Soon after seizing control of Buthidaung town in Myanmar’s northern Rakhine State from the Myanmar military in May, the separatist Arakan Army allegedly set fire to hundreds of homes belonging to members of the Rohingya Muslim minority. The Arakan Army has pledged to fight for the political rights of all people in Rakhine, on the border with Bangladesh, but it is mostly made up of Rakhine Buddhists, who have clashed with their Rohingya neighbors during previous bouts of communal violence. The incident was a grim parallel to the Myanmar military’s brutal crackdown on the marginalized group seven years ago.
Ethnic minorities and pro-democracy activists in Myanmar have long seen the military as a force of oppression. Since its generals took power in a 2021 coup, overthrowing Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) government, many in Myanmar have pinned their hopes on ethnic armed organizations like the Arakan Army—which have long fought for political autonomy in the borderlands—to liberate the country. They have also looked to these groups to usher in a new era of federal democracy that remained out of reach even during the decade of reform from 2011 to 2021.
Myanmar has traditionally had a strong central military government, at the expense of the political rights of ethnic minorities, some of which were promised autonomy in 1947. That promise wasn’t fulfilled, and for decades ethnic armed groups have fought variously for independence, autonomy, and federalism—but there’s never been a shared vision on how the latter would function in Myanmar. The NLD, for its part, blocked certain federal policy changes, including voting down a constitutional amendment that would have devolved power to allow states and regions to elect their own chief ministers.
Now, public opinion has swung far in the other direction, with many democracy activists conflating federalism with absolute autonomy.
Some ethnic armed forces in Myanmar seem genuinely committed to the proclaimed goal of federal democracy, particular those in the country’s southeast, on the Thai border. But that only works if all federal units have agreed upon certain political principles—and this is far from the case in Myanmar. The groups with more authoritarian tendencies, such as the Arakan Army or its allies on the Chinese border, seem to view federalism as merely an arrangement where they rule autonomously over their own territories as they see fit, including with the barrel of a gun.
As Myanmar’s political crisis morphed into civil war in the wake of the coup, young people opposed to the junta sought training and weapons from many of the country’s ethnic armed organizations. Since then, the military has lost unprecedented swathes of territory, especially since October of last year, turning these ethnic armies into heroes of the broader pro-democracy movement.
However, in a recent report, the think tank Crisis Group said that ethnic militias’ battlefield victories are “likely to be an impediment to, rather than a stepping stone toward” a federal union, because having already secured autonomy, they’re unlikely to disarm or bow to a central authority. “It is hard to imagine ethnic armed groups already enjoying de facto autonomy easily agreeing to join a federal project, which would require them to cede to a central government powers that they have fought costly battles to secure,” the report argued.
In the face of staggering losses on the battlefield, this year the Myanmar military activated a 2010 compulsory conscription law, allowing the armed forces to call up men aged 18 to 35 or women aged 18 to 27 to serve for two to five years. The regime said it aims to draft 50,000 to 60,000 new troops in the first year.
The draft immediately had a destabilizing effect in Rakhine. The military recruited Rohingya conscripts to join using a combination of force and incentives—such as promising citizenship to members of the largely stateless group—and deployed the draftees to the front lines against the Arakan Army.
In mid-April, some Rohingya conscripts and militants were accused by residents of burning down Buddhist and Hindu homes in Buthidaung town, with the Arakan Army allegedly retaliating in kind. In comments to the New Humanitarian, the Arakan Army denied burning down Rohingya homes, saying the destruction was caused by military airstrikes and Rohingya militants. (The Arakan Army spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.)
However, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute said the destruction was inconsistent with airstrikes or shelling, and that other Rohingya villages were torched at the same time in other parts of the township under Arakan Army control. The United Nations said the military had left Buthidaung two days before the fires started, adding that it has documented a range of other abuses by the Arakan Army against the Rohingya minority, including four confirmed beheadings.
Pro-democracy groups remained silent, or even walked back statements of concern on the alleged human rights abuses, while Myanmar society at large rallied behind the Arakan Army. Powerful ethnic armed groups are key to overthrowing the military dictatorship—but dependence on militant, ethnonationalist armies that abuse civilians may not usher in such a different future.
The Arakan Army has explicitly said it wants to be part of a “confederacy,” which implies substantially more autonomy than federalism would usually entail. Some other major ethnic armed organizations have paid lip service to federal democracy, while their actions tell a different story. In northern Shan state, the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA)—a close ally of the Arakan Army—has launched its own brutal forced conscription policy in newly conquered territory. It has controversially drawn recruits from outside the Kokang ethnic group that it represents, allegedly executing those who try to escape.
