🇲🇲 50,000 displaced in Myanmar, but Operation 1027 is still going strong
China, India watch on as humanitarian crisis spills over borders
Hello friends,
A very long one here today on the situation in Myanmar where Operation 1027 continues to heap pressure on the Myanmar military, known as the Tatmadaw.
Myanmar sections of this newsletter will remain free for all readers during this particularly heady time, so thank you very much to premium readers who make that possible.
However, if you’d like to help me recoup my Ice Americano costs on writing this one please join up here:
As always, free premium memberships for Asean and Timorese nationals under 30. Just hit reply and let me know a little about yourself.
Thank you so much for your support — regardless of which tier you’re on! It’s frightening watching Myanmar’s digital column inches shrink for other conflicts in the world, even as this continues.
A quick guide to finding your bearings
Don’t want to rehash this because we’ve touched on it repeatedly already, but if you’re just catching up: Operation 1027, named after the Oct. 27 date of launching, is a game-changing escalation in clashes between Myanmar’s armed ethnic organisations (EAOs) and the military. In fact, there’s a well-updated timeline of events on the newly established Wikipedia entry which is very handy.
Initially, it was based in the north with a focus on areas along the border with China in which all sorts of dodgy and straight-up illegal stuff happens, including a drug trade that is widely believed to be a large source of funding for the military. But over this month it is widening, either as part of the Operation itself or by EAOs hoping to catch the military unawares. The Operation has scared the hell out of both the military regime and China, where loads of villagers have fled.
The Irrawaddy has an excellent visualisation of the conflict here, which shows how widespread the fighting is as well as makes the players in each state a little clearer.
There has been some truly fantastic reporting, both from the foreign media heavyweights and the local publications. So, today, we’ll leave the rest of the Mekong and focus only on Myanmar. I do want to flag that Myanmar Now has talked about needing to pop up a paywall to fund its brilliant reporting and when the time comes I will be repeatedly hassling all of us to pull out the debit cards because their work must continue.
Moving out of harm’s way, with few safe options left
A staggering 50,000 people have been displaced amid the intense fighting in northern Shan state, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said on Friday. That’s in addition to the 40,000 people displaced across Sagaing region and Kachin state since the start of the month, Al Jazeera reports. OCHA said the vast majority of these people have sought shelter at religious sites with a few opting for internally displaced persons camps.
It’s a grim finding. “Ongoing hostilities, coupled with the existence of checkpoints, road closures, and structural damage to bridges, are severely restricting the ability of humanitarian agencies to reach affected people, conduct verification of needs, and transport vital supplies,” OCHA said in a statement.
Some are pre-emptively moving. Myanmar Now reported residents of Laukkai, in the Shan state’s Kokang Self-Administered Zone, began leaving the town in droves last week amid concerns that Operation 1027 fighting was moving closer and closer. Myanmar Now noted that at the time of reporting the town was still under junta control but the Brotherhood Alliance, a troika of ethnic armed organisations, had won control of neighbouring villages in recent days.
The reporting here shows how difficult it is for those seeking relative safety. Around 2,000 residents found themselves stranded by roadblocks and were only able to continue when the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, a member party of the Alliance, opened up alternative routes.
Operation 1027’s borders expand
The Arakan Army in Rakhine state launched its own offensive against junta targets yesterday, Myanmar Now reports. One unnamed villager told the outlet that villagers near the town of Rathedaung were forced to flee heavy shelling from the military, while others have been effectively trapped in bomb shelters.
“A lot of people are in the market, buying up dry goods and rice. Express boat services have been suspended. They’ve closed the gates, so people outside of town can’t get in and people in town can’t get out,” one Sittwe resident told Myanmar Now.
The informal ceasefire, in place since last November, has ended with a bang. Myanmar Now notes that while there are local reasons for fighting to re-emerge — AA members last week detained several police officers — it should be seen as linked to Operation 1027.
