An Overlooked War

By Hannah Beech

I’m a roving Asia correspondent based in Bangkok.

A people take to arms and fight for democracy. A military terrorizes civilians with airstrikes and land mines. Tens of thousands are killed. Millions are displaced.

Yet it is all happening almost completely out of view.

Recently, I spent a week on the front lines of a forgotten war in the Southeast Asian nation of Myanmar. Since a military junta overthrew a civilian administration there three years ago, a head-spinning 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 veteran combatants who have known no occupation but soldier.

Now, for the first time, the rebels claim control of more than half of Myanmar’s territory. In recent weeks they have overrun dozens of towns and Myanmar military bases.

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 lauded as a democratic success story.

A coup defied

In February 2021, a military junta, led by Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, arrested the nation’s civilian leaders and returned the country to full dictatorship. If the generals expected the populace to cower in response to their coup, they were wrong. With military snipers shooting unarmed protesters and bystanders, including dozens of children, an armed resistance coalesced. Tens of thousands of professionals and members of Gen Z decamped to the jungle. Rappers, Buddhist monks and politicians, among others, learned how to shoot guns and arm drones. Their hands grew callused.

This unlikely resistance has repelled the junta’s forces from wide swaths of the country, including most of Myanmar’s borderlands. (Here are several useful charts that explain how the civil war is unfolding.)

A lady tarnished

If there is one name from Myanmar that people in the West might recognize it’s 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 routed the military’s candidates in nationwide elections. With her civilian government sharing power with the army, Myanmar seemed like a rare counterpoint to the Arab Spring and other foiled democracy movements. President Obama visited twice.

Yet within a year, the military, which still controlled the most important levers of power, had intensified its persecution of Rohingya Muslims, culminating in 2017 with the expulsion of three-quarters of a million people within a few weeks. The United Nations designated the campaign a genocide. Rather than condemn the violence, however, Aung San Suu Kyi went to The Hague and defended the military in an international court. Her refusal to stand up for a persecuted minority knocked off her halo. The United States and other Western governments distanced themselves from her.

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

A fractured reality

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

But that may have been the easy part. The resistance is — perhaps hopelessly — splintered. More than a dozen major armed ethnic groups are vying for control over land and valuable natural resources.

For now, they’re fighting a common enemy. But some of these militias are just as likely to battle each other. This month, the rebels captured a key border town, only to relinquish it after one armed group withdrew its full support.

Already, much of Myanmar is fractured between different groups, all heavily armed. In other parts of the country, no one is fully in charge. Crime is flourishing. The country is now the world’s biggest producer of opium. Jungle factories churn out meth and other synthetic drugs that have found their way to Australia. Cybercriminals have proliferated, targeting Americans, Asians and Europeans with scams.

Myanmar’s civil war may be overshadowed by other global conflicts. But to the Burmese who live with uncertainty and chaos, the war has never been more urgent or real.

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