Myanmar’s military staged a coup in 2021, blocking democratic reforms and jailing many of the country’s civilian leaders. Three years on, the Southeast Asian nation is on the brink of collapse. Rebel forces, including pro-democracy and ethnic militias, are battling the junta’s soldiers. Tens of thousands of people have been killed and millions more forced to flee.
The rebels now control more than half of Myanmar’s territory.
Source: This map is a simplified version of the effective control map produced by the Special Advisory Committee on Myanmar (SAC-M). The original map provides more detailed information about the control situation.
The fighting in Myanmar’s forests and towns across the country has not attracted the same international attention as the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza. But a decade ago, the country sandwiched between India and China was hailed as a rare example of a peaceful transition from military dictatorship to democratic rule. A military mutiny ended the illusion of political progress. Myanmar has returned to the fractured reality of military terror and civil war. The lawlessness that pervades conflict zones spills outward, with transnational criminal networks using Myanmar as a base to export the products of their illicit activities around the world.
Adam Ferguson (The New York Times)
Why is there a civil war in Myanmar?
The short answer is that the military coup was met with widespread peaceful protests, after which the junta, led by Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, quickly returned to its old methods: imprisonment, terror and killing.
Pro-democracy forces took up arms and joined militias that have been fighting for ethnic minority rights for decades.
The longer answer is this: Myanmar has been in virtual chaos since gaining independence from British rule in 1948. Some of the world’s longest-running armed conflicts have simmered in Myanmar’s borderlands, where ethnic militias seek autonomy, or simply freedom from the repression of the Myanmar military.
A brief period of political reforms by a civilian government led by Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi did not significantly improve the lives of many ethnic minorities, and after her party defeated a military-backed party in Myanmar’s 2020 elections, the military regained full control of the country.
Myanmar’s decades of political turmoil
The common goal of toppling the junta has brought together pro-democracy militias and armed ethnic groups. Working together, these resistance groups have seized significant territory from the Myanmar military. On April 11, they scored their biggest victory yet when they seized a key border town from junta forces.
Who exactly is fighting the Myanmar military?
The diversity of resistance groups fighting the military junta — hundreds of pro-democracy militias, ethnic armies and local defense forces — has made Myanmar the most divided country on earth, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, which tracks 50 high-level conflicts around the world. Complicating matters, some rebel groups are also fighting each other.
More than 20 militias representing different ethnic minorities have been fighting for autonomy for decades, and some of these rebel groups control swaths of territory in Myanmar’s resource-rich peripheral regions.
Ethnic militias seize control across Myanmar
After the coup, exiled politicians and democracy advocates fled arrest, found refuge in these ethnic rebel-controlled areas and formed a shadow power called the Government of National Unity.
Tens of thousands of young people, including doctors, actors, lawyers, teachers, models, Buddhist monks, DJs and engineers, have fled cities under military control, pledged allegiance to the shadow government and formed more than 200 People’s Defense Forces.
The PDF, which is often trained by ethnic militias, is currently fighting in more than 100 townships across the country.
The People’s Defence Forces are made up of hundreds of militia organisations.
Source: Myanmar Peace Monitor
How successful were the rebels?
The resistance has made significant gains since the PDF-backed coalition of three ethnic militias launched an offensive on October 27. The rebels now control much of Myanmar’s borderlands, including the strategic trading city they seized on April 11. Days later, they fired rockets at the country’s top military academy. Some of the fighting has taken place within striking distance of the capital, Naypyidaw, where the generals’ bunkers were built earlier this century.
Military analysts say this year could be a turning point in Myanmar’s war. Junta forces are abandoning forward bases every week. The army is overstrength and undermanned. Even at the best of times, its greatest asset has been numbers, not expertise. In February, the military introduced conscription, signaling its desperate need for new recruits.
Adam Ferguson (The New York Times)
How are civilians affected?
The war in Myanmar is the most violent of the 50 conflicts it tracks, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, which estimates that at least 50,000 people, including at least 8,000 civilians, have been killed since the coup.
Deadly attacks on civilians by military forces
Note: Data as of March 15th
Source: Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project
More than 26,500 people have been detained for opposing the military government, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma) human rights group.
The Myanmar military has bombed the country for more than 900 days since the coup, according to the Myanmar Peace Monitor, an exile group that tracks the war. Tom Andrews, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, said airstrikes have increased fivefold since the rebels launched an offensive in October.
