when ethnic groups like the Karen, Kachin and Rohingya Muslims sided with the British, while the Bamar population welcomed the invading Japanese as liberators, though they too later switched allegiance to the British. This left a deep-seated mistrust between the Bamars and other ethnic groups.
When British colonialism ended, they did not leave the hill states independent of Myanmar, leading to multiple ethnic insurgencies that have become the country’s present predicament. Most of the hill states today have well-armed and trained insurgent fighters. After the latest coup, the Bamar population loyal to Aung San Suu Kyi’s ousted National League for Democracy government (now called the National Unity government or NUG) are seeking alliances with these ethnic fighters to become more formidable adversaries of the junta.
But the equation is not so straightforward. There are also ethnic militias referred to as the Pyusawhti that are fighting on the junta’s side, thereby resisting the resistance. These alliances are often determined by inter-ethnic rivalries. For instance, in the upper Sagaing region bordering India, the Shanni, a Shan sub-community, have a bitter territorial feud with their neighbours, the Kachins. Because the Kachins have now allied with the NUG to fight the junta, the Shannis find themselves fighting on the side of the junta.
Indian insurgents taking shelter in Shanni territory have also ended up fighting on the side of their hosts and therefore the junta. These alliances are not ideological and are determined more by the principle of ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend’. When Myanmar’s civil war ends, it’s uncertain where this complex web of friends and enemies will settle.
The country’s first military rule lasted six and a half decades, lifted as late as 2015, when an election was held to the country’s bicameral union assembly, the Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, as well as in its 14 sub-national assemblies, seven of the ethnic states and the remaining seven regions of Myanmar’s heartland.
The NLD swept the 2015 election and formed the government. But this return to democracy was only partial, for Myanmar’s military-drafted 2008 constitution limits the mandate of the people. It reserves 25 percent seats in the assembly for the army, as well as the key portfolios of home, border affairs and defence. The state and regional assemblies were made surrogates of the party in power at the Centre, for the latter was given the power to impose chief ministers on the states.
Evident in all these machinations is the fact that the Tatmadaw wants to remain in power even in a democratic set-up. Another anxiety stems from the suspicion that the ethnic states can start drifting away—a psyche shared by the Bamar public at large.
Even though the NLD swept the 2015 election, the Shan and Rakhine states returned regional parties to their state assemblies. The NLD under Suu Kyi invoked the 2008 constitution to impose the party’s own chief ministers on these two states. Suu Kyi also infamously supported the Tatmadaw’s genocidal campaign against the Rohingyas in her testimony at the International Court of Justice in 2019.
Can Myanmar ever overcome these mutual suspicions between its communities? Not long after the February 2021 coup, scholars Terese Gagnon and Andrew Paul wrote an article with the catchy title ‘Myanmar has never been a nation. Could it become one now?’ Today, the question is on everyone’s lips.
(Views are personal)
(phanjoubam@gmail.com)
Pradip Phanjoubam | Editor, Imphal Review of Arts and Politics