Myanmar’s grueling civil war permits few sunrays amidst unremitting attacks against civilians by the military State Administration Council (SAC) junta and the asymmetric struggles of multiple anti-military revolutionary groups across the country.
But a report released on September 26 by the Karen Peace Support Network (KPSN), “A shifting power balance”, indicates that a multi-pronged revolutionary strategy of “slowly and steady wins the race” may provide clues to continued territorial gains.
The KPSN report provides details of the gradual displacement of SAC forces from northern Karen state and the replacement of central state education and health facilities by service providers under the control of or aligned with the Karen National Union/Karen National Liberation Army (KNU/KNLA).
Since the February 2021 coup d’etat, the KNU have captured or forced the abandonment of 62 SAC military camps, first in northern Mu Traw and Kler Lwe Htoo districts (these are KNU administrative designations, not SAC nomenclature) and over the past year in Taw Oo District close to Karenni state and more south in Dooplaya district south of the Asia Highway.
As in other conflict zones, the SAC has eschewed deployment of ground troops and increasingly relies on air strikes and artillery fire support, with an estimated 1,178 artillery barrages since the coup including 417 airstrikes that have killed an estimated 129 civilians and injured 487.
As elsewhere, civilian-protected sites are targeted, with clinics (six), schools (19), churches and monasteries (10) destroyed. One clear data point of SAC administration replacement with Karen services since the coup is the Karen Education and Culture Department’s (KECD) takeover of 370 Ministry of Education schools.
It has come at a high cost: the number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the area has almost doubled in the past year to 637,414.
The KSPN report also reveals important long-term foundations for why this territorial progress has been made possible. First, the KNU/KNLA are a professional insurgent revolutionary force established over seven decades ago, with a sophisticated political, military and civilian administration apparatus.
The KNU/KNLA have a great deal of experience in these conflict-related challenges. They also enjoy a near monopoly on organized violence, especially in the areas the report highlights where there are few direct rivals, competitors or major SAC allies such as Border Guard Forces (BGFs), unlike other conflict areas in neighboring Shan state where there are multiple armed actors.
Second, highly capable service providers in health and education, as well as livelihoods, have sustained civilian communities in dire circumstances for several years in many of these areas.
A number of Karen and Karenni groups such as the Karen Women’s Organization (KWO), Back Pack Health Worker Teams (BPHWT) and KNU departments and administrators, amongst many others, have sustained hundreds of thousands of civilians excluded from United Nations (UN) aid efforts.
Third, Myanmar’s southeast region has one crucial geographic feature few other battlefields in the country can rely on: a porous border with Thailand. This ensures that the cross-border assistance, predominantly financial, that sustains these programs is available, albeit not without challenges.
Yet the capacity of Karen service providers is now beyond reproach: who would have thought that it was highly fashionable to denigrate border-based groups and discredit cross-border assistance just 12 years ago during the international stampede into Myanmar’s reopening?
But this all warrants three notes of caution. First, where are the outer limits of the KNU/KNLA’s expansion? In other words, what is the line of control for many ethnic armed organizations (EAOs)?
Joint KNU-People’s Defense Forces (PDF) teams now operate in the plain of the eastern Bago Region, a trend of forward power projection not seen in many decades, at least since the 1970s. I doubt there is much appetite within the KNU for marching on close by Bago City, let alone the country’s biggest city, Yangon.
Even “seizing” the Kayin state capitol of Hpa-an seems premature: you grab it, you own it, and who wants to run a small city when you’re fighting an insurgent war? The headquarters of the Myanmar army’s Light Infantry Division 22 (LID-22) is also in the center of town, which means any pitched battle could well inflict significant civilian casualties and destroy Hpa-an in order to save it.
Second, how stretched will the logistics lines to sustain momentum, both for military operations and for assisting education and health programs, become to determine the natural limits of operational capacity?
It is a remarkable reality that Karen armed forces are now operating in the hitherto almost out-of-range Sittang River area. It demonstrates a tactical and strategic merging of coordinated revolutionary cooperation that should serve as insight for insurgent efforts in other conflict zones of Myanmar.
