It was not long ago that Aung San Suu Kyi came to
the Hague to defend Myanmar to rebuff
charges that Myanmar carried out a systematic
campaign of mass murder, rape and terror against the Rohingya.
Here fiery speach where she
claimed the Rohingya were in fact the guilty party which did
little to convince the UN Security Council which referred the matter
to the International Criminal Court, in order to establish an ad-hoc tribunal
on Myanmar or having countries with universal jurisdiction use it to deal with
the plight of the Rohingya Muslims who fled
military crackdowns to Bangladesh.
During a 17 Sept. news conference in the Palais des
Nations a UN panel stated that Myanmar incurs state responsibility under the
prohibition against genocide and crimes against humanity, as well as for other
violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian
law. And that Myanmar’s civilian leader, Daw
Aung San Suu Kyi, could face prosecution for crimes against humanity committed
by the military.
Whereby now Suu Kyi herself became
the victim of the military she once so violently defended.
Given the current situation however the U.N. special
envoy for Myanmar now warns that the country faces the possibility of civil war
at
an unprecedented scale.
Does Myanmar now face civil war?
On Friday, most Myanmar citizens woke up to no
internet access.
Myanmar's military junta has cut all
wireless internet services until
further notice, in what appears to be part of a concerted effort to control
communications and messaging in the Southeast Asian country.
Rights group Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Friday that
the junta had also "forcibly
disappeared hundreds of people" -- including politicians, election officials,
journalists, activists and protesters -- since the February 1 coup.
The co-chairs of the United Nations Group of Friends
for the Protection of Journalists on Thursday issued a
statement voicing
"deep concern over the attacks on the right to freedom of opinion and
expression and the situation of journalists and media workers in Myanmar and
strongly condemn their harassment, arbitrary arrests and detention, as well as
of human rights defenders and other members of civil society."
Myanmar’s rulers this week crossed a threshold few governments
breach anymore: They have killed, by most estimates, more than 500 unarmed citizens of
their own country.
Such massacres by government forces have, even in a
time of rising nationalism and authoritarianism, been declining worldwide. This
is the seventh in the past decade, compared with 23 in the 1990s, according
to data from Uppsala University in Sweden.
And the violence in Myanmar was carried out by a sort
of government that has grown rarer still: outright military rule.
Myanmar does not signify a return to an earlier era,
experts believe, so much as an echo. Its violence hints at the ways in which
the world has changed, and hasn’t.
Governments are more oppressive but, with a handful of
exceptions like Syria, less likely to kill their own people at scale.
Dictatorships are more common but less overt. And world powers have come to
shun the government crackdowns they once encouraged.
Myanmar is unusual partly because it is a country out
of time, resembling a bygone style of autocracy, but also for the ways in which
it is unique.
And those traits, experts say, helped enable the February coup led by Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, and the
subsequent crackdown on peaceful protesters. They also point to a long and
difficult road ahead.
No two crackdowns are alike, each brought about by
events and personalities particular to its time and place. But scholars have identified
a set of factors that make a government likelier to kill large numbers of its
own citizens. And virtually all are present in Myanmar.
Perhaps the most important warning sign: direct
military rule.
Military rulers tend to be more aggressive in deploying
troops to crush dissent. And unlike civilian autocrats, they have little reason
to fear the troops turning on them, as happened when Romania’s armed forces
ousted the communist rulers who’d ordered them to open fire on protesters in
1989.
Most primes military rulers get paranoid and
don’t have a sense for what levels of dissent are acceptable in society, so
they might be quicker to use force against their citizens, such rulers usually
tend to have a kneejerk reactions to threats.
Myanmar’s generals are typical in this sense:
experienced at fighting, politically powerful, but unfamiliar with the
give-and-take required of even autocratic rule. Force is the tool they know
best.
The country bears another serious risk factor: its
civil war, raging against various ethnic militias since the 1940s.
Most militaries see themselves as protectors against
foreign threats, with a strong taboo against committing violence at home.
