The Arakan Army (AA), one of Myanmar’s most audacious and effective insurgencies turned 14 years old this week, underscoring what can be achieved by anti-military resistance as civil war rages on multiple fronts.
“Felicitation” notices were duly made to the rebel group and its leaders on the day, standard communications among resistance groups to each other on key anniversaries.
The anti-military National Unity Government (NUG), formed after the 2021 coup, also sent its best regards, as did the Bamar People’s Liberation Army (BPLA), the Chin Defense Force-Mindat, the Yaw Defense Force (YDF) and the Anti-Dictatorship Revolution People’s Army (DRPA), among others.
Well-wishers had to be careful about posting on Facebook: the platform still bans the AA and three of its ethnic armed organization (EAO) allies and posting anything related risks a suspension of any account. But this censorship threat has not diminished the AA’s popularity and reach.
The NUG’s acting president, Duwa Lashi La, sent a handwritten letter which was in many ways more touching for the occasion, congratulating the AA on uniting the people of Rakhine. His note received a positive reply from the AA’s charismatic founder and leader, Major General Twan Mrat Naing.
This reflected a respectful acknowledgment of the AA’s near-top position on Myanmar’s revolutionary ziggurat, and the struggles of the NUG to unite hundreds of disparate People’s Defense Forces (PDFs) to better coordinate armed struggle against the State Administration Council (SAC) junta.
In many respects, the AA is the preferred model for many emerging armed groups, who admire the AA’s determination, fighting spirit and elan, and its successful model for mobilization against military repression.
Myanmar has become an incubator for insurgent innovation, but this had spread well before the February 2021 democracy-suspending coup.
Formed in northern Kachin state on April 10, 2009, the AA cut its teeth in battling the Myanmar military after its 17-year-long ceasefire with the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) – the AA’s and other Rakhine insurgent groups’ initial benefactor and trainer – broke down in 2011.
Starting in 2009, the KIO nurtured three “startup insurgencies”; the AA, the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) and the reformed ethnic Kokang Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), now collectively known as the Three Brotherhood Alliance.
With methodical logistics, the AA has built up its base area in Paletwa in Chin state, the isolated northern back door to Rakhine state, and slowly pushed into the plains of central Rakhine.
A furious two-year heavy fighting period ensued from 2018 to late 2020, with the Myanmar military losing, by some estimates, 2,000 soldiers in furious battles across multiple Rakhine state townships that also displaced some 200,000 Rakhine civilians. Those fights are a microcosm of what is happening all over Myanmar now.
A surprise bilateral ceasefire agreed in the aftermath of the November 2020 nationwide elections restored some calm, but tensions and open fighting resumed before a November 2022 “humanitarian ceasefire” was brokered by controversial Japanese envoy Yohei Sasakawa of the Nippon Foundation.
The AA has prioritized consolidating administration in the areas it controls in Rakhine, but further hostilities with the SAC are inevitable.
The widespread popularity of the AA and its United League of Arakan (ULA) political arm stands in stark contrast to widespread public criticism of the longer-established Arakan Liberation Party-Arakan Liberation Army (ALP/ALA), which spent decades headquartered on the Thai-Myanmar border and since 2012 has engaged in bilateral and multilateral peace talks with previous quasi-civilian governments.
But the ALP has not been a serious rival to the AA for many years, and has fallen into deeper disarray as the AA has superseded it for several years.
In early January, following Myanmar Independence Day Celebrations in the Rakhine state capital of Sittwe, ALA chief of staff General Khaing Soe Mya and two subordinates were assassinated in town. Although the AA is strongly suspected, no one has claimed responsibility for the lethal attack.
The ALP’s leadership split in February, with the public face of the party, Saw Mra Razar Lin, expelled before bizarrely establishing her own parallel ALP on March 19.
A day after, the mainstream ALP banned her “new” party and prohibited her from attending Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) peace talks with the SAC in late March: she went anyway, injecting even greater absurdity to the wan proceedings of seven micro armed groups still discussing constitutional issues while Myanmar burns far and wide.
