Later, as the tragedies unfolded, the astrologers would explain that there had been a terrible mistake in their calculation. The time of Burma’s planned independence almost 75 years ago, on 4 January 1948—together with the six-star flag to be raised at precisely 4:20 AM—had been carefully worked out. The Union Jack was lowered precisely on schedule, and British imperial soldiers marched past new Prime Minister Thakin Nu, later known as U Nu, to the tune of Auld Lang Syne.
Then, the stars began failing the new nation.
Less than three months after the independence ceremony, the so-called Red Flag faction of the Communist Party of Burma, led by Thakin Than Tun, had gone underground and launched an insurgency. Karen ethnic armies threw open the gates of the notorious Insein prison, in Rangoon (now Yangon)’s suburbs. Karenni, Pa-O, mujahideen seeking a Muslim State in Arakan, and even the army’s own 1st Burma Rifles: All of the country seemed to be rebelling.
Over the past seven weeks, insurgents have again swept across Myanmar. Led by the so-called Three Brotherhood Alliance—a coalition of ethnic militia, notably the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance, Ta’ang National Liberation Army and Arakan Army—Operation 1027 has succeeded in pushing the army out of an estimated 300 outposts and bases. A separate operation, code-named 1111, has seen army bases collapse across the Karenni state.
Fighting has extended to the border with Mizoram, with Kuki National Army insurgents seizing a military outpost in northern Tamu on 11 December. Tamu residents reported that multiple air strikes were carried out in defence of the base before besieged soldiers eventually fled into the jungles. Fleeing troops and insurgents have taken shelter across the border in India—and ethnic ties between Kuki and Mizo communities on both sides pose a threat that the conflict could spill over.
Ever since the Myanmar military regained control of the State in 2021, India—like China and other nations in Southeast Asia—has seen its power as a kind of necessary evil. The military is seen, by many diplomats, as the only force that can hold the country together in the face of competing ethnic militia, often with deep links to crime and drugs.
The unprecedented success of the insurgent campaign has led political scientists and analysts of Myanmar, like scholar Zachary Abuza, to suggest the collapse of the military regime is increasingly likely. A correct alignment of the planets and stars could mean democracy is restored to Myanmar—but the slightest misjudgments could unleash a terrifying new era of narco-empires on India’s sensitive eastern borders.
A birth and a death
Even as Burma prepared for independence, two military jeeps raced through the streets of Rangoon, bursting into a cabinet meeting where the country’s political leaders were considering action to disarm a militia. The soldiers assassinated independence-era patriarch Aung San—father to Nobel Laureate and political leader Aung San Suu Kyi—and nine others. The country’s prime minister under Japanese occupation, U Saw, was tried and executed for ordering the killing, lawyer Maung Maung has written.
For imperial Britain, the assassination was not undiluted bad news. Till it turned on Imperial Japan just three months before the fall of Rangoon, Aung’s Burma National Army (BNA) had fought alongside Tokyo. Aung had appeared at the victory parade in Rangoon wearing the uniform of a Japanese major-general, historian Hugh Tinker writes.
The BNA had been called the “Traitor Army”—but Britain felt compelled to hand over power in Burma, knowing it could not sustain an insurgency there as its military moved eastward. According to Tinker, Aung San’s death likely provoked some private smiles in London—but Britain knew that new Prime Minister U Nu faced severe challenges.
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A Cold War crossroads
The tenuous peace achieved by the counter-insurgency campaign of 1949-1951 didn’t last. Thousands of soldiers of the Kuomintang (KMT), the nationalist regime defeated by China’s revolutionary People’s Liberation Army (PLA), found themselves cut off in the southern province of Yunnan. The KMT soldiers retreated south across the border into Burma. Eager to harass China’s communists, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) paid for and equipped these KMT remnants, historian Kenton Clymer records.
Even as CIA-operated cargo aircraft flew in weapons to KMT forces strung along the Salween River, all the way down to the Tenasserim coast, the operation ended up transforming Burma in fundamental ways.
In their efforts to secure the claw-hold inside Burma, scholar Bertil Lintner explains, KMT commanders tied up with ethnic militia seeking independence, like the Karens, the Karennis and the Mons. The KMT also built an opium empire to fund their proto-state, taxing local opium farmers and shipping refined heroin to Thailand. In less than a decade, Myanmar’s most opium production of 30 tonnes a year expanded to several hundred tons.
For its part, the military also acted to protect its own influence, seizing control of powerful sectors of the civilian economy. It bought up the Burma Five Star Shipping Line, a key freight company, a bank and key suppliers of high-quality imported goods. The Generals, thus, acquired a power base independent of the political leadership.
The foundations for a military-dominated State had been laid, just as they were in Pakistan. From 1962, when Myanmar experienced its first military coup d’etat, the country became locked in a deadly mix of ethnic warlordism, and military authoritarianism. The ethnic militia and the Generals fought, made truces, and built personal fortunes, scholar Maung Aung Myoe notes—all under the shadow of an expanding drug trade.
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Great power games
Even though Myanmar’s military has been historically suspicious of superpower neighbour China, the country is dependent on its ties to the People’s Republic. Even though India’s hopes of building a transport corridor linking its Northeast remained stalled by insurgent violence and extortion, the ethnic armies fighting the military have pledged to protect Chinese investments – from crude oil pipelines to casinos. The military, for its part, embraced Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) after the coup.
Lintner has suggested that the genesis of the insurgent offensive might lie in the military’s unwillingness to act against organised crime cartels in the Kokang region, which were given safe haven to engage in online scams and illegal betting operations. The Generals themselves allegedly profited from these criminal enterprises, making them cooperate with China’s law-enforcement efforts.
This argument is disputed by other analysts, like Nian Peng, who say that Beijing is deeply committed to the regime’s survival. As the only easy point of connection to the Indian Ocean for China’s southern provinces, Myanmar has enormous strategic significance for the People’s Republic. The democratic opposition’s links to the West, moreover, gave China reason for suspicion about the motivations of insurgent groups.
Either way, China seems set to benefit from the crisis in the short term. The country is currently brokering talks between the military and the Three Brotherhood Alliance and has called for a ceasefire. As the principal supplier of weapons—illegal and legal—to both parties in the conflict, China is well-positioned to assert its influence.
For exactly that reason, the crisis confronts India with a difficult strategic conundrum. Three decades ago, India was compelled to sacrifice its ties with insurgent groups like the Arakan Army, in a deal that involved the Myanmar military acting against insurgents in the Northeast. The ongoing violence in Manipur has flagged the real and present threat those insurgencies could ignite again, making the military in Myanmar a valuable ally.
At the same time, the local influence of ethnic armies, and their ties to communities in the Northeast, mean India cannot alienate them, either. In Mizoram, once home to one of India’s most bitter ethnic conflicts, sentiment on the issue runs deep. And New Delhi can’t be seen as siding with the junta over its own citizens.
Finding a way to negotiate these competing interests won’t be easy—and perhaps even prove impossible. Escalating warfare can make it impossible for India to indefinitely defer taking sides.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)