The Depths

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In the Southeast Asian country of Myanmar, casualties from natural and man-made disasters are mounting.

Typhoon Yagi recently claimed more than 220 lives across the country, mostly due to flooding and landslides, reported Newsweek.

At the same time, the United Nations recently determined that Myanmar’s military junta has killed at least 5,350 civilians since they took control of the country in a coup in 2021, Al Jazeera wrote. Since overthrowing the elected civilian government of Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, the junta has launched a campaign of terror marked by torture, violent crackdowns on protests, and the suppression of political dissidents.

“Myanmar is plumbing the depths of the human rights abyss,” said James Rodehaver, who leads the UN’s human rights office in the country.

Meanwhile, Myanmar is also in the throes of a civil war that has claimed around 42,000 lives in battle, according to the London-based charity Action on Armed Violence. A patchwork of rebel forces have formed to fight the central government, with many fighters living in remote areas where they have created parallel governments to run their affairs, the Diplomat explained.

The Myanmarese are not alone in perpetrating this suffering. China is backing some rebel groups who have formed to challenge the junta’s dark regime.

For example, insurgents with the Brotherhood Alliance, a coalition of China-backed rebel groups, have been launching attacks against Myanmarese military camps, using rockets that were likely made in China, the Economist noted. China also supports the United Wa State Army, a 30,000-strong force that is the largest group among the rebel forces, added Voice of America.

China has denied interfering in Myanmar’s affairs, reported the Irrawaddy, a Myanmarese publication. But Chinese officials recently demanded that the Ta’ang National Liberation Army – a group that is part of the Brotherhood Alliance – stop fighting, raising concerns that China might be losing control of rebel groups it has supported in the past.

Meanwhile, Chinese officials are not supporting Suu Kyi’s ousted pro-democracy National Unity Government.

The rebels are not necessarily noble characters, say observers. Some have forcibly conscripted members of the ethnic minority Rohingya, a community that has been traditionally repressed in Myanmar, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation wrote.

Rohingyas have been fighting the country’s government for years and around 750,000 have fled to neighboring Bangladesh to escape the violence. But their situation has grown much worse as the civil war has intensified, added Agenzia Fides, the Vatican’s news service. Now, there is another wave of emigration to Bangladesh, where more than a million stateless refugees have lived in dangerous and unsanitary refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar already for years, without much opportunity to learn, work or move. Others have been fleeing Bangladesh for elsewhere in Asia, wrote Deutsche Welle.

Still, despite the dire situation in Myanmar, there is room for optimism, according to Charles Petrie, a former United Nations assistant secretary-general and UN representative in Myanmar, who traveled to the rebel-held part of the country recently.

He wrote in Noema Magazine how amid the violence and destruction he discovered a country “in the midst of a profound transformation.”

“The struggle against the (junta government) has morphed from a fight by ethnic groups to control territory into the emergence of a new form of participatory governance,” he said. “This governance model has been created organically by a new generation of activists … a new type of civil society was also emerging.”

In other words, what he found, he said, was the elements of a future state.