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Levels of medieval brutality enhanced by modern technology have enabled the military junta, with help from China, to swing the fortunes of war back in its favour, often through air strikes and drone attacks on civilian targets. Torched villages are deserted.

Kyaw Thurein Win, on the anniversary of the military’s February 1, 2021, coup against the elected civilian government, watched his village of Shut Pon burning in the southern region of Tanintharyi – through satellite imagery.

“Today my village is witnessing the cruelty of the military. They set the fires and ordered that they not be stopped. This is beyond inhuman and beyond cruel. Watching this happen from afar is unbearable,” he wrote on Facebook.

While the strength of anti-regime defiance and determination is undeniable among many in Myanmar, there is also a growing realisation – especially among former combatants — that the resistance will not win this war so soon, if at all.

“It is a stalemate. Nobody can win,” said one military defector, saying that cries of total victory by both the regime and the resistance ring hollow.

A young woman who runs a safe house for former child soldiers as young as 13 says she joined the People’s Defence Forces of the resistance that sprang up against military rule in 2021. But she soon came to realise that, for her at least, war was not the answer and started taking in children forced by poverty and displacement to become fighters against the regime.

She rails against the “whatever it takes” mentality and the toll it takes.

“The civilian suffering is ignored or exploited,” she says, attending a coup anniversary event – a mix of politics and culture and foodstalls –  organised by anti-regime civilian activists in Chiang Mai, northern Thailand. She shares a picture of ‘Commando’ in uniform, armed to the teeth. He was 12 at the time.

Sayarma Suzanna, fundraising for her school in Kayin State, the Dr Thanbyah Christian Institute for displaced and local children, said she and her 97 students spent all of November hiding in the nearby forest because of air strikes.

“You have to understand that when the students don’t listen to you during lessons, it is because of their trauma,” she said, recounting how one student lost seven family members in air strikes on their village.

At a nearby stall, the manager of I-Walk displayed an array of quality prosthetic limbs made by his enterprise as affordable as possible. He has a waiting list of over 3,000 people.

Myanmar is the most landmined country in the world with the highest rate of casualties. It also ranks as the biggest producer of illicit opium and a major source of synthetic drugs. Networks of online scam centres run by criminal gangs and militia groups close to the regime have trafficked tens of thousands of people from multiple countries, scamming billions of dollars.

The UN says 5.2 million people have been displaced by conflict inside the country and across borders. Cuts by rich countries to aid budgets have had a crippling impact. Some clinics are reduced to dispensing just paracetamol.

This year’s coup anniversary coincided with the conclusion of parliamentary and regional elections tightly orchestrated by the regime over the scattered and sometimes totally isolated areas of territory it controls, which include all major cities.

The three-phase polls – endorsed by China and Russia but slammed by the UN and most democracies except notably the US – excluded the National League for Democracy, which won landslide election victories in 2015 and 2020.

NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been held in prison since the coup. There is speculation that Senior General Min Aung Hlaing might move her to better conditions of house arrest after the military’s Union Solidarity and Development Party, led by former senior officers, forms a nominally civilian government in April.

The USDP is cruising towards its managed landslide victory, according to almost complete results released last week.

The UN said it had reliable reports of at least 170 civilians killed in regime attacks during the month-long election period. Other estimates put the figure considerably higher.

One airstrike in Kachin State in northern Myanmar reportedly killed 50 civilians on January 22. Long-running attempts by the Kachin Independence Army and resistance forces to capture the nearby and heavily defended Bhamo town from the military have been costly. Some analysts ask, for what gain?’

Kachin State’s second biggest town is strategically located on a trade route to China but most of its 55,000 or so inhabitants have long since fled. The military would surely respond with heavy air strikes to any occupation by the resistance.

Data gathered by ACLED, a nonprofit organisation that analyses data on political violence, indicates over 90,000 total conflict-related deaths since the coup. The military, reliant on forced conscription, has borne the brunt of casualties, but civilian deaths are estimated at over 16,000.

“The military has carried out air strikes, indiscriminately or deliberately attacking civilians in their homes, hospitals, and schools,” said Nicholas Koumjian, head of the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar, adding that there is evidence that civilians have endured atrocities amounting to crimes against humanity and war crimes since the military takeover.

The IIMM is also investigating a growing number of allegations of atrocities committed by opposition armed groups, over which the parallel National Unity Government set up by lawmakers ousted in the coup has little or no control.

Former combatants say rogue People’s Defence Forces are also extorting money from local populations and holding people to ransom.

“Myanmar remains mired in an existential crisis – measured both in human security and the state’s shrinking sovereignty as rival centres of power harden on the ground,” the Institute for Strategy and Policy – Myanmar, a think-tank, stated in its recent annual review.

“The regime is meanwhile trying to break the current stalemate by accelerating counter-offensives on three fronts: military, diplomatic and political,” it said. The military-staged elections of 2010 led to a process of political and economic reforms but this time the regime intended to impose its own terms, the think tank said.

It warned of the risk that ethnic armed groups controlling swathes of border territories with Bangladesh, India, China and Thailand would end up – not for the first time – negotiating bilateral ceasefires and “rent sharing arrangements” with the regime. These would “consolidate the power of armed elites and reinforce central control rather than advance democracy, human rights or the rule of law.”

On Sunday, a panel discussion featuring anti-regime politicians and activists hosted by Chiang Mai University reinforced the sense of an opposition fragmented along ethnic and geographical lines, even if speakers upheld the principles behind their shared goal of a democratic federal union.

There was the customary rhetoric of “taking down this junta” and “whatever it takes”, but barely a mention of the National Unity Government that is struggling to knit together these diverse forces under the umbrella of a “Federal Supreme Council”.

On the panel, Debbie Stothard, a Malaysian democracy and women’s rights activist long involved with Myanmar, said the resistance needed two more years for victory, as the generals had “bought” one more year with their sham elections.

“Hang in there. We have to keep on going for at least two more years,” she said.

But in the big cities where the regime is starting to try and foster a sense of normality against a dire economic backdrop, the mood on the street appears more of resignation than defiance.

“When we started protesting against the regime in the streets in 2021, I told my husband we would defeat the military in three months,” an elderly Chin activist told IPS in Yangon, the former capital. “He replied it would take five years. Now I am afraid it will take another five years,” she said.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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