Ahead of Myanmar’s 76th Independence Day on January 4, the official preparations appear morose, half-hearted and unconvincing. By any objective assessment, “independence” from British colonialism has lost its mojo at a time the military regime is immolating Myanmar as a functioning society.
The five “objectives: of this year’s anniversary are as discordant as the State Administration Council’s (SAC) standard bouillabaisse of staid propaganda, blending the military’s “Three Main National Causes”, fantasy-land aims for boosting education and agriculture, and then: “(t)o make efforts to hold free and fair elections under the law and ensure the right to vote across the nation…(and) foster public cooperation for state stability and strengthen the multiparty democratic system at the end of acts of terrorism.”
In other words, there is no plan other than to hold on for grim life as “independence” collapses around them ahead of the third anniversary of their disastrous coup on February 1, 2021. Rumors of urban attacks circulate and the potential for the release of imprisoned former leader Aung San Suu Kyi always attends key holidays, as does hopes for an internal regime purge. Even the kaw la ha la (rumors) are stale this year.
The Myanmar military has never been plagued by ideas. The post-independence civil war of the 1950s was the decade of myth-making for the military as the savior of the union from multiple ethnic, communist and mujahideen insurgents across the country.
A short period of custodial political duties between 1958-1960 whetted the appetite for total rule leading to the 1962 coup of General Ne Win. The ruling class of Myanmar had by then been born with the establishment of the Defense Services Academy (DSA) in the mid-1950s, “The Triumphant Elite of the Future”, a caste of officers who came to see guaranteeing independence from colonial rule as replacing it with a domestic version.
Even in its Socialist-era heyday when its theoretical “System of Correlation of Man and His Environment” gave a delusional decoupage to a militaristic, patriarchal, xenophobic, racist, Bamar, Buddhist autocracy, there was a lack of depth to both political planning and strongman leadership.
Subsequent regimes, with the acronyms of SLORC and SPDC, earlier but sturdier versions of the SAC, blended brute force with low cunning but also realized that natural resource exploitation and crony capitalism won friends and influenced (some) people and were useful in distracting bitter adversaries in ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) with drug deals, jade mining, logging and gold.
Around 2009 it must have looked good to make a change: surviving a cyclone, widespread social acrimony, international isolation, but with a new constitution, insurgents quelled with business deals, and the panting opportunism of regional neighbors for some smash-and-grab capitalist exploitation. Preserving “independence” from civilian control and giving the stage to Suu Kyi to discredit herself was the contract of the post-2010 Myanmar decade.
The inescapable conclusion of Independence Day in Myanmar 2024 is that the SAC has irreparably weakened the central state and provided, in part, the grounds for potential multiple semi-independent “statelets” in Myanmar. This possibility has been growing over the past several years and appears to have been galvanized by the striking gains from Operation 1027, when several armed groups attacked multiple SAC targets in northern Shan state, overrunning hundreds of military and police bases.
There are been similar gains in Karenni, Karen, and Rakhine. January 4 should be a point of reflection that after more than several decades of punishing civilians, in ethnic areas and Central Myanmar, the demise of that “triumphant elite” as well as the current political structure of Myanmar may be inexorable.
The Myanmar military’s counter-insurgency (COI) approach has gradually shifted since the coup from predominantly ground-based operations to “stand-off” punitive air raids and heavy artillery bombardment.
At recent “peace” talks in China, a senior SAC official, secretary of the National Solidarity and Peace Negotiation (NSPNC) told a Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) commander following Operation 1027: “Even if you can militarily seize towns and villages in ethnic areas, your regions will never be peaceful. We will always carry out air raids using the sophisticated weapons we have.”
Around the same time, SAC leader Senior General Min Aung Hlaing was congratulating the Myanmar Air Force (MAF), which celebrated its 76th anniversary in December, on the fine job it was doing attacking various “insurgents” and “terrorists” around Myanmar and how technological trump cards would ensure eventual victory.
It was a message of brute defiance and using extreme force to ensure the survival of the central military elite, which has always subsumed the welfare of the state and society since the early days of the post-independence conflict.
It’s obvious that any strategy for preserving the central Myanmar state that relies on heavy firepower isn’t conducive to a sustainable peace. But the gap in some respects may be narrowing, as resistance claims to have used some 25,000 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), called “drop-bombs” now in Myanmar, since the start of Operation 1027.
These are certainly no match for Russian-made fighter jets and helicopter gunships, but they are part of a multi-pronged revolution from EAOs and their People’s Defense Force (PDF) allies to wrest away territory, technology, battlefield momentum, legitimacy, and above all, optimism, away from the Myanmar military.
Just as they did with Thantlang, the concert in Hpakant, then Par Zi Gyi, they are now subjecting Pauktaw, Loikaw and Namshan with punishment from air, sea and land. The option for conflict “resolution” with armed opponents is simply capitulation or carnage.
Any realistic assessment of political settlements since Independence in 1948 would have realized this. Why expect anything different now?
Despite the desperate straits the SAC is indisputably in, they will almost certainly fight to the end. The Myanmar saying “m’saarya ahmeh, their pett deh” (literally, throwing sand on beef) means “if I can’t have it, you can’t have it.” The spite that comes before a scorched earth campaign. This is what the “federalism from below” planners have been enduring for almost three years now: the deliberate targeting of anything deemed non-SAC.
The Myanmar military since Independence has relied on a colonial maxim: if your opponents won’t join you, divide them. So far, that hasn’t worked effectively post-coup, apart from a number of armed groups in other parts of Shan State remaining on the sidelines.
There have been a number of new collaborations between many armed groups, as clearly evident from 1027, with multiple PDFs being supported by the Three Brotherhood Alliance: the TLNA, Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) and the Arakan Army (AA).
But fueling fratricide, ethnic divisions, and territorial and resource competition are habitual tactics of all previous military regimes over several decades. The “new” revolutionary forces must be vigilant against the SAC’s malevolently effective machinations.
The effective formula should be broad common goals, not hierarchical command and control based upon the central canard of Myanmar Independence: unity. The concept of “unity” is contested in Myanmar. Unity is often perceived by long-persecuted ethnic nationalities as central control, or subordination.
Many in the international community cast the principle solution to a post-SAC Myanmar as the National Unity Government (NUG). The exiled government has an important role in planning a new Myanmar, but not a monopoly.
The NUG is seeking more effective collaboration, as equals, to many of the EAOs and help to build a new country where local aspirations are supported, not squashed, but more emphasis must be directed towards greater trust building.
Many ethnic communities don’t want to see a SAC military dictatorship replaced by a new central Bamar civilian dictatorship: a veritable continuation of 76 years of repression.
Models such as “confederation” or “subsidiarity” have joined “federalism” as new ways to conceive of future political units in the country, a patchwork of different approaches to state-level governance, from Karenni to Rakhine and Chin States. Multiple ‘independence struggles’ concurrently against the SAC
In so many ways, the challenges of Myanmar’s future Independence from the military are more daunting than in 1948. But removing the military, not just its leadership, but the entire institution in its current form, is the necessary purge to any future peace.
As the generals of the SAC gather for their bitter ceremonies on January 4, it will be yet another reminder of the inevitable end of their monkey grip on Myanmar’s independence.
David Scott Mathieson is an independent analyst working on conflict, humanitarian, and human rights issues on Myanmar