Saw Tah Doh Moo,
General-Secretary, Karen National Union
Khu Plu Reh,
General-Secretary, Karenni National Progressive Party
Salai Thla Hei, General-Secretary, Chin National Front
Under Indonesia’s rotating
leadership for 2023, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) will
reportedly hold their first policy retreat in Jakarta at the beginning of
February. The Burmese junta’s continuing violence against the people of Burma will
undoubtedly be an outstanding issue on the agenda.
As leaders of ethnic armed
organizations that provide security, sanctuary, training and operational
support for the nationwide armed resistance movement in Burma, we believe our
on-the-ground perspectives from the frontlines may help ASEAN to better
comprehend the situation. Indeed, grounded perspectives are essential building
blocks for a potentially fruitful ASEAN approach to Burma’s protracted
conflicts.
Emblem of the Karen National Union
Flag of the Karenni National Progressive Party (KNPP)
Emblem of the Chin National Front.
Here we offer our first-hand
observations with specific respect to three crucial issues, both immediate and
long-term, confronting Burma as a problem member of the regional bloc – first,
the military junta’s widely rejected plan for the new elections this year, and
their likely negative impact on the already deepening violent conflicts which
have enveloped the entire country of 55 million people; second, the immediate
need to prevent Burma from sliding further into state disintegration and ethnic
Balkanization in slow motion; and third, the post-conflict rebuilding of Burma
not simply as a majoritarian democracy, but also, as a federal political
system.
To start with, the Jakarta
meeting could not come at a more opportune time. Recently, the UN Security Council
passed its first-ever resolution on Burma (12 voted ‘yes’, and three abstained:
China, Russia and India) emphatically calling for an end to the violence that
has engulfed the Southeast Asian nation since the universally rejected coup of
1 February 2022. Despite the non-binding nature of the resolution, it
acknowledges ASEAN’s role as the most crucial mechanism for ending violence in
Burma.
Importantly, the Security
Council resolution came on the heels of the U.S. government passing the BURMA
Act, as a part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) just before
Christmas. The BURMA Act allocates substantial humanitarian aid and non-lethal
(non-military) support for the democratic resistance movement of which our
ethnic resistance organizations serve as the backbone.
Over the last three decades,
Russia and China had previously double-vetoed similar resolutions at the
Council not once, but twice (January 2007 and April 2022). Their abstentions on
the historic Burma resolution afford ASEAN leadership an unprecedented
opportunity to seek further constructive involvement of and backing by Moscow
and Beijing with regards to ASEAN’s efforts to kick start the bloc-led
diplomacy towards the cessation of violence and formulate a transitional plan
on Burma.
In this regard, President
Joko Widodo’s growing stature as a G20 leader, who is able to maintain his
“brotherly” ties with President Putin and President Xi, is in a position to
help sway the two fellow G-20 leaders for a firm and principled ASEAN-led
approach in resolving Burma’s perennial crisis with the spill-over regional
consequences such as Rohingya “boat people”.
Burma’s internal conflicts
have triggered chronic waves of war, atrocity and repression-fleeing refugees,
for instance, Karen, Kachin, Karenni, Shan, Chin, Rohingya, and now the
majority Bama. This poses non-traditional security threats not only to Burma’s
immediate neighbors such as Bangladesh, Thailand, China and India, but also
Malaysia, Singapore, Aceh province in Indonesia, and Sri Lanka.
Now, onto the 3-crucial
issues that we believe ought to be better understood: In his Independence Day
announcement on 4 January 2023, Burma coup leader Min Aung Hlaing coupled the
news of the amnesty for 7,000 prisoners with his plan to hold a new general election
in 2023.
Elections held by
authoritarian regimes, without addressing fundamental political conflicts, only
fuel ongoing conflicts and seed new ones. Burma, where the military has written
itself into the 2008 Constitution as the only truly altruistic and trust-worthy
organization to decide the nation’s future, is one glaring case in point.
