Myanmar

The region’s fast-growing but fragile democracies have been susceptible to strongmen and autocratic-leaning populists in recent years, propelled by concerns over inequality, crime, and dysfunctional governments.

Last month, the State Department released a report investigating violence against Rohingya in Rakhine State in western Myanmar. Although the report concluded that the violence was “extreme, large-scale, widespread, and seemingly geared toward both terrorizing the population and driving out the Rohingya residents,” as CNN noted, the report did not contain a finding that the violence rose to the level of genocide. The report also notably was released with little fanfare, despite the fact that administration officials had widely publicized that the State Department was conducting this investigation, and that a United Nations report had already found that senior Myanmar military leaders should face justice for genocide. In addition, administration officials, especially UN Ambassador Nikki Haley and her office, had been vocal about Myanmar’s brutal treatment and the need for justice for Myanmar leaders involved in the Rakhine State massacres. The report, as Politico noted, had been anticipated by the rights community and many on Capitol Hill as possibly a pivotal moment in how Washington approaches the Rakhine crisis. If the report had contained a finding of genocide or crimes against humanity, it would have provided the intellectual framework for tougher action, both in Congress and in the executive branch, against senior Myanmar military leaders, including possibly armed forces commander Min Aung Hlaing. Without that finding, the next steps for addressing the Rohingya crisis, from a U.S. policy perspective, remain unclear. The State Department has noted that “the U.S. government has previously characterized the events described in the report as ‘ethnic cleansing,’” according to Politico, and vowed to address the sources and results of the conflict in Rakhine State. Still, the finding seemed a departure from the actual evidence presented in the report. Perhaps the White House does not want to issue a finding of genocide or crimes against humanity because it does not want to empower the International Criminal Court on any issues, including those related to Myanmar. Perhaps the report’s ultimate message, despite the evidence that pointed to genocide and/or crimes against humanity, reflected a realist view of what could actually be accomplished in pressuring Myanmar. Or it might have reflected concerns about triggering a process in which targeted sanctions would be applied to Min Aung Hlaing, and he eventually ran for president in the next Myanmar election and he wound up being the elected leader of a country. The United States then would have sanctions on Myanmar’s leader. Still, advocacy from Congress—and from Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback, who has focused on the Rohingya issue—could possibly prod the White House to take tougher steps. In a hearing last week, Congressman Ed Royce and other leaders of the House Foreign Affairs Committee pressed the White House to reverse course and label the killing in Rakhine State a genocide. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a longtime advocate for human rights in Myanmar, and ally of Aung San Suu Kyi, has so far deferred to the Myanmar civilian leader, claiming that she has no power to stop the military’s abuses. Yet he and other old allies of Myanmar’s civilian leader face mountains of evidence—mountains that are still growing—that Suu Kyi now has little interest in rights advocacy at all, and has not taken even most steps to constrain the armed forces—rather, she increasingly seems like their advocate. Besides ignoring or essentially defending the military’s actions in Myanmar, Suu Kyi has overseen a clampdown on press freedom, and appears publicly nonplussed at how her government treats reporters. At a certain point, it becomes impossible to deny that Suu Kyi has not used even the (somewhat) limited powers of her office to advocate for progress on rights and freedoms, and to no longer let old deference to her constrain policy toward Myanmar. On Myanmar, there is more the White House could do. In addition to a formal genocide finding, which would be a bright line echoing the UN finding, the White House could impose targeted sanctions against a wider array of senior military leaders, including the Myanmar commander in chief, who has not been named in the targeted U.S. sanctions that have been imposed so far.

