The Arakan Military, or AA, is constant their sweep throughout Rakhine, furthering the navy positive factors of the ethnic Three Brotherhood Alliance, of which it’s a member, in Shan state. Whereas the seize of 9 cities, with a tenth in southern Chin state, is one other humiliating defeat for the Burmese navy, it additionally units the scene for a really messy political dialogue transferring ahead.
Myanmar’s navy continues to be on their again toes. The Kachin Independence Military continues to make positive factors, lately securing management over a significant commerce route with China, after seizing the final of the navy camps alongside the Bhamo-Myitkyina freeway. The as soon as staunchly pro-junta border guards forces in Kayin state are actually hedging their bets and placing far between themselves and Naypyidaw.
In the meantime, the junta’s introduced counter-offensive out of Lashio towards the Ta’ang Nationwide Liberation Military and Myanmar Nationwide Democratic Alliance Military – the opposite two members of the Three Brotherhood Alliance – in northern Shan State has not materialized.
However it’s in Rakhine the place the navy has been handed its most vital territorial defeats. The AA has captured six of Rakhine’s 17 townships and a number of other smaller cities since launching an offensive on Nov. 13, 2023, with ongoing offensives towards a number of others.
As of early April, the AA had captured some 170 junta camps and posts, in addition to a number of bigger bases, battalion headquarters, and coaching services.
The capital of Sittwe is surrounded, and plenty of civil servants have been withdrawn.
The Chinese language particular financial zone in Kyaukphyu is on the verge of falling, prompting the United League of Arakan, the AA’s political wing, to publicly pledge to guard all international direct funding that advantages Rakhine and “guarantee the sleek continuation of their operations.” At current, China’s US$8 billion funding, which incorporates their oil and gasoline pipelines and a proposed deepwater port with rail and highway hyperlinks, can solely be accessed by sea.
As a latest Worldwide Institute for Strategic Research report concluded: “However irrespective of the ultimate end result, the AA’s sweeping positive factors are already sufficient to allow self-rule over a big portion of the Rakhine homeland and to reshape the broader steadiness of energy in Myanmar.”
Little leverage over AA in Rakhine
On April 1, 2024, China’s particular consultant to Myanmar, Deng Xijun, met with junta chief Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing in Naypyidaw to attempt to dealer a ceasefire. Whereas the Chinese language-brokered ceasefire between the Three Brotherhood Alliance and the navy regime is tenuously holding in northern Shan state, the AA refuses to be sure by it in Rakhine. China has much less leverage over the AA, which has proven little interest in halting their offensive.
The AA has acknowledged their intention to seize your entire state, not simply their conventional heartland within the north, although it’s not clear that they’ve the manpower and sources to take action. Over-reach might unfold their forces too skinny.
The AA is within the midst of an offensive in Ann township, which isn’t simply the headquarters of the navy’s Western Command, however the important thing junction on the highway to Magwe area. The lack of Ann would make overland resupply to northern and central Rakhine extraordinarily troublesome. Overland provide might solely are available in by way of the freeway from Bago area’s Pyay township within the south.
The navy has responded in typical trend, with extra indiscriminate air and long-range artillery strikes towards unarmed civilians. In a two-day interval in early April, six civilians had been killed and 16 had been wounded. RFA Burmese reported that some 79 Rohingya civilians have been killed and 127 extra have been wounded up to now 4 months.
The junta has commenced implementation of its nationwide plan to conscript some 5,000 individuals a month, together with amongst ethnic Rohingya in Rakhine, regardless of the assassination of native directors.
This can be a perverse irony after the navy waged an ethnic cleaning marketing campaign that drove 1 million ethnic Rohingya, whom they seek advice from as “unlawful Bengalis,” into Bangladesh, and stored many others in focus camps.
Poorly armed and educated conscripts have restricted navy utility, indicating the navy’s desperation for manpower.
Position of Rohingya conscripts
However the Rohingya conscripts play a way more essential function in fomenting political strife inside the opposition camp.
The Buddhist-dominated Arakan Military has a tense relationship with the Rohingya inhabitants. It has tenuously accepted the shadow Nationwide Unity Authorities’s place that the Rohingya are authorized residents and that they need to be returned to the nation from Bangladesh in an orderly trend.
There have been quite a lot of reviews that the navy is reaching out to the Arakan Resistance Solidarity Military, or ARSA, whose misguided raids on border posts and police stations in 2017 had been the casus belli for the navy’s ethnic cleaning marketing campaign.
Since being pushed into Bangladesh, ARSA’s main actions have been to safe management over the refugee camps and get rid of rivals inside the Rohingya group; they haven’t participated within the armed revolt.
That the navy believes that they’ll recruit ARSA as a proxy towards the AA appears preposterous. The AA is neither keen to share any political energy in Rakhine nor countenance the presence of another armed actors. So there’s a perverse logic to the navy’s overtures to ARSA, which is trying to find relevance.
With mounting battlefield losses, the most effective that the navy can do is to strike up ethnic and sectarian tensions. This could come as no shock: stoking communal tensions has at all times been a key social gathering of their technique.
Certainly, the United Nations’ Unbiased Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar, which was established following the genocidal marketing campaign towards the Rohingya, has simply launched a report that makes clear that the navy had a “systematic and coordinated” media marketing campaign on Fb to “unfold materials designed to instill worry and hatred of the Rohingya minority.” It achieved this by forming “an interconnected community — the Navy Community — on the social media website with “the potential to succeed in an viewers of hundreds of thousands.”
In line with the report, the “hate speech content material usually performed upon prevalent discriminatory and derogatory narratives in regards to the Rohingya,” and strengthened a typical “narrative that they pose a menace to Burmese racial purity by way of their alleged rampant breeding.”
Backtracking on commitments
Because the AA captures extra territory, its negotiating place vis-a-vis the opposite armed opposition to the junta will increase. As such, it has began to backtrack on lots of its pledges and commitments in regards to the Rohingya group. This comes at a time when persistence for Rohingya refugees is sporting skinny in host states.
In a March 25 assertion that decried the navy’s stoking of communal tensions by way of focused conscription, the United League of Arakan set off a firestorm of criticism by utilizing the military’s time period of “Bengali,” fairly than “Rohingya.”
Twan Mrat Naing, the commander-in-chief of the AA, took to X, previously Twitter, to calm the tensions, however solely appeared to bolster suspicions about his group’s intentions by additionally utilizing the time period “Bengali.”
In sum, the AA’s offensive continues to place the navy on its again toes, whereas forcing China to reassess their assist for the generals in Naypyidaw. However it additionally permits them to default to much less accommodating positions on the difficulty of the Rohingya.
The Nationwide Unity Authorities’’s performing president, Duwa Lashi La, largely sidestepped the difficulty in a wide-ranging interview with the Indian Deccan Herald, stating solely that “we’ve a constructive relationship with the United League for Arakan / AA” whereas reiterating the shadow authorities’s stance on the Rohingya.
“Sooner or later, transitional governments will probably be established on the union and state ranges,” he mentioned. “We now have agreed with ethnic allies that these will probably be led collectively by representatives of allied revolutionary teams and in accordance with the transitional structure.”
Whereas the AA’s battlefield successes are expediting the junta’s demise, their power will impression any future negotiations over the institution of a federal democracy and the citizenship of all peoples.
Zachary Abuza is a professor on the Nationwide Conflict School in Washington and an adjunct at Georgetown College. The views expressed listed here are his personal and don’t replicate the place of the U.S. Division of Protection, the Nationwide Conflict School, Georgetown College or Radio Free Asia.
