2/12/2020 The changing face of Myanmar’s raging Rakhine war (Part 2) - Thar Le Zwa သာလီြစ - Arakan Monitor

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2/12/2020 The changing face of Myanmar’s raging Rakhine war (Part 2) - Thar Le Zwa သာလီြစ - Arakan Monitor
The changing face of
Myanmar’s raging Rakhin
(Part 2)
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Ancient Rakhine City of M

U Proposed for UNESCO W
Heritage Site
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Historically ethnic con ict in modern Myanmar has been a glacially slow-moving disaster, debilitating the
nation’s politics while shifting only incrementally from one decade to the next. RELATED ARAKAN NEWS

Ancient Rakhine City of M

In 2019, the eruption, spread and intensi cation of nationalist revolt in Rakhine state abruptly upended that U Proposed for UNESCO W
familiar landscape with sobering implications for an already fragmented and oundering peace process and Heritage Site
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domestic security more broadly.

Ancient Koe- thaung Tem

The new war in Rakhine state, pitting the military against the local Arakan Army (AA), a widely popular force parts damaged due to art
led by a young and ideologically committed leadership, is also increasingly impacting Myanmar’s regional shelling vibration
 Unknown  Jan 27, 2020
standing at a range of levels.

Village administrators now

China’s push for economic connectivity to the Bay of Bengal, stage-center during President Xi Jinping’s recent worried about their safety
 Unknown  Dec 16, 2019
state visit to Myanmar, will now need to navigate the hostilities already lapping close to the projected deep-sea
port and special economic zone at Kyaukphyu, a crucial component of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative. Body of village administra
found
 Unknown  Dec 16, 2019
Poor prospects for any repatriation of the Muslim Rohingya refugee population camped in neighboring
Bangladesh, estimated as high as one million, are now further receding, while additional migrant ows out of
Families le complaint ov
the state towards Southeast Asia are slowly gathering pace. deaths of two locals
 Unknown  Dec 15, 2019

In retrospect, 2019 will be de ned as a watershed in these events. It opened with raids by AA guerrillas on
police posts in northern Rakhine on January 4, staged symbolically on Myanmar’s Independence Day. TAGS

It closed in December with far larger AA coordinated assaults on army bases, not coincidentally as de facto AA A R A KA N C H R O N I C L E

national leader Aung San Suu Kyi landed in Holland to defend the military, or Tatmadaw, at the International A R A KA N H I S T O R Y A R A KA N N E W
Court of Justice against charges of genocide against the Rohingya community.
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The operations at year’s end involving hundreds of rebels staging attacks in widely separated townships only
served to underscore what Tatmadaw commanders already knew: the armed forces – now with all three D R . S AW M R A A U N G EBOOKS

services deployed — are facing their most serious insurgent challenge in decades. F E AT U R E S T O R Y

I N T E R N AT I O N A L R E L AT I O N
And unlike the on-again, off-again brush-wars in northern Myanmar, the Rakhine con ict offers virtually no
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prospect of a cease re.
KYAW M I N H T I N MUSLIM CRISIS

Sustained hostilities last year in icted steep losses on both sides, even as the ghting and accompanying
M YA N M A R N E W S NARINJARA
abuses have displaced close to 100,000 civilians in Rakhine and neighboring Chin state, where Paletwa
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township has seen repeated clashes.
T R AV E L ေ◌ မာ င္ေ◌ မာ ငိး 

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2/12/2020 The changing face of Myanmar’s raging Rakhine war (Part 2) - Thar Le Zwa သာလီြစ - Arakan Monitor
While neither the Tatmadaw nor the AA release casualty gures, analysts in Yangon estimate a toll of military
fatalities ranging between 800 and 1,000 fairly evenly balanced between the two belligerents.

Ambitious advances by the AA between January and April triggered an aggressive reaction as the Tatmadaw
has attempted to reassert control over the populous atlands and villages of north-central Rakhine while
pushing the rebel forces back into the state’s hills and jungles.

Sustained operations have involved large-scale deployments of light infantry battalions backed by heavy
artillery, mounting air power and a striking commitment of naval assets on the state’s numerous riverine
arteries.

Since the beginning of the May-October rainy season, the AA has responded with two strategies that are
gradually reshaping the con ict and likely to accelerate in 2020.

The rst has involved attempts to establish parallel government structures to exploit the collapse of civil
administration in many areas. Undertaken by the AA’s political wing, the United League of Arakan (ULA), the
process which undoubtedly facilitates recruitment of new ghting forces has only been hastened by the
resignation of government-appointed village and ward administrators in several areas following alleged
Tatmadaw abuses.

The AA’s drive to usurp governmental functions has been re ected since October in repeated abductions of
civil servants and off-duty security personnel from public transport on roads and rivers. Those held have been
subjected to AA screening and pseudo-judicial investigations into their backgrounds before being either
released or detained.

AA leader Major General Tun Myat Naing has also announced plans to levy taxes on businesses operating in
Rakhine state, a threat which the group’s military reach has only gone to underscore.

