The earthquake that struck Burma and its neighbouring countries on Friday has caused an immense human tragedy. Centring on Mandalay, destruction radiates outwards. Structurally unsound buildings collapsed on those inside them. Shoddily-build neighbourhoods fell in on their residents. Thousands are already officially declared dead. Many times that number are missing. The overall picture will take some time to grasp, as is often the case with disasters of this kind. The true death count will never be known, bodies vanishing beneath wrecked structures, never to be found and identified.
An event like this might be expected to have put on hold Burma’s civil war, which has been going in full swing since the 2021 coup, where the army displaced and jailed the technically civilian portion of the country’s government.
When the earthquake happened, the National Unity Government (NUG), an umbrella opposition coalition, declared a ceasefire so it could find the missing and bury the dead. But the army did not agree. Within hours of the earthquake, regime warplanes were striking targets across the country.
A new multiracial state must be built
Regime aircraft attacked targets in the Shan state, and in Bago and Sagaing, Saturday, and used helicopters to attack Sagaing again the following day.
Burma’s current civil conflict has had this flavour since 2021. But many advocates for Burma’s ethnic minorities say the war against them started years earlier.
An earlier episode of violence waged by the Burmese regime (including its civilian component, who are now in prison) against the Rohingya, for instance, caused the burning of their villages in Rahkine state, the murder of anyone who stayed, and their expulsion from the country in their hundreds of thousands. That conflict started in 2016 and commenced in earnest in 2017. Many hundreds of thousands of Rohingya were expelled from the country and many thousands of them killed. Those who survived were ethnically cleansed. They reside in squalid camps outside Burma. Observers and experts call this genocide, with justice.
This is the character of the war more broadly: aerial attack by military planes and the bombardment by any means to hand of civilian targets. A war of sieges and isolated government outposts defended by helicopters. A cat and mouse game in which numerous factions of insurgents arrive covertly in relatively small numbers to vie for individual townships, and to surround military bases.
The military junta has spent much of the past year on the back foot, with rebel groups taking ground in a number of provinces. The regime is under threat from a diverse collection of assailants. Some of them are directly affiliated with the NUG (their armed wing is the People’s Defence Forces, PDF). Others fight for tribal armies, including the Arakan Army, which is headquartered in Rahkine state, and the Taang National Liberation Army, military section of the Palaung State Liberation Front. (The AA and the TNLA are part of the Brotherhood Alliance. The war has many different alliances. Various groups affiliated with the Karen ethnicity also proliferate across the conflict. They are allied against the regime.)
But the earthquake might, dreadfully, give the army a little room to breathe. The NUG has declared that its people will be otherwise occupied. Now might be the time for the regime to reverse the tide of recent losses, hitting from the air at enemies who have put down their weapons to do humanitarian work.
Burma’s civil war is not much covered in Britain and for good reason. It is bewilderingly complex; there are few ties between our country and theirs; and there is very little scope for British policy to make any difference either way. Burma was a dictatorship more or less from its independence in 1948 and the brief beginning of civilian-military power sharing in the last decade was a blip.
Even the appointing of Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kye as State Counsellor in 2016, after her party swept the open seats in an earlier election, did not dramatically change the character of the regime. It was while Suu Kyi was in government that the army expelled the Rohingya, creating a region-wide, world-spanning refugee crisis that is still not over. It was Suu Kyi’s own Facebook page that declared well-substantiated claims of sexual violence at the hands of the army ‘FAKE RAPE’. Now she is in prison again, at the army’s hands, what difference, materially, does this make?
NUG leadership says that they have learnt their lesson. The military cannot be worked with or conciliated. It must be beaten. A new multiracial state must be built. The NUG has made the courting of international recognition part of its strategy. For winning the war and winning power. Its forces and its allies have been beating back the army lately. But it is possible this natural disaster, this tragedy, will make resolving the conflict that much harder – and add another sad example to the list of reasons why it will be so difficult to pick up all the pieces.
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