ICG includes Myanmar to its list of 10 world hotspots

25 January 2022
ICG includes Myanmar to its list of 10 world hotspots
Yangon. Photo: Mizzima

The International Crisis Group has included Myanmar in its list of 10 crisis areas in the world to watch in 2022. Their list of 10 includes the tensions over Ukraine, US-China relations, Yemen, Ethiopia and the Israel-Iran standoff.

The following is their assessment of the Myanmar crisis:

Since the February 2021 coup, a crackdown by the country’s military (known as the Tatmadaw) on mostly peaceful protests has fueled broad-based resistance, ranging from civil disobedience to armed clashes with security forces. A deadly stalemate exacts a terrible human toll.

If the generals hoped to reboot Myanmar’s politics, they miscalculated. Piqued at Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy’s landslide win in the November 2020 elections, military leaders called the vote rigged and detained civilian politicians. Their plans for new elections seemingly aimed to install friendlier faces to power. Instead, mass protests against military involvement in politics rocked towns and cities. A crackdown resulting in hundreds of deaths fueled fiercer resistance.

Since then, deposed lawmakers set up their own National Unity Government (NUG) and in September called for revolt against the regime. While the NUG is still developing its own military capability, resistance forces, many of which support the NUG but are mostly not under its direct control, stage attacks daily, ambushing military convoys, bombing regime-linked targets, and assassinating local officials, suspected informants, and others they see as junta loyalists.

Myanmar’s ethnic armed groups, some of which comprise tens of thousands of fighters and control vast upland areas, have themselves adapted. Some have remained aloof; others, responding to constituents’ anger at the coup, have resumed fighting the Tatmadaw. Some shelter dissidents, provide them military training, and are negotiating with the NUG. For its part, the NUG has sought to win over armed groups, including by promising a federal system for Myanmar.

Majority views about ethnic minorities are also changing: Long blamed for Myanmar’s problems, minorities’ demands for a fairer share of power today enjoy more support. While a united front against the regime is unlikely, given rebels’ historical rivalries, significant political and military cooperation is taking place.

For its part, the Tatmadaw has doubled down. It detains, sometimes executes, and routinely tortures opponents, often abducting kin as hostages. Battalions have crushed urban dissent, using tactics that aim to kill as many people as possible. (A U.N.-backed investigation’s preliminary analysis suggests crimes against humanity.)

In rural areas, the army fights new resistance groups with old counterinsurgency methods, namely its “four cuts” strategy, aimed at denying rebels food, funds, intelligence, and recruits. It targets civilians; in the latest of many reported incidents, credible accounts suggest that at the end of December the military massacred dozens of civilians fleeing violence in eastern Myanmar. The regime has also attempted to persuade armed groups from entering formal alliances with the NUG, in some cases keeping groups—including the Arakan Army, with which it fought a brutal war in 2019-2020—off the battlefield.

Having locked up their rivals—Aung San Suu Kyi has already been sentenced to two years’ imprisonment and could end up locked up for life—the generals are moving to amend electoral rules in their favor and hold a vote in 2023. However, any poll that would usher in a military-backed government would be seen as a farce.

The standoff’s human cost is devastating. Myanmar’s economy is freefalling, the national currency has crashed, health and education systems have crumbled, poverty rates are estimated to have doubled since 2019, and half of all households cannot afford enough food. Myanmar’s generals, convinced of their role at the country’s helm, are steering it off a cliff.

For the most part, the world is losing interest. While outside actors have little influence on the Tatmadaw, it is critical that they keep trying to get aid in without empowering the regime. They can also usefully throw greater weight behind the diplomatic efforts of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which have so far been mostly dysfunctional, and the new U.N. special envoy. Beyond the human toll, a collapsed state in the heart of the strategically vital Indo-Pacific region serves no one’s interests.