The second shift during the monsoon rains consisted of AA in ltration from the battleground townships in the
north and center of the state – Buthidaung, Rathedaung, Kyauktaw, Mrauk-U, Ponnagyun and Minbya – and
southwards into Myebon and Ann, seat of the Tatmadaw’s western regional command and close to
Kyaukphyu.

By the end of 2019, reports were emerging that small AA units had moved south along the spine of the Arakan
Yoma range as far as Toungup and even Tandwe townships.

The in ltration mirrored a similar pattern of activity between 2015-2017 when AA units rst slipped into
Buthidaung, Rathedaung and Kyauktaw townships of north Rakhine from bases in Paletwa to begin political
proselytizing and later local recruitment and training courses.

Tun Myat Naing, commander-in-chief of the Arakan Army (AA), attends a meeting of leaders of Myanmar's
ethnic armed groups at the United Wa State Army (UWSA) headquarters in Pansang in Myanmar's northern
Shan State, May 6, 2015. Rebel leaders in Myanmar on Wednesday urged the government to amend the
military-drafted constitution to give more autonomy to ethnic minorities, a step they said would make it easier
to sign a national cease re agreement.

Major General Tun Myat Naing, commander-in-chief of the Arakan Army, in a 2015 le photo. Photo: Twitter
To date there have been few reports of clashes in Rakhine’s south, suggesting that armed units have similarly
focused on building support networks to sustain active military operations in the current dry season and
beyond.

But the detonation of three small explosive devices on Munaung Island on December 19, hours before a
scheduled visit by State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, was a pointed, if bloodless, reminder of the AA’s
widening reach.


In the short to medium term, it seems unlikely that reach will impact the sea-board end of Beijing’s projected
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2/12/2020 The changing face of Myanmar’s raging Rakhine war (Part 2) - Thar Le Zwa သာလီြစ - Arakan Monitor
China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC). In mid-2019, the AA publicly expressed support for foreign
investment in Rakhine state that recognizes local interests and would seem to have nothing to gain by staging
direct attacks on CMEC-related infrastructure.

Twin pipelines that begin at Kyaukphyu and already carry oil and natural gas across central Myanmar, through
the con ict-prone region of northern Shan State and across the border into China’s southern Yunnan province
have never been targeted by insurgent forces at either end and for a simple reason: antagonizing China, the
source of most of the AA’s munitions, makes no sense.

A more striking aspect of the war’s escalation has been the logistical capability of a force operating several
hundred kilometers from its main sources of resupply in northern Myanmar, where the AA was rst founded
and grew under the auspices of the insurgent Kachin Independence Army (KIA).

The intensity and extent of ghting in 2019 appears to indicate that munitions are continuing to ow south
and west, almost certainly along routes developed by the same illicit networks that move millions of
methamphetamine tablets from Shan state to Rakhine and on into Bangladesh.

That, in turn, re ects the weakness of the Myanmar Police Force (MPF) and its stark incapacity to control
highways even in central regions of the country, let alone the con ict-impacted border, a recent Myanmar
Frontier commentary suggested.

The rare interdiction late last October of a truck moving 14,500 detonators between Shan state and the central
city of Mandalay provided some indication of the scale of a crisis rooted largely in of cial corruption.

Arakan Army ghters in 2018 in a Youtube screen grab. Photo: Youtube

Arakan Army ghters in a promotional video in 2018. Photo: YouTube screen grab.
Against this troubled backdrop, prospects for a cease re in Rakhine as part of a wider deal between the
Tatmadaw and the so-called Northern Alliance of rebel factions (of which the AA is a member) are vanishingly
slim.

A key Tatmadaw condition for a cease re requiring Northern Alliance factions to redeploy to “designated
areas” might be negotiable for armed groups operating solely in the north, namely the Ta’ang National
Liberation Army (TNLA), the Kokang-based Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) and the
KIA.

But for the AA, any return to a “designated area” near the KIA “capital” of Laiza in Kachin state where the group
was rst based but distant from its current theater of operations in Rakhine is a self-evident non-starter.

For its part, Naypyidaw can hardly agree to a cease re that would cede the AA’s demand for a recognized
presence in the state where their wide popularity would provide a base for further political and military
consolidation. The AA’s leadership has already made clear its ambitions for Wa-style “confederal” autonomy.

For the Tatmadaw, a more palatable option in 2020 would be a cease re with the Northern Alliance on the
easier ground of the north, where the KIA has already ceased ghting and where the TLNA and MNDAA have
declared a unilateral cease re through February while expressing hopes for a broader deal later in the year.

However precarious, peace in the north would serve to isolate the AA politically, satisfy Chinese impatience to
begin northern CMEC projects and enable the military to shift the weight of its resources to countering the AA
in Rakhine.

Ethnic divide-and-rule by means of cease res has been a leit motif of Tatmadaw counter-insurgency since the
1980s. It has never achieved real peace in Myanmar, but the strategy has seldom failed to buy time. Only in
2020 the main bene ciary looks likely to be China.

[This is the second installment of a two-part series. Read the rst part here]

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2/12/2020 The changing face of Myanmar’s raging Rakhine war (Part 2) - Thar Le Zwa သာလီြစ - Arakan Monitor

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