But civil war can break that taboo, normalizing the
idea that deploying domestically is legitimate, and making it easier to see
fellow citizens as enemies.
And it accustoms generals to the idea that their proper
place is not guarding the borders but imposing order at home. Myanmar’s
military has considered this its role for decades — even when it allowed
elections and limited civilian government in the years before the coup, it
granted itself permanent seats in the legislature.
Few factors predict future government massacres like
past ones. And it has been less than four years since Myanmar’s conducted one
of the bloodiest of the 21st century, targeting thousands of members of the
country’s Rohingya minority in what the United Nations and human rights
groups called a
genocidal campaign.
International outrage, though severe, did little to
the leaders’ calculus. And much of the domestic response to the Rohingya
killings was supportive. Social media filled with praise for the campaign and
the military officers who led it.
The current violence is not surprising “because of the
genocide and the fact that they were able to get away with it with very little
repercussions,” Dr. Frantz said.
Once a military kills its own with impunity, and even
feels it benefited from the bloodshed, there is very little to stop it from
doing so again.
Country missed out on a change how dictatorship works
The era of armed forces rule peaked between 1960 and
1990, when dozens of countries around the world came under full or partial
military dictatorships, many of them propped up by the United States or the
Soviet Union.
When the Cold War ended, that number collapsed to just
a handful, and has been steadily declining ever since, according to data maintained by One Earth Future, a research
foundation.
Government-sponsored massacres became less frequent
too. But a wave in the 1990s were mostly in countries that, like Myanmar, had
histories of civil war, weak institutions, high poverty rates and politically
powerful militaries — Sudan, Rwanda, Nigeria, Afghanistan, the Democratic
Republic of Congo, among others.
Though they largely failing to stop those killings as
they happened, world leaders and institutions like the United Nations built
systems to encourage democracy and avert future atrocities.
Myanmar, a pariah state that had sealed itself off
from the world until reopening in 2011, didn’t much benefit from those efforts.
The country also missed out on a global change in how
dictatorship works.
A growing number of countries have shifted toward systems where a strongman rises democratically
but then consolidates power. These countries still hold elections and call
themselves democracies, but heavily restrict freedoms and political rivals.
Think Russia, Turkey or Venezuela.
Repression in the last couple of years has actually
gotten worse in dictatorships. But large-scale crackdowns are rarer, in part
because today’s dictators are getting savvier in how they oppress.
Only 20 years ago, 70 percent of protest movements
demanding democracy or systemic change succeeded. But that number has since
plummeted to a historic low of 30 percent, according to a study by Dr. Erica Chenoweth of Harvard University.
Much of the change, Chenoweth wrote, came through
something called “authoritarian learning.”
New-style dictators were wary of calling in the
military, which might turn against them. And mass violence would shatter their
democratic pretensions. So they developed practices to frustrate or fracture
citizen movements: jailing protest leaders, stirring up nationalism, flooding
social media with disinformation.
Some Myanmar experts argue that the country’s civilian leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, was pulling the government in this direction before the generals
seized power for themselves.
But there is one way, experts stress, in which the
world has not much changed: its seeming inability to stop government-sponsored
killings once they begin.
Once the military is involved in politics, it’s hard
to get them out if they don’t want to get out.
Most military rulers do step down after a few years,
usually in response to an economic downturn, protest movement or other headache
that they decide they don’t want. And usually with a promise that they can keep
their ranks and salaries.
But there is a big exception: Rulers who oversee
atrocities tend to stay in office more or less for life.
They usually cling on until the end because they know
there’s a lot of uncertainty should they leave power. Rather than risk
prison time or war crimes charges, they do whatever it takes to hold power.
As to what next, the restoration of ‘democracy’
should not be the goal of Western policies vis-à-vis Myanmar. Instead, the
goal should be restoration of some form or semblance of civilian and
constitutional rule.
Conclusion
The military regime’s brutal killings and extreme
violence against peaceful anti-regime protests since its coup have led Myanmar
to the verge of a full-blown civil war and urban combat.