By Hunter Marston Over the last year, concerns about Southeast Asia’s increasingly powerful autocrats have dominated headlines and commentary about the region. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, though democratically elected, has imprisoned his critics, including even senators. Myanmar’s military has expelled hundreds of thousands of minority Rohingya Muslims through targeted violence, while the Thai junta has clung to power despite promises of elections to come. Meanwhile, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen this year won an unfree and unfair election in which the main opposition party was banned. Yet behind these headlines of creeping authoritarianism, Southeast Asian states often exhibit weak, centralized state power in many respects. Indeed, illegal economies in Southeast Asia, including narcotics, prostitution, and human trafficking, among other industries, thrive in the borderlands and frontier towns of Southeast Asia. Rather than imposing law and order, states are often either complicit in these crimes networks or lack the power to stop them. In his new book Hello, Shadowlands: Inside the Meth Fiefdoms, Rebel Hideouts and Bomb-Scarred Party Towns of Southeast Asia, Patrick Winn, Asia correspondent with Public Radio International and a veteran Southeast Asia journalist, analyzes the flourishing crime world on the periphery of state power in Southeast Asia (i.e., the “shadowlands”) and examines the “rational, complex actors” who engage in the sex and drug industries, among other illicit activities. Winn argues that these illegal economies flourish, in some place in Southeast Asia, due to the absence of powerful state institutions—but also that, where necessary, criminal networks cooperate with state authorities and security forces. Further facilitating these powerful networks, according to Winn, is the rising influence of Chinese authoritarianism and the declining power of the United States, the combination of which he sees as “a blessing for organized crime.” China’s enormous middle class, he argues, guarantees a steady stream of consumers with a rising demand for illicit exports, while the Chinese government’s preference for noninterference in neighbors’ internal affairs and disinterest in human rights dictate that Beijing will not restrict illegal trade flows. China’s expanding influence occurs as U.S. power recedes, and Southeast Asia is exhibiting a tilt toward authoritarian governance, although he notes that the United States’ approach to many of these illegal economies in Southeast Asia has often been ineffective in the past too. From the start, Winn offers vivid characters and a human dimension, making the book a compelling read. Winn’s first chapter, for instance, situates the reader in a den of methamphetamine addicts in northern Myanmar’s Kachin State, illustrating their addiction while also examining the broader reasons why the methamphetamine trade has flourished in northern and northeastern Myanmar. He moves on to focus on the lawlessness of Myanmar’s frontier towns, which facilitate a wide range of illegal trade. Winn illustrates how the flow of drugs and weapons persists outside the authority of Myanmar’s central authority, in areas controlled by ethnic Kachin militia for instance. Where the central government is present, it is unable or uninterested to enforce antidrug policies, while army officers who control key checkpoints often benefit from the drug trade by accepting bribes, and the military face allegations of a larger role in the drug trade. Winn next shifts his focus to the Philippines. Rather than just explore the drug war under President Rodrigo Duterte, Winn opts for a different angle. He tells the story of albularyo, herbal practitioners who take great risks to offer both actual drugs—albeit ones that are illegal in the Philippines and are brought in clandestinely, due to the government’s inability to police these shipments—that produce medical abortions, as well as folk remedies that supposedly induce abortions. Abortion is illegal in the Philippines, and the Catholic Church wields significant moral and political power in the country. The Duterte administration, which has pushed for broader access to birth control, has often clashed with the church, although Duterte has not pushed to legalize abortion. Facing desperate circumstances, albularyo remain popular among women with no legal access to abortion. Winn’s portrait of Karen, a woman barely making ends meet who seeks an herbal practitioner to prevent her fourth pregnancy, touches on both drug wars: the first on the modern meth trade; the other against the traditional healers who offer illicit medical abortions, many of which can be incredibly damaging to the health of the mother and child. During times where her income ran low, Karen started selling meth to make enough money to feed her children. When she heard of Duterte’s proposed amnesty for drug users and sellers who turned themselves in to authorities, she submitted her information to the government. But rather than a blanket pardon, those who took Duterte at his word learned that they were now on a list of targets for police and vigilantes enforcing the president’s drug war. Karen has narrowly dodged visitors to her home and is living on the run for fear of her life, unable to see her children. After examining how the North Korean regime uses restaurants across Southeast Asia to bring in hard currency for the totalitarian state, Winn’s tour of the growing “shadowlands” of Southeast Asia takes him to southern Thailand. In the deep south, near the Malaysian border, there is a significant sex industry—despite an ongoing separatist insurgency that often has directly targeted commercial sex workers, as well as soldiers, teachers, and anyone the insurgents see as somehow linked to or complicit in the Thai state. The insurgency, which dates back more than fifteen years in its current iteration, has killed more than 6,500 people in its current period. Insurgents often target bars and other sites in the southern border towns where sex workers operate. While prostitution is technically illegal in Thailand, many police are aware of and tolerate sex work taking place within certain bars because they are able to extract bribes. Police corruption and the heavy security presence of Thai armed forces in the south further inflame local resentment. In his afterword, Winn offers several policy recommendations designed to combat the growing illegal economy in various Southeast Asian states. These include: increase police officers’ salaries; decriminalize sex work; legalize narcotics (including meth); and create powerful anticorruption commissions to hold authorities to account and strengthen rule of law. Such commissions have demonstrated some notable results in Indonesia, for instance, whose corruption eradication commission has led to the arrest of high-profile politicians. Winn astutely points to inherent contradictions in US foreign policy that potentially facilitate illegal economies in Southeast Asia: spending billions on a global war on drugs while slashing overseas development assistance, for instance. Winn’s argument that Southeast Asian crime syndicates make rational choices and operate by certain codes of conduct holds up under scrutiny. But his broader geopolitical conclusions—that China’s rise is as preordained as the United States’ decline—come off as less supported by evidence. Winn is on firmer footing in his quest to understand the people he interviews in the shadowlands. His intimate portrait of the everyday criminals who skirt the law and live in the shadows adds an important human dimension to a still widely misunderstood domain of the global economy and Southeast Asia’s rapidly changing societies. Hunter Marston (@hmarston4) is a Washington, DC–based Southeast Asia analyst and coauthor of a chapter in the forthcoming volume Asia’s Quest for Balance: China's Rise and Balancing in the Indo-Pacific (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).

