(Bertil Lintner’s post from The IRRAWADDY MEDIA on 9 September 2024.)
The simplistic version of what is happening in
northern Shan State is that a united front of Bamar and non-Bamar resistance
armies has liberated huge swathes of territory. The Myanmar army is on the
defensive after being forced to abandon numerous small as well as major
outposts and is about to lose the war.
A more down-to-earth look at the situation,
however, reveals a much more complex picture. It is correct that the
Brotherhood Alliance, which brings together the Myanmar National Democratic
Alliance Army (MNDAA), the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) and the
Arakan Army (AA), has taken over large tracts of land in northern Shan State,
including several towns and highways between them.
But the bitter reality is that the resistance forces are not always entirely welcome in the areas they now control. Uniformed men from the TNLA, a Palaung group, patrol Shan-dominated towns like Hsipaw and Kyaukme as well as Kachin-inhabited areas around Namhpakka and Kutkai.
The MNDAA, a group made up of ethnic Chinese from
the Kokang region east of the Salween River, seized control of Lashio, a
multi-ethnic major city, in August. The AA fights for the interests of the
Rakhine people, whose homeland is located in western Myanmar and borders
Bangladesh.
Tens of thousands of people have escaped the
fighting in northern Shan State and, if they have cars, made it to Mandalay and
as far as the old capital Yangon. Poorer people have fled on foot or by
whatever means available and sought refuge in surrounding forests or in areas
bordering Thailand in the south.
Those who remain complain about forced conscription
of young people and having to pay taxes to their new masters. Many Kachin from
the north have gone to the Taunggyi area in southern Shan State. But, even
there, people are far from safe.
The Democratic Voice of Burma, an independent news
outlet in exile, reported on June 5 that “residents from villages in Hsihseng,
Taunggyi, Hopong and Pinlong townships stated that the military and its ally,
the Pa-O National Army (PNA), has been forcefully recruiting and conscripting
local youth since the end of May. Kyauktalonegyi residents [in Taunggyi] were
trained, armed, and sent to the frontline.”
The PNA, once an ethnic Pa-O rebel group, entered
into a ceasefire agreement with the central authorities in April 1991 and
became what could be best described as an auxiliary force to the Myanmar army.
Wealthy northern Shan State residents, regardless of ethnicity, have left
Myanmar altogether and settled in Thailand and other neighboring countries.
And everyone, rich and poor and whatever
nationality they belong to in Myanmar’s ethnically most diverse state, have
been caught in the crossfire between the warring factions and have had to
endure intense and indiscriminate bombardments by the Myanmar Air Force.
TNLA The Pa-laung Army
The role of the TNLA in the war in the north and
its unprecedented successes on the battlefield are especially remarkable. The
Palaung, a Mon-Khmer speaking tribe who call themselves Ta’ang, live mainly in
the hills around Namhsan, a town which once served as the capital of Tawngpeng,
the only Palaung principality in the erstwhile Shan States.
The Tawngpeng Palaung have adopted Shan culture and
the Buddhist religion, and their hills are famous for their many tea estates.
There are also animist Palaung, who traditionally have eked out a living as
slash-and-burn farmers, in the highlands north of Kengtung in eastern Shan
State. The exact number of Palaung living in Myanmar is not known, but
estimates vary between 500,000 and 600,000.
The first Palaung rebel group, called the Palaung
National Front (PNF), was set up in 1963 by a Shan-Palaung, Sai Hla Aung aka
Sao Hso Lane, as a group subordinate to the Shan State Independence Army
(SSIA). The PNF became the 5th and 6th Battalions of the 1st Brigade of the
original Shan State Army (SSA) when it was formed in 1964, uniting the SSIA and
two other groups in Shan State.
In 1971, the SSA set up a political wing called the
Shan State Progress Party (SSPP), of which Sao Hso Lane became the chairman in
1981 (he had been commander of the SSA since 1979.) But by then the Palaung in
the SSA had long broken away and allied themselves with the Kachin Independence
Army (KIA).
Based on the old PNF, a new group called the
Palaung State Liberation Organization (PSLO) with the Palaung State Liberation
Army (PSLA) as its armed wing, was set up in 1976. It continued to be an ally
of the KIA and, in 1986, the PSLO became the Palaung State Liberation Party
(PSLP).
