[After decades of running an isolated pariah state, the military began loosening its grip in 2010, allowing elections and gradually giving civilian leaders authority over public services, foreign affairs and economic policy. It also began permitting public access to the internet and the mass sale of cellphones.]
By Richard C. Paddock
YANGON,
Myanmar — For Myanmar’s
army, the campaign of atrocity it has waged to drive hundreds of thousands of
ethnic Rohingya Muslims out of the country is no innovation. The force was born
in blood 76 years ago and has been shedding it ever since.
Its founders, known as the Thirty Comrades,
established the army in 1941 with a ghoulish ceremony in Bangkok, where they
drew each other’s blood with a single syringe, mixed it in a silver bowl and
drank it to seal their vow of loyalty.
The army that they formed led the nation to
independence in 1948. But except for a brief, initial period of peace, it has
spent the last seven decades warring with its own people.
The army, known as the Tatmadaw, seized power
from the civilian government in Burma, as the country is also known, in 1962.
The military killed thousands of protesters to keep power in 1988 and
suppressed another popular uprising, the Saffron Revolution, in 2007.
In constant fighting with ethnic minorities,
the Tatmadaw has displaced millions of people while taking billions of dollars
in profit from jade mines, teak forests and other natural resources. Its
strategy has been to fight ethnic rebels to a standstill, manage the conflicts
through cease-fires and enrich its officers.
“There has never been any sense of needing to
win hearts and minds,” said Zachary Abuza, a professor at the National War
College in Washington. “The Tatmadaw’s doctrine is based on total submission by
the population through fear. And to that end, there is little they will not
do.”
Though it holds itself up as the protector of
Myanmar’s people, the military has a long history of murdering civilians,
torturing and executing prisoners, committing rape, conscripting child
soldiers, impressing convicts as porters and making civilians walk ahead of its
troops to trip land mines.
After decades of running an isolated pariah
state, the military began loosening its grip in 2010, allowing elections and
gradually giving civilian leaders authority over public services, foreign
affairs and economic policy. It also began permitting public access to the
internet and the mass sale of cellphones.
The moves, aimed at reviving a struggling
economy, gave Myanmar a veneer of democracy and prompted the United States and
the European Union to lift economic sanctions.
But under the Constitution it imposed in
2008, the Tatmadaw is not subject to civilian authority, it unilaterally
appoints a quarter of the Parliament and the commander-in-chief retains control
over many key institutions, including the police and border guards. And the
atrocities against minorities continue.
“The Tatmadaw is an unreconstructed,
unrepentant institution that is abusive to its core,” said David Mathieson, an
independent analyst in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city.
The violent expulsion of the Rohingya from
Rakhine has been condemned as ethnic cleansing by the United States and the
United Nations. Human rights advocates have called for the International
Criminal Court at The Hague to investigate the Tatmadaw for crimes against
humanity.
The military and the government have blocked
independent investigations and kept neutral observers from visiting the area,
even as the Tatmadaw’s commander in chief, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, denied
that the army committed atrocities against the Rohingya.
But there are signs that the military is
feeling at least some pressure.
General Min Aung Hlaing acknowledged this
month that four members of the security forces shot 10 Rohingya men whose
bodies were found in a mass grave.
Two officials who oversaw the security forces
in Rakhine, Maj. Gen. Maung Maung Soe, head of the Tatmadaw’s western command,
and Brig. Gen. Thura San Lwin, the border guard commander there, were removed
from their positions in recent months without explanation.
Washington imposed sanctions on General Maung
Maung Soe in December, freezing any assets he might have in the United States.
It is unclear, however, whether the penalties will affect him, and so far, he
is the only Burmese official the United States has sanctioned over the Rohingya
expulsion.
The Tatmadaw is proud of its history, which
it glorifies with a colossal museum near Naypyidaw, the capital.
One exhibit recreates the setting of the
blood oath ceremony and displays what are said to be the bowl and syringe used
by the Thirty Comrades.
The comrades named their militia the Burma
Independence Army and gave command to their leader, Aung San, who is regarded
as the father of the country (and was the father of Myanmar’s current civilian
leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi).
The Thirty Comrades went to Japan for
military training and fought against Britain during most of World War II, but
they switched sides after it became clear the British would win.
Aung San became premier of the British colony
but was assassinated in 1947, when Aung San Suu Kyi was 2 years old. Burma
gained independence the following year.
Led by one of the comrades, Gen. Ne Win, the
Tatmadaw seized power from a civilian government in 1962. After pro-democracy
protests erupted in 1988, he was ousted by other generals. The Tatmadaw killed
an estimated 3,000 protesters but maintained control of the government.