Developments in conflicts across the world that you might have missed this week.

Developments in conflicts across the world that you might have missed this week.

Developments in conflicts across the world that you might have missed this week.

After taking power in a coup in 2014, Thailand’s military junta made multiple promises of how they would change the kingdom. They vowed to clean up corruption, which supposedly had spiked under the Yingluck and Thaksin Shinawatra governments, to reduce political tensions in a country that had seen nearly two decades of partisan fighting and literal street fighting, and to transform the Thai economy, which had been floundering due to political turmoil as well as deep problems in Thailand’s education system, infrastructure, and how state funding is allotted to various regions of the country. Yet over the past four years, Thailand’s military has badly undermined the idea that, after the coup, it would somehow be a neutral and wise economic manager, and would not mix business and politics. Instead, even in Thailand’s highly restricted current media environment, local press outlets have discovered that top army brass seem to be unusually wealthy—a problem highlighted by the fact that junta number two Prawit Wongsuwan was caught, in public, wearing vastly expensive luxury watches. Meanwhile, the junta has been accused of stacking certain Thai companies with junta cronies, of boosting defense budgets since the coup, and of making little progress on economic reform. But the fact that the Thai military is intricately involved in the kingdom’s economy should not come as a surprise to anyone following Thai politics. In reality, as the contributors to the important new volume Khaki Capital show, armed forces throughout Southeast Asia, including in Thailand, have been deeply involved in countries’ economies for decades, extracting massive amounts of funds from state budgets for the militaries and for individual military leaders, and using their political and military power to profit in a range of ways. For more of my review of Khaki Capital, see the new issue of the Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia.