The MNDAA has also blocked members of Myanmar’s Bamar ethnic majority who previously lived in the Kokang area from returning and demolished the Bamar quarter in Laukkai, the region’s biggest city. It and the United Wa State Army (UWSA)—Myanmar’s most powerful non-state armed group, which has two large non-contiguous territories on the Thai and Chinese borders—both emerged from the Communist Party of Burma, which collapsed along ethnic lines in 1989; they maintain many of the organization’s authoritarian trappings.
“I have not seen any evidence from these three groups that they intend to implement a form of government that can credibly be called democracy in any form in their territories,” said David Brenner, author of Rebel Politics and a senior lecturer at the University of Sussex, referring to the Arakan Army, the MNDAA and the UWSA.
Some pro-resistance analysts may argue that ethnic armed organizations will transition to a more democratic form of governance once the military regime is defeated and the situation has stabilized. After all, there are glimmers of hope in the southeast, on the Thai border. In Kayah state, a coalition of Karenni resistance groups have managed to maintain unity among different ethnic subgroups and seem genuinely committed to democracy. The Karen National Union (KNU), meanwhile, has practiced internal democracy for decades, holding elections even amid heavy fighting last year.
On the other hand, the UWSA has had stable control over its expansive territory, known colloquially as Wa State, since agreeing to a 1989 ceasefire with the military, but far from transitioning to democracy, it has doubled down on authoritarian rule. In 1999, the UWSA launched a forced population transfer, marching some 100,000 Wa civilians into southern Shan State to consolidate newly seized territory there, displacing the local population. In 2022, the longtime leader of the UWSA and its affiliated political party promoted his son to deputy secretary-general of the party, likely in anticipation of a hereditary power transfer.
The KNU and Karenni groups are on one end of the “spectrum” of democratic rule, with the UWSA and MNDAA on the other, Brenner said, explaining that much of this discrepancy can be traced back to Cold War allegiances and “locations on different borders, which for instance provided a lot more global exposure to liberal ideas and practices to southeast-based movements.”
Insurgencies in Myanmar’s southeast, including the Karen and Karenni armies, operate on the border with Thailand, a close U.S. ally, and have had more exposure to and relationship with Western democracies, while the MNDAA and UWSA operate on the border with China, which backs the groups.
But many other ethnic armed forces in Myanmar fall between the two extremes. The Kachin Independence Army, for example, is based along Myanmar’s border with China but has been seen as drawing closer to the United States in recent years. It has also become increasingly responsive to the concerns of Kachin civil society and the public.
Chin state, on the Indian border, has become a cautionary tale of the potential for internal conflict once the regime is defeated. With the military partially chased out of the state, the oldest armed group there, the Chin National Front (CNF), has made controversial moves to shore up its hegemony, causing tensions with militias formed in the wake of the military takeover, some of which it was previously allied to. In recent weeks, the two factions have even clashed, with the Arakan Army supporting the rival group, while the CNF accuses the Arakan Army of committing rights abuses against Chin civilians in the state’s south, which borders Rakhine.
The National Unity Government (NUG), a parallel administration appointed by elected Myanmar lawmakers deposed in the coup, has been trying to cobble together a federal framework out of this patchwork of disparate parts. Many of the least democratic armed groups are among the most powerful, and it may be tempting for the NUG to overlook their ideological differences to cooperate against a common enemy.
NUG spokesperson Kyaw Zaw said the parallel government is committed to human rights and “building a genuine federal democratic union” but declined to comment on the alleged abuses by ethnic armed groups, saying only that the MNDAA and Arakan Army denied the reports. “NUG and ethnic resistance forces are capturing more territories, liberating more territories, controlling more territories from the brutal military,” he said.
But while some of these more authoritarian ethnic armed groups have provided weapons and training to pro-democracy groups, they have also shown little inclination to pursue objectives beyond their own narrow interests—including overthrowing the regime in Naypyidaw, the NUG’s ultimate goal. Pro-democracy fighters under the command of ethnic armed groups told Foreign Policy they don’t expect them to fight beyond their homelands, but do expect the groups to continue giving the NUG weapons and support, partly to ensure a resurgent military doesn’t one day return to reclaim the lost borderlands.
The challenge for the NUG will be to get the most out of its sometimes unsavory relationships with these armed groups, without becoming tainted by association. And the challenge for Western diplomats who hope to see democratization in Myanmar will be identifying which groups can be nudged in the right direction.
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