Back east in Kayah state: what happened to a military Fighter Jet that crashed on Saturday? The Karenni Nationalities Defence Force claimed responsibility, saying their fighters shot it down. As if, says the junta, it was a technical issue and the pilots ejected safely and have been in touch with the military, Reuters reported on the weekend.
A return to the revolutionary light
“1,000 days of revolutionary light” said anti-junta demonstrators in the Sagaing Region on Oct. 29, marking 1,000 days since the junta tore down the democratically elected National League of Democracy government. The area has historically been fairly quiet, but the coup turned it into a stronghold for the People’s Defence Forces and has reignited the revolutionary spirit.
Committees across the region have been formed to resist the military junta, Frontier Myanmar reports, with the Strike Strategy and Policy Committee and the Regional Strike Working Committee bringing it all together. “No matter how much the military council oppresses us, we want to show the people living in the city and the international community that we don’t accept military dictatorship,” SSPC member Ko Khant Wai Phyo told the outlet.
The focus is less on armed struggle — there’s plenty of that — and more on educating local communities about boycotting military-linked businesses, and showing that everyone has a place in the resistance even if you don’t want to carry a gun. “Some people think that public demonstrations aren’t needed anymore because the defensive armed resistance has become stronger. We need to convince people that popular mobilisation is also important,” Ma Chaw Su from the Monywa Strike Committee said.
Twin reports highlight personal toll
I am an enormous fan of Peter Torres Fremlin’s Disability Debrief (sign up!) which looks at world news, recent conflict in particular, through a disability lens. He spoke last week with an unidentified Myanmar national with mobility issues on how the broader post-coup trajectory of Myanmar looks for disabled nationals.
The whole Q&A is a fascinating, underexplored angle but I was really taken by the insight that people with visible mobility disabilities are assumed by security forces to be deeply anti-junta because the disability is suspected to have been sustained during pro-democracy/anti-junta clashes. For the interviewee, that is not the case. But still: “First they ask, “Where do you come from and where do you live and why you have a disability, when happened? When did you became disabled? What is the reason for becoming disabled?” They suspect persons with amputees were the People's Defense Force members.”
The broader breakdown in services and the ability for civil society organisations to operate has left disabled Myanmar people behind. Particularly, the interviewee says, in more rural areas where services were haphazard to begin with.
“We are struggling and moving ahead, but the expectation is for some years we'll not see the tangible success. We will still face the similar challenges or worse conditions. Currently our future is still dark.
But one day, many people believe that we will win and then could remove the coup and make a new nation. We hope that we'll have a bright future, and opportunities to start everything with a new trend, a new normal life.”
Elsewhere, new research from the Security Force Monitor (SFM), a project run by Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute, has found a revolting 64% “of all Myanmar’s senior military commanders are responsible for war crimes,” the Guardian reports. The most egregious alleged offender is Gen Mya Tun Oo, now deputy prime minister and a former defence minister.
The survey looks at allegations spanning 2011 to this year and includes the horrendous uptick in violence against the Rohingya in Rakhine state beginning (again) in 2017. “Ultimately, this research aims to support efforts to deliver international accountability for alleged war crimes committed by Myanmar’s military by shining a light on one of the most secretive and opaque militaries in the world,” SFM director Tony Wilson said.
Much of these allegations include terrible accounts of extraordinarily violent sexual assault of women across the country which still go unaccounted for, even as trauma keeps the victims awake at night for years.
Is it coming apart for Min Aung Hlaing and the military?
That’s the big question.
“It is necessary to carefully control this issue. As now is an important time for the state, the entire people need to support Tatmadaw,” Myint Swe, president of the State Administration Council, told a national security meeting, as reported by Reuters.
It reminded me immediately of Oliver Slow’s Return of the Junta, which looked at the history of the military in the country. As far as the Tatmadaw is concerned, the only thing standing in the way of the collapse of Myanmar as a nation-state is itself.