For the AA, it is pursuing a measured path to consolidating its rule and using the humanitarian pause to expand its administration, including over judicial issues tax collection, and expanding its armed forces, which some estimate may now number somewhere between 25,000-30,000 soldiers.
Despite some Rakhine political parties re-registering in recent weeks for the SAC’s planned elections at an indeterminate date, their potential participation in the widely criticized polls will likely be decided by the AA/ULA’s leadership.
The AA’s once prolific media strategy has also gone into a hiatus of sorts – at least the English language version – since its “state-building” phase began in late 2020. This shouldn’t be surprising.
The AA/ULA realizes its relationships with neighboring China, India and Bangladesh (and to a certain extent Thailand) are more important than with the West.
In fact, having to deal with Sasakawa is another symptom of how the Western-funded and misdirected peace process excluded the new, and arguably more representative, insurgents ever since it was signed in 2015.
It is no surprise that the AA and its northern allies have established close relationships with the Karenni National Defense Force (KNDF): they pride themselves on having an eye for talent.
AA/ULA deputy leader Dr Nyo Twan Aung told an online session on resistance “liberated areas” in early April, “Our Brotherhood recognizes the KNDF as a partner organization, and we are fighting this revolution together. We will continue to either operate separately or work together in the future, depending on the situation of the country.”
This also tracks with several other emerging groups receiving recognition for performance on the battlefield and political strategy over elite entitlement from the coup-toppled former ruling party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), which has hobbled the NUG since its formation.
The Bamar People’s Liberation Army (BPLA), led by the charismatic activist poet Maung Saungkha, has established close ties with renowned Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) leader Lieutenant General Baw Kyaw Heh, whose group is operating in northern Kayin state, and in early 2023 established the multi-ethnic Brigade 611 in the Kokang area near the China border.
Observers say the AA is likely providing clandestine aid to PDFs in the neighboring Magwe region, while the wider Brotherhood is likely supporting anti-SAC PDFs and EAOs with weapons in the southeast of the country.
But this support, if confirmed as some assess, is likely based on inter-group relations and not the efforts of the increasingly maligned NUG and its two widely perceived as feckless armed resistance leaders: Minister of Defense U Ye Mon and Minister of Home Affairs and Immigration Lwin Ko Latt.
Perhaps, then, Lashi La’s handwritten note to Twan Mrat Naing was a gesture toward establishing better relations with an armed group many believe it needs to model its comparatively torpid resistance.
To be sure, the AA has not jumped into the NUG’s embrace. This is for a number of reasons. The first is that the ULA’s political project of “Arakan Dream 2020” and “The Way of Rakhita” predated the February 2021 coup and was clearly defined as seeking more autonomy from the central ethnic Bamar state, which has maligned and marginalized Rakhine people for decades.
The AA, like other armed groups, will not easily forget or forgive the NLD’s years of withering dismissal of their political, economic and social claims.
It should also cast doubt on NUG Ministry of Defense claims it has the clout to effectively coordinate between well-established EAOs. Two years into the anti-SAC resistance and the NUG has failed to attract the AA and other EAOs into an effective anti-military coalition.
Twan Mratt Naing and his AA have a clear-eyed vision for the Rakhine revolution, a resolve that stands in contrast to the lukewarm lethargy of so many NUG leaders.
On the occasion of the Myanmar air force bombing a KIO celebration in Hpakant in October 2022, killing over 50, he posted on social media that it was a “clarion call for concerted action to exterminate the military fascism.”
As news comes in around the latest mass murder of civilians by a military air strike against a civilian food distribution center in Kantbalu in Sagaing Region, it’s precisely the professional yet ruthless leadership model of the AA that the wider resistance needs to adopt before its too late.
David Scott Mathieson is an independent analyst working on conflict, humanitarian and human rights issues on Myanmar.