And third, the KSPN report calls for US$43 million to assist IDPs in the coming year. The various Karen groups would be advised to keep very tight-lipped about the first two issues and prioritize calls for increased international assistance to sustain cross-border assistance programs and consolidate the merging of humanitarian, development, governance and livelihood challenges for people living in these “liberated zones.”
This is already far advanced and needs no foreign, especially UN, meddling. It just needs simple funding.
The KPSN report also serves as important counterpoint to dubious claims of territorial gains elsewhere and a broader recognition that many Western donors have been hoodwinked by lavishly funded yet evidently unscrupulous context analysis organizations that in 2022 were predicting the SAC’s imminent defeat while mapping a multi-layered National Unity Government (NUG) resistance administration in the Anya region that actually didn’t (and still doesn’t) exist.
In fact, these fatuous mapping exercises may have provoked SAC airstrikes and punitive raids against civilians in Sagaing and Magwe Regions.
Almost exactly a year ago, a report on “effective control” in Myanmar claimed that the SAC controlled only 17% of the country, implying that the “resistance” largely under NUG leadership controlled the rest. But the damage this report inflicted, both on the credibility of the NUG and claims of revolutionary gains on the ground, continues to echo and misshape analysis coming out of Washington DC.
A recent report on the NUG’s “Revenue Denial Strategy” by Zachary Abuza from the Stimson Center repeats the now totally discredited 17% control claim, along with a slew of other questionable data points that indicate so much Washington think tank analysis is increasingly out of touch with developments on the ground in Myanmar (with the Wilson Center’s Ye Myo Hein being the significant exception).
It may grate with the NUG’s acolytes but so much of the revolutionary progress of the post-coup resistance complex has been achieved in spite of the exiled government, not because of it.
The military operation and administration gains made by the allied Kayah forces, including the Karenni National Defence Force (KNDF) and the Karenni National Progressive Party/Karenni Army (KNPP/KA), have been a stunning achievement and illustrate the real strength of insurgent mobilization that harnesses mixed generation leaders and embraces inclusion over entitled hierarchy.
This includes the significant “bottom-up” federalism of Kayah (Karenni) State as evidenced by the recent formation of the Karenni Interim Executive Council (K-IEC). Importantly, the Kayah resistance have fire-walled the K-IEC from military operations to maintain a clear separation of powers and make governance an equal priority.
The same is true for the Sagaing Forum of various revolutionary groupings outside of NUG control, or the Arakan Army (AA) and its local administration, which now operates in large parts of Arakan state.
This brings into question the credibility of recent research from the International Growth Center (ICG), which recently staged an online survey of 1,113 respondents in six ethnic languages on attitudes of ethnic people toward the NUG. It found 69% said they trusted the NUG and 79% “said the NUG would be effective in providing social services to their ethnic group’s areas.” The KPSN findings cast serious doubt on this rosy survey.
Recent machinations in Naypyidaw, with an internal SAC purge that has seen ministers sacked and cabinets reconstituted, were replete with tantalizing predictions of Min Aung Hlaing’s ouster and the coup regime’s collapse. This should have evinced a serious reflection among all revolutionary forces over what to do if the regime falls and the military surrenders. It’s an unlikely scenario, to be sure, but it’s not an impossible one.
That Karen revolutionary forces would be capable of administrating their areas in the event of regime collapse is abundantly evident from the KPSN report. Similar administrative capacity could also be found in Karenni, Arakan and large parts of Kachin states.
But would the NUG be capable of effectively administering any territory or population outside of a Zoom call? Any capable administration would be the result of local mobilization, not NUG instructions delivered from multiple time zones. Perhaps imminent victory isn’t such a good idea after all?
The Karen tortoise provides more apt lessons for the revolution than the NUG’s hare.
David Scott Mathieson is an independent analyst working on conflict, human rights and humanitarian issues on Myanmar.