Global Thoughts: Myanmar on the brink

By Gwynne Dyer

If the Burmese drive General Min Aung Hlaing and his brutal military regime from power, as they seem about to do, the first thing they should do afterwards is take a leaf from Costa Rica’s book and abolish the army. Don’t reform it or downsize it; just get rid of it forever.

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

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’.

Those turbulent young patriots became the founding generation of Burmese military officers – and they
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 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 army 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 military 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 had been 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 right destination 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 they 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.”