In the last 30-years, in
every military-sponsored election – in 1990, 2015, and 2020 – the military’s
proxy parties were crushed at the ballot box. This, in spite of the generally
rigged election laws. Every electoral defeat has been followed by either the
wholesale annulment of the election results (1990) and widespread imprisonment
of MP-elects and national opposition leaders, or the military coup (for
instance, the coup of February 2022), on fabricated narratives of “national
security”.
Holding new elections in 2023
will not resolve the crisis. No one believes it will be a democratic exercise.
If the military wins, the democratic resistance popularly backed by the country’s
multiethnic public, will reject the results. The public will continue with
their armed resistance. And the country will slide further into state
disintegration and Balkanization. If the military loses, the generals will
either annul the election results, launch another coup, or find another excuse
to stay on in power. Either scenario will only trigger even stiffer popular
resistance, further destabilizing the already unstable country.
The Burma Army is holding
elections to re-install the 2008 Constitution which they tore up when they
launched the coup in February 2021. They need the 2008 Constitution because it
gives the military veto power in Burma politics in perpetuity. This
constitution of, for and by the military has not a sunset clause designed to
peacefully phase out the monopoly role of the dominant military, from the
country’s political life. All successful transitions from military dictatorship
to democracy such as Indonesia, Chile and Brazil, in transition have sunset
clauses.
In the last two years since
the coup, Burma’s diverse peoples have witnessed first-hand, and on social
media platforms, the extreme violence with which the security forces have
brutally killed the people of Burma. Today the people of Burma no longer
believe in the decades-old myth that the national military is protecting the
people and the nation. They no longer want the military interfering in the
politics of the country. They categorically reject the 2008 Constitution of,
for and by the military.
ASEAN
and the international community need to stress to the chief of the Burma Army
Min Aung Hlaing that elections are not the solution, but a formula for further
instability and state collapse. Instead, he needs to stop the killing and talk
to all stakeholders
who now lead the democratic resistance.
Burma today is a country in
the slow-motion process of state disintegration. The chronic waves of refugees
such as Rohingyas who drift and die at high sea across South and Southeast
Asian waters, the growing number of IDPs from all ethnic communities from all
regions of Burma, and the increasing volume of violence which permeates society
today are only the symptoms of the deeper malaise.
The Burma Army under Min Aung
Hlaing is losing territorial control to the stiff popular armed resistance that
has now spread across even the Burmese Buddhist heartlands from where it
typically drew its recruits. In places where some of the fiercest and best
organized resistance is waged, military commanders dare not venture out of
their regiment compound. The military’s control does not extend far beyond city
limits even in places like the former capital Yangon and Mandalay, the second
largest city. In the non-Bama ethnic regions such as Chin State bordering India
on the West, more than two-thirds of the territories are no longer under the
administrative control of the military junta.
The Civil Disobedience
Movement (CDM) made up of civil servants from all state bureaucracies including
technocrats, doctors, engineers, train conductors, teachers, academics,
accountants, administrators, law enforcement officers (for instance, police)
has more or less emptied the state of its essential administrators, managers
and staff, thus crippling the military junta. Even in major towns and cities
with strong military bases the junta’s administrators and their families are
routinely killed by the resistance fighters.
These internal conflicts,
coupled with the Covid-19 pandemic, have practically brought Burma’s national
economy to its knees. Crucially, the agricultural sector, garment production
sector and other local informal economies, which employed the greatest number
of people are reeling severely from the continuing and widespread violence.
This process of gradual state disintegration needs to be seriously addressed as
part of the emerging challenge to ASEAN.
In sharp contrast, our
territorial control is expanding. Our organizations have decades of experience,
in operating effectively as semi-state organizations in the territories which
we control through our self-defense armed organizations. Our political organizations
have armed or military wings established for self-defense purposes for our
respective ethnic communities. We have founded and run forestry and
conservation departments, health and pre-collegiate education systems, taxation
and revenue systems, civil administration and local democracies. Out of
necessity, we have also built humanitarian aid delivery and distribution
systems, and protection for Internally Displaced Persons – numbering a total of
1.8 million IDPs now since the coup of 2020.