In April 1991, the PSLP/PSLA, like so many other
smaller rebel armies after the 1989 collapse of the powerful Communist Party of
Burma (CPB) on which they had depended for direct or indirect support, entered
into a ceasefire agreement with the Myanmar military and became a
government-recognized militia force.
But that did not mean that peace and normalcy
returned to the Palaung hills. Before long, government-recognized militia
forces took advantage of the new order and began to cultivate opium poppies in
the hills around Namhsan. Drug addiction became rampant and the sale and
smuggling of opium and other refined narcotics undermined whatever law and
order that existed in the area.
In January 1992, Palaung community leaders, who
opposed the ceasefire agreement, met at the Manerplaw headquarters the Karen
National Union (KNU) and the now defunct rebel alliance the National Democratic
Front NDF and formed the Palaung State Liberation Front (PSLF). In the
beginning, it was a purely political organization but as conditions
deteriorated in the Palaung hills, it decided to resort to armed struggle,
which led to the setting up of the TNLA in October 2009.
Young recruits were sent to KIA-controlled areas in
Kachin State, where they received training and got their first weapons. In
February 2011, after only a few months of exercises, 40 men with 27 guns
crossed the Shweli River into northern Shan State. “It was like Granma,” a TNLA
officer told me when we met at the Yunnan-Myanmar border in May 2018.
He was referring to the name of the yacht Fidel
Castro, Che Guevara and a handful of other revolutionaries sailed on from
Mexico to Cuba in 1956 to start their revolution. Within a couple of years, the
TNLA had grown into a formidable fighting force.
The leadership consists mostly of young and
well-educated Palaung, including former government officials, and that makes it
different from most other ethnically-based rebel armies in Myanmar, which are
led by older people who have spent decades fighting in the hills and mountains
of Myanmar’s frontier areas.
The current armed strength of the TNLA is believed
to be between 8,000 and 10,000, and they are much better armed and equipped
than any of its rebel predecessors, which could, at most, muster 600-700 men in
arms.
In December 2023, the TNLA seized control of
Namhsan and it is very likely they were hailed as liberators by the town’s
mostly Palaung population. But by then they had already begun to expand into
Shan- and Kachin-inhabited areas, and today’s problems arose.
MNDAA The Kokang Army
The TNLA’s main ally is no longer the KIA, which
operates in nearby, Kachin-inhabited hills and towns, and certainly not the
SSA/SSPP, whose traditional strongholds are in the Hsipaw-Kyaukme areas. Most
of the TNLA’s impressive arsenal has been supplied by the MNDAA, another group
that has also expanded its influence and power way outside areas where one
would expect them to be operating.
The first group among them, the Kokang
Revolutionary Force (KRF), was set up in 1963 by Jimmy Yang, or Yang Kyin-sein
(Yang Zhensheng), a local politician and banker and sworn enemy of General Ne
Win, who had seized power in a coup the year before and abolished the previous
federal and democratic constitution.
The KRF became the 5th Brigade of the SSA when it
was set up in 1964. Jimmy Yang later joined a unified resistance against Ne
Win’s dictatorship led by the ousted Prime Minister U Nu but left for France in
1973 and returned to Myanmar during a general amnesty in 1980. He died in
Yangon in 1985.
His influence in Kokang was gone as some of his men
with Chinese backing in late 1967 formed the Kokang People’s Liberation Army
(KPLA). Led by the two brothers Peng Jiasheng and Peng Jiafu, the KPLA entered
Kokang in January 1968 and officially merged with the CPB in August that year.
Most of Kokang, then home to some 100,000 people,
remained under communist rule until a mutiny among the rank-and-file of the CPB
in 1989. The MNDAA was formed and, like three other former CPB forces — the
United Wa State Army (UWSA), the New Democratic Army in Kachin State, and the
National Democratic Alliance Army in eastern Shan State — it entered into a
ceasefire agreement with the Myanmar military.
In 2009, fighting broke out between the MNDAA and
the Myanmar Army, and the Kokang-based group began to expand and rearm. At the
time of the 1989 mutiny and the subsequent ceasefire agreement, the MNDAA had
no more than 1,000-1,500 soldiers. Today’s strength is not known but is
believed to equal that of the TNLA.
The MNDAA’s seizure of Lashio, including the
Northeastern Command headquarters of the Myanmar military, in August as well as
crucial border-crossing points into China such as Chin Shwe Haw, sent
shockwaves through the military establishment. The MNDAA has since then
established its own administration in Lashio, but it is uncertain how many of
its once 130,000 residents remain in the city — and how popular the new rulers
of the city actually are.
