Beijing and New Delhi gamble against the humanity of Myanmar people

Guest contributor Khin Ohmar Five years into Myanmar’s Spring Revolution, international news services are beginning to coalesce around a story: the resistance is weakening. A recent AFP dispatch, carried by outlets from France24 to Yahoo News, frames retreating fighters and a demoralized frontline as proof the movement is losing steam. It is a comfortable, if shallow, narrative. The resistance, mainly led by the young generations of Myanmar’s, has fought for five years with no state behind it—no government arming the People’s Defence Forces (PDF), no foreign treasury bankrolling the National Unity Government (NUG). Meanwhile the junta has formed many illicit revenue streams worth billions each year and enjoys the economic and military support of Myanmar’s next-door neighbors and two major world powers: China and India. Frontline fighters are exhausted. That is not in dispute. Who would not be? But, that the resistance is still standing despite this staggering imbalance in arms and funds—indeed, that it has at times pushed the military junta to the very brink of collapse—is a testament to the strength of the Spring Revolution. This is a story about foreign intervention The junta didn’t out-fight the resistance in Sagaing. Beijing bought two ethnic armed organizations out of the war, brokered the truces that stripped the PDF of their most capable allies, and threw its full diplomatic weight behind Min Aung Hlaing’s sham elections. This isn’t a story about a flagging resistance. And yet it is the story the world is telling itself again and looking as naïve as it did in February 2021. Back then, the prediction was that the military had restored order. Then, when that failed, the prediction shifted: the resistance would splinter under the weight of its own contradictions. There were too many armed groups, too many competing goals, and no unified command. Five years of the most brutal systematic campaign of war, waged with airstrikes on hospitals and schools, and still that fracture hasn’t come. Tactical illusions and a strategic stalemate Instead, as Sai Wansai provided analysis in SHAN News, the junta’s momentum is a tactical illusion resting on a strategic stalemate: it has recaptured towns, but the resistance controls the countryside, the border regions, and “the narrative of the future.” The Arakan Army holds nearly all of Rakhine State. The Kachin Independence Army has not been dislodged from the jade mines of Hpakant and rare earth mines in Kachin State. Karenni’s Loikaw remains under siege, not under junta control. Independent conflict analysts have been documenting this for months. So if the resistance hasn’t broken on its own terms, what actually shifted the ground?