The periphery cannot hold

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

MOST people think of Myanmar as one of the world’s few encouraging stories. Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s longtime democracy activist and Nobel prize-winner, sits in parliament rather than under house arrest. America has begun lifting sanctions. The government has signed bilateral ceasefires with most of the myriad ethnic armies which have been fighting against it, bringing communal violence to its lowest level in decades.

But strife in Kokang, a little-noticed region of Myanmar bordering China, is testing how much of that progress is real. Fighting broke out on February 9th, when Phone Kyar Shin (also known as Peng Jiasheng), an octogenarian warlord, launched a series of attacks on the Burmese army around Laukkai, Kokang’s capital. More than 130 people have died, and as many as 100,000 have been displaced. Ethnic Kokang are fleeing across the border into China; ethnic Burmans are heading south, deeper into Myanmar.

According to the government, the fighting is all but finished. Mr Phone’s plan was “foiled”, says Min Zaw Oo, director of ceasefire negotiations for the Myanmar Peace Centre, which oversees the reconciliation process between Myanmar’s government and its ethnic armies. “[The] government side is now conducting mopping up operations in and round Laukkai.”

Things look less rosy on the ground. Thein Sein, Myanmar’s president, has put the area under martial law until the middle of May. Many roads into the region are closed, and villages lie deserted. During the first week of March—long after the government crowed that stability had been restored—Burman refugees from Kokang were still streaming into the Mansu monastery in central Lashio.

Daeng Tun, a 41-year-old from Laukkai, says the army told him it was not safe to return. U Kyaw Min Lwin, a retired officer who spent 20 years with the Burmese army in Kokang, thinks the fighting is getting worse, and could last months. His pessimism appears more credible than the central government’s sunny reassurances—and that has troubling implications for Myanmar’s future.

The conflict in Kokang has sucked in other armed groups. Myanmar’s government has said China is arming and training Mr Phone’s Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), though both deny the accusation (see article). Even without Chinese involvement, the Kokang region seems to be crawling with fighters. The MNDAA claims its ranks have grown since the fighting started. Some ethnic armies that have either not signed ceasefires with Myanmar’s government or seen them break down have taken up arms alongside the Kokang.

In a squat cinder-block hut on a narrow street on the outskirts of Lashio, a solidly built Palaung soldier with the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) says he has just returned from Kokang. The Palaung live in northern Shan and Kachin states (see map); the soldier says the TNLA were drawn in because “the Burmese army was robbing [Palaung] villages and cutting down their sugar cane.” Members of the Arakan Army—based in the south-west—are reportedly fighting alongside the MNDAA. A Kokang commander adds that they have been getting help from Kachin rebels, who live in Myanmar’s northernmost state and have been fighting the government for decades (the Kachin deny involvement). Myanmar’s ethnic groups are often fractious, but those in Ko-kang have shown unusual unity—perhaps banding together in a last-ditch effort for survival against an increasingly impatient government.

A great deal about the conflict remains unclear. It is possible that the outbreak was a response to the shelling, last November, by government forces of a Kachin training ground which killed 23 people, many of them from the same armies now fighting in Kokang. Mr Phone may have wanted to muscle in on the lucrative gambling trade in the area. Whatever the reasons, though, they matter less than the centrifugal consequences of the conflict and what they imply for Myanmar’s peace process.

Myanmar-watchers have grown used to a familiar refrain from the government: the peace process is working; a national ceasefire deal is just around the corner; except for a few holdouts, all sides are not only talking, but have agreed on almost everything, with just a few details remaining to be worked out. The Kokang fighting shows that those “details”—which include military and police reform, control over natural resources and regional autonomy for ethnic minorities—are proving intractable. Moreover, it is happening at a time when problems for the government seem to be spreading: this week saw a brutal confrontation between students and police at Letpadan, 140km north of Yangon.

The long-term risk from the fighting is not that it destabilises the country—Myanmar’s government has proved adroit at containing small insurgencies—but rather that it could affect this autumn’s election, which was already under a cloud thanks to constitutional provisions barring Aung San Suu Kyi from becoming president and reserving 25% of parliamentary seats for the army. In the 2010 election, the government banned voting in some ethnic-minority areas, ostensibly because of security concerns. A similar ban this autumn would deepen grievances, raise further doubts about the legitimacy of the election and complicate relations between Myanmar and donor governments, on which much of the troubled domestic-reform process depends.

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