Last week, the research and advocacy group Fortify Rights, which has amassed considerable expertise on the situation in Rakhine State and the abuses perpetrated by the Myanmar armed forces, released probably its most comprehensive report yet. The report [PDF], based on interviews with more than two hundred survivors of the killings in Rakhine State and some two years of research, strongly suggests that the Myanmar military carefully laid the plans for massive crimes against Rohingya in Rakhine State in late 2017. In fact, some of the evidence collected in the report makes the situation in Myanmar seem reminiscent of the type of planning that occurred in Rwanda, prior to the genocide against Tutsis there in 1994. The Myanmar military has denied any and all allegations that it planned atrocities in Rakhine State. As the Guardian notes, “A military inquiry into the conduct of soldiers released its findings in November 2017, exonerating the army.” As the Fortify Rights report shows, however, the killings of Rohingya in late 2017 were not just an outpouring of violence or some kind of inter-ethnic bloodletting that happened in the heat of Rakhine State political tensions. Its evidence shows that, well before an attack by a shadowy Rohingya insurgent group on police posts in western Myanmar in August 2017 which the Myanmar government claims supposedly triggered the violence, the Myanmar military had apparently launched a concerted effort to prepare for the killings of Rohingya that came after August. Fortify Rights reveals that, nearly a year before, the military had begun stripping Rohingya areas of possible defenses against violence, including confiscating makeshift weapons and removing Rohingya’s fences. The report also shows that the army trained Rakhine Buddhist vigilante groups, and armed them as well, and that in 2016 and 2017 the military moved new detachments of troops into northern Rakhine State, which would be the epicenter of the violence. All this , it shows, was in preparation for 2017, and these preparations allowed Rakhine Buddhists, and security forces, to go on a rampage in late 2017 against Rohingya, with the Rohingya fully unable to defend themselves. Perhaps more than any other piece of evidence yet unveiled about the situation in Rakhine State, the report demonstrates the need for international actors to take action against senior leaders of the Myanmar military responsible for the atrocities. There is no hope that the most senior army leaders will face any reckoning within Myanmar, given the army’s continuing dominance of many facets of Myanmar politics, and Aung San Suu Kyi’s weakness, as well as the weaknesses of the civilian government. The Myanmar government has not even allowed the top UN human rights official focused on Myanmar into the country to investigate the situation in Rakhine State. But the international community should take stronger action against the top levels of the Myanmar military—even if doing so, as some analysts predict, would alienate the majority of Myanmar citizens (at least Buddhist Burmans), who have rallied around the armed forces in the past two years. Top Myanmar leaders could, for instance, be referred to the International Criminal Court, or the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) could create a framework for investigating alleged crimes in Myanmar; the Security Council will not do so, since any proposal would be blocked by China and Russia, so a UNGA framework would be a possibility. Without some kind of accountability for the Myanmar armed forces’ top leadership, the prospect of the army committing similar abuses in the future is high. And future crimes, in Rakhine, or in other ethnic minority areas, could not only bring more suffering but also further set back Myanmar’s peace process, and further undermine the country’s already-shaky political stability.

In early May, Malaysia was stunned by the victory, in national elections, of the opposition coalition, led by Mahathir Mohamad and essentially (from jail), longtime opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim. Although some journalists had, in the run-up to the election, noted that the opposition’s support appeared to be cresting, in the wake of years of massive corruption allegations against former Prime Minister Najib tun Razak and his allies, the win still came largely as a shock. Najib had governed increasingly autocratically, including by detaining many prominent opponents, and his coalition—which had ruled Malaysia since independence—also benefitted from control of state media, massive gerrymandering, and the ability to hand out large amounts of cash in the run-up to election day, a strategy it had used repeatedly in the past to ensure victory. Yet despite these obstacles, the Malaysia opposition won—and Najib and his coalition (eventually) conceded, marking the country’s first democratic transfer of power. Yet democrats throughout the rest of Southeast Asia, where many elections are due this year and next, should not take too much heart from Malaysia’s example. For more on why they should not, see my new piece in the Globalist.