For nearly half a century, the military
government kept the country isolated. It imprisoned political opponents for
years, intermittently closed universities and denied the population access to
the internet. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, who led the opposition and received the
1991 Nobel Peace Prize, spent 15 years under house arrest.
There was no attempt to create a cult of personality
around its leaders, but the Tatmadaw became the country’s only viable
institution, with separate schools and hospitals, its own judicial system and a
vast network of businesses.
“The military is a state within the state,”
said U Ye Myo Hein, executive director of the Tagaung Institute of Political
Studies, an independent policy center in Yangon.
The Tatmadaw academy’s motto is “The
triumphant elite of the future.” Triumphant or not, the generals took a nation
that was one of the wealthiest in Southeast Asia and, over six decades,
transformed it into one of the poorest.
By 2010, they had little choice but to open
the country to the outside world, seek foreign investment and begin
relinquishing control over the economy. But the new Constitution they imposed
includes many safeguards for the military.
For one, it grants immunity to the Tatmadaw
for crimes committed before the government handover in 2011. The military also
retains sole authority to investigate itself, and military courts have
jurisdiction over its personnel.
“Military impunity severely undermines the
rule of law in Myanmar,” said Sean Bain, a legal adviser with the International
Commission of Jurists in Yangon.
In its latest campaign against the Rohingya
Muslims in northern Rakhine State, which has no notable resources to extract,
there still has been a tangible gain for the military: a nationalist victory
for a force that casts itself as the champion of the country’s ethnic Bamar
Buddhist majority.
The Tatmadaw’s ranks are dominated by the
same Bamar ethnic group that makes up about two-thirds of Myanmar’s population,
and the force has kept Bamar nationalism as its central value.
The army’s constant warfare with ethnic
minorities has also given it a business advantage. The mountainous periphery of
the country that is home to most of the non-Bamar people is where many valuable
resources are found, including jade, gems and timber.
Soon after independence, the military began
fighting other ethnic groups that sought autonomy, pushing them further into
the periphery. Over the years, the Tatmadaw has battled dozens of rebel armies,
often several at a time, across an ever-changing landscape of alliances,
military-sponsored militias and cease-fires.
It uses a brutal anti-insurgency strategy
called the “Four Cuts,” suppressing entire civilian populations to deny rebels
support. The torching of villages, rape and mass killing that have been
features of the Rohingya campaign have been central tactics in other fights, as
well.
Since the quasi-civilian government took
office in 2011, rebel groups had been reporting about 10 armed clashes with the
Tatmadaw a month. But despite efforts by civilian leaders to secure peace, the
number of clashes rose sharply last year.
At the moment, the Tatmadaw is battling four
ethnic groups. Fighting has intensified in recent weeks in regions controlled
by the Kachin and the Shan. On Friday, four people were reported killed when
the Tatmadaw air force bombed a village in Kachin state.
The United Nations estimates that more than
340,000 people uprooted by years of conflict live in camps in Myanmar and
Thailand, in addition to the 737,000 Rohingya who fled to Bangladesh over the
past 15 months.
The perpetual conflict creates a state of
limbo in which the Tatmadaw can operate freely. In some areas, the military has
seized territory that holds vast resources. In others, where it has negotiated
cease-fires, it has struck deals with local groups.
With cease-fires, as opposed to peace
agreements, it can argue that a military presence is still justified, and
maintain firm control.
Kevin Woods, a visiting scholar at the
East-West Center in Honolulu, calls the Tatmadaw’s approach “cease-fire
capitalism.”
The military owns two large, secretive
conglomerates. A 2015 report by Global Witness, a London-based anticorruption
organization, found that the military, its cronies and major drug lords
controlled tens of billions of dollars from the jade trade in war-torn northern
Kachin State. The group said it could be “the biggest natural resource heist in
modern history.”
Other Tatmadaw enterprises in war-ravaged
regions include extracting rubies, gold, copper and timber. Ethnic groups say
the military has seized land for agribusiness and for hydroelectric dams, which
produce electricity sold to neighboring China.
Standoffs between the military and well-armed
ethnic groups have created a lawless territory along the Chinese border that
has become one of the world’s most lucrative drug-producing regions.
Billions of dollars’ worth of heroin and,
increasingly, methamphetamine are produced there and smuggled out via roads and
ports under Myanmar’s control.
“The army doesn’t want peace,” said U Win
Htein, a longtime adviser to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi who served 18 years in the
army and spent 20 years in prison for opposing the government.
He noted that in 2013, then-President Thein
Sein, a former general who became the new era’s first civilian leader, directed
General Min Aung Hlaing to halt military offensives against ethnic groups, to
no avail.
“Thein Sein ordered the army to stop, but
they didn’t stop,” he said. “The army is independent and no one can influence
them. They don’t listen to anybody.”
