Myanmar's earthquake exposes its political paralysis

A Buddhist monk gestures near a damaged pagoda in the aftermath of Friday's earthquake in Amarapura township, Mandalay, Myanmar, on April 2. AP

As the death toll from last Friday’s earthquake in Myanmar nears 3,000 – almost certainly a huge underestimate, given the difficulty of accurate reporting from the strife-riven country – long-term observers must ask themselves if there is any end to its woes, or any hope for a more peaceful future?

Some see the disaster as an omen that could spell the end of Senior General Min Aung Hlaing’s rule. But otherwise, there is little to suggest that the civil war unleashed when the military overthrew the duly elected National League for Democracy (NLD) government headed by Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2021 is about to cease.

The Tatmadaw, or armed forces, may never have controlled so little of the country. Far less than half of Myanmar is still in their hands, and last December they lost control of an entire border – that with Bangladesh, after a bloody battle with the Arakan Army, one of several insurgent groups resisting military rule. But according to a report by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in January, that didn’t stop them ramping up violence against civilians last year “to unprecedented levels, inflicting the heaviest civilian death toll since they launched their coup four years ago”.

The report found that “as the military’s grip on power eroded, it launched wave after wave of retaliatory air strikes and artillery shelling on civilians and civilian populated areas, forced thousands of young people into military service, conducted arbitrary arrests and prosecutions, caused mass displacement, and denied access to humanitarians, even in the face of natural disasters.” The UN estimated over 3.5 million people had been displaced, and 20 million were in need of humanitarian assistance. And that was before the earthquake.

An Assad-style collapse could be possible. But the Tatmadaw have not been propped up by external actors, as the Syrian regime was. They have had the key levers of power in their hands since 1962, when General Ne Win snuffed out the country’s nascent democracy, and they are used to acting on their own, unmoved by local, regional or global condemnation.

Not only is the country four years into a civil war which the Tatmadaw started, but they have continued air strikes even as rescue operations after the earthquake grow ever more desperate

Those who take the longer view might argue that Myanmar has never not been in a state of civil war, from independence in 1948 onwards. The Panglong Agreement and the country’s original constitution, both dating from 1947, were supposed to grant autonomy and the right to secede after 10 years to some of Myanmar’s ethnic minorities.

But after the assassination of the country’s independence hero, General Aung San, that same year, the subsequent military leadership refused to enact these provisions. There have been periods of relative stability, but conflicts of one scale or another between the mainly ethnic armed groups and the majority ethnic Bamar-dominated central government have been ongoing ever since.

Part of the problem has been in finding a pillar around which the whole country can rally. The Tatmadaw would claim that mantle, which Ms Suu Kyi – General Aung San’s daughter – acknowledged in the 1988 speech that led her to become an icon of the Myanmar democracy movement. If they followed the objectives her father had set out, they should have “the honour and respect of the people”, she said, adding: “I feel strong attachment for the armed forces. Not only were they built up by my father, as a child I was cared for by his soldiers.”

This is why independent-minded democracy activists like my old friend Maung Zarni, founder of the Free Burma Coalition, were arguing 20 years ago that a solution to the country’s troubles had to involve talking to the generals. The Tatmadaw was simply too big and omnipresent an institution. And although it had led decades of repression in Myanmar, it also retained the status of having been its liberating force (along with the Allies) from the Japanese occupation in the Second World War.

There was a significant degree of scepticism about the military’s real willingness to share power, as I reported for this newspaper in 2011, but the “roadmap to democracy”, which led to elections in 2010 and the NLD coming to power in 2015 seemed to justify that position.

Today, however, not only is the country four years into a civil war which the Tatmadaw started, but they have continued air strikes even as rescue operations to save any victims still alive after the earthquake grow ever more desperate. The UN’s Special Rapporteur Tom Andrews described this as "nothing short of incredible". "I'm calling upon the junta to just stop, stop any of its military operations," he said.

Myanmar’s monarchy, which went back 800 years (some would argue 1,000), could have been a sufficiently overarching national institution. But the colonialist British overthrew the last king, Thibaw, in 1885, and exiled him to India. The Sangha, Myanmar’s Buddhist monks and nuns, have not been prominent in intervening since 2021, as they were in the so-called Saffron Revolution of 2007-08. But that involved non-violent protest and resistance, not fighting, while some well-known monks espouse a form of ethno-nationalist extremism that makes them feared, not revered, by the Christian and Muslim minorities who make up 10 per cent of the population.

The outside world has never known what to do about Myanmar; hence its many decades as a near-pariah military dictatorship. Nearby countries are strong proponents of the principle of non-interference, but equally they realise that there are limits, although the Association of South-East Asian Nations – to which Myanmar was admitted in 1997 with the expectation that this would encourage the military to reform – has not proved up to solving this key regional crisis either.

The state that Myanmar is in might once have caused well-meaning outsiders to consider sending in their own military force. But there is currently little appetite for such interventions, and understandably so. Its giant neighbours, China and India, maintain friendly relations with Myanmar, but both would be allergic to being drawn into what has the potential to be a far more deadly quagmire.

Back in 2011, I quoted Bertil Lintner, a veteran reporter who had just published his book Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma's Struggle for Democracy. The country’s future “looks bleak”, he concluded. It’s a statement that could have been made frequently during its post-independence history. Unless circumstances change radically, unfortunately that includes today.