For weeks following the coup, the approximately 20
ethnic armed groups that have fought for autonomy for decades, but which signed
ceasefire agreements with previous governments in recent years, did nothing in
regard to the nationwide anti-regime protests. But more recently, some of them,
including the KIA and the Karen National Union (KNU), based in the eastern part
of the country, have started announcing that they stand with the people against
the military dictatorship.
On March 27, Brigade 5 of the KNU’s military wing, the
Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), seized a hilltop outpost held by the
military regime in Karen State. The KNLA killed 10 soldiers including an
officer and arrested eight soldiers as prisoners of war.
In retaliation, within a few hours the regime launched
airstrikes against the KNLA using two fighter jets in Papun
District, Karen State. More than a dozen Karen people were killed and thousands
of people fled their villages in the wake of subsequent airstrikes.
In northern Kachin State, the KIA launched offensives
against a military outpost in the jade-mining hub of Hpakant
and another military outpost in Injangyang Township
on March 15, days after the regime’s troops killed at least three young
protesters in Myitkyina, the state capital. In the following days, the KIA
launched more offensives and clashes continued between the KIA and the regime’s
troops.
The KNU is among 10 ethnic armed groups that signed
the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) with the previous government, as well
as the military itself. But the regime’s brutal killings have forced it
officially to break the agreement. More clashes between the KIA and the KNU and
the military are highly likely in Karen and Kachin states. And police stations
and military outposts in the towns and cities in those areas are likely to
continue to be targeted in the coming days, weeks and months.
And that’s not all.
In late March, the Brotherhood Alliance of three armed
groups warned the military that it would collaborate with other ethnic armed
organizations and pro-democracy supporters to defend the people from the
regime’s brutal crackdowns if the violence continued. The Arakan
Army (AA), the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) and Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) issued their
condemnation of the regime amid daily increases in the civilian death toll.
These armed groups are active in their territories in
western Rakhine State and in northern Shan State. Unlike the KNU, they have not
signed the NCA.
The anti-military dictatorship movement sees no room
for compromise at all. Civil war and urban conflict, therefore, seem
unavoidable. Myanmar has already suffered a more than 70-year-long civil war
since independence in 1948, though the fighting has mostly been confined to
remote or border areas. But the war this time will be different. Not only will
the civil war spread inland from the borders, but urban warfare will erupt from
within our cities.
All five of the above armed organizations have urged
the coup leaders to stop their violent crackdowns, release all civilian leaders
and detainees, restore democracy and accept the results of the 2020 general
election, which the NLD won in a landslide.
More of the 20 armed organizations are likely to join
the fight that erupted in response to the anti-coup movement in the cities if
the military regime keeps killing innocent people and terrorizing the entire
population. If that is their plan, however, they should act soon, as the
military regime pays no heed not only to its own people but also to the
international community. Over the past two months, the world has repeatedly
made the same demands as those listed above. But the coup leaders have just
ignored them, which shows they will not stop killing and violently oppressing
their own people.
And with the anti-military dictatorship movement sees
no room for compromise at all. Civil war and urban conflict, therefore, seem
unavoidable. Myanmar has already suffered a more than 70-year-long civil war
since independence in 1948, though the fighting has mostly been confined to
remote or border areas. But the war this time will be different. Not only will
the civil war spread inland from the borders, but urban warfare will erupt from
within its cities it seems.
As a recent article in Australia mentioned Aung Maunge was warned he faced life imprisonment if he rejoined
demonstrations. That has only strengthened his conviction that peaceful protest
alone cannot dislodge the junta. He is now headed north to
Kachin State, where rebel forces are training young protesters in armed
resistance.
“The military will do anything, kill anyone, to stay
in power,” he said. “We
have to combine this social movement with armed struggle. I know a lot of
other people also going to Kachin and Kayin State, because we have no choice.
The latest development came when Myanmar's
ambassador in London has spent
the night in his car after saying he was locked out of his embassy. Only
concerted pressure can get the generals to talk to the civilians and thereby
put Myanmar onto a less ruinous path. The alternative is a failed state at the
heart of Asia.
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