More than 2.6 million people had fled their homes in Syria, a country of about 55 million people, by the end of last year, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Nearly 600,000 of those internally displaced fled after fighting escalated in October. The UN says more than 18 million people are in desperate need of humanitarian assistance, with 1 million in need before the coup.
Every month, hundreds of thousands of people are displaced by fighting.
Source: Myanmar Peace Monitor
Note: Data as of April 2nd
UN investigators have said the junta’s forces should be investigated for war crimes and crimes against humanity, citing reports of systematic sexual violence, the burning of villages and the indiscriminate use of landmines. Such abuses predated the coup, and in 2017 the military carried out what the US has said was a genocidal campaign against the Rohingya Muslim minority.
Who lives in the countryside?
Myanmar is an extremely diverse country whose borders were determined by British imperialism, not ethnic boundaries. Officially, 135 ethnic groups live in Myanmar, but the only real agreement is that this figure is incorrect.
Myanmar has an astonishing diversity of ethnic groups.
Note: The Karenni are also known as the Kayah, the Karen are also known as the Kayin, the Rakhine are also known as the Arakanese, and the Ta’ang are also known as the Palaung.
Source: Myanmar General Affairs Department
Some of Myanmar’s ethnic minorities have more in common with Chinese, Indians and Thais than with Burmese, Myanmar’s largest ethnic group. Others come from princely states that were not fully under the control of the central government until the middle of the last century. Still others, like more than a million Rohingya, are stateless because the military refuses to recognize them as legitimate residents of the country.
Myanmar’s ethnic minorities, particularly non-Buddhists, share a long history of persecution by the military.
Myanmar’s ethnic diversity is concentrated in the foothills of the Himalayas and in the forested border areas that encompass the delta and lowlands through which the Irrawaddy River flows.
Myanmar or Burma?
Both.
In 1948, the Union of Burma declared independence from British rule. In Burmese, Burma and Myanmar have the same root. In 1989, a year after the pro-democracy movement was violently suppressed, the military junta changed the country’s international name to Myanmar, the name by which it is known locally. The generals argued that Myanmar was a more inclusive name because it was less clearly associated with the country’s majority ethnic Burman.
Still, pro-democracy activists led by Aung San Suu Kyi tended to call the country Burma to show their opposition to the military junta. Ethnic minorities often referred to the country as Burma when speaking English. The United States still officially refers to the country as Burma, but most foreign governments use Myanmar. After the 2021 coup, some exiled politicians and other pro-democracy activists who previously referred to the country as Myanmar have begun to refer to it as Burma when speaking to the international community.
However, most people still refer to it as Myanmar.
There is no common term to describe the inhabitants of this country. Some refer to them as Burmese in Myanmar, but this seems like an inconsistent usage. In Myanmar, the people are commonly referred to as Myanmarese, and this term serves as both state and nationality.
Can Myanmar unite?
Three years after the coup, Myanmar’s center remains under military rule, but the rest of the country is a kaleidoscope of competing factions, fiefdoms, democratic havens, and drug lord hideouts. Ethnic armed groups control some areas. Officials aligned with the Government of National Unity have set up schools and clinics in others. In still others, no one is in charge, and residents lack basic services and are at risk of falling into marginalization.
Adam Ferguson (The New York Times)
Parts of Myanmar are off-limits due to the junta’s widespread use of landmines. More than 100,000 civil servants have refused to come to work in regime-held areas as part of a long-running civil disobedience campaign. Many of Myanmar’s most educated people live in exile or in the jungle, and some are in prison.
The military remains Myanmar’s largest and most influential institution, and a military culture permeates many areas dominated by ethnic minorities. The question is whether the Myanmar military will remove its commander-in-chief, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, if it determines he is an obstacle to the military’s survival. Myanmar’s history is filled with soldiers being pushed aside for others. As soldier deaths mount, the military faces an existential threat.
A junta, perhaps a new one rather than the current one, could try to negotiate a ceasefire with the many rival armed groups, but trust would be hard to come by given Myanmar’s military’s history of turning its guns on its own people.
Myanmar’s future is likely to remain fragmented, with no single authority. Such a fragmented state is likely to provoke further unrest that cannot be contained at its borders. Myanmar is once again the world’s largest producer of opium, displacing Afghanistan. Some ethnic armed groups survive by mass-producing methamphetamine and other synthetic drugs. And Myanmar is the center of a cyber fraud industry that steals billions of dollars from unsuspecting people and kidnaps them to commit fraud.