Importantly, we have
conducted rescue missions, offered effective protection and/or provided safe
spaces for members of the National Unity Government (NUG), including the NUG’s
cabinet ministers. The Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) in the north, the
Karen National Union (KNU) in the east and southeast, the Karenni National
Progressive Party (KNPP) in the east, and the Chin National Front (CNF) in the
West, have trained thousands of democratic resistors in a defensive grassroots
war against the Burma Army. As the usurper, the military headed by Min Aung
Hlaing has made its own people “enemies of the state”. These young Burmese
majority resistant fighters live on our land, and fight the repressive
military. We fully support them logistically, operationally and politically.
In the past, when the
majority Burmese Buddhist public revolt, peaceful or armed as was the case in
1988 anti-dictatorship uprising, the Myanmar military would seek an uneasy
peace with us, the non-Bama resistance communities, in order to avoid fighting
the war on two fronts. The military leadership know that our ethnic armed
organizations are fighting for a federal system of power sharing with the
majority Bama – not secession or independence. And yet it has deliberately
mis-framed us as “ethno-nationalist secessionists hellbent on disintegrating
the Union of Myanmar” – to pit us against the nationalistic Bama majority.
The military’s misinformation
campaign is no longer working today.
What is unprecedented about
the present anti-coup movement of multiple ethnic communities including the
Bama majority is the following: the military’s divide-and-rule strategy of
pitting our ethnic nationalities or national minorities against the Bama
majority– no longer has any traction with the majoritarian public.
The opposite is happening
since the bloody crack-down of the originally peaceful anti-coup protests
throughout the country. Today, our ethnic armed organizations that have long
been in control of large swaths of our ancestral regions along Indo-Burmese,
Sino-Chinese and Thai-Burma borders since the coup 2 years ago have become
sanctuaries for nearly 100,000 activists. The new generation of Burma, known as
Generation Z, or “Gen. Z”, fled urban centers and volunteered to swap their
videogames and comfortable middle-class lifestyle to serve as new democratic
resisters.
As leaders of ethnic armed
organizations, we are acutely aware of the devastating intergenerational and
international consequences when a UN member states collapse, as the result of
civil wars, foreign invasions, or atrocities such as genocide. The last thing
Burma’s suffering peoples of all faiths and ethnicities need and want is the
Balkanization in the middle of the ASEAN region. The situation on the ground is
ripe for ASEAN to work with the democratic resistance in order that state
collapse in Burma may be reversed.
ASEAN
needs to emphatically tell the junta chief Min Aung Hlaing and his military to
stop killing the people of Burma, scorch-earthing whole villages and
neighborhoods, burning resisters alive and executing non-violence activists
with an alarming frequency. The military must acknowledge and accept that
they have failed to protect the people. They have failed to contribute to
building a stable and peaceful state out of multiple nations. It is time that
ASEAN work with the democratic resistance to end the violence in Burma and
to help all stakeholders towards rebuilding Burma as a federal and democratic
state.
Our ethnic armed
organizations had entered into an agreement to build such a state with both
governments of President Thein Sein and Aung San Suu Kyi, something Min Aung
Hlaing in his capacity as the Commander-in-Chief of the military officially
endorsed. Just as he has reneged on the ASEAN 5-Points Consensus reached in
Jakarta in April 2021, he has breached our national agreement, annulled
everything and seized power.
As leaders of ethnic armed
resistance organizations, we view ourselves not only representatives of our
respective communities but as national actors. We are forging ahead with an
institutional platform for a federal democracy. We offer our utmost assistance
to ASEAN and call on the UN and friends of ASEAN to support its efforts in
implementing the Five-Point Consensus. Expectations are high among the people
of Burma that under Indonesia’s firm and principled leadership, ASEAN will
finally use its collective leadership to help stem the tide of the violence in
Burma and help kickstart a process for peaceful conflict resolution in our
beleaguered nation.
Saw Tah Doh Moo, General-Secretary, Karen National Union
Khu
Plu Reh, General-Secretary, Karenni National Progressive Party
Salai
Thla Hei, General-Secretary, Chin National Front
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