📚The TL;DR📝

1. Myanmar: formerly known as Burma. 57,527,139 people, borders Thailand to the west, Bangladesh and India to the east, and China to the north. Governed by a military junta led by Min Aung Hlaing since 2021. 

2. Myanmar has a violent past stemming from repeated military interference within its politics a long-running ethnic conflict between the Bamar majority and various minority groups.

3. Myanmar transitioned to a democracy in 2011 but the military continued to hold significant political power later deposing Prime Minister Aung San Suu Kyi in 2021.

4. Now, Myanmar is fighting the most intense phase of a civil war that has continued on and off since independence threatening to tear the country apart.

5. Myanmar’s conflict zone has become a hub for heroin smuggling, human trafficking, and text message scams. The civil war has caused massive refugee flows and created shelter for insurgent groups from other countries.

📌How Myanmar’s Civil War Fuels Slave Labor, Insurgency in India, Heroin Smuggling, and Online Scams📌

You may have received a text from a number that you don’t recognize, asking you to confirm dinner plans or just greeting you with a simple “hi, how are you?” out of the blue. Shrewd readers will recognize this as the beginning of a “pig butchering” scam attempt; if you go along with it, a scammer, often a trafficked worker based in Myanmar, will gain your trust and drain your bank account. These workers are lured with the promise of high pay and then trapped, informed that they now “owe a debt” to their captors. The only way to pay off this debt and earn a shot at freedom is to scam people overseas.

On February 20th, Chinese and Thai police officers dealt a blow to these operations, conducting a joint operation that freed 10,000 of these captives working in Shwe Kokko, a massive resort developed by Chinese investors that housed a secretive cyber-scamming facility. Although the operation was conducted entirely in Myanmar’s sovereign territory, their police forces were not involved. Neither the Burmese army or the Tatmadaw controls the region. Instead, the area around Shwe Kokko is controlled by a local militia, the Kayin State Border Guard Force, one of the many armed groups fighting in one of the world’s longest-running civil wars. The civil war turned Myanmar’s eastern frontier into a hub of international crime and western frontier into the site of the brutal genocide of the Rohingya people.

💰From Brutal Colonialism to a Failed Democracy⚔️

The roots of the conflict stretch back to British colonialism. After the British annexed Myanmar into British India in 1824, they marginalized the predominant Bamars and stacked the civil service and colonial police with representatives of various minor ethnic groups, including the Karen,  Kachin, and Chin. As the Burmese nationalist movement began to take shape, they sought an independent Burma in which the Bamars would take the leading role. During World War II, many Bamar nationalists collaborated with the occupying Japanese army to establish a puppet regime that heavily favored the Bamar majority. 

Burma was granted independence in 1948, kicking off 14 years of unstable parliamentary democracy. Burmese politics was dominated by moderate nationalists, led by Aung San and U Nu. Aung San, who had supported the British through the war, was assassinated on the eve of independence. Aung San’s political tradition was carried on by U Nu who had been the foreign minister of the Japanese puppet government. Aung San and U Nu sought to balance the demands of the Bamar majority with the fact that much of Burmese state capacity rested in the hands of minority groups. 

This policy failed: a wide variety of forces on the periphery, including ethnic militias and an opium-smuggling remnant of the Chinese Kuomintang, carved out territories for themselves with the support of the U.S. and Britain. In 1962, Ne Win, once a comrade of Nu in the Japanese controlled state, overthrew his government and established a socialist military dictatorship. Ne Win quickly cracked down on both ethnic militias and left-wing student protestors further fanning the flames of the civil war that had brought him into power.

Despite this perpetual conflict, Ne Win’s regime would survive another 26 years. His government attempted to systematize a non-aligned and xenophobic “Burmese Path to Socialism” that rejected foreign alliances of any sort. Over time Ne Win grew erratic. For example, after a psychic informed him that the number 9 was auspicious he triggered a currency crisis by ordering the redenomination of Burmese cash in multiples of 9. In 1988 frustrated Tatmadaw officers overthrew Ne Win and established the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) that cracked down on disruptive student protests and announced a transition to democracy.

⏳A Transition to Democracy… Almost⌛

The SLORC established the National Unity Party and spent lavishly to ensure its success in free elections in 1990. Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of Aung San who had spent much of her life under house arrest under Ne Win, founded the National League for Democracy (NLD), which contested the elections on a platform of overcoming Burma’s legacy of military rule.