Developments in conflicts across the world that you might have missed this week.

Welcome to “Women Around the World: This Week,” a series that highlights noteworthy news related to women and U.S. foreign policy. This week’s post, covering May 26 to June 1, was compiled with support from Alexandra Bro, Rebecca Hughes and Rebecca Turkington.

Despite evidence of systematic violence against the Rohingya, countries remain reluctant to classify the humanitarian crisis in Myanmar’s Rakhine State as genocide.

ASEAN’s latest summit in Singapore produced little of substance on important issues like the ongoing crisis in Myanmar or the South China Sea.

Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh face serious risk during upcoming monsoon season, warns the UN Refugee Agency. 

The ongoing crisis in Rakhine State, where the Myanmar armed forces have credibly been accused of ethnic cleansing and where the Myanmar military recently admitted that the security forces were involved in a massacre that left a group of Rohingya dumped in a mass grave, shows no signs of resolution. It is extremely unlikely that many Rohingya will voluntarily return to Myanmar, where they are disenfranchised, have few civil rights, and face a situation in Rakhine State in which many of their towns have been torched. Taking advantage of potential Rohingya anger, a Rohingya militant group continues to launch attacks into Myanmar, making the situation along the border and in Rakhine State even more tenuous. The latest attacks, which came in early January, suggest the Rohingya militants are active and may been gaining skills. The situation in Rakhine State—and in the camps in Bangladesh—is the worst humanitarian crisis in East Asia. But at the same time, Myanmar actually confronts multiple other ticking time bombs. These demonstrate that Naypyidaw’s military/civilian government is failing not only in western Myanmar but also in other parts of the country. In Kachin State in the north, for instance, an excellent new article from IRIN News details how that area’s long-running conflict has gotten worse this dry season, while Aung San Suu Kyi’s peace negotiations with ethnic minority groups have produced no concrete results in the Kachin State battle. In fact, the military appears to be waging a tougher fight in Kachin State now than it had several years ago. As IRIN News reports, more than one hundred thousand people have been displaced in Kachin State and northern Shan State, and aid organizations have little access to many of these suffering people. As IRIN News notes: Rights groups say government restrictions have squeezed humanitarian access to a trickle, leaving tens of thousands of displaced people [in Kachin and Shan States] without aid, caught in the crosshairs between the military and rebel groups. In Shan State, violence is picking up again too, further suggesting a failure in Suu Kyi’s peace plans. In fact, as Anthony Davis notes in Asia Times, the dry season violence in Shan State, in which insurgent groups are getting bolder and the most powerful insurgency remains unchecked, could kill Suu Kyi’s peace plan completely. He writes that “this year could finally derail a government sponsored peace process that has already been stalled for months.” As Davis notes, small insurgent groups like the Paluang have in recent years gained recruits and become more aggressive, and the number of groups fighting in parts of Shan State has expanded. The spread of more armed groups into Shan State makes it highly likely that some of these armies could battle each other this dry season—and that the Myanmar military will initiate a large-scale offensive in Shan State as well. Meanwhile, the United Wa State Army (UWSA), a heavily armed insurgent group with over twenty thousand fighters (and historically linked to narcotrafficking), roams free in portions of Shan State it controls. The UWSA has mostly disdained the government’s peace efforts, and has increasingly supported and armed other insurgent groups operating in Myanmar’s northeast. Its support has helped make the other ethnic armies even more powerful. Suu Kyi’s government seems to have no plan for how to deal with the UWSA in the long-term; the insurgent group has for decades essentially run its own independent statelet in Myanmar’s northeast. The government has little to offer the UWSA to disarm and accept central power, and Myanmar’s military is loath to take on the UWSA directly. Rakhine State is certainly a catastrophe. But in other parts of Myanmar, the government and military face severe challenges as well—and ones that they do not seem to have answers for.