Two years after the army seized power, resistance to the military regime in Myanmar remains stable

BANGKOK – The prospects for peace in Myanmar, much less a return to democracy, look dimmer than ever two years after the military seized power from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi, experts say.

On Wednesday, opponents of the military regime heeded a call by protest organizers to stay home in what they called a “silent strike” to show their strength and unity.

The opposition’s general strike coordination body, formed after the 2021 takeover, has asked people to stay inside their homes or workplaces from 10 am to 3 pm. In the city, there are only a few vehicles on the roads, and similar scenes are seen elsewhere.

The level of violence across the country worries observers

Small peaceful protests are an almost daily occurrence across the country, but on the anniversary of the February 1, 2021, military takeover, two points stand out: the level of violence, especially in rural areas, the level of civil war; And grassroots movements opposed to military rule have largely thwarted expectations by stopping the ruling generals.

The violence has spread beyond rural battlefields where the military is burning and bombing villages, displacing millions of people in what is a largely neglected humanitarian crisis. It also happens in cities, where activists are arrested and tortured and urban guerrillas retaliate by bombing and killing military-related targets. After closed trials, the army has also hanged activists on charges of “terrorism”.

According to the Independent Aid Association for Political Prisoners, a monitoring group that tracks killings and arrests, authorities have killed 2,940 civilians since the army took over, and another 17,572 have been arrested – 13,763 of whom are in custody. The actual death toll is likely to be much higher as the group typically excludes deaths on the side of the military government and cannot easily verify incidents in remote areas.

“The level of violence involving both armed militants and civilians is alarming and unpredictable,” said Min Zaw O, a veteran political activist in exile who founded the Myanmar Institute for Peace and Security.

“The amount of killing and harm to civilians is devastating, and unlike anything we’ve seen in the country in recent memory,” he said.

The battle between the army and the resistance is a stalemate

When the military ousted Suu Kyi in 2021, it arrested her and top members of her ruling National League for Democracy party, which won a landslide victory for a second term in the November 2020 general election. The military claimed that it acted because there had been massive electoral fraud, a claim not supported by objective election observers. Suu Kyi, 77, is serving a total of 33 years in prison after pleading guilty to a series of politically tainted charges brought by the military.

Shortly after the military seized power and quashed non-violent protests with lethal force, thousands of young men moved into remote rural areas to become guerrilla fighters.

Operating in decentralized “People’s Defense Forces” or PDFs, they are proving to be effective warriors, specializing in ambushes and sometimes overrunning isolated army and police posts. They have benefited greatly from supplies and training provided by some of the country’s ethnic minority rebels – the Ethnic Armed Organizations, or EAOs – who have been battling the military for decades for greater autonomy.

“It’s not just a very brave thing to do. It’s a very difficult thing to do,” Richard Hershey, an independent analyst and consultant at the International Crisis Group, told The Associated Press. “It’s a very challenging thing to do, you know, with an army that’s basically been fighting a counterinsurgency war for its entire existence.”

David Mathieson, another independent analyst with more than 20 years’ experience in Myanmar, says the opposition’s fighting capabilities are “a mixed picture in terms of battlefield performance, organization and cohesion among them.”

“But it’s also important to remember that in two years no one would have predicted that they would actually be as effective as they are now. And in some areas, the PDFs are taking on Myanmar’s military and, in many respects, excelling them. In terms of ambushes and pitched battles on the battlefield, taking over bases .”

He says that the army’s heavy weapons and air power push the situation into a kind of stalemate where the PDFs do not capture large areas of territory, but fight back and prevail.

“So nobody’s winning at this point,” Mathison said.

The opposition has rejected the government’s proposal for elections

Senior General Min Aung Hlaing’s military government has the advantage — not only in weapons and trained manpower, but also in geography. Myanmar’s main neighbors – Thailand, China and India – have geopolitical and economic interests in Myanmar that satisfy them with the status quo, which largely protects its borders from becoming a major supply route for weapons and other supplies for the resistance. And while most of the world maintains sanctions against the generals and their governments, they can rely on getting weapons from Russia and China.

Min Aung Hlaing’s government is nominally pursuing a political solution to the crisis, notably in its promise to hold new elections this year. Suu Kyi’s party has refused to take part, deriding the election as not free or fair, and other activists are taking more direct action, attacking military government teams carrying out surveys to compile voter rolls.

“The regime is pushing for elections that the opposition has vowed to derail,” said Min Zaw Oo. “Elections will not change the political status quo, rather, it will intensify the violence.”

The planned elections are being run by a regime that “overthrows a popularly elected government. The people of Myanmar are clearly seeing what they are: a cynical attempt to overwrite the previous election results that gave Dr Aung San Suu a landslide victory. Kyi and his National League for Democracy therefore term these Not an election in any meaningful sense,” Hershey said. “They have no legitimacy or credibility.”

Western nations have imposed restrictions on the military

On the diplomatic front, the military government thumbs its nose at international efforts to defuse the crisis, even from sympathetic fellow members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, whose strong response has been to not invite Myanmar’s top military leaders to attend its meetings.

Myanmar’s military has rejected all peacekeeping efforts as interference in its internal affairs.

Conversely, the resistance actively reaches out for international support. It scored a small, new diplomatic victory on Tuesday after the United States, Australia, Britain and Canada announced new sanctions aimed at squeezing military revenues and supply lines. The British and Canadian sanctions are particularly notable, as they target aviation fuel supplies, a move activists are urging to counter the growing number of airstrikes faced by pro-democracy forces and their allies in ethnic minority rebel groups. area.

“Currently, both sides are not ready to find a political solution,” Min Zaw O warned. “Despite more deaths and violence, the military stalemate will not change significantly this year.”