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? Look at who is arming, financing, and legitimizing this war, and on whose side. China and India are threats to the Myanmar people China and India have made their priorities unmistakable. With their unflagging political, economic, and military support for this criminal junta, they put their own national interests over Myanmar people’s lives, every time. Min Aung Hlaing has spent recent weeks receiving official diplomatic welcomes in Beijing, New Delhi, and Vientiane. It is a tour of legitimacy conferred by neighbors who know exactly who he is and what his junta is. China brokered the ceasefires that saved the junta’s northern flank. Both countries kept the money, the equipment, and the diplomatic cover flowing through an illegal and illegitimate coup, a mass-atrocity campaign, and a fraudulent election. This is not neutral. It is not “balancing relations.” China and India are not bystanders to Myanmar’s catastrophe. They are major threats to the existence of Myanmar’s peoples. It is also not new. It is the same failure the international community made from 2011 to 2020, when donor engagement propped up a military-run “transition” in the name of so-called peace instead of confronting the power imbalance underneath it and supporting Myanmar people to address the root causes of their generations-long suffering. Myanmar will only achieve stability when the resistance succeeds The world keeps mistaking the military’s ability to buy time for the people’s failure to resist their illegality and cruelty. It keeps outsourcing its analysis to the same governments who benefit from Myanmar’s continued subjugation. But Beijing and New Delhi are betting on a stability this junta cannot deliver. In doing so, they are aiding and abetting the junta’s atrocity crimes. Myanmar’s people have said, unmistakably, for five years: they will not accept this military back in power, in any form, under any name. There is no status quo to return to. There is no genuine peace process this junta can host, because the people it claims to govern have already rejected it. China and India can keep buying ceasefires and red-carpet summits, but they are financing a war that gambles against the humanity of Myanmar’s peoples. Myanmar will only achieve long-term stability when the people get what they have fought and died for: human rights, democracy, inclusivity, and self-determination guaranteed in the form of federal democracy. So my question for Beijing and New Delhi is this: how many more billions, how many more summits, how many more years of a war without end, before you accept there is no peace to buy here in Myanmar? Only a debt to the Myanmar’s peoples that keeps compounding. Khin Ohmar is a Myanmar human rights activist who was involved in organizing the 8888 nationwide pro-democracy uprising. She is the founder and chairperson of Progressive Voice, a Myanmar human rights organization. She also developed the Women Peacebuilding Program for the Women’s League of Burma and served as its program coordinator from 2000 to 2006. DVB publishes a diversity of opinions that do not reflect DVB’s editorial policy. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our stories: [email protected] The post Beijing and New Delhi gamble against the humanity of Myanmar people appeared first on DVB.