The fear among the junta is increasingly plain to see. “This is the weakest the Tatmadaw has been since the coup,” one unnamed diplomat told Reuters, with others agreeing. Bamar People's Liberation Army leader Maung Saungkha told Poppy Mcpherson and Devjyot Ghoshal that the EAOs and anti-coup defence forces have been working on launching the operation for a year. Which sounds to me that, if true, is an immense failure of intelligence on the Tatmadaw’s behalf and may be further evidence that they simply have no idea what is going on.
In an extensive analysis, the BBC’s Jonathan Head and Lulu Luo note that the junta has, so far, been unable to regain the ground lost in the Operation — or bring in reinforcements from elsewhere in the country. The military is stretched very thin and, compared to an unusual degree of solidarity among the usually fractured EAO landscape, this is trouble for them.
Get out the textas and scrap paper, because this gets confusing quickly. With a score of EAO involved with varying degrees of actual combat engagement, let alone priorities — some want to overthrow the junta government while others are focused on ending the hideously exploitative scam compounds and narcotics trade — the next few months will be crucial, but complicated. And that’s before we even get to China and India.
The powerful neighbourhood
Fantastic Q&A here from VOA with Miemie Winn Byrd, a big brain from the Asia-Pacific Centre for Security Studies. She poured cold water on the line that China essentially ‘green lit’ Operation 1027 given it, too, wants to end the criminal trade along the border. It’s less approval, she said, noting that China doesn’t really have much outright influence on the groups behind the Brotherhood Alliance, rather “China kind of stepped back from putting pressure on them.”
The whole thing is great, but this is a stand-out answer to me: “China has a decision to make: They need to decide whether they want stability on their borders and stability for all the investment that they have put into Myanmar. They want someone in charge that they can manipulate, because military regimes have always been ones that they can manipulate. Under the military regime, Myanmar has been sold out to China a lot more, and China has gained a lot more than it was ever able to do in the civilian government. But now China has to make the decision: Do we want stability, or do we want the manipulation? You can manipulate the bad governance, but then you don't have the stability, and all the investment that you put into the area is at risk.”
Succinct!
For its part, Beijing’s comments have largely reflected this view: “China is highly concerned about the conflict in northern Myanmar and urges all parties concerned in Myanmar to immediately cease fire and stop fighting, pay practical attention to China's security concerns, and work with China to maintain the safety of China-Myanmar co-operation projects and business personnel,” foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said on Friday at a regular presser, as reported by Reuters.
Still, arrest warrants have been issued on “several members of a junta-aligned crime family” operating in the Kokang SAZ, Sebastian Strangio reports for the Diplomat this week. “These also signify in coded form Beijing’s tacit acceptance of the resistance offensive that has converged on Kokang since late October,” Strangio writes.
The focus has primarily been on China, but India is finding itself increasingly drawn into the conflict. Reuters reported yesterday that fighting in Chin state, which borders India, has seen around 5,000 people pour into the country, according to James Lalrinchhana, the deputy chief of Champhai, just across the border. Newswire Press Trust of India reported one 51-year-old man from Myanmar who had sought shelter in Zokhawthar, an Indian border town, was killed allegedly by a stray bullet, showing just how close the conflict is.
I’m really interested in knowing more about how this is developing in India, so if you come across analysis or reporting please let me know!
A note on language
Despite being addicted to Twitter for over a decade, tiffs between very smart people I admire still make me uncomfortable. Still, this conversation between BBC regional heavy-hitter Jonathan Head and those in the activist/advocate space about the use of terms like ‘government’ to refer to the junta was very interesting. Personally, I’m lucky to have been able to invent my own style guide (that is, just do whatever Frontier does) but it was interesting nonetheless!
I also just came across this year-old piece from Aung Kaung Myat in Oxford’s Tea Circle blog that debates the use of Sit-Tat over Tatmadaw, which has given me some thought. I think with such a diverse, international audience it may be difficult for my purposes, but the piece is fascinating. Linguistic nerds, this one is for you.