The Golden Land Ablaze

Coups, Insurgents and the State in Myanmar
A world-leading expert on Myanmar assesses the ongoing popular uprising against the military junta that deposed Aung San Suu Kyi.

Myanmar’s generals didn’t expect the nation to rise up against the coup they staged in February 2021. But after decades of stifling, direct military rule, the Burmese people had become used to another way of life during the relative openness of 2011–21. The army has been unable to suppress anti-coup protests as it did in 1962 and 1988; and, three years after sending tanks into Yangon, Naypyitaw and other cities, the army has yet to establish a functioning administration.

For the first time since the 1970s, armed resistance is not confined to traditionally strife-torn frontier areas, where ethnic insurgents like the Karen National Union and Kachin Independence Army have been active for decades—it has spread to the majority-Burmese heartland, in the shape of the People’s Defence Forces. But the anti-junta forces are insufficiently well-equipped to defeat the much more heavily armed Myanmar army, which itself is stretched too thin, on several fronts, to crush the resistance. And, despite foreign observers’ assurances, there is no unity, common command or synchronised strategy among the various ethnic- minority and ethnic-Burmese resistance groups.

This is a war that neither side can win. Caught in the middle, and bound to suffer most, are civilians.

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