In April this year, the European Union condemned
the MNDAA for carrying out public executions of dissidents within its own
ranks, calling the sentences “an inhuman and degrading punishment that
represents an ultimate denial of human dignity.” The Irrawaddy reported on May
16 that the MNDAA forcibly recruits migrant workers and kills deserters.
AA The Arakan Army
The AA was established in 2009, but not in Rakhine
State. Its first units were drawn from ethnic Rakhine, or Arakanese, working in
the Hpakant jade mines in Kachin State. Initially trained by the KIA, the AA
first saw action in 2015 when it fought against the Myanmar Army alongside the
MNDAA in northern Shan State.
While maintaining its presence in northern Shan
State, the AA soon moved its main area of operation to Rakhine State, where it
gained considerable support from the Buddhist majority population. Today, it is
believed to have at least 10,000 men and women under arms and its leader, Tun
Myat Naing, or, in Arakanese, Twan Mrat Naing, has appeared on several internet
videos speaking excellent English.
Despite once working as a tour guide in Yangon, he
comes across as a professional soldier with a vision for his homeland and its
people. Like the TNLA, the AA is a new type of rebel army led by younger and
more dynamic people.
Another, older ethnic Rakhine entity, the Arakan
Liberation Party/Army, signed the 2015 so-called “Nationwide Ceasefire
Agreement” with the Myanmar military, but that is a tiny group and its handful
of fighters were encamped with the KNU on the Thai border and never fought any
battles inside Rakhine State.
UWSA The Wa Army
The rapid rise of the rebel forces comprising the
Brotherhood Alliance would not have been possible without massive support from
their chief ally: the United Wa State Army (UWSA), Myanmar’s strongest and
best-equipped ethnic armed group.
The UWSA, with an estimated 25,000-30,000 soldiers
under arms, controls what amounts to a self-governing, 20,000-square-km buffer
state along the Chinese border in northeastern and eastern Shan State. As a
Chinese-language website put it recently, the UWSA remains “nominally neutral”
in today’s war, which, in plain language, means that they themselves don’t
engage in any fighting with the Myanmar military — but they are the main source
of weaponry for the Brotherhood Alliance as well as some of its ethnic Burmese
comrades in arms.
 |
| Almost every rebel soldier in Burma is armed with a Chinese Type-81 assault rifle. |
Those guns, in turn, have been obtained from China, which raises questions about the Chinese role in the war. The Brotherhood Alliance pays lip service to the National Unity Government (NUG), which was set up by elected MPs who were prevented from assuming office when Senior General Min Aung Hlaing’s tanks rolled into Naypyitaw and Yangon on that fateful day, Feb. 1, 2021. The NUG now includes other pro-democracy activists as well, and has been very active lobbying internationally for sympathy and political support for the resistance.
Min Aung Hlaing’s and his military’s ill-conceived
idea that they would be able to form a new, functioning government after
ousting the elected one resulted in massive resistance, and a bloody war not
only in the frontier areas but also, for the first time since the CPB was
active there in the 1970s, in parts of the Myanmar heartland.
But, needless to say, the course the war will take
won’t be decided by some imaginary united front comprising resistance forces
all over the country fighting for a common, nationwide goal and supposedly led
by the NUG.
What Will China Do?
China, which has close contacts with the
Brotherhood Alliance as well as the KIA and some other ethnically-based
resistance armies — and Min Aung Hlaing’s junta — is the only outside power
with the means and the motivation to be an interlocutor for peace in its
troubled southern neighbor.
It is not in China’s interest to see a full-scale
war in Myanmar because it wants to secure its Belt and Road Initiative projects
in the region, which include a vital outlet to the Indian Ocean through the
only neighbor that can provide it with such an access. The next development to
watch, therefore, should be how China is going to play its cards.
An educated guess is that China, once again — and
with more pressure on all sides in the conflict than was the case under its
previous, failed attempts to act as a peacemaker — will step in and negotiate a
ceasefire. But that would only lead to maintaining the status quo with possibly
some alterations and modifications. Not any way forward towards a democratic
Myanmar, which is what most people in the country would like to see.
(Bertil Lintner is a Swedish journalist, author and strategic consultant who has been writing about Asia for nearly four decades.)
