Southeast Asia (Page 3)

Lee MAI – US President Donald Trump’s proceed to freeze British international aid programs will influence legal war-wracked Myanmar, where multi-million-dollar USAID programs have supported health, rights, democracy, governance and impartial media programs along the Thai-Myanmar border.

The funding stop is a significant component of the large Trumpian assault on USAID, but it also highlights the earlier restrictions and potential complete end to US support for Myanmar’s pro-democracy movement and associated broad opposition to the now four-year-old coup-installed defense regime.

Before Donald Trump, Washington’s devotion to Myanmar’s fight against the coup that deposed a de facto overthrown government de post led by Aung San Suu Kyi was in question, with many in the opposition believing that the US could and should have done more in such a blatant conflict between democratic and autocratic forces. &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

With Trump’s visible significant departure from the turmoil, China will weave ever larger over Myanmar’s upcoming. China is the only inside power with the resources, capacity, and motivation to effectively engage in and use armed conflict to its advantage in Myanmar.

People have tried and failed. Under its so-called “five-point consensus,” which includes recommendations for dialogue between the junta and the opposition, the ten-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations ( ASEAN), of which Myanmar is a member, made a weak and ineffective attempt to reach a truce in the civil wars.

ASEAN has, as ever, been hamstrung by its two cardinal principles—non-interference and consensus—which means the union has not solved a diplomatic disagreement between its members, allow mediates an ending to an military conflict inside a member state, in its 58-year history.

Despite this, the dysfunctional and ineffective regional bloc has largely outsourced the administration of Myanmar’s war to Australia and the European Union. New efforts to mediate the conflict under Malaysia’s 2025 rotational leadership, with particular help from Thailand, are likewise likely destined to go nowhere.

It leaves China and its long-term plans for Myanmar in the open field. Despite the war, trade is still brisk across the two sides ‘ 2, 185-kilometer border and will be brisker if multi-billion-dollar plans to upgrade Myanmar’s roads, railways and a major port under the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor, an offshoot of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, are finally realized.

In Myanmar, China engages in a complex double-play. On the one hand, it distributes arms to the officially neutral United Wa State Army ( UWSA ), which is the country’s largest armed militia that distributes Chinese weapons to various anti-military armed groups. It is the successor of the Communist Party of Burma that Beijing supported during the Cold War.

At the same time, China has backed Myanmar’s often isolated and persistently abusive military regimes, not least after soldiers crushed a pro-democracy uprising in August-September 1988, an episode that still haunts the inflamed nation.

After a brief squabble with the US and the West in the 2010s, which was supported by a period of political openness and limited democratization, Myanmar’s generals have since retreated to China following the 2021 coup, which overthrew Suu Kyi and inaugurated a new era of US and EU sanctions and condemnation. &nbsp,

To be sure, China has no interest in the emergence of a strong, peaceful, democratic and federal Myanmar—the aim of most resistance armies.

China can play its traditional carrot-and-stick game, which involves dangling trade and investment on the one hand and blatantly deniable indirect support for ethnic armies via the UWSA on the other. Myanmar is at war and weak.

China does not want the conflict in Myanmar to get out of hand, as serious instability in border regions could cause torrents of refugees crossing its border and halt lucrative cross-border trade, which provides China’s landlocked hinterlands with a crucial outlet.

China does not like the Chinese-run scams that have grown out of the lawless border areas of Myanmar that target Chinese citizens.

That is why China recently used its manipulative hand in northern Shan state by repressing the insurgent Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army ( MNDAA ) and its ally, theTa’ang National Liberation Army ( TNLA ), both of whom at Beijing’s orders halted their advance on junta-controlled territory.

After ethnic Kokang chieftain Peng Daren traveled to China for what rumors called “medical treatment,” the MNDAA agreed to a ceasefire with the Myanmar junta in early December. According to the MNDAA on December 3, a resolution to the conflict would be sought” under Chinese government arbitration.”

The TNLA made a similarly-worded announcement in late November, saying that it would “always cooperate with China’s mediation efforts and continue to cooperate]to achieve ] good results”.

The Arakan Army ( AA ), the third organization under the so-called Brotherhood Alliance that has seized the majority of Rakhine state, announced on December 29 that it is prepared to negotiate with the military regime, even though hostilities have raged on for a while. In fact, AA appears to be on the verge of winning in its native state of Rakhine.

Beijing is heard by the AA, but it is more independent than some other armed groups. The Kachin Independence Army (KIA ), a largely Christian fighting force based in northern Kachin state, was established and trained in 2009 under the guidance of the AA to balance out its reliance on China. It has strong international ties, including with church groups in the US and ethnic Kachins in India.

The KIA’s Laiza headquarters is where the majority of its AA leaders are still based, reducing its dependence on China over its MNDAA and TNLA allies. The UWSA’s leaders must pass through Chinese territory when they travel from Laiza to the Wa headquarters in Panghsang, which they reportedly do frequently, and a large portion of AA’s weapons are sourced indirectly from it.

Therefore, it is surprising that the AA has so far stopped fighting in Rakhine state, where the Chinese have significant interests in a deep sea port and oil and gas pipelines that connect southern Yunnan province to China.

China may be a strategic advantage because it is the only foreign power that could possibly act as a mediator between the AA and the junta in Naypyitaw, but those interests do, in fact, give it a strategic advantage.

India isn’t as exposed as China to Myanmar’s instability but likewise has a keen interest in the conflict’s trajectory and outcomes.

One of India’s main goals is to depose ethnic Assamese, Manipuri, and Naga rebels from cross-border sanctuaries in remote and mountainous northwestern Myanmar, where they frequently launch raids into India and smuggle arms into its volatile northeastern region.

Up until the 2021 coup, when angry new resistance groups were established in the Sagaing region and Chin state of Myanmar, unrest has recently spread to Manipur in northeastern India. &nbsp,

Economically, India has sought to import oil, gas and hydropower from Myanmar to fuel its fast-growing economy – plans that have been complicated or put on hold by the war’s instability.

India also seeks, via its long-held” Act East” policy, to link with Southeast Asia’s vibrant markets via a preferably stable Myanmar. &nbsp, Yet even with these economic interests and security concerns, India is hardly in a position to challenge China’s pervasive influence over Myanmar.

There is now a lot of, if not quixotic, speculation that Myanmar’s collective resistance forces could soon overthrow the junta regime after seizing unprecedented territory from its troops. Some even went so far as to predict a sudden collapse scenario, as has recently occurred in Syria. &nbsp,

But as China’s recent interventions in and control over Myanmar’s wars show, that won’t happen unless Beijing wants it to – and it’s not at all clear that it does.

And Myanmar’s various resistance forces are fighting for the restoration of a democracy stolen by military forces without the real or even symbolic support of the US, with the US now fully withdrawing from the conflict.

Bertil Lintner is a Thailand-based journalist, author and security analyst. His most recent book is” The Golden Land Ablaze: Coups, Insurgents and the State in Myanmar”, which can be purchased on Amazon&nbsp, here.

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