An Overlooked War – The New York Times

By means of Hanna Beuk

I am a traveling Asia correspondent based in Bangkok.

A people who take up arms and fight for democracy. An army terrorizes civilians with airstrikes and landmines. Tens of thousands are killed. Millions have been displaced.

Yet it all happens almost completely off screen.

I recently spent a week at the frontlines of a forgotten war in the Southeast Asian country of Myanmar. Since a military junta overthrew a civilian government there three years ago, a dizzying array of pro-democracy forces and ethnic militias have united to fight the generals. The resistance includes poets, doctors and lawyers who traded life in the cities for jungle warfare. It also includes experienced fighters who have known no other profession than soldier.

Now, for the first time, the rebels are claiming control of more than half of Myanmar's territory. In recent weeks they have overrun dozens of cities and military bases in Myanmar.

Today's newsletter will explain how civil war has engulfed Myanmar – and why the world has ignored a country that less than a decade ago was hailed as a democratic success story.

In February 2021, a military junta led by Senior General Min Aung Hlaing arrested the country's civilian leaders and returned the country to a full dictatorship. If the generals expected the population to shrink in response to their coup, they were wrong. As military snipers shot unarmed protesters and bystanders, including dozens of children, an armed resistance emerged. Tens of thousands of professionals and members of Gen Z left for the jungle. Rappers, Buddhist monks and politicians, among others, learned to shoot and arm drones. Their hands became calloused.

This unlikely resistance has driven the junta's forces from large parts of the country, including most of Myanmar's border areas. (Be here various useful graphs that explain how the Civil War unfolds.)

If there is one name from Myanmar that people in the West might recognize, it is that of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the long-imprisoned democracy advocate who won the Nobel Peace Prize for her nonviolent resistance. (Her name is pronounced Daw Ong Sahn Soo Chee.)

In 2015, Aung San Suu Kyi's political party defeated military candidates in national elections. Because its civilian government shared power with the military, Myanmar seemed a rare counterbalance to the Arab Spring and other thwarted democratic movements. President Obama visited twice.

But within a year, the military, which still held the key levers of power, had intensified its persecution of Rohingya Muslims, culminating in the expulsion of three-quarters of a million people within a few weeks in 2017. The United Nations called the campaign a genocide. However, instead of condemning the violence, Aung San Suu Kyi went to The Hague and defended the military before an international court. Her refusal to stand up for a persecuted minority made her halo disappear. The United States and other Western governments distanced themselves from her.

The defilement of this simple morality tale – the lady versus the generals, the democracy versus the dictatorship – helps answer a question I was asked dozens of times during my reporting week in Myanmar: Why doesn't the world care about us? Allies in the West feel betrayed by a politician who, it turned out, did not meet her own high moral standards. (Aung San Suu Kyi is again imprisoned by the military.)

Even without foreign intervention, or much Western help, the Myanmar resistance has pushed back the junta. Rebels are now within 150 miles of the capital Naypyidaw.

But that might have been the easy part. The resistance is – perhaps hopelessly – fragmented. More than a dozen major armed ethnic groups are fighting for control of land and valuable natural resources.

For now, they are fighting a common enemy. But some of these militias are just as likely to fight each other. This month, rebels captured a key border town but surrendered it after an armed group withdrew its full support.

Much of Myanmar is already divided between different groups, all heavily armed. In other parts of the country, no one is completely in charge. Crime is flourishing. The country is now the largest opium producer in the world. Jungle factories produce meth and other synthetic drugs that have found their way into Australia. Cybercriminals have spread rapidly and are targeting Americans, Asians and Europeans with scams.

The civil war in Myanmar may be overshadowed by other global conflicts. But for the Burmese, who live in uncertainty and chaos, the war has never been so urgent and real.

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