Burma has no foreign enemies threatening to attack it; all its security problems are domestic. What it needs is an impartial police force, not a corrupt and cruel army. The military have been a curse on the country ever since Burma got its independence in 1948.

The Tatmadaw, as the army is known, got off on the wrong foot from the start. Under British rule there was no Burmese army, but during the Second World War young Burmese nationalists sought military training from the Japanese. Quite a few fought alongside the Japanese. No surprise in that: ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’.

Japan lost the war, but those turbulent young patriots became the founding generation of Burmese military officers – and they had learned some bad lessons from the Japanese. They had learned that the army is privileged above all other institutions, and that civilians have to be led firmly. They also learned that overthrowing governments is easy and quite rewarding.

The next 75 years saw a parade of military officers seize power and impose various half-baked ideological schemes on the country. They fought one another and waged incessant military campaigns against the big minority groups. (Only two-thirds of Burma’s population are ethnic Burmese, and the soldiers see their job as keeping the other ethnicities down.)

If students and other civilians dared to protest against the economic shambles and the political repression, the military just massacred them, sometimes killing hundreds of people. Above all, they drained every last drop of value out of the economy to feather their own nests. The army effectively took over the economy and the country got ever poorer.

Burma and next-door Thailand used to be almost twins: the languages are very different, but they share almost a thousand years of intertwined history, religion and culture. They also used to be similar in wealth, but Thailand’s GDP per capita is now $7,000, while Burma’s is $1,100. The army did that.

The Tatmadaw is feared but not loved, and the officer class lives in its own separate world. In 2011 a popular movement headed by Aung Sang Suu Kyi, the daughter of the army’s founder, led a largely non-violent revolution that forced the military to share political power, but in 2021 the army took it back very violently.

It was too late. People had been living in freedom and without fear for a decade, and even the economy was showing signs of recovery. The Karen, Shan, Rakhine and other minority groups, most of whom had been in revolt for a long time, went back to fighting the army, but this time the Burmese themselves joined them.

Tens of thousands of students and other young people left the cities (which are tightly controlled by the army) seeking weapons and military training. Today, three years later, the army still holds all the cities but at least half the countryside is in rebel hands.

Rebel-held territory is ruthlessly bombed by the regime’s air force, but the rebels are starting to hit back with drones. Entire military units are defecting from the army, and the regime recently declared conscription to fill the gaps.

The wild card is China, which shares a long border with northern Burma. In the past it has supported the Burmese army and was its main source of weapons, but it does not love the Burmese regime either.

In 2023 Beijing (or maybe just Chinese commanders along the border) got so fed up with the massive scams on Chinese citizens that various Burmese generals were running from northern Burma that they temporarily withdrew their support. The rebels made massive territorial gains right across the north.

But then the Chinese, having flipped, promptly flopped again, because the last thing they want is the disintegration of Burma into a welter of ethnically defined little states that would be wide open to American influence. But that may be on the cards, whether China likes it or not.

The right goal for all the insurgents would be a federal and democratic state that has abolished its army, but that is very tricky to design when they are fighting a war and the rebels have divergent goals.

As the independent International Crisis Group said recently, “The [Burmese] state is fragmenting as ethnic armed groups consolidate control of their homelands, while in the country’s centre a weak regime clings to power and launches revenge air attacks on territories it has lost. Further fragmentation seems inevitable.”

*Papers are welcome to call it Myanmar if they wish, but it was the army that changed Burma’s name in 1989 in an attempt to wrap itself in the flag. ‘Burma’ comes from ‘Bamar’, the colloquial name for the majority ethnic group, and so long as Daw Aung San Suu Kyi says ‘Burma’ in English so shall I.

Author

Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.

Gwynne Dyer