Despite these efforts, Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD won decisively and would have been poised to form a coalition along with ethnic minority parties. After her victory the junta annulled the elections, returned Aung San Suu Kyi to house arrest, and established a dictatorship that dropped Ne Win’s socialist ideology. SLORC managed to break the unity of many ethnic rebel groups, cutting ceasefire deals that allowed participating groups free reign to administer their territories and smuggle drugs in exchange for recognizing the SLORC regime.

The civil war flared up as urban students fled to the countryside to join the armed insurgency. This time, however, the oldest insurgent groups collapsed into infighting.  One infamous example of this came in the much-reported story of the Htoo brothers. The two Karen chain-smoking ten-year-olds threatened the hegemony of the oldest ethnic rebel group, the Karen National Union, by claiming to possess magical powers. Fighters loyal to the brothers seized the Burmese embassy in Bangkok in 1998, provoking a rare rebuke of rebel fighters from Western governments.

💵The Struggle to Revive Burmese Democracy⏱️

Western diplomatic pressure would eventually bring the SLORC to the negotiating table with the National League for Democracy (NLD). Aung San Suu Kyi was celebrated by Western activists and diplomats after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her anti-junta activism. In 2003, the military dictatorship announced a new constitution and a structured transition to democracy. The dictatorship dragged out the process until 2010 when they held the first election since 1990. The elections were boycotted by the opposition enabling the military proxy Union Solidarity and Development party to win in a landslide.

The conflict and diplomatic boycott continued through 2014 when the junta agreed to hold free elections (although they reserved a quarter of seats in Myanmar’s parliament for representatives of the military). Despite this, the NLD scored a decisive victory and were allowed to form a government. Aung San Suu Kyi became “State Counsellor,” an unofficial head-of-government position created because she was barred from the presidency for being married to a British national.

The government faced its first crisis in the form of a continuing insurgency by Rohingya rebels. Buddhist activists used religious nationalism to inflame a grassroots genocide of the Muslim Rohingya. They stirred up anti-Rohingya riots and launched boycotts against Muslim-owned businesses. The military embarked on a parallel campaign throughout Rohingya territory targeting the rebels while also burning villages and slaughtering civilians. The NLD government deported hundreds of thousands of Rohingya to Bangladesh rendering them stateless. Aung San Suu Kyi received intense backlash from her former Western backers as a result.

Despite Aung San Suu Kyi’s loss of Western support, her enemies in the military continued to view her as insufficiently supportive of its campaigns. In 2021, they staged yet another coup and returned Aung San Suu Kyi to house arrest. The civil war flared in the same recognizable pattern, with pro-democratic activists aligning with ethnic militias to take down the Tatmadaw. Since then, the military regime has teetered on the brink of collapse as this coalition seizes more and more territory. The integrated militias are crucial to the Tatmadaw’s anti-insurgency campaigns but have generally opted to enforce armed neutrality in the conflict. 

🌏Third Phase of the Civil War and its International Implications📱

The new phase of the civil war has created a wide open space for transnational crime on Myanmar’s frontiers. Opium and heroin production has skyrocketed since the coup because impoverished farmers and militia groups produce opium as a reliable source of quick cash. The opium is smuggled by Chinese international crime syndicates and distributed across the world. This opium is inflaming international opioid epidemics in Southeast Asia but also as far afield as Europe and the United States.  

The chaotic frontier of Myanmar is a staging ground for Indian separatist rebels who use the region as a base for raids, outside of the reach of the Indian army. This has prompted the Indian government to use anti-regime forces in Myanmar as a proxy to confront the rebels. This offers India an attractive middle ground between punitive invasions which would threaten the rebels and an accommodation with the Tatmadaw regime that would infuriate Bangladesh which currently hosts the vast majority of Rohingya refugees. 

As long as there is a civil war in Myanmar, cyber-crime slavery will continue. Chinese criminal organizations, after a crackdown forced them to flee from their previous bases in Cambodia, began to lure foreign workers to Myanmar with the promise of high pay as delivery drivers, translators, and other in-demand professions, before forcing them into cyber-slavery. The scams which the slaves are forced to carry out have made the organizations around 75 billion dollars, some of which goes to militias in exchange for protection money. This in turn provides these militias an incentive to shelter them and market their lawless territories as safe havens for crime.  

Not a subscriber? Click here to subscribe! 

See You Next Tuesday For 🌎The Beyond Borders Brief!🌎

This week’s newsletter brought to you by the Deep Dive staff. Connect with us on social media to pose questions, comments, or feedback. Click here to learn more about TSI.