Mizzima
The Myanmar junta’s election is misinformation and “continuation of the war with other means,” says pro-democracy activist Igor Blazevic, speaking on a webinar of Myanmar’s National Unity Consultative Council NUCC this week organized to mark the second anniversary of the Federal Democratic Charter.
The webinar was entitled: “Our Way, Our Goal”.
Speaking to the participants, Blazevic outlined four main points:
RUSTY TRAIN ABOUT TO CRASH
The first point is that the Myanmar Military is seriously weakened and very vulnerable. They are cracking and will implode.
The Military is committing all those terrible atrocities to hide its weakness. The SAC (State Administration Council) is creating different narratives, about fake, sham elections, about “dissolution” of legitimate and popular parties. All that is just smoke bombs to make a fog and hide their vulnerability.
The Military is bleeding every single day, every week, week after week. They are losing every single day. The profound problem is that the Military has and is not able to solve it any more – they simply have too little manpower. They have too many small units stretched over vast territory and being exposed to constant multi-layered attacks. It is like hundreds of bees hitting them on points of vulnerability.
Yes, the resistance has few weapons. However, the resistance has remarkable determination, there is growing and truly remarkable cooperation between the EROs (Ethnic Revolutionary Organizations) and PDFs (People’s Defence Forces) and resistance is on a constant learning curve.
The Military junta is like a slow, heavy, depleted, rusty train that is moving to its inevitable crash.
Yes, the “sit tat” (Military) can implode and will implode. We do not know when that will exactly happen, but that will happen. Myanmar’s “Tet offensive” will happen in one way or another, sooner or later, but it will happen.
We just do not know how much more damage and suffering Myanmar’s neighbours and ASEAN will allow Min Aung Hlaing (MAH) to inflict on the people before his final end in defeat and ignominy will come. There is no way MAH and SAC can regain control over the country. The only thing that will happen is for him to lose.
REJECT THE COUNTER NARRATIVES OF DISUNITY
The second point is that we should resolutely reject the counter narratives of disunity.
The junta is trying to split the alliance between the NUG (National Unity Government) and the EROs, between the Bama struggle for democracy and ethnic struggle for federalism and self-determination. That is understandable. That is the only way how they can survive.
China, Thailand, Sasakawa and various disingenuous “peacemakers” are trying to spread the narrative of disunity so that they can place themselves in the role of “facilitators” and gain undeserved influence. They are trying to “facilitate” negotiations of “all stakeholders”, which means nothing else but to appease junta which anyhow does not have the intention for any negotiations and is only trying to find the way to achieve full victory through terror and destruction.
Those outside players are not able to imagine a future for Myanmar without authoritarian and corrupt military, very often because they are themselves authoritarian and corrupt. But what the disingenuous and self-interested outside players cannot imagine, the people of Myanmar are able to achieve.
What we need to do instead of letting us being dragged into “narratives about disunity”?
We need to counter them with a “winning narrative”, the one I mentioned in the first point.
We also need to counter harmful “narratives about disunity” with “positive, visionary narratives”.
We have more cooperation between EROs than we had ever before. Cooperation between different EROs and PDFs is just remarkable. Key stakeholders, ethnic, Bama, Spring Revolution stakeholders, young protesters and CDM-ers, civil society stakeholders and independent media, they are all firmly committed to a common struggle and they enjoy the support of the people and diaspora. The criminal, murderous gang in uniform cannot prevail over such level of determination.
We also need to be patient with the few relevant stakeholders with whom we need to be patient. And there is also a certain number of fake “stakeholders” who are completely irrelevant and completely corrupt. We simply do not need to pay attention to them, do not treat them as stakeholders. Let them disappear into the dustbin of history.
One more important remark regarding the issue of unity and disunity.
I do not think that we need complex, elaborated formal agreements about the future Myanmar. We need first to make that future happen.
If the junta will prevail and consolidate repressive kleptocracy, there will be no future for the next twenty years at least. Or if the junta’s terror will break country into five or seven territories that are controlled by different armed groups, like for example Libya or South Sudan nowadays, there will be no future at all for decades. What we will have is a Hobbesian “Warre” in which life is “poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.
So, what we need at this point is what I call “minimum consensus” about basic principles and overarching, inspiring vision. We also need a series of small victories achieved through collaborative actions, until we achieve the final victory. Once we have common victory achieved through joint effort and joint struggle, we will have a completely different level of mutual trust and “social capital” and we will have security and time to discuss all the complexities and look for needed compromises.
We do not need formalized agreements at this moment. We need collaborative actions in which we achieve joint small victories. We need from time to time more ambitious bigger collective actions. We will need in one moment also strategic, targeted attacks on critical military supply lines, economic sources of their revenues or symbolically important posts.
More than anything else, we need “Stories and Narratives of Togetherness”.
Particularly when we speak with outside actors, with the UN agencies, with Indonesia, India, Thailand, the rest of ASEAN, China, Japan, Australia, US, European Union, and the UK, we need to speak with them together and with confidence. They are welcome to help with the heroic struggle of the people of Myanmar if they chose so, but they do not have any right to tell to the people of the country that they should accept servitude and oppression under the predatory gang in uniform.
PSYOPS PLAN THAT WILL FAIL
My third point is about the elections. There are no elections. And there will be no elections.
What the junta is trying to achieve is not even a sham, fake election. What they are doing is pursuing a “continuation of the war with other means”. The fake narrative about elections is an attention-diverting operation, it is a disinformation operation to confuse and divide and it is a time-buying operation.
There will be no elections simply because people will reject it. People will not participate. Resistance, both civic and armed will disrupt it. It will never happen.
The Military tried with a coup, and failed. They tried with terror and violence, and they are failing as well. They had that Plan A with elections after two years but they themselves admitted that they failed. So they are trying to see if they can achieve something with a psychological warfare operation which they call postponed “elections”, collecting voters lists or census.
Nothing of that will happen. Full stop.
We just need to stay alert and active, and discredit, undermine and disrupt any attempt to even start to prepare the scaffolds of a fake Potemkin village, which the junta would like to call “elections”.
BIG PROMISE
Let me make the last point. Currently the leadership of the Spring Revolution are promising democracy, freedom, rights, federalism and self-determination. The younger generations of activists are also promising refreshing progressivist ideas about non-discrimination, equal opportunities and inclusion. That is all good and necessary.
However, one more “Big Promise” in necessary.
Leaders of the Spring Revolution need also to promise to the people of Myanmar social-economic reparation, radical programmes of land justice and not just economic growth but also the transformation of the economy.
For decades, the wealth of the county has been plundered and misused by the predatory military and by the kleptocratic mafia on the top. Natural resources and wealth has been used to pay for repression and wars against the people of the country, and also to pay for luxury and the vanity of a small circle of top brass families and their business cronies.
The Spring Revolution should make a credible promise to the people of the country, to all those whose villages have been burned to ground, all those who have been violently expelled from their land, all those who have been incarcerated and tortured in jails, all those who have lost their dear ones, all those who put their lives at ultimate risks by fighting in the jungle or by organising street protests, all of them and many others should be promised that for at least twenty years, if needed even longer, revenues from the national wealth will be primarily used to compensate and affirm their loss, trauma and disadvantage.
The people of Myanmar deserve socio-economic justice and catch-up, which can be given to them only by state policies, not by neoliberal economic competition. The Spring Revolution should clearly promise that as well - and it should keep that promise.
